Mirabai Starr: Wisdom of the Women Mystics
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. Mirabai is on the 2020 Watkins List of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People of the World. Her latest book is Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.
An Interview with Mirabai Starr: Wisdom of the Women Mystics
Interview by Sandie Sedgbeer
According to Mirabai Starr, seeds of feminine wisdom that have been quietly germinating underground are now breaking through the surface. We live in a world that has suffered the abuses of an unbalanced, masculine rule for thousands of years. Still, everything we’re hearing and reading right now suggests that the feminine is rising. Women everywhere are rising to the collective call to step up and repair our broken earth. We are activating a paradigm shift, such as the world has never seen.
Mirabai Starr has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new translations of the Mystics, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich and is the award-winning author of God of Love – A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and Caravan of No Despair – A Memoir of Loss and Transformation. A writer of non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature, she taught philosophy and world religions for 20 years, and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialogue.
Mirabai Starr joins Sandie Sedgbeer to talk about her latest book Wild Mercy – Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Mirabai, you’ve been described as a daughter of the counter-culture, you were born in New York in the early ’60s to secular Jewish parents who challenged institutionalized religion and were active in the anti-war protest movement of the Vietnam era. When you were 11, your family moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they embraced an alternative, back-to-the-land lifestyle in a communal effort to live simply and sustainably. Tell us about your early life and how that shaped you.
Mirabai Starr: My parents were not only non-religious Jews from New York, but they were also actually anti-religion. They felt that religion was not only irrelevant but dangerous and responsible for a lot of suffering in the world. So, I grew up with no sense of adherence to any particular faith tradition. They were nominally Jewish under their cultural identity but, I, on the other hand, from a very young age, was drawn to every single religious tradition that I encountered. When I started becoming interested in spirituality and religion, they were very suspicious of what was going on. Over the years, I think they realized that I wasn’t joining any particular institutionalized religious tradition; I simply was temperamentally oriented to respond to the presence of the mystery, of the sacred, of the ineffable in the form in all these different spaces. I was also temperamentally unsuited to pick one tradition to the exclusion of the others. I just would get deeply connected to a spiritual tradition, whether it was Sufism or Buddhism. I would find myself recoiling against the forms, the structures, the established belief systems, and the proscribed practices. I don’t know if it is because I was a spiritual rebel, but I think many are built that way. We’re temperamentally oriented to recognize and praise the presence of the sacred across the spiritual traditions and kind of incapable of picking one that excludes any of the others.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: As a young teenager, you lived at the Lama Foundation, an intentional spiritual community in New Mexico founded in 1968. What were the most important things you learned there?
MIRABAI STARR: I believe that my inter-spiritual orientation was formed in many ways at the Lama Foundation because Lama is the place where Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now and created the Here Now Community there and where Murshid Samuel Lewis created the Dances of Universal Peace, and Father Thomas Keating, gave his first centering prayer retreat. Many Roshis, Lamas, Swamis, and Rabbis have done ground-breaking work in that little community up in the mountains of northern New Mexico where we lived. Lama is a place that has always been about what Murshid Samuel called the Meeting of the Ways. Even Ram Dass, who recently left this world and was my life-long beloved teacher, was very much an inter-spiritual teacher. However, he had a Hindu guru and was writing about the so-called Eastern traditions. He was one of those beings who just naturally drew on the wisdom wells of all spiritual paths. So I was raised in that counter-culture world of Taos and the Lama Foundation, where I was exposed as a young girl of 11, 12, 13 years old, to multiple spiritual traditions, all of which were presented as being equally valid and true. And I thought that was true for everybody in the world; that anyone with an open heart would recognize that all these religions were singing the same song of unity and love in deliciously different ways.
But as I grew up, I discovered that was far from true. Although I do think that inter-spiritual exposure prepared me for the world we’re entering now where a lot of the existing structures are collapsing, including and maybe especially the organized religious structures. We’re going to need the ability to stand in that fire of not knowing and not throw the baby of spirituality out with the bathwater of institutionalized religion. There’s still such a deep hunger for spiritual connection and spiritual experience that draws on all the great world’s wisdom ways but is no longer separated into these little boxes that exclude the other the way that they have been historical.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: I’m sure you appreciated it, but perhaps didn’t fully appreciate until much later how being at the Lama Foundation was so valuable to who you’ve become and what you do in the world.
