Mary

In defence of feeling

If this is the first time you have encountered my writing, you might like to start with my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece.

And it might be helpful to say that I experience the world self-referentially (I), but my interest is always political (we). So when you read ‘me’ or ‘I’ (frequently in this piece) I invite you to hear it as ‘me and anyone else that can relate to this’.

‘Woman’, watercolour, painted (and gifted to me) by Eva Emrys

‘But Mary stood outside by the tomb weeping...’

(John 20:11)

‘The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface, it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep’

(Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury)

Stormy Seas

I get hurled about by feelings.

For the last months I have felt like a little boat in huge seas. Seas of my own feelings. Seas of other people’s feelings. And, somedays, seas of what feel like the feelings of the whole world. Including lands and trees and creatures that I will never meet, and memories and histories that are not my own.

I’m sure many of you reading this can relate.

It is hard to regulate.

Sometimes I turn towards my bed thinking ‘well that was a productive day’. But then, scanning back, I realise that yes, I may have moved my body from place to place and performed some tasks, but the only work of substance that I have done is to feel feelings.

Not exactly the essence of ‘productivity’ in most people’s understanding.

I have learnt, for the most part, to surrender to such waves of feeling. Let them crash over me. Pass through me. Leave their trace. Find their own way out.

When I do that, eventually the seas calm and I am left with insights. Understandings. Sometimes even wisdom.

But those seas of feelings are...well...turbulent. For me. And for any that dare to cross my path in those moments!

Last week, to my amusement (I am an artist, not a mathematician), I found myself drawing a graph and plotting on it all the things I had learnt through the internal storm of the last months. My soul quietened within me. My mind bright and alive. Not a wave in sight.¹

And at last I am able to write again.

‘This is the purpose of emotion, to let
a streaming beauty flow through you.
Call it spirit, elixir, or the original
agreement between yourself and God.
Opening into that gives peace, a song of
being empty,
pure silence’.

(Rumi, The Purpose of Emotion)

Danger

I grew up in a culture where feelings are considered dangerous. Indulgent. Sentimental. Self involved.

An inheritance from the wars. Boarding schools. Baked in reverence for certain institutions and etiquette.

But I had a problem.

Not feeling or expressing my feelings made me want to die. I was low-level depressed for much of my childhood and more seriously so through my twenties. Books and art taught me how to feel. Taught me it was ok to feel. That it was vital.

When I eventually got my shamed body through a door to speak to a therapist, we quickly began to unravel the chaos of unfelt feelings in my heavy soul. Many of which weren’t even mine.

So feeling and expressing feelings has always been a matter of life and death for me. And, unintentionally, a form of resistance too.

Now I help others to feel and express their feelings, which is a great privilege.

But something profound has changed for me over these last weeks. Possibly thanks to not drinking alcohol through Lent, which heightened my felt experience. But mainly due to the urgency of these times. The need for us to become more whole-hearted in the ways we share and love and engage. Less afraid.

In the spirit of ‘efficiency’, the purpose of feeling, naming and processing feelings is often just to get them out of the way. Like a road blockage. You have to pause and analyse and dismantle so that you can carry on your way. Feelings are a blockage. Feeling them... rationalising them ...clears the way.

But I have realised that feeling IS what I do.

And I’m not meant to clear myself out of the way. Much as I might like to a lot of the time.

If done with my whole heart, my capacity to feel feelings is a blessing. It doesn’t clear the way. It makes a way. Not just for me, but for others too. In the ‘real’, and in the ‘spirit’.

Bright Field

I remember years ago, when my life began to crack for the umpteenth time, having a moving-image come to mind of me getting a puncture in a big road race.

I could see that I would need to pull in to a lay-by for a while to learn to fix my puncture. But then I saw that instead of re-entering the race, I stuck around in the tree-lined puncture lay-by, helping others to learn to fix their bikes in the shade of the trees too.

And, as I watched that image play out in my mind, I noticed that few of the people that entered the lay-by went on to exit and re-enter the race. And I began to suspect there was a secret exit from the lay-by that, in the process of learning to heal, people became more drawn to than re-entering the race.

A small gap in the hedge through which a brighter light shone and which, without cause to pause, they might never have noticed, let alone been able to choose.

