God or Goddess?

One of the reasons Walhydra was so slow about putting out the previous post is that she has become confused and wary about the so-called "God versus Goddess" thing.

As she said last time, during the difficult years about the only thing that kept her going was "centering down, breathing, [and] asking the God aspect of the Divine One to bring her back into his present moment."

She understands that the "God aspect" is the aspect she learned to know and trust as a child growing up in a loving Christian family and culture.

Nonetheless, despite the Truth which came through to her from that upbringing, it was an exclusively patriarchal and orthodox environment.

Patriarchal christianities have rarely been comfortable with the divinely fluid ambiguity of sacred language. They tend to want precision and changelessness.

Anyway, as life has gradually become livable and even joyful at times over the past year, Walhydra as felt divided about "which religion to practice."

"If I turn to Goddess instead of God, what if I lose my way again?"

"Um, Deary?" Goddess whispers. "This isn't about me. It's about you. It's about how you experience me, how you are most honest with and open to me—at a given moment."

"Huh?"

Goddess rolls her eyes.

"You need to go back and reread this! This was you way back at the start of the blog!"

"Um...."

"Don't you remember?!"

"Hey, wait a minute!" she exclaimed, eyeing the Goddess slantwise one day. "You're that same Guy…!"

"Yes, Dearie," Goddess smiled, batting her eyelashes. "Glad you finally noticed."

You see, as Walhydra now understands it, human concepts—including concepts like "the gender of the deity"—are just that. Human.

They are temporary and ever-changing maps of what we happen to know or suspect, at a given moment, about the character of our individual and collective experience of What Is Real. They are, just like the labels which direct us to them, merely pointing fingers.

But we know What Is Real.

"Oh."

"You say that a lot."

"Oh."

Walhydra grinned sheepishly.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be
Bright Crow

Walhydra goes to church

Walhydra has been so busy for the past few months that she hasn’t been able to tell about the happy developments with her mother, Senior Witch.

As the faithful reader will remember, Walhydra and her brother and sister decided early last year that it was no longer safe for Senior Witch to live alone.

Sister and her hubby and six kids were absolute angels for fifteen months, taking Senior Witch into their home and lives, keeping her physically and socially active and healthy—and bearing with her escalating Alzheimer's foibles, which alternated between amusing and painfully disruptive.

[Youngest grand-daughter once complained in tears, "Why can't Grandma learn how to do this for herself?" Her Mom's answer—which must have sounded both confusing and a bit spooky—was, "Grandma is un-learning things now."]

The sad irony was that, not being able to perceive her own declining capacity, Senior Witch believed she could still live independently. That meant she became increasingly more resistant to "living under her daughter's roof." Loving care seemed to morph into the perennial trial of crones across the globe.

By April of this year, Walhydra agreed with her sister that it was time to find an assisted living facility (ALF) for Mom near her own home in Jacksonville.

Of course, though she was more or less “in recovery” from chronic depression, by this time Walhydra was up to her eyebrows in anxiety about managing Mom’s business.

For reasons she has not yet been able to discern—perhaps she read too much Charles Dickens as a child—Walhydra has always had a near phobia about dealing with the legal and financial world. As if, somehow, any misstep with an application or transaction might bring on pauperdom, the workhouse or worse.

That being case, imagine Walhydra, already struggling to sell Mom’s house from 300 miles away and fighting automated phone menus to get to a human being who might sort out health policies, bank accounts, retirement annuities….

Imagine her doing all of this and then also having to find a reliable, affordable ALF, one that might actually suit Senior Witch, who has always said she “never wants to end up in a ‘home’.”

And yet, though it took time to get up the gumption to act, once Walhydra started calling her local contacts, the network (both divine and human) worked as it always does for those who leap—or stumble—out on faith.

She called a Quaker friend, who referred her to an enthusiastic Alzheimer’s day care social worker, who referred her to a care cost planning paralegal, who said, “Why don’t you call so-and-so at this wonderful, non-profit ALF I know about?”

The place was perfect! And a spacious private room opened up a month later!

This meant that, rather than waiting till after her sister’s vacation in early July, Walhydra was able to get Senior Witch happily settled in her new home by the beginning of June.

Walhydra stayed with Senior Witch all of the first full day. What she kept hearing from her Mom was, “Oh, I’m not too good at socializing. Oh, I’m a very private person. Oh, I’m not sure about eating all my meals in a cafeteria.”

