"OPEN‐EYED,
IN THE TERRIBLE PLACE''
JOSEPH HAVENS
At the 1982 Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, I
helped facilitate a small group on Mother Kali, a Hindu Goddess.
We were interested in learning more about this strange feminine
form of the Godhead; we also hoped to understand and evoke something
of the "Kali" within each of us, and to see how Kali manifests
herself in the wider world.
Who is Mother Kali? She is frequently portrayed as the Black
Goddess, wearing a necklace of skulls and devouring human entrails.
But she is life-giving, as well as life-destroying. Thus, she
usually has full breasts, and holds a golden ladle and a vessel of
milk-rice in two of her many hands. She presents Creation and
Destruction as equal partners in life's unfolding. But it is her devouring
side which seems to fascinate her devotees. One member of
our FCRP workshop wrote us afterwards about his relation to Kali.
He was struck by
. . . the stark negative side of Kali: the fact of destructiveness,
wrathfulness, unpredictability, irrationality; that
which at the personal level creates or stirs up in us hostility,
anger, envy, jealousy, all the seven cardinal sins; what
compels us to project the shadow, locate the enemy out
there, find a scapegoat and want to kill it.
Kali at the collective level is for me what compels man
to war, genocide, the devastation of civilian populations,
torture, The Final Solution, concentration camps, exploitation
of the defenseless, the rape of nature. . .
Though this description is clearly one-sided, pondering it has
made me aware of how unprepared we were in our workshop to deal
with the stupendous problem of Judeo-Christians trying to comprehend,
much less to affirm, this vision of Kali. As I have scaled down
my own expectations in this regard, I have recognized that I am
drawn to Kali in two specific areas: facing the forces of violence and
destruction within our own psyches, and recognizing and attempting
to understand these same dark forces at the political level. I do
not feel capable of dealing with the enormous question of whether
these powers of death and destruction are integral to the Godhead. I am
also well aware that to affirm the values of overturning and
annihilation creates significant moral dilemmas and dangers. Kali
philosophy has been used, I am sure, to justify mistreatment and
suffering; it can leave one complacent to the evils of the world. But
there is at the heart of all spiritual treatments of evil a great puzzle,
e.g., how can an all-powerful God create a world containing cancer,
rape, torture? How can we reconcile ultimate goodness with all that
contradicts it within and around us? Kali turns these questions into
what Rudolf Otto calls a Mysterium Tremendum, a holy awe. There
is terror in it, but also truth. Kali encompasses within her being the
whole range of human behavior. She invites us simply to contemplate
that. "Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown," writes
May Sarton, "We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place."1
There is a form of enlightenment born of listening steadily and
\ receptively to the full orchestration of life's symphony. But this
carries us beyond the scope of this paper. I want here to address the
meaning of Kali in particular realms and events.
I quote our correspondent again in specific reference to our
workshop:
. . . in no session did we do enough to 4live into' the qualities
for which Kali stands. The opening slides were excellent;
the quote from Isaiah 24 was excellent. But . . . when
it came to our giving instances of Kali in our own experience,
we either witnessed to the fact that we were living
very positive, sunshiny, problem-free, relatively undistressed
lives, or that we were not able to associate personal
experiences with Kali.
Why are we not able to "live into" these qualities of rage and
horror, swallowing up and overturning? Why should we even try? It
is frightening to discover these dark elements within ourselves—it
doesn't fit with the image most of us have of ourselves; it might
mean seeing ourselves as different kinds of persons than we now do.
Such changes in self-perception usually come about only after a
fundamental change or catastrophe in our lives, or a years-long
course of psychotherapy. Those of our conferences which have at-
tempted to evoke direct experiences of the Shadow have had difficulty.
Kali is "unpredictable" and "irrational." Our planned exercises
and events operate within constraints of time and social acceptability
which inhibit direct experiencing of these shadow
realms. When Kali enters our lives directly, she usually does so
unwanted, uninvited and unexpectedly. We are all aware of moments—
in Quaker Business Meetings for instance—when violent
feelings erupt. Bitterness or chaos may ensue. We avoid such occurrences
as if they were infectious and try in every way to prevent
them; and for our own comfort we usually attribute their source to
other people. So our attempt to "evoke Kali" in our workshop I now
see as naive. Though we may believe in Her and want to know Her
directly, we have a heavy stake in maintaining our cool, keeping our
emotions within bounds, not exposing our darker selves to one another.
A more legitimate aim for such a workshop is that of preparation,
i.e. helping us to recognize and value Kali experiences when
they come to us—to see the kernels of truth which usually lie hidden
in them. Jung admonishes us to "withdraw our projections" of our
Shadows. That means that any outburst of Kali—in our families, our
meetings, in Lebanon or El Salvador— should lead us to inquire
about its source not only in "the others" or in "the System," but in
our own attitudes and attachments.
Kali proclaims that anger, destruction, and death are necessary
if life is to proceed. I recall a brief workshop I was leading in
which we had been thoughtfully and carefully discussing the state of
the world. Finally, a young woman burst out with her feelings of
despair, not only about threats to the planet, but also about the lack
of feeling communication within this group (which had been together
for several weeks). This opened many others to share similar
disappointments and frustrations, and brought the community to
deeper levels of understanding and mutual support. The open expression
of these feelings made many of us uncomfortable at first,
but it had within it the seeds of renewal and new energy, and began
a process of reconnection among those who had been feeling separate.
In the following, our correspondent pursues to its logical conclusion
his view of Kali as an expression of God:
If Kali is a fact in the way God works, and my whole understanding
is that this is what is being said, why shouldn't
some of our plenary sessions be decorated with huge banners
showing massacre, torture, imprisonment, devastation?
Why shouldn't there be recurring times in the church
year when such banners would be put up in our Christian
churches? Are we running away from the fact of this horrible
side of the way God works? Are we deliberately trying to
sweep it under the rug? The Hindus thought it important to
be constantly reminded of this fact of Kali. How do we
justify our total neglect of it?
Though this may be overstated, it makes an important point. Why is
there no Christian equivalent of Kali? Good Friday is relevant, but it
is frequently relegated to a single day of the year; and it is not a
popular theme in Quakerism. Teresina Havens points out that there
is a strong element of Kali in the Hebrew prophetic writings. Readers
may be familiar with Isaiah's celebration of God's use of war and
political catastrophe to bring the Israelites to their spiritual senses:
"Ah, Assyria, the rod of mine anger, the staff of my fury! . . .
Destruction is decreed, overflowing with righteousness" (Isiah 10:
vss. 5 and 22). The 24th chapter of Isaiah is a fearsome calling down
of destruction upon the wayward people of God. Plenty of Kali
there!
The East would put the same message in Karmic terms: We
reap what we sow. They who live by the sword shall die by the
sword. We who have put our faith in military might and in the economic
exploitation of the Third World shall reap fear and insecurity
and perhaps much worse until we learn to live with compassion for
our fellow sufferers the world over. Joanna Macy has developed this
idea in relation to the Bomb: "It is the materialization of divine law
and its awesomeness. Saints and prophets and mystics have always
seen it. . . the dread-filled breath-taking seriousness of karma . . .
and the hell we make when we cease to learn to love. Now all can see
it." 2 So Kali provides us with a vivid and shocking symbolic mode of
attending to "evil" as a part of our existence, both personal and
cosmic. The more deeply we acknowledge that, the less devastated
we shall be by whatever Kali sends for our spiritual edification, and
the more meaning we shall find in it.
Some versions of the New Age seem to ignore or cut out completely
the existence of the Darkness within us. Kali, however, will
not be denied. Just as the terrible destructiveness of the Third Reich
can be traced in part to the disillusionments of the German Youth
Movement which preceded it, so there may be a rebound toward
Totalitarianism or Nihilism if and when the great dreams and predictions
of the New Age fail to materialize.
In our small group we tried to deal with the question, Why is
Kali feminine? We talked of the image of the Devouring Mother, of
the stifling symbiosis which can exist between mother and child, of
the Bacchanalian violence of the Maenads. In Kali, these fearful
sides of the Feminine are combined with the Nurturant Mother
image, symbolized in her milk-filled breasts and the life-giving rice
in her hand.
There are many male equivalents of Kali: Shiva and Vishnu in
their destructive aspects (see, for example, Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad
Git a ) , Moloch, Darth Vader. A friend once wrote me about his
Kali-like image of his father: "for years I had a symbol for him
which was Gustav Dore's print of Moloch, red-hot from the fiery
furnace inside of him fed by wood by the priests, on whose outstretched
arms were placed small children to be burned alive ..."
Gender seemed of less than primary importance, for Kali stood for
the Darkness in all of us.
A poem by May Sarton, "The Invocation to Kali," is for me a
powerful mode of affirming Kali and opening our hearts to her
fearful ministrations. Here are three brief excerpts from it:
It is time for the invocation, to atone
For what we fear most and have not dared to face:
Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;
We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place. . .3
For a long time we shall have only to listen,
Not argue or defend, but listen to each other.
Let curses fall without intercession,
Let those fires burn we have tried to smother. . .4
Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us to bring darkness into the light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is—
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.
Put the wild hunger where it belongs,
Within the act of creation,
Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love. . .5
4 'For a long time we shall have only to listen.'' Listen in our personal
affairs, and listen to the anguish of the planet. Griefs, hates and
fears which we have been taught are shameful contain Kali-truth.
They are deeply human and an essential aspect of creativeness. The
planetary teaching of Kali is perhaps best understood in terms of
Karma. We have reaped the Bomb. If we heed its Kali-message, we
may be able to reverse the course of humankind. If we do not, I am
convinced, Kali will visit us even more destructively in Her cosmic
form and we shall suffer until we see that we are indeed "All members
of one body," and that Kali abides in us all. Meanwhile, "we
must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place."
JOSEPH HAVENS, teacher and therapist, "open-eyed" in today's threatening
environment, has dealt with problems of society and the Self in a
Black ghetto, in three colleges, in community mental health and has with
Teresina Havens—been creating "Temenos", a meditation and retreat
center in Massachusetts.
REFERENCES
1 Sarton, May. "The Invocation to Kali," A Grain of Mustard Seed, N.Y.
Norton, © 1971, p. 20. Reprinted with the permission of the author, and of
the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2Quoted from a personal letter by Joanna Macy, circa 1981. Reprinted with
% the permission of the author.
3Sarton, A grain of Mustard Seed, p. 20.
4Ibid., p. 22.
5Ibid., p. 23.