sacred feminine – The Kingdom of Enough

Tending the Flame

Strolling through the center of Kildare, you can’t help stepping into Brigid’s footsteps: this figure revered as Celtic mother goddess and Christian saint smiles at you larger than life from murals on McHugh’s Pharmacy and the Firecastle Pub. Since 2012 I have been part of a circle in Santa Cruz acting to keep Brigid’s legacy alive, so it was with the spirit of a pilgrim that I spent an afternoon around the corner from the pub at the site of the fire temple where a flame was kept burning in ancient times to honor the goddess and later the saint who bore her name. For centuries before and after Christianity came to Ireland, women tended that flame to the sacred feminine until it was extinguished during the Reformation.

Author leaning against an old stone wall and writing on her iPad — Photo courtesy of Carolyn Brigit Flynn

Leaning against a stone wall that marks the old boundary of St. Brigid’s monastery, I pulled out my iPad for some writing en plein air in a field of green grass dotted with white alyssum, yellow cat’s ear, and old gravestones. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, and birdsong mixed with the distant hum of traffic from town, clattering from the restoration of the medieval round tower on my right, and soft-voiced visitors drifting into the cathedral. Before me was the fire temple, surrounded by a short rectangular wall with stairs leading down to a depression in the earth, empty now as a breeze danced through the sea of yellow flowers. Once upon a time this enclosure might have been round instead of rectangular, formed by hedgerows instead of stone. Long ago it did not share this field with a Christian church and cemetery; now it does, a tangible reminder of how devotion to the goddess transformed into a fidelity acceptable to those in power, transformed, but in the red-hot heart of the fire, one and the same.

This is part of why Brigid appeals to me: she accommodates a Christian sensibility, and she holds the ancient impulse to honor the sacred feminine, just as that primal instinct lives inside me along with the Catholic tradition I was born into. In the heart of the fire and in my own human heart they are one and the same because each mirrors the spark of the One beyond all names and forms and even gender, the fire inside each of us meant to be the light of the world.

Pillar candle surrounded by stones and vases of heather

In 1992, as a new millennium approached, the Brigidine Sisters in Ireland began a process of discerning their mission which led to opening a small center for Christian Celtic spirituality in Kildare called Solas Bhride. A year later they re-lit Brigid’s flame in the market square of Kildare, carrying a spark of that flame to Solas Bhride where they have kept it continually burning ever since. Our retreat group spent a morning and an afternoon with the sisters there, learning about what Brigid can teach us today about caring for the planet, hospitality, peacemaking, and contemplation. The main building is constructed of circular rooms in the shape of a Brigid’s cross, and in a concluding ritual in the round room where a pillar candle burns with Brigid’s flame, we each lit a tea candle from that original ceremonial spark of 1993. As part of the Santa Cruz Brigid’s Circle, I take turns with eighteen other women tending her flame, and it thrilled me to carry the seeded wick of that little tea candle back to Santa Cruz to light my candle at home.

Altar with statue of Brigid, icon of the Holy Trinity, and lit candle

During those days in Kildare, it occurred to me for the first time that the real flame I’m tending is the one inside me – kindled by something greater than me but my responsibility to keep burning. How to do that? Fire needs oxygen and fuel. For each of us the fuel may be different. My flame feeds on contemplation and connection to community, nature, and the Divine. (Therapy, books and chocolate help too.) Fire can also be smothered or doused. I confess, this year anxiety has dimmed my inner flame, the big problems of the world that don’t diminish the little ones in my personal life even though I try to keep them in perspective. At two in the morning the challenges of my aging parents keep me awake as much as climate change and the political divisions cleaving our country. But when I’m anxious or afraid, my inner light can’t shine outwards the way it’s meant to. Maybe mindfulness practices like meditation and deep breathing, practices that calm anxiety and help put fears in perspective, are vital tools in the basket of a flame tender.

Years ago, when I was in thrall to some trouble I’ve forgotten now, a friend placed her hand on my chest and told me, “You can come from a place of fear or of love.” How many times did Jesus tell his disciples, be not afraid? This might have been more than a beloved teacher’s reassurance to his frightened friends and followers. Maybe it’s the prerequisite to the greatest commandment of all, a key for each of us to tending our flame.

