the woman
Emotions and revelations are like blood and fire. Forgive me for not always being thankful for God's never ending ability to place within my reach what I currently need. Well, Father, what I need is all good, but what about the fact that I don't want it?
You started this, God, not me. Well, I can remember myself carefully reflecting on the subject. I started out, a few months back, by asking a little upset: What's the deal God, is there no female part of you at all? What about Holy Spirit? What about Hebrew grammar, is there no equivalent to say the German language with it's female/male words? Couldn't there be a female side of Holy Spirit? And yes, you did answer just a few days later, through someone who had no idea what I silently had asked you, who was just talking on the first chapter of Genesis and happened to be a Hebrew scholar, that the Hebrew word for Spirit in Genesis chapter one is in it's female form... And then we were off. Well, not for yet a while to come, but it all started there.
For then came the slow process of meeting Mary in every Catholic Church of my trip. And then, on a walk during my pilgrimage when I was walking out of Leon, I found myself crying in realization of the pain of giving birth in a stable. And the overwhelming discovery of my own womanhood, how in some intangible way I found myself being a woman but couldn't put my finger on why I was discovering this now or when I became her or if she has always been there or who she really is.
And all the time that Mother Figure, with her brown-redish, curly hair, glittering eyes, flashing, beautiful smile. The woman no amount of philosophy or psycology can tame with their analyzes of her existence. The woman from every Bob Dylan song, giving Shelter from the Storm, the woman every woman battles with in one way or another; we cannot make love to her, we cannot hide in her womb any more, we cannot quite flee her; we can try, or we can settle for hating her, or becoming her.
I hate psycology. I know I will have to change my mind about this eventually, but for now I hate how all my emotions and revelations get stripped down into one thesis or another, into explanations and theories. And I hate how this Woman will have a thousand different names in psycology and religions, but in my simple faith in Jesus Christ I seldom encounter her. Help me, brothers and sisters, why did Freud and the rest of the gang I do not read or study get monopoly on Mother images and womanhood?!
And then of course the book dropped out of the shelf. Well, it didn't actually drop out, it just stood out and kind of placed itself in my hand in a friendly manner, and even though I felt the God is giving me this book- alarm go off I didn't really understand the terror and agony this involved. If one is battling with The Woman and wondering who she is and how to deal with her, why not read Herman Hesse's "Narziss and Goldmund" and make things bitterly worse?
Can one really survive such a book, with it's painfully broken hopeless life view and yet deep deep life desire no despair quite reaches through? Or maybe, that is the whole point, that it is the despair that is fueling that life desire, that the despair and the pain is so linked to the desire for life, and everything life brings. Maybe it is all along the lines I have been working on in my mind, about love and pain being so tightly knitted together in the female heart and mind, and love so physically leading to birth and pain in our bodies.
But then, what do you do with a book that ends with a man dying and his last words to his best friend being, But how do you then once want to die, Narziss, if you have no mother? With no mother you cannot love. With no mother you cannot die.
Figuring out what to do with this woman seems so hopeless, because if I love her I must hate every other woman on earth as everybody else suddenly fades and go bitter, but if I ignore her and pretend she doesn't exist as a shade, no more than that an image, or dream, an answer to an unspoken question, if I ignore her, then I find myself desperatly compensating by trying to become her in every way.
Who is she then, this imaginary picture of the perfect woman, beyond good and bad, beyond life and death, beyond love or hate, in whom's womb I cannot crawl back in, with whom's body I cannot make love, by whom's side I cannot stand measure and whom I cannot become, nor flee, nor hate?
You started this, God, not me. Well, I can remember myself carefully reflecting on the subject. I started out, a few months back, by asking a little upset: What's the deal God, is there no female part of you at all? What about Holy Spirit? What about Hebrew grammar, is there no equivalent to say the German language with it's female/male words? Couldn't there be a female side of Holy Spirit? And yes, you did answer just a few days later, through someone who had no idea what I silently had asked you, who was just talking on the first chapter of Genesis and happened to be a Hebrew scholar, that the Hebrew word for Spirit in Genesis chapter one is in it's female form... And then we were off. Well, not for yet a while to come, but it all started there.
