Sophia (wisdom)
She emerged from the bus
right in front of us
gracefully flowed into the park
and though it was getting dark
she was like a flower in bloom
at high noon
She was a song of eternity
a compassionate divinity
a maritime maiden of Maine
free spirit filled of delight
and at first sight, when the
blues began
she atoned a summers day in Acadia
and established the heavens again
she traced the foundations of love
and has mingled her wine with the sea
She wore a prayer flag in her hair
and a spiritual music permeated the air
as she danced the village green without a care
rapt in a serenade that began
before time
fashioned its sinuous
flesh around our souls
and the songs of experience played
seasons of streets carved years upon
her.
She was dancing freedom's
tapestry,
sun catching, drifting and dreaming
like a shaman child all native wild,
she had the left hand of God
in her right pocket
and her moves seemed scriptural
butter
like a fluid earth mother
A poetic breeze blew off the harbour
and the puffins gathered in her
honour
whales sang a sweet rhyme sublime
by the island at the end of time
for Wisdom was the first to doubt
and that's how the world came about
and I was simply passing by, in a
sigh
as portions of the universe
flowed from her
like words encrypted
with the genesis of bliss
Sophia -- Greg Spalenka
“Sophia” is the Greek word for wisdom. Originally it meant technical skill, while another word, phronesis , was used for sound judgment or intelligence, but Platon in the 4th century BCE altered the usage, especially in his development of the word “philosophy,” the love of wisdom; in “Protogoras” he replaced phronesis with sophia as 1 of the 4 cardinal virtues. In the 1st century BCE Philon, a Hellenized Jew in Alexandria, tried to use allegory to harmonize the Torah with Platonic philosophy. He called the role and function of wisdom “logos” (meaning ground, plea, opinion, expectation, word, reason, expectation, speech, proportion, discourse, it was used by Heraclitus in the 5th century BCE as the link between rational discourse and the rational structure of the cosmos; after the 3rd century BCE the Stoics defined it as the active reason itself that animated the universe). For Philon, the logos was “the 1st-born of God,” an intermediary divine being (demiurge) that linked the perfection of God with the imperfection of matter and held all things together. In clause in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” became the basis for the Christian identification of Jesus as the personification of discourse or reason, based on the Jewish notion of Chokhmah (Divine Wisdom), or Hagia Sophia in Greek. The Gnostics, who competed against the Judeo-Christian theologians of the early centuries of the 1st millennium, regarded Sophia as a feminine figure analogous to the soul, an emanation of God, sometimes the syzgy (yoking together) of Jesus (i.e., the “bride of Christ”) as well as being the Holy Spirit itself. For the Gnostics the transition from immaterial to material was caused by the passion of Sophia, who emanated without her partner Aeon, resulting in the Demiurge, who did not properly belong to the Pleroma, the totality of divine powers, so 2 other aeons, Christ and the Holy Spirit, emanated to save humanity; Christ took human form to teach humanity how to achieve Gnosis (knowledge), the ultimate end of which is repentance, undoing the sin of material existence and returning to Pleroma. The redemption of the world thus equates to the return of Sophia from exile. In Russian Orthodox mysticism, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Sophia was regarded as the feminine aspect of God who co-existed and acted in concert with the other 3, masculine, aspects. In mid-20th century Valentin Tomberg advanced the notion of a double Trinity (Father-Son-Holy Spirit plus Mother- Daughter-Holy Soul).
ReplyDeleteIn the 16th century Giovann da Verrazzano explored part of the Atlantic coast of North America and called the area north of Virginia "Arcadia," a region of Greece whose name came to mean refuge or idyllic place. In 1603 Henri IV of France chartered La Cadie, a colony south of the St. Lawrence river. The Mikmawisimk-speaking peoples of the region had the suffix "akadie" which meant "a place of abundance." The conjunction of the 2 terms led Samuel de Champlain to establish its name as Acadie (Acadia). Its borders were never clearly defined and shifted as the result of the Franco-English wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, but its erly capital was at Port-Royal in modern Nova Scotia, and it sometimes included New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, and part of Maine east of the Kennebec river. The entire area came under British rule in 1758. Before that time much of the population had been expelled; many of them migrated to southern Louisiana and served as the nucleus of the Cajun culture there.
ReplyDeleteThe left hand of God is the archangel Gabriel (Gavri'el, "God is my strength"), who serves as his messenger and reveals his plans. For instance, Gabriel (Jibril) revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad. To the Êzidî (Yazidis), Gabra'il is one of the 7 Mysteries to whom the care of the world is entrusted. In "The Book of Enoch," supposedly written by the great-grandfather of Noah, he is described as "one of the holy angels, who is over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim" [unearthly beings who attend God and were identified in the 5th century as a lower order of angels] (20:7) and as the one "who is set over all the powers" (40:9). (According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the "Mormons," Gabriel lived a mortal life as Noah.) In the Garden of Eden a tree of life blooms, creating new souls, which fall into the Guf ["Body"]; Gabriel reaches into the Guf and randomly removes souls, which then become human embryos. When the Guf is emptied, the Messiah will come and the world will end. (In 1382 John Wycliffe, the 1st translator of the Bible into English, was the 1st to identify Gabriel as the one who would blow a horn as a signal that the dead are to be resurrected.) In the Kabbalah, every soul is a fragment of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man who was co-equal with the universe until he sinned and mankind was demoted to its present condition. Kabbalists identify Gabriel with the sephirot (a node in the Tree of Life) of Yesod, which allows movement from one thing or condition to another as well as the foundation upon which God built the world. Yesod gathers the vital forces of the masculine sephirot above it and transmits them to the feminine reality below it, enabling it to interact with the divinity.
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