Your country wants you to spend

It is almost four-o-clock in the afternoon and the sun is already setting in a clear blue sky. Here in Brighid's Isles we have already had the first snow of winter and the dark and the cold cover the land. Winter is such a beautiful time for introspection, for entering the heart with the Goddesses and letting them gently open us to all that is good and beautiful and true.

Meanwhile the news media are buzzing with government initiatives to help us spend our way out of a recession. It seems that our country wants us to shop and our government is willing to lend us our own money to do so for a whole year before they claw it all back in more taxation. 

Goddess help us all! We spend all this money and have nothing to show for it. Buy a new car and it loses half its value the moment it is driven off the garage forecourt. Buy the latest electronic wonder and we are only happy until a new model is introduced eight months later. Buy a printer and it is cheaper to buy a new one than replace the ink; so the old one goes into the landfill. We repair nothing because we are told it is so environmentally friendly to recycle the old and buy new. But worse of all we have forgotten how to share what we have.

There is an old story - given a divine mandate - about a harsh and cruel man who goes off on a journey entrusting three of his servants with differing sums of money according to their ability to work the monetary system. It is a story that tells us how the weak always go to the wall and how violence is always inflicted upon the weak by the strong. One of the servants is so terrified of his master that worry and stress take over his life. The other servants do nothing to help because they are too busy making money for their master. When the harsh and cruel man returns he shows absolutely no compassion to the servant. He makes no attempt to help him. The servant is simply condemned. And this is held up as a model to follow. Indeed it has become the model that is followed.

Since I started writing this it has become entirely dark and the stars have appeared in the night sky. To be alive under a starlit sky is a wonderful gift. Creation shares its beauty with all. I have eyes to see, I have a roof over my head and food on the table so I am rich. I have others to love and I feel loved and cherished so I have riches beyond avarice. 

If we can appreciate the beauty and wonder and magic that is all around us then the Goddesses have touched us. If we have learnt to share and be content with enough we have found Goddess wisdom. Sometimes less is in truth much more.

Balancing on Air

My local paper has been covering the closure of a number of churches in the area. Each church has its own unique history. Each has faithful people who have invested a great deal of emotional and spiritual capital in the living community that makes up the local church. It is obvious that a church cannot be closed without breaking a chain of history and hurting a lot of people. We should all be sad at their loss. Those in authority need to be blessed with more than their fair share of tact and sensitivity when they are faced with closing a church.

In the days when churches were normally open and anyone could enter freely at any time of day I would often spend time in one. To leave a busy city street and enter a church is to enter a different world where history matters, where the veil between the living and the dead is thin, where silence prevails, and where prayers spoken through the ages hang like magic in the air. To enter a country church you usually have to pass the graves of our ancestors who encircle the building in an embrace of love. Their presence reminding us of our debt to them and our duty to honour them.

Our historic churches have become part of the landscape and now appear as benign and beautiful as the trees. Walking into their peaceful interior spaces it is easy to forget that this was not always true. Indeed most historic cathedrals and churches were designed and built as much as symbols of power and authority as places of worship.

The gracious Norman cathedrals of England were a potent sign of Norman power and superiority, built strong, huge and impressive to remind a people that they had been conquered. Within decades of their construction there were expulsions of Jews from England, France and Spain and legislation against homosexuals was enacted across Europe. Many town churches were built to proclaim the power and prosperity of craft guilds that actively worked to exclude women from membership. Rich and powerful men filled cathedrals and churches with their tombs and memorials and stained glass displaying their coats of arms. Military flags festooned the ceilings. Special pews were installed for the local gentry, the rich rented seating at the front and the poor were sent to the back.

I mention this because Geraldine Charles has written an excellent article entitled, ‘Balancing on Air’ for the current issue of Goddess Pages. In this incisive article she addresses the question, "Yeah, but what about balance?" She writes:

"It should hardly need to be pointed out that a Goddess Temple exists for a reason – in part to redress, in a very small way, thousands of years of complete imbalance ... On the right hand I will put the x thousand years of patriarchy that affect my every thought in ways I cannot begin to enumerate, particularly as many of them probably aren’t even conscious. On the left – how shall I symbolize the deliberate decision to have no representation of the god, the male principle, in a small, one-roomed Goddess temple in an English country town?"

For me, discovering the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury was an absolute revelation. It is beautiful, peaceful, prayerful, overflowing with love, alive with creative energy and totally devoid of hierarchical power and authority.

In a world obsessed with power and dominion this small, one-roomed Goddess temple points to a better way.

In a world where fundamentalist, creationist leaders proclaim that only a God powerful enough to create an entire universe in six days is worthy of worship; it points to Goddesses who are present in a grain of corn and the hum of a bee’s wing.

