Tag: rosary

The Glorious Mysteries

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.

I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.

The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.

The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation:
1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process
2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel
3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation
4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!”
5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story

The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey:
1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come
2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture
3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting
4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish
5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being

The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way:
1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening
2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.”
4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle
5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery

This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Denise Levertov’s poetry
2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice
3. Circles of beloved community
4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning
5. Always new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!

“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr

“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit

“The child’s hand
Folding these wings
Wins no wars and ends them all. “
―Thomas Merton

“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi

Ekphrastic Poem

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Today’s prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem, to take a piece of art, and to write a poem about it. All month, I have been writing a poem, and then creating a piece of AI art to go with it. As I began to create a piece of AI art to use for this prompt, the poem approached. Before I managed to create a piece of art, the poem had found its way to my notes, and so I created the art to go with the poem that went with a piece of artwork that I had imagined. And so it goes: Which comes first?

Which came first:
the image or the word,
the sound or the sense,
the egg or the bird?

Did it happen with BANG or “Begin,”
with the seed or the dream,
with poem or picture,
with to say, or to seem?

A project, a poem, a world comes to be
in the nodes where the lines of word and image cross,
the woven fibers of vision and voice interlocking,
and in the silence and darkness between,
meaning–like water– trickles into the spaces,
into the interstices, of the living, breathing tapestry.

Becoming becomes,
word takes shape and image speaks,
and something new comes into being.

Gratitude List:
1. Every day right now: November Roses!
2. People telling their stories
3. The buck who whuffed at me in the grove
4. Cardinal singing in the cherry tree
5. Words and images
May we walk in Beauty!

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.” ―Gandalf

Let the rain come and wash away
the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds
held and nurtured over generations.
Let the rain wash away the memory
of the hurt, the neglect.
Then let the sun come out and
fill the sky with rainbows.
Let the warmth of the sun heal us
wherever we are broken.
Let it burn away the fog so that
we can see each other clearly.
So that we can see beyond labels,
beyond accents, gender or skin color.
Let the warmth and brightness
of the sun melt our selfishness.
So that we can share the joys and
feel the sorrows of our neighbors.
And let the light of the sun
be so strong that we will see all
people as our neighbors.
Let the earth, nourished by rain,
bring forth flowers
to surround us with beauty.
And let the mountains teach our hearts
to reach upward to heaven.

Amen.
―Rabbi Harold Kushner

I place in the hands of Time these stones:
the story of this day,
the people I have been near to,
the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears,
the colors that haunt me.

See how they turn to mist,
how they glow for a moment–
red, then golden, then blue–
then dissipate like ash blown by a wind
before I can register
that they have lost their substance.

Where does memory go
when it flows out with the tide,
when it slips down the drain,
when it is blown out with the morning fog?

I am still the child in the forest,
walking blind through the swirling mists,
under the shadows of the great trees.
With each forward step on the trail,
a little bird flutters from the pathway behind,
a bread crumb in its beak.
―Beth Weaver-Kreider

“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford

Inviting Your Enemies

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

I’m not Catholic, but I pray the rosary. I had been intending to learn the prayers and explore the process (very intellectualized, I know), and then my father got very sick. On the weekend that he was receiving a risky treatment simply to try to save his life, I picked up the rosary and my little booklet into which I had scribbled my versions of the rosary prayers, and I learned. In desperation and need of grounding and comfort, I began to say the Aves and the Love Prayer (the Our Father), holding desperately to the beads. When I had no words for the mix of terrible anxiety and holy presence I was feeling, I walked the path of the beads.

Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, in their book The Way of the Rose, speak about holding the beads as holding the hand of The Mother. Comfort and peace and tenderness upwelling in the midst of whatever life is bringing: crisis or joy, or the quotidian rhythms of the day.

Here is my version of the Our Father. It changes every once in a while, as praying it brings me new insights into what I mean when I say the words. I’ve gotten a little wordy on the sign-off, but that’s my own flourish. It feels right to me:

Oh Love, which imbues the cosmos, Holy is thy name.
May thy realm come. May thy will be done,
here on earth as it is in the heavens, and within the sacred circle.
Grant unto us this day what we need to survive,
and lead us ever into right relationship with you and with others and with the all.
Keep us from walking in paths of destruction, and deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Wisdom and the Vision and the Virtue,
the Promise and the Presence and the Peace,
the Glory and the Story and the Song,
both now and forever. Amen.

Lately, when I say the line, “Draw us ever closer into right relationship,” I see in my mind’s eye several of the people who have hurt me. Of course, I mean them when I pray that line–still, they intrude upon my peaceful prayers. Today, when it began to happen, I invited them in. I had also been thinking about how this is the day of the Archangels, the Feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. And so, instead of simply holding the idea of being drawn into right relationship with them, I asked the archangels to invite their angels to witness my prayers.

It feels really weird to write that, but it felt so right in the moment, and continues to feel right. My rosary prayers also became more lively, more awake, more focused. I felt safe (who doesn’t feel safe when surrounded by angels and Mother Mary?). It feels like the line in the Psalm: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” I’ll admit, when I got to “Keep us from walking the paths of destruction,” I found myself talking very directly to their angels, and “Deliver us from evil” has a new sort of ring when you say it in presence of the angels of people who have harmed you.

