Out of the Ashes, Love Rises Like a Phoenix
Rev. Lilli Nye
April 8, 2007
This week, Christian communities have entered fully into the story of Jesus’ last days, the passion story, moving liturgically, emotionally, and spiritually through a series of events and services. The Christian Holy Week will include Tenebrae, which comes from the Latin word for “shadows,” which deals with betrayal and abandonment. It will include liturgies of mourning and times of vigil and silence, remembering the period when the great stone covered the mouth of the tomb, and death seemed to have had the last word. Only after all that will the people gather on Easter morning to rejoice in the miraculous transcendence of life over death.
We come to Easter without having gone into these shadows. As a religious community we have not undertaken the Holy Week journey. But Easter is Easter only because it dawns out of the darkest of night. Just as the Passover liberation begins in the condition of slavery and resonates when we have experienced oppression or reckoned seriously with it, resurrection comes out of crucifixion, and rebirth out of death. Even in the natural world, which is awakening all around us, the spring comes only after the decay and stillness of winter.
And so this morning we will take these archetypes of death and rebirth as one story, a full circle, and will hold the whole together. And we will make this journey through the vehicles of poetry, song, and reflection, drawing on the myth of the phoenix.
ASHES:
I was looking through a collection of art works by the collage artist Penny Slinger. She pieces together found images from a colorful array of resources—commercial magazines, religious iconography, photographs of animals and insects, planets, suns and galaxies, landscapes and skyscapes, trees, faces, mythical creatures. Through startling juxtapositions she creates strange, riotous pictures of the many facets of the human psyche. Each collage is a portrait of a state of mind, a picture of an emotion, a representation of an archetype of human experience. These images often suggest a paradox, as most of our deepest experiences do.
One collage showed a Tibetan Buddhist icon of a Divine Couple joined in ecstatic embrace. This image in itself symbolizes the union of opposites. But the artist had surrounded them with wings and flames, and placed them against a background of stars. At the very center of the image a red jewel glowed from within, as if a small sun were captured inside it.
The collage was titled “Phoenix.” I looked at the image for a long time, and it occurred to me that it portrayed one of the most amazing, mysterious things about human beings, about the human spirit, and that’s our capacity to love—to love again, and again, in spite of the fact of loss. Like the mythical phoenix, surrendering itself to fire and then rising up again from its own ashes, we can rise again to embrace life, to welcome life into our arms, even after death has laid waste the landscape of our heart.
How is it that we are able to love again after grief has closed us down? How is this miracle possible?
The story of the phoenix offers us a complex metaphor. According to ancient Egyptian mythology, the firebird reigns as a sign of vitality and divine energy for 500 years. Toward the end of its lifespan it builds a nest, which is also a funeral pyre, from myrrh resin and the twigs and branches of spice trees. Turning to face the rays of the sun, it begins to beat its wings, fanning the flames, and then allowing itself to be utterly consumed and cremated in the fire.
An egg forms from the resin and ash. Inside the egg an embryonic new life takes shape and grows and finally breaks free. The infant firebird remains in its nest, while its wings gather strength. When it is finally strong enough to fly, its first act is to gather up the ashy remains of its former self and fly to Mount Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, and place those ashes on the altar of the great temple. This cycle of self-sacrifice and regeneration is repeated through the eons, revealing the eternal life that survives unbroken inside the cycles of death and rebirth. So, too, the phoenix is also said to be able to regenerate when wounded by a foe, and its tears have healing powers.
What does this fantastic story have to do with love, and with the human spirit? These states of the phoenix—of death and ashes, of the new self gestating and gathering strength and finally rising up again on new wings—these stages tell us about the seasons of our own lives.
To be mortal is to be constantly vulnerable to change and loss: There is the shocking, incomprehensible loss of a sudden, unexpected death. There is the gradual aching loss of a slow dying. There are the many minor and major losses that aging brings, and the devastations of a serious illness.
