The thirty-something Cherokee woman asked me, sitting across the table at the mission.
“It feels like everything on the reservation is falling apart and the world is, too,” she said.
To her, there were two worlds. The one “out there,” which was more desirable than the one “in here.” Until now, that is. The lifelong destination of her dreams, the world I had come from, the one that held the strange mixture of oppression and opportunity, didn’t seem much better than hers. The boundaries had become blurred and she didn’t know what to make of it. She was in need of a Holy Woman or a Beloved Woman, to interpret the signs. Aren’t we all?
We long for this Wise Woman, the one who turns the end of the world into a new beginning. But where has she gone? We read about her in the Bible, we hear about her healing, her songs, prophetic insights and stabilizing force in tribal stories, but can she still be found? This question is what brought me to the Qualla Boundary of the Cherokee Nation and it’s a question that has haunted me most of my life. Where is the woman “out there” who feels like the one I have “in here,” inside of me? I began my journey with the ones with whom I share ancestry, the Cherokee.
Sally (her real name is undisclosed) was one of the few women who agreed to be interviewed. Their resistance was understandable. Exploited by society’s hunger for the exotic and rare, they were clinging to what little threads of identity remained past the thin veil of the Hollywood generated images that brought in tourism dollars. It was all they had left, and it was a thing to be protected.
Apparently, my application for interviews was still on hold at tribal council. But Sally agreed to speak to me because I was a minister, she was hoping to be one herself. She heard I was on the hunt for the memory of the Holy Woman, in Bible and in native cultures. To me, the Holy Woman had become almost extinct, but I had read stories about this type of woman, call her an archetype if you will, in Bible and in native history. I hoped to discover remnants of her to bring her influence to my own faith, to shed light on how these women might have functioned in the tribal cultures whose stories haunt the unexplored territories of the Bible. If we could get a glimpse of her, maybe we could believe that she actually exists, maybe we could say with more confidence, “here we are.”
Holy Women or in Cherokee, “Beloved Women,” were the property owners, not the owned, women warriors, prophets, owners of crops and lands, negotiators, judges, matriarchs. I was given this definition of a Beloved Woman when I asked the tribal historian for his understanding of her role in Cherokee culture:
“The Beloved Woman is an important community figure among the Cherokee people. The wise woman bestowed this role acts as a one-woman legal counsel and judicial authority over all members of her tribe. Her word is law and all people must abide.”
It would be a miracle if this woman survived.
When the early American settlers came, the men were shocked that they were forced to negotiate with Cherokee women for goods and food. It didn’t fit into their scheme of how the world worked. If a society wasn’t patriarchal, to them, it just wasn’t civilized. It hadn’t been that long ago, relatively speaking, a few generations back. I wanted to know if anyone remembered, or if anyone was still carrying on this tradition.
I began with the question, does the “Beloved Woman” still exist or has she become a force of the past? Her feminine powers brought into submission through patriarchy, as in many dominant strains of my own Christian tradition? I knew that at one time, the Cherokee tradition had revered these women as tribal leaders, judges, warriors, property owners, prophets and healers. But did she still live, if only in ancient memory?
We sat across the table in the fellowship hall of a quaint, stone church in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountain range. The mission, constructed in the 1950’s, was what remained of the Methodist efforts to bring Jesus to the Cherokee, an effort begun out of the early 1800’s missionary zeal of the circuit riding preachers. I guess the Methodists were not aware, in the beginning, that Jesus had already appeared to the Cherokee almost two thousand years prior. But even Jesus, the one in the Cherokee legend who was known as “the great healer that walked the earth,” and the Methodists, as powerful as they were at the time, couldn’t stop the Great Removal. All that was left of the mighty nation that once roamed the entire southern region freely was a stamp of land known as the Qualla Boundary and an identity that lived somewhere beyond the pages of history books; somewhere beyond the layers of intergenerational trauma, in the river, in the land, in the wind, in the lost women who were once “beloved.”
