Our Lost Wisdom
What is Wisdom, you might ask? How can I possibly possess it? An ancient writer spoke of her this way.
For in her is the spirit of
understanding; . . . loving that which is
good, quick, beneficent, gentle, kind,
steadfast, assured, secure, . . . intelligible,
pure, subtle: for Wisdom is more active than all active things;. . . For
she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God’s
majesty, and the image of his goodness. .
. . For she is more beautiful than the Sun, and above all the order of the
stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it. For after this cometh night, but no evil can
overcome Wisdom. Wisdom 7:22-30
My
five year old friend Ava explained Wisdom to her father this way when talking
about how she loved her family.
“Wisdom is when you know you love them
in your heart, but you haven’t figured it out on the outside yet.”
I believe we are all searching for our
lost Wisdom.
For a long time now, Wisdom, adorning
our public buildings as the Greco-Roman Wisdom-goddesses, Minerva and Pallas
Athena, could only be channeled through a masculine, left-brained mode of
perception if women wanted to be taken seriously in our culture. Women who go into politics, law, medicine,
science and finance – considered masculine professions – find they have to toe
the patriarchal line every day. While
they use their intuition and feeling whenever possible, they have to fit their
feminine perceptions into an already structured reality.
But the world is changing. Women are healing our inner wounds, and
learning to express our feminine being without fear or shame. Women have a need to get to know ourselves,
after long centuries of being subjugated and twisted by patriarchal
expectations. When women look within and
acknowledge our strengths and recognize our weaknesses and wounds, we begin to
untwist ourselves. We stand up for
ourselves, our feelings and our beliefs.
We stop trying to become a man’s perfect fantasy. We become our own fantasy! The woman we always wanted to be. We stop being afraid to excel, and since
we’ve learned to listen within to our own wisdom, we find solutions to our
problems. We remember that we are here
on Earth to be whole, not perfect, as is so often expected of each of us.
As women heal the wounds inflicted on
our feminine being, we become living examples of new ways of being for our
children and men. Feminine consciousness
within men is just as twisted and wounded – maybe even more so, since the
patriarchy looks down on men who are in touch with their feminine soul. While
there are many women who still uphold the values of patriarchy and will defend
them to their deaths, there are also men who have reclaimed their feminine
consciousness and are examples of the new masculine man who works in harmony
with feminine spirit.
Our culture has not served us
well. By devaluing the feminine aspects
of life, we created an out-of-control life-style that is killing the Earth, and
killing us. And so, it is most
especially women’s purpose, our unique purpose, to achieve our inner freedom
and learn to embody Wisdom, so that we help create a new society that equally
values and respects both men and women as well as masculine and feminine
consciousness, and most especially soul and spirit.
As women regain and express our
feminine powers, and become Conscious Wise Women, we need an archetypal image
that allows us our shadows as well as our light. Women have learned to understand the bright
light of the Sun, for we have been Father's daughters – Daughters of the
Patriarchy - for a long time now. We are
unique individuals as much as any man.
But still . . . We sense that
we can be more.
There are many ancient forms of the
Divine Feminine, goddesses that women can learn from, and in turning to these
ancient powers, women have become more comfortable with our innate feminine
powers. But these ancient goddesses are just that –
ancient. Their images come from
different times and different cultures.
We need to discover an image of the Divine Feminine that can help us
find our unique purpose in these tumultuous times of change, one that embodies
the returning Goddess-energy that so many people are feeling.
The Woman Clothed with
the Sun
In the many cultural stories about the
changing of the ages, it is the Divine Feminine energy that brings about the
transition to new life, for feminine spirit knows the rhythms of life, death
and rebirth and is often portrayed as the ‘opener of the way’. Since we live in a world of duality, both
masculine and feminine energies carry their own unique attributes which we’ll
explore in later chapters. We need to understand
how these different energies work and how to best use them. In times of death, it is feminine
consciousness which helps us let go so we can experience the transformations we
need to undergo for a rebirth.
The image of the returning Goddess I believe
we need to incarnate is the transformative energy at work during the changing
of the ages. While different cultures
see this Divine Feminine energy within their own mythological traditions, we
Westerners have lost touch with our mythological roots. But we have our own story of change and in
the midst of it there is an image of Lady Wisdom who mediates the
transformation.
In this story of the changing of the
ages, there is a powerful image of Conscious Woman, an image of divine feminine
spirit who transforms and births a new Age.
I am attracted to this image without being attracted to the Christian
End Time story it is part of. I am drawn
to this archetypal image because I believe it speaks to our modern
sensibilities. And I know that this archetypal
image gives us instructions for accessing and incarnating Wisdom.
The image is one of the Cosmic
Woman: “A Woman, clothed with the Sun, standing on the Moon, crowned with Stars
who is in labor, giving birth to a Savior”.
In earlier times and different traditions, this archetypal image was
understood as an image of Lady Wisdom.
Today I feel this Goddess image of Conscious Woman can be incarnated by
women everywhere. This Woman is Lady
Wisdom and all women are called to become Wisdom’s daughters.
Our times, which are the forerunner of
a new world age, call to us to honor Lady Wisdom, who in Gnostic Christianity
is the equal partner of Christ. But Lady
Wisdom is not associated with any one religion. We find her in all traditions. Lady Wisdom is the image of the Anima Mundi,
the World Soul; the energy of our Earth’s conscious evolution. As such, she belongs to all of us and is within
all of us. I believe she is calling
women out of the Father’s House so we can ‘give birth’ to a new collective
paradigm, a new ‘way of doing’ to match her ‘deep being’ that embraces
partnership over domination, love over power, unity over divisiveness, peace
over war, our collective benefit over individual profit.
