Reflection on “Retreat with She Who Is”  by Jo Ann Heydron

The new year starts for me in September. I have been raising children for a quarter century, and not so long ago I became a student again and then a teacher myself.  Late summer has always brought new color and energy to my mind and heart, as well as the determination, not always successful, to clear away fixed ideas and habits that no longer nourish me.   This year, the Retreat with She Who Is [sponsored by Ebenezer Lutheran Church, San Francisco on the grounds of Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey ] was a grace-filled way to begin afresh—with hands on experiences and fellowship, prayer and theological conversations with Pastor Stacy Boorn, rest and ocean air.

Pastor Stacy reminded us of some of the discounted feminine images of God in the Old Testament—probably none of which were the products of female imaginations—and invited us to form our own images in clay of Asherah, the mother goddess of the Canaanites familiar to early Jewish inhabitants of Canaan.  I am no artist.  Warming and working the clay with my hands, I wondered whether my goddess would look anything like the photograph of an Asherah figure Stacy provided as a possible starting point.  Almost immediately I forget all about the picture.  I began to form, as well as I could, my own breasts and hips, my own hair and face and arms and belly, my 52-year-old self, an Asherah with a sacred body just like mine.  I can't tell you how healing that was.

The next project, led by Kathryn Wagner, was to make a mandala, a circular, meditative image of the self.  My own didn't turn out very well.  I wasn't able to draw symbols from my unconscious mind, or lay down color and other materials—paper, paint, fabric, beach sand, feathers, sequins, tiny mirrors—in a way that deepened my understanding.  But others were, and in remarkable ways.  I admired the beauty of their creations.  That was a kind of learning, too.

Kara Benson led us in simple movement.  I was certain that this activity was going to be wasted on me.  But Kara began with journaling and meditation.  Words I can deal with!  One of the questions Kara asked was, what are your dancing dreams?  I have those all the time! I was able to write about, meditate on, and even move with a vision of dancing with my father, 20 years dead now, and sick for most of my childhood—of dancing with my father when he was healthy and whole.

On the shore of Monterey Bay, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, all ten of us prayed the Goddess rosary [some beaded their own Goddess Rosary that afternoon] beside a cross erected of driftwood and draped with seaweed. Stacy called us to remember the sea as the primal water from which life emerged, to think of it as the amniotic fluid of our mother's wombs. 

Beginnings are fuzzy things.  We don't always start with a clean slate.  That cross—we didn't build it.  Another of the many Christian groups at the conference center must have, and some of us wondered whether they would be glad we were using it.  Not all Christians are as conscious as herchurch is of Jesus' message of radical love for all people, of his determination to bring the marginalized of his own day back into the circle of compassion.

One of the great challenges in my life has been to take seriously Jesus' claim in Luke 4 that, not only had he come to bring good news to the poor, release for the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed and cancellation of debts, but that all those revolutionary things were happening right then—and right now.  The kingdom—the kindom—of God/Goddess is already among us.  In grace-filled moments like those at the Retreat with She Who Is, that idea is easier for me to grasp. Its reality lies right in the palm of my hand. 

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Jo Ann Heydron is a Presbyterian who lives in Palo Alto.  She worshipped at herchurch [Ebenezer ELCA – San Francisco] this summer and hopes to do so again in the future.