Sally told me that she had longed to take a spiritual journey but she felt trapped. I encountered a similar sentiment in each of the woman who agreed to speak to me. A deep, unmet spiritual yearning that seemed to run parallel to the beautiful, winding river flowing through the mountains, constant and determined. It was something that each of them felt intensely and yet also felt sealed off from, as if they were not allowed access to the beauty of their own souls. It was as if this spiritual desire that ran through them belonged to someone else from another time. As if their very identities were the property of an elusive power they couldn’t even name.
Though these women were connected to one of the richest spiritual traditions on the continent, Cherokee spirituality, they somehow struggled to make the connection at the soul level. Sally felt bound by many things, her husband’s illness, her mother’s recent death and her many children who had taken what she called “bad roads,” succumbing to the rampant drug and alcohol epidemic that plagued reservation life. But more than that, there was a kind of binding of her spirit that she struggled to give language to, to her, it was only a distinct feeling she could name as “the end of the world.” The blurring of the boundaries between the “outside world” and the “inside world.” I told her that when it feels that way, when it feels like something important is crumbling, then something more valuable than money, property or power is usually wanting to be born. Something old, a hidden treasure, wanting to be discovered.
Like the woman in Revelation 12, the woman at the end of the world, clothed with the sun, golden, full of light. She had to endure the epitome of suffering in order to give birth to something new. All the while fighting off a dragon. I wanted to tell Sally that she was that woman, that we all are, at one point or another in our lives as we embrace the terrifying freedom of the birth of our very own souls in the world.
But the Holy Woman would have understood these things, she would have interpreted them for the women of the tribe with her songs, stories, healing and her prophetic insights. The Beloved Woman would have made the end of the world feel normal.
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When I asked her about the tradition of Beloved Women in her culture, she said she didn’t really know of any. She grew up in a time in which it was dangerous to be native. She had always felt disconnected from Cherokee culture and though her grandmother spoke the language, she only spoke it among trusted friends. To be Cherokee was to remain hidden, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to keep your true identity a secret.
I wonder if the bones of the Holy Woman are buried in the spiritual longings of these women. Longing to connect with the grandmothers who spoke their language freely.
I wonder if the Beloved Woman is walking alongside the “great healer who walked the land,” two thousand years ago, gathering her medicine in the mountains, fighting off the dragons, clothed with the sun. Singing her songs as the boundary between the end and the beginning fades. Giving birth to something old.
Maybe she is still alive in us all.
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We all begin in the dark. A tiny seed of life potential sewn into the body of a mother in total darkness. Somehow, remaining in this utter darkness for a period of time is a very important element in becoming what we are created to be.
Jesus compares the children of God to a good seed planted into mother earth. (Matt 13:24-43) In our spiritual journey, we are like a seed with great potential, planted underground. If we are to become who we are created to be, that image of ourselves that God has imprinted upon our very souls, at some point along the way, we have to learn how to see our way forward in the dark.
Just like a tiny seed bursting into life underground, growing roots in the deeper darkness as it shoots its tender, life bearing limbs towards the light of the surface, we also must risk becoming in some very dark, uncomfortable, maybe even claustrophobic spaces. In the darkness, we learn to depend on something we cannot see with our physical eyes, Spirit. Spirit becomes the light we move towards, what we yearn for, need and require in order to grow. In this darkness we develop our spiritual intuition.
We all experience times in our lives when there seems to be no guiding light whatsoever. Times of seemingly unbearable pain, grief, sadness, loss, disappointment, disaster, times when we feel trapped by life’s circumstances. We may feel overwhelmed and think that there are no answers or solutions. St. John of the Cross called this period of spiritual trials, the “dark night of the soul.” It is the time between a major life disruption, a time of darkness, and the place where we have not yet reached a spiritual stabilization or awakening. It can last weeks, months or years. He wrote volumes of poetry about his own “dark night” experience while imprisoned for his radical religious beliefs in a cell with hardly any light. During this time, he learned to see light in the darkness and it liberated him from his suffering. It was to be the critical passage of his own spiritual journey. His writings of learning to see in the dark have inspired millions to perceive the value of a life passage through a dark time and have words and images to navigate through it.
