KALI’S CHILD
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
OSCAR WILDE
Three months and three part-time jobs after my college graduation, I found myself wandering the crowded streets of Calcutta, interviewing Kali devotees and Indian scholars, participating in various Kali pujas (devotional practices), volunteering at Nirmal Hriday (“The Home of the Pure Heart,” Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying, which is next door to Kalighat, one of the main Kali temples in Calcutta), and trying desperately to align my Western academic perceptions and personal experiences of this unruly Indian Goddess with my fieldwork results. They were incongruent, to say the least.
Although vivacious images of Kali greeted me on almost every Bengali street corner, Her spiritual presence was shackled with a millennium of orthodoxy and repressive cultural conditioning. On Kali Puja, the annual festival dedicated to Kali (always held on a new moon), I spent the night wandering Calcutta’s crowded streets, visiting various places of Her worship — from teeming temples to eerie cremation grounds, peaceful private home gatherings to noisy public spectacles. Although I respected each form of worship, finding some of them truly intense and others truly moving and others truly strange, I did not find my place to worship Her.
Around 4 a.m., exhausted and sweaty, I walked back to my tiny, bare room at the Ramakrishna Mission and found my way to honor Her. I lit some candles, turned on my CD player, and with an aching heart, slowly began to dance to “She Makes Me Wanna Die,” an electronica song by Tricky.
Since we come from different cultures and life circumstances, I expected there to be differences between my personal experiences with Kali and those of the Hindu women I interviewed. However, I simply wasn’t prepared to miss Kali so much or to feel so alone while I was on Her home turf. Where was my transformative, transgressive, erotic Red Divine Feminine Lady? I had hoped to find more resonance in India than I was finding, as well as something stable on which to place my ever-growing unorthodox experiences of Her. But what was clearer than Evian water was that their Kali was not my Kali. Finding nothing external to match my internal experiences of Kali, I tucked our strange relationship away and went home three months early, disappointed and confused.
Why had I been guided to study Her in Calcutta?
Here’s the skinny on Divine winks: They don’t necessarily lead to happiness or a pot of gold or our next date, nor do they necessarily make sense or answer our most burning questions. In fact, they can often seem more like stumbling blocks than signposts. Sometimes, Divine winks validate a budding internal realization or point to the “best” choice to make, but more often than not, they illuminate carefully ordered “steps” leading us down a very deliberate path, chock full of twists and turns in consciousness. They can be provocateurs, pranksters, party crashers, and slinky sirens. They are always a practice in surrendering to the ongoing support of mystery.
My relationship with Kali was becoming an unsolved mystery.
And it looked like it needed to stay that way.
When I got to Harvard the following year to begin my graduate degree in comparative world religions, I quickly learned how incorrect it was to “take” a practice, belief, or deity from another religious tradition and culture and use it for what was generally viewed as one’s own pseudospiritual and psychotherapeutic needs. It was misappropriation. It was theft. It was neocolonialism and modern imperialism. It was narcissistic, egocentric, Western-centric, white woman–centric, individualistic, abusive, and just downright wrong. I agreed intellectually with parts of these beliefs, especially because here in America, aspects of the world’s religions often appear on a smorgasbord so that hungry Westerners can chow down on the most appetizing pieces, while ignoring the whole Divine dish.
But what the hell do you do when a Goddess from another religious culture appropriates you? Goddess knows I didn’t consciously ask for Her disruptive arrival in my life, nor did I pick Her out of a catalog like a cool T-shirt to match my lululemon yoga pants or as a shiny new icon to power up my meditation space. She was much more than a trendy spiritual “belief,” or a therapeutic exercise that would be “good for me” to explore, or an archetype that women invoke during a women’s circle, or a rebellious bitch slap to my catholic upbringing, or simply a tantalizing academic thesis.
She was a familiar, terrifying Inner Knowing …
that totally humbled me.
