My most brilliant ideas always come with Easter. Like as if my ego just gives way to deeper knowing and numinosity. There's myriad ways to interpret the Easter festival, Pagan and Christian and and and... For me, this giving way of the ego is poignantly described in the Easter myth.
The ego is like the habits of the psyche. They long for something fresh, a drop of dew, a stroke of light, fresh air... The psyche will do anything to find something fresh, but.. The amazing things is, that when it finds it, the ego will bite and gnaw at the new whatever until it fits within the containers of the ego..
So it is with Sacred Space. Whenever we find it, the ego will start gnawing and biting at it. Which is beautiful when we see it as an invitation to find it again and agin. Build no fixed temples or churches, for they become the opposite of what you want.
The restaurant — hole-in-the-wall with age-darkened brick wallpaper, old-lady peony-pink damask table cloths, the color my Chicago adopted grandmother used to like in homemade church blouses, eyelet white lace curtains festooned with paper ribbons in the ceiling, entwined with silk flower vines, glitter easter-eggs, feather butterflies in “old-lady chic” the guidebook calls it, ribbons hanging from the trophy animals, dusty green-red pheasant I can’t see his tail, two deer heads with gold mardi gras beads wrapped ’round dead necks and antlers, soft orange carrot salad a feast of hunter’s stew between potato pancakes plump meat chunks tucked in a surprise the old man with Andy Warhol hair arguing cheerfully with the middle-aged waiter reading a conservative fantasy novel, this food is better than your mother’s he says with a straight face, expecting the rejoinder as my husband checks out, tart herbaceous currant juice, the color of crushed berries — it tastes like secrets –
It’s Good Friday 2013 and, as I pause to reflect on this strange day in the Church’s year, I ask myself what can all this possibly mean to my beautiful Pagan friends? But then it occurs to me that, as a somewhat heretical Christian, I may as well also ask myself, what does it all mean to me now that I’ve escaped from the straight jacked of organized Christianity?
Bruno
I don´t know her Phoenician name, but was posibly Astarte, since in the myth she and Zeus fathered Asterion (the famed Minotaur), which may hint to a ...
Steven Posch
Ah, right, I'd forgotten: the Phoenician princess with the surprising Greek name. (I wonder what her Phoenician name was?) A tantalizing possibility, ...
Bruno
Thank you! Very interesting reading and connections. Perhaps this has to do with Europa ("Wide-Eyed") who was kidnnaped by Zeus from Phoenicia into Cr...
Diotima
I get emails when several W&P blogs are published. It always amuses me how I can tell which ones are yours before I even open the email, just by readi...
