Welcome to Spirit Expressing with Rev. Ed Townley

Channeling the Goddess

I was a 16-year-old kid living in a small, sheltered Pennsylvania town when a friend of my mother’s (who was a librarian at the small local college) offered me free tickets to a concert at the college that wasn’t selling well – probably because no one had heard of the performer. I don’t remember who went with me, but I have a clear memory of being in about the fourth row, on the aisle. The house lights went down. The lights went up on the stage, and out of the shadows came a large black woman, barefoot, guitar in hand. She stopped center, nodded slightly to acknowledge our presence, and began to sing. She was Odetta, and I was transfixed.

(More videos after the jump)

I have never forgotten the impact of that evening. It wasn’t just the enormous talent – that incredible voice! Odetta brought into my limited life experience something rich and deep and mysterious. She sang about pain – but there was love in the way she sang it. She sang about love – with an undercurrent of profound sadness. She wasn’t there to entertain us; she said little between songs, and she didn't seem concerned with whether this entirely white, comfortably middle class audience liked her or not. She graced us with her presence, and with her gifts, and that was enough.

As I look back today, I think that evening was probably my first experience of the goddess. Odetta expressed an energy both strange and familiar, appealing and intimidating. She was a strong physical presence, and yet something in her eyes and her manner suggested that only a part of her consciousness was in that hall with us. Time past and time to come were as much a part of her as that moment on that auditorium stage. When she sang “No More Auction Block for Me,” its historical roots became an immediate experience. She was making a choice in that very moment, and inviting us to leave our own auction blocks behind and join her in moving forward.

Odetta died last week after a long and extraordinary career. She never became a superstar; I suspect it never occurred to her to try for such a limited and insignificant goal. She never stopped singing, and she leaves us with many recordings of her unique voice and energy. She used her talent freely in support of worthy causes – equality, compassion – and worthy people, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And she had a powerful, permanent impact on at least one confused and restless white kid, for whom her music suggested that there were depths to life beneath the comfortable surface; there would be pain, but there would also be richness and love and a sense of spiritual purpose.

In the wake of Odetta’s death I’ve been thinking about other channels through whom I’ve experienced the goddess in the years since that concert. I think immediately of the late Colleen Dewhurst, striding onto a Broadway stage in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” poor and barefoot (there’s a recurring motif!), yet filled with compassion and totally accepting of the barren land she stood on and the harsh life she was living. The play hadn’t started, not a word had been spoken, and I was already in tears.

And without question one of the greatest avatars of goddess energy I ever had the privilege of experiencing was the late Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatre Company in New York City. To see him as a thinly disguised Maria Callas, in anguish at the loss of her Greek tycoon, or – even more astonishingly – as the plainest, funniest, warmest and most deeply moving Marguerite ever, in his own adaptation of “Camille,” was to know that the goddess transcends sexual identity and expresses wherever there’s a dedicated channel.

Each of these – and so many others that come pouring into mind – shared that same quality of being both immersed in the moment and aware of a larger dimension in which everything happening is both significant and not. We get so lost in our dramas we forget the truth – that those dramas are contained within an infinite reality of spirit that is our true home, and our true identity. The goddess sometimes graces us with a song or a story that helps us remember that truth.

Who has carried goddess wisdom and compassion into your life? Who is offering it now? And how willing are you to be the goddess yourself, in the stories that unfold in and around you? Odetta was willing, and my life is richer because she was. I am grateful.

Do You Know My Mind

House of the Rising Sun

Interview with Odetta

A Movie Tip

If I am not the first person to recommend that you see the film “Slumdog Millionaire,” currently in release, let mine be the recommendation that gets you into the theater. It’s the richest, most life-affirming film I’ve seen all year.

It’s also dark and unflinching in its depiction of just how squalid, sad and painful this human experience can be. Its protagonist is born in the slums of Mumbai, India – as apparently soulless and demeaning a place as you will find anywhere on our planet. The reality of that life has rarely been so vividly depicted; it’s as if the harsh world of Dicken’s “Oliver Twist” has been outsourced to India and debased even further by its contrast to surrounding luxury.

I know that many of you will, during the film’s first 20 minutes or so, make a vow never to trust my recommendations again. But stay with it. You’ll be glad you did. I don’t want to talk about the film in any detail until it’s completed its first run; you need to experience it for yourself. When you do, let me know what you think. And sometime later, perhaps, we can discuss its underlying spiritual message.

Oh, and don’t even think about leaving before the final credits!

Slumdog Millionaire trailer