 | JOURNEY TO UNIVERSALISM
by Elizabeth Watson
© 1991, Quaker Universalist Fellowship
|
Yet once again in our time our country is at war. That fact
underlies all our lives, and our being here today. Those of us who work
and pray for peace wonder how it could have happened. When will we ever
learn the futility of violence? As I have worked on this paper, it has
become clear to me that if those who wield temporal power had made the
journey to universalism, they would have found other ways to deal with
the problems in the Middle East. We have all seen the pictures of Earth taken from space. Earth looks
like a little blue and white marble in the vastness and darkness. That
picture lets us see Earth whole. Battle lines are not visible; national
boundaries do not show up on that picture. We see that it is a globe.
If lines were drawn on it to separate enemies, and then extended, they
would eventually curve back on themselves to form circles that include. British physicist James Lovelock and U.S. biologist Lynn Margulis looked at
that picture and brainstormed the Gaia Hypothesis. 1
(It was named for the great primordial Greek Earth Mother.) They noted
that our planet looks different from the other planets. It is a living
planet. They sensed that it is all one living entity, with an innate
capacity to regulate conditions for the optimum benefit of all the
components. Human interference now threatens the whole delicate
ecosystem. And war, of course, accelerates the breakdown of the
supportive structure on which our lives depend. If a critical mass of human beings were to internalize the Gaia
Hypothesis, that we are all part of a single living organism, and that
when we destroy other humans or other species we destroy part of
ourselves, war would become unthinkable. Apparently it is not enough to know this intellectually. Each of us
must make the journey to universalism emotionally, experientially, and
spiritually. That road is the last best hope we have. "Nobody else can
walk it for us. We have to walk it by ourselves." 2
Sharing our journeys may help us clarify our individual paths and
discern the landmarks. The quality of our listening will enable a story
teller to articulate more clearly the journey. "We hear each other into
speech," as theologian Nelle Morton used to say. 3 We have come
together for this purpose, and I have been asked to share my own journey with you.
I want to tell my story in terms of actual travel to three places:
Israel, India, and Greece. Early in life I had a sense of spiritual
roots in these places. The actual journeys took place fairly late in my
life: in 1982, 1983, and 1988, but I had been on pilgrimage
intellectually and spiritually most of my life. When the opportunities
came to make the journeys, I had clear ideas as to where I must go and
what I might see. The terrain was familiar. How far back do my journeys
go? I began my pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as I called it, in
childhood. Israel did not yet exist as a modern state. In high school,
India became another spiritual home. And in college I found I also had
spiritual roots in Greece. In each place a feeling of coming home
confirmed my long sense of spiritual rootedness.
I. JOURNEY TO ISRAELWhen I was seven, I felt called to the ministry, a sense of being
set aside for something holy. This had determined not only the inner
events of my life, but to some extent outward ones as well. My concept
of ministry has grown and changed during the years. I grew up a Methodist, a devout Christian. My loyalty to Jesus knew
no bounds. Not until high school did I begin to question some of the
articles in the Apostles' Creed that I recited each Sunday. From early
childhood I have been a Bible reader. I knew the map of Palestine,
where events took place, and could trace the journeys Jesus made
between Galilee and Judea. For a long time I thought of a Christian
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but by the time George and I went to
Israel in 1982, that was much too narrow. George was assigned to Civilian Public Service in the Second World
War, without pay or dependents' allotments. Our three pre-school
children and I returned to a settlement house in Chicago where George
and I had lived and worked during our graduate school days. An
understanding head resident and a supportive staff were there for me.
The children and I had two rooms and a bath on the top floor of the
main building. I worked for our board and room and they attended a day
nursery affiliated with the house. In the two rooms next to ours lived
a young staff couple, Gerhard and Ruth Neubeck, newly arrived from Nazi
Germany. They had a four year old son, the same age as our eldest
daughter. The children became inseparable friends. At first Gerry and Ruth kept their distance. They could not imagine
anyone being a conscientious objector in the war against Hitler, but
before long they lost their reserve, and their proximity, along with
their love and support, kept me going. The night the war in Europe ended, the three of us went downtown.
