“That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?” ~Mary Oliver
Of all the ways my experience of Israel has been working on me, this refrain, this call to co-creation with the divine, echos the loudest in my soul: We are the people we’ve been waiting for. While engaging with scripture in the historical terrain of the land, it becomes apparent that the mothers and fathers of the faith were wrestling with the same questions about the divine all of humanity has been asking since the dawn of time. And this question of place — where does God live? — shifts and expands. From the Tabernacle to the Temple to the Torah and Synagogue, the locus of God is ever-changing. There is a sense of decentralization and detribalization even before Yeshua of Nazareth comes and tells his people that they are the temple. That they have direct access to the divine — first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. In short, for everyone. The spirit, breath, wind (ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek) keeps blowing, keeps moving, keeps changing. In the creation poem God creates and then entrusts humanity with the care of that creation. God works, we work. Jesus, the incarnation, walks among humanity, teaching us the radical and upside down ways of the Kingdom of God, showing us the ultimate way to love through sacrifice, and then pours out the spirit so that we may do the same. God works, we work.
It is becoming ever clearer to me that I don’t really care about the future of Christianity as an organized religion* or the survival of the church as it currently exists. Let’s be frank, Jesus did not come to establish a religion. He he came to show us how to live and love and to invite us into the dance with the divine. I can hear a lot of you asking, “But Sarah, if you’re not so interested in religion, then why the bloody hell are you talking about it all the time?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Again, I will say that I don’t care about religious organizations or the church as an institution. I mean, I find the conversations around the way the church has changed over the millennia and the current reckoning it’s going through abundantly interesting intellectually, but spiritually I’m far more invested in a complete shift of consciousness. That said, I am and always have been endlessly fascinated by what one might call “questions of ultimate importance.” What is the nature of the divine mystery? Why are we here? What is our relationship to the divine? How can we access deeper connection with the divine and draw life and purpose from it?
This is the ocean I swim in. It is the fire within me.
To that end, I do care very deeply that our culture wakes up and grows up and conversations around the new forms our faith communities might embody, especially forms that embrace the sacred feminine. I love my current community of faith. I love that we are engaging in the discussion of how the spirit has moved and is moving (it is not surprising to me that one of our fabulous female pastors gave this sermon as I was writing this blog…collective consciousness, amirite?), and that the sacred feminine voice is being platformed and celebrated. And yet…
It doesn’t feel like enough.
If we are to give birth to new ways of being and living in our communities of faith, the question cannot merely be: are we elevating and amplifying female voices?
Instead, it must be: what would our structures and systems look like if they had been created with deference to and in partnership with the sacred feminine?
Or to say it another way, we can’t expect to experience true change if we keep staying in structures and systems built by the patriarchy. So, to slightly misquote the horribly maligned Daenerys Targaryen (finish the books and redeem her, George!), I want to break the wheel. Burn it down.
While the sacred feminine is largely seen as creative and generative, I think we sometimes forget that she is also the destroyer of worlds.
“She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans…. But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.” ~Hildegard von Bingen
Let me be clear, we are having a crisis of both the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine right now, and everyone is harmed due to this imbalance. Men can and will play a vital role in any healing that happens. Our leaders on this trip, Kent Dobson and Michael Hidalgo, are men who have done their inner work and are participating in the rebalancing. I am so grateful for their voices in the world. And yet, while I love and affirm each of their particular gifts, knowledge, and wisdom, I feel like I keep looking to them as the authority (not just them, add them to a long list of men who have help shaped me over the years: Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Richard Rohr, etc.). I even had a dream that one of them (who shall remain nameless) was standing behind me, telling me which U2 lyrics I should get as a tattoo…haha. The meaning of the dream was fairly obvious. I’m outsourcing my authority.
Authority is difficult for me, probably for lots of women, and even more so for those of us who were explicitly taught to submit to the authority of men. I’ve always felt like my voice was too much in Christian communities because I’ve never been the slightest bit passive or submissive and I don’t hide my intellect. But it’s time to reclaim our voices, stop asking for permission, burn down what needs to burn, and give birth to something new.
What might this new creation look like as it applies to our spiritual communities? One thing that I love about the feminine consciousness is that it is intuitive and imaginative. Here are a few seeds that are growing in me as I grow in the imagination of the feminine:
What if we truly embraced the collective? Our churches are still largely built around the needs of the nuclear family with rituals that only affirm certain rites of passage like marriage/child birth. What if we stopped idolizing marriage and family as the only ways to show that you have grown up? What if we actually lived together in larger communities, grew food together, ate together, loved each other’s kids, and provided the benefits of mutual aid and support to those without nuclear families? Yes, one could say that I’ve gone kibbutz crazy, but my close friends will tell you I’ve been asking for a commune for years!
What if we stopped thinking about our physical spaces as places where people come on Sundays to be talked at and possibly com during the week to various “ministry programs”? Instead of a large church sanctuary/auditorium, maybe we build a space with smaller rooms where the community discusses a particular question/practices spiritual inquiry, or dances in joy or grief together, or participates in art therapy? Maybe our communities include a communal garden, affordable housing, studio space for artists, and a place where the unhoused can come to shower, get out of the elements and find resources? What if spent more time together in nature rather than in a building at all?
The possibilities are endless and the opportunities are thrilling. But we can’t put new wine into old wineskins, we need to throw the old ones out.
So, that is all I have to write about Israel for now, but I have no doubt that this trip with live and work in me throughout my whole life. What has awakened in me is a deep soul knowledge that the spirit continues to move, urging us on towards ever greater unity and love, that something new wants to be born in our hurting world, and that we are the ones to be the midwives of its birth.
We’ll build it better than we did before.
We are the people we’ve been waiting for.
*The word religion gets a bad rap. Religion derives from the latin “ligare” (the same root where we get the word ligament). It merely means the thing that is holding you together or binding you. So, religion should just be whatever puts you back together. For me, it’s always been U2’s music (or in this case a collaboration), which has been the theme of the titles in this series (and I may continue this trend). I tell my students this a lot, but the word legato also derives from the same latin root. As singers, legato means to connect our voices to our breath and link the notes together in one seamless phrase. The older I get, the more profound this connection seems.
p.s. Some of the fabulous women from our trip have started a “sacred femmes” book club. We’ve started reading the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Next up, Women Who Run with the Wolves. If you’re interested, add them to your list!