MIRABAI STARR: Yes, it’s so true. I really do recognize now what a blessed experience that was to come of age in that kind of milieu, and how much it informs everything I do every day of my life now. All those teachers who have been change-makers in the world, many of whom are dead now, and I got to just be with them at such a young age and didn’t realize how significant that would be. Except insofar as sitting with them and having many powerful experiences that I did recognize at the time. Wow! They shattered my foundation over and over again. They remade me every time I would have a new spiritual experience in the presence of these great beings.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: How and when did you first develop a connection with the great Christian mystics?
MIRABAI STARR: At Lama Foundation, where I encountered Sufism in various different forms – the Mevlevi Sufi Order of Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi Rumi, the great Persian Poet, and the contemporary western Sufi movement that’s now known as the Ruhaniat, and other Sufi traditions. Sufism is kind of rooted in the Lover/Beloved metaphor which really resonated with me and still does. So, when I was 20, I decided to do a semester abroad in Spain and Seville. I had a dual major in Anthropology and Spanish, and I thought living with a family and studying Spanish literature would be a great way to become fluent. And, indeed, it was. Studying Spanish literature, I encountered San Juan de La Cruz, Saint John of the Cross, who’s known, of course, for his mystical masterpiece Dark Night of the Soul. He has an incredible body of poetic work, and every poem I read reminded me of Rumi. It was almost like he was stealing Rumi’s material, even down to very specific metaphors like the fire, the garden, the wine, and intoxication, and those kinds of images, lover and beloved having a secret rendezvous in the garden. I became deeply enamored of John of the Cross. When I returned from Spain, a year or so later, when I graduated with my degree in Anthropology and went to graduate school in Philosophy and Religious Studies, I decided to do my Master’s Thesis on him. I remember being told nobody understands Saint John of the Cross, so basically you, a woman, have no business dabbling in this great mystical genius. Well, those were just fighting words, so I dove in headfirst and resonated so deeply with John of the Cross that I ended up in my late 30’s translating Dark Night of the Soul into English, which opened the floodgates to the Christian mystics for me.
I had studied them in graduate school, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and many others. But something about this intensity and intimacy of translating John of the Cross just melded any barriers I had in my heart to Christianity. The wisdom of the Christian mystics just came pouring in, and not only did I fall in love with them, but through them developed this intimate relationship and love for Christ himself. You have to understand that growing up in an anti-religious, Jewish household and studying and practicing all of the Eastern traditions, having met Ram Dass very young, I became a devotee of the great Indian Saint, Neem Karoli Baba, who is still my guru, I developed a very disciplined Buddhist meditation practice at a young age, which I always do. There was Sufism. There are the Native American traditions of my beloved hometown of Taos, New Mexico. Many different traditions. Basically, all of them, except for Christianity, which I had this kind of cellular aversion to. I think it’s ancestral trauma. Whatever it is, it was a definite block in my heart to Christianity. Still, through the Christian mystics, who speak in such a universal language of love, I was able to connect to them. And suddenly, I was being asked to translate and write about various Christian mystics, and so found myself inhabiting this space of speaking to and about Christian mysticism as a Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist pagan.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: You’ve written so many critically acclaimed books about the medieval mystics. What elements moved in your personal inner scape to bring about the birth of your latest book Wild Mercy – Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics?
MIRABAI STARR: So many of the religious traditions and teachings that I’ve spent a lifetime immersed in are conspicuously missing the voice of the feminine, and I couldn’t ignore that anymore. Every time I was exploring and lifting up these mystical traditions, it was the voices of men I was sharing, even the beliefs and practices that I cherish the most. Most of my own teachers were masculine voices. Instead of looking for the voice of the feminine, the wisdom of women, outside of myself, and my own work, I realized that it was my turn to excavate and share those jewels myself because it wasn’t happening elsewhere. I mean, there were lots of women in their own spiritual traditions bringing out the voices of women. Still, there was no one doing that across the spiritual traditions, which is my kind of area of interest, inter-spirituality.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Mirabai Starr
