5

CONNECTING

Community and the Web of Interbeing

opening

You feel special. Sometimes this feels like a curse. Like no one will understand you. Ever. Like you will always be an alien walking among regular humans, pretending to blend in. You have learned to live with this gulf, but what you really crave is community. You long to belong to the human family. To Mother Earth.

       Participating in the human condition can be bewildering. It is just not always cozy and easy—rather, it’s humbling at best, downright humiliating when it’s not flowing. It can seem so much simpler to ride solo, slaying your own dragons and singing the ballads you wrote about yourself. Collaboration can be tedious, and the prevailing masculine value system may have conditioned you to feel like you are giving away your power when you share it with others.

       So what? Give it away. The time of the singular sage bestowing his unique wisdom is over. That was a method devised by the men in charge who sought to regulate wisdom. They taught us to suffer alone in the desert for forty years, collecting our insights in a secret box labeled “Esoteric Knowledge.” Then, we were supposed to dispense those insights stingily to those who proved themselves worthy by also suffering alone for the requisite forty years in the desert.

       It turns out that this world is filled with special beings, grappling our way through the anxiety of solitary conundrums and tasting the occasional reprieve of connection. When you realize this, your body lets out its breath and relaxes. The curse lifts. You come in from the cold. You hold out your cup and some other special being fills it with sweet, milky tea spiced with fragrant herbs. You drink.

       Our way, the way of the feminine, is to find out what everyone is good at and praise them for it and get them to teach it to one another. Maybe you know something about the hidden meanings of the Hebrew letters, or how to build a sustainable home from recycled tires and rammed soil, or loving-kindness meditation. You, the one who knows the Islamic call to prayer, climb this minaret and call us all to prayer. You, the one who knows how to sit quietly at the bedside of the dying, show us the way to bear witness. You, the one who knows how to get us to wake up to the shadow of privilege, please, wake us the fuck up. It will be chaotic, all this community building, but your cooperation will save the world.

       Besides, it will be fun.

We Need Her Voice

When I first began to play with the notion of writing this book, I was animated by optimism about the rising voice of the feminine around the world. Women everywhere were standing up and speaking truth, and the established powers were paying attention. Mainstream values that emphasized money over humanity were shifting, and efforts concerning women and children, refugees and people of color were receiving widespread support. From around the world, people were pouring onto the grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect the waters, to pray together and offer loving care to Mother Earth.

It seemed clear that patriarchal structures were finally falling out of love with themselves and were looking to the feminine to restore some balance to a polarized paradigm and wholeness to the broken world. Polls indicated a certain win for Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. We were about to have the first female president of the United States of America! Like many of my soul sisters, I was puffed up with the certainty that this was our time. I was ready for the feminine to take the stage with a whole new choreography.

Then I went to bed on the eve of the election, and when I woke up in the morning Donald Trump had been elected president of my country. This man was the very embodiment of every value I reject. Having been raised by a feminist mother who modeled self-empowerment, and now being married to a man who is a loving father to multiple daughters and who supports my every aspiration, I had never doubted that I, as a woman, could accomplish any goal and make a meaningful contribution to the world. In contrast, the new president was a misogynist who demeaned women with a breathtaking brashness. I felt like a nuclear bomb had detonated in the night and that it would take years for the full extent of the damage to become evident.

I have always stood in solidarity with the marginalized. The soon-to-be most powerful person on the planet was determined to unravel the social safety net that protected those who lacked access to the spaces and resources disproportionately allotted to the privileged. By virtue of having adopted my children—a decision I made in my youth, when I first confronted the reality of overpopulation and the looming shadow of the climate crisis—mine was a multiracial family. This man was a master of racist rhetoric and an apologist for white supremacy. As a member of the emerging interspiritual movement, my entire life is dedicated to uncovering and sharing the treasures that lie at the heart of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. Donald Trump wanted to ban all Muslims from the shores of our land. Not only was his Islamophobic rhetoric ignorant, it was sacrilegious. Like the proverbial bull in the china shop, he shattered the Golden Rule (treat all beings with the loving-kindness with which you would hope to be treated, or, if you prefer Old King James, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” [Matthew 7:12]).

Flabbergasted, heartbroken, I put the proposal for this book aside. The time of the feminine rising was clearly not now, I told myself. I might as well try writing that novel I always thought about. Who wants to listen to me glorifying the vanquished? I would be propping up a corpse and calling her a movie star. I should surrender. We will rise some other time. For now, the emperor was on his throne with his machine gun by his side, and there was not a damn thing we could do about it.

