The Queen and Governess of the World

A few quotes from the 17th century English Puritan preacher and author Thomas Watson:

"The providence of God is 'the queen and governess of the world.' It is the eye which sees, and the hand which turns all the wheels in the universe."

"Meditation is the saints’ perspective glass, by which they see “things invisible.” It is the golden ladder by which they ascend in holy imagination to heaven. It is the dove sent out, and which brings back the olive-branch of peace."

"The wheels of a chariot are an emblem of contentment: the wheels move, the axle stirs not. When change and motion are around us, a contented spirit remains firm in its centre."

The Wheel of Fortune, from John Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes

 

Hildegard von Bingen's Vision of the Divine Feminine

She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at Her face or Her garments for the splendour 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’s vision of the Feminine Divine, from Scivias, III, 4.15, translated by Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. and Jane Bishop

Angelus Silesius

Angelus Silesius was a 17th century Christian mystic, native to Silesia, in what is now Poland, and was known as The Prophet of the Ineffable. He composed spiritual epigrams mostly in the form of couplets written in German, and was influenced by his reading of medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroeck. 

Most of the English translations I have seen of his epigrams are very outdated, and sometimes horribly contorted in order to make them rhyme in English. I think Silesius wrote them as rhyming verses, but it's not always possible to translate such concise rhyming couplets into another language successfully. 

Here are some renderings I've made from them, some freer than others in adherence to the originals. They are not intended to be accurate translations, and I didn't try to make them rhyme. I was struck by the similarity of some of Angelus's poems to Indian mystical writing. 

Search within yourself. 

The Philosopher’s Stone, 

the key to transformation, 

cannot be found outside. 

The entire Universe, 

Heaven, Hell and Earth, 

are all within you. 

Whatever you desire, 

you already have. 

The world does not contain you; 

you contain the world. 

You are yourself the world 

and you contain nothing but yourself. 

God is no thing. 

He is untouched by time or matter 

God is heard in silence, 

and is best worshipped in silence. 

The saint does not look forward to a heaven in an afterlife; 

he lives in heaven now. 

You cannot enter heaven; 

heaven is who you are. 

Before there was a sense of a separate I, 

there was only Universal Being. 

And when the separateness disintegrates, 

you will know you are that Universal Being. 

Time is timeless; 

it is only the mind that tries 

to measure what is measureless. 

God is gold hidden in river sand, 

and love is river water, 

washing God into view. 

The rose has no rationale, 

it simply blooms. 

Joy can only be experienced 

by dissolving the sense of ‘I’ and ‘other’ 

in the ocean of Unity. 

Love is a faster way to God than knowledge. 

God pours Himself out into Creation for Eternity, 

yet He is undiminished. 

Without rebirth we are like rivers 

which turn back from the ocean. 

Theologians form different schools to describe God, 

but the school of the Spirit within you teaches you to know God. 

When the human heart becomes attuned to God, 

the whole everlasting cosmos becomes a bell that rings. 

Those who know God’s depths also attain His peaks. 

We think a child foolish for crying over a broken doll, 

but are the things we covet any more alive than a doll? 

When you heart is pulled neither by attraction nor aversion, it rests in God. 

The richness and vastness of God is like an undiscovered continent. 

Even if God was to be born a thousand times to Mary, in Bethlehem, 

it would do you no good if you do not bear Him within yourself. 

The saint knows that all possessions are nothing but himself. 

The owner of the world’s greatest treasure is poorer than a beggar 

if he sees that treasure as other than himself. 

God is one without an other. 

To know God, the knower must know that he is one with the known. 

A loaf contains many grains, 

and the sea countless drops; 

so is God both one and many. 

The All emerges from the One 

and to the One the All returns. 

If you do not become reborn in God 

you do not value His birth in Bethlehem, 

and if your separateness does not die, 

His death at Golgotha will not save you. 

God and Self are one. 

If the Self ceased to exist 

God would cease to exist.

Rose Window, Milan Cathedral

The Divine Feminine as Wisdom in the Bible

Despite the devotion expressed towards Her in the Bible, the Feminine aspect of God has been neglected in the Christian churches (particularly the Protestant churches), some would say, to their detriment. This is no doubt due to the bias of an all male priesthood.

She is personified as Wisdom in The Book of Proverbs, in the Old Testament, and invoked in The Book of Wisdom, which is considered canonical, and part of the Old Testament, by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, though not by all Protestants.