“This,” Walhydra thought to herself, “from a woman who was a preacher’s wife for thirty-some years. Hmm…. I’ll just wait and see.”

The next night, with Walhydra and Hubby Jim visiting, Senior Witch chattered away happily about all the people she’d met and how much she likes the staff.

“Um-hmm,” Walhydra chuckled to herself. "I thought as much."

Almost two months later, Senior Witch is cheery and at home in her new-found "independence." She's also charming all the staff and other residents.

Now that Senior Witch is all settled, part of Walhydra’s "Mom duty” is to get her to the nearest Lutheran church every few Sundays.

Senior Witch is not dogmatically invested in Lutheran theology. Even so, she feels more comfortable with the richness of the Lutheran liturgy and hymns and the Lutheran style of preaching. She is, after all, a preacher's kid as well as a former preacher’s wife.

A key difference between Senior Witch and Walhydra is that Mom evolved through orthodox Christianity and “came out the other side,” while Walhydra needed to walk away from it in order to meet her Mom on that side decades later.

To understand this odd contrast, the gentle reader needs to know that Lutheran worship is wholly liturgical.

This means that every moment of the service involves either the pastor or the congregation or both in reading or singing some prescribed text. Prayers, blessings, passages from the Old Testament, Gospels and Epistles, hymns, creeds, a sermon from the pastor—and the sharing of the Lord's Supper, the Communion, the Eucharist, the bread and wine.

As a child, Walhydra found such a service reassuring in its regularity. Her father preached, Mom played the organ, the old ladies sang the hymns….

…and Walhydra learned the stories about Jesus.

Those stories—including the difficult, puzzling, contradictory ones—snuck into her heart before she had any knowledge of theology or doctrine. Better still, they conjured for her a real person, one more difficult, puzzling and contradictory, yet ultimately more whole, than any theology or doctrine could contain.

However, by the time she was a teenager, Walhydra was in trouble. She’d learned what Lutherans were supposed to believe and done her best to believe it. Then she sat through service every Sunday, wondering whether she actually believed it enough to go up to Communion.

She didn't doubt the faith as she'd learned it. Yet she doubted—in what she now knows is the classic "dark Lutheran" way—whether she truly knew it or felt it within. It all seemed to make sense, so long as she accepted the basic premises, but it didn't live in her as flesh and blood.

At least, not in the way Jesus did.

One thing that never quite worked for her—though it took getting all the way to seminary to recognize this—was the notion that salvation depends upon Jesus having "paid the price" for the whole human race.

Didn't YHWH say to Hosea, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Hos. 6:6a)? Didn't Jesus himself quote those words to the Pharisees (Matt. 9:13b)?

The more she learned from the caring saints and sinners in her life, the more Walhydra came to believe that the Bible was a cycle of stories in which YHWH interrupted the priests and worshippers over and over again to say, "No. That's not what I meant. I'm not like that."

So Walhydra walked away from liturgy and hymns and creeds for a decade or so. She sampled the whole 1970s smorgasbord of Jung, I Ching, Tarot, astrology, witchcraft, meditation, Buddhism...and, um, pot and sex.

When she eventually wandered back into Christian worship services with not-yet-hubby Jim, she maintained a steadfast silence through all the words-in-unison stuff, her inner translator struggling to keep up.

Every week, as the rest of the congregation approached the altar for Communion, Walhydra would hang back, wondering. And then she'd get the giggles as she heard the Master's voice whispering, "Oh, get on up here, you silly witch!"

Eventually, Walhydra and by-then-hubby Jim found their way into the blessèd waiting silence of Quaker worship.

And, every Christmas Eve, they joined Senior Witch for candlelight service at, of all places, the Lutheran church where Walhydra got into trouble in the first place.

So, here she is now, twenty years later, taking her Mom to a little Lutheran congregation near the ALF. Alternating this with taking her to Quaker Meeting—where, of course, Senior Witch has charmed and been charmed by all the members.

This church’s pastor has the genuine preacher’s gifts: humor, humility and grace. He does what Frederick Buechner [see Note] demonstrates so well, drawing his listeners into his own story of doubt and of little glimpses of faith.

How in the world, he asks them, do we make any sense out of these millenia-old Bible lessons we’ve just read out loud? How do we stumble through them toward any real, usable connection with our 21st century lives?

