Among the many things I am not, is a theologian. I have never studied, in any scholarly way, how God is transcendent and how "he" (at least in the traditional religions) is immanent. My schoolgirl impression probably remains much as it was when I was singing in the girls' choir at St. George's Episcopal Church in Schenectady...that overall, God is a white-haired man in heaven, far from earth, that he transcends (or exists above) the earth plane and its limitations and (whether metaphorically, or literally, or both) looks down on us from this exalted place. In an effort to connect with humans and have the experience of living in our world (and to be immanent, or present, in that sense), he sent his son to earth for a short lifetime two thousand years ago.
It could be said that the rites, rituals, choral music, Prayer Book language, and art/architecture of Anglicanism (and its roots in Catholicism) glorify the distance between "man" and God. Think of those long, incense-infused Easter processions to the altar, Jesus hovering high in the stained-glass skies, God reaching a fingertip out to Adam in the Sistine Chapel, from the clouds. When I said the confession, I told God that I was not worthy to "gather up the crumbs" under his table...He was like a powerful medieval king at a banquet, at the high table, and I was a nothing, less than a serf. In the intervening years, church language changed and I changed, but what I must not have lost was a powerful sense of frustration with this imagery. Even my introduction to Quakerism (and references to "that of God" within all of us) didn't help me break free of that notion of a distant, all-powerful man running everything, but not really caring for "here".
It is interesting that I included the word "here" in my "Words of the Goddess" list written fifteen or twenty years ago. I mean, it's not like the debate over "where God is" ever had a place in my thoughts. And even in the early 2000's, I had still done relatively little reading about Goddess consciousness. Only in the last few years have I read some classics in that genre that are at least 40 years old.
This list of Goddess words blew out of me, "channelled", I suppose. It was like all the qualities I had personally been hiding from the world, writing them down fast and before I had a chance to edit myself or second-guess myself, or fill myself with the shame of unworthiness. This list described the Goddess, but it also described me, and it was an enormous relief. And in an odd way, I wonder if the most important word on the list is, "Here". I am here. You are here. We are here. She is here, and yes, the male aspect of the divine is here too. We all exist. We are the creation. For the purposes of a traumatized earth in the hottest summer on record, the divine "here-ness" is the crux of the matter. Everything we see, everything we step on and feel, everything we breathe, nature in all its forms, is us and is the divine. For generations, we seemed to cavalierly dismiss earth's inherent worth, but She is the divine.
It will be tempting, going forward, to run for the hills. To "get out of here", to go where it is safer. But such a place will probably not exist as earth goes through the kinds of changes that are coming. If possible, stay "here". Be in the present, honor the earth wherever you are, in whatever form She presents this day, and say, "I am here". Yes, this from a woman who spent most of her life trying to find a way to live in another country. It didn't happen, and for the moment, I am here. I am where I am. If the Goddess is everywhere on earth, I might as well experience her here. She has her transcendent side too, but we've had enough for the moment of that theological concept. The lesson of these times is the divinity of "here".
