By Jamie Moran COMMENT 3 1, I have written about Sophia more often during the nearly two years in brokenness than at any other time in my life. Brokenness…
By Jamie Moran
COMMENT 3
1, I have written about Sophia more often during the nearly two years in brokenness than at any other time in my life. Brokenness has brought me to a deepening love and respect for the Sacred Feminine Mystery. It is not that my vision of the feminine has altered. It has expanded. It has deepened. It may be that losing Myfanwy has sharpened my appreciation of how much I have lost. Neither the world, nor the home, we shared is the same without her. Both places are profoundly different. The hole is not just in me. It is in the world and in my home. Yet brokenness has meant opening a channel of prayer to the Mother of God. Tradition asks her to save us, to be a refuge for us, and this now makes a total, and new, sense to me.
I met Sophia at a crisis point in my middle 30s. She rescued me from a fight I was not mature enough to conduct effectively. She put me on my own road of creativity, as I had been on for several years soon after meeting Myfanwy in my early 20s. She told me, ‘we want to hear from you.’ From that moment onward, I took up the cudgels and got stuck into my own work, the novel [winter of 1976/77] and the spiritual-psychology writings that resulted in two books and many essays.
Sophiology is not Esoteric Gnosticism, or the Perennial Philosophy. Sophia inspires knowledge of the hidden God, and the secret Creator-creation linkages spanning the whole of creation. Her wisdom is essential to art and science, healing, ceremony, and much else culturally diverse. Her responding to God, out of joy in God’s creative action and sorrow for alienated humanity, runs the gamut from the spiritual to the material, with the visionary and the psychic in between. Wherever alignment with God, attunement to God, is the challenge, she is the mediation that makes it possible. Her mediation, in many forms, is in direct experiencing.
Sophia opposes Lucifer= the Sacred Woman against the evil angel, the evil spirit [called “the evil one” in the Lord’s Prayer sung in the Liturgy]. Tradition identifies Lucifer with the masculine Morning Star. Sophia’s ‘Wisdom’ is the wisdom of love, indeed the wisdom of Eros in loving ‘intercourse’ with the soul of the creation. That soul is not just Uncreated or created, but something mysteriously in between, liminal, impossible to pin down in its ontology.
A mediator, a bridge, a relational space, the beauty and inherent goodness of the creation as ‘seen’ by God. The Vision of the creation in God. The creation as House of God. The the creation as cup of the Wine of God [joy] and the daily bread of God [sweat and tears]. The creation as God’s poem, God’s song.
The primal ‘She’ stands in immediate and close connection to the ‘He’ of God. The ‘he’ of humanity has no such direct link with God. The ‘he’ of humanity is born of woman, of God acting through woman. St Paul admits this in one of his letters.
Sophia= the ‘primal’ is feminine more than masculine. There is no basis for ‘patriarchy’ of any ilk in the Lakota Way and Shamanism, in Judaism, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. One of the chief errors in Western Christianity, Western Rationality, Western Moralism and Legalism, is the rejection and desecration of the Sacred Feminine.
Wohpe the Beautiful One, the Beautiful Star, the mediating peace bringer, was one of my pet names for Myfanwy.
2, The whole point of ‘creation spirituality’ or a ‘spiritual cosmology’ is to bear witness to the reality that the universe, nature, the earth, the embodied state, is a vast inter-locking, active network of communication. The communication is moving among all persons, creatures, things. This communicational nature of being at the Beginning awaits the End when ‘being will become communion.’
The creation opens its secrets to personal love, but they remain hidden from abstract thought. The I—thou relationship to nature befriends it, not seeking to tame it, control it, exploit it. When you treat nature through I—It, nature shows you only its outer mechanical and material aspect. When you treat nature through I—Thou, nature will reveal to you its inner energetic and magical aspect. Zen= ‘If you meet a fellow poet on the road, shown him your poem. If you meet a fellow swordsman on the road, show him your sword.’
