Grace Amidst Chaos:

Lessons from Warrior Goddesses in a Time of Political Turmoil

Hybrid (In person and online) at
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Palisades

Services are held at the The Bristal Assisted Living at Englewood
412 S Van Brunt St, Englewood, NJ 07631162

In a world where political tension and societal polarization seem to be the new normal, finding balance and grace amidst chaos can feel like an impossible task. Yet, as we navigate these turbulent times, ancient wisdom offers us profound insights. At the time of this sermon, in my birth culture of Bengal, India, we would have recently honored the fierce warrior goddesses, Durga and Kali. These goddesses, venerated for their wrath yet loved for their protective benevolence, teach us invaluable lessons in holding complexity and chaos with grace and flexibility.

Into this rich tapestry of wisdom, we can weave the teachings of another ancient deity: the Minoan/Cretan goddess, so ancient that she remains nameless. This goddess, often depicted holding two writhing snakes, represents the delicate balance of duality. The snakes, symbols of life and death, creation and destruction, are held at just the right distance—neither too far apart to lose the creative tension nor too close to devour each other.

On this day of the sermon, a mere two days before one of the most contentious presidential elections in the United States, and in the shadow of worldwide wars and climate and sociopolitical collapse, the wisdom of these warrior goddesses feels ever more urgent. As our entire human race teeters on the brink of annihilation because of our unchecked hubris, the wisdom of the warrior goddesses Durga, Kali, and the ancient Minoan goddess offers us a timeless guide.

By learning to hold complexity with grace, engaging in the dance of duality, and cultivating inner flexibility, we can at least begin to hope to navigate our polarized world with strength and compassion. Let us draw from their teachings to create a more balanced, harmonious existence, where we respond to chaos not with hardness but with the elegance of a well-practiced dancer.

What Is Mine To Do?

An Interspiritual Approach to Political Engagement

A Day Workshop Live on Zoom
Oct. 26, 2024 · 9:30am-5:30pm ET

As spiritual people, we should not avoid the political realities that harm us and those we love. We can no longer use our spirituality to numb ourselves from feeling the real pain of oppression, nor can we use our spirituality to justify turning away from our responsibility to one another. Each of us is valuable and necessary to co-create the world we want, and each of us may have a different role to play. The question then becomes: “what is mine to do?”

Some people seek to force their theology into politics, while others believe that the right way to handle politics and spirituality is to keep them separate. Both of these perspectives perpetuate systems of inequity. If we truly belong to ourselves and to each other, we need to find a radical, spiritually grounded way to participate in the democratic process. In this workshop, participants will delve deeply into an embodied experience of our interconnection and interdependence.

Register for this one-day workshop to practice identifying and claiming your uniqueness, listening to one another’s stories, working with emotional activation. and discerning opportunities for action.

Following this workshop, you’ll be ready to answer the question “what is mine to do?” with a holistic plan for taking action.

Wabi sabi:
cultivating suppleness in a tautly polarized world

September 15, 2024
IN PERSON ONLY

Hosted by New Thought Spirit, North Sea, Southampton, New York

North Sea Community Association House
130 Noyac Road, Southampton NY 11968

We are living in an increasingly polarized world, which is further accentuated in this moment because of the upcoming elections in the United States. The problem with polarization is that no matter which side of the polarity we find ourselves on, it becomes rigid, hide-bound, dogmatic.

The author Sophie Strand calls it the "Newtonian polemic" of our times - where rather than opening up to what is new, surprising, or does not quite fit in with our position, we use our knowledge and intellect as a weapon to prove the other side as wrong, immature, and out of touch with reality.

Practicing wabi sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that focuses on the beauty in what is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete, could be one way we train ourselves to move away from the rigidity of perfection and "correctness." Instead, we can learn to flow, to dance with what is arising in the moment - knowing that the only permanent thing in this embodied existence of ours is change! As the author Octavia Butler so poignantly declares:

"All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change."

We remember that wabi sabi is not intrinsic to an experience or an event. Rather, it is a state of mind - a way of being. Wabi sabi allows us to revere and rejoice in the moment, while simultaneously holding the knowledge that whatever it is, it will pass, and soon.

May we become masters of wabi sabi, so we can celebrate our life at this moment, while also holding the beauty and humility that comes from accepting our own fragility, our own brokenness, and the pathos that lies in intentionally turning towards what is lost, or will soon be lost.

We hope you will join us for this gathering.

