Spiritual Authority
Image credit: Mansour Almalki on Unsplash
“Give us the inner listening
that is a way in itself
and the oldest thirst there is.”
(For Doug, Helen and Carrie, who taught me to trust myself.
And for Brian.
The ocean looks beautiful tonight.)
When you are young, they teach you to find a wise elder, to ‘sit under’ their leadership. You do this thing, because you are earnest and want to know and be known, both. You long to have someone tell you that you are on the right path. That you are doing good, that you are sanctified, blessed, walking the good walk. Talking the right talk. Elders are easy to come by, because anyone over thirty qualifies. You move between the various elders in your life, soaking up their wisdom, sit at their tables, hold their babies. Sleep over in their spare rooms.
As time goes by, sometimes you notice that these wise elders say unwise things. You don’t know they are unwise, they are Master and you are Student and that is how things are. You do the unwise things they tell you to do, swallow their doctrine whole, repeat the language you’ve become fluent in. Because now you belong and exile is death, plus you still want to know and be known and you have not yet had your satisfaction on either of those fronts.
You get older, they get older. They get tired. Their failings are starting to show through. Some of their marriages have ended. Some of their kids are on drugs, or have run away from home, or become Wiccan, or come out as gay. You are not supposed to ask after these kids anymore, you know this like you know the sky is blue. The elders who are still available to you in some way have said harsh things and sent you away because you broke the rules, or were too curious, or too much, or because your pain triggered their own and the mirror you held up scalded them with the ferocity of their own reflection.
It doesn’t matter why; all you know is rejection. Sometimes the pain of this rejection is unbearable. Sometimes it swallows you whole.
“You have not yet learned they are human, with their own limitations. They may not be able to own up to this yet because they are still reeling from what they saw when the mirror you held reflected back to them their own divinity, their own belovedness, their own shame.”
They are still on a pedestal in your mind, only now you can’t get close enough to see the whites in their eyes anymore.
You feel un-tethered, alone. Fear flutters from time to time in your heart.
One day you wake up to realise that you are in fact the Captain of your own ship, but you cannot locate your compass; because you were trained to steer by the wisdom of the elders. Only now the elders are nowhere to be found, or you have been exiled from their presence, or both.
And so you do what your ancestors did and start to chart a course using the stars and your five senses. Feel the tide. Notice the changing seasons of the moon. Watch how the fish move. Move your sail to catch the winds. Learn to trust the swaying of the waves as they gently move your little boat steadily onward. Feel how your body instinctively moves in time with the rhythm of the changing seasons. You wonder to yourself, if maybe this is what a compass is? This deep instinctual knowing that you hold inside you.
“Surely not,” you think. But you wonder, just the same.
“As you start to practice this deep instinctual knowing, the old habit for external validation rears up again. You are still looking for your elders, because now you need them to tell you that you are ready, that you have got this.”
You still feel like an apprentice. No one told you that you had arrived. But by now, your elders have died, or have given up on you as a lost cause because they can no longer see the whites in your eyes either, you are too far out to sea.
You stop hoping that they will come. You realise it is time for you to trust your own compass; you are your own elder now. As you start to steer your ship alone, something amazing happens.
You start to discover deep wisdom from deep time. Prehistoric, mythical wisdom.
And new elders emerge. If you are especially blessed, maybe even old elders that you are now seeing with fresh eyes.
But these elders are different, or perhaps you are different. They do not ask you to sit at their feet and not break any rules or to swallow their doctrine whole. When you ask them a question, they return it to you like this: “What does your body know to be true about this thing?” or “What does your own wisdom tell you?” or even better, “Why are you asking me this thing that you already know the answer to?” or one time, “Why are you asking me to approve of you? You are already so beloved, you do not need me to remind you of this thing. When will you wake up and remember who you are?”
Image Credit: Gregor Moser on Unsplash
And so hesitatingly, falteringly at first, you start to offer up to them the secret things you learned under the stars, by watching the fish, and learning the tide and following the phases of the moon. You brace yourself to be told you are foolish, or navigating the wrong ocean, or using the wrong boat.
Instead you look up, into the face of a loving and compassionate other whose eyes twinkle with joy and recognition.
‘Ah yes. Excellent. You are stepping into your own deep-knowing now. And what else do you notice?’
You start to describe the dimensions of your own boat, the one you carved out of virgin wood with your own two hands. The boat you needed to traverse the waters you had found yourself in. The boat you never wanted to make, because you really longed to stay safe and dry on the shore. You start to talk about weather and seasons, hunting and cooking, and changing tides and how some things change and some things are cyclical, and that you are starting to notice the sacred pattern in all these things, the divine dance.
With great shyness, you tell them that you are starting to enjoy being the Captain of your own ship.
When the young ones come to you now, wanting to put you on their pedestal, you point out to them that there will be no place for a pedestal in the boat they must carve. When they come wanting your doctrine, your ideology, wanting you to describe to them the path they should walk on, you now know that no one person’s journey is the same as another’s, and so you do not give them your own dimensions, map or compass.
You ask them the right questions, to teach them to find their own.
“What does the ocean you are sailing in right now look like? Describe to me its smell, its taste, what it sounds like, how it feels. Who are the predators in this ocean, where are your food sources, what phase is the moon in tonight?”
“How did you make the boat you are sailing in? What do you dream about when you sleep in your boat?”
“What is your body telling you about what is needed for this stage in your journey?”
“What is the thing you know deep down to be true?”
And you watch in joy as they chart their own course home.