I don’t know whether there will ever be reconciliations and restorations on this plane. I’ve walked away from that door. I won’t wait around for that to happen, and making it happen will take a great deal of work on someone else’s part at this point. But I might continue to invite their angels to the table of my prayers.

Gratitude List:
1. Angels
2. Art
3. The rosary
4. Always something new to learn, some new way to deepen
5. Celebrating thirty-two years with my soul-mate. Such a good, good man.
May we be draw ever into right relationships.

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou

“Sometimes it seems as though the Wildest One (you might call her God, or the Universe, or Love) is actively meddling in the affairs of mortals, like I am given a thing to learn, and then immediately after am handed the situations necessary for practice and integration.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider

“You don’t need to attend every argument you are invited to.” —anonymous (possibly Zig Ziglar

“It’s hard to be mad at someone who misses you while you’re asleep.” —Calvin, of Hobbes (Bill Watterson)

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any– lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
―e. e. cummings, read by Anne Marie at our wedding on this day in 1990

“To live a creative life,
we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
―Joseph Chilton Pearce

“If music be the food of love, play on.” ―William Shakespeare

“At the still point, there the dance is.” ―T.S. Eliot

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ―Leonard Bernstein

“To speak about that location from which work emerges, I choose familiar politicized language, old codes, words like ‘struggle, marginality, resistance.’ I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or ‘cool’ – hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different meaning.
I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”
From the essay: ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness;’ From the Book: “Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics” (1989 ) by bell hooks

Hermit

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
The Hermit, from The Brightwing Tarot by Beth Weaver-Kreider and AI.

If you’re just joining me in these recent posts, I am taking a trip through the Fool’s Quest, the soulpath laid out in the stages of the Major Arcana of the tarot cards. I have been using the tarot as a tool for deep inner understanding and spiritual growth and development since 1992, and I thought it was time to do a public exploration of some of the ways in which this tool has helped me to learn more about myself and my connection to others and to the Holy One.

The way out is the way in.

Recently, I have begun praying the rosary. I’m in the middle of a 54-day novena, praying along with a group of others for our heart’s desire. I’ve been praying that I may live wildly and freely, unbound by others’ expectations and boxes. I can feel this prayer working and growing within me every day. The saint that we’ve been focusing on during this novena is St. Thecla, who listened to the apostle Paul and herself became an evangelist. Her story is told in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Thecla was captivated by Paul’s preaching, particularly with his ideas of celibacy, which seemed to offer her freedom from an arranged marriage and the Roman ideas of respectability proscribed to young women of her day. Instead of being caged within her proscribed gender role, Thecla became a wandering preacher, wearing men’s clothes, and living on her own terms.

I’ve been thinking about St. Thecla quite a bit lately as I have been considering the tarot. The eighth card in the Major Arcana is Strength, which traditionally features a young woman closing the mouth of a lion. In St. Thecla’s story, when she refused the advances of a prince of the city, she was thrown to the lions, but they would not harm her, and one female lion actually protected her from the others. Thecla, like Strength, is portrayed in the company of lions, not dominating them, but quietly present with them.

Later in her life, having survived several attempts by powerful people to have her put to death, she withdrew from human society and lived in a desert cave, as many of the church’s early mothers and fathers did, where she ministered to people who came to visit her, and performed many miracles of healing.

So today’s Tarot character, the Hermit, is also reminiscent of St. Thecla. The Hermit withdraws from the hustle and bustle of society in order to focus and think, to pray and contemplate, to do inner work.

The way out, they say, is the way in.

The Hermit is a special kind of activist, an inner activist, who anchors and focuses the work that must be done through prayer, contemplation, generating healing energy, developing wisdom–not hoarding it. The Fool comes to the Hermit in the wilderness to learn to anchor and channel energy, to balance outward movement with inward contemplation. The Hermit is always portrayed carrying the light of their own inner wisdom in the wilderness. The Fool comes to the Hermit and learns to find the fount of Wisdom within.

One of the lessons I still carry from my college days was one a group of our professors worked hard to help us explore: that the work of the activist to create social justice must be balanced with inner work. Contemplation feeds action. Action enriches contemplation.

If you’re a Hermit, don’t give into feelings of shame that you aren’t doing more active work in the world. Do the work you’re called to do. Anchor energies. Pray. Find wisdom. Welcome the seekers. Be a refreshing fountain where your beloveds who are at the front lines of activism may come and receive your healing calm and wisdom.

Gratitude List:
1. Hummingbird
2. Holiness everywhere. In the Aenid of Virgil is the phrase: Incessu patuit dea. The Goddess is revealed as she passes. Everywhere you turn, She is there.
3. Wide and welcoming tables, and the people who work to create them.
4. My colleagues are so incredibly supportive and welcoming.
5. Cats
May we walk in Beauty!

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Hope is a renewable option:
If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.” ―Barbara Kingsolver

“There is a voice that doesn’t use words.
Listen.”
―Rumi

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
―Carl Jung

“I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.”
―Mary Oliver

“We have come into this exquisite world to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and light.”
―Hafiz

“Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

“A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.” —Barbara Ehrenreich