2024 a year of sacred memory, dreaming dragons, and original prayer

Week 35--in which we ask what grace is

Friends, soul writers, mystics, witches, and lovers of prayer,

Last week, I shared the invocation I received for The Return of the Witches pilgrimage early in 2021. Little did I know that that profound event, in which we met, up close and personal 13 women and men denigrated, abused, and murdered as witches, wasn’t a standalone. It turned out to be the first in a steady stream of witch events, each building on the one before.

But always there is Joan of Arc, the center of all things witch. I call her “the greatest mystic witch of all time.” Because she is. Her story is so astonishing that you almost can’t believe it. Youngest general of any gender in history. Almost ended the 100 years war singlehandedly. Drove the imperial power of England off most French soil. She would have finished the job had the church and government not conspired to murder her as a witch. Can’t have a 19 year old girl with an army at her command roaming the countryside now can we!

In that invocation, (here’s last Sunday’s Notes from the Field if you missed it) the one praying asks: “grant me the courage, give me the grace…”

That word grace. It’s such a conundrum. What exactly is grace?

Growing up orthodox catholic I heard the word grace all the time. And not just at the dinner table. But no one seemed to be able to describe or define it in any way that felt right or made sense.

So I stopped using the term. But grace wouldn’t go away. I once interviewed a lovely woman who wrote a book titled Grace for my radio show. I read her book. I reread it. I underlined. I composed questions. But even after a lengthy conversation with her, if you’d asked me to define grace, I’d still have shrugged my shoulders.

And yet, Joan (who dictated that invocation in the middle of the night in February 2021) put that word front and center in her invocation.

Give me the courage. Grant me the grace.  

And then things get really dicey. Just what are we going to do with all that courage and grace?

to see what wants to be seen
to hear who wants to be heard
and to do what must be done

Right there, in three short lines, you learn everything you need to know about why patriarchy loathes wise women. Witches. Myrrhophores. Priestesses. Because at our core, we are willing to do three very radical things. Things patriarchy cannot afford to have revealed.

See what WANTS to be seen.

Not what society or religion or power or patriarchy wants us to see, but all that is waiting, hoping, begging to be seen. Noticed. Acknowledged.

And hear who WANTS to be heard.

You can be certain the powers that be do not, not, not, want us to hear the wounded, the suffering, the abused, the silenced.

And the big finish: to do what MUST be done.

That leaves us asking ourselves some tough questions:

• Am I willing to see who wants to be seen?
  If I am, when I look, who do I see?
• Am I willing to hear who wants to be heard?
  If I am, even a little bit, what do I hear?
• Am I willing to do what must be done?
  If I am, even a little bit, what is mine to do?
  And when am I going to start doing it?

Those questions are so massive that suddenly I understand why we need grace.

Whatever it is, we need it. To do what must be done.

We have now said this Invocation to Jeanne d’Arc in every gathering for the last 4 years. But it wasn’t until this week that I began to wrap my head around this magical, mysterious, elusive word, grace.

The breakthrough came while reading The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary. Take a breath before I tell you the subtitle: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition.

You might not be familiar with this particular book, but if you’ve been curious about the apocryphal gospels, you know Jean-Yves Leloup. He has written 90 books. His most famous are his translations of The gospels of Phillip, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene.

Leloup has a wildly interesting background. He was born in 1950, converted to Christianity at 20, trained at Mount Athos, and became a Dominican priest in 1978. He left the catholic church and joined the French Orthodox Church in 1986.

Now in Myrrhophore Anointing (the current intensive in The Witch Sequence), we are meeting Magdalene and her beloved, Yeshua at a profound and intimate level. In preparation for an Experiential Journey into their loving hearts this week, I reread The Sacred Embrace. On p 72, I stopped in my tracks.

Here was the deepest and best exposition on grace, I’ve ever read.

Note: Leloup uses the term God. I do not. I use Goddess. Here is his  passage with slight edits. To feel confident making the edits, my collaborator in The Witch Sequence Cathy Stevens Pratt and I did a deep dive into the Hebrew words. 

“The grace of Goddess/God is compassion in the face of misery (hen), generous fidelity to love (hesed), unshakable solidarity to truth (emet), kindness of the heart (rahamim), and fathomless justice (sedeq).

"Here we encounter the great richness of the Hebrew vocabulary relating to grace, which has been translated as charis in Greek, the root of our words charity and charisma. Our word, grace, from the Latin gratia, signifies both the source of the gift and its effect on the receiver. It also encompasses the meanings ‘freedom’ and ‘beauty’.”

Before continuing, I drew a figure 8, the infinity symbol, the mobius strip in the margin. This is the perfect symbol to expresses the endless flow of source and effect. Lover and beloved. Cathy painted this flow of grace. Isn't it gorgeous! 

Grace by Cathy Stevens Pratt

Leloup continues:

“When it is said of the Virgin Mary or of Jesus that they are 'full of grace,' they are invested with all these various qualities. But above all, the intent is that they are filled with the Holy Spirit, which is grace par excellence. Beyond all gifts, grace means the very capacity of giving oneself. The Holy Spirit is also the spirit of truth.”

The use of the term Holy Spirit leapt off the page. Because it’s the term Yeshua uses throughout The Gospel of the Beloved Companion: The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In it, Yeshua doesn’t call god, god the father. No, he always says Spirit. And Spirit, it is essential to understand, is a feminine gendered word.

I went back and read aloud all the gifts of grace, all the gifts flowing from Spirit, from the source of the gift to the recipient where the gifts come to life:

• compassion in the face of misery
• generous fidelity to love
• unshakable solidarity to truth
• kindness of the heart
• fathomless justice
• freedom
• beauty

Just imagine if we’d been taught by all our religions that this is not only what grace is, but how it bears fruit in us.

Thanks to this brilliant exposition, I am beginning to realize just how radical the request to give us the grace to see what wants to be seen, hear who wants to be heard, and do what must be done really is. And realize what it might actually look like.

Grace, in other words, suddenly has legs.

And that leaves us with even more life-altering questions:

• Am I capable of compassion in the face of misery?
• Do I have wildly generous fidelity to love, real love, big love, holy love?
• Do I have unshakable solidarity to truth—not to what an authority tells me is truth, but to what I know in my gut is truth?
• Am I kind? Really really kind?
• Am I willing to do the work of fathomless justice?
• What does freedom really mean? How do I serve freedom in the world?
• What does beauty really mean? How do I serve beauty in the world?

to walking in grace

Janet

website: janetconner.com

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