 This is all I really know: there is a presence that is larger than myself that has been with me all my life. I experience this self as loving, and in some essential way it is what I am.
Many of the people I know experience this presence in their lives in ways they would never label spiritual - by the way they see and cherish all that is green and alive on the planet, through their participation in the ecstatic struggle of creativity, by giving themselves to a greater beauty in shape or colour or sound or word. Some longing within us is met when we participate in the beauty of creation by really paying attention. It connects us to the presence of that which is unnameable. Beneath all our longings, the ache within the ache is a soul-deep desire to live within an awareness of this presence that is larger than ourselves, every moment.
But our prayers are the prayers of human beings and are rarely so grand. When we are unemployed and worried about providing for our children, our sincerest prayer may be a plea for money or a job. When we drop beneath these immediate and legitimate concerns, we find a longing to know that we belong to a community, that we are not isolated and on our own, prey to the real or imagined vagaries of the marketplace or uncertainties of the world. And beneath this real desire for support and community is a longing for contact with that which supports and connects us all – the Great Mystery.
I am not denigrating our very human needs as less than our longing for the Sacred. One of the students I have worked with for many years, a woman in her early fifties, lost her mother and her brother when she was fifteen. They were killed in a car accident. Often when she does ceremony, the grief over this loss and the longing for her mother are touched again, opening the wound that never heals within her. At one retreat I sat with her as she sobbed uncontrollably. When she could speak she said to me, ‘Sometimes I wonder if I confuse my longing for my mother with my longing for Spirit.’
And I said, ‘Same longing.’
We see God in the face of the child or mate or parent we cherish; we feel held by the Mystery when a lover or friend – or sometimes more acutely when a caring stranger - extends a hand and opens their heart to us. And yet, to meet the deeper need we feel, we must not burden these relationships, which are of necessity impermanent and ever changing, with the weight of unmet desires for what is constant and ever-present. This most often happens in romantic relationships, perhaps because the fire of sexual intimacy when we are in love is so similar to - is an exquisite embodiment of - the ecstasy of feeling those sweet lips of the Mystery on our own.
Jai Uttal, a gifted musician and singer, leads three hundred people in Hindu chants to the goddess Sita and the god Ram at a retreat in upstate New York. I am not Hindu, but I sing these beautiful unfamiliar names of the presence I know to the rhythm of the drum and harmonium. What I love about these chants is that they are declarations of devotion to the divine. Once in a while my own prayers can sound just a little too much like a grocery list of need. We sing for over an hour, and I am filled with awareness of the Beloved around me and within me. Beneath the chant a voice sings, ‘You are mine.’
Later, alone in my cabin, I lie in the dark and remember my name.
Oriah is a name that was given to me when I was thirty years old by the Grandmothers in the dream. I had been ill with chronic fatigue immune deficiency syndrome for several years, and when I awoke from the dream I felt that taking this new name was part of the healing I so desperately sought. But it frightened me. It all just seemed to weird, too flaky. I was afraid of what others would think. Despite my fear, a week later I changed my name. When I asked the women in my dreams what the name meant, they simply shook their heads and said, ‘Not time.’
Over the next ten years, unexpectedly and irregularly, the Grandmothers in the dream would tell me something about the meaning of my name. The last time, about six years ago, one of them said, ‘Your name means She Who Belongs to God.' I knew she could have used the word Mystery or Beloved with equal conviction, and I wondered if the term God was a deliberate reminder of my childhood experiences.
As I lie in bed after the Hindu chanting I think again about the meaning of my name - of how it is true for all of us. We belong to God – to the sacred life force. I repeat my name to myself, whispering into the darkness, ‘Oriah, She Who Belongs to God... She Who Belongs to the Beloved... She Who Belongs to the Great Mystery...’ And I begin to imagine what it might be like to live every day, to direct my actions, choose my words, and see the world as one who remembers that she belongs to, is an embodiment of, and is connected to that which is sacred and larger than herself. How would she treat her own body and heart? How would she treat the other embodiments of the Sacred - other people, the trees and animals, the earth? How would you plan your day if you really knew you belonged to God, if you believed you were an embodiment of the sacred Mystery, surrounded and held by the Beloved?
I do not seek perfection. I simply seek to remember who and what I am every day. I seek the people and places and practices that support the expanding of this awareness in my day, in my life, in my choices. Our lives are the story of how we remember. It is the dance that was woven into the fabric of our being from the beginning. The presence of the Great Mystery is always with us. I only have to turn my face toward it, and it is there – as a voice beneath the sound of the pale grey waves crashing on the shore, as a touch of the unseen on the back of my neck that makes me pause and turn as I cut carrots on my kitchen counter, as a kiss that lingers as I come up out of dreams in the mist of dark mornings.
From The Dance, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, copyright 2001 by Mountain Dreaming Productions Inc., published in the UK by HarperCollins.
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