But years of meditation practice have nurtured a modest little witness inside of me who knows better than to believe everything she thinks. As my friend Vera de Chalambert suggested, I turned inward and gave myself permission to not have a clue what was going on or how to make myself useful.

Slowly, I remembered that the feminine mystic is a different creature than the manly prophet. She is not a lone wolf, raising her voice in the wilderness. She is not a strident preacher, warning of doom. She is only as powerful as her community. Alone she is nothing, and she knows it. The very concept of an individual messiah makes no sense to her. When she hears the cries of the world, she reaches out and grasps the hands of her sisters, gathers up her children and asks the blessings of her elders, kisses her lover and turns the kettle to simmer, and rides straight into the arms of the Mystery, where she will wait until it is clear what needs to be done. Then, together with her companions, she will do it.

Look at Mother Mary. A working-class Jewish teenager. Unmarried. She receives an uninvited visit from a vast winged being, who fills her room with his radiance and hands Mary her sacred instructions. “You will be a vessel for the incarnation of the divine here on earth,” he declares. “And it’s going to hurt like hell to be his mother.” Mary trembles, but she stays present. And then she says yes. “Hineyni. Here I am. Thy will be done.”

That moment between Mary’s “no way” and her wholehearted “yes” is the dark night of the soul. It is a space of numinous mystery, of radical unknowingness. It is unconditional (and usually unintentional) surrender, without a flicker of expectation that everything will be all right. Nothing may ever be okay again, and that’s okay. This is the place from which Mary agrees to show up as mother to the whole world. She does not do this alone. She is linked to every mother everywhere, forward and backward in time.

There is a great need to be mothering the world together right now.

So there I sat, an ordinary woman in a slightly apocalyptic world, with a megalomaniacal president, a broken climate, and a signed book contract. I took a breath, wiped the hands of my despair on the jeans of my bodhisattva vow, and renewed my intention to stay present with the pain of the world as long as it would take to ease it. I called on the Shekinah to speak through my written words. I lit a candle and started to write. In between chapters I made soup and answered email and sat at the bedside of a dying friend. I continued to be unskillful in my relationships with my children and a devoted mentor to my students. I found God in all of this. In other words, I got on with the work of the feminine mystic. What else was there to be done? Besides, we need the voice of the feminine more than ever. So I wrote my book.

Building Community

The way of the feminine is the way of connecting. And the path of the mystic leads from the illusion of separation to the reality of divine union, manifested as interdependence with all that is. To walk as a feminine mystic in this world is to recognize that our lives are interpenetrated with the lives of all sentient beings and that the One we love shines from every nexus in that web of interbeing. Whenever we tend to a single strand, we are participating in the care of the whole. When we turn our face from the suffering of any being and walk away, we are exiling ourselves from our Beloved.

Women build community. Not as a mason fabricates a fireplace or a developer plans a shopping mall to maximize consumerism. We create community the way we create a family or a symphony or a good meal: without a lot of grandiosity or demand for accolades. We empower one another. We ask questions, and then we listen, and then we respond. When I lead grief retreats or teach writing workshops—which are largely populated by women—it takes about five minutes before community begins to magically coalesce before my eyes. Without my doing a thing, the people in the room gravitate toward one another and take the risk to trust. They notice one another’s wounds and tend them, detect one another’s vulnerabilities and protect them, read the stories of one another’s souls and affirm them. How did that happen? I used to wonder. But I’ve begun to rely on the invisible force that transmutes a cluster of strangers into a circle of safety. It is the Shekinah in our midst. She comes when we get out of our own way.

I am not, of course, proclaiming that all women are compassionate and relational. I am bewildered about the significant number of my American sisters who vote against their own interests, or claw their way to the top of the corporate ladder at the expense of the most vulnerable, or adopt the very attitudes and strategies of the masculine paradigm that has been used historically to oppress them. And I bow at the feet of my brothers everywhere who willingly abdicate or share their power and join us in getting on with the work of repairing the torn fabric of the world.

Sometimes we drift into despair when we perceive the entrenched power imbalances that devalue life. We cannot imagine how we could possibly rectify anything on our own. The song I am singing—and millions of my sisters and brothers are everywhere echoing the refrain—is one of interdependence and mutual empowerment, of collaboration rooted in love. These are feminine values. Cooperation and emotional connection. Championing one another’s efforts to build a better society and supporting one another’s projects to sustain the earth.

Recognizing the truth of interbeing, community effortlessly unfolds. This unitive awareness is not reserved for the spiritually adept. We all catch glimpses. Remember those moments of mystical melding, whether in the quietude of contemplative practice or in the rush of awe when we encounter something unspeakably beautiful, when our individual identity melts into the Oneness and sets us free? That’s when we recall that there is no separation between ourselves and Ultimate Reality. What we have been seeking has found us and absorbed us into itself. These are fleeting experiences, but they change everything.