The crowds were jubilant but subdued. Many had lost loved ones. My
brother had been killed in the south Pacific. Late in the evening we
dropped into a restaurant for coffee. Ruth and Gerry began to share in
great depth all they had lost: relatives, friends, homes, jobs,
country, language. They talked of living with fear day and night, the
nightmare of getting out and leaving loved ones behind. So deep was
this experience that I said to them that from that time on part of me
would look out on the world through Jewish eyes. And so it has been. The war in the Pacific finally ended. George came home and found a
job. The Neubecks and we left the settlement house for homes of our
own. We have kept in touch over the years. In grade school our son had a best friend, a boy named Isaac Bonder
whose father was a rabbi--not a reform rabbi but a conservative one.
This family kept a kosher kitchen. Ruth, the mother, was a social
worker for a Jewish agency. Several years later, our post-war daughter
entered kindergarten, and there was Isaac's sister. These two now
became best friends. The families were drawn together. The Bonders'
life was undergirded by their faith, as was ours. Ruth and I became
close friends. We had Seder with them and attended Isaac's bar mitzvah.
Occasionally they attended Friends Meeting with us. Isaac grew up to be a rabbi, and within two years of ordination,
died of leukemia. We lost our eldest daughter in an automobile
accident. Grief drew Ruth and me even closer. They made the decision to
emigrate to Israel, and left Chicago the same month that we went to
Friends World College. Ten years later, in 1982, George and I visited the Friends World
College program in Israel--my chance at last to visit the Holy Land.
Ruth asked us to spend two days with them at the beginning of our time
there. Our plane arrived in Tel Aviv and we drove to Jerusalem to the
Bonders' apartment on the top floor of a new building. When the
elevator deposited us there, Ruth led us to the balcony. The sun was setting. There lay Jerusalem, its golden domes shining
in the last rays of the sun, its buildings of native stone turned a
luminous rose in that unearthly light. I had expected the city to be
beautiful, but I was overwhelmed by this vision of the Holy City: the
City of God imposed on the actual earthly city. It will never leave me.
Next morning the vision still touched with radiance the actual streets
and buildings and people. After two days we were guests of Artur and Shirley Isenberg, joint
directors of the Friends World College Middle East Program, our dear
friends and colleagues. They are Israeli doves, critical of their
government's aggression and policy in the West Bank. They scrupulously
made sure that we saw all the Christian sites in Jerusalem. The sites
were disappointing. Each place something had happened, an ornate church
or chapel had been erected, so that there was no sense of the original
event. Bethlehem turned out to be a tourist trap. We visited students on project, as far south as desert research
centers near Beersheba. Then we drove north along the Mediterranean. We
turned eastward in Galilee and about noon came into Tiberias on the Sea
of Galilee. We had lunch at a seaside restaurant, eating "Peter's
fish," bony but good. Out on the water we saw a few simple fishing
boats. I began to catch a glimpse of Jesus walking along the shore. After lunch, we visited Nazareth, a modern city, and then Capernaum,
which is an archeological dig. Until 1894 a Bedouin tribe eked out a
poor existence there among the thistles and scrubby plants. Then a
Franciscan order bought the land and began to excavate. We went round
the site with a knowledgeable guide. He identified a foundation which
they think may have been Peter's house. We walked down what had been a