Interspirituality: A Path to Peace and Justice in a Divided World

A One Spirit presentation at the Freedom Rising Conference
Marble Collegiate Church, 1 West 29th Street, New York City

Freedom Rising Conference is from April 26-28; our presentation is at 3:45 pm on April 27 (in the Chapel)

The overall theme for the FREEDOM RISING CONFERENCE is: YOU. MOVE. THE WORLD

Day 1 (April 26): YOU. Rejuvenation. Recovery. Resistance!
Day 2 (April 27): MOVE: Activate. Revolt. Rise up!
Day 3 (April 28): THE WORLD: Envision. Equip. Repair!

In a world increasingly marked by intolerance, conflict, and violence, how can we access the levels of compassion and love needed to address humanity’s divisions? As change makers, we are constantly attempting to dismantle systems of oppression, but how do we do that when we – our identities, our minds, our very ways of seeing the world – are products of those very systems we are hoping to change? Imagine trying to dismantle a house while trapped inside the house.

Interspirituality offers a key to unlocking the door of our oppressive indoctrination so we can be present, step outside the systems we are attempting to impact, and take action with wisdom and radical compassion. Interspirituality invites people of any faith, or no faith, to trace the roots of all the world’s wisdom traditions back to their common origin: a direct, embodied mysticism that is alive in nature and rooted in the heart.

In this workshop, you will discover interspirituality as a vital response to our volatile and complex times. Engage in experiential and interactive activities that will help you:

• Look past theological differences to uncover the universal experience available to people of all faiths – or no faith – that ignites transformative social action.

• Deepen your appreciation for your own philosophy, faith, religion, or belief system, and understand how your unique path is in sibling-hood with all the world's wisdom traditions.

• Aware of the profound interconnectedness of all of life, navigate the world and our contemporary challenges with radical compassion and a different level of consciousness than those which created our problems.

This workshop welcomes everyone, regardless of your religious affiliation, tradition, or none at all. Receive this opportunity to broaden your perspective, deepen your spirituality, connect with others passionate about peace and social justice, and most importantly, contribute your perspective to this emerging phenomenon.

RE-MEMBERING OURSELVES INTO THE FUTURE

DECEMBER 3, 2023 | IN PERSON ONLY

Hosted by New Thought Spirit, North Sea, Southampton, New York

North Sea Community Association House
130 Noyac Road, Southampton NY 11968

RE-INVITING PLAY IN OUR ELDER YEARS

NOVEMBER 11, 2023 | ON ZOOM

Hosted by Anne Marie Bennett, founder of Kaleidosoul

A PANEL PRESENTATION AT THE

2023 PARLIAMENT OF WORLD RELIGIONS

AUGUST 14-18, 2023 | MCCORMICK PLACE LAKESIDE CENTER, CHICAGO

Along with panel members Roya Akhavan, Allison Stokes and Edward Price

In this panel presentation, we will present a tapestry of the embodied feminine in various world religions and spiritual traditions. We will open with an in-depth look into the life and legend of Táhirih, an influential spiritual leader, scholar/poet, and heroine of the Bábí faith in Iran (1814 or 1817 to 1852). We will then explore how her life and work continues to influence the feminist spiritual movements in the United States.

And finally, we will hold the story of Táhirih within a larger tapestry of how the feminine is expressed in world traditions, both historically and in our time. This will include an exploration of the divine imaged as mother (Gaia and a variety of mother goddesses), as ancient fertility and grain goddesses, as embodiments of sensuality and beauty, as warrior and protector figures, and as keepers of the realm of death and rebirth.

We will end with a reflection on how the spiritual and secular landscape of our world might look like, if the feminine and the masculine are perceived as two polarities of one reality: neither superior or inferior, and both necessary for generating a creative tension which leads to new birth. What might be ours to do, in bringing about a way of being where the feminine and the masculine are engaged in a creative dance?

If you are in the area, please join us in person at:

Water Mill Community House
743 Montauk Highway @ the traffic light
Water Mill, NY 11976

Rumi says, "The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now..." What is this clear bead at the center of our being - that allows an undistorted vision of all there is?

We will hold this poem as a portal to access our own core - that still point at the center of our being - that is beyond names, forms or rational interpretation.

Our intention this evening will be to begin finding our own pathways into this space of the clear bead, so we may return to it often, and allow it to point our feet toward our next steps in life. 

In the early 1980s, Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart wrote a book entitled “Words as Eggs.” The title phrase originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams, where a voice said, “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” This is so very true. It has been said, “Words Make Worlds.” Depending on how the words are used, they can hurt or heal. Words can be literal or poetic. Words can fix meanings into “this, and only this,” or allow it to breathe: “this, and that, and maybe that too.”