There is the loss felt as one’s children grow up, assert their own selves, change through the years and eventually leave home. There are the endings that come to friendships and love affairs, the experiences of betrayal, of abandonment, or any other failure of the promise of love.
These losses give us the time of ashes. Something we had counted on or believed in shows itself to be ephemeral, suddenly gone. Something that had sustained our life suddenly slips through our fingers. A love that seemed passionate spends itself out and ends, leaving only dust. A connection that seemed solid and lasting deteriorates, leaving a great emptiness. When anything beloved is taken from us by death or change or cruelty, we find ourselves in a landscape of ashes.
William Carlos Williams describes this landscape in his poem entitled, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”:
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirty-five years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
We have all known dark times when our life was a landscape of ashes. Wherever we looked, wherever we went, all we could see or know was loss and grief. Things that had once given us joy or pleasure were now utterly empty. The world had not necessarily changed, but because something at the center of our life had been taken away, through the eyes of a heart in mourning everything is desolation.
I am reminded that in the Christian story, when Jesus is dying on the cross, he cries out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) These words are from Psalm 22, a hymn of lamentation.
I am poured out like water,
All my bones are out of joint,
My heart is like wax, melted within my breath,
My mouth is dried up, like a potsherd,
My tongue sticks to my jaws,
You lay me in the dust of death.
From the time of ashes comes another quintessential song of lamentation, from the African American tradition:
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
A long way from home, a long way from home…
Let us sing together Hymn #97, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”
GATHERING STRENGTH:
Mary Jane Moffet writes:
At a recent exhibit of American quilts at the Oakland Art Museum, I was moved by an example titled “Widows Quilt.” The artist has fashioned from her husband’s clothes a tableau of their life together. Around certain scenes—their wedding day, the gravestone of a child—her usually meticulous patching veered, the uneven stitches a powerful metaphor for her grief. By assembling from the fabric a memory of all that had been lost, all she cherished, she had created a comforter of warmth for others and a work of enduring beauty. The quilt maker suggests that each of us might create, in our own way, something new from sorrow.
In the myth of the phoenix, the new firebird is born out of death itself. But there is a waiting time when the new creature must slowly grow, gestate in the dark, and then push against its shell to seek the light. As a hatchling, it remains in its nest of ashes until it is ready to fly. This is the time of gathering strength….
What I know of healing—whether from my own experience or the experience and wisdom of others—is that the process involves small, gradual movements toward regeneration that nourish a wintry soul. In small acts of creativity, small gestures that affirm life and affirm the possibility of a future, small rituals of reconciliation, making peace with past events, we gain strength like a fledgling bird.
And as the quilt maker channeled her mourning into the creation of something beautiful that would be passed on to future generations, the time of gathering strength is a time of forging a tender relationship between the past and the future.
Jane Flanders tells how gardening heals and strengthens her, in her poem, “Planting Onions”:
It is right
that I fall to my knees
on this damp, stony cake,
that I bend my back
and bow my head.
Sun warms my shoulders,
the nape of my neck.
The air is tangy with rot.
Bulbs rustle like spirits
in their sack.
I bury each one
a trowel's width under.
May they take hold,
rising green in time,
to help us weep
and live.
Help us weep and live.… The bulb pushes up through the cold ground. The baby bird strains to be born and use its spindly wings. That gathering-strength time calls for both patience and struggle.
In the study of butterflies, it has been found that if one helps a butterfly to emerge by pulling away its cocoon, it will not be able to fly, because it has been robbed of the necessary exertion it needs in order to gain strength. As it heaves itself out of its chrysalis, fluid is pumped from its body into the veins of its wings, causing them to uncurl and expand and become aerodynamic and able to bear its weight. The laws of nature require that the butterfly must struggle to hatch itself. The laws of nature require that we too must struggle to hatch ourselves, like the butterfly, like the young phoenix, out of the shell of our former self. Something in us must do this—this reaching for light, this struggling, this healing. The phoenix power, the resurrection power, the vernal power, cannot be denied forever.
With this in mind, we will sing a round, #396, “I Know This Rose Will Open.”
RISING:
A poem by Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly:
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking forth in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive here inside my heart.
And the golden bees were making white combs
and sweet honey from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had here inside my heart.
The water of new life, sweet honey made from the pollen of old failures, a sun dawning inside the soul that brings warmth and light and healing tears—these are the images of heart’s regeneration.
We can’t necessarily know through what mysterious source or process this power of regeneration comes, but it does indeed come, in time. We don’t know how a brokenness inside gets knit back together, slowly, often invisibly, but our souls, like our bodies, do know how to heal and rise up out of the ashes. For the phoenix, this is the time of rising, of taking wing.
Through small affirmations of life and simple acts of creativity, through gestures of closure and gestures of opening, there has been a gathering of strength, emerging from the cocoon of the past, of what was and will not be any more.
Perhaps it comes as a surprise, when we find again the strength and the desire to open to life, and receive and give love in its fullness. When someone can fall in love again and risk intimacy, after having suffered terrible loss, or betrayal, or abandonment, here is the phoenix energy, life energy, enduring, insisting, rising up out of the dark ground. And when someone can celebrate the life of one who has died as much as mourn their loss, here too is the power of resurrection.
I observed an acquaintance, Paul, as he has grieved and healed from the tragic death of his teenage son, Danny. I came to know Paul less than two years after he lost his son. When he spoke of his Danny, his face shone with love and tears would stream down his face at the same time, as he shared openly with others the joy and gratitude he felt for having experienced the gift of his son’s life and being.
He said to me once: “I am complete. I am complete with who Danny was as a person, and I am complete with the fact of his death. I miss him terribly, always, but every day I am thankful for the time we had.”
I was awed by Paul. I had never seen anyone able to hold himself open like that after such a loss. Paul had let the experience of grieving and loving burn a place of such depth and power in himself that all of his connections, with others and with life, were now at a level of intensity and presence and commitment that would not have been possible before.
Theologian Paul Tillich writes “Love is the blood of life, the power of reunion in the separated.” A human being must love—by necessity, by the essential drive of our nature. A human being must also, by fact of being mortal and loving mortal things, experience the pain of greater and lesser losses over and over again.
So we are stretched in the paradox of love being our life’s blood, and loss being a fact of our life. But it is inside paradoxes such as this that spiritual truths lie, and that the miraculous appears. Author and teacher Steven Levine, in his book, Healing Into Life and Death, writes:
When we look at our lives with a deeper compassion, we see that amidst the suffering and confusion, the conflicts and the attempts to escape pain, even a millisecond of love is a miracle. It’s quite amazing that we can love at all. Each moment of life is indeed remarkable and a great grace, considering the conditions through which it rises. We should praise ourselves greatly for each moment of such openness rather than denigrate ourselves for those times when our heart is not capable of opening.
The image of the phoenix, like the story of the crucified and resurrected Jesus, is like an icon through which we can look and imagine the possibility of transformation, the integration of and transcendence over death.
The phoenix, surrendering itself to flames of experience, forming from the ashes an embryo of new life, hatching from the shell of its former self, gaining strength, lifting its reborn self up again on new wings, and consecrating the ashes of its past self to the sacred powers of life—and doing this again and again through time—this metaphor shows us the mysterious spiritual strength that we are given as human beings to wrestle with the seasons of love and loss.
On this resurrection morning, we sing praises to this power within us and within all things, to come back from devastation, to come back from shadow and dust, to rise up out of winter.
I will leave you with Mary Oliver’s poem “Poppies,” somehow fitting with its celebration of red-orange and gold, like the plumage of the phoenix:
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
In the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
In this world that doesn’t
sooner or later drown
in the indigo of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like miracle
as is floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course the nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But also, I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed, and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?
Perhaps, now, we have arrived at Easter, and can sing, with our final hymn with our whole hearts: “Morning has come! Arise and greet the day! Dance with joy and sing a song of gladness!”