There is no Resurrection Without the Feminine.

Turning tombs into wombs.

I feel in need of resurrection.

But I realise that the word is problematic for me.

You see,

I was sold a story once, a long time ago.

Actually, it wasn’t just once.

It was over and over again.

That there was only one resurrection.

His.

You know the one I mean.

The one featured in garish childhood images of a hippy looking man and an empty tomb.

‘ I am the resurrection the truth and the life,’ he is purported to have said.

No-body really explained that to me.

They just said that I had to believe.

Believe that he died.

That he went down to hell and conquered Death and Satan

So that I may have life.

The ultimate hero’s journey.

That tale that has some poor guy leaving home,

Collecting allies around him and facing all sorts of trials together.

Until he has to go alone into the cave

Battle the Dragon

And return victorious with the spoils, bringing the treasure back to share.

The treasure was the gift of eternal life I was told.

Death has no sting.

I have no need to face the cave or the dark.

I can live in the light.

Always.

As a child I wondered about that. If he had conquered death, then why did that pigeon I found in my garden die?

Why did my Grandma die?

‘Oh that’s just their bodies!’ I was told.

We get a new body in the next life.

One that we get to keep forever.

But we can experience eternal life now

I believed them.

But then I got sick

and my mind encountered darkness.

Some new people came into my life, who said they were were allies of the hero, told me that it was because I hadn’t met the real hero.

Or if I had, I had forgotten to believe.

So I believed again.

And it was true

For a while there was light and joy.

But then I got sick

again

and I was in darkness

again.

They told me that the darkness was sin.

The darkness was because I didn’t have enough faith.

That the sickness was punishment for not holding onto the light.

They kept saying “It is finished!”

That the work was done.

That his resurrection was all I needed.

But then.

In the midst of the darkness

I met someone who filled my life with love.

Kindness

Compassion

Fun

Sexual passion

Fidelity.

Those allies (by now I was I beginning to wonder if they had really travelled very far with him) told me it was wrong.

That this had all the hallmarks of death.

That to entertain such love was dallying with damnation.

But I remembered some words from another old story

“Love is stronger than death.”

So, taking the hand of my beloved, I escaped from their so- called Kingdom and ran to a steep sided valley, where trees grew tall and offered shade.

Each year I watched as green spread across the valley and buds burst into vibrant leaves, full of life.

Grasses waved to the sun and flowers and blossom were extravagant in their colour and perfume.

Blossom gave way to ripe fruits, dripping with juice, succulent and sweet to the taste.

Then the days got shorter. The sun struggled to stay for long in the valley.

Green turned to glorious gold and copper.

But as the sun faded. So did the colour.

The trees stood stark against the hillside,

Skeleton like. Stripped of all their showy beauty

Sometimes I feel like that.

In fact, I do right now.

Stripped of all that brought such colour and ripeness to my life.

When I lost the last of my horses,

Something in me died with them.

When my body became so sick I could no longer work as a therapist,

The juicy fruit that I could offer to others dropped to the earth and rotted.

When pain stopped me being able to spend hours creating

I found myself in a cave.

In darkness.

Longing for resurrection.

“There is no resurrection without the feminine.”

The words dropped into my heart one day.

They wouldn’t leave me alone.

‘What do you mean?’

I didn’t know who I was asking. It didn’t seem important anymore.

Slowly stories came to my notice. Attis and Cybele, Osiris and Isis, Tammuz and Ishtar.

All died and were brought back to life because of the actions of a woman.

I thought of the other one.

Yes, him.

The one who those so-called allies said faced death alone.

According to them, he surrounded himself with men and as he approached his final showdown, was left alone.

Except he didn’t.

And he wasn’t.

There were women too.

And the women stayed.

They didn’t look away during the agonising hours of his dying. They were there as he took his last breath, and they helped lay him hastily in the tomb before their Sabbath began.

The first one to be there after the Sabbath was one of those woman.

‘There is no resurrection without the feminine’

The words are whispered again.

In my minds eye I see that garish childhood painting. What catches my attention is not the hippy in his long white dress but the stone.

The large boulder that has been rolled away from the mouth of a cave.

That’s where he went.

Into the cave.

Into the dark.

Into the Mother.

A tomb.

Another voice enters the story.

‘What if this darkness isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?’

The voice of Valarie Kaur, Sikh peace activist speaking on New Year’s eve at the end of 2016.

I think of all those times I was in darkness and was told I needed to get out of it.

Get out of the tomb of unbelief.

Get into the light.

But what if they weren’t tombs but wombs.

And all I did by fighting my way out or letting them drag me out was induce premature labours.

Cause still births.

Dreams that died.

Possibilities killed off.

And now?

I admit, there is a part of me, the part that has been indoctrinated to think like those allies,

who still hankers after a hero’s journey.

After all, we are told to be successful in life, you have to be big.

Be public.

Have lots of followers.

But my life isn’t like that.

It has become smaller.

Stripped back.

I keep looking for the big resurrection.

THE one that will fix it all.

But then I miss the small ones.

Like the one I experienced this morning.

I can’t walk as far or as fast as I used to.

So I sat down on the grass by a lake whilst my dogs played. As I sat, a wren in a small willow tree began to sing her morning prayers and I felt sheer joy as she flew down to a low branch,

cocked her tiny head on one side and invited me to join her.

Later, as I continued my amble, I noticed a sycamore tree had dropped her seeds. Despite the beauty of their golden shapes, my heart felt sad for her loss.

‘Do you grieve?’ I wondered as I stroked her bark.

Gathering the seeds, I went into a clearing in a copse of trees. A clearing where friends and I had spent the solstice, honouring the earth.

Gently, I lay the seeds in a circle on the ground, placing a piece of charred wood left over from somebody’s fire, some oak leaves and a leaf from the sycamore tree in the centre.

Waiting.

Watching.

I sat in the clearing.

A shaded space.

A womb like space.

And I thought of the ancient forest that had once covered that land,

A forest cut down to make the charcoal that had fuelled furnaces for the iron works.

I said the name of the forest.

‘Shirlett.’

Was it my imagination, or did the trees surrounding me lean closer, repeating the name.

‘Shirlett.’

Perhaps it was just the breeze in the leaves of the Birches.

It didn’t matter. In that moment, I remembered the Oaks of the forest.

I stood witness to Sycamore’s loss.

Walking out of the copse, I felt it.

The resurrection.

I felt more alive.

Last week in Europe we suffered devastating heat waves.

Some say our planet is dying.

At the weekend I subjected to trolling and abuse on a community page on facebook.

Cruelty seems to be on the rise.

Injustice is the norm.

It feels like civilisation is falling.

We humans continue to want big showy resurrections.

We want the hero’s story.

But what if the answer is to go small.

To be faithful.

To witness.

To trust Earth.

To wait in the darkness with the Mother?

To trust that new life can come out of all the loss.

That this present darkness,

Yours

Mine

all of it

Is not the darkness of the tomb

but the darkness of the womb?

Can we be like the women who didn’t look away but remained as the earth went dark, and who were there as dawn crept into the garden, met by a gardener who called them by name?

Don’t be fooled by those who would say that his was the only resurrection.

They made it all about him.

Told us it was all about the light.

But that’s not what he said.

He said that we should be like a grain of wheat and go into the earth if we want to live.

Not just once.

But over

and over again.

Can we let the earth teach us that there is the potential for new life in every death. Can we be willing to surrender to the dark.

Allow it to become a womb

because….

There is no resurrection without the feminine.