...I promise...
<3 to anyone reading this...
K
Friday, July 6, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Titles of the Virgin Mary
I've been looking for a list of these...this one has 333...there have to be lots more, though. This one leaves off Our Lady of Space, a 1960s-vintage appellation...still, some of these are so interesting: "Star that Bore the Sea"..."Light Cloud of Heavenly Rain"...
"Unwatered Vineyard of Immortality's Wine" is a little klunky, though...
my mom (raised by lapsed Catholics, lapsed even further, and now back, sort of, in the fold--on her own terms, of course) is coming to see the new Temple of Doom for the first time and Goddess knows what she will make of the multitude of Marys on the walls (probably approve)...the aggregation of angels (ditto)... the gaggle of gurus (probably not say anything)...the handful of weird Hindu images, including a repro of Sarada Devi's devotional image of Kali...then again, my mom, ever eclectic, ever marching to her own fife and drum corps, gave me the image of Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati that's nailed up by the door...
it was my mom's girlhood bible, well-hid in her grown-up closet, that beckoned me to the spiritual world when I was a kid, and though my parents' fears of my becoming a "religious fanatic" have long since and in strange fashion come true, I'm also happier with me, with my mom, and with the memory of my father than I've ever been...and Mom can see it, or maybe after 43 years she's just given up on making me into a dittohead (she's actually been more and more, er, laissez-faire since my dad died years ago)... which increases harmony and mental health, as does my post- Al-Anon decision to cease and desist fretting about the error of her or anyone else's ways...for their ways might work far better for them than mine would...or might be their Higher Power's means of drawing them nearer...
Jane Flax or Patricia J. Williams or somebody once said that "the complexity of the world is a fact of great analytical importance," and it's also one that Kali seems determined to impress upon me, by immersing me in complex experiences with complex women in Her complex unfolding and giving me just enough smarts for my head to ache at how-- complex-- it All is... and I know that I honor Her complexity in part by living and letting live, by being who I am and not getting bent out of shape when others, lo and behold, want to be who they are...hard as it is, it's so much better than what I knew before... if Mary can have hundreds of titles, then Her children can have several, at least, too...and it's OK...like mother, like child...
"Unwatered Vineyard of Immortality's Wine" is a little klunky, though...
my mom (raised by lapsed Catholics, lapsed even further, and now back, sort of, in the fold--on her own terms, of course) is coming to see the new Temple of Doom for the first time and Goddess knows what she will make of the multitude of Marys on the walls (probably approve)...the aggregation of angels (ditto)... the gaggle of gurus (probably not say anything)...the handful of weird Hindu images, including a repro of Sarada Devi's devotional image of Kali...then again, my mom, ever eclectic, ever marching to her own fife and drum corps, gave me the image of Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati that's nailed up by the door...
it was my mom's girlhood bible, well-hid in her grown-up closet, that beckoned me to the spiritual world when I was a kid, and though my parents' fears of my becoming a "religious fanatic" have long since and in strange fashion come true, I'm also happier with me, with my mom, and with the memory of my father than I've ever been...and Mom can see it, or maybe after 43 years she's just given up on making me into a dittohead (she's actually been more and more, er, laissez-faire since my dad died years ago)... which increases harmony and mental health, as does my post- Al-Anon decision to cease and desist fretting about the error of her or anyone else's ways...for their ways might work far better for them than mine would...or might be their Higher Power's means of drawing them nearer...
Jane Flax or Patricia J. Williams or somebody once said that "the complexity of the world is a fact of great analytical importance," and it's also one that Kali seems determined to impress upon me, by immersing me in complex experiences with complex women in Her complex unfolding and giving me just enough smarts for my head to ache at how-- complex-- it All is... and I know that I honor Her complexity in part by living and letting live, by being who I am and not getting bent out of shape when others, lo and behold, want to be who they are...hard as it is, it's so much better than what I knew before... if Mary can have hundreds of titles, then Her children can have several, at least, too...and it's OK...like mother, like child...
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Guru of Cusswords
I can't believe I haven't posted this...I've intended to since...late 2005!!!!!!!!! And maybe I did...I don't think so...
my brain these days, these Cupid spring melting into Bacchanalian summer days, is a Commodore 64 trying to run Office 2007... not to compare the Divine Mother to Bill Gates, mind you...
anyhow-- this comes from Christopher Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple, an excellent memoir about a doubting Westerner drawn into Eastern spirituality...Isherwood is especially good on why Hinduism appealed to him as an intellectual who was constitutionally averse to religion... I posted on that a little...
but the following was probably my favorite thing in the whole book: an anecdote about Ramakrishna and one of his followers, Girish Ghosh, an artistic genius and dissipated sensualist that many of Ramakrishna's more "religious" associates strongly disapproved of:
Ramakrishna danced with winos in the street because their staggering reminded him of his own intoxication with God; he (again, to the horror of the "religious") bowed down to prostitutes who, in his sight, were Kali Herself. Though Girish was notorious for his drinkin' and whorin', Ramakrishna never asked him to abstain, never reproved him or quoted scripture at him or warned him of dire reincarnations. It isn't that the saint didn't care for the fate of the sinner's soul, it was just that, for him, the world was so thoroughly permeated with Kali--so thoroughly was Kali--that in his eyes the sinner was a saint already...in his mouth, the foulest words could be a whisper of grace, saying to the sinner: they're not curses, just words...you're not evil, just asleep...
my brain these days, these Cupid spring melting into Bacchanalian summer days, is a Commodore 64 trying to run Office 2007... not to compare the Divine Mother to Bill Gates, mind you...
anyhow-- this comes from Christopher Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple, an excellent memoir about a doubting Westerner drawn into Eastern spirituality...Isherwood is especially good on why Hinduism appealed to him as an intellectual who was constitutionally averse to religion... I posted on that a little...
but the following was probably my favorite thing in the whole book: an anecdote about Ramakrishna and one of his followers, Girish Ghosh, an artistic genius and dissipated sensualist that many of Ramakrishna's more "religious" associates strongly disapproved of:
Swami talked about Ramakrishna and Girish Ghosh. They once had a competition to find out which of them knew the bigger number of risqué words. (It was amusing to hear this corny French adjective pop up out of Swami's vocabulary.) After they had both said all the risqué words they knew, Girish bowed down and told Ramakrishna, "You are my guru in this also."
Ramakrishna danced with winos in the street because their staggering reminded him of his own intoxication with God; he (again, to the horror of the "religious") bowed down to prostitutes who, in his sight, were Kali Herself. Though Girish was notorious for his drinkin' and whorin', Ramakrishna never asked him to abstain, never reproved him or quoted scripture at him or warned him of dire reincarnations. It isn't that the saint didn't care for the fate of the sinner's soul, it was just that, for him, the world was so thoroughly permeated with Kali--so thoroughly was Kali--that in his eyes the sinner was a saint already...in his mouth, the foulest words could be a whisper of grace, saying to the sinner: they're not curses, just words...you're not evil, just asleep...
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Nephthys, on a gigantic sarcophagus in the Louvre. Isis is on the other end. I stood in front of Isis for a long time, praying to Her (at least it wasn't out loud)...as people milled around, I wondered how weird I looked and then it hit me: Isis worshipers probably come here all the time! I mean, Paris being rife with Memphis-Misraim types and all...
Sekhmet (Louvre). She has a powerful pull on people to this day...Robert Masters (of Masters and Johnson fame) seems to be a devotee...
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