Words, when taken too literally, become prisons. They give rise to all kinds of fundamentalism. This has happened so often with scripture - not because of a limitation of the material itself - but that of the mind confronting it.

Today, we will explore what it might mean to bring a poetic attention to words. To allow words to be translucent. To breathe. To hold within it not only many layers of meaning, but also what is beyond meaning-making. To the poetic eye (or the poetic ear) - the world of mystery shimmers through the veneer of meaning. A life lived from this vantage is always an adventure - into mystery, into freshness, into a magical way of being.

If you are in the area, please join us in person at:

Water Mill Community House
743 Montauk Highway @ the traffic light
Water Mill, NY 11976

In this 4-week journey, we will learn how to sit with dreams: ours, and/or of those we minister to. I believe that dreams come from the deepest, most archaic layers of our psyche, and often present to us our psychic situation in a poetic, mythic language. A dream is deeply personal. It is thus a folly to search for a one-to-one correspondence of dream symbols with specific “meanings.” In this course, we will instead learn how to “circumambulate” (walk around and around) a dream, how to sit with the dream figures and scenarios with reverence, and often, with awe. Rather than “interpreting” a dream, our intention will be to “journey into” the depths of a dream, using as a central yardstick those responses that have a particular resonance with the dreamer’s psyche. Eventually, we leave the dream “open” (rather than ultimately understood), so psyche can continue to provide further information, or corrections, as the case may be.

One Spirit Dream Circle

Third Sunday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators

One Spirit Dream Circle

Third Sunday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators

We are all aware of the toll that rampant individualism and our navel-gazing “me” culture has wrought upon us. Many of us are waking up to the fact that personal growth without a concurrent social engagement is not only unsustainable, it is in fact harmful. Simultaneously, many of us are becoming painfully aware that if we focus just on the “we,” without also cultivating and refining the “I,” we often enter community spaces with way too much baggage. And then, regardless of our best intentions, our unresolved “personal stuff” ends up sowing confusion and discord in groups. What we need is a more mature and balanced interplay of our “I” and “We” consciousness.

Trees offer us a great metaphor for this balanced relationship. Trees, especially old trees, have roots that go deep into the earth, finding underground springs and rivers to draw nourishment from. And when the storms come, or the snow, or the spring thaw, it is these roots that anchor the tree and keep it steady and firmly grounded. And, as a tree grows and matures, it becomes host to a million lifeforms that live on it, and off it. The birds that nest on it, the critters that find home in its nooks and crannies, and all the beings that rest in its shade and feed off its bounty.

And… a tree does not go it solo. Recent research has shown the presence of “wood wide web” - a complex underground web of roots, fungi and bacteria that exist beneath every forest and wood, helping to connect trees and plants to one another. These extensive mycorrhizal networks [Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza)] serve not only as symbiotic exchange conduits for nutrients, but also as “social networks” where plants and trees support each other as needed, and transmit information (e.g., impending aphid attacks) to facilitate the well-being of the forest as a whole.

During this gathering, we will look deep into the ecosystem of trees, in the hope of garnering some lessons on how we can live better, and more inclusively, in community.

If you are in the area, please join us in person at:

Water Mill Community House
743 Montauk Highway @ the traffic light
Water Mill, NY 11976

One Spirit Dream Circle

Third Sunday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators

Many maps have survived from medieval Europe where all uncharted lands and waters were marked with illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures, representing potential danger. These were the “no go” zones. One such illustration, from the Hunt-Lenox Globe (c. 1504 AD), has the Latin phrase “hic sunt dracones,” translated as “Here Be Dragons.” Another, the T-O Psalter world map (c. 1250 AD) has dragons, as symbols of sin, in a lower "frame" below the world, balancing Jesus and angels on the top.

Unfortunately, to this day, our god-image is similarly limited. It includes only the “good” (bright, light, white, comfortable, well-circumscribed) aspects in our life’s map. Consequently, everything in our experience that does not fit neatly within this narrow definition of “god,” is relegated to the realm of the devil, satan, demons, or sin. And when our god becomes so small, so unidimensional, we also tend to experience ourselves and our life journeys as small, limited and lackluster.

What if we could create a safe container, in community, so we could lean into the discomfort of life experiences that we have called, until now, “not of god?” What if we dared peer at the dragons? Maybe even dip a toe in the uncharted waters? And what if in doing so, we brushed across a crack in our god-image “where the light gets in?” In this Sacred Conversation, we will do just that - using an image that dials our discomfort up to a level 3 or 4, not 10, so we could safely stretch our limits, just a little. This may be the beginning of a lifelong practice where we intentionally develop a more expansive and nuanced map of what is holy ground, so we are able to take up our rightful space in the world.