Just as our eyes use light to produce images that send information to the brain about what to think and do, our hearts need to discern a spiritual light within to find the way forward in dark times. The darkness has work to do in us if we allow it. But so often, we avoid the kind of emotional pain we might risk feeling in the dark times of our lives.
We have developed a very strong pain numbing culture and become dependent upon all kinds of artificial light. Most of us spend our days staring at a computer screen and then go home to stare at T.V. screens and go to bed with the bright, electric lights from the outside burning through our windows. This is just modern life. The point is, we need to take some time to turn off the kind of light that distracts us in order to fully experience the work of the darkness within.
We are all packed with painful information inside that we need to feel, process and turn over to a Higher Power in order to grow. If we continue to numb it and ignore it, the darkness cannot do its natural work in us, our emotional life becomes stagnant and expresses itself in negative ways. It seems that if we cannot grow into a spiritual maturity, the kind of soul birth and journey that Jesus proposes, then we go the opposite direction, we decay.
In our culture, we have all kinds of ways of making death look like life, but we are smart people. God has equipped us all with great internal sensors. At some point along the way, we get tired of our own tricks. We reach a point when we can no longer sustain the patterns of anxiety, addiction, co-dependence and all kinds of artificial ways of dealing with internal pain. This crisis point is often where the dark night begins.
Jesus points to a pathway that enables us to become real, authentic, and grow into what we are created to be. To find a higher strength and power that enables us to flourish, even and especially in a dark and darkening world. He tells us that the children of God are meant to shine like the sun, but only after we learn how to bloom in the darkness. (v. 43)
The faith journey is about learning to see in the dark and sharing the hope we find there with others. We bring jewels out of the caves of our dark times and share them with the world. We help others find the way in the darkness. In my own experience, these times of the dark night are when God sends the angels, God in human skin, to point the way forward, a thing that is perceived with spiritual sight. (v. 41) Apparently, the dark night of the soul is where they like to hang out. Perhaps in that kind of utter darkness, they can really shine.
We often have to go through dark times in our lives so we can learn a new way of seeing, through the eyes of God. In these times we develop deeper roots, our sense of what we are created to be grows ever stronger, we surrender more of our own will to God, we become more refined in our faith journey and we learn to trust an inner truth. Eventually, God brings us to the other side and we reach a new level in our faith. We even look back on our times of suffering with a sweetness, a fondness for how we fell ever more deeply in love with God, with people and with what we were put here to do on this earth.
So have faith in your dark times, embrace them, walk through them, know that God is doing something very special in you and will bring you through it to the other side, a place of joy, sweetness and growth. Sometimes we have to sit in the darkness until we learn how to see the light. When we develop this way of seeing, we begin to burst into new life.
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We all have choices about who we will be in this world. It may not feel like it sometimes, we may feel suffocated by a job, a lack of finanical resources, a relationship or a system in which we feel trapped. But even in these situations in which we may feel trapped, we have choice. In making choices, we find our way forward. Sometimes to more freedom, and sometimes to more entrapment. It’s all about buillding discernment, the ability to make better choices.
But we live in a world in which “better” is not always true to form. Where the news is written primarily for “click bait” headlines and self worth is often defined by how famous you are or how many people are following you on social media. How do we know what is truly authentic anymore? How do we learn to tell the difference between what is truly good and what might just be posing as good? Both in ourselves and in the world?
When problems seem really big in the world, we can always return to something small to find the way. Stories point the way forward. We can examine stories to build discernment in a crazy time.
A big theme throughout stories is discernment. Just because we live in a technologically advanced society, the themes of humanity really haven’t changed much. We just have more of everything now. But some stories really hit on a nerve in our world.
So it is with the Eden story of the serpent who tricked Adam and Eve, and the story of Jesus being tempted by the Devil at the very end of his forty day fast in the wilderness.