Walhydra could almost be content to sit through the service for such sermons. Except for that little matter of the wholly scripted liturgy.

“Do I ever get a chance to just stop and think about this for a few minutes?” she asks. “Even when the rubrics say ‘Pause for a moment of reflection,’ it’s a very skinny moment!”

Ironically, after one recent service, Senior Witch sighed with obvious satisfaction.

“It’s so good,” she said, “to be back in a Lutheran service. Your sister’s church [a hymn-singing evangelical mega-church] was okay in its own way. But I missed the Lutheran liturgy. It directs and focuses your thoughts so well.”

“Yes, it does do that,” Walhydra agreed silently.

Despite this challenge—or perhaps because of it—Walhydra had a welcome little glimpse of faith during the most recent service she attended with her Mom.

Looking forward to the pastor’s sermon, she felt a little wary when she realized that the congregation’s brand new assistant pastor, fresh out of seminary, would be preaching his first “official” sermon.

Worse, the Gospel for the day was that troubling parable comparing the Kingdom to a landowner who’s enemy sows weeds in his wheat field (Matt. 13:24-30).

It’s the lesson in which Matthew, to suit his own post-destruction of Jerusalem agenda, has the disciples wheedle an allegorical explanation out of Jesus, in which the weeds become “the progeny of the evil one,” eventually to be cast “into the fiery furnace” where they will “weep and grind their teeth” (Matt. 13:36-43).

“Oh, bother!” Walhydra thought. “We’re in for it now!”

Sure enough, the novice preacher wasn’t experienced enough yet to step very far away from the textbook, so his words clove to doctrinal formulae and left little breathing space for amateur human beings—which all of us are.

“At least he’s giving us the Lutheran ‘saved by grace’ version, not the Southern Baptist ‘repent or else’ version.”

Walhydra sighed through the offertory and the start of the Communion liturgy. Then her eyes drifted upward…

…to notice again that this church is blessed with a remarkable, life-size statue of what she recognizes as the real Jesus.

High above the altar. Robed and at peace, one knee bent as if stepping down. Raised arms spanning an arc which embraces the whole chamber.

Walhydra could feel that embrace, reaching around and through her to the whole world.

“It doesn’t matter,” that embrace said. “Let each person trust the little piece of grace she is ready to trust. Let each follow whatever worship form buys her enough time to make some sort of peace with me.

“It doesn’t matter. You are all already in the Kingdom.

“Just get on up here, you silly witch.”

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.


Note from the amanuensis: There is a companion piece to this one, quoting from Buechner, on The Empty Path.

Is it Spring yet?

New Chaste Moon after Imbolc, Ash Wednesday, Year of the Rat
Having hidden under the covers since mid-October, Walhydra has been wondering how to go about poking her head out again, crocus-like.

Some of her readers may recognize the sense of awkwardness which can accompany recovery from depression.

After months of moaning to friends and avoiding strangers, now Walhydra has to go about telling folks how much better she is feeling. Not the sort of thing a melancholic person usually enjoys—unless, perhaps, it includes modestly accepting congratulations for having made such wise medical choices.

What's more, in difficult moments, Walhydra catches herself indulging nostalgia for the perverse comfort of hiding beneath her own seeming despair and helplessness.

Fortunately, this latest round of depression has been far too viscerally unpleasant, and Walhydra's real-world responsibilities, far too important. After the annoying detour in December, she is glad to report that the SSRI experiment is now working well. Whenever she realizes that the nostalgia is tempting her, she quickly tells herself: "It's the chemistry, stupid."

Of course, now that her chemical balance is being artificially maintained, Walhydra knows she needs to be an adult again. She needs to face and deal responsibly with a maze of family, medical, financial and legal matters of far more consequence to others than any mazes she's lost herself in before.

That's part of the "becoming mortal" business she acknowledged before Yule. Walhydra has no children of her own (at least in this lifetime). She hasn't until now been responsible for assuring the wellbeing of loved ones…except, of course, for playing fair as an equal adult partner in the blessèd relationship with hubby Jim.

However fraught with risk her previous descents into the underworld might have seemed, it was Walhydra who would be most directly hurt by inaction or ineffective action. Now there's her mother, Senior Witch, her sister and brother, her father, the retired Lutheran pastor, and his second wife, the two step-sisters and their three children…etc., etc., etc.