In a country that spends £34 billion pounds on offensive capability and sells the means of death to nations around the world; it proclaims the true beauty of life, produces a riotous flowering of creativity and reminds us that we are all divine.

Our human society is desperately imbalanced. In England a small church closes and people are hurt and feel powerless in the face of authority. Not everyone has a car, buses are infrequent on a Sunday and some will find it hard to travel 2 or 3 miles to the next church. In Africa a woman regularly walks 15 or 20 miles to church in the tropical sun.

The Goddess Temple is 260 miles from my home and I know many who travel that distance and more just to be in this special place. When we cannot travel our hearts are our temples and the Goddess inspires all the choices made to work towards a better world.

What defines us?

The comments posted on blogs are often very revealing. I hope Athana doesn't mind me quoting from an anonymous comment on her Radical Goddess Thealogy blog. Anonymous writes, "Do you have a regular job? If not, when is the last time you actually worked full time to make a living? Are you really a hippie?"

It is disturbing that today we often define people by their job, their spending power and their postcode. As if any of these things come close to defining who a person really is. The idea of working long regular hours away from home using artificial light to work in the dark of winter and oil to commute many miles each day is really quite novel. Most human societies have worked close to home according to the flow of the seasons and the lengthening and shortening days. Indeed, they have also given a lot of time to dance, music, play, storytelling and honouring the invisible world.

Life is such a precious thing and the elderly remind us how short it is. If we have not found more to life than work, retail therapy and a mini-mansion at a fashionable address then we have truly failed to live.

I have a great respect for good teachers, who despite all the restrictions placed upon them by government, still manage to open young minds and hearts to the beauty, mystery and magic that is all around. For it is such things that truly define a person.

Do you wake up on a morning and stand in awe and amazement at the sheer beauty, diversity and fecundity of the world? Have you learnt to truly love and delight in your own beautiful body? Have you learnt to truly love your partner? Are you passionate in your work for justice and peace? Is there a lightness in your step, do you dance and sing, do you delight in story and myth? Do you sense the magic in all things? Do you give freely of your time and talents to make the world a better place? Do you find time for play, for silence?

These, and many more like them are the things that truly define a person. Beside these, issues such as our job, bank balance and address pale into insignificance. Answer yes to some of the above and your are walking in the footsteps of the Goddess.

Goddess Economy

It is always a joy to give and receive gifts around the Winter Solstice and I love the adventure involved in searching for beautiful things that will bring a little magic into someone's life.

Here in Brighid's Isles it isn't always easy. Somehow we have all been asleep whilst the big chain stores of the corporate world have cloned our high streets. Now they all have the same stores selling the same boring things, much of it manufactured by women working long hours for poor wages in the far east. In truth our high streets have become battlegrounds of domination and competition aimed at relieving us of our money as quickly as possible.

I live between two cities, Leeds and York and they couldn't be more different. Leeds is a typical british clone town whilst York is filled with small independent shops offering a veritable cornucopia of magic and delight. In Leeds people look rushed and harassed. In York you can see the delight on people's faces and they seem to have time to stop and socialise.

So York seems to me to be closer to a Goddess economy, one based on beauty, magic, nurture, co-operation and real social interaction. In Leeds you go into a shop and buy. In York you still go into a shop and buy; but you also receive gifts, personal service, the delight of an artisan in her own work, the chance to talk and exchange ideas.

By now you can guess in which city I bought my Winter gifts ! However, Leeds didn't seem to be all corporate greed for there was one oasis of difference which made it actually worthwhile to get the bus into that city. The old Corn Exchange is a beautiful building which was a haven for small independent shops selling their own kind of magic and every weekend the floor was filled with artisans selling their wares. The place buzzed and had its own special atmosphere. It rapidly became THE place for the city's teenagers to socialise. A little Goddess economy in a world of corporate greed.

Then came the bad news. It was suddenly announced by the owners of the Corn Exchange that it was "under-performing" and all the small shopkeepers and artisans were given notice to quit. Instead, the Corn Exchange was to become an expensive restaurant and a luxury food hall.

Needless to say "under-performing" is all about greed. As a value added, gift added, magical, Goddess economy place to socialise and shop the Corn Exchange was quite clearly performing very well indeed.

So last Saturday I took the bus into Leeds to visit the only place that made it worth the effort to travel to that city, you guessed it - the Corn Exchange. Over the last few weeks many of the shops had given up and closed and there were few artisans left weaving their magic on the floor.

But, one thing gave me real hope for the future. On a cold, wet, winter afternoon some 300 teenagers dressed in the finery you could only buy in the magical shops of the Corn Exchange stood outside protesting the closure. Their spirits were high and their behaviour impeccable. Three corporate heavies watched them closely, their presence and their attire quite incongruous. I felt really, really proud of our young people and they gave me real hope for the future and for a truly Goddess Gift economy.