Sophia in the Sacred Ordinary
Margaret A. Short
For millennia, the supreme
deity {who} united human beings, Earth and cosmos was a goddess -- a nurturing,
profound feminine presence, an embodiment of wisdom and compassion. In the Western tradition she was often
called Sophia. Since the rise of
patriarchy, Sophia has been overshadowed by the notion of an all-male
spirituality, represented by abstract logos -- divinity as rational intellect, and personified as
the Father. (1)
Deep concern exists about the
urgent need for re-integrating Sophia into our lives today. In the preface to Sophia, Goddess of
Wisdom/Bride of God, Matthews claims: "I am keenly aware of how the
world has come to a place of fracture, how urgently it needs the peace of
Sophia."(2) This concern is
echoed across many fields.
The late Sir Laurens Van Der Post, in the Foreword to Baring
and Cashford's, The Myth of the Goddess (3) writes of the, "decay
of feeling and the caring values of life" as well as "the pursuit of
masculine rationalism" as a consequence of neglecting the "feminine
half of the human spirit."
He calls us to honor and obey the story of the divine feminine, "if
we are not also to vanish, like so many other cultures in the labyrinth of the
past." (4) Similarly, in the
Foreward to Gimbutas pivotal study of Goddess culture (5), the late mythologist
Joseph Campbell expresses his concern about the fate of Earth if we do not
incorporate the essence of the Goddess into society today. (6)
Sophia, the archetype of the
world soul, is in exile explains depth psychologist and author, Robert
Sardello. We need to locate her presence in the world because her voice, “remains
silent, drowned out by the monotheism of the Father Logos.” (7)
Reading of these concerns, I
began to wonder if we were to
locate Sophia’s presence, where would we look? She is said to be the Goddess of the Hidden Way. (8) She is the Goddess of Liberal Arts, the
Goddess of Poetry, and her presence is glimpsed through music, poetry, dance
and art. (9) Thus, I began to look
for recent evidence of Sophia (in the form of Sacred Feminine, the Christian Mary
and other manifestations of the Goddess) in women’s contemporary
writings, especially about spirituality and in poetry. I speculated that if we
look closely we will see a reverence for the connection between Earth, cosmos
and ordinary life -- that Sophia is there in the link between the cosmos and
the commonplace – in the sacredness of the ordinary.
In both women’s poetry
and recent literature, examples of this connection abound. For example, in her poem Daily, Naomi Shihab Nye so clearly illustrates the
sacredness of everyday things: “The shriveled seeds we plant and cover
with measured fingertips . . . The T-shirts we fold . . .The tortillas we slice and fry to
crisp strips. . . This page I type and re-type . . . This table I dust . . .
This bundle of clothes I wash and hand and wash again. The days are nouns: touch them. The
hands are churches that worship the world.”(10)
Elinor Frost's
Marble-topped Kneading Table is an
exquisite poem linking the sensuous qualities of kneading bread with the
unfolding of Earth life and the cosmos.
Poet Pattiann Rogers asks us to, “Imagine that motion, the
turning and pressing, the constant folding and overlapping, the dough
swallowing and swallowing and swallowing itself again . . . “ Then she links this to:
the
same circular mixing and churning
and
straightening out again seen at the core
of thunderheads born above deserts; that
involution
ritualized
inside amaryllis bulbs
and
castor beans in May.
Rogers celebrates “flour-caked
fists and palms knuckling the lump, gathering, dividing, tucking and rolling,
smoothing, reversing” and “far
in the distance . . . far past
Orion and Magellan's vapors, past the dark nebulae and the sifted rings of
interstellar dust” there is
still centered, the aproned woman baking. (11)
In the popular book The
Still Life of Bees, author Sue Monk Kidd tells of a young girl, Lily, who
meets up with a family of African-American women who inherited a masthead
revered by the slaves as Mary (the Black Madonna).
Well, August said,
you know, she's really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people
needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the
spirit of Mary took it over.
Really, her spirit is everywhere, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people,
but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at
you in a special way. (12)
Sophia is said to court
“our hearts even when we cannot explain her presence.” (13) Kidd continues: “I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised
Mary's sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about
that people could rub and touch, only
we didn't recognize them. (14)
“One of Wisdom’s particularly endearing qualities
is that she is never concerned with the power principle. She cannot be invoked . . . in the name
of destructive power” Schaup
(15) points out in her book, Sophia. Early Christians used to petition Sophia as the hidden
Mother made manifest in her works (16), and we see here evidence that Sophia is found in her works. She is evident, emergent,
influential but not loud and exclamatory. Sophia “hooks us with her
intriguing subtleties, then lets us struggle until we can integrate the
pieces.” (17) And yet, Kimmel
in her acclaimed novel, The solace of leaving early, writes.
When she picked up
the butterfly she says: ‘It
was a woman, it was Mary, I recognized her right away. She just looked at me, she didn’t
say anything, but I realized I’d been wrong about her, I could see it in
her face. That whole humility and
patience thing: that’s completely bogus, that’s not her at
all. She’s quite competent
and smart; she has a lot on her mind, and she wants us all to get busy.’
