Tenth Birthday
A Twilight Ritual was held at Sophia, under the Moreton Bay fig tree, on 7 April 2001 to celebrate the gift of Sophia and our tenth anniversary. People from the Sophia community gathered to celebrate and remember ten years of growth.
During the evening, four women, Anna Lulka, Lyn Von der Borch, Rosanne Debats and Ali Wurm, spoke generously of what Sophia means to them. Their comments are below.
Sophia
This story was told by Margaret Cain.
In ancient times and now, some people imagine Sophia as the earth herself, a dancing woman engaged in a creative act of movement and rhythm, a flowering of life.
The wise and Holy One sustains wind, earth, fire and water and these sustain her. She is the one who draws aside the veil of appearance to tell of the secret essence, the world soul.
She is the dance of creation. Sophia also resides in the Hebrew spiritual tradition, she sings in her Song of Songs a glorious celebration of her abiding presence at the heart of life. Emerging from that same tradition, Jesus became, for his community, Sophia visible among them, in the way he lived and loved. They called him the Sophia of God.
In every century and in every generation, the people look for signs of Sophia in the life they live and in the culture they both inherit and create. Today, people see and feel Sophia in thousands of different places and forms. This wonderful Moreton Bay fig tree with its deep roots, its great leafy branches bound to the trunk and its superabundant fruit can speak to us of her. It surely stands as both witness to an unfolding history of this land and as symbol of the the Sophia space now celebrating ten years of growth and fruition.
Today’s ritual journey in community brings us here by these roots. See how they tunnel into the earth in search of nourishment. Moreton Bay fig trees have been in this land long before white settlement. Aboriginal people’s roots are deep in this soil, and more recently, our roots too are part of this place. Standing as we do on common ground we take strength from the wise counselling of Aboriginal people in their kinship with the land. We gratefully share their inheritance.
We also receive the land from the original Irish-Australian Dominican Sisters who, in 1868, came and drew their sustenance from this earth, and gave their shape to her. Upon these two foundations a new community began a journey together ten years ago, when women and men gathered in ritual to celebrate a beginning. They were eager to give new shape to the work of creating opportunity for full expression of human life, especially addressing women’s needs. They wanted to have a place to listen to each other, to hear the wisdom traditions giving shape to life, to acknowledge their own wisdom and the wisdom of this land, and to help each other heal their brokenness.
See the great trunk of this Moreton Bay fig tree, how she holds herself, to strengthen her ability to carry many branches. This second trunk - so robust that it might have lost balance and fallen away from the roots and been lost to us. Instead it has thrown itself a lifeline back to the main trunk. Together these two stand to offer a home and canopy for birds of many kinds and for our comfort. It may also serve as an image of reconciliation, reaching out, creating and sustaining wholeness.
See the various branches of the tree, so abundant and leafy. See how they overshadow the labyrinth, an ancient symbol and tool for contemplative being. These branches speak of the variety of activities at Sophia, activities that have grown in number, and in their shape and process, over ten years. In that time women and men have found a brief resting place or a home both to be heard in and to hear, for each activity shares common purposes, to meet Sophia/Wisdom and to create our world with her.
Sense the sap, the life-blood of this tree, moving up and outwards to nourish her branches. Sap empowers them to fling figs merrily, with gay abandon, upon the earth, daring people to do as they will, and reminding them that what comes from the earth has its final home there too. It images the great life-cycle deep in the law of all creation. The life sap of Sophia derives from each person who participates in any of a variety of ways in her work. Sophia’s struggle and deep achievement is in a spiralling, non-hierarchical movement of energy between women and men caught up with each other in the sacred dance of life.
As in ancient times, we have among us women and men with gifts of every kind, who live these gifts in a community which struggles for many things: to live real and compassionate relationship, to respect and share of themselves and others, to strive to make a more just world for all humans and other earth creatures. All who come and share in Sophia’s life are the carriers of the sap that enables Sophia’s presence to grow.
Indeed Sophia rejoices in all the women and men, too many to name, but whose names are recorded in Sophia’s history; those who have come and given shape to the unfolding of her wisdom. For we speak of Sophia, the dancing Spirit, the One who unveils essence and is there in the deeps of our creative being, who surely wants this work to live.
Sophia lives from within and draws herself through to the very tips of the tree of visible life. It is not easy for her to flourish in a culture where competition and champions vie with good and bad financial outcomes for news space. However, flourish she will in the movements of the people, and as some of Sophia’s feisty women take on the task of planning a financially viable future, she is there. Even hard things, like the sustenance of the tree, she fills with enjoyment, creating good relationship and sharing her wise self. For Sophia this place has become a living organism, and she is ready for the responsibility of finding her way to stand freely in her own environment, as does this magnificent Moreton Bay fig tree.
Margaret Cain was a member of the Dominican community until her death in August 2004.
The Margaret Cain Memorial Fund has been established in her honour.
Anna Lulka:
When the student is ready, the teacher appears - and I guess I came across Sophia soon after its inception here, so for me it has been a growthful association of almost ten years, and Sophia has been a teacher to me in many ways.
My main learning has been to a new depth of gentleness - I would come here thinking I was peaceful only to find new levels of depth and stillness to be plumbed. I am grateful to the women here who have modelled and facilitated that.
I am also mindful of the courses run here and their effect on me. The first course I came to was of an evening, and when I was leaving in the dark, I tripped on the roadhumps outside, landing heavily and skinning my knees and elbows. I’d just finished reading Sophia’s charter on the wall and was still mulling over the word that had particularly struck me - “patriarchy”.
That fall marked a symbolic collapse for me of the perimeters of patriarchy, as an understanding of its constraints and dimensions dawned in my consciousness. But it was also the beginnings of something new in me - a claiming and honouring of the feminine, a process that has continued over these ten years and restored balance into some of the more heavily weighted events in my life.
So Sophia is for me a place of transformation, unfoldment. It is an oasis where I come to drink of knowledge, to be refreshed, share in friendship. It is a sanctuary where I have been able to take shelter, to grow, heal and discover so that I can, in turn, take that into the world.
My special thanks to the women whose inspiration began Sophia and to those same women and others whose love and service have given so much to so many of our lives.
Lyn Von der Borch:
If I’d been asked a year ago what Sophia meant to me, I would have made a different response to the one I make tonight.
A year ago Sophia, for me, was a place and a space for women - warm, welcoming and comforting. Today it is still the same space and place but now I feel that I have glimpsed Sophia’s soul.
In 2000 I had set out to write a simple, historical account of Sophia. It wasn’t simple. Women’s lives never are. My task became a journey that took its own course and led me in unimagined directions and to places deep within myself.
I became immersed in Sophia’s story. I rejoiced with the women who dreamed brave new dreams, crossed boundaries and set out to create Sophia.
At the same time, I felt the sadness of those who generously relinquished other dreams so that Sophia could come into being. On this journey I was privileged to speak with Indigenous women and to have the issue of ‘whiteness’ opened up to me in such a challenging way.
Sophia’s story is of vision and steadfastness, sorrow, perplexity and frustration, but above all it is a story of love and reconciliation.
Thank you Sophia for that precious glimpse of your soul.
Rosanne DeBats:
I was raised a Lutheran, with its view of women limited to “Kinder, Kirche, Kuche” – Children, Church and Kitchen. I left, and wandered for many years in a spiritual wasteland…
Through Margaret Cain and thea Rainbow I found a spirituality that embraced women, and I was fed. thea introduced me to the goddesses of history, which still live in and through us today.
Opening to the Goddess meant being enriched by:
* deity in women’s form
* loving the earth and body, not just the sky and mind
* celebrating cycles, the wheel that turns and returns, not just the upward sloping straight line
* revelling in myths and stories, symbols, inner meanings, the unconscious and intuitive.
Sophia is comfortable to me. It is, in broad unspecific ways, simpatico. I don’t feel I have to shut up and hide my light. Sophia accepts me.
And I love the feeling of Sophia - the energy of its space which is both physically and spiritually open. I am grateful that Sophia exists, for it feeds my soul….
Ali Wurm:
As a young Anglican woman I was privileged to participate in events and courses at Bethany*. At this time my longing was to be ordained as an Anglican priest in a context where they didn’t exist. My connection with the Bethany community helped nurture my longing despite my struggles with the institutional church.
After ten years away from South Australia, I was blessed to discover Sophia, which has been a sanctuary of support and hospitality enabling me to find my voice and reclaim my passion.
Through my involvement with the Justice Circle and through Basket Weaving, I have developed friendships with Aboriginal women and deepened my journey in the process toward reconciliation.
I give thanks for the richness of Sophia - for healing, for valuing spirituality, for inspiring mentors and friendships.
*Bethany was a women’s spirituality centre that operated in Adelaide from the mid 1980s.