A dream of love in a time of chaos and crisis
As we celebrate the birthday of the world, I search for hope and healing for Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham's broken family
In the aftermath of a storm and in a time of war, Sarah's story takes center stage.
Earlier this month I asked for a healing dream. That’s because four times a year, I host a group dream for global healing, with people from around the world.
I like to think that when we focus our hearts and minds on the possibility of healing, we project more goodness into the world. I also believe that it is up to writers, dreamers, and artists to cultivate a quality of imagination that can help us see past the surfaces of things into more wholesome possibilities.
And yet, what is reflected back to us in the news each day challenges that aspiration, to put it mildly.
I tell you this here, where I usually share my poems about the biblical matriarch Sarah, because I started writing my Sarah poems in a season of personal darkness, when I was reeling from being separated from my daughter for nearly five years.
I began writing these poems to try to describe how Abraham’s complete faith and surrender to God’s will liberated me from my pain.
Then it was Sarah — priestess and prophetess, whose inner and outer beauty, whose laughter, and ferocity as a guardian of divine feminine wisdom and strength — who inspired me.
Over time I also came to know Hagar as foremother and matriarch, who embodied parts of my own motherhood journey. Like Hagar, I was the “other mother,” and I took heart from Hagar’s relationship with an empathetic deity who spoke to her in her distress, and who heard her son’s cries in the desert.
In the process of sharing my “Sarah” poems with you, I’ve also come to see that the sources of much of the conflict and crisis that are playing out in today’s headlines can be traced back to this story.
Although I have found in Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham’s story the record of powerful spiritual teachers who glimpsed a Divine Union that could merge and multiply our capacity for a higher ethical and moral plane, that is not how it has played out.
Instead, for generations and generations the sons and daughters of these three parents have embraced a patriarchal version of monotheism that extirpates the Divine Feminine from the predominant image of one God.
As a result, the story of the origins of monotheism has become the story of how we abandoned a spirituality centered in a reverence for the earth.
It has become the story of how we lost our balance and built up a world that devalues women, motherhood, and Mother Earth.
In misreading this story we have mistaken care and stewardship of the land for possession of it.
We’ve lost sight of this story’s potential to help us increase our human potential—rather than descend into rancor and chaos.
And we have largely overlooked, trivialized, or dismissed its message of a shared Eternal Source of lineage, wisdom, and promise.
I believe we tell this story each year at this time because we are meant to grow its message forward and enlarge our best hopes for humanity every time we tell it.
A simple dream in a time of complexity
Which brings me back to the dream I had when I set my intention to picture global healing. Although I often have long, complicated epic dreams, this one merely brought me face-to-face with photograph that’s pasted into one of my albums, and that was barely altered at all by the dream:
I am looking at an old photograph from 1987. I see myself and my ex posing with the AHAVA sculpture by Robert Indiana at the Jerusalem Museum. In this picture we are literally threading our arms and legs through the oversized letters that are arranged in the same shape of the famous LOVE sculpture in NYC by the same artist.
This simple dream of a snapshot is laden with symbolism.
In it we are not yet parents.
In it we are literally in love.
In it we are visiting Jerusalem, the spiritual home of all of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham’s children.
It brings together the personal pain of losing my daughter for five years while my ex and I battled for custody — and the collective tragedy of war in the Middle East between the children of three shared ancestral parents.
It evokes the individual tears being spilled by mothers and fathers and seeping into the land which might instead teach us how to be holy, together.
This simple dream of AHAVA/LOVE speaks to me of a Oneness, Unity, and Love that is both an idealist’s fantasy — and also a necessity.
Transforming stories into sweetness
Each year, on Roshashana and Yom Kippur we read the story of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar. In the book, The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Rabbi Arthur Waskow writes:
"And we might even think that precisely by lifting up these stories for us at this time of transformation, the sacred cycle of the calendar itself is asking us to transform the stories toward a healing of the broken family of Abraham … "
Tonight is the start of Roshashana, a holiday that marks, among other things, the birthday of the world.
May we be given another chance to learn and grow together, in the spirit of love.
Make Sarah’s Story Your Own
Join me Sunday, Oct. 20, 11 a.m. US Eastern Time, for Unearthing Sarah's Story with Creativity and Spirituality, a free workshop at Temple Beth Zion, Brookline, MA. More info here.