I am Shekhinah

I am “I AM”
I am mayim
I am Mother, womb of the world,
I am Midwife, birther of souls,
I am Maiden and Matriarch, joyous, fierce, kind and true,
I am Mourner, honouring loss and seasons of change,
I am Memory and MidrashA rabbinic method of interpreting text, often through the telling of stories., wisdom keeper,
I am Mishkan custodian, of temple and hearth,
I am Mystic and Music, spirit song,
I am MiriamMiriam is the sister of Moses and Aaron. As Moses' and Aaron's sister she, according to midrash, prophesies Moses' role and helps secure it by watching over the young baby, seeing to it that Pharaoh's daughter takes him and that the baby is returned to his mother for nursing. During the Israelites' trek through the desert, a magical well given on her behalf travels with the Israelites, providing water, healing, and sustenance., prophetess and leader,
I am Movement, seeker and mediator,
I am Mirth and Merriment, sacred clown,
I am Merging, the lover, the infinite moment,
I am Maker and Mender, wonderful weaver,
I am Woman,
I am, I am;
I am mayim
I am “I AM.”

Inspired by “The Thirteen Priestess Paths,” by Rabbi Jill Hammer at http://kohenet.org/resources/, an article that first appeared in Ashe: The Journal of Experimental Spirituality, Volume 5, Issue 4.

Author’s note: I grew up with a language and liturgy that embedded masculinity into my deep programming of God-thinking and God-feeling. On the one hand, through years of familiarity, I became comfortable with this. But in more recent years, I have become disturbed that I should be so comfortable (and have increasingly felt an incompleteness with an exclusively male-languaged liturgy), and disturbed that prayer and biblical commentaries that use feminine language could so easily throw me. So I know that I must explore feminine language as well, and interchange this with masculine, in order to keep myself alive to my own biased conditioning; this makes my God-seeking and God-encountering much more strange, vital, challenging, and immediate. It awakens me to aspects of the divine that I could never previously have imagined. Women who write novels have to find words for, and embody in their writing, male characters. As a man, until writing this poem/prayer, I had never tried to write from a female/feminine perspective, and I have done so with some trepidation. I hope readers are not offended at my attempt to perceive the world from a perspective opposite to my own experience.

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