THE INITIATION
While I was in graduate school, my beloved grandfather passed away. My grandmother, aunt, sister, and I were present when he died. It was the first time I had ever witnessed a death. In the grim hospital room, after days of fighting, he finally let go. As his soul left his body, I felt the astonishing presence of
The Between.
I lost my grandfather
Here.
I found Kali
Here.
Later that night, as I was crying into my pillow, I realized something: No matter how touchy-feely She got with me or how many books I read or how many vivid dreams or mystical experiences I had or how long I spent in Calcutta or a classroom, I had had no fucking idea who Kali was until I witnessed a loved one’s body die. I knew that that space between the soul and the body was the holiest space I had ever witnessed … the closest I had ever come to the Divine. For the first time in my years of studying Kali, I actually briefly, but undoubtedly understood Her. It felt like an initiation.
The next morning, the inner critic stepped forward: Why was I smearing my self-absorbed notions of sacredness all over that sad night? Did I need to interpret everything as a divine sign?
Apparently, I do.
The day we buried my grandfather was my birthday, and two validating gifts showed up: a Red journal from my older sister, who was also present at the death, and an icon of Kali from my then-boyfriend, Jay. His story of how She came to me is interesting. On Sunday, when my grandfather was still alive, Jay had bought a birthday gift for me. The next morning, my grandfather passed, and Jay, not yet knowing this news, felt mysteriously pulled to return his gift. He went back to the original store, and that is when he saw Her. She had not been there the day before, because She had only just arrived, still smelling of the Indian temple from which She came. Jay bought Her without hesitation.
So, once again, this persistent Indian Goddess made Her presence known — this time, in delicately carved copper.
THE RED JOURNAL
As for the other birthday gift … well, I eyed that Red journal nervously after the funeral. I knew that due to the circumstances from which it came, this was not supposed to be just some ordinary journal filled with my thoughts about my boyfriend or my intentions for my new birthday year or even my vivid nightly dreams. I knew this Red book was for Something Else.
Weeks passed.
Finally, late one night, I shut a particularly dry book by Foucault, lit a candle, and opened the Red journal. For a few minutes, I simply stared at the big white pages, remembering that sacred space I had encountered when my grandfather had passed. And then I fell
In
Between
In that space, a simple phrase flowed out:
“Come forward …
now.
Till ‘closer’ has meaning no longer.”
I turned the page:
“Sera making love to sera loving to make sera Love.”
The next page:
“See You, Vision your Self seen as the Vision you have been looking for.”
Up to this time in my life, I had felt and witnessed the presence of the Divine, but I had never heard Her speaking inside me. When it happened, it changed everything. There is nothing, no thing, like hearing your Self speak for the first time. You enter a pause so deep, you actually remember your Divine purpose. Your cells catch up with your truest meaning. Your heart begins to home itself. You start to Re-member.
Oh yeah, this is Me.
Oh yeah, this is the Divine.
Aware of it or not, you have this voice within you as well, though yours probably sounds quite different from mine. You’ll know when this voice is speaking, because even though your mind might be all “WTF you sayin’, woman?” your body will feel an actual physical release. While expressing this voice might seem odd at first, it will still feel natural, it will feel good — like you’re scratching an itch you’ve had since before you were born.
Buckle up, buttercup!
