What makes a “Feminine Mystic?”
This is the question that writer Carl McColman asked Mirabai Starr, author, speaker, mystic, and translator of the mystics, in a Patheos interview. This is an excerpt from Starr’s reply.
“Mysticism is about a direct experience of the sacred – nothing between our souls and a naked encounter with the Beloved.”
“A life of spiritual practice may help empty the cup of our preconceptions and lead us into the radical emptiness required for this kind of communion, but ultimately a mystic meets the Holy One beyond the forms of prescribed prayer or corporate theology.”
“Such an experience of divine love changes us forever, but in ways that may be invisible to anyone else – even to ourselves.”
“So to be a mystic is not necessarily to become a teacher or a guide, in any formal sense.”
“Still, in these times of rapid global change, humanitarian crises and environmental devastation, we are all being called to step up and respond to the cries of the world.”
“The path of the feminine mystic illumines a way to cradle the broken heart of the world inside our own broken heart, and to allow that tender holding to be the beginning of any action we might take.”
“If a mystic is one who is intimate with radical unknowingness, a feminine mystic accepts the mystery as the starting point for any kind of meaningful response to the task at hand…” [end excerpt from Patheos.]
Sophia’s Children musings to stir the mystical & Via Feminina heart:
• The Interspiritual Shift – Common Wisdom, Many Traditions
(‘Events’ like NDEs, EPEs, Kundalini Blasts, etc., that catalyze the “direct experience with the Transcendant”)
• The Via Feminina – Divine Feminine Mysteries
• Mary Magdalene & the Inner Way.
Or, check out the new Feisty Divinas Cyber-Salon and Ways of Wisdom Apprenticeship programs that are emerging like a wee green sprout from the Winter earth:
Big Love,
March 12, 2016 at 6:42 pm
“beyond prescribed prayer or corporate theology” – these very things have been on my mind this very morning. 🙂
That all sounds good, Jamie! xxoo
March 13, 2016 at 4:39 pm
Nice post, Jamie.
March 14, 2016 at 3:48 pm
Thanks, Jeff. 🙂
March 13, 2016 at 9:15 pm
<3
March 14, 2016 at 3:49 pm
Indeed, Joanne. 🙂
March 17, 2016 at 6:19 am
Women are natural “mystics” who does not need this reverent space of spirit and love in her heart defined. She is full of it. She also doesn’t need to acquire mysticism via academia or books. She is the natural expression of Nature and life, life and love is her “book”, a life she does not seek to explain to her own mind because she lives what is termed ”mystery” which is ineffable, unable to be learned.
This is why women do not ”seek out the mystery”, it is because She lives it within her Uniquely Feminine Heart and Spirit, when left to her own sensibilities and wisdom uncorrupted by the inquisition mentality, or as Mirabai says, ”nothing between our souls and the naked encounter with the beloved”.
A rose does not question why it is a rose with exquisite scent, it simply is. When you ask her what is the ”mystery” she will tell you she doesn’t know…..because she is it. Its like asking fish what is water, they swim in it all their lives. History shows that men do not ”understand” women…..this is why. And she doesn’t know she is the mystery that is simply her reality. This world needs the wisdom of women.
March 17, 2016 at 3:48 pm
Beautiful, Serena. Thank you for sharing. It reminds me very much of something Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee said, too. Of course, we’re all very much conditioned by this culture and ‘in the world’, so while many may be natural mystics as women, so too do many need to clear away the ‘pavement of culture’ to let that mystic-self and mystic-nature free-and-clear.
It may well be that this very thing, as you so beautifully have expressed, is why there has been a long-standing envy and perhaps fear of the ‘power’ of the Feminine (thus all the various efforts to ‘pave it over’, etc.).
But here we are … remembering, reclaiming, re-embodying. 🙂
xo and blessings,
Jamie