(18)
Sophia is in the world as a work
of art, Sardello reminds us. (19) Schoemperlen describes in Our Lady of the
Lost and Found that although
appearances of Mary abound and they have been subject to scholarly research and
documentation, they are still officially dismissed. Even so, these appearances continue, stories are passed on,
and people’s faith persists, “undaunted, shining, and
true.” “How is
it” she asks, “that the most influential, inspirational, and
significant woman in the history of the world is not accorded a single mention
in most standard history books?” (20) Sophia does not appear in headlines, the way we might
expect the big news of Logos.
Instead, she demands from us “an understanding of the world
artistically rather than intellectually.” (21)
Feminine energy is
essentially relational, Hart explains in The Unknown She. In patriarchal systems, spiritual power
occurs through authority, and spiritual progress is recognized through
individual effort and achievement.
In contrast, feminine traditions respect the energy and power of
non-hierarchical systems rather than authority. The individual stays part of a divine wholeness,
rather than an autonomous or separate power. (22) This is akin to theologian Matthew Fox’s description
of Sarah’s circle, in lieu of Jacob’s Ladder. In Sarah’s Circle, everyone is
level; and everyone can look everyone else in the eye. (23) It is grounded and fair. “Wisdom,” Caitlin Matthews
reminds us, “is the craft of life itself, not the preserve of
experts.” (24)
After interviewing women
about the meaning of the sacred in their lives, Anderson and Hopkins concluded
in The Feminine Face of God, that the heart of the spiritual in
women’s lives is relationship --
relationship that connects, not separates; relationship that brings
together human beings with other life, with flesh and spirit, with matter and
the divine. Anderson and Hopkins
report that "over and over like a litany, the women we spoke with told us
how intimately connected their own cycles are to those of the earth and how
fundamental this bond, this sense of relationship, is to their sense of the
sacred." (25) Similarly, Powell, well-known author of books about Sophia,
explains that it is she who opens us to the relationship between Earth and
cosmos, to the mysteries of the seasons.
Her gift to humanity is to “cast her light of understanding upon
the mysteries of human relationships.” (26)
From spiritual conversations
conducted with prominent women, Susan Skog discerned emergent themes about the
significance of relationship with others as well as with the Divine. This relationship is cultivated in
sacred space and stillness and in distance from patriarchal postures. Skog says her conversations revealed
that Spirit fosters humility and is found in the ordinary moments of life. (27)
Lesbian authors highlight the
depth and sacred quality of relationships. Mary Hunt (28) and scholar Lillian Faderman (29) both
address the rich and deep nature of women's friendships. Hunt suggests that this love, this fierce
tenderness as she calls it, provides
a model for intimacy and friendships for all. Increasingly popular in the past decade are books about
women's friendships and other books celebrating women friends (30, 31) as
exemplified by the book and film, Divine secrets of the ya-ya sisterhood; (32)
or journalists, Goodman and O'Brien, writing of their friendship with one
another in I know just what you mean.
The power of friendship in women's lives. (33)
I believe that a great influence
on our understanding of the power and need for women’s participation in
relationships has come from the pioneering work of psychologist Carol
Gilligan. In a Different Voice
describes how girls’ socialization is driven by attachment in contrast to
boys’ task of separation.
Thus girls and women develop a distinctive morality and unique voice.
(34 ) In 2002, Gilligan published
a new book about relationship and myth; and in this book she shows the clarity
of the sacred ordinary:
The
seemingly impossible tasks assemble.
Sort, practically on an unconscious level; find economic sustenance,
learn how to move safely in the face of danger, pay attention to the cadences
of emotional life; take water, go to the source, repair relationships, know
what you know; listen to the stirrings of nature, remember the culture, face
mortality and choose life -- this is an old wife's wisdom. (35)
In The Feminine Face of
God, Anderson and Hopkins note how often the concept of a "new
way" has emerged in their work.
"If women are to pioneer a new way of embodying spirit in the world
today, one thing seems certain: we must listen to the deep source of wisdom
within ourselves and tell the truth about our lives and what we are
learning." (36) Both "academic and popular books about Goddess worship
have become a publishing phenomenon" Aburdene and Naisbitt report in Megatrends
for Women. (37)
The Divine
Feminine is being re-discovered.
By having internalized a male God, women in the past tended to
internalize an unconscious inferiority, but now women are expressing a divine pride that seems to come from discovering the
essence of the Sacred Feminine within themselves. This is a source of liberating
energy, wisdom, and power that emerges from their own meditations and from the
depths of women’s own being. (38, 39) Lily, the
character in The Secret Life of Bees, standing by a casket and speaking
to the deceased, sweetly proclaims:
I hope you will be happier in heaven, I told her.
