A Goddess Speaks

Earlier this week, I traveled on the road by Volcanoes National Park where Goddess Pele has been sending forth small explosions and big streams of billowing gases from her crater home, Hale mau mau. I pulled over and walked out on a trail leading toward the ocean to get a better view of what the Island’s Grand Lady may be up to. I was on my way back home from the house of a hospice patient, a 90 year old woman named Leilani who has seen a multitude of volcanic, earthquake and weather patterns on this highly volatile Isle, where new land for our planet is being created every day.

Leilani is a Catholic, who longs for a return to the Latin mass which she loved in her youth. She had been a catechism teacher who reveled in the majesty and mystery of medieval Church traditions. Since Latin was minimized during the changes of Vatican II, Leilani gradually stopped going to the Anglicized mass. It did not touch her soul. I shared with her that Pope Benedict had recently issued an edict which would make it easier for bishops to perform the Latin mass again. She smiled wearily, as if to say, ‘well what took them so long to figure that out!’ As we discussed the vog (a volcanic equivalent of smog) which was troubling her breathing, she said casually that “Madame Pele must be trying to tell us something.”

Here in Hawaii, a crossroad of East and West, of indigenous and mainland cultures, most of us have little trouble crossing cultural and religious boundaries with our thoughts and conversations. Grandmother Leilani, a devout Catholic, certainly understood the primacy of Pele, the fiery goddess who lives just a few minutes up the road from her house. She didn’t need to consult Catholic doctrines or attend interfaith dialogues to understand the reality of the ancient Hawaiian gods and goddesses. And, to Leilani they posed absolutely no threat to her belief in and devotion to the Christian God.

Leilani and her daughter thought that perhaps Pele was protesting the increasing development of the coastline of the Island by ‘rich investors from the mainland.’ They spoke their thoughts out loud: ‘and what will happen to us Hawaiians when all of the land is privately owned by outsiders?’ We all began to speculate on other possible reasons why Pele was spewing her gases out onto the Island at an alarming rate. Was it a sign of protest against the spread of greed and aggression all over the planet? Was it a warning of things to come? Was it a wake-up call or a call to action? Was it the blast of a natural trumpet announcing the beginning of a Golden Age which would bring all of us together?

Whatever Pele’s reasons, I stopped and offered my prayers to the Goddess for a relief of Grandmother Leilani’s breathing problems, and for patience with us interlopers of all races and cultures who have settled into this particular patch of Nature, a little confused about how we all fit into the flora and fauna of this Island paradise. “You have our attention,” I silently prayed. “Help us to be pono*, help us to wake up to our part in the Life of the Whole, help us to take care of each other and the Land, help us to cooperate with the perfect movement of the All That Is. And….thank you for the reminder.”

*Pono, a Hawaiian word meaning to be righteous, aligned with humanity and Divinity.