May Day Goddesses

Spring Goddesses

Freya, Artwork by Kris Waldherr

Freya, Artwork by Kris Waldherr

Love of life, a lust for life, is beautifully symbolized by Spring/Fertility Deities all over the world. Unsurprisingly, most of them are women.
What did the Spring Deities do for the folks who celebrated and worked with and studied with them?
There are LOTS of answers to this question but I've got three favorites:

• Story: moral tales and lessons. Telling a story about a fertility God or Goddess changes emotion and belief so much more effectively than saying "Be proud of how you look" or "You don't need to be ashamed of your sexuality"
• Practicing Presence: Acknowledging the changing of the seasons, tuning in to the world around you. being present to what is true now and what could be. a sense of companionship when all human companions are absent. 
• Community connections: coming together for feast days and rituals that strengthen the bonds of community.

Finding your Spring Deity

Vesna: Art courtesy of JankaLart on etsy

So, who is your lust-for-life deity? What stories can give you insight and what practices can give you self awareness, agency, and build community

Bone Forest Moon 

I use the structure of "Moon/Forest/Bone" to define my relationship with the sacred.

• Bone: What images of the divine, what stories and mysteries and lessons, what beliefs and practices have been (or SHOULD have been) passed down to me through my tribe, ancestors, and family?
• Forest: What does the place where I am ask of me? Knowing that holyness and divinity often comes from direct experience of a place, what has relating to the divine looked like in this place in the past?
• Moon: What universal human truths and experiences are available to me to work with? What is the cosmic view in which the earth is a blue marble floating in space and the scientific view that seeks to find ways to describe and relate to reality that hold up across many experimenters, many experience-ers.

Flora (Spring), from the villa of Varano in Stabiae

I can tell you about my Spring Deities. I invite you to find who or what might be yours.

Bone

This includes the deities my father's Slovak mother would have known if she hadn't been brought to the U.S. so young. Vesna for the first breaking of Spring and Lada for the fertility, love and warmth of Summer. There are also the deities of my mother's French/Gaulish and Scottish ancestors and my father's English ancestors. Artio from Gaul, Celtic Olwen, and depending on which historical period of the British Isles you want to focus on, Freya from the Anglo-Saxons or Flora from the Romans. your heritage might lead you to Oshun: The Yoruba Orisha of rivers and beauty and sensuality, Or Ishtar from the ancient near east and Sumeria, Kono-Hana-Sakuya-Hime from the far east. or Atabey, the Taino Goddess from the Caribbean.
heritage isnt the only place to seek for symbol and sacred meaning, you can also open your awareness to the here and now.

Forest

Gaulish Muri Statuette: Artio

I live in the green Willamette valley at the confluence of two great rivers. Spring begins with flowers in March and by May we have planted our gardens and are cleaning up from the muddy month of April. My deities of place are Mount Hood, known as Wy’east, the Willamette river, and the hazelnut trees. Take a moment to reflect on the sacred places and things right here.

Then you can also seek among the Universal.These images of the most holy will resonate across place and time and culture.

Moon

Kano-Hana-Sakuya-Hime

The cycle of the earth around the sun, the tilt of the earth, the changes of the temperature and day length... All these things are experienced by human beings in all parts of the planet. The experience of falling in love, of birth, of losing and regaining health are all experiences shared by human beings everywhere. My deities of the cosmos are Love, Birth, and Joy. They are the Sun and Heat and Fire. You might share some of mine or have a few others that especially resonate for you.

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Reverend Amy invites you to find your own spiritual direction through a relationship with the sacred in the domain of Bone, Forest or Moon.

Earth Day 2018

Concept: Ian Ridell, Art: Kimberly Debus

Seventh Principle of Unitarian Universalism

Art by Mare Cromwell

RESPECT FOR THE INTERDEPENDENT WEB OF ALL EXISTENCE OF WHICH WE ARE A PART

What did you do today that connected you to the earth?
What did you do today that you can point to and say: “That was the seventh principle at work in me”?

Gaia

When I think of my relationship with the earth I think of Gaia. Gaia is the Greek word for the goddess who is the earth, but what I’m talking about is Gaia as the idea, put forth in the 70’s, that the entire ecosystem of earth is one being. A being that is made up of rock and plant and animal. A being that breathes and lives. And we humans are a part of that being.

Process theology tells us that everything is made up of many other things. And that all of these things aren’t even things, they are processes. The planet is a collection of many processes, just as each person is a collection of many processes. And there is really not much distinction between the process that is one of my cells and the process that is the earth or even the solar system. We are all containers of many other things. The chalice of the earth contains us, just as we contain myriad forms of life. The earth is a green growing container, a chalice, if you will. And so are each one of us.

Have you seen the video going around the internet that is narrated by Julia Roberts? The visual is fly-bys of these spectacular places on our planet: orange and brown desert canyon; frothy white jungle waterfall framed in deep green; stark pale blue arctic ice floe in endless sea… In it Julia is the voice of Gaia, and Gaia is reminding us that she has existed before us, and will exist after us. She doesn’t much care if humans make ourselves extinct. She doesn’t need us. She is so much bigger, so much more, than an earth lifeboat for humans. We need her.

