The Glory of Wombful Mercy
For this time of Lent, we are inviting our ICN community to embrace a time of grief and glory. Each week, we are offering reflections and practices on grief, glory, and their integration, as a way of evolving our participation in this season.
We’ll focus on one word and one beatitude as pathways of mystical practice. We encourage you to hold and engage with them throughout the week ahead.
We hold in the divine womb our personal struggles and fears alongside our dreams and unique soul calling. We hold our collective pain and loss alongside our communal nurturing and creativity. And we hold our global crises and suffering alongside our deep courage and ultimate faith. We invite you into this collective womb space/time of painful lament and generative possibility.
May we walk with grace together in this season of grief and glory, through the Mystery and portal of death and resurrection.
Image by Christy Thrasher
An Integral Lent
One of our intentions in this season of invitation is to explore what it might look like to evolve our understanding and practice of the Christian time of “Lent.”
Different church traditions across Christianity hold and practice this season to varying degrees and in somewhat different ways. Several do not follow the “church calendar” much at all, aside from Easter and Christmas.
You may have a rich and complex personal history with Lent or none at all. Whatever your background with this season, we hope you may find an invitation and opening to deeper growth and transformation through this exploration.
The root meaning of the word “lent” is simply “springtime.” It may also have some relation to the lengthening of days, which turns especially beyond the halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox, typically near February 1st. Christianity integrated many of these pagan and pre-modern rhythms and celebrations rooted in nature, and in the Celtic form this day is known as Imbolc. Of course, these particulars of the season are all relative to the northern hemisphere alone, so in our global community, we can embrace the holding together of opposite movements and meanings. This is also the fall season and the shortening of days for half of the world.
In earlier Christianity rooted in Greek and Latin, the term for this season simply denoted the length: 40 days.
Image by Paul Fryer
In an integral way, we can participate in different forms of time. From the modern age, we are most familiar with participating in linear clock time. Though we’ve perhaps all had experiences where time seems to stretch and slow down or perhaps speed up and flow quickly. We may have had experiences beyond time, where we are taken out of our egoic experience of past/present/future orientation.
We can move through eternal time, through timelessness, through linear time, through sacred time, and through cyclical/seasonal time—embracing and integrating them all together, not bound to or exalting any one form of time, while also not needing to reject any either. This is moving in time-freedom, as Jean Gebser describes of integral consciousness.
Lent is an invitation into seasonal or cyclical time, a rhythm that comes each year. If we practice this in a deficient way, we are bound to the repetition in a limited sense that keeps us trapped. It may deepen somewhat, but we are always stuck in returning again to its repetitive patterns.
What would it look like to integrate other forms of time as we spiral into this deepening cycle of lent in an evolving way?
In other languages, the word itself used for this season means “fasting.” This is one form of participation, but is certainly a limited engagement in the richness that this time can bring us into.
Traditionally, Lent has also been focused as a period of grief. In an evolving sense, we can enter into grief while also owning and embracing the glory now accessible and present in our divine participation. In the Eastern Orthodox, the time is referred to as a season of “bright sadness.”
So we also hold these two in integration, as we’ll explore more next week.
Long-standing religious and spiritual practices create a groove in reality that flows with energy infused by patterns and cycles of traditions engaged with heart and meaning for so long. We can move with this groove while also not getting stuck in the rut of traditionalism.
We can participate and co-create evolving forms and ways of moving through the Lenten invitation. If we feel drawn, we can embrace the possibility of receiving these 40 days in a greater way.
Mercy
Our word and primary invitation for this week is mercy.
I invite you to pause and speak the word aloud several times. As you hear it spoken with your own voice, where does it land in your body? Where do you feel the word mercy touch you within?
Remain in that felt sense.
Let it deepen into your body, not thinking about it, but first receiving it in your heart, your spiritual womb, your feet, or any other part of you where you sense it touching.
Open to the energy it is bringing awareness to in you.
Stay with your inner process as long as you need.
