A Cauldron On Its Lips
January 7th, 2007
The past few months of my spiritual hiatus have left me with a question: where did God go? I was so sure of God’s place in the universe, so sure in the vision of God that I had established, borrowed from several different theologies and mystical practices. I had grown very fond of a panentheistic God, a God both seen and unseen, named and unnamed, a God that was both the Indwelling and the No-Thing. But then it were as though I woke up one morning and my thirst for God had simply vanished.
I once wrote that a large problem with interfaith dialogue, especially amongst non-traditional religionists, is that the notion of “God” is not portable from one faith framework to another. If two people from different religions come together to talk about God, they won’t make much progress until they define precisely what it is they are talking about.
It never occurred to me, however, that my own terminology and my own ways of thinking might allow me to distance myself from the numinous.
Erynn Rowan Laurie, a bard and scholar, introduced me to the Cauldron of Poesy years ago, and I’ve been in love with it ever since. We each have inside us an emptiness that must be filled through experiences: love, anger, grief, joy. Through emotion and experience we turn our cauldrons ad fill them, until we are whole, complete people, capable of feeling, empathizing, sharing, connecting with others.
But what the poem doesn’t talk about, what I had to learn from Zen Buddhism instead, is that once the cauldron of wisdom is full, it must then again be emptied that it might be refilled. The earlier in life you fill your cauldron, the more likely you will have to empty it out many times, because the experiences that shape a wise child are not the same experiences that shape a wise woman. The cauldron must be emptied of what we know, and refilled with what we are still learning. Some things will come back again as true: a few perennial truths will prevail. But life changes us, and the waters of our cauldron need changing out as well.
The process of emptying, however, is unpleasant. It’s the little death, the trip to the underworld, the shedding of the skin. The emptying of the cauldron causes us to question everything: ourselves, those around us, our purpose. And in my case, concepts I have held sacred for over a decade.
Over the years, “God” became a loaded term. The God of Judaism, which I most closely identified with, became just as tiresome to me as the God of Christianity. And in my world, being a monotheist, that meant I had run out of Gods. (Don’t get me started on Allah). It wasn’t that I thought that those two were it–but those two were what I knew. They were what I had based my personal theology around. When I became unhappy with those notions, I left God altogether, even though I still had hope in the numinous. I still had hope in an indwelling spirit of some kind. Not necessarily sentient, not necessarily caring, but available.
Today, I am not filled with the words of Rudolf Otto, or Martin Buber, or Paul Tillich, or Abraham Joshua Heschel. Today I am not preoccupied with what Kabbalah has lost to commercialism, or what I might have gained had I been able to stick it out in the Episcopal church a few months longer. Today, there is silence. It it the silence of slow waters moving themselves from one space to another. It is the quiet of undoing years of prejudices and closely held beliefs. It is the unweaving of a web of knowledge that shapes the self, leaving me haggard and still. But the stillness itself is the incubation of life. In the dark earth where movement has slowed, the seeds of new ideas settle and sprout, and the cauldron on its lips makes its slow efforts to once again turn itself upright.
It will take some time for my ideas about what God must be to be emptied from my cauldron. It will take time for me to make peace with the emptying process so that I can go back outside and reacquaint myself with whatever it is that’s out there. There is something out there; I want there to be, so I will find it. But as my cauldron lies on its side, its contents seeping back into the earth, I feel melancholy and unsettled. But knowing I will be able to refill the cauldron with new ideas that I can synthesize with the old is comforting.
I found this when I was doing one of my rare checks for stuff linked with my name on the web. Thank you for your comments and your thoughts about the Cauldron of Poesy material. As the year progresses, I’ll be starting work on a book on filidecht, the practice of sacred poetry, and writing quite a bit about the three cauldrons as a part of that process. The emptying was not something I ever really thought of, but now that you’ve said it, it does seem obvious and it’s something I want to work with.
My feeling has always been that the cauldrons are in constant motion, their contents ever-shifting because of this, and that emptiness is but one of those stages. Verbalizing it, though, has been different and it seemed so subliminally obvious that I never even thought to bring it out into the open.
Thank you.