Francis Bacon made a huge Freudian slip when he said nature was loathe to surrender her secrets. Therefore, nature had to be raped to force her secrets into the open. This is a truth about Western science that Mary Shelly warned of in her prophetic story ‘Frankenstein’, where the monster is the scientist, not the hideous beast cobbled together and animated by electricity. The sleep of reason does not breed monsters. The over extension of reason – a kind of madness as is seen in the mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein — breeds the worst monsters, and many of these are yet to come.
The communicational creation is a web of personally loving family relationships. Everybody and Everything is related by kinship. Creation is a family of persons, creatures, things, who are relatives. Mitakuye Oyasin – ‘all my relations’ – recognizes this.
Personhood [the hypostasis] differs from ‘individuality.’ Personhood is not definable as a discrete entity, self-sufficient and self-enclosed. As Martin Buber makes clear in ‘I and Thou’, Personhood lives in relation to the Other Person. God is a Communion of Three Persons sharing one Divine Nature. This nature cannot be divided, parcelled up, split off. Its unity is unbreakable. The circle is the symbol of the inviolate unity of the divine. That the creation is designed basically as a continuous circle, not a box constructed from straight lines, means that the divine unity makes possible the unity of all created. The poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw this unity in nature, contrary to British Empiricism and its close ally British Associationism, the dominant worldviews of his day [late 1700 to early 1800 AD]. Coleridge carried forward work Goethe had done on the difference between ‘organic form’ and ‘mechanical form.’ The mechanical form is an imprint from which exact copies can be made. The organic form is the Gestalt that, as a simultaneous Whole, guides the parts to assemble together according to the prior holistic design. No two growths of such a Whole are ever going to be identical.
In the Fallen condition, we feel isolated, cut off, and everything seems just an individual being whose nature is distant from all the other individual natures. This sense of division into separate natures is the Primary Ignorance of Buddhism. If we were unfallen, we would recognize the stream, the coyote, the tree, as relations, and speak with them. Even now we hear their whispers and are unsettled. Our paranoia runs riot. Yet these whispers are the sighs of a pronoia we have lost. We guard our lonely citadel of individuality for dear life. Nothing gets in, nothing comes out. No surprise we wilt on the vine. We need the sap of the vine, but we can only access it if we will share it. In trying to secure ‘a ground of being’ for our individuality in isolation, we lose any grounding of being. We despair to be adrift in a universe with no voices, no faces, no hearts.
In the West, the personhood has been lost, becoming more and more identified with the individual ego, its will to success [and fear of failure], fuelled by the lust for ‘power over the other’, and its cognitive, abstract mind which uses selective attention to navigate its path through the jungle of competing egos. The rise of the ego in the West since 1500 AD, or earlier, is intimately linked to the rise of capitalism. The West has become one of the most ego-ized cultures in world history.
The apophatic approach might mistakenly lead the Western mind to think of God as a cold, blank, abstract “Nothingness” or an impersonal cosmic energy that can be used for good or ill whilst it is neutral [‘the Force’ in the Star Wars films]. The ultimate is the Hypostatic Reality of Personhood. Hypostasis= that which stands under, the bottom of everything. God is boundless, yet this means God’s Love, Person to person, is boundless.
Indigenous spirituality is an asceticism of everyday life. To ‘walk in a sacred manner’, you do what helps creation, you eschew what doesn’t help, or harms. Self-control is necessary. An old mountain man I met at Wilmer Mesteth’s house told me he had prayed with the Oglala Lakota for years. He smiled ruefully, and added, “If you want to pray with Indians, be prepared to suffer.” Wilmer ran four-hour sessions in the Sweat Lodge. I knew what the old man meant.
The spiritual cosmology of the Lakota Way, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian Way, and many other sacred cosmologies round the world, meet a raw need in the West. For many Westerners – and those influenced by the West — the cosmos, nature and the earth, is an empty void you can shout into, and from which you will get no reply, creating a deathly fear of our human aloneness in a vast machine that cares nothing for us. If this ‘infernal machine’ [the “dark Satanic mills” of Wiilliam Blake] does not care for us, then we feel, why should we care for it? Use it for what we can get out of it, before it spits us out. That is the increasingly pervasive unconscious premise in the broken culture of ‘progress’ all over the globe.
