Living within a new-older story is coming. I can feel it.
Trouble (for my mind) is that I cannot quite see or hear it in ways I’m accustomed to trusting. I have lived within a story of separation and abandonment for most of my life, sometimes unknowing, sometimes exquisitely aware of it. I inherited compelling religious language for this, at least for the time, but these last decades have been about breaking some of that open, seeing the wounding shadows as well as the assuring light. How do I live into the new-older story that beckons when I'm prone to distrust now, to sense only the abandonment I now know amidst previous stories of divine promises never to be broken? [i.e. Ps 145:13, even as it seems to me that this God has broken his promises to women for generations, confirmed in the dehumanization of women in 'holy' scripture. All true, even as I know God/de as a Force and Flow that has never let me go, always seeking my best S/self in overwhelming abundance and Love. Complicating, eh?].
Many folks who awaken in this way make a firm break with whatever came before. Fundamentalisms most often assumed to be ‘religious’ breaking free into liberating secularisms. I find, in some contrast, that any fundamentalism can express in both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ dress. It’s the habit of mind I cannot stomach in the end–calcified, rigid–exchanging the wounding side with a presumed healing side…all the while, this liberating ‘healing’ rarely transfigures the wound of separation in the mind. It usually simply displaces it, with different projections onto 'those others' who have wounded. For good and ill, then, I have never been one for leaving anything behind, completely, even as I perpetually create new and larger spaces within which I can continue to grow. Think of the nautilus–always growing, creating more-larger home-space while using the rest (now emptied) for flotation and sustenance.
Today I can sense a new-much-older story of deep belonging and unbroken connection yearning to take shape in my own life, my own body. This is the story I’ve been yearning to live my entire life, perhaps even have lived in pockets of my life already. The old story of separation is the plot-device in most religious storying I know, with the various religious practices/doctrines naming the pathway back to connection. My root tradition of Christianity tells of original goodness, then a primordial “fall” traditionally blamed upon the F/feminine, therefore the entrance of sin into the human condition, separation from God. Salvation is the shape of storying from here on out, relying upon God’s agency, God’s Son, taking human form that reunifies in what is called atonement, at-one-ment. I have a strong visceral sense about the truth of this Story, even accounting for its failings and woundings of the F/feminine, as I also know there is a new-older, no-less-true story underneath it somehow.
The subset story within the separation one is abandonment, for me anyway. I’m not sure this word points to a narrative that others sense within the stories of separation we’re living today, as it took me decades to really receive and live inside its veracity in my own life. Maybe abandonment is simply the searing, visceral experience of separation that my body remembers somehow? I have told the story within family-of-origin patterning, ecclesial-congregational systems, and the environments of higher education I’ve worked in for decades. Abandonment has a whole lot more emotional-psychological wallop within relationships purportedly of love, care-giving, belonging, i.e. someone abandons, someone is abandoned. My body feels that exquisitely, painfully, even today. I have a strong inner sense of injustice and wounding with the word abandonment that can easily be elided with the word separation. Irreconcilable loss, it is. Anything we or I might do can never erase this wound from my woman’s body, but the freedom beyond forgiveness offers a buoyant way to be in this world anyway. (Again, think nautilus). What if this larger story diffuses the felt-injustice surrounding the personal-abandonment sensations and provides an antidote of deep connection, belonging, with all those already within me, those who have passed on, leaving me their own signatures somehow? Connection with them is indivisible, except as I allow division.
Regardless of which word one chooses–separation or abandonment or both–I am awakening to an older, deeper, potentially more transfiguring story that perhaps has goaded me all along: belonging, deep connection. The languaging I’ve had my entire life for this has been within a framing with the Divine. Practicing and growing in Spirit toward union with God, Whom I now spell/refer to as God/de. I am a theology professor, after all. The newness beckoning doesn’t come in contrast or opposition to that at all, but the newness-in-the-older story feels like it might undergird my old storying in some new ways.
What if some part(s) of me have known the deep connection and belonging of generations within me for longer than I’ve forgotten? Having lived deep connection with my people--living and not-enfleshed--then choosing to enter this life for healing-work in a lineage of deep dissociation would feel like abandonment in my body. If I chose it, then the injustice of it all wanes...
What if the cultural story of rupturing–moving to dominator cultures instead of partnership ones, rise of agricultural-patriarchal organizations instead of sustenance-web of creation ways, rise of industrialization/modernity instead of F/feminine knowing and intuition (archetypal energy regardless of gender)--what if the cultural story of rupturing is that one of separation, and we can ritually repair and maintain interconnection, deep belonging within our world(s) today?
What would living into the new-older story of deep connection with generations, ancestors, communion of saints look like, feel like?
Reconnection with one’s ancestors–preferably the well, healed and wise ones–appears to be this ancient, older story becoming anew for me, for many of us today. I’ve landed into an ancestral medicine journey that finally feels time somehow, even as I also recognize my fears and resistances. I’ve lived within the grief and irreconcilable loss for so long, I almost don’t know how to not begin there.
“The ritual is the faith gesture,” I remember from an elder/friend a couple years back.
Perhaps I simply begin with tending an ancestral altar each day, in anticipation of feeling more connected as my father’s father’s grandfathers’ line reaches toward me and I receive them. Perhaps a time of daily prayer within a drum-beat, to quiet the mind, the self-doubt and separation I’ve learned for decades. Allowing this new-older story to make itself known in its own time, in my bodysoul deepening in receptivity to the world(s) most around me don’t see, won’t consider. Opening my heart and mind to signals, clues, serendipities that may find me. This last being what I’m actually pretty practiced at, attributing each one to God/de or the Spirit, in some fashion. What if I made room for my people(s), connecting with me? None of which means a hard leaving or boundary with my root tradition, but it does mean an open box, a willingness to breathe more deeply into Mystery, allowing and receptive.
One has to have a LOT of capacity to hold ambiguity, grief and praise to sit at the intersection I’m trying to describe. It requires a more subtle habit of mind that can love the transgressor, love-in-hope-for-peace amidst the wounds that never seem to end, trust again what has felt untrustworthy of late. If one is fortunate or blessed, one gets to know the freedom that finds you on the other side of forgiveness, which is not an act of will but a happening of grace, a practice of lament, a willingness to digest the pain of irreconcilable loss while not being eaten up inside with the pain, sense of injustice of it all. I was blessed to find–be found by–an elder who walked me through this journey through the forgiveness I was not seeking. But it does complicate living in old stories, dreaming new stories without demonizing the old ones. So...the plan, then:
Tend the altar.
Pray within the drumbeat.
Breathe.
Allow.
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