The Gospel According to Sappho -- a #UU reflection #amreading #memoir #faithfullyLGBTQ
Today, I thought I'd post a reflection I did for a Unitarian Universalist service that I participated in -- in which I reflect on my pilgrimage in the past that I took to the birthplace of the lesbian poet Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesvos in Greece and my forthcoming memoir LOST, A Daughter Navigates Father Loss and Discovers What It Means to Belong.
The YouTube recording of the talk is below and beneath that is the text.
When I first heard that Cathy was planning a service around her pilgrimage to Transylvania, I became excited to hear the stories and to see the photographs. Cathy’s pilgrimage and what it means to her and for us is quite interesting.
On further reflection, I realized that my excitement is based on my own experience of taking a pilgrimage to Greece when I was forty – now twenty-seven years ago. At the time, I thought I was taking a pilgrimage to the lesbian poet’s homeland in the seaside town of Skala Eresou, a coastal town on the western coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Sappho, who lived there in the seventh century B.C.E., lived roughly two generations after the poet Homer.
Sappho, the classical Greek poet who happened to be lesbian and also an actual lesbian from the island of Lesvos (the English ‘B’ is pronounced as a ‘V’ in Greek), was very important to me as a younger lesbian. I would not have considered, at the time, that in this pilgrimage I was searching for a spiritual home since in those days I avoided all things religious. However, in my younger days, when I wrote poetry, I viewed poetry as a religion and Sappho as its high priestess.
I had a saying in those days that I had intolerance for everything and everyone who had intolerance for me. This doesn’t reflect my sentiment now. As a Buddhist, I send good energy to all sentient beings, including those who need to wake up.
I now define myself as intersectional, which means, like all of you, I am more than one thing. In this later chapter of my life, I realized that my pilgrimage to Greece was also about something else. I spent this summer editing two different books of mine that are scheduled to be published next year. Since this is something that rarely happens – in fact, it has never happened to me before – I have been thrilled.
The book I am editing now, LOST, a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong, is a memoir written about the changes I went through in the five years after my father’s death, now almost ten years ago. In rereading it, I have had to reflect on many uncomfortable truths about my life. I grew up in a working-class suburb where difference was not tolerated, to the point where some people tried to erase it with violence. I write about how this experience sowed the early seeds for me becoming a Buddhist and how taking a breath, detaching, and having compassion for all is a survival skill.
Another major thing that shaped me is that I grew up hearing about an image of the Parthenon on the Greek Acropolis on the apartment wall in my father’s (and his family, in which he was the oldest of five children) of his Fishtown home. Fishtown is an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood, which, at the time my father was a boy, was a neighborhood populated by poor European immigrants.
When I read through my memoir this summer, I reflected that arriving at the Greek Parthenon may have been the point of my pilgrimage, or at least it is now. I particularly felt this way when I read the following passage:
When I look back on my trip to Greece, I remember sitting in front of the Parthenon and posing for my own camera in some other tourist’s hands. The photo was lost long ago, but I can see it in my memory: I was wearing a white cotton shirt and sunglasses. The look on my face was determined rather than happy. I wasn’t thinking of it consciously, but the memory of the image of the Parthenon on my father’s boyhood wall must have been in my body. I still feel the sentiment in my bones that sitting in front of the Parthenon provoked in me: I had arrived.
The fact of me considering myself intersectional is related to me being here. As part of my identity, I am Unitarian Universalist. This means I try to understand and embrace all religions and infuse them with my own Buddhist breath. Diversity, including religious diversity, is a necessity for me. I wouldn’t be here without it.
My memoir LOST starts with a quote from the late poet Audre Lorde, “we were never meant to survive.” My story is one of survival. In my mind, the importance is not so much on what I survived as on the lessons I learned. Self-knowledge is a form of survival, also. Maybe your story is about survival, too. Perhaps this is true for all of us. We are here because we survived.
In my mind, a pilgrimage is about survival. It doesn’t always have to do with travel. It’s any experience that you live through and that changes you.
May all beings be free.
--Namaste
CINNAMON, my most recent novel, is available on amazon.com: Cinnamon: A dairy cow’s (and her farmer’s) path to freedom: Mason, Janet: 9781958419786: Amazon.com: Books
CINNAMON is also available through your local bookstore and library
(ask them to order it if they don’t have it).
For more information on my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders published by Adelaide Books, click here.
To learn more about The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
For more information on my most recent novel , Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.
To order my book, Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters, click here.
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