A Dedication

Any of you who have been on a spiritual journey of your own, or undergone a rebirth of any kind, have probably been chomping at the bit reading my last few posts. You already know the "moral of the story" -- if other eyes and ears haven't been able to see or hear us, we need to see and hear ourselves; if other hearts don't love us, we need to love ourselves; if other people's economies don't value us, we need to value ourselves. It's so easy to read this in a book and "get" it. Goodness, how many millions of books about spirituality have I read over the last thirty years or so? But I guess it is classic "spiritual journey" stuff that we may never turn ourselves inside out completely until we are literally at our wit's end, where everything we try doesn't stick, where most everyone we know thinks we're a goner, when we are at our most non-functional, and when all the giant waves of old you-know-what in our life are breaking over us.

At that moment, it is just us and the Divine One alone on the beach, however we conceive of him or her. You know, for years, I have tried so hard to adopt gender-free terms for a force that is clearly beyond human conceptualizing. Like many in my generation, I have found it easier to say "Universe" or "Source" than "God" (at least when I wasn't in a cathedral music setting). But over the last few weeks, it hasn't been the male or gender-neutral face of the divine keeping me company through the storm, it has been the feminine one. She has been in every grain of sand shifting at my feet, every drop of water pouring over me, every gust of wind trying to blow me over. She has been in the hardy grasses peeking out of the dunes, in the gulls crying overhead, in my patient little boat pulled up, waiting for me to survive the onslaught so I can pull back out into the river. She has cried with me and felt my grief. She has been the one whose pure voice I hear in the wind, saying and teaching me to say, "I see you, I hear you, I love you, I value you and all your gifts." 

I don't like buying into duality, and have avoided it. But as the waves continue to crash over me, I need to make a dedication. Whether I survive another four weeks, four years, or four decades in this lifetime, I dedicate myself to the feminine face of God, the Goddess, the Great Mother, Gaia. Yes, I will often use other terminology, but in my heart, Goddess energy best represents all-love, all-joy, all-life. The funny thing is, I actually suspect my life was dedicated to Her all along and I just didn't realize it. How this relates to the world of Mags and Nuncs and Preces and Responses, I still don't know. I think She'll help me figure that out.