Blessing Our Wombful Glory
For many of us, “Mercy” is a word loaded with layers of meaning and associations. Particularly, we may feel some dissonance in us as it relates to power. In Christianity, the word has often been associated with God foregoing punishment or harm (which betrays an understanding of the initial posture of God that is antiquated and highly problematic). We may feel it in the way of a release or forbearance shown to an offender or those who are weak and dejected. In its Latin roots, the word is associated with a transactional “price paid” for another with compassion.
In Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken, and in Hebrew, the word for mercy, “rechem,” is the same word used for womb.
What does it feel like if we hold mercy from our womb space?
What if mercy is less transaction and more a deep state of being held in common?
How does it feel if we are met in our grief with a deep, inner-abiding divine mercy of compassion, comfort, and embrace?
Image by Dalmo Mendonça
As we move with glory, we may also have some baggage of associations with this word. We may think of being honored because of achievements or accomplishments. We may feel dissonance with “glorifying God” and giving praise to “his” majesty as we would to a king or great figure (which is also rooted in antiquated and problematic in its own way).
Another way of moving with this word is as “luminosity.” It invokes delight as we encounter something glorious and magnificent. We can also feel into our glorious participation—not as a separate and distant admiration. “The glory of God is humanity fully alive.” We are invited into the interflow of glory as we are illuminated with the divine in our embodied being, here and now.
Mercy, in a wombful sense, is a glorious way of meeting grief.
A wombful mercy springs forth not from power over—but arises from the depths of sacred Origin. The ever-present beginning-ing that is always happening.
A wombful mercy embraces our grief and holds it in the compassion of deep empathy—with us in the midst of it, from inside the womb. It remains and releases in response to what is embodied here and now. It is able to hold and let go, responsive with the blessedly ripe and right time.
A wombful mercy evokes a more feminine way of meeting pain and dejection, less concerned with fixing or trying to absolve, it stays with us as long as we need in great care.
A wombful mercy is creative and illuminative. It gives birth to new life and wonderous conceptions.
A wombful mercy is communal, helping give birth to a new sense of ourselves. It lets go of “shoulds” for ourselves and others, freeing us into the fullness of our unique, authentic being in divine creativity—held together in communion.
How might you welcome and embody wombful mercy today and this week?
Blessed are the Wombful
Throughout this season, we will use his teachings, often referred to as “The Beatitudes,” as pathways to help us walk with grief and glory. We offer various translations, many of which are illuminating the rich textures of meaning that are contained in the original Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken originally.
We invite you to receive these various translations as a meditative practice. Let your whole body receive them, slowly, absorbing them deeply. This might include thoughts about the words or phrases heard in a new way, but as those come, integrate them in your whole being, into the deeper spaces of your soul and embodied receiving.
This practice can also be done with a partner, reading aloud to each other. One person can read all of them, pausing between each for at least 30 seconds, and then the other does the same. Or you can each say the phrase aloud to one another, pausing to receive before going on to the next.
A Practice of Blessing
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
(King James)
Happy are those moved to help someone in need; they will experience and be shown the comfort they give.
(Greek literal)
Blessedly ripe are those who radiated from a new self within; they shall be shown a waking vision: the womb of the One surrounding them with compassion.
Blessed are those who, from their inner wombs, birth mercy; they shall feel its warm arms embrace them.
Aligned with the One are the compassionate; upon them shall be compassion.
Healed are those who extend a long heartfelt breath wherever needed; they shall feel the heat of cosmic ardor.
Tuned to the Source are those who shine from the deepest place in their bodies. Upon them shall be the rays of universal love.
(Aramaic)
Greek literal translations by Dave Brisbin
Aramaic translations by Neil Douglas-Klotz
We invite you into your own deep process with this season, engaging in reflection and practice with these themes and experiences.
Questions for Reflection
Where do you feel the call to mercy in your life now? If you tune into your awareness through the space of your spiritual womb, how does “mercy” feel?
What did you experience in the practice of blessing? What word or phrase found a home in your body? Where and howso?
What has been your picture of “glory”? How might you be invited to expand and integrate your understanding and embodying of glory?