Fort Knox, Maine

This is Fort Knox, Maine. Its construction was started in 1844. The argument that resulted in so much money and manpower being spent was that British troops had occupied northern Maine during both the Revolution and the War of 1812, more than thirty years earlier, but what if something like that ever happened again? What if? For twenty five years it was under construction. Troops never lived in it. No battle was ever fought there. 

I’ve been there a number of times now, and it’s always struck me as a strange place. Signs tell the story of soldiers who never lived there. 

The floors of some sections are the dirt of the hillside, having never been finished. It’s got a dungeon vibe in places. 

Upkeep keeps happening, 

but not at a pace that outpaces Mother Nature.

So on this visit I found myself asking “what exactly is this a monument to?” I asked Adam “Is this a monument to fear?” Without missing a beat he responded “It’s a monument to the military-industrial complex.” (God, I love that man.) “Right,” was my one word reply. 

“Someone needs to come here and write subversive poetry,” was one thought I had, but I’m not a poet. 

So I decided that if the whole thing was mine to do with as I please, I would offer it back to Mother Nature. I would humbly ask that She take this bit of our larger folly and redeem it. I would stop all preservation efforts, but continue to invite people to come and watch Mother Nature reclaim this bit of land. (And maybe write a bit of subversive poetry while here.) 

Then when the building became unsafe, I would still invite people to come and walk circles like prayerful pilgrims around the building as it came tumbling down, as ferns and wildflowers unmade what men of war once made. That’s what I would do. 

The Feminine Divine in Boston: Knowledge and Wisdom

When you enter the Boston Public Library from Dartmouth Street, you are confronted with six brass relief doors. They are epic and subtle at the same time. Each door features a different image: Music and Poetry to the left, Truth and Romance to the right, and Knowledge and Wisdom in the middle. The middle doors are generally open.  This makes them harder to see, because of the lighting and foot traffic, but it also puts them in dialogue with each other. While I’m sure the artist intentionally put them together as a pair, I don’t know if he intentionally thought about them facing each other when the doors were open. Either way, I love it.

Knowledge is depicted as a masculine figure. He holds up on his shoulder a large bound book with his left hand. With his right hand he holds up triumphantly an astrolabe. He can read and calculate numbers, skills we are not hardwired for, but must labor at. He looks out at the viewer with a penetrating gaze. This is an outward looking, intellectually rigorous way of knowing. He wears a laurel wreath on his cocked head. He is proud of his accomplishments. His robe barely covers him and looks like an afterthought. He seeks to hide nothing and uncover everything.

Wisdom is depicted as a feminine figure. Her robes are intricately woven. They almost cover her entire body and she has them pulled over her head. This is an inward looking way of being. It requires humility (which is a good thing and different from humiliation which is not). She holds in her right hand a caduceus. Two snakes, symbols of life and death, are bound together and are the source of the staff’s power. In her left hand she holds a covered chalice. The chalice is a vessel of transformation, growth, metamorphosis. Think of communion wine transmuted in the cup, the new human that grows in the womb, the powerful potion in the witch’s goblet. She travels deep within mystery and is transformed by it.

We live in a world that generally values masculine Knowledge over feminine Wisdom, and that, predictably enough, contains a few who have rebelled against this by rejecting Knowledge in favor of Wisdom. What I think Wisdom knows, what she says to Knowledge while standing across from him all day long is what the caduceus teaches her. We need both, and we need them bound together. 

The next time you go into the Boston Public Library I hope you pause a moment to look at these images. I hope you are blessed by them as you walk between them. I hope you find both Knowledge and the inspiration to seek Wisdom in the books and music and movies and art and quiet and noise that that beautiful old library contains. 

The Bacchante at the Boston Public Library

Deep inside the Boston Public Library is this statue - the Bacchante, she’s called, a female follower of Bacchus. We know Bacchus as the Roman God of wine and merriment, but he was actually much more than that. In the early period of Roman history his name was Liber Pater, the free father, and he was associated with the inherent freedom and dignity of the individual man. (He had a female counterpart named Libera,) Later the Liber Pater was associated with the Greek god Bacchus, who was often portrayed as a young, feminine male, one of the ancient deities that blended and defied gender norms. As Bacchus he was worshiped by people, including women, who found in his communities of worshippers a relationship with the divine that was separate from the state and the family. Bacchus represented the ecstatic aspect of human experience and he was worshiped in that spirit. In countless Roman carvings his worshippers follow him in processions, wild and merry and fey. There's was a full-bodied worship free of inhibition, a wild state of being. The Bacchante statue is a reminder in the Boston Public Library, a temple to the intellectual and carefully executed, that we cannot just live in our heads, but also freely and wildly in our bodies. To experience the Feminine Divine is to know ecstasy.

I was here some years ago with my daughters. My younger daughter was five and had just spent a year in Catholic preschool. We were sitting at a table having a snack and she kept glancing over at the statue. Finally she said “Mom, I’ll be right back.” She walked over to the edge of the fountain and sat with her legs folded underneath her and her hands in her lap staring up at the statue. And I realized, after a moment, that she saw this statue as Mary holding Jesus. What a wonderful idea that is to me- the Bacchante as Mary- a fully-embodied, uninhibited woman holding her son and showing him the grapes, showing him his future, with joy on her face.