street in front of it. Excavation was going on at other sites. At the
end of the street were the ruins of a large Byzantine church, beneath
which they had found a tile floor, still in very good condition, in
which were ancient Jewish symbols. The guide dated it back to the time
of Jesus. This was probably the village synagogue where Jesus had
healed the man possessed of demons. I took off my sandals, for the
place we were standing, beside that ancient floor, was holy ground. I
could visualize him preaching there, and then walking down the street,
up which we had walked, to Peter's house. Peter's mother-in-law was
ill, and Jesus healed her. On a Sunday we left our friends and took a bus to Ramallah on the
West Bank, to attend Friends Meeting and to spend the afternoon with
Faud and Jean Zaru. Faud was principal of the Friends Boys School. We
learned something of the difficult conditions under which
Arabs--Muslim, Christian, Quaker--exist, with no passports, mail coming
"via Israel," and all the indignities, restrictions, bars to
communication and arbitrary school closings. There was, of course, no
communication between the Isenbergs and the Zarus, but the two women
sent greetings to each other. Jean hoped Shirley would find a publisher
for her book. Our pilgrimage to Israel brought into focus my journey to
universalism. First, at the center, is a deep commitment to the Jesus
of the Gospels, and a rejection of the creeds about him. I am glad to
be a Quaker, sharing George Fox's vision of "primitive Christianity
revived," that is, first century Christianity, before it became
established in the Roman Empire, before the creeds were formulated. Second, there is the inner knowledge that Jesus was a Jew, and that
I am not just a Christian but a Judeo-Christian. I also carry the
knowledge that just as we dissent from some policies of our government,
so there are Israelis of good will who are critical of some of their
government's policies. Third, I feel a deep compassion for all to whom this land is holy,
especially for the Palestinians in the West Bank.
And finally I carry with me a vision of the City of God imposed on
our own over-crowded, violent, noisy, exciting, secular cities. William
Blake also saw that vision. He wrote a beautiful poem about it, which
concludes:
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land. 4
--and I add, in all Earth's green and pleasant lands, and likewise in the
pleasant brown and desert lands.
II. JOURNEY TO INDIA
The summer I was fourteen, my Methodist Church in Cleveland sent me
to a missionary conference at which the main speaker was the wife of
the Methodist Bishop of India. He had just resigned, because, he said,
he felt it time for an Indian to be the bishop. His wife was more candid. They had come to know Mohandas K. Gandhi,
and felt the inconsistency of trying to make Christians of Hindus, when
Hinduism had produced a more Christ-like person than anyone they knew.
She was full of Gandhi, and talked of him in her formal addresses and
informally afterwards. I was fascinated. Here was someone in our own
century who was living out the teachings of Jesus, and on a large
scale. I wanted to know more. I sought out the Bishop's wife at her hotel, and she was generous
with her time. She answered my questions, gave me things to read, and
promised to send more. She kept in touch with me for years. At first I was interested in Gandhi because he seemed to me to
demonstrate that the teachings of Jesus were workable. I soon came to
see that Gandhi was important in his own right. In time I came to believe that what God had to say to the twentieth
century was poured into this little brown lawyer in his loincloth. I
wanted to go to India and be his follower. I mentioned this at the
dinner table one night and my mother reacted with shocked incredulity.