SOUL SISTA POWER
The Universe wanted Maya and me to meet. At the beginning of my second year at Harvard, everywhere I turned, she was there, with her strong voice, long eyelashes, and cool demeanor. Finally, after a Krishna Das concert at my yoga studio, we made eye contact from across the room, walked toward each other like magnets, and clasped hands like we had been waiting lifetimes to do so. We made small talk about how “funny” it was that we were in three of the same classes this semester and practiced at the same yoga studio and were raised in the Midwest and studied Kali in undergrad and liked to go out dancing all night and, weirdly enough, even looked like each other. But the subtext that was running between us like a Red thread on fire was
I admired, envied, and, at times, was completely intimidated by Maya’s unflinching public presence, self-confidence, and powerful voice, especially because I became small, shy, and quiet as a mouse in most public environments. But behind closed doors, I was a fireball. In fact, Maya used to say I was the Shams to her Rumi, because our friendship felt more like a mystical awakening for both of us. Unlike Shams and Rumi, however, our spiritual partnership was mixed with cocktails, road trips, pedicures, haircut traumas, sex-toy recommendations, man troubles, inappropriate laughter at serious spiritual retreats, self-appointed spiritual “names” — Li (her) and La (me) (Lila means “the divine play of the goddess”) — and remote-controlled electronic fart-machine stunts in Barneys New York (hysterical laughter when hearing a fart is always a sign of a soul friend to me). We fell deeply in platonic love. Everything we had ever desired from a best friend, mother, sister, lover, healer, therapist, divinity, we finally found in each other.
I’m sharing my relationship with Maya with you because it was through our meeting in graduate school that Red became identified between us, out loud, as something sacred.
There are many reasons the Red fire burned brighter when Maya and I became friends, some of which I will address toward the end of this book. But here’s an important one: We provided a safe space for each other to share our unbridled passion for the Divine Feminine and our unorthodox spiritual experiences (aka “the freaky shit”). In fact, Maya was the first person I let read my Red journal. ’Cause here’s the down and dirty: The Divine Feminine is such a suppressed, misconstrued, and often “forbidden” facet of spirituality, that when She starts to reawaken inside, we’re apt to feel like we’ve been given a one-way ticket to crazy town … or to hell, depending on our background. So, in order not to doubt our experiences and shut down our inner knowing, we need the right external support and reinforcements, like a redwood tree needs rain. According to Sue Monk Kidd, the best way to trust your inner divine feminine is
To be still and remember who you are, to listen to your heart, your inner wisdom, as deeply as you can and then give yourself permission to follow it. If you can’t give yourself permission, then find someone who can. Everybody should have at least one permission giver in her life.1
This book is a Permission Giver.
During my final year in graduate school, Kali sent in another Red reinforcement — Jeffrey Kripal, a controversial scholar of mysticism and the author of one of my favorite books, Kali’s Child. Kripal was my academic Life Saver for many reasons, but mainly because he taught me the importance of gnosis — a way of knowing God/dess that’s not merely faith based (believe in Her) or intellectual (understand Her), but that’s based on one’s inner knowing.
Know Her
Here
(hands on heart)
Here
(hands on belly)
Here
(hands on pussy)
Here
(hands on this book)
Here
(in the Space Between)
Not surprisingly, gnosis was the preferred way of knowing God for many mystics around the world, especially the female mystics. In Enduring Grace, Carol Lee Flinders tells us that while the female mystics could hold their own intellectually with their male colleagues, these ladies weren’t as interested in theological beliefs or intellectual debates. What was more important to them was wisdom that came from personal experience.
Kripal also introduced us to the Gnostics — various groups of early Christians from the first through fourth centuries, who aimed to know God directly, sans intermediaries like priests. Many Gnostics did not appreciate being told what to do by Church authorities, so they took their spiritual lives into their own hands. According to Elaine Pagels in Beyond Belief, these folks believed “that the divine being is hidden deep within human nature, as well as outside it, and, though often unperceived, is a spiritual potential latent in the human psyche.”2 In essence, the Gnostics knew that the Divine and we are one; we just need to take the necessary steps toward making that fiery re-union possible — inner, mystical steps that mere church-going doesn’t necessarily provide. As Pagels elaborates: “Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.”3 Jesus even said, “He who has not known himself does not know anything, but he who has known himself has also known the depth of all,”4 and J.C. speaks in Red — just open any bible.
