Re-membering ourselves into the Future
A sermon offered at the New Thought Spirit, North Sea, Southampton, New York on December 3, 2023 (which happens to be my birthday)
Below, is a very lightly edited transcript of the sermon.
I start the sermon with thanking and land acknowledgement – both where I am (Home of the Shinnecock Nation) and where I live and work (Lenape Indigenous Territory).
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Today, the title of my presentation is “Re-membering Ourselves Into the Future.”
The Story of La Loba
I want to start today by telling you a story.
Many, many cultures have told this story in many different ways. This particular version is called La Loba, the Wolf Woman. It comes from the beloved DrE, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who is a Jungian analyst, an author and a Cantadora - meaning a keeper and singer of old stories. This is how it goes.
There is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place.
She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company. She is both a crower and a cackler, generally having more animal sounds than human ones.
They say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara Indian territory. They say she is buried outside Phoenix near a well. She is said to have been seen travelling south to Monte Alban in a burnt-out car with the back window shot out. She is said to stand by the highway near El Paso, or ride shotgun with truckers to Morelia, Mexico, or that she has been sighted walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed boughs of firewood on her back. She is called by many names: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer; and La Loba, Wolf Woman.
The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She is known to collect and preserve especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures: the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her speciality is said to be wolves.
She creeps and crawls and sifts through the montañas, mountains, and arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.
And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out.
That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some more, and more of the creature comes into being; its tail curls upward, shaggy and strong.
And La Loba sings more, and the wolf creature begins to breathe.
And still La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes, and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.
Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by splashing its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transforms into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.
So it is said that if you wander the desert, and it is near sundown, and you are perhaps a little bit lost, and certainly tired, that you are lucky, for La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something—something of the soul.
Dis-membering and Re-membering in our personal lives
So, let's take a minute with this story. Let us ponder:
What are the “desert places” in you?
What are the places in your life where there has been no rainfall, no flow of water, no flow of feeling, for a long time? What are these places?
And… what are the bleached bones that litter this inner desert?
What stories do those bones hold?
I want to take a moment to remind us that the opposite of remembering is not forgetting. It is dismembering. We dis-member and we re-member.
Dismembering is the process of taking apart, of disconnecting. Of suppressing or repressing what feels too much to handle in the moment. And, we also want to acknowledge that it is in service of life. This dismemberment is necessary for us to live.
But now, we are in a different moment; and it may be possible for us to now start recollecting those bleached bones from the inner desert of what has been dismembered. To bring them back, to reform this… what Dr E calls… the “criatura” - the creature - of our true being!
Dis-membering and Re-membering in our communal lives
And this applies not only in our personal lives, but in the world as well. I know all our psyches are affected by what's happening in the Middle East right now. If you think about it, it's really a story of dismemberment, right? The Israeli people… the diaspora… not having a home… And the Palestinian people… dismemberment of their homeland… So, we really living this - the story of dismemberment.
What is increasingly clear to me is that it is not a logical solution that is going to bring a closure here. We might need to re-member the story; creating this beautiful woman who came alive from the wolf bones! How might we even begin to imagine that story?
Dismembering and Remembering in myths and fairy tales
One of the things I also want to remind us is that dismemberment is an essential sacrificial act, that we see in many, many stories around the world. There are the old stories of Osiris, for example, who's cut up into parts by his brother, and thrown in the River Nile. And his wife-sister, Isis, collects them back and that's how she reinvigorates the land. There are mythologists who claim that Osiris is a metaphor for the River Nile itself. That he is the face of River Nile, which becomes full and alive and powerful in a certain season, and then becomes like a thousand little threads of tributaries in the dry season. So, we're talking about a cycle of nature through this story.
Similarly, I come from a culture where Kali is our dismembering and remembering goddess. She dismembers to create something new.
And then, we can briefly speak about the story of the handless maiden. It’s a much newer story. It’s the story of a princess who's born without hands. She gives birth to two children, and she's thrown out of her father's castle with these newborns, because the stepmother doesn't like her. You know, the usual fairy tale story! Now, she is thirsty. She really wants to drink water. She comes to a river. She tries to bend down to drink water my immersing her mouth in the river, because she has no arms or hands. As she does this, the two babies are tucked under her armpits. In the process of her drinking, the babies fall into the water. And in that moment of desperation, when she knows that the babies are going to drown if she doesn’t do anything, she plunges her stumps into the river, and her hands grow back!
So, it's that moment… when there is no logical recourse, when pure instinct leads her to put her stumps in. And that's when her arms grow back. So, again, we are at this place of re-membering. A place of new birth. The presence of something new that could not have been imagined a priori. Could not have been planned for.
