Calling to Justice
Justice we call you into the center of our hearts, our minds, our spirits.
May the fire of your being inspire us to believe your beauty can shine forth in our world.
May the flow of your being purify and release us from wounds that come from the places where You are violated.
May the breath of your being pass through us and form on the lips of all words of wisdom.
May the endurance of your being aid us to persist in serving You.
May we hear your truth. May we know your balance. May we gather your wisdom.
Justice, please guide our thoughts, words, and actions.
In 2017 I explored facets of Justice in the Faces and Spaces of Justice series. Right relationship between all beings; the role we can play in the renewal of Justice; the importance of Love; and the necessity of Justice’s presence in both the halls of power and community settings were vital themes.
Today I am thinking about the Shadow Woman of Justice from Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe.
When Justice is not honored in the public sphere, she finds sanctuary in the cave.
Before humans built sites of worship, they entered caves as places to connect with and honor the sacred. Our ancestors experienced caves as the origin place of the Gods and Goddesses or the world itself, a passageway into otherworldly spaces, a place to practice divination and ritual, or a burial site. Suggested by its rounded darkness and these associations with life, death, and mystery, the cave is an earthly womb offering regeneration for those who dare to give themselves to its darkness.
In the darkness, Shadow Woman – and all of those dare to follow her teachings – meets her losses, sees the limits to her power, comes to understand what has thrown her out of balance. In the darkness of the cave she gains this gift of greater self-knowledge. In the darkness of the cave she begins the process of regeneration.
I see the Shadow Woman of Justice, who having given herself completely to the cave’s sacred energy, is beginning her return to the world. She stands at the threshold and has placed her two pans just beyond the cave’s entrance. She’s been casting stones – a kind of divination perhaps – to find the right time for her emergence. Now that there are a matching number of stones in each pan, the time is near.
Today I am not sure where Shadow Woman is. I can imagine she has receded further back into the cave. If we are to partner with Her, we must follow Her into the darkness. It’s no easy thing to do. In our darkness now, there is terror that is not over but keeps coming. In the darkness, there is the complex history that many want to forget. In the darkness there is wild, uncontrollable grief that is absolutely dangerous.
But also in the dark, there is a poet, Mosab Abu Toha. He is sitting in the dark because there is no electricity in Gaza. There is a flash of light but that is from an explosion. He doesn’t know if he will live to read the books he has collected for his library. I have read his book of poems, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, that is filled with brutal truths but a possibility of their passing invoked:
The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.
In the dark you may find a rabbi and imam from the United States talking. Rabbi Sharon Brous has been listening to a Bedouin doctor, Dr. Yasmeen Abu-Fraiha, who works at a medical center in the south of Israel. Rabbi Brous recounts:
She’s been treating many of the people who came in from the massacre site. And she said the real dividing line is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who believe violence is the answer and those who believe there is another way. And I believe there is another way.
Imam Mohamed Herbert agrees and says this sentiment is what allows for a conversation to happen.
In the dark you may hear Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. Hear how the killings and taking of women and their children, elderly men and women in wheelchairs as hostages horrifies him and how he feels in himself and understands in other Israelis why their blood is boiling. At the same time, he despairs that his government responds by committing war crimes in Gaza. He doesn’t see the possibility of an easy resolution but that has not destroyed his desire for it:
I desire that maybe from this calamity we will start crawling out of that pit. And we can try to do all these — trying to go through different roads. Eventually, the road map is right before us. It’s international law. It’s justice and human rights and respect for the dignity of all people and for their rights and for their collective rights, for the right of self-determination. There will be no end for this, no end to bloodshed, there will be no end to the conflict, without adhering to the principles that humanity has adopted throughout its long, scarred history of man-made catastrophes.
[Because my government has been and will now increase sending of arms to carry out what Sfard defines as war crimes and what United Nations officials decry, I have called my elected officials to call for a cease fire and diplomatic solutions rather than the sending of arms. Many groups are organizing campaigns to make these calls. Here’s a Quaker group and a Jewish group if you are looking for somewhere to connect. The US’ government disfunction mute the effectiveness of these actions. One of the reasons why I feel we must now work at many levels to make real change.]
In the dark, we may hear the voices of the dead. Our passage card of the moonth points us there to listen.
Passage and Practice: The Four of Swords
This moon passes through the last third of Libra, which could be said to be its most developed aspect and associated with the Tarot’s Four of Swords.
In the iconic Rider Waite Smith image, this passage, at first glance, seems to indicate a time of inaction. But there is something mysterious about the central figure in the image. Is the Knight shown, a person sleeping or are we seeing a sarcophagus representing the dead buried within?
As a living being, the Four of Swords Knight is engaged in meditation or prayer to clear and concentrate the mind and invites us to do the same. The Knight has stepped out of the everyday world for these meditations, seeking out a sacred place to support a connection to the highest/deepest values the Knight desires to uphold such as Justice. Centered again, the Knight can resist the spell that the noisy, political world would cast, disrupting their focus on serving Justice. As one dedicated to a quest and cause, this meditative pause represents a temporary time of renewal to gather energy for the work ahead.
Meditation practices scheduled into your day (even 5 minutes helps) or week (can you find a block of time to step out of the busyness of life?) are especially beneficial for moving through this moonth’s passage. This could be as simple as closing your eyes, focus on your breath, and reminding yourself of the values you seek to uphold. When you open your eyes, you will be more centered in what is most important.
It is also possible that this Knight is an effigy of an ancient ancestor. Perhaps the ancestor prays for us, the living. This moon cycle that goes up to November 12th brings us through cross cultural days of ancestral remembrance. Samhain, the Celtic New Year, comes on October 31st, when the veil between the worlds is said to be thinnest. Then November’s first days bring Mexican Day of the Dead and Catholic masses for All Saints and Soul Day. Secular commemorations on Veterans Day conclude these 12 days of tending to the dead.
In this time of lengthening nights, we reach out to our beloved dead and ancestors with love. We may put a lot of effort into our reaching rituals, in our sending of love. But the Four of Swords as a passage of Justice reminds us to balance our reaching with receiving. Our ancestors can be active in their support of us. They may be sending just what we need to know to move in a positive direction out of these testing times in which we find ourselves. Perhaps they are praying for us and we need to open our hearts to receive this loving support.
Posture: King of Cups (known as the Mystic of Vials in the Numinous Tarot)
This emotional balance supports the King’s ability to imagine and believe in possibilities beyond rational proof, what has not yet come into existence, or what lies waiting in the past to be reclaimed. This King holds on to and shares out this vision of a just and generative world. Even when the world’s realities seem to tip far away from the vision, this King persists in working for the good of the whole in creative and loving ways.
Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets who died in 2000, has a voice like the King of Cups in his complex poem, Wildpeace. He writes he knows how to kill, and his son has a toy gun that says Mama. He hears that “howl of the orphans is passed from one generation/
to the next, as in a relay race:/ the baton never falls.” And yet he dares to end his poem with:
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
We don’t yet know what wildpeace is. But a first step toward it is believing in its possibility. Trusting that this wildpeaace has a power has uncontrollable as wild grief. Imagining that it can be found in the cave of the Shadow Woman of Justice. And then daring to sit with the Shadow Woman and let Her open our eyes to wildpeace’s new ways.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS / READING FOR THE MOONTH
These questions are offered for reflection and to spark practice throughout the moonth. Pulling Tarot and oracle cards in connection to these questions is appropriate, but not absolutely necessary. You might carry a question with you on a walk for example and observe what is happening in the natural world as a way to find insight into the answer to the question.
JUSTICE: What contribution can I make to the renewal of Justice during this moonth?
SPELL BREAKING: What spell do I need to break to make my contribution?
POSSIBILITY: What possibility—perhaps only imagined before—can I make real as I break the spell on the path of Justice?
I do offer this as an e-reading in my collaborative initiative format for $23. Sign up with Pay Pal or email me about sending a check. When I receive notification, I’ll be in touch to let you know about when to expect to receive your reading by email. I generally have openings to do these readings on Mondays and Saturdays.