My wise father quietly said, "You don't have to go to India to follow
Gandhi, you can follow him here." His words made sense to me. I made
the commitment to non-violence at that time. It has underlain my life
and George's and our life together. That fall in high school I took a speech course. When it came my
turn to make a formal speech to the class, I talked about Gandhi. The
teacher spoke to me afterwards. Gandhi was in the news, he said, and
people were curious. Would I make my speech elsewhere. He became my
booking agent and I went out all over greater Cleveland, to men's
luncheon clubs, women's organizations, church groups, and high school
assemblies, carrying Gandhi's story. After graduation I went to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. Word of
my speaking preceded me, and I was invited to join the University
Speakers Bureau to carry the message of Gandhi all over southwest Ohio
and eastern Indiana. I do not know how many times I have spoken on
Gandhi, but it runs into the hundreds. I had to read constantly to keep up with Gandhi, for these were
momentous days in his career. And as my know ledge of Gandhi grew, so
also my interest in all things Indian grew. A bookseller alerted me to
new material. One day he put into my hands a small book of poetry,
called Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore. 5 The word
means "song offerings." Here for the first time I found in words my own
inner experience of practicing the presence of God. The metaphors and
similes might be Bengali, the poet a Hindu, but the poetry rang true,
for it was my own experience. Tagore's little book has been my
companion for sixty years, a never-failing source of strength. So I discovered India's other great gift to the world in our
century. Interest in Tagore ran parallel to interest in Gandhi. I have
actually written more on Tagore than on Gandhi, although I've spoken
more often on Gandhi. I continued to try to be Gandhi's follower. In our early years in
Chicago, George and I were involved in the civil rights movement. In
the Gandhian tradition, we sat-in in restaurants with black friends. I
worked for the Regional Office of the American Friends Service
Committee at a time when we were opening up job and housing
opportunities. Later I worked for a community organization in a
neighborhood turning from white to black. Our goal was a stable
interracial neighborhood. We bought a house and raised our family
there. Meanwhile we hoped way would open to go to India. Several times we
explored this with the American Friends Service Committee, but each
time it fell through, either from their side or from ours. As our fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, our daughter, Jean
McCandless, began to think of some sort of celebration. She had grown
up seeing Gandhi's picture on my desk, and knew of my longing to go to
India. She and her siblings raised the money for an Indian pilgrimage.
We took a year to plan it. And in 1988 we spent six weeks in India. Our pilgrimage was truly blessed. Everywhere people welcomed us and
cared for us. Everywhere extra, unplanned things happened, to enrich
our experience, like a village festival in West Bengal, and a visit to
the studio of K. B. Patel, the sculptor who did the Gandhi in Union
Square in New York City. We had rail passes, and often ate rather dubious looking things,
from vessels that were probably not too clean. We were scrupulous about
carrying boiled water with us, however. Neither of us had any
gastro-intestinal problems the whole time. We both had a sense of
well-being. We visited ashrams and other places associated with Gandhi. We
traveled to some fairly remote places to meet people carrying on in the
Gandhi tradition. We spent several memorable days at Tagore's school,
Santiniketan, northwest of Calcutta. We worshipped with various communities after the pattern Gandhi had
established. Worship morning and evening was out of doors, with no
walls or doors to keep anyone from joining. There were prayers and
hymns of all the great religious traditions. So we recited the Lord's
Prayer and sang "Lead, Kindly Light" with each group, participating in
the other traditions as we could. On Gandhi's birthday, we sat in silence at the Friends Rural Centre,
Rasulia, with a friend of Muslim background. We shared "Lead, Kindly
Light" together. Aziz Pabaney will be at Pendle Hill in the Spring
Quarter, 1991. We spent an evening with Jai Gopal Malik, a Friend of Muslim
background, and the only Quaker left in New Delhi. He goes each Sunday
morning to the Y.W.C.A., hangs out the sign announcing meeting, and if
no one comes, meditates in silence for the hour. We spent an evening
with him. He is a scholarly man who shared the fruits of his study with
us. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he said, all begin with the fact
of God's existence. From that creeds develop. Buddhism begins with the
fact of human suffering--universal suffering really--and from that
comes compassion. We visited Vinoba Bhave's ashram, near Wardha, which he left to a
group of women who had walked all over India, making contact with women
in villages. They manage it now, using consensus decision-making. Some
men have joined the group. One of our richest experiences was with Narayan Desai, son of
Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's confidant, secretary, and close friend, who
died in prison with his head on Gandhi's lap. Narayan spent his boyhood
at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, and his teenage years at Sevagram
Ashram. Gandhi was part of his family. Now he heads the Institute for
Total Revolution, a training school for people wishing to carry on
Gandhi's work in villages. We visited classes and spoke to the
students, with Narayan interpreting, since none of them spoke English.
In the evenings he talked of his life with Gandhi. It was history come
alive. Narayan's wife was visiting her sister in Delhi, but he spoke of her
with so much love that we felt her presence. She had designed the
simple buildings and laid out the plantings of the Institute. At our
next stop, the ashram at Ahmedabad, we learned that she had died of a
heart attack. We participated in a moving memorial service, which began
with chants and prayer and turned into something like a Quaker memorial
service, with people speaking out of silence. George was led to speak. It would take a book to convey something of the richness of the
whole experience, and indeed, George and I have just completed writing
it. A cousin, into desktop publishing in retirement, is helping us
produce it. From India I carry the experiential knowledge that there are many
paths to God, and that among those who are truly seekers, there is no
barrier to communication at the deepest level, though we may not speak
the same language or worship in the same way. But mostly India was people. Tagore wrote:
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not;
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made brothers
and sisters of strangers. 6
And Gandhi said,
It is enough for me to see the Light and act up to it, and it is more than
enough when I gain companions on the onward journey.7
The human race is my family. The planet is my home.
III. JOURNEY TO GREECE
When I entered college, I registered for a class in Greek. I was
preparing for the ministry and wanted to read the New Testament in its
original language. At the first class session I found I was the only
student: for several years, no one had taken Greek. The professor had
been teaching Greek art and history and classics in translation. I had
expected to take two years of Greek, but the professor was due to
retire the year I graduated. How could I leave him with no Greek class?
I took a major in Greek. Professor Clark was a scholar of the old school, steeped in the
classics. He had spent much time in Greece and loved the country and
its ancient heritage. I was to spend time with this man five days a
week for four years. Our relationship became one of deep friendship. I
was learning much more than the language. We read the New Testament together, and we also read Plato, Homer,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and much more. As I gained in fluency, I did not
have to look up words constantly and could appreciate the flow and
sheer beauty of what I read. I came to share my professor's
appreciation of the perfection of Greek art, sculpture, and
architecture. I came to cherish the Greek ideals of proportion, of
beauty and truth. One day he brought a poem I already knew and loved, "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
by John Keats, with its closing lines:
"Beauty is truth; truth, beauty," That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
We discussed whether this was really true.
Greek mythology also entered my life. I came to love those ancient
myths that underlie our Western Civilization. The interaction of
mortals with deities--those very human gods and goddesses--spoke deeply
to me. Rilke has a beautiful sonnet about an ancient torso of Apollo which
is in the Louvre. He says that this fragment, without head or limbs, is
so perfect in itself, so suggestive of the whole, so powerful, that
once experiencing it, you will never be the same again. He ends the
sonnet abruptly with this line:
...You must change your life. 9
My whole experience of majoring in Greek did change my life. Greece was
my professor's spiritual home, and it became mine also.
The year George and I were at Woodbrooke, in England, we went to
Greece during the winter holiday. Unlike India, where a sense of
well-being accompanied us, my Greek experience did not get off
auspiciously. Modern Greeks are heavy smokers. On the plane from
London, people smoked all over the plane, ignoring the no-smoking
section. When we arrived in Athens, we were all funneled into a long
line for customs. Everyone but us was smoking. When we finally got to
the counter, the official, smoking like a chimney, gave us a hard time,
and went through our bags thoroughly. The taxi driver puffed away, and
felt it too cold to have a window open. I arrived at the hotel, quite
ill, and spent the first few days of our precious time in Greece in bed
with pneumonia. In many ways December is a good time to go to Greece. Air pollution
is at a minimum, and tourists are relatively few in number. However,
boats do not run to the little islands, so I have unfinished business
in Greece. As soon as I was well enough to be up, we began our sight-seeing.
There were only a dozen or so on the huge tourist bus that took us to
Delphi on a bright winter day. My sense of excitement grew as we
traveled, for the dramatic mountainous countryside seemed somehow
familiar. I sensed the configuration of mountains against the sky
around each bend in the road. Delphi was an ancient city at the foot of Mount Parnassus. The
mountain has a deep cleft or ravine roughly in the center. At the
bottom of the cleft is a cave, with a spring, home of the oracle whom
Greeks consulted before making a journey, or a marriage, or a war. The
road has been brought in at this level. This shrine was sacred to Apollo. Scattered on the hillside to the
left of the oracle's cave are the ruins of temples and other buildings
and a small amphitheater. The guide lined us up to tour the site. My lungs were not fully healed and I knew I was not up to the climb.
I urged George to goon, and I sat down on a marble column that had
fallen over, probably centuries before. The stone was slightly warm in
the sun and made a comfortable bench. In addition to not being entirely well yet, I was depressed over a
tragedy in the life of one of our daughters. In the course of a bitter
divorce, her husband had disappeared with their small son, barely two
years old. They had been missing almost a year. 9
Suddenly there was a burst of bright bird song, catching my
attention and directing it to the right side of the mountain beyond the
oracle. Out of that hillside grow many trees; in addition to
evergreens, there are aspens, their leaves all golden at this time of
year. The wind had set all those golden leaves a tremble. I knew that
in Greek mythology this is a sign of the presence of a deity. And then
I felt it, that overwhelming sense of Presence, flooding my whole
being. I believe that God comes to us according to our needs: sometimes as
a burning bush; sometimes as a stranger asking for a drink of water;
sometimes like a father, strong and courageous, standing between us and
disaster; sometimes like the comfort of a mother's lap. Do you know
Psalm 131, with its haunting line, "My soul is like a weaned child on
its mother's lap"? The Presence I felt at Delphi was unquestionably female. I had a
sense of a warmth and comfort, of being gathered into everlasting arms.
And I felt assured that wherever our small grandson was, whether alive
or dead, he too was held in those arms. I had been a feminist for some years before I went to Delphi. This
experience confirmed for me that God is larger than our human
sexuality, and inclusive of both feminine and masculine qualities. Our
patriarchal conception of an exclusively male God is too small. For perhaps four thousand years we have lived in a society in which
the qualities generally associated with men have been in the
ascendancy: courage, risk-taking, a tolerance of violence, a
willingness to assume power over other people for whatever reason,
noble or base. The experience of men has been normative for all people.
This shows up in our language, job opportunities, and the reduction of
women to sex objects in advertising, and consequent violence against
women. Other qualities are generally associated with women: caring,
healing, nurturing, and a concern to protect life, particularly young
life. These are generalizations, of course. Not all men are violent and
greedy for power, and some women are cruel and devious. The men in my life--grandfather, father, brother, husband, son--have
all been supportive of me, and I love them too dearly to want to build
a new matriarchal society to replace the patriarchal one that has
brought us to the war in the Persian Gulf. However, caring, healing,
nurturing, and a concern for life--all these feminine qualities--must
become part of our nation's value system, if we arc to save the planet
from destruction. A Jungian analyst, Edward C. Whitmont, reports that a number of his
patients, both men and women, are having dreams of an archetypal female
figure. 10 Another Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, reports
a "Black Madonna" and a crone-like figure appearing in the dreams of
some of her clients. 11 Both Whitmont and Woodman see this
as evidence that we are collectively undergoing a shift of values, and
that qualities of tenderness and caring will be coming into ascendancy.
In this they see hope of a way out of our global problems. At Delphi all this was confirmed for me. My journey to universalism
is based on the full personhood of each human being. And I experienced
the Deity as fully feminine there. But I am sure it is fully masculine
too, and with infinite additional possibilities we cannot fathom. But wait. There is more. I had known for years that long before it
was a shrine to Apollo, Delphi had been sacred to the great primordial
Earth Mother, as far back as the dawn of human experience. "The navel
of the world," the Greeks called the place. I had not yet heard of the
Gaia Hypothesis, but I experienced its truth at Delphi. The Presence
that enfolded me and comforted me was indeed the Earth Mother. And I
knew inwardly that her ability to comfort me grew out of her
woundedness. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, says we must "hear within ourselves the
sound of the Earth crying." 12
I heard it at Delphi. I felt Earth's grief for the oil spills, the
destruction of the forests, and all the endangered and extinct species. At Delphi I committed myself to the whole living planet, and felt
oneness with every member of creation. Later reading Lovelock's book, Gaia:
A New Look at Life on Earth, I knew beyond doubt that he and Lynn Margulis were right.
