She: A Salvation Story for Women

23 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Spirit of life and love, Father/Mother God, we are joined today in a moment of gratitude for the warmth of this beloved community, for the comfort of this sacred space, for the moment of peace and contemplation in which to appreciate the precious gift of life. This moment of relative comfort sharpens our perception of an imperfect world.

We are reminded of the many innocent people in the world who are suffering hunger, terror, violence and loss. We pause to share our concern and care for the people of Iraq. Here at home, our thoughts are with all soldiers, on all sides of this warring, and with their families and loved ones, both here and abroad.

May we find it in ourselves today to work toward a better tomorrow. These are hard and bloody times, guided by imperfect leaders on all sides, prompted by a mix of motives, not all of which are proud. It is a deeply human moment arising from the always-present, always-dangerous mixture of good and evil that reside in the human soul, in human institutions and governments.

We have both good and bad spirits within and among us. Today we pray to the angels of our better nature. We seek strength from the still, small voices of understanding rather than arrogance, /generosity rather than greed, /peace rather than war. These are the voices, the angels, the spirits we need now and in the trying times ahead of us. We need these insights and strengths as Americans, as people of faith, as citizens of the world, and as brothers and sisters to all people on earth who cry when their hearts break, who bleed when they’re cut, and who, with us, hope and pray for a better tomorrow and a better world. Let us hope and pray, but not only hope and pray.

Amen.

SERMON: “She: A Salvation Story for Women”

In a recent USA Today poll, people were asked what one question they would most like to ask God. The overwhelming response was that they wanted to know the purpose of their life. That says at least two things. One is that they don’t know the purpose of their life; the other is that they haven’t found it out from God, either.

Some of this is a comment on our times. In ancient times, even medieval times, people felt that they had encounters with the gods regularly. They provided places for it to happen. They had shrines, where there were statues of the gods, fires lit to them, temples you could go to be in their presence. But today, about the only place people still feel the overpowering presence of the old gods is when they fall in love, and are connected either with Aphrodite, the older kind of love, or Eros, the adolescent kind.

Last week, I used a medieval myth of Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail as the archetype of a man’s struggle to grow up and grow whole.

The archetypal salvation story for women is far, far older and more complex. It’s the very ancient, even prehistoric, Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. Parsifal’s story was one of adventures and conquests; Psyche’s story is one of relationships and unfolding. Parsifal, like most men, had to grow up through experiences; Psyche, like most women, grows up through learning how to find and develop seeds already inside of her.

Psyche is the Greek word for soul. Eros was the adolescent god of love. Today, we call him Cupid and picture him as a fat little baby. But the Greeks knew he was an adolescent, and they saw the falling in love that he brought as an adolescent kind of love, too.

I want to move back and forth between real people and this old myth, as I did last week. Last week, I also talked about the labyrinth from the Chartres cathedral, which we had down for people to walk. That gave me three balls to juggle. I like having three things to juggle, so today I’ll also talk about a movie that’s been nominated for Best Picture tonight, “The Hours.”

The story of Psyche and Eros is very complex, as I think psychologically women are more complex than men. I’ll confess at the start, though, that while I felt pretty confident talking about the inner lives of men last week, every time I start to feel confident this morning, I hear a little feminine voice from somewhere saying “Shut up, you fool!” So, my dear women, this is the best I can do. You see if it fits.

The story begins in adolescence, as it did for Parsifal. Psyche is an adolescent girl, beautiful and mythic. The prettiest of the three girls in her family, she’s really too pretty. Boys admire her, maybe even worship her, but from a distance. She’s more like an image of an adolescent kind of mythic beauty than she is like a real woman.

Girls today are flooded with images of Psyche, images of that beautiful, mythic, vacuous look they are taught to emulate: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilara, J. Lo. Or Liv Tyler, in the Lord of the Rings movies, has this ethereal, almost mythic look. Teen and movie magazines carry their pictures, their stories, and young women know them the way they once knew the stories of the gods and goddesses.

There’s something about them that’s unreal, and unfinished. They don’t seem like grown women, or like wives or mothers. This is the age when girls play at grown-up roles they haven’t grown into.

These are girls known for prettiness and innocence, not depth or wisdom. That’s the age of Psyche, a beautiful unfinished woman. And the old myth is about what she must go through to grow up, to become whole. If she doesn’t grow up, she may still be trying to play the role of Psyche in her 30s, 40s or later – when it is known as playing an ingenue.

In the myth, her untouchable beauty finally makes Aphrodite angry. So Aphrodite decrees that she shall be married to death, since she isn’t playing a useful role among the living.

