Don't Just Do Something Sit There

“The war on women and women’s bodies is a sign of patriarchy at its worst (raw reptilian brain at work); therefore, fascism. And the marriage of fundamentalism and fascism. They are kissing cousins. They represent patriarchy unabated.

As Ralph Abraham, who is one of the founders of chaos theory, pointed out in his important book, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, in the ancient times the goddess of Chaos was honored and integrated into culture. But when patriarchy took over around 4500 BC, the myths switched and now Chaos became an enemy. Consider the myth of Murdoc killing Tiamet. Now men considered it their right and responsibility to put Control first.

This patriarchal attitude was buttressed by religion with its quest for orthodoxy and, beginning in the seventeenth century by science. But in the 1960s, when science developed chaos theory, it rediscovered chaos in nature, with its vital role in weather systems, in imperfect elliptical movement of planets and more. But notice: The key to fundamentalism is the need to control. To control the feminine; to control creativity which, as Jung observed, arises “from the realm of the mothers.” Mussolini defined his form of fascism as the “marriage of government and industry.” Henry Wallace, vice presidential candidate in 1940, talked about the danger of American fascism in this way:

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.

America was founded on the idea that citizens care about their fellow citizens, that they contribute through their government to provide resources for the benefit and fulfillment and that Democracy is more than voting. Democracy and citizenship require us to care about each other. …”

Lakoff traces this lack of empathy to the view of the Father. He considers the core teaching of fundamentalism to be the elevating of a Punitive Father God to the status of worship. Such a God is vengeful and coercive, judgmental and lacking in any appreciation of the Divine Feminine). Says Lakoff:

“In a Strict Father family, the father holds ultimate authority. Father knows best. He gets his authority from the claim to know right from wrong, and what he says is by definition always right. His word is law and needs to be swiftly enforced through strength—swift painful punishment. Even a show of disrespect deserves to be punished.”

In this paradigm, Lakoff says that people who are not prosperous are people who lack discipline—thus they are deserving of their poverty. “The poor are poor because they’re lazy and so it’s their own fault. Responsibility is individual responsibility. There is no social responsibility.” Moreover, this logic applies to all of nature, which imposes a natural moral hierarchy. It goes like this:

“God above man, man above nature (it’s here for us to plunder), the strong above the weak, the rich above the poor, employers above employees, adults above children, Western culture above nonwestern culture, America above other countries. Then the hierarchy extends naturally to men above women, whites above nonwhites, Christians above non-Christians, straights above gays…”

We are also talking about bullying—which always accompanies fascism and authoritarianism and advanced patriarchy. As a Roman Catholic, I watched fascism grow in the government of the Roman Catholic church in my life time. Catholics know a lot about fascism—consider the twentieth century history of Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, and Austria. And consider personalities such as Hitler (a Catholic who was never excommunicated) and the popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The latter gave us a coup d’eglise, as I point out in my book The Pope’s War. And the present administration is serving up a coup’detat.

Bullying is part of fascism. “Bullies go for admiration, for status, for dominance,” comments Dutch sociologist Rene Veenstra. In writing my book on Cardinal Ratzinger I was indeed driven to investigate the subject of bullying, for he was a bully both in his role as chief inquisitor and in his role as Pope. In the process, I learned that bullies are in fact cowards on the inside. To compensate, they need a pack around them to carry out their deepest needs.

Centuries ago theologian Thomas Aquinas observed that a politician must know more about the human soul than a doctor knows about the human body. Hitler knew the wounded German soul of the 1930’s very well and found ways to exploit those wounds of resentment and loss… He suggests that in previous times Americans looked up to the superhero Superman who “fought without irony for truth, justice, and the American way. And his alter ego, of course, was mild-mannered Clark Kent, a reporter no less…”

A globalism of the 1% is well underway and very advanced. People asleep; people mesmerized by Silicon Valley gadgets; people addicted to TV, sports, money-making, etc. And of course people merely struggling to survive. But for all it is time to wake up!

Now—what to do? How to do it?

First: Wake Up. Says the 15th-century mystic from India, Kabir: “You have been asleep for millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning?”

Second: Act Up.
The women’s marches were excellent examples of waking up and acting up. How many reading this attended a women’s march the day after the inauguration? Poet Rafael Jesus Gonzales put it this way in a recent public letter following on the women’s march in Berkeley.

“We must be very grateful for the women's marches in the United States, throughout the Americas, throughout the world January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States, in resistance to the fascism that menaces us all. Thank you, thank you, our sisters, for your womanhood, your power, your grace. Let us hope that your actions make patent the very essence of what must be our revolution against the patriarchy of millennia that has brought us to this juncture, a patriarchy that has wounded us all and distressed the Earth itself to the point where her very ability to bear and sustain life as we know it is at stake.