It's no mystery why Walhydra crawled under the covers of depression back last Spring.

Obviously, though, Walhydra's prolonged crisis hasn't really been just about brain chemistry. In fact, because of the "annoying detour," her best Virgo efforts to engineer a recovery of psychic orderliness before Senior Witch's Christmas visit backfired. Instead, Walhydra was in the midst of side effects-induced panic attacks for the first three days of that visit.

Life's real presence yanked the covers off and said, "deal with it!"

Walhydra's real crisis, in other words, has been a crisis of faith. Not, the gentle reader should understand, a crisis of losing faith. A crisis, rather, of using faith when nothing else was available.

"It's all well and good," Walhydra grumbles, "to say, 'It's the chemistry, stupid.' But when every little challenge, real or imagined, seems enormously ominous, you still have to act—or at least to keep yourself from fleeing in panic."

Now, Walhydra is always wary of talking about faith in public. She is very firm in her private faith—even when she doesn't practice it very well. However, the public faith words are all taken, and they carry too much controversial, contradictory baggage.

Walhydra's friend Cat put it very well recently, when she described Cuban American Quaker minister Benigno Sanchez-Eppler's concept of religious code-switching.

[Beningo has spoken] on what's it's like to have a rich, active spiritual life with roots in (literally) two languages, since his spiritual development occurred in Spanish in his youth and in English in his adulthood. Some of the language with which he has mapped his spiritual experiences does not translate well from one tongue to the next, and, to truly communicate his deepest experiences, he finds he must have access to both languages at once—something linguists apparently term code switching. The point Benigno made over and over again was that "code switchers are not confused."

And what I believe he meant—what seemed clear from the context, where he was discussing tensions between strictly Christ-centered Quakers and universalist Quakers, like myself, who draw upon many religions traditions in understanding our spiritual leadings—was that those whose religious experiences span multiple mythologies or
traditions are not playing pick-and-choose, designer-style spirituality.... Rather, we are code-switching—using the metaphorical language best suited to reflecting the lived spiritual experience we are trying to convey.

I am not saying that God or the gods or Spirit is a metaphor.... Instead, I'm saying...that, because we humans don't understand the gods..., we only ever understand them through metaphors—imprecise, inadequate, but powerful echoes of a reality we can only dimly touch.

Some of us have heard the voice of Spirit speaking in many different metaphorical/ mythological "languages." We have become bilingual through experience. We are code-switchers, and it can be hard for us to communicate in ways that others will hear and respect.

But we are not confused—except to the extent that all of us, attempting to meet the eyes of God, necessarily are...

"So," Walhydra says, staring her audience down. "I'm a code-switcher, and I am not confused. See if you can keep up with me."

Privately, Walhydra tends to use the "code" of her native religion, Christianity.

For decades she has quested on Pagan, Buddhist and other paths, having discovered in seminary that the outward forms and doctrines of orthodox Christianity didn't really compute for her.

As Walhydra wrote to Cat in response to another blog post,

When I came out in 1973, I realized that I had to make a choice between striving to meet the expectations of "acceptable" Christianity, on the one hand, or embracing and living what Mother-Father God created me to be, on the other.

If one hears YHWH say "Forget the safety of cultural and religious orthodoxy and live with me"—and if one accepts that daunting challenge—fear, awe and joy become ongoing vibrations in one's life.

It's difficult ever after to really explain to anyone else what it is that one trusts so implicitly...or why.

In the past few years, though, Walhydra has been looking for the pre-theological core of her faith, her spiritual enthusiasm [from Greek enthous, entheos, possessed, inspired : en-, in + theos, god].

Guess what? She found its roots in the positive visceral childhood experiences of Lutheran Sunday School, her father's sermons, her mother's organ-playing, and the hymn-singing of the congregation's old ladies.

What an interesting surprise!

This actually makes sense, though. Ever since childhood, the real Jesus—who is far more real than any of the "Christianities" seem able to express—has been Walhydra's hero.

Walhydra imbibed all of those Sunday School stories and sermons and hymns, to the point that Jesus became a real presence for her, a divine human of fierce integrity and fierce compassion. Whenever anyone makes false claims in his name, he lets her know. More to the point, whenever Walhydra causes harm or tries to hide, he lets her know.

So...back to the winter faith crisis, which stretched from Samhain through Yule and beyond.