Facilitators

Kali is the Dark Goddess of India. Her name means both Black and Time. She is thus the keeper of all that lives in the "shadow," and also all that lives in the realm of Time. She is both the womb and the tomb - holding us with fierce compassion as we journey from life to death to what is beyond both. One of her names is Maharatri - the Eternal Night, while another is Adyashakti - the Primordial Power. Modern Western Culture, after the disappearance of the ancient Goddess cultures of Europe around 6000 years ago, has grown increasingly afraid of this Dark Goddess. She has become the "other." Eminent (mostly male) psychologists in the past hundred years have called her "the Negative Mother," or the "Devouring Mother." But her absence in the public psyche has left us bereft. Among the many consequences of her absence from public worship and discourse is our abominable treatment of Mother Earth. We are just now waking up to the impossibility of this arrangement where this maternal energy is used solely as a resource, with no sense of reciprocity. The myth and the cult of Kali, which has been preserved in the East in a relatively uncontaminated form, can offer us a mythos to explore a renewed relationship with the feminine energy in all her manifestations, including those that have been denigrated as dark, primitive, and savage!

In this workshop, we will explore this Dark Mother mythology through storytelling, active imagination, writing and conversation.

A Panel Discussion on our conference theme with Kevin Copeland, M.F.A., Rev. Dr. Sushmita Mukherjee, Sarah D. Norton, Ph.D., and Dr. Robert Pullen with moderator Rev. Darby Christopher

In this panel, join us as our panel members help us unpack our conference theme: Living the Earth’s Dream: Listening to the Other in Nature and Self." Over the course of this hour, panel members will address questions, such as, "What might it mean to live the earth’s dream?", "How do we listen deeply to nature, including animals, land formations, and the stars?", and more. Bring your own thoughts and questions to add to this rich discussion.

One Spirit Dream Circle

Third Sunday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators

We are living through troubled times. Some have even called it apocalyptic. Rather than cower in this storm and seek to save only ourselves, we can be reminded that the word “apocalypse” derives from Greek roots meaning "uncovering,” “revelation” or “disclosure?" What is it that we are being asked to uncover at this time? What veils are ready to be lifted, and what shadows do we need to confront? In this hour of companionship, we will utilize the story of Kali, the Indian Goddess of fierce compassion, to try and find some answers. The hour will start with a Sanskrit invocation of this Dark Goddess, followed by meditative storytelling and conversation. We hope to depart with a better sense of an emerging myth that can guide our steps along that “long arc” which bends towards justice for all.

And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found world.

~ John O'Donohue (For Light, from “To Bless the Space Between Us”)

On this day, we will contemplate together the nature of light, the nature of darkness and the sacred dance between the two. Rather than dichotomize light as good and darkness as bad (something to “come out of”), we will contemplate how we can become willing participants in this dance, and thereby cultivate our own wholeness.

If you are in the area, please join us in person at:

Water Mill Community House
743 Montauk Highway @ the traffic light
Water Mill, NY 11976

One Spirit Dream Circle

Bimonthly gathering, Fourth Monday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators

Join us for an exploration of the Wild God. Some people easily invite this Wild God to dinner, while others are, true to themselves, more cautious. Most often, the Wild God shows up unbidden. As we read together and discuss the poem “Sometimes A Wild God” by Tom Hirons (https://tomhirons.com/poetry/sometimes-a-wild-god), participants are invited to lean in to their own edge of tolerance for the chaotic. As we allow our boundaries to be pushed in just the right amount, we create space for more instinctual energy in our lives. While the Wild God’s arrival can bring chaos and fear, this is not a cause for regret as its arrival also brings an opening and invitation. As we listen to one another’s experience, we are both held in a safe container and gently challenged to stretch.

This gathering will help set the stage for the February 25 - 26, 2023 workshop “Pushing the Boundary of the God-Image: using Myth, Dream and SoulCollage®.”

One Spirit Dream Circle

Bimonthly gathering, Fourth Monday of the month

This is a circle for our One Spirit community members and friends who wish to do deep soul work around our nighttime dreams.

Darby and Sushmita hope to co-create a safe and brave space where we delve into the stories being revealed to us from our Dreammaker. We will use a variety of approaches to dreamwork, and always hold dreams as sacred communications from our divine source.

Facilitators