What's a woman to do when she has personally experienced the shadow side of her own tradition--demonization of the Feminine, active harm of others ascribing to a Many, condemned--AND she needs a Merciful Judgment that is honest yet kind, discerning but clear, arises out of Love but also remains detached from demonization? My strategy regarding judgment up to this point has largely been...you guessed it...unconditional positive regard. As a woman, I know what uninvited, demonizing judgment feels like.
The last ten years have taught me the virtues of nonattachment, knowing a deep-belly love but having little to no energetic bondage to a place or a person. I have weathered a tectonically shifting awakening to the Feminine amidst a family with little experience of Her. Being an empathic sort myself, I could feel all the pain I was accused of 'creating' or 'causing,' even as I needed to disregard others' (refused) growth journeys to devote everything I had for learning anew and integrating healing from my own inherited traumas, suffering, griefs...amidst a resilience that blessedly led me/us to a life of much healthier abundance and redemptive family relationships I/we now cherish. But don't underestimate this... It was excruciating for me, for others. Ruptures happened. Some healed. Others did not.
I now know this is the pathway to spiritual maturity most of us avoid. It's impossible without soulful containers of wisdom and spirit-friendship, grounded in Sacred Mystery larger than any of us. The sacred fruit I now know emerges in how this One pushed me outward, beyond each companion, into our own separate pain(s), with a gentle affirmation of others, even if we felt they had wounded us. Unconditional regard, of a sort, while in deep pain.
A young-ish woman I care for deeply is enmeshed in a situation of deepening pain. I have been bending over backwards to honor her and her choices without judgment. While I cannot stomach the pain I see rippling out into all of her family and friends, I also have labored to interpret it as women coming to voice in the feminine.
Except this is not the Sacred Feminine I know, which I now need to name aloud.
This youngish-woman is becoming completely surrendered to another older-woman in her deepest, utterly refused pains. Each woman has many wounds, not least is an excruciating mother-wound, screaming to be healed. These are binding them both, with pain being multiplied, amplified to all those around them. I can see no sacred fruit of gentle affirmation, honoring of others, or willingness to face their own pains toward birthing new relationships.
Am I judging the choices and behaviors of two women I care for deeply? Apparently so. My Evangelical colleague knew something I could not see til now. He and I would both hold that only Godde can judge, in the end, but I can now discern, name and lament the pain I'm sensing as it grows, seemingly without any resolution in sight.
Prayers from this listing welcome...
[Eleven words to spare!].
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