While the SSRIs were swirling around, tripping homeostatic switches back and forth, Walhydra was trying to do her job (pretending to be nice to library customers). At the same time, she was trying to psyche herself for the visit from Senior Witch—plus her brother, sister-in-law and Bard sophomore nephew, a beautiful, brilliant trio from the sacred land of Massachusetts.

[Note from the amanuensis: More on this visit in another post.]

How did using faith work through all of this? Every morning when she awoke, every moment throughout the day when swirling neurochemicals threatened to pull her under, Walhydra would stop herself with a deep breath.

"I'm just in the present," she would whisper, and try to center down into the divine Presence.

If that wasn't enough, she would reach for whatever outer world spiritual geegaws might help her remember that she is okay. That she is loved by the Divine One, even when all she can do is sit there in chemical panic.

If she was fortunate enough to be with hubby Jim, that blessèd man would spontaneously whisper "I love you" and give her his warm Leo hug—without asking for explanations or striving to "fix things."

A month later, Walhydra is sailing into the new year, starting new projects at work, and mentoring a bright new library associate on her staff.

A week before Imbolc, just when Walhydra was itching to plunge back into the blogosphere, another of her online friends gave her the marvelous gift of sharing the dream she had had about Walhydra the night before. Somehow this wonderful soul had glimpsed the shimmering, gorgeous colors beneath Walhydra's drab black uniform.

"Drat!" Walhydra thought, secretly delighted. "My secret is out."

So, here we are. A new moon. A new year. Having survived the ”Super Fat Tuesday Bowl" and blessing ourselves with the ashes of the One who holds us all.

When Walhydra finally lifted her covers, she noticed something nice. A year ago in March, she had bought "on faith" an orchid plant which she was told would have a cluster of small white blossoms if it bloomed.

Well, here it is.

Spring is here.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

"Jewel Orchid," Ludicia discolor

The Empty Path

The gentle reader may have noticed that Walhydra has been on a vacation of sorts since her last post.

That's because her amanuensis has been busy trying to figure out how to create another blog...and how to boil down all the things he wanted to say into an initial post.

For several months he's been reading the blogs of other Quakers and Pagans...and Pagan Quakers...and Quaker Pagans...and Nontheists...and so on, all part of an interesting cyber-conversation about religious group identity compared and contrasted with religious group membership.

There were so many good posts and comments, triggering so many deep responses on his part, that he was bogged down in the outlines-of-outlines-of-outlines stage of composing, well on his way to a dissertation—or at least an honors thesis.

After a week or so of watching him stumble through this increasingly intellectual exercise, Walhydra reminded him of what a dear friend of hers said recently:

God wants witnesses, not lawyers, so testify, don't argue.

"Just tell them what you know at the moment, not what you think would be clever to say...if you could figure out how to."

Walhydra can be a ruthless English teacher when she has to.

In any event, that gave the gay, fifty-something, etc., the impetus to finish a first post and go public with The Empty Path.

Walhydra is not at all pleased with the comment on the Profile page: "Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device."

"The nerve!" she snorts. "And after all I've done for him!"

But she understands that mere humans—especially writers, who are the merest—have to have their fantasies about being the real center of the universe. Walhydra knows who actually is, so she deigns to ignore the slight.

In any event, she sort of agrees with the About page, which explains—or pretends to—the blog's subtitle, "Nonaligned faith and practice in the present."

She just thinks this boy is way too serious.

For now, she's content to close with the Stephen Jay Gould epigram from the blog sidebar:

Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or even often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature...but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent for conceptual transition.

—Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
New York, NY:W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, p.264

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Thy kingdom come….

Ever since she dropped out of seminary after discovering that she was not simply an orthodox Lutheran boy but also a Pagan and a Queer, Walhydra has puzzled over how to affirm the grace she knew as a Christian youth—and continues to know now.

One of her puzzlements has been how—if at all—to use any of the prayers, canticles, psalms and hymns she remembers and loves from way back in her...um... days of innocence.

As a natural-born linguist, Walhydra knows where words come from, how they operate and how they tend to be used, as well as how misleading they can be.

Sometimes she manages the mental gymnastics of translating between the old, beloved words and what she now believes. Sometimes, though, that just puts too much of a kink in her neck! She has to put the old words aside and prayer wordlessly.

"That's why I became a Quaker," she grouses. "So I wouldn't have to check my words with anyone to be sure I was saying the right ones in the right way."

