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The Hearstone Festival
Opening Up the Heart Chakra of England
Heartstone Festival
Atherstone: 29th February – 2nd March 200
It was a very simple dream and the interpretation seemed straightforward. A clergyman colleague dreamed that a stork flew into Coventry carrying a pink bundle. Obvious interpretation, I thought, of something new being birthed through the feminine.
It is something I believe in passionately; that new experiences of spirituality are defining this generation as the 'emergence of the divine feminine'. What was significant about the dream, though, was that it was specifically relating to Coventry. For several years, many Christians have believed that something special is happening in and around Coventry. Some of us actually believe that that special thing is to do with the divine feminine and indeed is being driven by the Spirit of God (whose proper pronoun according to the Hebrew word 'ruach' meaning 'breath' is actually 'she').
Perhaps a sign of that belief in something special has been that a group of Christians from many different churches have felt prompted by the Spirit to put on a Body, Mind and Spirit fair at Coventry Cathedral, called Spirit of Life, for the past two years. Arising from our Christian conviction that God intends wholeness and blessing to all people, we offered meditation and dance, alternative therapies, spiritual direction and seminars.
I was invited to give one of those lectures and so I used it to talk about these special things that are happening in the area. It was then that I remembered the stork dream and I decided to use it to open my talk. I really had no other purpose than the necessary 'attention-grabber', and to make the point that the word used in the Bible for God's faithful love (hesed) comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for stork (hasidah) a mother bird whose loyalty to her young in staying with them even to the point of death was well observed.
The clearest definition of how the Bible speaks of God's love is as a mother bird associated with both birth and unfailing love. That was all I thought of saying about the stork.
In fact much of my talk focussed on the possible link between Coventry and the goddess Coventina, the Celtic goddess of healing waters. I spoke of how, when Roman remains were excavated in the city, coins were found featuring a woman pouring out jars of water just as Coventina was depicted elsewhere. Given that Coventry was once virtually covered in water and that its main river, now known as the Sherbourne, used to be called the Cune, there is the possibility that Coventina was at least honoured in the city.
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Given the iconic similarity between Coventina and Aquarius, I did focus on healing waters and wells and used the story of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well to reflect on the necessity of reaching beyond cultural barriers to talk honestly and openly with each other. There were three reasons why, under the Jewish custom of his day, Jesus should not have spoken to that woman. She was one of the enemy race, she was a woman, and she was not exactly respectable. Yet as they opened their hearts to each other, the divine Spirit encountered them and brought refreshing and invigorating power.
So my talk ended. But in the discussion afterwards, something new began to happen. One of the audience (who I had not met before) suggested that the pink bundle the stork was carrying had even more significance. She suggested that it did represent the heart chakra, just as the colour pink of the rose quartz stone is associated with the aura surrounding the heart.
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This lady, Fiona Miller, turned out to be, like me, a Christian who has been working in alternative therapies and valuing the wisdom of both parts of her spiritual life. She went on to suggest that it was significant that we were talking about the risk of opening our hearts to one another when we were in the city which is closest to the heart of England.
Her suggestion was that the stork was bringing the pink light of the heart chakra in order to birth something new. So, we were not simply being encouraged to open up our individual hearts, but the heart of England.
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She could not know that such a suggestion was the very link for which I had been searching. I do not actually live in Coventry but in Nuneaton, about a mile away from the exact centre of England (cartographers now locate it in a field between the two villages of Higham-on-the-Hill and Fenny Drayton). One of my churches is in Atherstone, the town nearest to those villages. When I first became the minister there, I received a spiritual word that ATHERSTONE was made up of the same letters as STONE HEART and that we had to open our hearts to the Sprit so that the stone heart would be rearranged. It was a reference to the Biblical passage from the prophet Ezekiel which speaks of God's people having hearts of stone until the Holy Spirit fills them and gives them hearts of love open to the will of God.
Over the past few years we have tried to be open to what God was saying to us - we had got as far as believing that we were to put on spirituality fair and that it would be to do with colour. One of our church members had actually dreamed a couple of years ago that something special was going to happen in Atherstone and that it would be to do with the colour pink!
So the final piece of the jigsaw had been provided by Fiona. The ultimate re-arrangement of STONE HEART is HEART STONE, the rose quartz of the heart chakra.
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We have started to organise the HEARTSTONE Festival which will be held over the weekend of
29th February to 2nd March 2008. The date has been deliberately chosen because 2nd March is Mothering Sunday, and is simultaneously, Holy Wells Day, a name inspired by the Celtic Christian Saint Chad (who is also celebrated on 2nd March) for whom the spirituality of living water and wells was extremely important. It was St. Chad who first brought the Christian faith to the centre of England and he did so with a humility and compassion that made him deeply loved. Chad opposed so much of the increasing earthly power and wealth of the church and insisted that he followed the example of Jesus in serving and loving others rather than trying to get status and power for himself. For example, Chad refused to ride a horse as other bishops did, but insisted on walking everywhere, so that he could meet people on the same level.
We will be celebrating the story of his faith and spirituality on Sunday 2nd March and remembering that the real Mother Church of Britain was the Celtic Church whose witness was so much more about humble love and service and whose spirituality was far more holistic and feminine than the church later became.
On Saturday 1st March we will be hosting a Spirituality Fair at Trinity Church from 10.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. There will be many different kinds of spirituality on offer - prophetic prayer, aromatherapy, massage, prayer through the chakras, praying with your aura, Celtic spirituality, a labyrinth, colourful prayer etc., etc.,. In the evening there will be Circle Dancing.
The weekend begins with 29th February, Leap Day and we are going to open with a service celebrating some of the powerful women of the Bible, particularly the story of Ruth who (not needing Leap Year!) took the initiative towards Boaz and not only secured a husband for herself, but began the family line which would climax in the birth of Jesus. Her story will be one among many women celebrated that evening - some of them from the Bible and some of them from this area.
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We will remember that Lady Godiva, whose story of risking herself out of justice for the poor has been trivialized into nothing more than mild pornography, once actually owned the heart of England. We will remember Boudicca whose outrage at the rape of her two daughters led to the rebellion against the Romans and her death in battle which may well have happened on the edge of Atherstone. We will think about the Fontrevaud order of nuns and monks, the only order in Roman Catholic history to give women authority over men, and whose abbey herb garden in Nuneaton was the start of the healing ministry in this area. We will even remember that Florence Nightingale was actually travelling with Lord and Lady Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall when she was inspired to begin her nursing work. And, lest we should fall into the trap of believing that women are always the innocent victims of terrible men, we will remember the Glover brothers, the Mancetter Martyrs, who were put to the stake by 'Bloody Mary' for their loyalty to the Protestant faith.
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All these stories are of local people inspired to open their hearts in the cause of justice and healing. As we celebrate the spirituality at the heart of England we hope that this generation's heart will also be opened to God's Spirit. "Behold a new thing is happening on the earth. A woman encompasses a man", wrote the prophet Jeremiah. That verse will be the inspiration for the Leap Day worship and could stand as a definition of the whole weekend.
Because we are Christians who are leading this, it will be a weekend which unashamedly comes from the Christian tradition but we hope that we will be as open-hearted and loving as Jesus was, as open to receive living water from others as to offer what we have of it to others. That is the example we take from Jesus himself in his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well. We are only too aware how often the Christian church and Christians have got in the way of the wisdom and example of Jesus. In fact, one of the things we will be doing that week-end is to listen to people's stories and when that story involves hurt and damage by the church, we offer to pray a prayer of repentance for what we have done. Our belief is that every single human being is created as unique and infinitely valuable, created to be open to the Spirit but whose unique spiritual journey must be honoured and respected. Interestingly, the man whose spirituality first coined the phrase 'the divine spark in everyone' was George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. Where was he born? At the very heart of England itself - Fenny Drayton.
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Finally, people often ask me how I, a Christian minister, can work with pagans and goddess worshippers. The answer is quite simply is that I have learned so much from the wisdom of those paths in terms of what it is to be feminine. It was important for me to hear from those wisdoms because, at times on my spiritual journey, I was not being nourished by the church in that way. I hope to change that for others, though. My experience of God's Spirit leaves me convinced that the story of Jesus is about God's love releasing all people to be their infinitely precious, unique selves.
It is precisely because I believe that that I want to encourage others to know that truth for themselves. For women, especially that means discovering many insights which have been ignored or repressed by Christian tradition. I have learned that that is quite a lot of insights.
Did you know, for example, that Venus the goddess of love appears in the New Testament? The word peitho is the name given to either the daughter of Venus or her attendant or sometimes herself. She was the goddess of persuasion and seduction. Indeed, the Roman equivalent of her name is Suadela and is the word from which our word 'persuasion' comes. Peitho was known as 'feminine rhetoric', the art of talking with people in such a way that you do not dominate or coerce them but you do persuade them to see the truth of what you are saying for themselves. The same word appears fifty eight times in the New Testament but it has unhelpfully been translated as 'obey' and thus almost the exact opposite of its true meaning has been communicated. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in a passage which tells people to 'obey your church elders' and which really means 'Be persuaded by your leaders'. As one such leader, I have to say that the kind of church I want is where everyone is free to share their spiritual journey without judgement. If I fail to persuade you of the truth I experience in Jesus and the Spirit, that might be because I have failed or, more likely, because we need to carry on walking together, sharing and learning from each other. My belief in the divine feminine peitho in us all cannot take any other way.
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Divine love asks us not to get right answers but to open our hearts to one another. We hope that you will join us for all or part of the Heartstone Festival and let us together open the heart of England.
Images from the Heartstone Festival
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