Mother Earth and Rebirth

In The Power of Myth program from 1987, Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell: the Lords' Prayer says "Our Father, which art in Heaven." Could it have said, "Our Mother?" The Earth, Campbell said, is the greater Being to whom we owe allegiance today, more than to one nation or religion.

So, here's my revision, in honor of Mother's Day: Our Mother, who art Spirit on Earth, hallowed be thy name. Thy Awakening come, thy will be done, on Earth, which is also Heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our transgressions against Thee, as we remember our debt to Thee. And leave us not in temptation, but deliver us from illusions of separation. For thine is the peace, the power and the glory, now and forever. Amen. The Earth is our Mother; we must take care of her. She is sacred ground. We need Her, for She is the living goddess Gaia from which our life springs. Our Earth nurtures the growth of Spirit. The life which grows on Earth expresses the boundless, astounding beauty of divine, Infinite Spirit. It is our Garden of Eden.

But we have left it. We have separated ourselves from her fullest glory. Our Earth today is under threat from the ways we humans treat Her. Lest much of life on Earth die, She must be reborn. And for that to happen, we must be reborn too. Our Mother needs to experience rebirth in us, as we learn Her ways.

In honor of Mother's Day, I rephrase Jesus. John 14:10-12: Don't you believe that I am in the Mother, and that the Mother is in me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, the Mother that dwells within me doeth the works. The works that I do, you will do also, and greater works than these. John 5:30: I can of my own self do nothing. I seek not my own will, but the will of She who sent me.

And among these greater works, certainly the easiest to accomplish, is to speak even greater words.

To be reborn, we need a new philosophy to see things correctly. Genesis 5 says that God made man in His image. But, as George Gershwin wrote, "the things that you're liable to read in the Bible, it ain't necessarily so." The truth is not in the books, but in ourselves. We emerge from the womb of Mother Earth, and like a baby does, we grow from within outward, just like every flower or fruit. Like Rev. Christine says, it's an inside-out world. You might think, looking at the early Earth, all rocks and fire, how could life grow on it? Just like you might look at a barren tree in Winter. Where do the cherries come from? Yet life in its incredible richness of beauty and spirit is inherent in the Earth itself from the start, just like cherries are already in the bark of the tree.

No Big Daddy in the sky shaped and made us from the outside. Nor did it just happen by chance, or automatically, as if it were a machine. These ideas have separated us from Eden. They allowed us to manipulate the Earth to make machines from the outside in. But we weren't made, we grew. To nurture ourselves and the Earth and return to Eden, we need to regain our connection. We can experience, every day, that everything in the Earth is part of us. The trees and the birds are blooming and singing inside me now.

As John Lennon said, "when I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way." The young Earth needed no help from humans. Even storms and fires are natural; they clean things out and restore life. But they get in the way of what we build, and when the Earth shakes, they fall on us. Like palm trees that are strong because they evolved in hurricane zones, we need to adapt. The animals know when storms come, and they get out of the way. We are causing more storms to happen by burning fossil fuels, causing the greenhouse effect. The Earth has a fever, and we need to cure it by switching from fossil fuels faster than we're doing. And when our connection to the Earth as one mind is reborn, we can help settle the storms with our inner peace and prayers.

Earth and her humans are getting older now. Just like some of us have to care for our mothers now, so we must take care of our Earth Mother too. Jesus in John 21 said to Simon Peter, "Do you love me? feed my sheep. When you were young, you dressed yourself, and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you don't want to go." We may need to sacrifice some of our wants, cravings and comforts so that we may become Earth Mothers. I encourage you to help and support the rebirth of Earth in any way that feels right to you. It depends on us. We are called to be compassionate toward all living beings.

Rev. Christine recently quoted a Divine Science author who distinguished the Earth from the world. The Earth is the real planet that gives us life, but the world is Society, and in the spiritual quest we are called to leave Society's beliefs instilled in us by authority. The tarot and the kaballah's Tree of Life are convenient symbols for this journey.