To love God is to love God’s creation. St Isaac of Syria, in Homily 81, describes a ‘merciful heart’ as one “on fire for the whole of creation”, including humanity, animals, and even demons, causing the person to shed tears and offer prayers for all beings. This profound compassion is driven by a “vehement mercy” that cannot tolerate suffering in any part of creation. Such a heart is on fire with divine love for all created.
St Maximos says that humanity was created at the ‘intersection’ of all realities, all kinds of being and nature, all ‘worlds’ invisible and visible, intangible and tangible [spiritual, material, intelligible, animal, elemental]. The human task — our ‘soul work’ – is to lovingly and creatively gather up all the diverse aspects of the creation, heal their divisions, and as the priesthood of the creation applicable to women and men, offer them back to God in thanksgiving.
Salvation, for St Maximos, is not about going to heaven. It is the transfiguration of the creation in the Uncreated Light of the Logos and the kindling of the creation in the Holy Fire of the Spirit. Enlightenment and Ecstasy will permanently dwell in all created. For this End means ‘God will be all in all.’
[9] The Mystery of the Darkness
1, The darkness of the night comes from a primordial darkness known as Han. This darkness is not evil. What is it then? It is akin to the primordial chaos in Genesis, the darkness of the unformed waters over which the Holy Spirit hovers. It also is reminiscent of the ‘uncarved block’ in Zen Buddhism.
This plunges into another Western bias. In standard Western legalistic theology, darkness is instantly equated with moral evil, sin, and the demonic.
In both Lakota metaphysics and Eastern Christian mystical theology, the primordial darkness is not evil. Rather, it is the state of ‘uncooked’, unformed, pregnant potential. Han is parallel with the Genesis unformed deep over which the Holy Spirit broods, and the Uncarved Block [Pu] of Zen.
In the Lakota creation story, Han existed before there was light, or any separation of day from night, or sky from earth, or land from sea. Han is the nothingness that is the matrix of being. Han is a condition of absolute quiet, total stillness, rest, and hidden potential. Han is potentiality before it is actualized in any way, in any form, or any movement. Han is pure potential.
Han is dark not because it is wickedness, but because the Light and Energy of creation has not started working yet. There is a ‘pause.’ Maybe this signifies the acknowledgement of a certain ‘loss’ in creating. Once you carve the uncarved block into a bowl or a crane, you gain an object but lose the ‘infinite possibilities.’ Han is the cosmos before it was carved. Perhaps the ‘big bang’ of physics set that carving in motion.
The darkness is deep. The first two verses of Genesis= “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
In Hebrew the primordial sea is the ‘Tehom.’ It is not a demonic entity. It is the ‘raw material’ of creation. It is the chaotic soup out of which God speaks the creative structuring of his Words, and into which he pours the creative power of his Spirit.
There is a certain analogy with the ‘Divine Darkness.’ God so far transcends the human mind that divinity appears as a dark, thick, impenetrable cloud.
Han seems an aspect of Sophia, an aspect that matches the apophatic mystery of God.
To understand why Han is not evil, it is necessary to note how the Lakota cycle time. The counterpart to Han is not a warring angel of light, but the Dawn [Anpao].Every night, the world dips back into Han so that creation can rest, regenerate, and dream. Without the dark, seeds cannot gestate underground, and humans cannot heal in sleep. Han is the necessary, passive, feminine rest that balances the active, intense, masculine light of the Sun.
Before a Word can be spoken, there must be silence.
Before an Action can be undertaken, there must be stillness.
This is the way in which a channel to God is kept open, in Speaking and in Action.
Han is nothing evil. Han invokes the presence of the Creator’s unexpressed, latent power, waiting for the dynamic moment when the movement of the Spirit, and the coming of the Light, will set creation going.
There is a holy dark, of God beyond the creation, and of the creation in its infinite potentiality before it is made.
2, Jewishly, there are several different ‘dark’-nesses.
