Persephone Graces a Drum Dance Chant Gathering

On March 31^st, which happens to have been Easter Sunday, fourteen souls came together at the Sugarloaf UU church to celebrate and serve the love of the Goddess through drumming, chanting, and dance.

The date was not chosen because it was Easter; however, we were mindful of the correspondence of our gathering with the day on which many of our Christian brothers and sisters celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, defeating death and opening the gate to eternal life.  This correspondence inspired our invocation of Persephone, daughter of the great Goddess Demeter and a goddess in her own right, she who blesses and sustains the souls of the dead, joining the realms of the living and the dead and opening the gate to eternal life.

I think it worthwhile to reflect on some of the correspondences between the ancient pagan religions of the Mediterranean basin and Christian religion as it developed over the first few centuries of the Common Era in that same part of the world:

First, the notion of incarnate deity, the divine manifesting in a living fleshly person, had been common in the Mediterranean world for centuries.  Egyptian kings had been considered gods, as had Persian emperors.  By Jesus time there were temples and priests dedicated to the god Augustus, founding emperor of the Roman Empire.  Mainstream Christian religion came to embrace the doctrine that Jesus had been God Incarnate when he walked on earth.  It’s a very un-Jewish idea and one that would perhaps have seemed strange to incomprehensible to Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Jew.

Second, the movement of Christ between the realms of the living and the dead: “He descended into hell.  The third day he rose again from the dead.  He ascended into heaven” parallels the movement of Persephone between the realms of living and dead, joining them.  Persephone’s journey is conceived of as recurrent, engendering the transitions of the seasons.  Christ is conceived to have made the journey once, but the Christian faithful celebrate the event seasonally.

Finally, the triple Goddess of ancient pagan religion parallels the triune God of Trinitarian Christianity.   The pagan triple Goddess is comprised of the elements: maiden, creatrix, and crone, or, in different language, daughter, mother, and wise elder woman.  The triple Goddess associated with the great Goddess Demeter is Core (the personal name of Demeter’s daughter), Persephone (a title accorded to Demeter’s daughter as a goddess in her own right), and Hecate.  The Christian Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit which is the spirit of wisdom/truth.  The archetypes have been re-organized and re-imaged as male, but persist across the religious traditions of the Mediterranean world.  Persephone is still with us, but today she is most commonly called Jesus Christ.

Our circle also included a healing ritual prompted by my familiar, Hummingbird Spirit.  Two of our gathered choose to receive healing with laying on of hands.  We chanted the words “Healing Spirits come, come.  Light our way, light our way” to a tune written by Joanne Hammil as a setting for a line from Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”)  A lesson for us from Hummingbird was that healing and illumination are much more intertwined that we usually think and are really both aspects of wholeness creation.  She also told me that healing of the individual always heals the world and healing of the world always heals the healers and that our gatherings should always include a chant for healing of the world as well as offer individual healing.  Both of the participants who choose to receive healing in the circle later reported positive results.

Our poly-rhythmic drumming segment seemed to engage us very deeply.  It was full of energy for me and two participants have told me that it was powerful for them.

At the end of the gathering there seemed to be an energy to gather again soon, so perhaps we’ll meet again near the cross quarter.

May we all be blessed

Poetry Reading

Back in February solicitations were made for presenters for the Sugarloaf UU pledge dinner.  I agreed to read some poetry.  Something changed in the interval and the reading never happened, so I thought I'd post it here . . .

Until recently Linda and I had a teen girl from Ethiopia living with us.  We’d intended to adopt her, but it didn’t work out.  That’s been painful, but back in June, when we were full of hope, I wrote this:

Morning Star

Shed your tears on our shoulders

Take our hands and together

    Let us face the East

For a new sun rises

A new day dawns

Together let us heal our broken bones

Together let us join our beating hearts

    That have never broken

Together let us form a circle

    Amidst the circles of our kin

Across the mighty face of Earth

She who loves us

And bears us gently home

. . .

Beginning of last year I got interested in poetry therapy, the use of literature as a means of personal healing.  I took on a wounding that I suffered from my father as a kid.  He’d wanted to read me a well known poem by John McCrae about world war I dead.  It’s a lovely poem that I’m sure most of you will recognize:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
 
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
 
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

When I wasn’t able to receive the poem in the way he’d wanted my father let me know how disgusted he was with me.  It was one of many shamings I got when I turned out not to be what he’d wanted.  Last year, I wrote this:

In Flanders Fields my father dreamed

Of noble thoughts, high minded verse

As I walked innocently by

He halted me to hear those words

I might not learn in school

He would be pleased I knew

If I attentive, grateful, heard

From him those noble verses read.