Perhaps we should be grateful to the 45th U.S. president, embodied caricature of the masculine, wounded, distorted, and perverted by a toxic patriarchy, to terrify us from our nightmare. Thank you and please, our sisters; come into your power and bring in the age of the healer, for the age of the warrior has not served us well and must come to an end. Please and thank you, brothers, for honoring women and liberating the feminine within ourselves. It is a matter of women's liberation and of men's liberation as well from a patriarchy that maims us all. We are all liberated together or none of us are. The world and the Earth depend upon it.”

A toxic masculine has indeed run and dominated the world for long enough. It has invaded the souls of (some) women as well as men. It puts the reptilian brain ahead of the mammalian, compassionate brain. We can do much better. (I've tried to lay out a map in my book on what constitutes a healthy or sacred masculine. The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors for Awakening the Sacred Masculine ends with two chapters on what a true "sacred marriage" of the Divine Feminine and Sacred Masculine would look like.)22 The march, inspired and invented and led by women, is a good start to generating a new era--one that moves beyond both fundamentalism and fascism and a dark and overly familiar patriarchy. Lots of inner and outer work awaits us, however.

The return of the Divine Feminine is our grounding, our “sustainable wisdom” (which is always feminine not only in the Bible but around the world in other traditions as well.) The Creation Spirituality tradition is full of the Divine Feminine, which can be found in Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, Black Madonna, Father Bede Griffiths, and Rachel Carson among others!

Accompanying the Divine feminine is the Via Positiva: joy, smiles and laughter and love of children and music and art and nature are part of the pleasure of life! In short, Eros is integral to the Divine Feminine! “This is wisdom, to love life,” says the Bible’s Book of Wisdom. Thus, wisdom and Eros are interchangeable concepts. We need to take Eros back from patriarchy’s efforts to 1) disavow it and 2) make money on it, turning it into pornography. Values of compassion and caring over power and aggression are alternatives to patriarchy as well. Partnership, not powership. Power with, not power over. Dancing Sara’s circle, not climbing Jacob’s ladder.

A feminist view of the world is about a love of the whole! The entire Cosmos. Consider the work of Rachel Carson who is often credited with launching the ecological consciousness with her book Silent Spring, published in 1962. Feminism and the large view of interdependence, the web of life (Hildegard’s terminology)—this was Carson’s principle contribution to awakening our consciousness. Consider the latest teaching from cosmology that barely made the news due to the inflamed noise around Donald Trump during the campaign—we are part of a universe of two trillion galaxies. Think of that — two trillion galaxies to love! The sacred temples of our bodies, our earth, our universe are all part of two trillion galaxies! We could use a good dose of news about the universe to counterbalance the narcissism that reigns in our public discourse.

Thomas Berry puts it this way: “The small self of the individual reaches its completion in the Great Self of the universe”… but our religions and cultural institutions are not there yet. Cosmology is a medicine for our narcissism as a species, our anthropocentrism that shows through so much of our economics, politics, media, education and religion still. It is a link to our first chakras—which need feeding and need to ground us. But we have our work cut out for us, as Berry warns: “To move from this abiding spatial context of personal identity to a sense of identity with an emergent universe is a transition that has, even now, not been accomplished in any comprehensive manner by any of the world’s spiritual traditions.”

The Woman’s March was created by women and led by women. Let women lead and feminist consciousness lead! In both women and men. The Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine. Let us live out our common vocation to live on the edge (sur la marge) twixt Mysticism (love of life and contemplation and silence) and Prophecy (urgency to stand up and Say No) in so many ways. A revolution is afoot. Join it in any ways you can. Dance on the edge! Prepare yourself! Study! Consider the timeliness of the new University called the Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality (FICS) being started up this year in Boulder, Colorado where that tradition can be studied in depth. Deepen! Practice (Thich Naht Hanh—“don’t just do something—sit there”)!

The “Indivisible” movement is also instructing people in the power of waking up and acting up together, for example by attending legislative gatherings and making their voices heard… It is a time for the fifth chakra, the prophetic voice that our throats represent, to make noise. All prophets make noise. But to do it creatively and non-violently is important. And not just showing up at legislators’ events but at their offices and by getting on line and by writing letters to newspapers and radio and television stations and their sponsors and by calling in to radio talk shows and more…

It seems the Via Transformativa, the struggle for Justice and Caring and Compassion, is alive and well. The battle has been joined. Let no one sit on the sidelines. If one believes in democracy or justice or compassion it is time for all hands on deck. If, as David Orr puts it, “hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up,” then hope will be proportionate to the work and passion we put into bringing democracy back again. Standing up and speaking out is key; pressuring our representatives and signing on to become a representative oneself is key. Citizenship means action from a deep place, not just a place of action/reaction.

This is what prophets and mystics do. They say No in order to pave the way for the good news of their Yes.”

~ Mathew Fox, Reading the Signs of Our Times