As I write, we have just passed the midpoint between the autumn equinox and winter solstice with celebrations of Halloween, All Saints Day, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain. The days are getting shorter and cooler, and we may feel trepidation at the darkness ahead. How to tend my flame now? In a time of trouble when I am susceptible to fear, it begins with faith in the light. The feast day of St. Brigid is celebrated on February 1st, the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and spring equinox known as Imbolc in the Celtic calendar when the goddess Brigid is also honored. At the beginning of February winter isn’t over yet, but we feel it yielding. Lambs are born, crocuses bloom, and sunrise comes earlier; light lingers a little longer each day. In this way Brigid reminds us (in the words of a song by Cyprian Consiglio): “There is a light that can overcome the darkness. There is no darkness that can overcome the light.” Even now our flames can be vibrant — especially when joined. The ritual of lighting a candle to Brigid both symbolizes and feeds my faith in that light. Fear is a bushel over the lamp. Love is the array of lighthouse mirrors that reflect it far out to sea.

The Secret Cup

The Essential Rumi (book on floral background with a tulip)

I first came to Rumi in the fall of 2000 at the suggestion of my teacher Carolyn Flynn. In response to a now forgotten comment or question, she recommended that I read his poem “Love Dogs.” A few months in her writing group had already dispelled my notion formed in college that poetry was an esoteric genre best left to more literary readers, and I trusted her judgement completely.

“Where can I find it?”

She pulled a worn copy of The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks from the bookshelf behind her and held it up; the next day I held my own copy in my hands.

“Love Dogs” tells the story of a man who gave up praising Allah after a cynic pointed out that he’d never gotten a response. In a dream, Khidr, the guide of souls, explains to him:

This longing

You express is the return message.

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

It was as if the guide of souls had appeared in my own dream, offering me solace and a way out of my confusion. As soon as I finished, my eyes pulled my heart into the next poem, “Cry Out in Your Weakness,” and before I came to the end, I was weeping.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.

A nursing mother, all she does

is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper,

and she’s there.

At the time, I was going through a divorce, which had been preceded by discovering I was infertile. The loss of my marriage was piled on the grief of my empty womb, so many dreams for my life gone, and here was God like a mother wanting nothing more than to let the milk of loving flow into me. Suddenly I began to encounter Rumi everywhere. My friend Eric was quoting him in Caffe Bene, Sufi translator Kabir Helminski read at the Vets Hall, Coleman Barks at the Rio theater. One might never guess this celebrated poet had been born eight hundred years before in Afghanistan!

Rumi was a Sufi scholar guiding a community in Turkey in 1244 when a wandering dervish named Shams showed up and changed his life. The friendship between the two men transformed Rumi into a mystic and a poet spouting inspired verse as he whirled in the Sufi tradition. Fortunately for us, Rumi was profligate with the wisdom he received in his ecstatic dance. Like the right key fitting into a well-oiled lock, his poems opened my heart to the sensuality of the Divine. Rumi didn’t simply rave about bliss, nor did he discuss it in intellectual terms; he actually gave me a taste. And always Rumi had the right words.

When, in the thrill of new love, I half-complained to my therapist about not getting enough sleep, he laughed and shared a few lines from Rumi:

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

After the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the director of the International Students Program at Foothill College was planning a memorial service for our students who had lost loved ones. He called me in the library, asking for the poem “No Man Is an Island” or any poem I thought would be appropriate. Instead of John Donne I gave him Rumi: This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression … (p. 109) “That was perfect,” he told me later. And so a teacher from the 13^th century found grieving students in the 21^st, a mystic born in Afghanistan becomes a bestselling poet in the United States.

With eyes opened by Rumi I became alert to hints of sensual spirituality in the Bible. Taste and see how good the Lord is, David sang three thousand years ago, inviting us in Psalm 34 to use our senses to experience the Divine, while the Song of Songs offers a gorgeous allegory for our connection with God in its celebration of the erotic longing between a man and a woman: Arise, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come away … As a woman privately grappling with the patriarchy of my church, I felt the delight of noticing spring’s first roses whenever I discovered feminine imagery. More than once in the Psalms David compares God to a mother bird protecting her young, and Isaiah likewise promises that as a mother comforts her child, so will I [God] comfort you. Jesus takes up the metaphor when He laments over Jerusalem: how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings ….

As a Muslim and a scholar, it seems likely that Rumi was familiar with Hebrew and Christian scripture. Maybe some of those verses lived in his subsconscious and ignited in a moment of ecstatic twirling. Or could it be that the resonance of Rumi with other worshipers under the Tent of Abraham speaks to the universality of our experience?

It turns out that the Christian tradition also has a rich legacy of mystics. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegard of Bingen, and St. Teresa of Avila have joined The Essential Rumi on my bookshelves, but Rumi has a special place in my heart. He is there whenever I need to cry out in my weakness or simply long to taste and see the goodness of the Divine.