In the first story, the characters take the offer, the offer that is always on the table. Be big, be famous, be legendary, be powerful, be the master of your own destiny.
The offer always comes at a time when the character is doubting themselves and/or God. This seems to be the time when the trickster comes, at a time when the character is vulnerable. The trickster plays on the character’s internal doubt: God? Where is your God, anyway?. Why does he have so many rules? Oh yeah, he doesn’t want you to be like him, knowing everything, having God power. He’s kind of selfish, don’t you think? If he’s so powerful, why doesn’t he solve all these problems here on earth? You really should take matters into your own hands. You really have nothing to lose.
And we see Eve and Adam fall for it. And of course, the serpent can’t deliver on the promise of “God power,” at least in the terms he presented, because, after all, it wasn’t a promise, it was just a sale, a trick. Instead, this “God Power” delivers some pretty awful realities. Adam and Eve enter into the great human saga of suffering and are shut out of paradise. Homeless, they have to make their own way in the world without all the resources of Eden. So they experience shame, guilt, vulnerability, all of those things we know so well from our experience of being human in the world. We can relate to them and the feelings of entrapment that come with these very real emotions.
But it’s tricky, really, to tell the difference between snakes and devils. In the ancient world, the snake was considered wise, a symbol of healing, renewal and fertility. It wasn’t odd for Adam and Eve to have trusted a snake’s wisdom. How do we tell the difference between snakes and devils?
In another story, with another trickster, we have Jesus, on the other hand, who resists a similar offer. Not once, or twice, but three times.
Even though many people were going hungry in Jesus’ community, he resisted the temptation to create enough food to feed them all in order to prove his power. He resisted proving the power of God just so the Devil would believe that Jesus is the real deal. He resisted inheriting all the wealth, fame and power the world had to offer so that he might become a legend in his own time. Why? Because all of these things, while it is arguable that he could have done a great deal of good, would have taken him away from his true mission.
He was on a journey of resurrection. A soul journey. He was focused on the choices that would enable him to complete his mission. And resisted the ones that would take him further away. From his choices, we learn his true character.
We are all on a soul journey, we each have a soul story. It’s difficult, much of the time, to figure out what brings us closer to or further away from our spiritual path. It is tricky to know how or when or even why to resist the offers before us. The offer comes in many disguises, this offer to become masters of our own destiny.
Jesus’ path helps to point the way forward, especially when things get confusing. The One who resisted the offer can point the way, a way we can trust, because it is always primarily concerned with genuine love, not tricks or sales. Jesus simply has nothing to sell, he is only peddling hope. By studying his path and meditating on that internal garden, that “kingdom of Heaven within” as Jesus said, we build faith in something substantial. We build discernment and learn to the art of making better choices. We learn to tell the difference between snakes and devils.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens.” –C.G. Jung
Love is the bridge between you and everything. -Rumi
Click here If you’d like to hear my homily, “The Difference Between Snakes & Devils” (13 minutes) from this week’s Tuesdays in the Chapel at Scarritt Bennett, Nashville.
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We all yearn for spring, for the thaw, with its fluorescent green and goldenrod. In the doldrums of the long winter, we are oblivious to spring’s surprises, her thunderstorms and her turbulent tornadoes.
We are not ready for what we love.
We’re living in a new normal. More ice, more snow, more fire, more wind, less rain and more rain than ever before. More heat will come with summer, more than we think we can bear.
The world is a beautiful and terrifying place all the time and it is where I belong. I belong to the earth, to the rivers, lakes and oceans, to the wind and the air, to the fires that rage, they are all me and I am them. In this biosphere, space ship earth that we are living on, we all get recycled.
We are reminded of this on Ash Wednesday, how very recyclable we are. I will say, as I take my finger and smudge it in some dust, push back the hair of those who have come from their precious brows and make the sign of a cross, “from ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” It’s a sobering reminder that we are all connected through our very birth and death to one another, to creation, that all things capable of life are in fact, in one form or another, still living.