I giggled.

Sternly, he began again.

I really tried.  Despairingly

I tried to hold at bay

My glee and his contemptuous glare

And failing as a literary don

He taught disgust instead.

I took the lesson in.

Oh I took up my quarrel with the foe

That lurked inside, recoiling from

The shame he planted there

And fought the futile battles till I know

That there are places less remarked

Where blood is shed, than Flanders Fields

. . .

McCrae’s famous poem takes a form called a rondeau, it’s one of many medieval French forms to make it’s way into English.  They’re fun to write and I’ve written several.  My favorite is this:

Between the worlds and restless dreams

Where shadows dance and moonlight streams

A spider waits on stealthy web

And feels the trembling in each thread

And coming is and going seems

As moonlight glints off swirling streams

Trees whisper, sighing in their dreams

Expectancy, or is it dread?

Between the worlds

The breeze demanding what it means

The spider skitters soft unseen

Across the taught and trembling web

Vibrations dance as mass is shed

A shadow slipstreams through the screen

Between the worlds

. . .

When I began writing a year or so ago I’d expected to write poetry in free verse; I had no reason to want to write end rhyme or metered lines; but to my surprise I found that if I set myself to write in verse forms something in me engaged the task with great pleasure and my imagination went places I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.  A playful exercise in verse writing lead to what is probably my wife’s favorite of my recent compositions:

Two moonbeams came bouncing and glistening

Off of the shiny wood floor

They’d slipped through the louvers

Then straight on maneuvered

To the cat near the foyer door

“What ho” said the cat “are you stalking?”

“Then I will go stalking too

For the sky it is wide

And it’s my cat’s pride

To go prowling the night with the moon”

So the cat he ascended a moonbeam

His little feet silently crept

Round the shimmering sky

He was ever so sly

And he never did falter a step

And he gazed at the cities of angels

And he roamed through the lands of the elves

And he spoke to the dreams

Of the silvery moon beams

And he had a fine time for himself!

The morning of course found him napping

All curled in a tight little ball

For though sunlight is fine

A cat’s sense of time

Is a mystery pondered by all

. . .

My friends that’s my five minutes.  I thank you for your kind attention.  May we all be blessed.

What is Spirituality?

I developed the following remarks for the worship service at the Sugarloaf Congregation of Unitarian Universalists on Oct 7, 2012.  They are intended, in five to seven minutes, to answer the question “What is Spirituality?”  I’m grateful to Carol Plummer, the lay service leader, for the invitation to participate.  The SCUU web site can be found here: http://scuu.org/site/.

…..

Most of you know my wife Linda.  We met here at Sugarloaf.  When we were first getting to know one another we had a conversation in which Linda said:  “I don’t do spiritual.”  My response to her was something like “But you play music.  To me music is spiritual.”  And she said “I think of it that way too!”, and we talked about how at a contra dance the band will shift the music up a key and there’s this surge of energy and the whole thing becomes more alive and spirited.  Now I’m sure that when we call a dance or a person or a conversation “spirited” we mean something different than if we call a dance or a person or a conversation “spiritual”, but I’m also sure that the connection in language isn’t an accident.  I think that most of us who are interested in spirituality and spiritual practice seek in part to be more alive, more spirited.

Two sayings come immediately to my mind in this connection.  One is a phrase placed on the lips of Jesus by the evangelist John, chapter 10 verse 10: “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”  The other is from Joseph Campbell, from the well known interviews with Bill Moyers. Campbell says: “People tell us that we’re seeking a meaning for life.  I don’t think that’s what we’re seeking.   I think that what we’re seeking is the experience of being alive.”

I’m going to segue this into the big ugly, that big looming thing that so disturbs and frightens most of us: our inevitable personal death.  For Christians the words of Jesus just quoted can cover that base as well.  Christianity, like most religions, offers the promise of life that goes beyond the death of the body in this world.  Joseph Campbell has a teaching on this score too.  For me it’s a very compelling teaching and a cornerstone on which much may be built.  Moyers asks him “What about the dark gate?” and Campbell says “Oh, that’s no problem at all.  That a question of whether you identify with the light bulb, or whether you identify with the light, of which the bulb is merely a carrier.”