As you can probably imagine, the early Christian fathers did not appreciate this declaration of spiritual independence and dedicated self-inquiry that many Gnostics championed (most early Christians believed God was separate and “wholly other” from humans). Nor did they like the radical idea that one could find God not by going to church or listening to the clergy, but by simply turning within. In fact, according to Elaine Pagels, one particularly pissed-off Christian bishop, Irenaeus (180 CE), decided that the Gnostics “were divisive and arrogant upstarts who threatened to undermine church unity and discipline, for they ‘disturb the faith of many by alluring them under the pretense of superior knowledge.’”5 Irenaeus also called the Gnostics “self-appointed ‘know-it-alls.”6 Sounds familiar. (By the way, I just gotta point out that in the Bible, knowing someone often meant having sexual intercourse with them, so calling someone a Know-It-All, in mystical terms, means they are Making Love to All of Existence, which is about as Red as you can get, folks.)
Despite orthodoxy’s best efforts to do away with those ghetto Gnostics and their witchy writings, lo and behold, in 1945, a Red jar was found buried in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, encasing fifty-two heretical Gnostic texts dating back to the first century of the Christian era — texts that have added a revolutionary new dimension to Christianity. Aw, snap!
THE RED PAPER
Despite these external supports, when it came time to write my final paper for graduate school, I found myself struggling. After all my Red experiences and all my Red journaling, my academic writing felt, well, dead. Kali sounded like a specimen I was studying, disinfected from Her divinity under the microscope of my scholarship. I spent months sifting through computer files containing my five years of research, slowly piecing together a solid paper, barely noticing that all of my data came from other people’s academic research or personal experiences of Kali. A week before my final paper was due, feeling totally dissatisfied with what I had written, I looked up from my computer at my icon of Kali and asked, “How do I do this? How do I really write about You?” My question slid off Her bright-Red tongue, dripping a scary answer:
(Gulp.)
The next morning, my computer wouldn’t turn on. Frantic but hopeful, I ran to the computer repair shop, only to find out that my five years’ worth of research, including my final paper, was irretrievable, unless I married a millionaire in the next week. Sobbing, I called my mother, who auspiciously voiced, “Well, Sera, She is the Goddess of destruction.” I slammed down the phone and screamed to nobody and to everybody, “Why THE FUCK didn’t I choose to study Kwan Yin, the benign and compassionate Buddhist goddess, or Saraswati, the chill Hindu goddess of learning and culture?!” (And, of course, “Why the fuck didn’t I back up my computer?!”)
That night I had a dream:
I’m sitting awkwardly underneath my desk. Yet my right hand is extended, moving gracefully, pulsing with Red ink. My veins are finally speaking. My fingers paint wet Red words onto dry white paper. Frantically pacing back and forth behind me is my “uncle,” upset that he has no pen to give me, muttering over and over, “You must write about your angel Kali, your goddess Kali, your angel Kali.” I turn to quiet him, because I know I am finally “writing” Her.
And so I continued to write Her in waking life. For seven days and seven nights, with only a few hours of sleep each day, I wrote (on a borrowed laptop) in a way that kept Kali alive in my research and, most importantly, in my Red heart. In other words, I told the truth about Us. I titled my paper what it was, “An Offering,” and printed it on Red paper with one of my Red journal phrases pasted on top:
Your eyes reflect every side of me.
It is in Your gaze that I strip off heaviness and swell light …
reflecting Your opened blackness …
dissolved in sight …
I dare not blink.
This was academic suicide. In fact, if any other Harvard professor had received this paper, he or she most likely would have failed me and sent me for a psych evaluation at health services. But I will forever be grateful that Kripal was the receiver for the Red. He actually called my paper “beautiful.” According to this unconventional professor, my eclectic, ever-growing Red experiences were, well, normal — and more than that, they were important. In fact, Kripal crusaded, if we scholars don’t reveal essential personal experiences in our work, we’re actually stunting the study of religion.
While Maya gave me permission to be Red outside of school, Professor Kripal gave me permission to turn Red within the walls of academia.
Needless to say, it was a true “Graduation.”