[1] There is the divine darkness that signifies the unknowability of God – the Apophatic Way, or Cloud of Unknowing. This is what Moses confronted on Mount Sinae. Exodus 20, 21= Moses “drew near to the thick darkness where God was.” Here, darkness is the ultimate sign of intellectual humility and reverence of heart for the ungraspable Mystery. In Hebrew this is ‘yirah’, the awe of God. Yirah is not the instinctive, biologically based fear of threat, ‘pachad.’ Such instinctual fear can be amplified in panic, trauma, terror of harm. Nor is yirah the neurotic anxiety that, as Anita Harmon told me once, is a ‘sickness of imagination’ where we fill the future with all manner of terrible and fearful eventualities, as if they were inevitable and nothing good will ever happen. In Existential Angst, we can sustain ‘awakening’ to the edge we are on in existence, then resolve its suspense by action. But in the sickness of the imagination, we are flooded [or flood ourselves] with imagined disasters and horrors whilst remaining passive in the face of the flood. We are swirled up into the flood and feel we can do nothing other than impotently suffer the hideous and debilitating inundation. It is necessary to shut down this avalanche of negative imaginings. Existential Angst, in sharp contrast, breaks us out of comfortable ruts, and forces to be free and choose— and take responsibility.
[2] There is the primordial dark of unformed creation or unformed potentiality of creation, at the start of Genesis. It is the ‘stuff’ of creation, awaiting the Word to shape its being and the Light to illumine its nature. The Holy Spirit will give it life, motion, its dynamic energy, and kinetic purpose.
[3] There is a darkness of evasion, feigning ignorance of one’s own sin= the hiding we do from the Light that exposes our heart in intent and deed. As soon as the tragedy of the Fall occurs, Adam & Eve hide from God [Genesis, 3, 8]. So, the darkness of sin is hiding, the ‘dirty secret’ we cover over and bury and hide our own eyes from. This is what Sartre meant when he said the Freudian personal unconscious is our ‘bad faith’, our hiding from our past deeds, refusing responsibility for them, and thus likely to never correct them. The darkness of sin is the illusion of a defended place where no light can get in. It is the person defending themselves from looking at what they have done, and in that process creating a shadow where the gaze of God, the gaze of other people, and even one’s own gaze, supposedly cannot reach. Such ‘hiding in the dark’ is born of shame, guilt, and the fear of exposure. While the first darkness is holy mystery, this darkness is a self-imposed prison of isolation. What we hide away in this manner can undermine the sincerity, truth, honesty, of all our relationships, and it can block the authenticity, courage, and generosity, of all our actions. We don’t ‘look people straight in the face’ but avert our eyes. The defended against turmoil, the repressed, tends to return, as Freud claimed. We act it out unconsciously. The same defensiveness can be erected to ‘dissociate’ our conscious awareness from early damage, hurt, wounding. This too festers in the dark, becoming an unconscious premise of existence’s paranoia, not its pronoia. The world is against us, nothing good will happen, there is no providence. The worst affect of dissociated hurt is that it blocks off our vulnerability, forcing us to build a facade of ‘tough guy’ inviolability. This invulnerability is itself very brittle and prone to easily crack. Vulnerability is crucial to the pathos and passion of living from the heart. Still, both with ‘failure to hit the mark’ [sin in Hebrew & Greek] and early injury, there may be a time when the person just cannot ‘deal with it’, and so defences can be protective, a kindness. Readiness to face and engage with the darkest gates in existence is key. If we are not ready, the encounter can destroy us. Yet the paradox is also that certain floorboards falling in beneath our feet could never be prepared for. You have to go through that long dark valley to know what it is. Those who have not been affected by the experience cannot imagine, intuit, foresee, just how awful it really is.
[4] The ‘undercover’ God= there is an existential darkness in this world within which God ‘hides.’ This is sometimes the dark clouds of the storm that herald God’s storm-like entry into history, to strengthen the oppressed and overturn the oppressors. This is a threat to the haughty but a comfort to the broken. Psalm 18, 11= “God made darkness His hiding place, His canopy around Him.” Similarly, God answers the pained questions of Job in his innocent suffering out of the whirlwind. This darkness can also mean the reality that space grants perception of pattern, but in going through time we go blind= we can neither see the future nor discern a pattern in the events that succeed each other over time. Moreover, this dark that hides God hides not so much God’s majesty, glory, or omnipotence, but rather God’s secret actions in history that happen in a providential manner we cannot understand. This providence is at work in our suffering, our deepest pain in the heart, our tragedies and disasters, just as it works in the good things we receive from God’s grace. There is a holy trouble wherein the Holy Spirit is actively at work. “God toils in the sign of the Abysmal.”