Failing. Pausing. Feeling. Healing. Seeing. Choosing. Moving.

A Bright Field.

And this may be why I am so drawn to the Easter morning story, as told by John,² that some of you will have found yourselves encountering yesterday.

In it I experience both the race and the lay-by.

The Race

Mary Magdalene, beloved friend (some would say lover) and follower of Jesus, having witnessed the brutal death of her beloved, arrives early on the Sunday morning, whilst it is still dark, perhaps so she can be present to, and ready to tend to, his body when the the tomb is opened. Or perhaps just to be near Him.

(She isn’t from Jerusalem, so the re-finding of the route to the tomb, potentially alone (according to this version of the story) and in the dark, is in itself another act of singular devotion. I think Mary is incredible. A true disciple.)

She is shocked and distressed to find that the tomb is already open. Leaps to the conclusion that Jesus’s body has been taken and, rather than pausing to assess the situation herself, immediately runs to get those with (apparently) more authority than her - the male disciples, Peter and (most likely) John (the writer).

I know that experience so well. As a youngest child, and a woman that wrestles with a lot of internalised misogyny, my default is often to assume that someone more important than me should be dealing with things.

Anyway, Mary runs to get the guys, who seemingly do not doubt their aptitude for the task and run to the tomb to assess the situation (warning: I am going to be quite harsh on Peter and John in this piece, but that’s only because I want to let Mary, in contrast, sing for a moment).

And here follows what, for me, is one of the more ridiculous moments in the Bible. And there are many.

In the shadow of the death of Jesus, and the seriousness of the apparent loss of His body, the writer bothers to tell us that these disciples raced each other to the tomb. John outran Peter and got to the tomb first. Bending to look in he sees the linen cloths that Jesus had been wrapped in lying there. Peter then arrives and goes in to the tomb first, noticing not just the linen cloths, but also the handkerchief that ‘had been around His head’.

We are given exacting details of what they find where. Before John (who reminds us again that he was there first), goes in to the apparently empty tomb and, based on their analysis, ‘saw and believed’.

So they race, arrive, enter, observe, assess, measure, see and believe. The Enlightenment project in microcosm. Then they go back home.

Mary, on the other hand, who is seemingly ignored through their important task of analysis, simply ‘stood outside by the tomb weeping’.

The Poet

In her essay ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’,³ writer Audre Lorde helps us feel our way in to the power of such an experience...the necessity of such an experience...for women.

Lorde is writing primarily for women of colour, and in particular lesbian women of colour, so, when I read her work, I try to remember that much of the consolation isn’t primarily intended for me. Or at least that I need to receive both consolation and critique.

But I have leant heavily on her writing over the last weeks. Reminding myself that feeling can be a hidden source of power ‘from where true knowledge, and, therefore, lasting action comes’. That feeling feelings and working to draw them in to colour (I am an artist) and movement (I dance) and language are neither pointless nor indulgent.

Rather:

‘our feelings and the honest exploration of them [can] become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas’.⁴

By this I don’t mean the obsessive recycling of old feelings, which I am expert at. Or a languishing in self pity or shame, which I can slip in to like a pair of cosy old pyjamas.

I mean a felt aliveness to whatever the moment genuinely holds, in all its complexity. A developing of a capacity to become expansive enough in body and heart to let a diversity of feeling exist and find its own way in to language and expression.

The poetic. Which Lorde understands to be ‘revelatory distillation of experience’.⁵

Lorde’s work helps give me a bodily understanding of what theologian Walter Brueggemann must mean when he speaks about a prose vs poetic world. Prose refers to a world ‘that is organised in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos’. Whereas poetry ‘breaks open worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace’.⁶

Mary here is poet.

Her earlier response, to run and get the guys, took her out of her own experience. But, as the guys go about their prose-like assessing of the situation, she allows herself to feel. And, when they leave, she stays put, weeping.

Self-validation

I remember sitting for a long time in front of a twenty minute black and white on-repeat film of the artist Henri Matisse using a pair of scissors to carefully cut out shapes from coloured card.

This little film was right at the heart of the awesome Cut-Outs exhibition at Tate Modern many years ago. Which is exactly where it belonged. At the heart.