For then came the slow process of meeting Mary in every Catholic Church of my trip. And then, on a walk during my pilgrimage when I was walking out of Leon, I found myself crying in realization of the pain of giving birth in a stable. And the overwhelming discovery of my own womanhood, how in some intangible way I found myself being a woman but couldn't put my finger on why I was discovering this now or when I became her or if she has always been there or who she really is.
And all the time that Mother Figure, with her brown-redish, curly hair, glittering eyes, flashing, beautiful smile. The woman no amount of philosophy or psycology can tame with their analyzes of her existence. The woman from every Bob Dylan song, giving Shelter from the Storm, the woman every woman battles with in one way or another; we cannot make love to her, we cannot hide in her womb any more, we cannot quite flee her; we can try, or we can settle for hating her, or becoming her.
I hate psycology. I know I will have to change my mind about this eventually, but for now I hate how all my emotions and revelations get stripped down into one thesis or another, into explanations and theories. And I hate how this Woman will have a thousand different names in psycology and religions, but in my simple faith in Jesus Christ I seldom encounter her. Help me, brothers and sisters, why did Freud and the rest of the gang I do not read or study get monopoly on Mother images and womanhood?!
And then of course the book dropped out of the shelf. Well, it didn't actually drop out, it just stood out and kind of placed itself in my hand in a friendly manner, and even though I felt the God is giving me this book- alarm go off I didn't really understand the terror and agony this involved. If one is battling with The Woman and wondering who she is and how to deal with her, why not read Herman Hesse's "Narziss and Goldmund" and make things bitterly worse?
Can one really survive such a book, with it's painfully broken hopeless life view and yet deep deep life desire no despair quite reaches through? Or maybe, that is the whole point, that it is the despair that is fueling that life desire, that the despair and the pain is so linked to the desire for life, and everything life brings. Maybe it is all along the lines I have been working on in my mind, about love and pain being so tightly knitted together in the female heart and mind, and love so physically leading to birth and pain in our bodies.
But then, what do you do with a book that ends with a man dying and his last words to his best friend being, But how do you then once want to die, Narziss, if you have no mother? With no mother you cannot love. With no mother you cannot die.
Figuring out what to do with this woman seems so hopeless, because if I love her I must hate every other woman on earth as everybody else suddenly fades and go bitter, but if I ignore her and pretend she doesn't exist as a shade, no more than that an image, or dream, an answer to an unspoken question, if I ignore her, then I find myself desperatly compensating by trying to become her in every way.
Who is she then, this imaginary picture of the perfect woman, beyond good and bad, beyond life and death, beyond love or hate, in whom's womb I cannot crawl back in, with whom's body I cannot make love, by whom's side I cannot stand measure and whom I cannot become, nor flee, nor hate?
(And what the heck does she have to do with all this about God's female side and the virgin Mary?!)
posted by wild rose pilgrim at 5:02 PM
4 Comments:
(careful, you might scare people!!)
I think your blog is too good for the internet.
spk sn
Thanks Tom! That was a major compliment, I appriciate it! But of course my blog stays on the internet, I need to know people read what I write, and maybe some of them need to be a little scared at times, at least that's what I like to think, because it makes me less scared by the wonder of life if I can share it with others...
you really are the wild rose pilgrim. i am awed by the art in your words. you are so special erikka. thankyou for being brave.
whitney
wonderful thoughts... is the love, in wich you love mother mary the same as you hit yourself to love your own mother? Is the love you have for god the same as you have for your father?
Maybe you find your answers there, where nothing more is than the truth... and the incredible pain of seeing, that everything you once adored has passed away...
Go on, there s a light!
Moni
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