The Feminine Divine in Copley Square

 

This stained glass window resides in the Gordon Chapel at Old South Church in Boston. The red shape behind Christ is called a mandorla. In Italian the word means almond. It is a womb symbol, a symbol of the creative and transformative aspects of the Feminine Divine. It is also a symbol of the universality of the Feminine Divine. In our patriarchal culture, we still think that the masculine is for everyone and the feminine for women. For example, books with main characters who are girls or women are marketed solely to girls and women, while books featuring main characters who are boys or men are marketed to everyone. The womb symbol reminds us that the Feminine Divine concerns all of creation. The shape is created by overlapping two circles - one male and one female, just as the male and female parts are brought together in a womb to create a new being. As our belly buttons attest, we all began our earthly lives in a womb.

This mandorla frames the resurrected Christ. Christ steps out of the tomb, which is itself a second womb in our Mother Earth. The symbol draws a line from the Cosmic Womb of the Feminine Divine through Mary’s womb within which Jesus was incarnated to Jesus’s tomb in our Mother Earth within which Jesus was transformed into his resurrected form.

The Black Madonna of Boston

 

In the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul in downtown Boston there is a beautiful and inviting little chapel. In the chapel, resides this Black Madonna. Black Madonna statues and paintings are found throughout Europe. They are Mary as manifestation of the feminine Divine. 

As much as we Christians love stories of individuals defying Roman emperors and choosing Christianity even when it meant death, we need to remember that the majority of people living under the Roman empire did not choose Christianity. They had their temples destroyed, their sacred rituals outlawed, and they were told that they were now Christians, worshippers of one decidedly masculine God. (The English, French, and Spanish would replicate this process when they invaded what are now known as the Americas.)  I truly believe that many of these people knew in their hearts that the Divine was both masculine and feminine, and they looked for the feminine Divine within this new religion that was forced upon them. And for her part, the feminine Divine responded to and reached out to them. They met in the story of Mary.

This is not the sentimentalized, obedient Mary that the patriarchal hierarchy of the Catholic Church would produce and preach - the girl-child Mary who responds meekly to the Angel Gabriel with downcast eyes. This is not the Mary of progressive Protestantism who gives birth to the baby Jesus and then politely exits stage left. This is Mary as Lady to monotheism’s Lord, and Mary as Our Mother to Christianity’s Our Father. Boston’s Black Madonna, in particular, is both Queen of Heaven and Mother Earth, re-tying together (the origin of the word religion) the heavenly and the earthly, just as Jesus re-ties together divinity and humanity.

I had been to pray before this statue a number of times before really considering the apple in her hand. I’ve read descriptions of Mary as the new Eve, obedient where Eve had been disobedient. And this is how images of Mary holding an apple are often interpreted. This has always seemed a bit simplistic to me though. This Mary is gazing right at me. Her gaze is intense and she is offering me the apple (a golden apple at that for those of you who read Greek and Roman mythology). What if the problem was never that Adam and Eve disobeyed God by taking something that was forbidden? What if everything went awry because Adam and Eve took what could only be rightfully received? In meditation I’ve learned that certain kinds of knowing cannot be grasped at or reached for with my ego and intellect. I have to be open to receiving them. Here Mary offers me the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. All I have to do (this is one of those simple yet terrifying things, so I take a deep breath here), all I have to do is let go of all that I am grasping at and clinging to and hold out my open hands, ready to receive Her gifts.

(The lighting in the niche where this Black Madonna resides is not ideal for photography. If you want to see a better image, click through to the Cathedral's website here: https://www.stpaulboston.org/exploring-st-pauls)

Saint George and the Dragon

Around the year 270, a baby boy was born in Cappadocia. His parents named him George. Cappadocia was in the middle of what is now Turkey. When George was born, the people of Cappadocia were Greek and the region was part of the Roman Empire. George’s parents were Christians. George’s father taught him to fight with a sword. His mother taught him all about God and God’s mighty archangels - Raphael the healer, Uriel the artist, Gabriel the messenger, and Michael the protector. At 17, George joined the Roman army. He was a brave soldier and eventually became an officer. He respected the men under him. He was fair and just with them and as a result they respected him, too. 

One fall he was traveling home alone to visit his family. He came upon a beautiful young woman. She was dressed like a bride and walking all alone. This seemed strange to George. So he stopped and asked her if she was in danger, if she needed help. She said that she was in danger, but that she didn’t need help. This seemed a strange answer to George, and so he asked her to tell him her story. 

She told him that she came from a nearby city. Many years ago a dragon had come to the city and attacked it. The people had given it a sheep and it had gone off to a cave in the forest near the city. But every year it had come back. And every year it had demanded more sheep before it would go away, until finally the people had run out of sheep. That is when the dragon had started demanding children be given to him to eat.  The people’s king had made the people draw lots to decide whose children should be sent. And for a few years this had been enough to keep the dragon from destroying the city. Then one year, the lot had fallen to the king’s own daughter, Sabra. The girl’s voice shook when she told this part of the story, but she took a deep breath and continued. The king had offered the people all the gold and wealth he had, if they would just draw lots again and let him keep his daughter, but the people had refused saying he let them send their children to their deaths, so why shouldn’t he have to send his. The girl had told her father that this was only fair and that if it would save the people, she would go willingly. So the father had had her dressed as a bride and had sent her off to walk down to the cave alone to face the dragon. 