Even so, Walhydra longs for both the poetry and the certainty of some of those old words.

Take the Lord's Prayer, for example.

Walhydra has been through the whole textual-critical, dig-up-the-original-Aramaic-of-Jesus exercise and found it quite enlightening…intellectually, at least. She loves the work of people like Sufi scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz and his Prayers of the Cosmos.

However, the child in her—an ancient, ancient child—resonates best to the words it learned in childhood. How to capture that resonance in the present while still being honest to the Truth of the present?

Walhydra thinks she found a clue while traveling last weekend to help her Mom, Senior Witch. On the road she listened again to someone she considers among the most powerful of bards: Tracy Chapman.

Chapman's work always touches something very deep. Whether it is a love song or an anthem, songs Walhydra heard over a decade ago can still conjure tears of joy or grief—or both.

So, as Chapman's rich voice sang "Heaven's Here on Earth" from the 1995 New Beginning album, Walhydra felt sobs of recognition welling in her chest.

You can look to the stars in search of the answers
Look for God and life on distant planets
Have your faith in the ever after
While each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
And heaven's here on earth

We are the spirit the collective conscience
We create the pain and the suffering and the beauty in this world

Heaven's here on earth
In our faith in humankind
In our respect for what is earthly
In our unfaltering belief in peace and love and understanding

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise
Of ordinary people leading ordinary lives
Filled with love, compassion, forgiveness and sacrifice

Heaven's in our hearts
In our faith in humankind
In our respect for what is earthly
In our unfaltering belief in peace and love and understanding

Look around
Believe in what you see
The kingdom is at hand
The promised land is at your feet
We can and will become what we aspire to be

If Heaven's here on earth
If we have faith in humankind
And respect for what is earthly
And an unfaltering belief that truth is divinity
And heaven's here on earth

I've seen spirits
I've met angels
I've touched creations beautiful and wondrous
I've been places where I question all I think I know
But I believe, I believe, I believe this could be heaven
We are born inside the gates with the power to create life
And to take it away
The world is our temple
The world is our church
Heaven's here on earth

If we have faith in human kind
And respect for what is earthly
And an unfaltering belief
In peace and love and understanding
This could be heaven here on earth
Heaven's in our heart

© Tracy Chapman 1994

"That's it! That's it!" Walhydra thought. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!"

It was so obvious!

Of course, it was also so Pagan. So focused on this world, this life.

But isn't that what "on earth as it is in heaven" means? That Mother-Father God created this world and is incarnate in this world—where She longs for us to live and rejoice and share grace along with Her?

Somehow, years ago, Walhydra realized that all of the so-called petitions in the Lord's Prayer made more sense—resonated with more divine power—if they were spoken as affirmations.

Not "Let thy kingdom come" but "Thy kingdom is here!"

So, Walhydra felt even more than the usual sob-in-the-throat thrill as she sang along:

Each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
and heaven's here on earth!

And so it is.

Blessèd Be!

The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida

Walhydra doesn’t like to acknowledge her East Coast liberal condescension toward the popular gullibility of “the masses,” especially their love-hate relationship with celebrity and their gleeful embrace of “miracles” which claim to trump science.

She and hubby Jim have not had a television since 1992, shortly after the now-departed Miso the Cat came into their lives. This means that they learn about news and culture the old fashioned way, through the newspaper and the radio.

And...by browsing the tabloid covers at the grocery checkout. One of their favorite games is to count how many different covers show Brad, Angelina, Jennifer and Company in how many contradictory combinations of adoption, jealous spat, breakup, secret meeting, ecstatic reconciliation, etc.

Given her myopic view of the world, Walhydra was delighted to have her eyes opened a bit by Elizabeth Svoboda’s recent New York Times article about University of Bremen neuroscientist Doris Tsao’s research. Intrigued by how readily people will claim to see “faces” given the right configuration of light and dark areas, Dr. Tsao eventually discovered three regions of the temporal lobe in macaque monkeys which fire at the slightest glimpse of such a configuration.

Of course, Walhydra was also fascinated, and she plunged immediately into an extensive Google search.

[Aside: “I became a librarian,” she says, “because I can’t remember anything any more, but I know how to look things up.”]