Once we have tasted the glory of our unity with all of creation, we can never again fall for the illusion of our independence from the global community. The ego self, the personality we carry around and thrust ahead of us to convince the world of our relevance, becomes irrelevant. And so does the idea of the “other” as an object to be reviled or desired. Donald Trump and the Dalai Lama are both waves on the boundless ocean of being.

This does not mean that the world is a mirage and that our perceptions of pain and injustice are delusional. It means that we have momentarily touched the core of Reality, which is Love, and so it is now incumbent upon us to treat all phenomena as manifestations of that love.

In fact, many of us are already feeling more than ready for horizontal, inclusive leadership. In this more egalitarian and relational dynamic, the insights of particular teachers from various religious traditions are welcomed as worthy contributions offered to and arising from an interconnected community of women. It is accepted that each member of the community, formally trained or not, officially sanctioned by a religious organization or stepping up as a rogue sage, has something of value to offer the whole.

A more feminine flavor of leadership is not something that only women crave. It is nourishment for men as well. Feminine wisdom feeds the human spirit. Mary Magdalene, in her passionate spontaneity, defiance of established plot lines, and the tenderness of her devotion, is an ever-living source of this soul food. Let her nourish you as you step up now. You may look to “the Magdalene” as a role model of an empowered mystic or call upon her as a metaphysical being available as a spirit guide. Either way, she can be an ally in our reclamation of feminine wisdom and power.

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY

I left home when I was fourteen. This may sound outrageous, but it was 1974 and my family was steeped in the counterculture, where conventional social norms did not apply. Besides, I didn’t go far. I moved to the Lama Foundation, an intentional community high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains around twenty miles from my family’s house near Taos, New Mexico. Founded in 1967 by a handful of artists from the East and West Coasts who had the audacity to believe that every one of the world’s religions carries a spark of divine truth, the experiment was grounded in the hypothesis that if we gather together and celebrate the sacred through the practices and teachings of all spiritual paths, we can connect with Ultimate Reality and generate peace on Earth. They did not elect a seated leader and did not pay homage to one guru. Nor did they default to a single faith tradition to the exclusion of the others. They invited Zen masters and Sufi sheiks, yogis and yoginis, rabbis and Native American elders, and they harvested the fruits of these ancient lineages. Fifty years later, Lama is still thriving.

Lama’s approach to the world’s many wisdom ways—with open hands, a listening heart, and a willingness to not have all the answers—strikes me as uniquely feminine. The only leadership position, called the Watch, rotates every two weeks, from new moon to full and back again. Every member of the community, regardless of age or religious education, takes a turn guiding the circle in spiritual practice and welcoming guests. I believe that one of the main reasons the Lama experiment has been so successful is precisely because of this commitment to empowering community and resisting the urge to elect someone to boss everyone else around. It was at Lama that I learned to walk as a feminine mystic in this world.

THE BEGUINES

Intentional community is not a recent phenomenon. The Beguines were a group of women who began gathering in communal households in the Low Countries, primarily the Netherlands and Belgium, in the twelfth century. The last known Beguine died in Ghent in 2014 at the age of ninety-two. Like the Lama Foundation, beguinages were not bound by any strict codes and did not require formal vows. Although their members were Catholic (pretty much the only flavor of religion available to them in Europe during the Middle Ages) and their communities tended toward the monastic, Beguines were not nuns. They were women from across the educational and socioeconomic spectra who chose to dedicate their lives to a balance of interior prayer and service in the world. The Beguines were powerful exemplars of the feminine mystic. They cultivated a direct connection with the Divine in the chambers of their hearts and expressed that intimacy by caring for the poor and sick.

As it turned out, such a choice was a matter of life and death. The church viewed the Beguines with suspicion. Their emphasis on prayer as a private matter between the soul and her God disrupted their institutional hierarchy. These were women who did not require either the permission or the powers of the institutional church to claim their connection to the Divine. Marguerite Porete, probably the most infamous Beguine, was accused of being a “free spirit” and condemned as a heretic.

“I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this soul is God by the condition of Love,” Marguerite wrote in her mystical masterpiece, The Mirror of Simple Souls. “Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says love, takes my nourishment.” Lover transformed into Beloved? Did she mean the soul is transformed into God? Well, yes. Yes, she did. And she never recanted, either. And so they burned her at the stake.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR

My friend Sister Greta is a Benedictine monastic in the Episcopal tradition who has been deeply formed by the example of the Beguines. For Greta, the essence of the Christian message is one of connection. “Community is so Jesus!” Greta exclaims. “It’s at the core of why I am Christian.” She reminds me that when Rabbi Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he said that we should love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our strength, and we should love our neighbor as ourselves. “Both of these instructions are utterly and profoundly relational,” Greta says. “Loving your neighbor is an obvious way to express connection. But contemplative prayer—silent meditation—isn’t about nothingness. It’s about sitting in the presence of the Divine. It’s about resting in God.” It’s about Love.