In leaving the Father’s House, women
are not rejecting the masculine energies of life, but by re-connecting to our
own unique feminine gifts, we are re-integrating both feminine and masculine
energies at a newer, higher level of consciousness. Women are learning to re-balance the two
lights in our sky: Earth's bi-polar consciousness – the Sun and Moon. Perhaps we are entraining with the Earth
when we learn to use both sides of the brain.
We are becoming this Woman clothed
with the Sun, finally able to access our feminine Wisdom freely and
consciously. This Wisdom gives us the
insight to make life-enhancing decisions, to understand complex situations and
to consciously co-create new directions for our culture. This Wisdom gives us spiritual insight into
life.
We are called to be social artists, people
who use our creative vision to enhance and strengthen our common lives, our one
world. Our job now is to bring this
knowledge and wisdom into the public arena.
But we have to face the fact that our womanly wisdom is still viewed
with suspicion by the patriarchy. We
have only to look at the reaction to Chief Justice Sotomayor calling herself a
‘wise Latina woman’ to realize how deeply afraid patriarchal men are of sharing
their power and privilege. Our most
powerful institutions, which control our civilization, are still solidly
entrenched in this kind of patriarchal thinking. We live with an imbalanced
perspective on life, one that often disregards feminine qualities and values,
or else uses them to support our culture’s masculine values. We live in a dying paradigm that disregards
the Soul and therefore also the Spirit. And it has led us to the brink of
global annihilation.
The
truth is: Wisdom is what we most need
right now in our world.
Women, in breaking away from the
patriarchal structures and strictures of life, are recognizing our gifts and
re-discovering our wisdom. Wisdom itself
is encoded in both our physical and soulful DNA, and as you will see, is
available to us within our own bodies, minds, souls and spirit. This Wisdom belongs to all humanity, and yet
the truth is that women and feminine consciousness connect most easily to
it. That is why I believe it is women’s
gift to the world. That is why it is so important for women to ‘leave the
Father’s House’ – leave behind the rules and expectations of being a proper
wife, worker, mother, friend, as well as the rebellious roles we play out
against those rules – being wild, irresponsible, addicted, promiscuous, stupid,
angry, or crazy. We need to step
outside the collective expectations and heal ourselves, so that we can learn to
access Wisdom and incarnate it in our lives.
To leave the Father’s House means to
leave behind the old rules and perspective of patriarchy, to take
responsibility for our own life and find meaning in what we do; to learn to
understand our feelings instead of being overwhelmed by them or repressing
them; to learn to listen to and trust our intuitions instead of ignoring them;
to search for our personal visions and meaning in life instead of buying into the
prevailing collective story of desire, power and consumption; to open ourselves
to love in whatever form it comes to us, instead of continuing to get lost in
the misery and need to possess and control love; to find our creativity and
give it to the world, whether it’s to our children who grow into conscious
adults or our artistic creations that open others to healing and
consciousness.
These are the gifts women find once we
leave the Father’s house behind. We find
our own talents, our own patterns of life; we find the source of Wisdom that we
need to live securely with our Mother, the Earth. Like Yin and Yang, the cosmic interchange of
Earth’s bi-polar energy, we all need to be in balance. Coupled with the masculine values of action,
rationality, individuality, creative genesis and discipline, Wisdom’s feminine
values empower the imagination, love and compassion, endurance and compromise. Wisdom encourages intelligent and fruitful
dialogue over issues. Wisdom opens us to
think with our hearts, to love in a way that allows for our imperfections while
demanding greater consciousness, to use our imaginations for life rather than
profit. Wisdom takes the whole into account, while still honoring
individuality. What wonders could we achieve here on Earth
if we all asked for the gift of Wisdom?
Wisdom is not a word we use very often
anymore in our society, just as Lady Wisdom is so often ignored by the
world. But it’s not because there
isn’t plenty of wisdom around. I hear
it flowing out of women all the time.
The older woman walking her dog is secure in what she knows and isn’t
afraid to say it. Mothers who listen to
their instincts know it. Women who are
turning to the ancient goddesses find it.
But we have to name it to own it. Yes, we are wise.
Of course, men go in search of
wisdom. These are men who have engaged
in deep soul work and who have integrated their feminine and masculine consciousness.
They have created the best of our
Western culture. And of course, Wisdom shows herself to
children, like Ava, who see the world with Spirit’s eyes. But there are still so many ‘father’s
daughters’ who do not even know there are other possibilities, as well as men
who don’t realize Wisdom is even there to be found. And the power structures of religion,
government, finance and industry – the Fathers – too often denounce and
disrespect Wisdom, and so our people are not taught about this vital aspect of
life.
Lady Wisdom cries out in the
marketplace, but no one listens.
In most traditions, Wisdom is
female. It is not only the Hebraic
Wisdom that is feminine, but also the Gnostic, the Greek, the Native American,
the Celtic. Men and gods desired Wisdom,
just as King Solomon desired the Queen of Sheba, who was the incarnation of
Lady Wisdom for him. So it makes sense
that when women search for our life’s purpose, we discover our connection to
Lady Wisdom within ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment