Mirabai Starr's Blog

On a dark night
Inflamed by love-longing–
O, exquisite risk!–
Undetected, I slipped away,
My house, at last, grown still. 

Sometimes it is in our prisons that we find our freedom. In 1577, when St. John of the Cross was thirty-five years old, he was abducted by his own monastic brothers and incarcerated for nine months in a monastery in Toledo, Spain. It was there, as he languished, that the caterpillar of his old self dissolved and the butterfly of his authentic being grew its wings.

Purgation

Secure in the darkness,
I climbed the secret ladder in disguise–
O, exquisite risk!–
Concealed by the darkness,
My house, at last, grown still. 

John was a contemplative and a poet. He was undoubtedly an introvert. But he was also a revolutionary. After six years of his engaged leadership in Teresa of Ávila’s efforts to reform the Carmelite order and return it to its roots in desert spirituality, a contingent of Carmelite monks, opposed to the reform, broke into John’s dwelling in the middle of the night, dragged him away, and locked him up. His prison cell, a stone room barely large enough for his body, had formerly been a latrine. His single robe rotted from his body in the fetid heat of summer, and in winter he shivered in the rag that remained. Several times a week, the brothers brought him out to be flogged while they enjoyed their midday meal. Otherwise, he sat in the darkness, tracking the stars through the single small window, high up in the wall of his cell.

“Have you heard?” one monk would say to another in a stage whisper outside the locked door of John’s cell. “The Reform has been crushed.” Or “Teresa is dead.” Sometimes they would direct their comments to the prisoner: “You have been forgotten, Hermano. Renounce la Madre and her wickedness. She doesn’t care about you anyway.” John did not believe them, and he did not forsake his mentor.

At least, he did his best not to believe them.

Doubt began to infiltrate his psyche and, though he clung to the life-raft of faith, it began to disintegrate in his hands and he drifted into despair. Like Jonah in the belly of the fierce fish (an analogy John later evoked when he wrote the commentary to Dark Night of the Soul), the imprisoned friar found himself suspended in the void. He was unable to move toward any kind of hopeful future, or backward to the innocent idealism that had led to his being swallowed up in this terrible emptiness.

It was painful enough for him to wonder if God had given up on him, but the true agony descended when he began to find himself giving up on God. At last, he simply ran out of energy and let himself down into the arms of radical unknowingness–which is where the transmutation of the lead of his agony began to unfold into the gold of mystical poetry.
It was poetry that saved him. 

Not at first, and not all at once, but little by little. Even as John cried out to a Beloved whose presence he could no longer detect and whose existence made no sense, his longing began to take the shape of words, and the words formed themselves into stanzas. He repeated these poems, again and again, until they were seared into his heart and fixed in his mind.

Where have you hidden away,
Beloved, and left me grieving?
Why would you hurt me, abandon me,
Fleeing like a deer?
I rushed after you,
But my cries only drifted in the empty air. 

Like the Bride in the Scripture he loved best–the Song of Songs–John went “tracking the sandal-mark” of his Beloved through the streets and plazas of his ravaged heart and, finding no trace of the One who “wounded his soul and set it on fire,” converted his yearning into sublime love-language. It is the fruit of that alchemy that sustained the poet in his imprisonment and has continued to feed the rest of us for five centuries.

Illumination

That sweet night: a secret.
Nobody saw me;
I did not see a thing.
No other light, no other guide
Than the one burning in my heart.

This light led the way
More clearly than the risen sun
To where he was waiting for me
–the one I knew so intimately–
In a place where no one could find us.

Finally, a sympathetic guard slipped sheets of parchment, a quill, and ink into John’s cell so that he could write down the poems he spent his days reciting. That same Brother probably looked the other way when, one night, after the time it takes for a fertilized egg to ripen into a baby and enter the world, John fashioned a robe from strips of the cloth that covered his pallet, tossed it over the ledge of his high window, and hoisted himself out of hell. He scaled the outer wall, crept across the courtyard, and scrambled over the monastery walls. Legend has it that a black dog was waiting for him–a shadow against the darkness–and led him to one of Teresa’s convents in Toledo, where the Sisters swept him into safety and nursed him back to health.

A deep quietude settled on John’s soul as he sat in the convent garden in the mornings with the sun on his face, and as he climbed the hill to embrace the night sky he so loved. From this peace arose a wondrous joy, and from that ecstasy, one of the greatest poems in the canon of mystical literature bubbled forth like water from an artesian well: Songs of the Soul. From this sensual love poem, at the behest of the Sisters, came one of the most important teachings on the spiritual life ever articulated: the prose commentary known as the Dark Night of the Soul.

This is the teaching that saved my life when I was thrown into a prison of my own.

Union

O night, that guided me!
O night, sweeter than sunrise!
O night, that joined lover with Beloved!
Lover transformed in Beloved!

Radical loss can be a prison, and grief can feel like a life sentence. Toward the end of 2001, on the very day that my first book came out–a new translation of Dark Night of the Soul–my fourteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, was killed in a car accident. I heard the prison gate clang shut as I was plunged into a bondage of the heart so violent that I could not imagine ever being set free to live again among the human family. I could not imagine tasting the essence of a ripe pear, appreciating the beauty of the sunrise after another sleepless winter night, or caring about the fragrance of an infant’s hair.

But John of the Cross had taught me just enough to know that my only task was to rest in the Mystery and stop trying to solve the problem of death. My highest calling was to relinquish my attachment to feeling the presence of the Holy One so that the Holy One could do her work in me. Years of contemplative practice had taught me just enough to know not to believe everything I think, or even to expect my practice to save me. Like my spiritual brother John, I closed my eyes and composed silent love poems to a God in whom I no longer believed.

“If only the souls this happens to,” says John, referring to the spiritual crisis known as a dark night of the soul, “could just be quiet, setting aside all concern about accomplishing any task–interior or exterior–and quit troubling themselves about accomplishing anything! Soon, within that very stillness and release, they would begin to subtly taste that interior nourishment, a nourishment so delicate that, if they were purposely to try, they could never taste it.” 

And so I did that. I sat in the center of the conflagration of my heart and watched (with a mixture of self-compassion and mild curiosity) while the flames consumed who I thought I was. Into this wreckage began to seep the “subtle sweetness” of which John spoke. I experienced the breath of my Beloved on my eyelids, the warmth of his hand in my hand. In my unfathomable brokenness, I began to discover my hidden wholeness. My captivity became my emancipation. It was not dramatic; it was subtle, almost imperceptible, but I began to recognize it as a gift of grace, and I said “yes,” and I said “thank you.”

Annihilation

I lost myself. Forgot myself.
I lay my face against the Beloved’s face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind.
Abandoning my cares
Among the lilies, forgotten.

Not only do we have a tendency to miss the chance to engage our experiences of incarceration as monastic opportunities; the reverse is also true: we resist emancipation. John refers to the Israelites as they crossed the wilderness from captivity in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. Every morning, when they awoke, the ground was covered with manna from heaven. Every morsel contained the flavor that each wayfarer most loved. And yet, what did the former slaves spend their days craving? “The meats and onions they ate in Egypt.” The food of bondage. We get attached to our inner Pharaohs, as Jewish wisdom teaches us in the Passover liturgy. We settle into the comfortable misery of the familiar prison cells into which we have sentenced ourselves and refuse to embrace the Holy Wildness of spiritual liberation.

The great mystics of all traditions teach us that the spiritual life is not really about consolation; it is about annihilation. It is about allowing the small self, which suffers from the illusion of separation from God, to burn in the flames of transformation so that the True Self may emerge. “In this way,” John writes, “God makes the soul die to all that is not inherently of God. When the soul is stripped bare of her old skin, God clothes her afresh. Like the eagle, her youth is revitalized. She is clothed in newness of being.” 

Our prisons take many forms. Some of us struggle with the very real circumstances of physical incarceration. Many of us suffer from profound losses; not only the death of loved ones, but also serious health diagnoses, or loss of a job, career, or community. We may grapple with chronic mental illness, addiction, or the addictive behaviors of loved ones. Embracing our imprisonment as a chance for a direct encounter with the Sacred is counter-intuitive, but it may be the very blessing we most need for our journey home. Stripped of all sensory and conceptual attachments, freed of our own opinions on the matter, these dark nights of our souls dismantle the obstacles that stand between ourselves and our Beloved. Our only task is to say “yes,” no matter how tentatively; to say “thank you,” no matter how quietly.

“Exquisite Risk: John of the Cross and the Transformational Power of Captivity,” by Mirabai Starr, was first published in “Emancipation,” Volume 3, Number 1 of Oneing, the spiritual literary journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Copyright © Center for Action and Contemplation.

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At night on my bed I longed
for my only love.
I sought him, but did not find him.
I must rise and go about the city,
the narrow streets and squares, till I find
my only love.
I sought him everywhere
but I could not find him.
(From The Song of Songs)

Love-longing is one of the casualties of the Post-Modern Age. We seem to have come to some kind of corporate decision that relegates spiritual passion to the psychological trash basket of romantic delusion. It’s the same thing we say when two people fall in love: “She is infatuated with an idea,” we declare, “not a real person.” (We learned this in Psych 101, and it explains a lot about our own history of romantic disasters.) Or: “She is a blank screen onto which he projects his own hopes and dreams of love. It has nothing to do with her.” 

The conclusion of this line of reasoning is that one day the lovers will wake up, the scales will drop from their eyes, and they will see each other truly. That, we assert, is when the real work of relationship begins. And that’s when many lovers bail and bolt, only to run the same delusional story on someone else.

Maybe. Or perhaps falling in love is more like what Leonard Cohen said in an interview I read in Interview Magazine while pumping my quads on the Stair-Stepper at the gym years ago. It’s not falling in love that’s the illusion (I’m paraphrasing here); it’s falling out of love. When that intoxicating feeling of awe and connectedness washes over us and penetrates our consciousness, that’s when the shroud lifts and we see that person for who she truly is: a being of exquisite beauty and pure goodness. When we fall out of love, the veil drops once again over our eyes, and we stop seeing our beloved as the holy creature he is.

I believe the same principal is operating with spiritual longing. Many of us start on a spiritual path at a young age, crazed with desire for God. We fast and pray, meditate till we can’t stand up, read and re-read the Gospel of Thomas and the Tao Te Ching, chant kirtan and sing hymns and memorize Rumi poems — all in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Numinous, which has become the object of everything we have ever wanted. And then some well-meaning elder, who has been cultivating wisdom for way longer than we have and has graduated from such sophomoric inclinations, suggests that perhaps what we think is spiritual desire is actually just a case of raging hormones directed at the idea of God, and that we need to let go of attachment and get grounded. 

“Don’t worry,” they reassure us. “It’s a perfectly natural developmental phase. You’ll grow out of it.”

Maybe we’re not supposed to grow out of it. What if the Bride in the Song of Songs represents the very highest state of the human spirit, and when she rushes from her bed (where she has been smoldering in agony all through the night) and onto the streets and plazas in search of the One who has set the blaze, she is forging a direct path to mystical union. A path of fire.

This longing you express
is the return message.
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
(Rumi, from Love Dogs)

It is true that religion has its limitations, some of which can be harmful (divisive dogma, antiquated rituals, abuses of authority), but the longing of the soul for union with the Divine transcends formal religious boundaries and leaves belief systems in the dust. At the core of every one of the world’s major spiritual traditions lies a heart that burns with yearning for a Presence that cannot be defined by membership in any particular mythic system and cannot be explained by the most precise theology. Longing for God is a trans-religious phenomenon, and so lends itself beautifully to the inter-spiritual quest.

What do I mean by inter-spiritual? I mean an experience of the presence of the sacred anywhere and everywhere we can find it. I mean an Episcopal priest singing the Kol Nidre with her Jewish neighbor and finding the gates of heaven blown open by the ancient Hebrew liturgy and the light of Christ come streaming through. And then the following week there sits the Jew in a pew on an ordinary Sunday morning and when she is invited up to receive communion she overrides her instinctual panic and stands to receive the body and blood of one of the greatest prophets her people has ever known, and then she returns to kneel at the altar rail, her eyes streaming, the taste of love alive on her tongue. I mean an agnostic chanting zikr in a circle of Sufis — Allah Hu — and watching in awe as every preconception he has ever harbored about Muslims being perilous wackos falls away and his spirit soars in remembrance of the One, who is the embodiment of Mercy and Compassion. By inter-spiritual I mean the cultivation of radical humility, and a spiritual thirst so powerful it drives us into the arms of the Beloved wherever we think she may be hiding, even in unfamiliar holy houses. It means being vulnerable enough to be transformed by our encounter with the other.

It means saying yes to love.

O Lord, you Supreme Trickster! What subtle artfulness you use to do your work in this slave of yours. You hide yourself from me and afflict me with your love. You deliver such a delicious death that my soul would never dream of trying to avoid it.
(Teresa of Avila, from The Book of My Life)

Longing is a key that opens the door to the garden where the Beloved is waiting, and has been waiting all along. Stop trying to grow up and grow out of it. Instead, descend. Sink the roots of your love deep into the Ground of Being. This is incarnational spirituality. It is not about ascending some kind of spirit ladder up and away from this messy world into a pure land of equanimity. It’s about fully inhabiting this place, and picking up the tools that come with the package: these glorious, riotous, ravaged hearts that want to praise and burn, these fecund, holy souls that long to see and be seen, these complex minds whose highest task may well be to unlearn everything they think they know, and rest in the mystery of love.

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You may never read this, Robert, but I have to write it. I know you know what I mean.

I’ll tell you exactly when it was that I first fell in love with you. I was 16 years old, living on my own in Mendocino, far from my family in Taos. I had dropped out of high school to pursue a spiritual quest, but then Jerry Brown found me. Well, not Jerry himself, but a mandate he had put in place as the governor of California to track down all high school dropouts and offer them an alternative program to graduate. So a couple of young hippie teachers in a Volkswagen bus plucked me from my tree-house in the redwoods and allowed me to customize my own education. Which, you will be pleased to know, consisted primarily of poetry and drama and music. Meanwhile, I continued to call out to God with all my might.

One day a van pulled up to our portable building next to the football field overlooking the Mendocino Headlands and a troop of men and women in flowing tunics and colorful scarves piled out, followed by their troubadour: you. It was the Sufi Choir, and their composer, Allaudin, had set your translations of the poems of the great Indian mystic Kabir to music and created a choral symphony, which they had taken on the road. I have no idea what brought you all to our little seaside village, but there you were. The minute I heard the first song, I was smitten. Are you looking for me? / I’m in the next seat / My shoulder is against yours.

The next evening you were giving a poetry reading in nearby Fort Bragg. You were going to debut your new translations of the great poet saint, Mirabai (my namesake). When you found out my name was Mirabai and that I was an aspiring poet myself, you looked at me (very earnestly) and asked me (very politely) if I might be willing to read some of the poems with you on stage. Yes, I said. Yes. And I did. Be ready to orbit his lamp like a moth giving in to the light / To live in the deer as she runs toward the hunter’s call / In the partridge that swallows hot coals for love of the moon.

Many years later, in my 30s, I found myself teaching Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico in Taos. I assigned Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross, to my Humanities class because I had been captivated by the great Spanish mystic ever since I was 20 years old, living in Sevilla and studying Spanish literature. John of the Cross is the Rumi of Spain! I declared when I first read him in his original language. This was before you, Robert, had published your translations of Rumi, whom I knew primarily as a Sufi master through the arcane translations of your predecessors.

Anyway, Dark Night, as you well know, started off as an ecstatic love poem to God that poured from John’s heart following his miraculous escape from nine months of captivity in a Carmelite monastery where he had been held in punishment for his efforts to support Teresa of Avila in her reform of the Order (But that’s another story. I translated her next. I was unstoppable!). The nuns begged their priest to explain how this semi-erotic rhapsody might serve as a guide for the inner life. John obliged with a 200-page commentary that brought me to my knees in awe but left my students cold. My friend Sean convinced me to try translating it myself – the poem and the commentary — and I did (not without the usual resistance: Who me?). It sold quickly, because you, Robert, had opened the way for fresh, contemporary renderings of mystical masterpieces.

Fast-forward another decade. I was 46, and had been invited to present at a conference on the Golden Age of the Andalusia, held in Granada, Spain. I was to speak on the roots of Judaism and Islam in the writings of the Spanish mystics, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. You were there, too. You had recently turned 80 and you made it clear that you weren’t going to do many more of these journeys. My husband and I ate dinner every night with you and your wife, and I finally had the opportunity to tell you about the impact you had had on me as a translator and a human being. I gave you a copy of my translation of Dark Night and you signed a tattered copy of your book, The Winged Energy of Delight, which I had carried with me across the world. I couldn’t fully decipher your handwriting, but it said something about offering me the grapes and chocolates you had stolen over the years.  Fondly, Robert.

The next night you were scheduled to give a poetry reading in the Flamenco Theater in Granada. Once again – thirty years after the first time — you invited me up on stage with you. I read each stanza of the poem, Dark Night of the Soul, in Spanish and you alternated with your own English translation. Here’s the opening of my version:  On a dark night / filled with love-longing / undetected I slipped away / my house, at last, grown still. We gazed into each other’s eyes as we sang this love song, and everyone – all 500 people – melted away and there was only us, calling out to God, recognizing each other’s souls.  I lost myself / forgot myself / I lay my face against the Beloved’s face / Everything fell away and I left myself behind / abandoning my cares, among the lilies, forgotten.

I am in my mid-50s now, which must make you over 90. And so I hasten to add this little epistle to the storehouse of love letters you must have received in the long course of your career as a conduit for the mystics, you beautiful, wild, fearless man. I hope your wife will excuse my infatuation. I know my husband does; he’s also smitten with you. He’s one of those early Men’s Work Vietnam vet guys whose lives you also transfigured, remember?

With love from Mirabai, a not-so-secret-anymore admirer

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My first spiritual teacher was Ram Dass, author of the iconic book, Be Here Now, which introduced a generation of Americans to the ancient wisdom of the East. Along with framed photographs of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (affectionately known as Maharaji), and statues of Krishna (Lord of Love) and Ganesh (Remover of Obstacles), Ram Dass (a Jew, by the way) kept pictures of Christ and Mother Mary and carvings of Saint Francis on his altar, and he quoted with intimacy from the New Testament. Maharaji himself taught his Western devotees to “meditate like Christ,” as Krishna Das, contemporary kirtan master, writes about in Chants of a Lifetime. My entire spiritual formation was predicated on the interconnected teachings of all spiritual traditions, and the unifying message of love.

I first met Ram Dass at the Lama Foundation in the mountains of Northern New Mexico when I was fourteen, and our paths have intertwined ever since. Lama is the original inter-spiritual community, a place where all faiths meet and mingle: Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Christian, Jewish, Native American, and the emerging path that has no name yet praises all forms of the sacred. Lama is leaderless, which may be one of the reasons it has thrived for almost 50 years. From full moon to new and new moon to full, each resident takes a turn as “watch,” responsible for the spiritual guidance, guest hospitality, and daily business of the community for that period. When their time is up, they let go. There is no creed to affirm, no dues to pay. Those whose hearts find a home there enigmatically refer to themselves as Lama Beans — the name they adopted for their volleyball team when they played against the neighboring commune of New Buffalo in the early 1970s.

It was at Lama that I first fell in love with Saint Francis. How was I to know that he was the accidental founder of the largest order of institutionalized Christendom? I grew up in a family of Jewish agnostics who had tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. All I knew was that this gentle Italian saint from the thirteenth century loved animals as much as I did, that, like me, he wandered barefoot through the hills and meadows, and talked to donkeys and crows. His heart, like mine, fell at the feet of anyone who was suffering, and he preferred to sing than speak. Francis was also an interfaith prophet and a radical peace activist.

At the height of the Christian Crusades, Francis walked for days and risked his life to cross enemy lines and personally meet with the Sultan of Egypt where he listened — really listened — to the wisdom at the heart of Islam. Both men emerged from that encounter changed. Although Francis was on a mission to convert his opponent to Christianity, and Malik-al-Kamil was committed to opposing the Crusades with all his might, their individual agendas fell away as they sat together. It was Francis’ devotion to his beloved Brother Christ that broke open the sultan’s heart, and it was the unequivocal surrender to the Divine which characterizes Muslim life that reanimated the way Francis approached spiritual practice. Their mutual willingness to be present to the living essence of the other’s faith created an alchemical transmutation that turned the lead of conflict into the gold of love.

Legend tells us that Malik sent Francis home with the gift of an ivory horn the muezzin would sound to call the faithful to prayer, and which Francis used from then on to summon his own people into remembrance of God. This is peacemaking at its best: the disarming of hearts. This is authentic inter-spirituality: a living, life-giving, life-changing encounter with the sacred in another tradition. This is my legacy as a Jewish woman with a Hindu guru, a lifelong Buddhist meditation practice, a close connection with indigenous traditions, and an abiding love of Christ.

And so it is with curiosity and hopefulness that I watch as the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church — one of the most powerful roles on the planet — takes on the name of his humble forebear. Pope Francis is changing the way the world sees an institution that has historically wielded its authority as a weapon. Francis of Assisi was the epitome of non-violence in action. He lived his master’s teachings of identification with those on the margins and celebrated his interconnectedness with all of creation, from Sister Water to Brother Fire, from lepers to kings. I doubt that the pope will ever make his way up the miles of dirt road to my beloved interspiritual mountaintop monastery, Lama. But I like to think that if Saint Francis had known about us he would have felt completely at home there.

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I have always been drawn to a God who eluded me. A God who transcends gender — transcends everything, actually. A God who rebels against all forms, annihilates conceptual constructs, blows my mind. In other words, a God I can’t believe in. Because beliefs are dangerous — dangerous to God, anyway. The minute we define Ultimate Reality we destroy it. God chokes and dies inside the boxes we make.

All the great sages tell us this, have always told us this. Zen poetry compares our human effort to describe the sacred to a scientist dissecting a flower to understand it. We murder the flower. Instead, we must simply pull up our bucket from the well and notice the morning glory wrapping itself around the rope, drops of water clinging to its luminous blue face. The very first thing Lao Tzu tells us in the Tao Te Ching is that the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. This is the same reason why it’s blasphemy to speak or pronounce the name of God in Judaism. That’s what it means to kill the Buddha when you meet him on the road.

I am as inclined toward this non-dual relationship with the Divine as any reasonably educated person. I too think it’s goofy at best and even perilous to our souls to fall for the illusion that we can know anything about that Ground of Being, let alone speak about it in any kind of dogmatic terms. Even calling it the Beloved (my favorite nickname for God) is a limitation. And yet, as the years go by and I pride myself in fearlessly championing the radical unknowability of the Holy One, I find that I am drifting back toward a wee bit of personification. My God is starting to look like a woman.

She is the unconditionally loving mother and she is the unbridled lover, the little girl lost in play and the dignified queen whose mere presence radiates authority. She animates all that is sprouting and she scatters all seeds. She drives the surprise of creative self-expression and she dwells in stillness. She is fiercely protective and she pours mercy upon all beings. She is the embodiment of compassion and she is not even slightly sentimental.

My God is the Shekhinah of the Jewish tradition: the indwelling feminine face of the Holy One, who guides us through the wilderness of our lives as a pillar of mist by day and a pillar of fire at night. Through the Christian lens I recognize her as Sophia — Wisdom — and as Mother Mary, even as Christ himself, which is what Julian of Norwich concluded “the second person of the Trinity” had to be. In Islam, one of her 99 names is Sakina (serenity) and another is Jamila (beauty). She is Kwan Yin in China, and in Tibet she is Tara — born from the ocean of the Buddha’s tears he looked upon the suffering of the world and wept. My God is embodied. She is incarnational. She is right here.

Some say that until we ransom the exiled feminine from the religious equation we have no hope of rising above gender and restoring the Godhead to wholeness. Without Her, we are doomed to pine for an invisible Beloved we cannot hold in our arms, in whose arms we may not take refuge. Once we welcome Her home, we integrate the Great Mystery into the cells of our body and set our hearts free to encounter the Absolute in the place beyond all forms, in the Garden of Love where we were born.

What I know is that I know nothing. And so why not pretend? Why not imagine God as Divine Mother, as Sacred Lover, as Wise Ancestor and Faithful (Female) Friend? This is working for me. A breath I have long held is starting to release. If my God had a gender, she’d be a girl.

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“All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich)

Sometimes I can hardly believe what I get to do for a living. As a translator of the mystics, I plunge into the wellspring of their wisdom and remain immersed, until they have told me all they have to say. In the Hindu tradition, this is known as darshan: sitting at the feet of a saint and receiving their transmission. It can be done whether the being is still in the body or has left it. It is not an exchange that is ruled by the common laws of time and space. This flow spills across the centuries and, in my case, across religious lines.

I am Jewish by birth, not-Jewish by upbringing, and Jewish-again by inclination. I have a lifelong Buddhist sitting practice and a Hindu guru. And I translate and write reflections on the teachings of the Christian mystics. My most recent encounter was with Julian of Norwich, the medieval English anchoress (1342-1416). My new translation of her masterwork, The Showings — an extravagant account of a series of visions Julian had during a near death experience — came out earlier this month (Hampton Roads 2013).

We do not know much about Julian’s life. In fact, that was not even her real name, but rather a reference to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich to which she attached herself — literally — cloistering herself forever inside a small stone anchorage built against the outer wall of the sanctuary. What we do know was that by the time Julian entered her cell she had already witnessed three rounds of Plague, had probably lost almost everyone she loved, and had nearly died herself. We also know that when she was very young she asked to bear witness to the passion of Christ. Her wish came true. The visions she had on her near-deathbed were of Christ’s crucifixion, which she endured in every cell of her own body.

This kind of corporeal identification with Christ is not unique to Julian. Other saints and mystics, known and unknown, have reported similar experiences. But what is unusual about Julian’s story is that Christ’s death was not dreadful to her. That is, he certainly suffered and she hated to see her beloved in such pain, but he also radiated warmth, sweetness, and a kind of ineffable joy. His countenance was “friendly and courteous.” And try as she might, Julian could not detect one iota of condemnation in him toward any member of the human family. She tried to line up the content of her visions with the “teachings of Holy Church” but sometimes they just didn’t mesh. Like the matter of our fallen nature.

Sin, says Julian, turns out to be “no thing.” This has been a controversial passage in Julian’s work. But she is quite clear: “Nowhere in all that was revealed to me did I see a trace of sin,” she writes. “And so I stopped looking for it and moved on, placing myself in God’s hand, allowing him to show me what he wanted me to see.” In Julian’s exceedingly practical view, “sin has no substance, not a particle of being, and can only be detected by the pain it causes.” When we make mistakes and create suffering, we humble ourselves and God loves us all the more. For those of us non-Christian and post-modern types, try substituting the word sin for shame, or blame, or even karma. In other words, we screw up, but that only opens the tender heart of the cosmos where we can find refuge and come back into wholeness.

The other startling thing about Julian’s homespun theology is her view of the feminine identity of God. Julian sees the Godhead in the Trinitarian context of Christianity, but with this radical twist: the Second Person (Christ) is actually the Mother (not the Son). “As truly as God is our Father,” she says, “just as truly is God our Mother.” Who else but a mother, she asks, would break herself open and pour herself out for her children? “Only God could ever perform such duty.” Not only that, but Julian’s God-as-Mother remains available at all times, especially present in our darkest hours — some kind of spiritual hybrid that encompasses the unconditional love of Mother Mary in the Catholic tradition, the infinite compassion of Tara in the Buddhist tradition, and the indwelling holiness of the Shekhinah in the Jewish tradition.

It baffles Julian that we don’t get this. When we miss the mark, we want to run away and hide. But “our courteous Mother doesn’t want us to flee,” Julian says. “Nothing would distress her more. She wants us to behave as a child would when he is upset or afraid: rush with all our might into the arms of the Mother.” For Julian, the good news is not merely the reward we will receive one day when we slough off this mortal coil and go home to God. Every moment is an opportunity to remember that we are perfectly loved and perfectly lovable, just as we are.

“And so when the final judgment comes,” Julian writes at the end of The Showings, “… we shall clearly see in God all the secrets that are hidden from us now. Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, ‘Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well.’ Instead, we shall all proclaim in one voice, ‘Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: ALL IS WELL.'”

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“Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.” (Gautama Buddha)

You know the cliché that asserts that those in power will never voluntarily relinquish power? As with most generalizations, this one tempts us to abdicate the authority of our own experience and risk missing what might actually be unfolding. I’m happy to report that I witness exceptions to this particular platitude everywhere I go now. As I travel around speaking about the interconnected teachings of love at the heart of the world’s religions, I have been encountering an emerging tribe of middle-aged, middle-class white men who are dropping their male privilege and bowing at the feet of the feminine. And not only white guys, but men of color. Not only Western men, but representatives of traditional cultures as well.

From Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Episcopal priests in Pasadena to Catholic priests in San Antonio, Conservative rabbis in Washington D.C to Vipassana teachers in the Midwest, college professors at my own Alma Mater to Yoga teachers in Brooklyn, men are joining with women to proclaim: the masculine solution to the human condition has backfired. It’s time for something different (yet ancient–primordial, even). This shift takes many forms. Sometimes it is an invitation. A religious leader will call a woman up to the proverbial altar and step aside while she shares the dharma, willing to listen to whatever comes out of her mouth, unafraid of her wildness or vulnerability. Other times it is a simple reconfiguration of the default language, in which male clergy replace the masculine pronoun for the feminine when speaking of God — not because they suddenly think of God as girl instead of a boy, but just to even out the score a little.

A few years ago I had the great fortune of hearing the Dalai Lama speak to a few thousand of my closest friends (he has this way of cultivating intimacy in any setting) at Radio City Music Hall in New York. What struck me most profoundly about his talk was when he said something along the lines of, “It is time for Western women to step up and bring peace to this ravaged world.” Whatever his exact words were, the message landed like an arrow in my conscience. It’s my turn. Mine. I have been born into the wealthiest nation on the planet; I am educated and socially conscious; I have a few decades of spiritual practice under my belt. I don’t have all my shit together by any means, but I can work with what I got. OK, Mirabai: go.

We are not separated from our brothers in this task. There are large numbers of men cheering us on, reinforcing our endeavors. I keep running into them. I have celebrated Mass with an elderly Irish priest who invited me, his “Jewish friend,” to bring the communion host to the altar. In the past year I have heard at least three homilies in which the otherwise conventional minister has referred to God as “she,” without missing a beat. A growing group of women leaders is emerging in every one of the world’s faiths — from the most institutionalized to the radically reformed — bringing the fierce tenderness of the feminine to the table and offering much needed sustenance to the withering collective spirit.

I am not in any way suggesting that oppression of the feminine is a thing of the past and that every man in any position of power and control is suddenly ready to cheerfully hand it over. It’s clear that we have a long way to go. Our ravaged economy, precarious environment, and fundamentalist religious and political agendas provide ample evidence of entrenched patterns of greed and corruption. Yet my heart is lifted by the loving efforts of the men I am meeting who are dedicated to supporting the empowerment of women however they can. This is playing out in the religious arena — the soul of the world — and I think it’s going to change everything.

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As a Native New York Jew who grew up in the counter-culture of New Mexico and spent my 20s in northern California, the American South is as foreign to me as Mongolia. Maybe more. And so visiting the Bible Belt is a perfect opportunity for me to walk my talk and reject the impulse to “otherize.”

Otherizing is a word I thought I made up, but then I found it in the Urban Dictionary online. Also my friend Elizabeth Lesser uses it in a TED talk. So I’m in good company. Thou shalt not otherize is one of the pillars of the Judeo-Christian traditions. It did not make it onto the stone tablets, but (IMHO) it should have.

As I travel the country sharing the common teachings of lovingkindness at the core of the world’s diverse religions, I place special emphasis on the Abrahamic tradition of “welcoming the stranger.” Recently, I taught an interspiritual workshop in the South and all my own otherizing responses were triggered. It was the first time (besides here on the HuffPost) that my message of the universal love that lies at the core of all faiths was met with anything besides a resounding YES. In fact, the minute I started talking about the beauty of Islam, I saw smoke coming out of some people’s ears. And when I led the group in chanting the name of God in Arabic, mature grown-ups began to leave the room. I was stunned. What happened to the love fest I had come to expect? I found myself catapulted into the role of stranger, and I was not welcome there.

That night I spoke to my husband on the phone. “Tough crowd,” I said.

“Remember where you are,” Jeff said. “You are in Martin Luther King country. Be a prophet of peace.”

“Good idea,” I said.

And so I showed up again the next day disarmed and ready. By the end of our three days together, heart-gates were swinging open and the most dogmatic were testifying to the connecting power of love.

But what about me? What about my close encounter with breaking the commandment? I almost otherized. I started to tell myself a whole story about how some of these people are not at all like me. They are narrow minded and racist; I am open and inclusive. I support universal health care; they voted against their own interests. They believe in heaven and hell; I dismiss such notions as being something along the lines of “the opiate of the masses” — delusional and dangerous. Even our costumes were radically different: conservative polyesters (them); flowey silks and low-cut linens (me). I have way more in common with Mongolians stirring pots of goat stew over dung fires on the Steppes. Off I went, spiraling into my lonely little specialness.

But then I caught myself. I reminded myself that if we are all one, we are all one. That the illusion of separation is what causes violence and oppression. The minute we identify an individual or a group as being the Other, we banish ourselves to a spiritual wasteland and justify treating someone else with anything less than lovingkindness. This is the sin. This is what it means to miss the mark: the drawing of artificial boundaries to bisect the circle of our interconnectedness with all beings.

Here’s a practice I try to cultivate: When I travel to a different community, I show up. I ask my hosts to share with me what they love most about their lives, their landscapes, their faith. I accompany them to religious services in their church and I hang out with their kids; I eat their regional foods, swim in their waters, hike in their mountains and explore their neighborhoods. I listen to them. This discipline is bearing fruit. Rather than feeling depleted and beaten down when I return home to my safety zone (where people are more like me and I can count on being agreed with), I am stretched and gratified — like a good workout at the gym. My love muscles are growing.

It’s nice when I can preach to the choir and everyone nods their heads, tears of gratitude springing to their eyes in response to my suggestion that we are naturally interspiritual beings who are specially designed to embrace the sacred everywhere we encounter Her. But it also feels good to extend myself beyond the confines of my own little sub-culture once in a while and sing this love song in foreign lands where people may actually believe that all Muslims are terrorists and all Jews are greedy and all gays are going to burn for eternity. Because when we sit together and begin to peel back the layers of possibility, it turns out that just about everyone everywhere affirms that Ultimate Reality is a unified field and that no matter what names we ascribe to it, God is One. And its true name is Love.

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Today is Saturday. The sun has just dipped below the western mesa and the face of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is about to be washed with the scarlet glow from which the range derives its poetic name. Shabbat is over and, in the tradition of my ancestors, I mourn a little. The Sabbath, they say, is a taste of “the world to come” — a day so sweet that the Holy One, in His infinite mercy, gives us 25 hours instead of the standard 24 so that we can have a little more time to dwell in tranquility and delight.

Or Hers. Her infinite mercy. Shabbat is drenched with the Sacred Feminine. When the sun sets on Friday night and we kindle the Sabbath candles we call in the Shekhinah, the indwelling feminine presence of the Divine in the form of the Sabbath Bride. The Shekhinah has been exiled from her beloved Israel, which stands for all people. Jewish mysticism teaches that when we rise to meet the Bride in song and thanksgiving she enters us and renders us whole again. She infuses us with a second soul, an additional spiritual resource with which to navigate the holy temple in time that is Shabbat. Filled with her radiant presence we can pray more deeply, study more insightfully, enjoy food and sex and all the other blessings of creation with greater gladness.

I grew up in a family of secular Jews who were no more familiar with concept of the Shekhinah than the Christian doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or the Apostle’s Creed. While they reluctantly identified with Judaism as an ethnic heritage (my mother often pointed out that if we had been around during the Holocaust, the Nazis would have picked us up and thrown us into the gas chambers regardless of our belief system), my parents distrusted the entire enterprise of organized religion and raised us with a kind of free-floating orientation toward the Golden Rule. They were anti-war activists, champions of human rights, defenders of the poor and marginalized, but seemed to have forgotten that this commitment to social justice is the living core of the religion they rejected: Judaism.

In my teens, hungry for a container to hold my growing passion for the numinous, I looked to the Eastern Regions. Much later I began to reconnect with my own Jewish roots. As I gathered with my community on Friday nights to sing the ancient Shabbat prayers it did not occur to me to carry this practice into the next day. To actually “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Until once, around 10 years ago, when I was interviewing a Jewish artist on Shabbat and he was nestled in his studio with a cup of warm tea and a copy of the Talmud. Entering his space was not just a physical experience. There was a palpable sense of the sacred. I wanted it.

“I have always wished I could take a day a week to rest and study,” I sighed.

“Oh please,” he said. “People always say that to me. Just do it.”

And so I do.

In case you might be thinking (as I did) that you are too busy doing to simply be, indispensable in your self-imposed responsibility of holding the fabric of the universe together, I am here to say that the intention to unplug from “ordinary time” and drop into sanctified time functions as an alchemical transmutation. Suddenly, there is enough to go around. The world morphs to accommodate us. The base substance of our overextended lives becomes the gold of pure presence. The Shekhinah makes this possible.

For me, Shabbat is a two-fold experience. It is a practice of mindfulness, in which I turn off my computer and put aside my to-do list in effort to fully show up each moment. And it is also an act of social and environmental justice, because for that one day a week of voluntary simplicity I refrain as much as possible from consuming the earth’s resources and decline to participate in the machinery of commerce that causes so much suffering. I hope in this way to leave a lighter footprint on the earth.

The practice of Shabbat, then, is not only a spiritual response to the timeless commandment given to my ancestors to keep the Sabbath holy. It is a political act. I am keeping the Sabbath radical. That too is my heritage.

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Here in the mountains of northern New Mexico where I have spent most of life, the winter solstice season is marked by fire. During Advent, families and businesses fill small paper bags with dirt and nestle yellow votive candles inside them. They line the adobe walls around their homes and the low hanging flat rooftops of their shops with these homemade lanterns, called farolitos, and kindle them at sunset. The entire valley glows with tiny golden lights. What began as a Spanish Catholic tradition is now a cherished ritual for our entire multicultural community.

On Christmas Eve hundreds of visitors and residents gather at the Taos Pueblo — the oldest continuously occupied indigenous village in North America — for the lighting of the luminarias. These bonfires are made of juniper wood stacked in a lattice pattern and piled as high as ten feet. As the sun goes down, the luminarias are ignited and flare up into the pink sky. Then the statue of the Virgin Mary is taken down from her perch in front of the San Geronimo Church and carried in a ceremonial procession around the village plaza, weaving in and out of the towers of flame, with men shooting off deafening rifle blasts at regular intervals and other participants playing drums and chanting devotional songs in Tiwa and Spanish. The procession is a unique blend of traditional Native and Roman Catholic spiritualities, and it carries us all through a landscape not of this world but of some other, more rarified realm.

These fire rituals are said to represent the light that God uses to find his way home to us. During this season of gathering darkness, we seem to instinctively search for signs that the light will come back. We seek this light as individuals navigating our inner wildernesses, and we gather as communities to reassure each other that within the womb of darkness the Light of the World is getting ready to be born.

In the Jewish tradition, we celebrate the miracle of light with Hanukkah, an eight-day holiday that commemorates the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem after a small group of revolutionaries prevailed over a large army of occupiers. The amount of oil left to light the sacred flame was only enough for one night, and yet it lasted for eight. Just when we are convinced that there is not enough light to illumine God’s path, the miracle unfolds and the fire blazes.

In this light — embodied in the flames of the farolitos and luminarias, in the candles of the Advent wreath and the Hanukkah menorah, in the burning bush out of which the Holy One spoke to Moses and revealed his unknowable identity, in the Star of Bethlehem that led the shepherds to the feet of the newborn Christ Child — all barriers melt and we remember our essential interconnectedness. In this light we notice that there is no such thing as the Other.

How, in these times of renewed strife between the Children of Abraham and Sarah, do we find the light and remind each other that the God we love (or fear, or suspect may not even exist) is One? Maybe through embracing the holy fire at the very core of our deepest darkness and allowing it to transform us.

At the mystical heart of each of the Abrahamic faiths lie teachings about the transformational power of fire and the identification of the Holy One with light. In the Judaism, the Shekhinah — the indwelling feminine presence of God — took the form of a pillar of fire at night to lead the Israelites through the desert. In the Christian tradition, God revealed Himself (sometimes as Herself) to the 12th century visionary, Hildegard of Bingen, as The Living Light. In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Christ says that he is “the light that is above them all.” In Sufi teaching the highest spiritual state is fana, the annihilation of the separate self in the fire of Divine Love, so that lover and Beloved become One Love.

If all three monotheistic traditions glorify the fire of the Divine, maybe it is within this image that we can find the secret medicine to heal our broken connection. Here is my prayer for this Season of Light: May we let ourselves down into the arms of fire and allow it to melt the armor on our hearts. The excruciating fire of our loneliness and our fear of intimacy. The sweet fire of our longing for union with the Beloved. The purifying fire of radical unknowingness, which all the great mystics assure us is the beginning of knowing God.

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