[5] The Easter Saturday Liturgy refers to another existential darkness when it speaks of ‘the secret wisdom of God hidden in hell.’ This is the darkness of Redemption by going through hell, not avoiding it, and emerging on the other side of hell in Resurrection. Hades or Schoel, and Hell, are the deepest dread and most final defeat of the human venture. Christ’s Descent into Hades and Hell undermines these powers at root in the human heart, bringing forth Life from Death and Love from Hell. ‘By death he overcame death’ and by ‘refusing the throne of the world he became the world’s true king.’
[6] Finally there is the darkness Christ embraced on the Cross, the ultimate darkness in human existence, the fear of final abandonment by God. ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ As a child, we take the Father’s love for granted. As an adult, it is tested to breaking point. In its deepest breaking point, we come to spiritual despair. The Messianic Event, and its Power, takes us through despair.
Lakota tradition honours the first four kinds of darkness. The Incommensurate Darkness is the unsearchable Wakan Tanka. The primordial darkness is Han. The Evasive Darkness of sin is Iktomi and Double-Faced Woman. They operate through masks, deception, hidden motives, that seek destruction as the way to get the ‘last laugh’ on those destroyed. This is malice and malevolence, not prankster mischief. The Existential-Historical Storm Darkness is Wakinyan Tanka of the West. The Wakinyans wrap themselves in black storm clouds, lightning, and destructive winds. To an outsider, they look terrifying and destructive, yet to the Lakota, they are deeply loved because their dark storms bring the rain that cleanses the earth, smites evil, and protects life. The Wakinyans come fearfully but bring restoration and healing to the world.
Darkness is not the enemy of God. Darkness is often the very condition wherein God accomplishes his most holy and revolutionary work.
Indigenous Peoples do not embrace darknesses five and six, because their tradition is not focused on the Messianic Mystery. But the leap from the fourth darkness into the further two darknesses is not far to go. After what has befallen all the tribal peoples in modernity [1500-1900 AD], the fifth and sixth darknesses, kicking off from the fourth darkness, make sense. The continuity becomes more obvious.
For just as the Jews in the concentration camps, and Christ on the Cross, cried out to the Absent God, so too all indigenous peoples, and markedly the Red Indians of the American North, experienced the ‘darkest’ Gold, the God who failed them, as this God failed his chosen the Jews, and as this God failed his Son on the Cross. What Father allows the defeat of Goodness and Beauty in the cause of sacrificial love? What sacrifice is this?
The really deep pain in the really deep heart is the absence of God at precisely the most terrible point where his help is needed. What Fatherhood is this?
[10] The Seventh Darkness
In modernity and post-modernity, all light has failed, secular and sacred. This has engendered a new darkness. Nothing is trusted, nothing is respected, nothing is believed, nothing is ventured. ‘The centre cannot hold’, and we all dread ‘what beast is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.’ The Common has disappeared, thus people cannot unite round a shared life, a shared interest, a shared suffering and a shared joy. What it means to be human is no longer shared. Fragmentation, factionalism, clashes of different kinds of selfishness or absence of love predominate. As my friend Dougald Hine puts it, we are living in the ruins.
Heraclitus said the Logos is the common, and he added, ‘stick to the common.’ This seems impossible, at such a dire time.
This darkness of the defeat, the retreat, the absence, of any and all light is ever encroaching and will become pervasive.
There is a paradox of this time when the light, secular and sacred, departs the world. It is now the time of the Spirit, God’s secret agent. The darkness can extinguish the Light, but it cannot extinguish the Fire.
In this darkness, Fire is kindled.
The Fire Jesus Christ the Messiah came to kindle, and he wished it had been kindled already in his time, is being kindled in this time. The Fire is bringing the Messianic Age. The future End is coming to the past and the present, here and now.
The Fire next time is this time. It has already been kindled. In its time, the Fire will spread.
(end)