In the Tree of Life symbol, God emanates down from the top to the Earth at the bottom of the Tree, which is God in manifestation, called Malkuth. In the tarot, Malkuth corresponds to the #10 cards, which show the abundant gifts and burdens of life on Earth. But on the Tree Malkuth is also divided into four parts, and the next four cards after the 10's in the natural progression are the 4 face cards: the Kings, Queens, Knights and Pages (like the kings, queens and jacks in a normal card deck). They represent human society, especially the authorities from whose influence we escape in our quest back up the Tree to rediscover God for ourselves.

The numbered major arcana tarot cards are the pathway up the Tree and back to God, and the final card called World is much misunderstood, according to tarot expert Robert Place. With the naked goddess in the center of God's throne, as pictured on the card, it does not represent the world, but the discovery of the "naked Truth," that the World itself is sacred. It is the end of the journey, the throne of God, cosmic consciousness.

The World card says we become the whole world as God. Just as we are not just ourselves, but also the world, so the Earth is not just the earth. It is the temple of Life, but its being spreads to the cosmos, and that means especially the solar system, and in particular, The Moon: also a symbol of the Mother and female cycles. And Father Sky is also part of Earth too, since the air is fully as much the Earth as the dirt, the oceans and the liquid fires below. In fact, I think we should also celebrate Father Sky on Father's Day.

The Sun is our great living cosmic Father from which our life and consciousness emerge. Venus is the planet most intertwined with Earth, and in astrology it's the symbol of the productive powers of Nature in all their beauty. Every 1.6 years, the Earth passes Venus in its orbit, and after 5 passages, Venus returns to the same place in the sky. That's 8 Earth years, and 13 years of Venus. 5, 8 and 13 are Fibonacci numbers, which create the divine proportion (1 to 1.618) that governs the growth of all life on Earth.

The divine proportion, for example, is shown in the difference between smaller and larger portion of a line, which is equal to the proportion of the larger portion to both together. In Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of Vitruvian Man, that portion is seen in the position of the heart chakra (the green circle in the picture) in relation to the whole up and down axis.

Venus also governs this Divine Center within us, the Heart, or 4th chakra, through which we know the divine proportion in all of our affairs. Amazingly, Venus also makes 5 rotations on its own axis between each Earth passage. Venus is ours' and the Earth's connection to Love, the basic energy of Life.

Closer to the Sun is Mercury, which governs the 5th chakra. It rotates three times during two of its years, or its two solar orbits. We make sound at the 5th throat chakra. The 5th or dominant tone in music is a 3 to 2 proportion. Mercury is known as the planet of communication and expression in sound.

The 4th and 5th chakras resonate to the 4th and 5th tones (commonly known as F and G respectively in the C major scale), which together with the root tone, are common to musical scales in all cultures. The first or root tone can also be called the zero tone, because for some mysterious reason, the scale circles back to itself at the octave. So we have 5, 4 and 0, which describes the relationship of Venus to Earth. In the picture of 8 Earth orbits and 13 Venus orbits, a line is drawn between successive positions of the two planets during this time, forming a five-star petal in four sizes within the circle of Venus' orbit.

540 is the work number of the sacred Toccata in F by Bach. But today I want to share a few minutes of an electronic piece by Andrew Lahiff called Silver Droplets, a symbol of the silvery Moon, and water, and of the nurturing Mother. It evokes powerfully the beauty of nature's life, ever soft and graceful. It's like crystal bowls, only more intense. Like Bach's Toccata, it's built on the root tone held throughout (like Om). In this case the scale is a minor; which arguably is just as valid as C major as a chakra tone symbol-- in fact, it's all the same notes, but starting with A. The zero tone, the dominant 5th tone of the 5th chakra, and the sub-dominant 4th tone of the 4th chakra, are constantly present, and the other tones are woven in softly.