She quickly found the term pareidolia, referring to the misperception of vague and random stimuli as recognizable. As Dr. Tsao’s research confirms, we have a “hardwired” survival technique enabling us to recognize faces from a distance with poor visibility—but this wiring also “sees” what isn’t there.

Or so the scientists claim, say Walhydra’s skeptical masses. For every space probe photograph revealing the natural structure of the Cydonian “face” on Mars, there is a True Believer who can prove that it is actually artificial.

All of which brings us back to Walhydra’s condescension and subsequent enlightenment.

What mainly caught her eye in the Times article was the picture of Diana Duyser’s grilled cheese sandwich. After keeping this sandwich in a reliquary for ten years—during which time she insists it got neither moldy nor crumbly and brought her miraculous blessings—Mrs. Duyser sold it on eBay for $28,000. Definitely a miraculous blessing.

And why all the attention? Because you can see the face of the Virgin Mary on the toast.

Umm....

Walhydra sees it too. Or, rather, some cells in her temporal lobe fire because a certain configuration of light and shadow matches the hardwired primate pattern for recognizing a face.

A woman’s face. Gazing upward. With lipstick and, Walhydra imagines, the permed wave of her bangs falling coyly over her right eye, in the manner of a Hollywood starlet—if that isn’t going too far....

So, this is a case of religious pareidolia. A Catholic woman seeing the Virgin Mary, where a Muslim might see the name of Allah or a verse from the Qur’an, written in Arabic script.

But, um.... Walhydra furls her eyebrows.

Could it be, then, that Mrs. Duyser’s reaction to the toast means she had already experienced Mary as the personification of divine feminine benevolence and compassion breaking into her life?

Sort of like the Tibetan Buddhists’ acknowledgement of Green Tara, who refused to become a bodhisattva until she could do so in female form, and who then returned to bless the world, as she does to this day.

Maybe Mrs. Duyser came to her lunch already imbued with a trust in and longing for Divine Presence, and her temporal lobe—and the toaster—just did the rest.

Hmm....

That gets Walhydra to wondering, a bit ruefully: How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining faith for oneself?

Increasingly as she approaches—eek!—sixty, Walhydra finds herself suddenly awake at 2:30, 3:30, 4:30 in the morning. Wide awake, with “monkey mind” jabbering away, listing off and analyzing all the problems ahead.

How to provide long distance care and safety for her Mom, Senior Witch?

How to trust her knowledge that, beneath their well-guarded father-and-son barriers (“After all, boys will be boys”), she and her Dad, the Lutheran pastor, live in the same land of the heart?

How to sustain hubby Jim’s career hopes, when the alpha male-driven winds of academic bureaucracy may be forcing them to move again.

How to get the code on that library web page to put the pop-up menu where she wants it?

How...how...how...?

For her first thirty years, Walhydra alternated between her favorite pastime of despair and her search for the right combination of outer world rituals and magical thinking.

Hoping to find the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

Now, instead, she drags her old bones into the dark living room to do limbering exercises flat on her back. Stumbles into her meditation room to sit a squirmy, inattentive zazen....

And at some point, amidst the monkey chatter, glimpses the right combination of dark and light patterns to remind her of a face which no one can see and no one can name adequately.

It is a face of calm certainty, saying, “Be still.”

Walhydra exhales.

“Be in the present moment.”

Walhydra inhales.

“Walk in this moment throughout the day.

“Everything else is in your mind. Memories of what’s happened. Imaginings of what you hope or fear will happen. Struggles to control and reshape both.

“It’s just monkey mind, doing its hardwired job of trying to survive in the jungle.

“But you don’t have to give it all of your attention all of the time. After all, it’s had millions of years of practice.

“And eventually you’re going to die anyway. Everybody dies.”

Walhydra has stopped squirming.

“So just be in the present moment. It’s the only place your awareness can actually be.

“Five hours from now, you can only be in the present moment. Five days. Five years.”

Walhydra grins silently. She bows, rises to her feet—much lighter than when she sat down—and stands before her Jesus/Buddha altar.

The words of the old ex-slaver John Newton come back to her:

Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.

I once
was lost,
but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.

Amused at the horror of her Lutheran ancestors—not to mention a number of Pagan, Quaker and Humanist friends—Walhydra giggles as she feels her right hand lift to the ceiling on its own, in good Pentacostal style, to send this blesséd energy back to the Source who has graciously shared it with her.

Blessèd Be.