No one could be more surprised than Greta that she turned out to be a Christian, let alone a monastic. Greta was a pioneer in the American yoga movement, cofounding the legendary YogaWorks in Santa Monica, California, and Yoga Zone in New York City. Before that, she was engaged in feminist activism. But while these practices fortified her body and aligned with her values, neither path offered the nourishment Greta’s soul hungered for. In 2000, as Greta’s carefully woven life was unraveling (marriage, business, housing), a friend encouraged her to do a retreat at an Episcopal monastery in Massachusetts, just to have a chance to breathe and center herself before figuring out her next step.

“On my first day there, an old monk—the kindest person I have ever known—gave me homework,” Greta tells me. This assignment was the beginning of her “conversion experience.” He instructed her to go back to her room that evening and sit across from an empty chair and imagine Jesus sitting in it. “Unburden your heart,” the monk directed Greta. “Tell him everything.” Greta shared the depths of her pain with the imaginary Jesus. She wept her way through the entire exercise. “And I felt nothing in return,” Greta admits.

But later that night, when Greta finally lay down to sleep, she became suddenly and intensely aware of a vast presence—not a personal Jesus, but the Cosmic Christ. It did not have a body, but rather was composed of a kind of electrified light. Greta half sat up and was held in place by this electric light streaming back and forth between Greta’s heart and the heart of the Cosmic Christ. She felt (rather than heard) the words: “First we must heal your heart.” Then she lay back down and sensed all her sorrow draining away. In that moment, she knew she was healed. After that, Greta simplified her life, giving away almost everything she owned and paring all her belongings down to what would fit in a single room, which is how she has lived ever since.

“I just knew I wanted to live as a monastic,” Greta tells me. “I wanted my whole life to be about God.” She began seeking an intentional spiritual community to match her longing for a life of prayer and service. “I had asked God what she wanted me to do for her and she led me to the word chaplain. Then I met Dennis, who was a chaplain in the jails, and I knew this was what I was supposed to be doing.” It turns out Dennis, too, had a monastic calling, and so together they created the Community of Divine Love in Southern California.

Brother Dennis and Sister Greta balance their days between praying the Divine Office—the five contemplative prayers in the Benedictine tradition—and ministering to human beings caught up in the toxic web of the Los Angeles prison system. Whenever I visit the Community of Divine Love I am struck by the joy that radiates from the hearts of these gentle monks and can imagine how it oozes like light through the shadowed passageways of the jails and prisons where they spend most days, healing and transfiguring every heart they encounter.

It may no longer be deadly to form small communities dedicated to the values of contemplative practice and environmental sustainability, but it’s still subversive. Living with other human beings is one of the most challenging things most of us will ever do. It’s hard enough to coexist with our own partners and children. Making decisions and making meals and making a difference in the world in conjunction with a bunch of people who used to be strangers requires a depth of surrender and humility rarely demanded of us in mainstream Western society.

If we look to the feminine, drawing on the innate value of relationship, we can navigate these alternative social structures and find a viable path through the changes that are coming. We do not need to reside in intentional communities like Lama Foundation or a beguinage to live lovingly and responsibly as feminine mystics, but it’s vital in these times of desperate divisiveness that we reach out to the rest of the human family and affirm the truth of our interconnection in any and every way that we can.

The Feminine Prophet

Not every mystic is naturally prophetic, and not every prophet leans toward the mystical. Traditionally, the primary concern of the mystic has been communion with the Divine, and the major issue for the prophet has been speaking truth. For the feminine, however, the line between contemplative life and social and environmental action is blurry to the point of insignificance. She turns inward, where she recognizes herself in all beings, which moves her to turn outward and act on behalf of the whole.

All times are urgent times, yet I don’t think humanity as a whole has ever faced the magnitude of the threat of imminent extinction with which we are presently confronted. And rather than doing everything they can to thwart disaster, certain men in charge of steering the ship of the world are leading us straight into the iceberg.

We need all hands on deck. While it is not in everyone’s nature to vocally decry the violation of human rights and the degradation of the planet, I believe that we are all on some level prophets, women and men, and that all prophets are reluctant prophets. At least the real ones are. We stammer and protest when we are called upon to stand up and do something about the suffering around us. We cannot imagine how the Holy One could have picked us to speak through when there must be so many more worthy mouthpieces to choose from. If I were God (which I am, and which you are, too) and someone was applying for the job of prophet, I would send him away at once. I would mistrust his motivation.