There was nothing...zero, zip, zilch...that gave authority to Matisse’s random and seemingly pointless task of cutting out coloured shapes, other than his choosing to do it. And because he was so earnest in his endeavour...so whole-hearted...the viewer didn’t for one moment doubt the validity of such a task.

It was essential, because the artist determined it was essential.

Art is, at its heart, self-validating.

Returning to our Easter morning story, when Mary stays true to her own experience she begins, like Matisse, to stand in her own authority.

And doing so does indeed break worlds open.

She finds courage to stoop down, still weeping, to look in to the empty tomb. Facing her deepest loss and fear. Not looking away. And there, in the dark, she glimpses the Bright Field. A Field that Peter and John, in their extractive mode of analysis (a bit harsh I know, sorry), had entirely missed.

There are two angels in that tomb.

Peter and John saw linen cloths and handkerchiefs. Signs of absence.

Mary sees presence...angels...‘one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain’.

Presence that marks Absence that in turn marks a different kind of Presence. The angels ask Mary why she is weeping. Her response is very far from the assessing and theoretical believing of Peter and John. She is distraught. Someone has taken away her Lord and she doesn’t know where they have laid Him.

At that moment she must sense a presence behind her, because she turns and sees someone that she mistakenly takes to be the gardener. Which suggests this person looked like they belonged in a garden. Down to Earth. At ease in that particular garden, even though it was a site of death.

And I can’t help but pause here for a moment.

It turns out that this gardener is the risen Jesus. According to the story (and I am of course not expecting readers to believe this), this is the longed-for-through-generations Jewish Messiah, whose Life has now broken open to the whole world. And the story suggests that the first words this newly risen longed-for-through-generations Messiah says are in the form of a question to a broken-hearted weeping woman. A question that invites her to deepen only further in to her own felt experience, and to own and voice her desire.

‘Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?’

To my mind, and heart, this moment alone stands in judgement of the history of the Church’s posture towards women.

And it poses a deeper, more offensive challenge to the Church than ‘do you see this woman’, which the living Jesus often asked. It asks ‘are you able to hear what I really said? To notice what I really did? Do you even care enough to find out?’

Women

I have the joy and privilege of beginning to be in conversation with writer, psychologist and wise-owl of story and myth,

Dr Sharon Blackie

, about stories of women in the Bible, and my own lived experience of faith.

I was left with so many questions for Sharon (which I hope one day to be able to explore) after this conversation-interview, titled Eros, Elohim & other beautiful stories,⁷ where she asked me about my spiritual path, about my experience of the divine-feminine in the Jewish-Christian tradition, and about why I don’t call myself a Christian.

She modelled a lovely form of hospitality, allowing me space to stretch and roll with my answers, trusting that I would return home to the original point, letting me be ‘an artist’ in the way I communicated.

But the highlight for me was being asked why I want to encourage more women to be reading stories about other women in the Bible, whether they have faith or not. Whether those stories can have value outside of any theological framework.

I found myself talking about the Song of Songs. An erotic love poem that is found right at the heart of the Hebrew Bible.

Through this dripping-with-oil poem, the woman is continually wooed and delighted in...called forth with words of desire and affirmation...by her Beloved.

At one point the Beloved cries:

‘O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret places of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
Let me hear your voice;
For your voice is sweet,
And your face is lovely’.⁸

And it was this moment that I found myself drawing on in my response to Sharon’s question.

What if the ‘Beloved’ is, in this moment, particularly calling forth women’s voices from the clefts and cracks in which they’ve been hidden, or silenced. What if we are being told that our voices are sweet (because they are true, not because they are docile) and our faces are lovely (the faces of our souls (I can dream)...and the many faces of the Deep).

And what if a good way for us to emerge from the cracks, is to engage from the inside with the stories that are themselves hidden in the ‘clefts of the rock’. In the many cracks in the Bible.

The Bible was written by men,⁹ for men, and, for the most part, about men. Until recent decades...it was translated by men, interpreted by men and preached by men...methods of both biblical exegesis (understanding the meaning of particular passages) and hermeneutics (approaches to interpretation) were developed by men...and the theological frameworks that were drawn from Bible, and that still get imposed back on it, were constructed by men.