The Earth Mother came to me a year later, in December 1984, the
night before major surgery for cancer. She held out both hands to me.
In one was life, and in the other death. I wanted desperately to live,
for I have work still to do, but I knew that in the end it did not
matter. My body would, sooner or later, go back to the Earth to become
part of the ongoing recycling of life. This was a further stage on my
journey. Life and death too are a whole. Thus far I have come on my journey to universalism--my journey to
the whole of Earth. With George Fox, my journey has been coming "to
walk cheerfully over the earth, answering that of God in everyone." It has been acknowledging, with Martin Buber, the autonomy of each
member of creation by greeting each as Thou. In his beautiful book, I and Thou,
he writes movingly of saying "Thou" to trees and to animals. 13
The journey to universalism is walking the Indian road, making the
Hindu gesture of greeting, and saying, "Namaste," "I greet the God in
you." And it is knowing with Asclepius, the legendary Greek physician,
that "only the wounded can heal." We who feel the brokenness of the
human family and the woundedness of Earth as our own must be the
healers. The fate of the earth is up to those who make the journey to
universalism. And then I go out under the night sky and feel the vastness of the
universe, knowing that we live on a satellite of a minor star in one of
the countless galaxies of that universe. And I know that the journey is
not over. The journey to universalism is a journey to the universe.
Footnotes
1. J. E. Lovelock, GAIA: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press,
1979. See also, Lovelock, The Ages of GAIA: A Biography of our Living Earth.
New York, W. W. Norton, 1988; Bantam Paperback, 1990.
2. Quoting the spiritual, "Lonesome Valley."
3. Nelle Morton taught at Drew University, and was the first
theologian to teach a university course on women and religion. She was
active in movements for peace, human rights and women's liberation, and
a mentor to many of the present generation. Her major work is The Journey Is Home,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1985. 1 heard her use this phrase at a conference In 1976, and it
has been widely used.
4. Final four lines of a poem by William Blake called "Jerusalem,"
which appears at the beginning of a longer work called "Milton." 5. Rabindranath Tagore. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a
collection of prose translations made by the author from the original
Bengali, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. New York,
Macmillan, 1934. 6. Lines from Gitanjali no. 63.
7. From a book called Gandhi: One Hundred Years, published in 1969, in England on the
centennial of his birth, p. 239.
8. Rainer Marie Rilke, "Archaischer Torso Apollos," in Neue Gedichte, Anderer
Teil. Translated by various people, including M. D. Herter Norton, Translations from the
Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. New York, W. W. Norton, 1938, p. 1811, and more
recently by Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Marie Rilke, Translation and
Commentary, New York, Harper and Row, 1981, p. 136 (commentary), p. 147,
(translation).
9. Our daughter lives in Minneapolis. Our grandson was found by the FBI in Atlanta,
Georgia in February 1984.
10. Edward C. Whitmont, Return of the Goddess. New York, Crossroads Press, 1982.
11. Common Boundary, March/April 1989. "The Conscious
Feminine," an interview with Marion Woodman by Barbara Goodrich-Dunn,
"The feminine in many guises--like the Black Madonna and the Crone--is
erupting in individuals the world over." 12. Thich Nhat Hanh is quoted as saying this in John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming
and Arne Ness, Thinking Like a Mountain, Philadelphia, New Society Publishers,
1988, p.7.
13. Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufman. New York, Scribner, 1970.
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