This comforts me.
I overheard two older men in a coffee shop talking about “little deaths.” One of them was a Wise Old Man,
I could tell, he was the one giving the advice to the man who was facing cancer. He talked about the “little deaths” in the form of all the things we lose, the car keys, the wallet, the life we once had, a loved one, our mobility, our freedom. He then said something about attunement. I became aware that I was eavesdropping and then stopped listening, though I could not help but smile. Attunement is simply the act of bringing all things into harmony. This WOM was trying to help the other find harmony in the act of living and dying. It was a beautiful thing to experience, the exchange of loving and caring in the act of comforting through truthfulness and wisdom.
Each day, we have something to give to someone along the way; a smile, a word of encouragement, an expression of hope. Think of all the things the world gives you without ever asking for anything in return. The sun shines, as does the moon, creating day and night, we love the contrast of light and dark and the beautiful moments as it changes. The earth brings food, creation brings rain and all the things that are needed for the conditions of life are provided for us for free. How much more we can offer the earth and one another when we live each day in the mindfulness that we belong to an order much greater than ourselves, and yet we have been invited to experience it, to become attuned to its natural rhythm, to rescue creation, each in our own small way, from the damages done.
This week, to those of us who receive the mark of the cross and follow the Christ on that journey of life and death and resurrection, let us meditate on that phrase, “From ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” Let it be a reminder that though our bodies may be tethered to earth, our spirits were meant to soar. We belong to a greater gift than we could ever give, made real to us in so many ways, every day. The gift of life unending, the gift of the ashes.
We’re having a lot of conversations about breaking down stereotypes in our world today. This is a great thing, because even though we sometimes use stereotypes to help us figure out who we are, we can also use them to reject people that are different. Stereotypes can become threatening, hurtful and wounding in a variety of ways.
I know a thing or two about being the target of stereotypes and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of projecting them as well. In this short video on untamed women of the Bible, I talk about women who “smash the brands,” in the Old Testament and challenge the names used to label women who tried to express their individuality in ways that were not culturally acceptable. Stereotypes can cause division, suppress identity formation and lead to great suffering, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
For the past decade, I’ve worked with some of the most traumatized and rejected people in our culture who suffer from stereotypes. Homeless, refugees, immigrants and the poor. However, it has been my experience that when we decide to answer the cry for love and acceptance that comes from all human beings, particularly those who have been rejected, prejudice and stereotypes are shattered.
This is one of the first steps in effective social justice, heart change. It is in human community where we learn to trust one another and become open to difference that we discover our own deepest needs are met. This is where things like meaning and purpose are born, in love and friendship among strangers. This is where we overcome our own deepest fears and are able to lift others out of suffering.
I have found that it is impossible to break down a stereotype, or experience change in your heart just by talking about it. The walls between us come down as we decide to take action, to be in community with those who are different than ourselves.
There is a great scripture from my tradition that says, “do not forget to show kindness to strangers, in doing this, many have entertained angels unaware.” (Heb 13:2)
In my work with the homeless population, I experienced this more than once. The presence of the sacred as I opened my heart to the strangers in my community. Of course, my work was always tinged with fear, and I had to use some discernment to keep myself relatively safe. But heart change does require some risk, mainly the risk of moving out of our own comfort zone and opening our minds and hearts to the rejected. This is how the world changes, one heart at a time.
I wrote a song about it called “Tending Angels” and got to work with an award winning film maker, Tracy Facceli, to tell the story in this short music video. We wanted to break down the typical stereotypes of the homeless and show the real reasons people spiral into shelter insecurity. I hope it inspires you to spend some time with those who are different than you, particularly those who feel rejected. It is as simple as offering friendship. What you find might surprise you and it will most certainly change you for the better.
I’m Sherry Cothran, a pastor, singer-songwriter and author who was once known as the lead singer of the popular rock band, The Evinrudes. Check out more of my story here.
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