And I think that here we’ve reached the nib of the question.  I think that spiritual seekers almost universally seek a connection with something greater than the embodied self, with the light rather than merely the bulb.  We seek a connection that can free us from the prison of separate, individuated, personal existence. People seek and find that connection all the time in all kinds of ways, many having nothing to do with religion as it is conventionally understood.  I witnessed such a connection . . .

. . . a few years ago I participated in a workshop on vocal improvisation.  Our coach offered us an exercise for clearing the mind’s ear of musical ideas and then going into an improvisation so that something new can emerge.  We worked with that for a bit and then formed a semi-circle of chairs and began each taking a turn.  There was a guy in the workshop, Charles.  He was a masterful pianist, I heard him play.  He was not an experienced singer.  He’d chosen this workshop as a way to stretch himself musically.  Charles went to take his turn and there he was doing the clearing and then suddenly his voice soared.   And I was going like this [hands shaking].  It was acutely painful for a moment to be in the presence of that energy unprepared.  I got my hands on the arms of my chair and grabbed hold.  I was sort of all right then.  And Charles sang out this music.  It knew exactly where it was going.  It had a conviction that snapped you to pieces.  And it knew exactly when it was finished.  And there we were in the semi-circle, astounded; our jaws half way to the floor as they say.  Charles went to take a step toward his chair and his legs crumpled underneath him.  He actually fell, but he was all right and he got to his chair and in the moment his weight was supported he exclaimed: “WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!  WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!”, in just about the way I said it just now.

There’s a simple and obvious answer to the question “where did that come from?”  It came from within Charles.  I don’t have a problem with that answer.  I’m not going for anything metaphysical or supernatural here.  I don’t care about those things.  But I don’t think the answer really answers Charles’s question.  What was that inside of Charles?  What font of creativity that he didn’t know about until then?  And it wasn’t just inside of Charles.  I know because I heard the music.   We in the semi-circle could not have been touched, and we were touched profoundly I promise you, unless we were touching whatever it was that Charles touched.

I’ll end my remarks with words that are part of my daily spiritual practice, and that I’m sure most of you will recognize as adapted from the 23^rd psalm of the Jewish bible:

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.  Your rod and your staff they comfort me.  You prepare for me a table in the midst of my fears.  You anoint me with light, my cup runs over.  Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of this life, and I will dwell in the house of light, forever.

…..

Notes: 

      1) The vocal improvisation workshop was offered by “Music For People”, an organization dedicated to empowering musicians of all levels to improvise music freely.  Their web site is here http://musicforpeople.org/my/.

2) For more information about Joseph Campbell and the interviews broadcast as “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” check out this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth.

Atonement Chant

I cantered the service at the Sugarloaf Congregation of Unitarian Universalists on Sunday and offered a prelude chant that I call At One.  A friend asked me for a copy of the words so I reproduce them here:

hail bright vision

great spirit

kind mother

we are your children who circle your world

may we be your wisdom

may we be your laughter

may we  be your spirit a foot in the world

at one, at one, at one, at one

at one, at one, at one

at one, at one, at one, at one

at one with your spirit a foot in the world

REFRAIN:

purify our hearts and

purify our minds

cast out all that blocks us from thee

may we be your window

through us may you shine

grant us your vision to be

at one with the stars from which dust we are made

at one with the light that we seek

at one with the salt sea from which we have come

at one with the voices that cry out to be free

REFRAIN

at one with the circle

the circle of life

at one with our family

our brothers our sisters

lovers and friends

all our relations at the jubilee

REFRAIN

Being the Sunday closest to Yom Kippur Reverend Megan chose to speak on atonement.  The text of her sermon can be found here: http://scuu.org/site/content/remove-our-shortcomings.

A mentor once told me that atonement means "at one-ment", restoring our oneness with our source.  When I thought about a prelude what came to my mind was the 3/4 heartbeat rhythm and how a drumming teacher used to chant to it the words "We are one, we are one, we are one".  You'll form the rhythm if you chant "bomp bomp <pause> bomp bomp <pause> bomp bomp <pause>" with equal time given to the bomps and pauses (silence at the pauses).   The sound is like a beating heart which is perhaps why it suggests the oneness of all to many of us.  In my mind I heard "at one, at one, at one" in place of "we are one, we are one, we are one" but conveying much the same idea.  The 3/4 heartbeat forms the underlying rhythm of the chant.

This is the first time I've written creatively in months.  It seems I need a reason to write.

May we all be blessed