The Great Dark
The Storyteller continues:
At the unique, singular moment of "beginning," before time and space unfurled, before the caravan set out on its journey, no individual being had stepped forward from the heart of the Holy One.
Everything was what we might call "chaos" today, but that chaos was really like the germ of a seed of a plant, waiting for the right moment to push through its shell into the light.
The Great Dark was also there. We call it that because we can't see or illuminate anything about it. It is so dense that no light escapes it--no intelligence. The old stories say that the Great Dark wasn't alone. It hovered over the face of an even Greater Deep, a bottomless well of existence in which everything that
could be waited its turn for its dance of birth.
In some old stories we have heard, the Great Dark herself dances on the surface of the primordial Waters of Flow (another name for the Greater Deep, perhaps.). Yes, we can probably attribute some of this talk about "depths" and "water" to the fear our ancestors had of being washed away by floods. Some of us, of course, are not immune to the same fear, as we notice how the poles seem to be melting from global warming. Or as we find out how often large objects from space have struck the planet, causing tidle waves and other devastation. We are none of us as secure as we think.
As you may have guessed, in some old stories, the Great Dark is another name for various faces of the ancient Middle Eastern Great Goddess. There are many stories about her, but sometimes, as here, her name was changed from a being to a concept to disguise her. In some stories, she is the womb of everything living. (We can still see this in the second story in Genesis, where Eve is called the "Mother of All Living.")
In other stories, she is a wild, violent being who becomes limited by the boundaries of a more tame civilization. Some of this may be an attempt by our ancestors to explain the mystery of how we moved from being nomads-living in the moment with nature, with all of the inevitable suffering and unexpected death that this entailed-to being farmers and herders, which made human existence a bit more secure.
Most of us today probably couldn't exist as nomads, so who are we to judge? In many of the old stories, the Great Dark-Goddess is conquered by a Hero who represents civilization. We can see some problems with splitting things up this way today. The suppression of what seems "dark" and "wild" in our world has not worked. It just comes back in new ways, and when suppressed, these ways are usually violent. As we will see, the stories our ancestors told also tried to explain why human beings do things like this to each other.
In still other stories, the two principles-male and female, the wild and the tamed-live together in harmony and partnership for many years. If we take this creation story alongside the one told about Holy Wisdom, which was first told about the same time (and which I'll tell you later), then perhaps we have some evidence, or at least a memory, of that partnership here.
The stories I'm telling you seem to come from a time when our early fathers and mothers were making sense for themselves of the important things in life. How did we get here? How do we live with each other? How do we live with nature and with those who seem different from us? Why are we here?
Water and Breath
(John 3:5 from the Aramaic Peshitta version)
By the sacred earth of
the Holy One on which we stand,
by the ground of faith and confidence
I have that God includes everything,
let me tell you this:
Unless you are reborn
from the primordial flow and breath,
the depth and connection,
the feeling and communion,
the sacred forces through which
the Holy One created the cosmos,
you will not be able to enter
the realm of creative power in which,
at the first beginning,
Alaha said "I CAN!"
through everything that could-
and would--come forth.
Wilderness
(from a sermon by Meister Eckhart, 14th century Germany )
When Jesus was 12,
his parents lost him in Jerusalem.
Finally they found him by
going back to where they started-the temple.
So if you want to experience this noble birth,
you have to go back to the starting place,
the core out of which you came.
The crowds where Mary and Joseph looked
but couldn't find him are like
your soul's activities: memory, understanding,
will, imagination, sense perception.
Believe me-it's not there!
The divine birth must come
flooding up within you from
what is already God within.
Your own efforts must be on hold,
the soul and its helpers
at God's service.
You cannot do better than to
go into the darkness within,
the un-knowing and unknown,
which is nothing more than
the potential for and origin of
sensing itself, through which
you become complete.
Pursue this potentiality
until you are alone in the
darkness of un-selfconsciousness.
Track every clue there,
never retracing your steps.
The real Word of eternity
resounds only in the solitude
of one who has become a wilderness,
desolated and removed from
all thought of "self" and "other."
The Darkness
Genesis 1:2b: wa choshekh 'al-penei tehom
"…and darkness was upon the face of the deep."(KJV)
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wa choshekh
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The Great Darkness
is already right here:
everything we can't know or control,
everything too compressed to expand,
too closed to be open,
too mysterious to penetrate
with any understanding--
just like heat and cold
battling for control:
one trying to expand,
the other to contract.
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'al-penei
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Like the play of emotions
flashing across our faces
at a time of surprise or shock,
it is existing
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Tehom
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on the surface of a larger
TOHU, a deeper chaos that
is inside the seed of the seed
of the seed of existence.
There is so much space,
so much flow there
that the Great Dark itself
only dances on its waves.
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Meditation
Within each of us is a part of our selves that is waiting to rediscover that it is part of the divine whole, connected to all. Like the creation of the universe, things develop. Not everything happens at once, and so we often call this part of our being subconscious or unconscious.
Begin this body prayer by breathing in the heart, feeling all of the love and compassion you can manage at this moment. With this feeling, breathe in and out the sound of the word cHO-SHEKH (there is a slight breath on the first "h" sound, like the 'ch' in the word loch) and direct both breathing and feeling towards the parts of your self that feel most dense and compressed. Meet each place of restriction or darkness with as much compassion as you can at this moment, not expecting change, or even understanding. If you cannot bring compassion, then bring respect; if not respect, then simply bring presence.
To complete this meditation for now, affirm that this too is part of your own creation story, a work in progress.