This sounds fantastical, but it’s more real than you’d think. If a woman gets stuck in the Psyche role of being a dream woman, an adolescent man’s dream, she stops before she becomes whole enough to be a woman. And to enter into a marriage at that stage is to come in playing a pretty costumed role that can be the death of the human woman in her who hasn’t developed.

There is a powerful character in the current movie “The Hours” that has some of this. Julianne Moore’s character “Laura” is this kind of a two-dimensional mythic image, and it is killing her. She even describes this picturesque life as “death.”

But here’s how the Greeks told the story, well over 3,000 years ago. Left on the mountain for death to take, Eros, the teen-aged son of Aphrodite, was sent to stick her with his arrow so she would fall in love with death – the myth was that once stuck with Eros’s golden arrow, you fell in love with the first person you see.

But Eros is so struck by her beauty that he sticks himself with an arrow, and falls in love with her immediately. He has her transported to a paradise to be just with him. This is one way you know Eros is an adolescent. This is an adolescent’s dream: transporting their mythic love to a paradise to be with them alone.

All paradises have strict rules, and Eros had strict rules for her in his adolescent paradise. He would join her at night, but she could never see him, never ask questions or know him at all. If she did – if she ate from the tree of knowledge – the paradise would end, he said. Still, it seemed like paradise, so she stayed, spending nights with him, waking to find him gone before the light could show her his face.

In the meantime, her sisters were jealous, and kept inquiring how she was doing. She told them she was with a wonderful man she didn’t know. This isn’t just an ancient story, you know!

They told her he was probably an ugly monster, and talked her into taking a light, and a knife, so she could see his face in the night, then kill him before he could destroy her. But when the soft light showed his face, she saw she was married to a young god. She dropped the knife, a drop of hot oil landed on his shoulder, he woke up, saw she had disobeyed, and left her, just like that. Paradise was over.

Women have these two tools, a light to shine and a knife to cut with. Even today people talk of the cutting remarks a woman can make to a man, or how she can cut him down. Just a well-aimed sharp comment can do it, and does so much damage it’s hard ever to undo it.

The light meant the Greeks thought women could usually see more deeply into men than men could, and a lot of that seems true. But lighting the light is tricky, too. It’s almost always women who do this in a relationship. It’s women who say “We need to talk,” who want to know what he feels about this, who he is, more personally and deeply than just small talk.

But she threatened to know him, so he left. The paradise was over as quick as a Hollywood marriage. And the end of paradise is the beginning of young Psyche’s chance to grow up, if she can do it.

The Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson sees Eros as the woman’s own unconscious masculine component. It’s an adolescent masculine component in girls, and is the voice telling them the role to play, that pretty but vacuous role that never asks questions – the kind of girl you see in beer ads or on The Man Show.

It’s the voice in teen magazines, movies, ads, telling girls how to look and act to be attractive to young men, or the adolescent parts of men of any age. Don’t know or be known, don’t probe deeply, don’t question. Be seduced by the glitter, the look, the charisma, and be present as glitter, looks and charisma. That’s adolescent love in its adolescent paradise.

The next steps are the woman’s version of Parsifal’s knightly adventures and fights. Her battles are inside, but every bit as hard. If she is to get beyond this adolescent role of Psyche and grow into a real woman, she had hard work ahead of her. Aphrodite, the voice of that grown-up kind of femininity, lays out the tasks for her.

First, she must sort things out. She is overwhelmed, and needs to sort out what does and doesn’t matter to her. In the Greek myth, she has to sort through thousands and thousands of seeds. In the movie “The Hours,” Laura is trapped in a picturesque 1950s marriage, surrounded by a hundred things that are killing her, and she has to sort them out. Clean the house, cook the meals, tend to her boy, tend to her husband, keep everything looking perfect, bake and decorate the perfect birthday cake, make this false picture convincing. Then, somewhere, care for herself, attend to her own soul’s needs.

She had to sort out what gave death and what gave life. Some Jungian psychologists have described the feminine aspect of the soul as “unfocused consciousness,” and Psyche’s task is to learn how to sort, and how to focus, so she can find and attend to the really important parts of her life.

The second task is to get the strength to go through this, and to do it wisely. In the myth, she must get some golden fleece from the dangerous rams. If she tried it in the daytime, confronting them, they could hurt or kill her, because she’s no match for their physical strength. But her wiser voices tell her to go at night, and pick some fleece from the bushes where it has rubbed off.

Both modern psychologists and ancient mythmakers are saying it takes a tough-minded masculine kind of strength here, and it’s safest for a woman to steal some masculine energy rather than try and take it by confronting the rams. I’ve heard so many stories of women who tried to confront the rams directly. A woman who confronted her father over his habit of demeaning her, and was withered by his anger and insulting outbursts. Or battered women who try to have a showdown, challenging their battering partner’s masculinity and authority, with brutal, sometimes deadly, results. It’s safer and wiser just quietly to gather the strength you need to do what you need to do. Don’t waste energy on unnecessary risks.

Psyche’s third task is like the first: to take just a little bit of life and develop it, rather than being overwhelmed by all the demands that are flooding her.

In the myth, she must go to the River Styx, the river of life and death, and take just one crystal goblet of water, no more. Just a little, just what she can manage. Take just that, don’t be overwhelmed. It’s about sorting things out, focusing on what gives life, and taking only those parts of life you can manage right then.

In the movie “The Hours,” the floodwaters of the River Styx are pictured graphically, almost shockingly. She is lying on a hotel bed, contemplating suicide. You view the scene from above, and suddenly the whole room is flooded with water from beneath, covering her. I’ve never seen a psychological mood given such graphic staging. It is scenes like this that make you aware of how deep the psychological insights of those ancient stories are.

All the tasks of keeping the house, baking the cake, keeping the picture pretty and absorbing all the unhealth in the family were the flood that was killing the character in the movie. Just take a goblet full, and choose only those parts that you can handle, the parts that give you life.

In the movie, she made a radical and surprising choice. After the birth of her second child, she abandoned her family. She left the children and her husband and fled to Toronto, where she became a librarian. That’s all the flood of life she could handle, just that goblet-full.

The costs of this sorting and choosing and leaving can be very high. In the movie, her role was to carry all the unhappiness and death of a very sick system. When she left, the unhappiness and death had to go somewhere. Fifty years later, when she appeared again after the suicide of her son, she said that whole 1950s Los Angeles scene had been death to her, and she chose life. Both her husband and her daughter later died of cancer. The death in the system had to go somewhere. In her life, both staying and leaving had costs, terrible costs. It’s not that her choices are recommended for others, just that they were the only way she could choose life.

She had used that second tool, the knife, to cut herself free from what was, to her, a deathtrap. Most women would have chosen children and family over the solitary life of a librarian in another country. She was almost a negative example, one that ran counter to type – or at least counter to stereotype.

Part of the story, both in the myth and in the movie, is that the tender mercies, the feminine kind of caring that are so often a sign of a mature woman’s depth and love, can be traps that keep her from making the hard decisions needed to grow whole. She had to have the strength to leave, and let the sickness and death go where it would: in this case, to all the rest of the family. That’s the masculine energy, the golden fleece. It just takes a little, but without a little of that kind of strength, it can’t be done.

The fourth task is implied in all this, though it is the most difficult. It is the inner visit to your own unconscious, to the place where you can discern your own soul’s calling, your own unique style: who you are, who you must be, how you must live, what you must do. But you see that this is now the exact opposite of Psyche at the beginning of the story, where her whole life was choreographed by others, and she went along.

Now she has done the hard work, of sorting out what mattered to her and bringing it to bloom. She has worked for, and gained, her own soul and her own life. It took a toll, and in the old myth it is Eros, who has also grown up some in the meantime, who finally reclaims her. This Eros is several things, it is a complex story:

1. It is the adolescent Eros, now grown up.

2. But since Eros never grows up, that means it’s really her own interior masculine and strong side that has come to complement her more mature feminine self. Eros and Psyche are parts of the grown woman, now complementing each other.

3. Eros is also love, for this is the story of the soul’s search for love. And only love can finally unite all the parts of our psyche into an authentic and happy whole.

Zeus sees all this, and decrees that Psyche and Eros should now be married. And so the wedding takes place, and Psyche is given a drink that gives her immortality so she can join the other gods.

That’s so lovely, it hardly needs translating. The growth of a woman from an adolescent Psyche to a mature and integrated woman is a sacred event, blessed by all the gods. And she bore a child, the old myth says, a daughter whose name was Pleasure.

She became one with the gods, found the integration of her soul through the hard work of sorting, focusing, choosing that which gave her life and bringing it to grown-up fruition. And when she was done, she found her grown-up self in a holy union with Love, forever.

Whether in an old Greek myth, a modern movie, or a real down-to-earth woman’s life, it sounds like calling the results “Pleasure” is a magnificent example of complete understatement.