In many strands of the church, including some that have become popular in recent years, there is still an ancient underlying assumption... and a contemporary acceptance ...that women have less authority than men when it comes to handling and understanding this strange book... and... well... to being alive. Hence no women priests and, in many cases, no women preachers or teachers.

So why, on this aching-earth, would I be encouraging women, particularly women that are otherwise free of such religiously sanctioned misogyny, to encounter the stories within such a book?

That will take me a life-time to write about. And I intend to do it.

But, for now, my answer is simple... Jesus.

Making a Way

Jesus lived in the cracks and highlighted, affirmed and empowered the people that He found there. Particularly the women. Called forth their voices. Welcomed their desires. Healed and released them from their physical, mental, emotional, political, social and spiritual oppressions and infirmities.

When it came to those women, He provoked them to action. Compelled them to initiate and lead. And, quite simply, enjoyed being in their presence.

The resurrected Jesus trusted Himself first to a woman. To women. They were the first apostles of the risen life. They were His truest friends at His death. And His chosen collaborators and confidants at His rising. The ones He wanted to see first.¹⁰

The fact that history has, for the most part, buried that truth, and built civilisations on its remains, does not make it any less true. Or, thankfully, alive.

In my experience, there are ways in which stories from the Bible, even the horrific ones, quietly resonate at the frequency of those buried truths. It is time for more of them to be unearthed. And for those frequencies to be amplified.

And, much as I am appreciating the voices of many beautiful men talking and writing about their experiences of faith, and of the Bible (and I really am) the work of excavating those particular truths, and of the others that will follow in their wake, is being done by women. Is being sung by women.

Women can become tuning forks, resonating with, and then amplifying, some of the muted (not entirely silenced) frequencies of the Bible.¹¹ Letting their bodies and souls vibrate and their words slowly take shape. Letting poetry become the ‘architecture of [their] lives’.¹²

I am listening for the voices that don’t feel entitled to speak or take up space, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Bodies that have lived in the cracks are the ones best positioned to share the treasures that can only be found there (and that of course is not limited to women...and is mostly heard on shores that are not European or North American).

We desperately need those treasures.

This is why I want to encourage more women to read the Bible and particularly the stories about women in the Bible.

We are in need of resurrection life through every element of our social, political, economic and spiritual lives together. And it may be that the messengers of such life... the angels (however they present in the day to day)... are waiting in the dark to be noticed by... well... women.

‘Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’’

Waiting to invite us to turn and hear our name said in a way that releases the oil of gladness back through the generations in our families... on our lands... in our hearts. That brings healing. Recognition. Embrace. Power. Delight. Connection. Agency. And that then courses through the lives of the generations to come.

Returning to my own recent insight that I feel feelings not for the sake of clearing them out of the way, but, rather, for the sake of making a way, I experience the Easter morning story as a true friend.

By standing in the inherent authority of her own felt experience, Mary makes a way.

She weeps.

Dares to look in to the dark.

Notices the Bright Field.

Turns and encounters Resurrection Life.

‘But when we begin to live from within outward,
in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us,
then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense’.

Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’

1. Any of you familiar with the Enneagram will be able to spot a classic Four-type, drawing on the strengths of the One to help her feelings self-organise.

2. All the Bible quotes here are from John 20, New King James translation.

3. Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, Norton, New York, 2020

4. Lorde, p.4

5. ibid.

6. from Poetry in a Prose-Flattened World, by Walter Brueggemann

7. This conversation will only be viewable for Sharon’s founding members, who are part The Hearth. In a few weeks time we will be reading the book of Ruth together with her Temonos/Hearth group.

8. Song of Songs 2:14 - most of the imagery through the Song of Songs can be read as sexual (plenty of bosoms and clefts and cracks) but it is not limited to that.

9. (though there are small parts that we in my Hebrew Bible class have decided must have been written by women)

10. (obviously I’m exaggerating a bit (only a bit), but the story allows me to make these assumptions)

11. Men can of course become tuning forks as well..many of my favourite poets are men..but my priority is to affirm the felt experience of women here, which so often gets silenced, ridiculed or dismissed.

12. Lorde, p.5