George did not ask if she was the girl in the story, he didn’t need to. He admired Sabra’s bravery and wanted to help her. He told her that he wanted to see the dragon for himself. That maybe he could help. Sabra agreed.

So they walked down to the cave together. As they got closer they could smell the dragon’s rancid breath long before they saw it. And when they did finally see it, what a terrible sight it was. The dragon emerged from the cave and it’s head towered above them. Smoke came out of its nostrils, and its teeth, each as long as a man’s forearm and as sharp as George’s sword, jutted out over its lower lip. Fear rose up from deep in George’s stomach into his throat. He had been a solider for many years, but never had he known fear like this. He remembered a prayer his mother had taught him as a child: “Saint Michael, archangel, defend us in battle and give us strength.” As he said it he realized that it wasn’t strength to face the dragon that he was asking for. It was strength to face his own fear. He drew his sword and approached the dragon from one side. The dragon lunged it’s head at George, but George stood his ground. He struck at the dragon with his sword, but it glanced off the dragon’s scales and he was forced ro retreat a few paces. Once again George whispered the prayer to Saint Michael and once again he approached the dragon from one side. George realized that as he was fighting the dragon, always approaching it from the right side, Sabra had been approaching the dragon from its other side. She was singing her own prayers, prayers to the goddess Hygieia, goddess of healing. Sabra held her long, woven belt in her hand. The next time the dragon lowered its head to lunge at George he struck at it with his sword, and Sabra slipped her belt around its neck, like a harness. Harnessed like this, the dragon bowed its head to them, still a dragon, but subdued now, all its hate and its hunger for the fear and blood of the innocent drained out of it. George raised his sword intending to thrust it into the dragon’s eye, but he caught himself. There was nothing left for him to fear. The dragon was subdued. Was that not enough?

Walking side by side, each with a hand on the belt, George and Sabra led the dragon back to the city. Sabra led them all to a temple in the city’s center, where there stood a statue of Hygieia, a serpent draped across her, the goddess and the serpent staring out at them. Sabra vowed in the temple of Hygieia to build a statue of the Archangel Michael to stand next to that of the goddess. She could not have subdued the dragon without George. George vowed to honor the goddess Hygieia and her worshippers. He could not have subdued the dragon without Sabra. The vows spoken, the mighty dragon shrank down to a serpent and slid across the floor disappearing into a crack at the base of the goddess’s statue. 

Feast of the Archangels

I first learned of the feast of the archangels in the Episcopal church, where it is known as Michaelmas and the focus is on the Archangel Michael. My fascination with the Archangel Michael goes back earlier though to a trip to Mount St. Michel in France in my 20’s. I loved the idea of pilgrimage, of people traveling by foot for months to visit one of the sites dedicated to Saint Michael throughout Europe. For years, I wore the little medalion that I bought in the village below the monastery there. On the medalion is Saint Michael, spear raised, ready to kill the dragon.

The issue of dragons in European culture is complicated though. Our portrayal of dragons as evil probably dates back to the suppression of goddess religions. Apollo killed Gaia’s dragon in order to establish his own oracle at Delphi. And if dragons came to represent the wild, it is too easy to turn the metaphor of slaying the dragon into permission to destroy the natural. And if dragons came to represent anger, it is too easy to turn the metaphor of slaying the dragon into permission to tell suppressed people to shut up and take it. 

John Edgerton, when he was minister at Old South Church gave several sermons on demons. He believed in demons, he told us, but not as cartoon characters with horns. He believed in the demons of greed and despair and hate. If the dragon represents these, then perhaps we have something to work with. 

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” We cannot deny the existence of hate and greed and despair, especially as they appear within ourselves. It is easy to see them out there, but to see them in here is a much more difficult matter. Yet they are universal and when the old stories are told of Saint George praying to the archangel Michael for courage to face the dragon, it is the dragon within that he is looking for the courage to face.

That just leaves us with the problem of slaying the dragon. In my 20’s that idea seemed so right. I believed there were things that could, nay should, be cut out with a sword. Cut out of society. Cut out of me. I wonder about that now though. If, as Master Yoda says, hate stems from anger which stems from fear, then maybe we can’t just cut out hate, from ourselves or from society. Maybe we need to face the hate and work our way back through the anger to the fear. Which means the dragon isn’t hate itself, but a creature consumed by fear and anger until it became hate. Maybe then as Saint Francis did with the wolf of Gubbio we are meant to tame the dragon, return it to it’s true self and learn to live beside it. And honestly that seems a more difficult and frightening task than just killing it. So today, I offer this prayer to Saint Michael, the Archangel:

Saint Michael the Archangel, send us courage to face the dragon within. To love back to its true self what has become unloveable. Amen.