Hanukah and Christmas as stories of Remembering
We are in the season right now of Hanukah, and then Christmas. These are also stories of re-membering.
So… the story of Hanukah, very briefly, is that the second temple in Jerusalem has been ransacked and the Jews have been thrown out. A pig has been killed at the alter. The altar itself has been dedicated to Zeus… All the things that are not acceptable to the Jews. And then… finally, it's 164 BCE, 25th of Kislev, when the Jewish people win the temple back. They want to celebrate! So, they are looking for clean oil to light a candle in celebration. They find only one jar of olive oil that's clean, that's kosher. It's only going to light the candle for one day. They light the candle. And it so happens that the candle continues to burn for eight consecutive days! And hence, the celebration of Hanukah, where you light candles for eight consecutive days. Maimonides, a well-known teacher and a scholar of the Jewish tradition, says that it is actually “forbidden” to lament or to fast during Hanukah! You are supposed to celebrate. It is forbidden to lament! Think about that…
Similarly, we all know the story of Christmas. I don't want to go into detail because we all know the story. But again, it's a story of a people who have been broken apart. Who've been controlled from Rome by Caesar Augustus, who wants taxes. That's why Joseph, and very, very pregnant Mary, have to walk a hundred miles from Nazareth back to Bethlehem. That's how the baby is born. A new hope is born.
So again, I want to underline that re-membering is often associated with New Birth. It could be a human birth, the birth of a Savior King, birth of light…
That's the story here.
Re-membering in art and philosophy
In art, we see this kind of re-membering, for example, in the Cubist Movement. That's what the cubists did! They took what is obvious, they broke it apart, and then put the pieces together so you had new perspectives.
Similarly, we have this Japanese art of Kintsugi. It is a beautiful art form that comes out of the wabi sabi philosophy. Wabi sabi is a way of life in Japan. A part of Zen Buddhism. Here, the idea is to celebrate what is broken. What is imperfect.
So, what happens in Kintsugi is that if you have a beautiful porcelain vase and it falls and shatters, you collect the pieces, you mix glue with gold powder and you repair the broken pieces with this golden glue. That’s why it’s called Kintsugi, which loosely means “golden joinery.” So, in Kintsugi, all the broken seams are highlighted with gold. The idea is that we don't hide what is broken. We celebrate what is broken. There's a philosophical underpinning of this practice, which is called mono no aware, which has been translated as “the pathos of things.” And it is the pathos that opens into beauty, into joy!
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So, as a community, we sit here. The season, the year, is ending. There is a question about whether we're going to continue to meet in person past this time. Or maybe we’ll meet in person again in Spring. Maybe we will meet in the interim on zoom, maybe not…
It is a moment to stop, and really wonder what has been dismembered here.
And how can it be re-membered in a way that's useful for us. That gives this new birth a new possibility. And… as I was thinking about this, I thought of the word “reflect.” I realized that to re-flect means literally to “bend backwards!” So, we bend backwards. We see what was, and what of it we want to keep, and what of it it's time to say goodbye to. That is a beautiful discernment process in itself!
So, I will leave you today with this poem as an ending. It is from a beautiful poet that I have discovered only in the past year or so. Her name is Chelan Harkin and this is from her book, “Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved.” *
You don’t have to believe in God
You don’t have to believe in God
but please collapse in wonder
as regularly as you can
try and let your knowledge
be side-swiped by awe
and let beauty be so persuasive
you find yourself willing
to lay your opinions at her feet
Darling, you don’t have to believe in God
but please pray
for your own sake
great prayers of thanks
for the mountains, the great rivers
the roundness of the moon
just because they’re here at all
and that you get to know them
and let prayer bubble up in you
as a natural thing
like song in a bird
You don’t have to have
a spiritual path
but do run
the most sensitive
part of your soul
over the soft curves
of this world
with as much tenderness
as you can find in yourself
and let her edgeless ways
inspire you to discover more
just find a way
that makes you want to yield
yourself
that you may be more open
to letting beauty fully
into your arms
and feel some sacred flame
inside of you that yearns toward
learning how to build a bigger
fire of love in your heart
You don’t have to believe in God
but get quiet enough to remember
we really don’t know a damn thing
about any of it
and if you can, feel a reverence to be part
of This Great Something
whatever you want to call it
that is so much bigger
and so far beyond
the rooftops of all
our knowing
Thank you!
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*The source of this poem was incorrectly cited as “Susceptible to Light” in the sermon. The source is actually another of Chelan Harkin’s books: “Let Us Dance: The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved.”