I hope you will not need any kind of wall up there. And if you see Mary, Our Lady, tell her
we know Jesus is the main one down here, but we're doing our best to keep her
memory going. (40)
How are we keeping that
memory of Our Lady, Sophia, the Divine Feminine? Sardello suggests that our
task now “is to form a consciousness that can hold together art,
intellect, imagination and thought.” (41) Matthews challenges
us to create a Goddess thealogy, i.e., a feminine theology, that can work
practically in the world. She
describes how this is occurring naturally with women creating spontaneous
liturgies, celebrations and new forms of devotion outside of conventional
religious traditions. These new
forms of worship are typical of the Goddess expressing herself among us, as
homes become temples; shelves become altars and shrines; and gardens become
places where people dance circles to honor the Goddess. (42) “Step by
step, intuition and the innate wisdom of nature are returning and becoming
acknowledged as a part of everyday life.” (43) Matthews agrees. “Amid the desacralization of our
world, ancient wisdom returns out of the dark to lead us to our future."
(44) We are honoring the
commonplace and seeing the ordinary as sacred. As Andrew Harvey (45) prays, in The Return of the Mother:
"May [all beings] open to the Divine Mother in the ground of their ordinary lives!"
Notes
1. Twist, L. (1996, Spring). The spirit of Sophia rises
in China. Noetic Sciences
Review, 37, p. 26
2. Matthews, D. ( 2001). Sophia Goddess of wisdom.
Bride of God. New revised edition.
Wheaton Il: Quest Books, p. xvii.
3. Baring,
A. & Cashford, J. (1991).
The myth of the goddess.
Evolution of an image. NY:
Penguin/Arkana.
4. Van Der Post, L.
Foreward In Baring & Cashford, op.cit., p. x
5. Gimbutas, M. (1989). The language of the Goddess. NY:
Harper Collins.
6. Campbell, J. (1989). Foreword. In M.
Gimbutas, op. cit, pp. xiii-xiv.
7. Sardello, R. (1992). Facing the world with soul. Hudson,
NY: Lindisfarne Press, p. 16
– 17, p. 64
8. Matthews, op cit, p. 344
9. Parrish-Harra, C. (2000) Foreward in R. Powell’s The most holy Trinosophia. Great
Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic
Press.
10. Nye, N.S. (1995). Words under the words.
Portland, OR: Far Corner Books. p. 54
11. Rogers, P. (1994). Firekeeper. New and selected
poems. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Publishers, pp. 185-186
12. Kidd, S.M. (2002). The secret life of bees. NY:
Viking. p 143
13. Parrish-Hara, op.cit., p. 12
14. Kidd, op.cit., p. 143
15. Schaup, S. (1997). Sophia.
Aspects of the Divine Feminine. York Beach, ME: Nicholas-Hays. pp.
25-27.
16. Freke & Gandy (2001) In Jesus and the Lost
Goddess. NY: Three Rivers Press. cite Irenaus and the Thomas Gospels.
17. Parrish-Hara, op cit. p. 12
18. Kimmel, H. (2002). The solace of leaving early. NY: Anchor
Books. p. 259
19. Sardello, op.cit., p. 27
20. Schoemperlen, D. (2002). Our lady of the lost and found. NY:
Penguin, pp. 289-290
21. Sardello, op.cit.
22. Hart, H. (2003).
The unknown she. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center.
pp. xiv-xv
23. Fox, M. (1994). The reinvention of work. NY:
HarperCollins.
24. Matthews, op.cit. p. 324.
25. Anderson, S. R. & Hopkins, P. (1991). The
feminine face of God. NY: Bantam Books, p. 17
26. Powell, R. (2001). The Sophia teachings. NY: Lantern Books, p. 15.
27. Skog, S. (1995).
Embracing our essence.
Spiritual conversations with prominent women. Deerfield Beach,
CA: Health Communications.
28. Hunt, M. (1991). Fierce tenderness. A feminist
theology of friendship. NY:Crossroad.
29. Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the love of men. NY:
William Morrow.
30. Beanland, A. M. & Terry, E.M. (2000). it's a chick thing. Celebrating the Wild side of women's
friendship. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press.
31. Pearlman, M. (Ed.). (1994). Between friends. Writing women celebrate friendship.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
32. Wells, R. (1997). Divine secrets of the ya-ya sisterhood. NY:
Harper Perennial
33. Goodman, E. & O'Brien, P. (2000). I know just what you mean. The power of friendship in women's
lives. NY: Simon & Schuster.
34. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
35. Gilligan, C. 2002). The birth of pleasure. NY: Knopf, p. 235.
36. Anderson & Hopkins, op.cit., p. 9.
37. Aburdene, P. & Naisbitt, J. (1992). Megatrends for women. NY:
Villard Books, p. 243.
38. IBID.
39. Dresser, M. (1996). (Ed.). Buddhist women on the edge.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, p. 7.
40. Kidd, S.M. op.cit. p. 201
41. Sardello, op.cit. p. 27
42. Matthews, op. cit., p. 342
43. Harrish-Parra, op. cit., p. 13
44. Matthews, op.cit., p. 351
45. Harvey, A. (1995). The return of the mother.
Berkeley, CA: Frog, Ltd. p.
xiii
Margaret A. (Peggy) Short, Ph.D. is a former professor and
researcher who is completing her Doctor of Ministry at the University of
Creation Spirituality. Peggy has
published and lectured in human development, animal-human relationships and
spirituality. A version of this
paper was presented at the Women’s Spirituality Conference in San
Francisco in 2003.