Look at Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval Rhineland visionary: a true prophet. Hildegard starts having visions of the being who calls itself the Living Light when she is a small child. Her prophecies so deeply disturb the adults that she wrestles the messages down and plows them under. She buries them as a girl and stuffs them back down as a woman whenever they begin to rise again. But they continue to smolder in the subterranean zone of her soul, threatening to destroy her if she does not share them.

At last, on the threshold of death, she gives in. She sits up and starts writing down the cosmological information that comes coursing through her. Her illness falls away. She writes and she draws, she composes heavenly chorales and she concocts healing remedies. She praises the Divine Mother—Mary, Sophia, the Earth—and invites us all into intimate relationship with the vital essence flowing through all of creation.

Look at Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, whose name means “Resplendent One.” Those who knew Fatima, from the time she was a little girl until her death at age twenty-nine, remarked on the luminosity of her countenance. Many feel that it was Fatima who was meant to carry the Prophet’s lineage. Muhammad did not have the opportunity to name his successor before he died. This ambiguity created the historic rift among Muslims commonly referred to as the Sunni/Shi’a split. Some of his followers felt the Prophet would have wanted the community to decide among themselves who would succeed him after his death (Sunni). Others thought that Ali, who was both Muhammad’s cousin and his son-in-law, should lead the community (Shi’a).

But there is ample evidence that Muhammad revered his daughter Fatima more highly than any other woman, placing her as equal in status to Mary, who is so profoundly respected in Islam that an entire chapter of the Holy Qur’an is dedicated to her. It seems entirely possible to many people, Muslim and non-Muslim, that Fatima was the most qualified of all potential successors. We have not heard whether or not Fatima clamored for this position or even imagined herself worthy. She simply continued to love Allah with all her heart and all her soul and all her strength and to be of comfort to those who suffered. She suffered terribly herself.

This must be how it feels to be a prophet: we are swallowed up, like the biblical prophet Jonah in the belly of the great fish, and must spend some time suspended in the darkness. We agree to be a spokesperson for God and then, as happened to Muhammad, bearing that burden almost crushes us. We get our people through the narrow straits of Egypt, like Moses and his siblings Miriam and Aaron did, only to discover that our people seem to prefer the comfortable misery of slavery. Like Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, we love the Beloved against all odds and through all consequences.

Tears of the Buddha

One day Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion, stood on the mountaintop gazing down into the valley where human beings were busy with their work of suffering. They burned and moaned, reached out and drew back, were born and died and were reborn to do it all again. He couldn’t bear it. His eyes filled with tears, and he wept. One of these tears crystallized into Tara, the bodhisattva of compassion. She stood up, looked around, and spontaneously she vowed: “I will strive for the liberation of all beings for as long as beings exist. And I will do this always as a woman.” And then she sat down to meditate for ten million years, during which time tens of millions of beings were set free by the power of her practice.

This is the feminine version of the bodhisattva vow. It may sound like a grave matter, but it is not solemn. Tara is playful, irreverent, and wild in her mercy. When we begin to take ourselves and our spiritual path too seriously, Tara shows up to play tricks on us and get us to laugh at our own self-righteousness. She pulls the rug out from under those who show disrespect for the feminine. On the field of the open mind, Tara dances. In the sea of the open heart, Tara soothes all wounds. She has eyes on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Seeing the pain of the world and acting with compassion are integrated realities.

Tara helps us to remember: We are not on our own. There are countless women hearing the call, extending their hands, blessing and strengthening us to step up. We cannot and should not transmute the toxins of the prevailing paradigm inside the cells of our own individual bodies. The alchemy happens in a circle. We need to weave together our threads of care and transfigure this tapestry. It is only together that we can reimagine the territorial treaty we’ve inherited as a generous invitation to a communal feast. Look around. Your allies are everywhere. And they love you.

deepening

Mystical Jewish wisdom teaches us that we are all born with a particular task we are meant to do to contribute to the healing of the world, and we are precisely and perfectly designed to do it. What is the unique task imprinted on your soul? Hint: it is probably something you are already good at and is almost definitely something you love doing.

       Sit quietly, with your eyes closed (or downward cast and unfocused). Allow yourself to contemplate your strengths and imagine how you might harness them for the benefit of others. Write down a list of ways you could rise to the call, even if they don’t look like dramatic contributions or if they take a very different form than you might have imagined. Be wildly creative. Make a plan of action to implement one of these ideas.