She is described as having existed before the Creation (perhaps always) and as the agent through which it was achieved. She is considered to be the Breath of God, and the manifestation of His power. Like the Holy Spirit (who some believe is the same being, and therefore a feminine, motherly aspect of the Holy Trinity) She is present in those who have the pure desire for God.

For She is the breath of the power of God,
and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty:
therefore no defiled thing can fall into Her.
For She is the brightness of the everlasting light,
the unspotted mirror of the power of God,
and the image of His goodness.
And being but one, She can do all things:
and remaining in Herself, She makes all things new:
and in all ages entering into holy souls,
She makes them friends of God, and prophets.

-The Book of Wisdom 7:25-27





Luca Giordano, Allegory of Divine Wisdom, National Gallery, London (detail)

Written in Sand

Many have wondered what it was that Christ wrote in the sand/dust when the woman was brought by the Pharisees to be stoned for adultery. The passage from St John, telling of this event, is the only one in the Bible where there is mention of Christ ever having written anything. Knowing the human tendency to make idols out of words and sacred books, Christ probably decided not to personally write any scriptures (neither did Muhammad nor the Buddha). 

The Bible doesn't say what Christ wrote, and so there has been a lot of theological conjecture about it. The most interesting explanation is that He was writing down the sins of those who had gathered to carry out the stoning. In Jewish tradition, when an adulterer was brought to the Temple for punishment, their sin was written in the dust of the court floor and then brushed away (perhaps because the sin was considered too unmentionable to say aloud in such a holy place), but the Pharisees seem to have neglected to do this. They were also supposed to have brought for punishment the man caught in adultery, not just the woman. So, though they were presenting themselves as upholders of the law, they didn't even follow the letter of the law, let alone the spirit of the law, which is no doubt what Christ was trying to show them.

By writing down their hidden sins (as tradition stated the adulterer's sin should be written) Christ showed the Pharisees that He thoroughly knew the law. And when they saw their sins written on the earth, they were too shocked to carry out the stoning. John says they walked away one by one, leaving the woman with Jesus, who told her that no one will condemn her, including Himself. 

Appealing to their consciences, by just telling the Pharisees they were hypocrites ("he who is without sin may cast the first stone") would not have been enough for such people. They had to see their sins written for all to read.

Knowing He preached forgiveness, the Pharisees had tried to trick Christ into publicly going against the Old Testament laws, so they could accuse Him of blasphemy. Only a divine personality could have resolved the situation so perfectly.

Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, 1860.

The Givenness of Things

On September 14, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa, President Obama and the writer Marilynne Robinson sat down to talk. They recorded a conversation that, in the president’s words, was designed to cover “some of the broader cultural forces that shape our democracy and shape our ideas, and shape how we feel about citizenship and the direction that the country should be going in.” The two had a warm and wide-ranging discussion, later published by The New York Review of Books and posted to iTunes, addressing Robinson’s writing life and Obama’s admiration of her novels; the democratic virtues expressed at Little League games, in emergency rooms, and in school buildings; and their shared sense that once upon a time democracy itself was considered an ongoing achievement. (The conversation has now been appended to the paperback edition of Robinson’s most recent essay collection, The Givenness of Things.) In the midst of some observations about American “goodness and decency and common sense on the ground,” the president arrived at a moment of synthesis, confronting an issue that, he said, “I’ve been struggling with throughout my political career.” continue reading

Barack Obama was the first American president to officially celebrate Diwali, the festival, observed by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and some Buddhists, which marks the victory of light over darkness. Shri Mataji has said that this is the time of birth of Lord Jesus, the Light of the World. Although millions of people celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on Dec. 25, most scholars agree that he wasn't born on that day, or even in the year 1 A.D.

The Inner Wheels

“There are beautiful wild forces within us. 

Let them turn the mills inside 

and fill sacks that feed even heaven.”

–St. Francis of Assisi 

Painting by Graham Brown

The Fountain

The Fountain
by St. John of the Cross

English version by Willis Barnstone

How well I know that flowing spring
in black of night.

The eternal fountain is unseen.
How well I know where she has been
in black of night.

I do not know her origin.
None. Yet in her all things begin
in black of night.

I know that nothing is so fair
and earth and firmament drink there
in black of night.

I know that none can wade inside
to find her bright bottomless tide
in black of night.

Her shining never has a blur;
I know that all light comes from her
in black of night.

I know her streams converge and swell
and nourish people, skies and hell
in black of night.

The stream whose birth is in this source
I know has a gigantic force
in black of night.

The stream from but these two proceeds
yet neither one, I know, precedes
in black of night.

The eternal fountain is unseen
in living bread that gives us being
in black of night.

