Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
March 4, 2018
OPENING WORDS
Come into this space,
you beautiful rowdy people,
where today we explore the sacred role of the trickster.
So bring in your trickster self,
your misfit self,
the parts of you that buzz with creativity,
that hunger for revolution,
that resist order & control.
Bring it all in.
It is good to be together.
SERMON
The Norse God Baldr is the Pure One: handsome and good, associated with the Sun. However, one day Baldr begins to have some troubling nightmares that some harm will come to him. He tells his mother Frigg, and she sets about forcing every thing on earth to make an oath that it will not harm Baldr. This appears to work, and everyone gathers around Baldr and has fun slinging all kinds of things at him and watching them drop to the ground before they touch his body.
All of this really annoys the god Loki, who then disguises himself as a woman and goes to Baldr’s mother Frigg. Eventually Loki gets a piece of information out of her. She says: “West of Valhalla grows a little bush called mistletoe. I did not exact an oath from it. I thought it too young.”
Loki immediately goes and gathers some mistletoe, makes a dart out of it, and gets another god – Baldr’s blind brother – to do the dirty work for him. His brother expects it will fall just like the other weapons, but the mistletoe dart goes straight through Baldr and he dies immediately.
I’ll pause the story there.
Loki is a trickster figure. Almost every culture has stories about tricksters: clever, creative, subversive, often devious figures who create disruption, chaos, and often creation, too.
Native American trickster figures include Coyote, Hare, wolverine, and Raven. West African trickster stories star Tortoise, Anansi the Spider, and Zomo the Hare, who was integrated into slave stories to become Bre’r Rabbit. The Yoruba have Eshu. Japan: Badger and the shape-shifting fox Kitsune. Hindus have Krishna; The Greeks had Hermes. Many say that Jesus, properly understood, is a trickster figure. And on and on…
Lewis Hyde, author of the book Trickster Makes this World says that wherever humans invent boundaries – which is everywhere! – the trickster figure emerges to mess with our boundaries and our need for control.
This is what we see in the story of Loki and the mistletoe.
At first glance it seems that Loki is just a rebellious trouble-maker. But he in fact sees the bigger picture.
Like most mothers, Baldr’s mother wanted to make her son invulnerable to harm. Imagine if I did everything I could to make sure my 3-year-old daughter was never hurt by anything. Imagine the life of restriction she would live. Baldr and his mother are acting from the need we all often feel: a compulsive need for order and control in an unpredictable and frightening world.
But how much control can we have before the good life we’re guarding becomes sterile and hollow?
The classicist Martha Nussbaum says that one strain of Greek thought said the good life must include risk. The good life must periodically occupy what they called “the razor’s edge of luck” – “the most delicate balance between order and disorder, control and vulnerability.”
So Loki sees Baldr and Frigg’s excessive, controlling behavior, and – in proper trickster fashion – has to respond to correct it. He fixes the balance by injecting some vulnerability to the situation, bringing them back to the reality of life: that not everything is in our control.
Baldr dies. His death was needed – in fact, it was said that he was on the decline anyway as a god, that he needed to die to make way for the new.
But of course after Baldr’s death, the culture represses Loki. They send Loki beneath the earth and punish him without end. Meanwhile, winters come one after another with no summer between them. The stars vanish; violence rules the earth.
But when Loki finally escapes and is free, the world is born again. A woman prophet says of this rebirth:
I see the Earth rise from the deep,
Green again with growing things….
The unsown fields will bear their crops,
All sorrows will heal, and Baldr will return.
Lewis Hyde says:
There is no way to suppress change, the story says,… there is only a choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop styles (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of [change.]
We humans inherently have a hard time with change and disorder and chaos. But thankfully, we are also inherently called to richer ways of making meaning – through story, symbol, and ritual. Even if you aren’t conscious of it, you are always navigating your world with the help of story, symbol, and ritual.
A famous anthropologist said that humans are not just homo sapiens, we are homo religiosus. We tend to think of religion as about belief, but it’s actually about story, symbol, and ritual. Sometimes they match up with our beliefs, but not always. Sometimes our symbols, stories, and rituals are rich and powerful and help us navigate life – and sometimes they are shallow and literal and even harmful.
What makes any one’s symbols, stories, and rituals really life-giving is that they balance what scholars call structure and anti-structure. They hold in dynamic tension a sustaining orientation to the world as well as a disruptive disorientation.
This is one of the reasons I think the symbol of the Christian cross has survived so long and so powerfully: a person can see the cross in one minute as a soothing reminder of Jesus’ love for the world, and in the next minute as the symbol for his death, and the need to dismantle the corrupt systems of the world. And that’s why so many trickster stories have survived in so many cultures, and continue to be created.
Tricksters give us some of that anti-structure that keeps our tendency toward structure from sterilizing our lives.
John Stratton Hawley talks about the disruptive trickster Krishna of India and explains why any community might actually make such unruly characters into gods and heroes:
We live in an era of savage order. We have seen bureaucratic finesse used to cause and at the same time justify unimaginable extremes of human suffering…But India’s longer experience with the structural oppression of society has produced a notion of God that is peculiarly liberating. To perceive God as the sort of being who roams about outside our walls of reason and discretion, looking for a chance to make a raid, is to question the ultimate sense and authority of the structures we erect in such glorious and proud detail. These machines of the mind, these boundaries and perimeters, often cost us dear; hence it seems little wonder that as we watch them crumble in the mythology of Krishna, we register a certain glee.
The real life trickster poet Hafiz, from the Sufi tradition, also talks about a God that breaks into our cozy patterns:
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.
The trickster is often led, by the way, by his appetite – reminding us that sometimes it’s okay to want, to hunger … that sometimes the world is created out of our hunger.
We do need order and control, but we also need to be disrupted, reoriented, loosened up. It’s a dynamic relationship.
The trickster reminds us, that as the theologian Paul Tillich says, the Courage to BE only comes out of our willingness to face chaos – even despair and meaninglessness.
If we always shield ourselves from anxiety, doubt, and chaos, our lives may seem orderly or happy, but quickly turn stagnant, shallow, repressive.
There is a life-sustaining, glowing meaning that appears in the destruction of meaning, a hope that appears when all is hopeless. Life is change, but if we admit that, we can paradoxically find peace in the midst of all of it.
The trickster reminds us that we can shape-shift when needed, that our creativity is often more powerful than our control, and that new possibilities bloom at our borders.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon