Mennonite Centering Poem
A Mennonite poet who is featured quite regularly in Mennonite circles has two poems on the last page of the March issue of the Mennonite Brethren Herald. One of them is called for Lent, and goes like this:
For Lent
Jean JanzenPress your palm against the Tree.
Feel its pull toward the center of the earth,
how roots drag through flesh like nails
as earth claims the crown.Now let the Tree hold you in your
full weight of wrong and right,
your selfishness absorbed by flaming roots.
You have never been so light.
The picture below this poem is of a sliver barked tree trunk with entangled exposed roots (click here).
Could it be that this poem is a subtle indicator of how the current New Age phenomena of meditation and centering prayer has been infiltrating Mennonite denominations in the form of contemplative spiritual formation?
Compare this poem to the following:
Spiritual Chakra Meditations
How To Do A Spectroscopic Healing Meditation
Align all of your chakras by sitting with your back straight. Slow down your vibration by taking a few deep breaths, then bring white light down through your crown chakra, let it flow like a mountain waterfall into your heart chakra, then anchor yourself into the Earth.
This meditation carries the white light into your heart chakra at this point, at this point white light enters your heart chakra a major signal, is released which will circulate around the body. This creates a stabilising energy from the heart centre, if there are any problems in any of the lower chakra centres, the energy from the heart centre the full vibrational sequence of your body can be raised.
Drawing the black restorative energy up from the feminine essence of the mother Earth and into your roots, the roots of a large tree spreading deep underground, anchoring the tree into the earth, use your creative visualisation to imagine the roots, going down from your body plunging into the depths of the planet and spreading out, just like the roots of that tree. Envision the prominent bulky roots extending downwards below the surface, broadening from the base of your spine.
(http://healing.about.com/od/meditationadvice/a/chakra_meditate_4.htm)
OR the method from Medicine Garden called Finding your safe place, which describes visualizing silver tree roots winding gently around your ankles down through your foot and several hundred meters into Mother Earth that takes you toward a light.
OR the meditation from Healing of the World Soul that talks about focusing on a light flowing through your body like sap in a tree and down through the trunk of your body and rooting you in the earth. The light is the energy pouring down into your roots, giving you a sense of grounding and safety, flowing out through your hands…”as your arms are out-stretched through the top of your head…opening its light to combine with the light of all Creation.”
Are the parallels not obvious? The ‘crown’ is the first chakra (the head), the ‘roots’ are the grounding of centering prayer or meditation. The Seven Chakras are linked to the energy of the serpent power of Kundalini, the root chakra being the center of your existence, the seventh, or crown chakra, being your point of enlightenment.
Of course, some will say that Roll Over Menno is jumping to conclusions over such a benign poem that is simply about the cross and the crown of thorns. Perhaps they need to take a look at what else was written by the same author of this Lent poem (since when is Lent a Mennonite tradition?). Here is a song (based on the writings of Juliana of Norwich, an English Roman Catholic mystic who wrote about Jesus in terms of a mother) written by Jean Janzen, and is called Mothering God:
1.Mothering God, you gave me birth in the bright morning of this world.
Creator, source of every breath, you are my rain, my wind, my sun.
2. Mothering Christ, you took my form, offering me your food of light,
grain of life, and grape of love, your very body for my peace.
3. Mothering Spirit, nurturing one, in arms of patience hold me close,
so that in faith I root and grow until I flow’r, until I know.
It can be purchased (here) from Wild Goose Publications (of the Iona Abbey Community). One article about this song, called Her Hymns - The Faith We Sing, states:
“Jean Janzen, author of the song “Mothering God” and a poetry professor at Fresno Pacific University, says the hymn, based on the writings of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century Christian mystic, is an attempt to balance the warrior image of God with a more nurturing one.”
The Bible always refers to all persons of the Godhead as ‘He’. What does this tell us about the beliefs of this author?
Do the editors of the Mennonite Brethren Herald show a lack of discernment by choosing this author’s poem for their magazine? Perhaps it is merely a case of being blissfully ignorant and they have no idea about the roots of centering prayer. If so, they may need to begin educating themselves with what is happening all around (and within) them in the movement towards contemplative spiritual formation. Or perhaps this poem actually is all about Jesus. I suppose we will never know. One can only hope the Mennonite Brethren are not following in the steps of the Mennonite Central Committee, who until very recently had Litanies of praise to Mother Earth on their website in the Creation Worship Resource section.
ROM Index: somewhere in the center of the earth
You are right to be concerned about the term “mother God”. There is an increase in goddess worship these days, and i suspect this term is warming people up to the idea of worshiping a goddess. There is also an increase in Mary worship, and not just within the Catholic Church. One day these two beliefs may merge and become one. Roger Oakland of ” Understanding the Times” has done excellent research into these trends. We all need to be checking everything out with God’s word to see if it is faithful to His teachings.
Wow. Just wow. I’m not a Mennonite but a member of the church of Christ. We are also anabaptist (lowercase ‘a’). We oppose infant baptism and practice baptism of believers only for the remission of sins and believe in the authority of the Scriptures’ silence (also called by some the ‘regulative principle’). I’ve been reading Menno’s writings recently and am very pleased with the level of agreement I find with him. He even uses some of the same terminology and distinctions that I do, such as in his book Christian Baptism he says “The believing receive remission of sins not BY baptism, but IN baptism” because it is not the bare act but our belief in the atonement by Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection and our taking hold of the promise that God gives concerning baptism in Mark 16:16 and Acts 2:38. Anyway, I haven’t had much dealing with the denominations of the world being that all my dealings have been in the church of Christ with every now and again a debate between myself and a Catholic or a Baptist or Presbyterian (much debating indeed, but generally with the conservatives of these denominations). This New Age stuff is very shocking. But this is what happens when people begin to rely on “the learned” as Menno would call them rather than the Scriptures. This is what taking Martin Luther’s opinion on the basis of him being a ‘Doctor’ leads to. Now they have graduated from Luther to following these other ‘doctors’ and ‘learned men’ who have taken them even further away from Scripture. The only solution, as always, is a return to the Bible and that alone. As Menno writes, and as other Reformation figures like William Tyndale also write, whatever God has not commanded is idolatry when you try to worship him with it. Even as Nadab and Abihu did not please God with their strange fire, neither will these modern day Nadabs and Abihus please God with all their “chakra” talk and carnal foolishness about “mother Earth.” In fact, their teachings fit the definition of heresy that Menno gives in his preface to the book Christian Baptism, “For hereticus means: one who sorts out, one who chooses, one who gleans..[Latin phrase]..one who selects such as will suit his own opinion” as opposed to one who believes whatever Scripture says. Any teaching that suggests we ought to be “drawing the black restorative energy up from the feminine essence of the mother Earth and into your roots” is by definition heresy and idolatry and opposed to the gospel of Christ.
I’m stunned by the comments prior to mine . . . yes, stunned. I happen to have known Jean Janzen personally for over 40 some years and know her to be a thoroughly “Christian” person. She is not in the least “New Age” yet rather a scholar and deeply contemplative follower of Jesus. I have also read most of her poetry, published and unpublished . . . and I have read the scriptures with the same rigor. What a sadness to hear this sort of “fear mongering” among believers. Would that we would discern with the heart of love as Jesus himself does. Really people!
No doubt she is a contemplative follower of Jesus.
The God of the Bible is not ‘Mother God’.