This can come as a bit of a shock. Or it can help us to feel our dependence, and our connection, with the natural world. Indeed, our oneness with the natural world and all that makes up the earth.

Viriditas

The other concept I think of when thinking of our relationship to our earth lifeboat is the idea of viriditas. That idea that the divine is the greening life-five was articulated by Hildegard von Bingen. “Hildegard of Bingen”, also known as "Saint Hildegard" and "the Sibyl of the Rhine" lived from 1098, to 1179, in Germany. She was a Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, and visionary who wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

A cornerstone of Hildegard's spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Hildegard celebrated the sacred in nature, something highly relevant for us in this age of climate change and the destruction of natural habitats. - The definition of viriditas or "greenness" is an earthly expression of the heavenly in an integrity that unites dualisms.

Mandalas

One of Hildegard’s spiritual practices was to draw her visions. We, in this modern world, call them mandalas. Just like the mandalas created in India and Tibet, her mandalas were visual patterns that represent the cosmos metaphysically, spiritually, or symbolically.

When you truly believe in and value your relationship with the earth, or God (and for Hildegard those were the same) you act on your spiritual connection. The Church of her era was rife with corruption and sexual misconduct. While many men held back from protesting, fearing the repercussions, Hildegard decided that she would take on the mantle of reformer. Although St. Paul had forbidden women to preach, Hildegard embarked on four preaching tours in which she delivered apocalyptic sermons to her male superiors, warning them that if they did not mend their ways, they would fall from grace and be toppled from their seats of power.

Nor did Hildegard enjoy a quiet retirement. She took in and nursed a man who had run away from fighting in the crusades, and when he died she buried him in the churchyard. It is hard for us UUs to imagine, but giving this Christian burial to someone who rejected the command to fight in the crusades didn’t sit well with the powers-that-be and she and her nuns were collectively excommunicated. The excommunication was only lifted a few months before Hildegard's death in 1179.

Acting on Your Spiritual Direction

Hildegard didn’t just pray with words. She lived her belief that every person was sacred, that her love of Viriditas must be expressed, that the church, her communities, and yes, the whole world was worth her time and energy, risk, and commitment. What does your relationship with the earth, or the divine ask of you? We need to listen to our heart songs, our earth songs, the voice of viriditas, the sacred, and we each need to find our own spiritual direction, a direction that lives our love for our world.

Hildegard speaks for God, saying: "I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars ... I awaken everything to life." -- Hildegard von Bingen, Liber Divinorum (Book of Divine Works)

Planning Programming for your Community?

Planning programming for the coming year? Here's three reasons you want me to visit your civic group, religious community, meditation or study group, grove, or coven.

Message

We can each find our soul's way to create love and justice. We are faced with a shrill political atmosphere, painful despair about our environment, and suffering, loss of rights and dislocation of values. We need the reminder that each of us is a gift, what we do matters, and there is merciful nourishment available to us.

Earth-relating Spirituality

Help your community with exploring gifts of Moon, Forest, and Bone: cosmic and scientific truths, insights from interaction with your place on this earth, and knowledge from heritage and personal experience. Strengthen the Earth-relating gifts already present among the community. I bring the joy of myth and the arts of song, storytelling, imagery, and ritual.

Praise

My presentations, worship services, learning experiences, and consultations are consistently appreciated. Leaders of religious communities value the opportunity to turn a time slot over to someone they trust, or to request a one-off or "pop-up" interim ministry. Women's groups experience connection and transformation. (See testimonials on my web site! amybeltaine.info)

How does it work?

West of the Rockies, I bring my own housing. I am available on site for several days for retreats, workshops, preaching, presentations, and individual or small group appointments.

I have an extensive catalog arranged by theme or by liturgical year. I invite your Programming, Worship, and Adult Ed teams to browse for what resonates! amybeltaine.info

Honorarium: Worship service or 20 minute-1 hour Presentation: $250 (+$50 for a repeat the same day) Learning experience: One hour ($150), Half-day ($350), full day ($550) Alternatively: $20 per person per hour. $25 at the door.  Housing: West of Rockies - Hospitality of your parking lot or a congregant's driveway for our little house. East of Rockies - home hospitality welcome. Travel: IRS rate from my last location. (negotiable) CUUPS consultations are free (travel/housing waived if already on site)

Who?

Rev. Amy Beltine, Spiritual Mentor: Inviting those who feel adrift to learn and live your gift. As a Spiritual Director, Amy witnesses the way for givers and justice seekers who dread getting out of bed to find their soil to root and thrive in, and their fruit to offer. Meetings are over Skype and in person using Physio-divina (Tarot, body prayer, etc.) She visits communities West of the Rockies offering presentations, retreats, and Sunday Services such as "Green Chalice", "Inanna Journey" and "Sacred Fool." Amy served as the president of continental CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) and is on the steering committee of UU Spiritual Directors' Network. Learn more at http://lAmyBeltaine.info.

Did you know?

I also offer Spiritual Accompaniment: helping people learn and live their soul's way.