She calls on all mankind to start
to drink her water, though in dark,
for black is night.

O living fountain that I crave,
in bread of life I see her flame
in black of night.

Ghent Altarpiece (detail), Jan van Eyck.

St. John of the Cross was a Spanish Christian mystic and poet of the 16th century.

The Eternal Fountain is an image of the Kundalini, the nourishing energy of the Holy Spirit, which John describes as the feminine aspect of the Divine.

Bede Griffiths

Bede Griffiths was a British-born Indian Benedictine monk who lived in South India and became a noted yogi. He has become a leading thinker in the development of the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism. 

Shakti Shekhinah Sakinah

In all the major religious traditions there is, or was, the concept of a feminine manifestation or Presence of God.

Hinduism

Shakti from Sanskrit shak – "to be able", meaning sacred force or empowerment – is the primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move through the entire universe in Hinduism. Shakti is the concept, or personification, of divine feminine creative power, sometimes referred to as 'The Great Divine Mother' in Hinduism. On the earthly plane, Shakti most actively manifests through female embodiment and creativity/fertility, though it is also present in males in its potential, unmanifest form.

Not only is the Shakti responsible for creation, it is also the agent of all change. Shakti is cosmic existence as well as liberation, its most significant form being the Kundalini Shakti, a mysterious psychospiritual force. Shakti exists in a state of svatantrya, dependence on no-one, being interdependent with the entire universe.

In Shaktism, Shakti is worshipped as the Supreme Being. However, in other Hindu traditions of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shakti embodies the active feminine energy Prakriti of Purusha, who is Vishnu in Vaishnavism or Shiva in Shaivism. Vishnu's female counterpart is called Lakshmi, with Parvati being the female half of Shiva.

-Source Wikipedia

Judaism

The feminine, creative, transformative Presence of God is called Shekhinah in Judaism. Shekhinah is associated with the Throne of God and the holiest precinct of the Temple. She is said to reside within the Ark of of the Covenant. As a Pillar of Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night, the Presence of God, the glorious Shekhinah, guided the people of Israel.

Shekhinah is a feminine noun in Hebrew and derives from a word meaning 'dwelling', while the Hindu Shakti means 'power'; however, it may not be a coincidence that the two words are similar, both referring to the feminine power or manifest presence of the Divine.
In the Talmud, Shekhinah is the power which caused the prophets to prophesy and King David to compose his Psalms. 

"The Shekhinah does not rest amidst laziness, nor amidst laughter, nor amidst lightheadedness, nor amidst idle conversation. Rather, it is amidst the joy associated with a mitzvah that the Shekhinah comes to rest upon people, as it is said: 'And now, bring me for a musician, and it happened that when the music played, God's hand rested upon him' [Elisha]"

-Talmud

There is a tradition of the Shekhinah as the Sabbath Bride. This recurrent theme is best known from the writings and songs of the legendary mystic of the 16th century, Rabbi Isaac Luria. Here is a quotation from the beginning of his famous shabbat hymn:

"I sing in hymns to enter the gates of the Field of holy apples. A new table we prepare for Her, a lovely candelabrum sheds its light upon us. Between right and left the Bride approaches, in holy jewels and festive garments..."

A paragraph in the Zohar starts: "One must prepare a comfortable seat with several cushions and embroidered covers, from all that is found in the house, like one who prepares a canopy for a bride. For the Shabbat is a queen and a bride. This is why the masters of the Mishna used to go out on the eve of Shabbat to receive her on the road, and used to say: 'Come, O bride, come, O bride!' And one must sing and rejoice at the table in her honor ... one must receive the Lady with many lighted candles, many enjoyments, beautiful clothes, and a house embellished with many fine appointments ..."

Christianity
In Christianity, the inspirational powers of the Shekhinah have been absorbed into the figure of the Holy Spirit.

Islam

The Islamic form of Shekhina, is Sakinah, and is associated with the quality of Divine Tranquility. Sakinah is mentioned several times in the Koran.

According to Ali, nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, "Sakinah is a sweet breeze, whose face is like the face of a human".
Ali's son Hussein, named one of his daughters Sakinah. The name has now become popular in Islamic countries.

Christian Nondualism

Gnostic Christianity is usually understood to be a dualistic movement; however, recent discoveries, including the Gospel of Thomas, have led some scholars to believe that Jesus' original teaching may have been one accurately characterized as nondualism.

The Gospel of Philip, another of the Apocryphal books, also conveys nondualism:
"Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. For this reason each one will dissolve into its earliest origin. But those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble, eternal."