Several years ago, I received a phone call from a therapist who was new to Huntsville and had found me by doing an internet search for Jungian-informed therapists. In search of community and colleagues, she came to see me, and we sat together in my office talking about our work and interests. At some point she asked me if I had read Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Secret Life of Bees, to which I responded with a resounding YES! I have read this book multiple times – I’d say it is one of my top five favorite novels – and the movie was one of the best adaptations I’ve ever seen. Brenda then told me that she and her colleague Jackie had led groups of women on journeys to France several times to walk the labyrinths, visit the Black Madonnas, and make pilgrimages to shrines and other sacred sources of divine feminine energy and wisdom. If you know me at all, you’ll understand why Brenda Jacklin and I became fast friends.
During the pandemic, Brenda and her husband decided to move to Colorado, where her children and grandchildren live, and while I’m pleased for her to be so close to her beloved family, I certainly miss her presence here. But while she was here, we were able to work together many times, offering workshops on the Divine Feminine, doing spiritual and artistic practices together with a group of amazing friends, affectionately known as the Pachamamas, and, best of all, throwing a Bee Party. The Bee Party was created by Brenda and Jackie and was based on the characters and events from The Secret Life of Bees.
On a beautiful, sunny day in May 2019, we met at Brenda’s home and began the day
creating an altar and honoring our personal mothers and mother figures by placing something on the altar that reminded us of them. I took one of my mother’s paintbrushes as
well as a couple of old pieces of sheet music to honor her creative spirit. We read some excerpts from the story of Lily, Rosaleen, and the Boatwright sisters, August, June, May, and May’s twin sister April who died as a child. We ate a southern-style lunch seated at a table decorated with pink houses to represent the Boatwright home. The afternoon was filled with contemplative time, visiting stations representing the characters, receiving small gifts at each one, and journaling about what we were noticing as we placed ourselves into this story of strong, brave women, each of whom carried her own particular woundedness. Finally, we sat under some shade trees and drank ice-cold co-colas (as my Mammaw called them) from the old-fashioned small glass bottles that seem to make the drink taste so much better.
To close the day, Brenda and I brought her statue of Our Lady of Rocamadour, purchased on one of her trips to France, down to the shady place where everyone was gathered. The statue was wrapped in chains to represent the black Mary from the novel, part of a masthead from an old ship that washed up on the shores of a plantation years ago and became a powerful symbol of hope and freedom for the enslaved people who lived there. She was so powerful, in fact, that the plantation owner wrapped her in chains nearly fifty times. And each time she managed to escape her chains. August Boatwright, her sisters, and friends, collectively referred to as the Daughters of Mary, called this Black Madonna, Our Lady of Chains, not because she was still chained, but because she broke free of her chains time and again. And so we, as a group, unwrapped the chains on our Black Madonna, and then, just like the Daughters of Mary from the book, we poured honey over her and took turns rubbing the honey into the wood. In the book, August Boatwright describes the honey as holy water, and says this ritual preserves the statue from year to year. This ritual that we performed together allowed us to close the day honoring the archetypal Mother, the Great Mother of us all, just as we had honored our personal mother figures at the beginning of the day.
The Secret Life of Bees is a beautiful, powerful story and a great introduction to the Divine Feminine, represented in the book by Our Lady of Chains. When Lily, the young heroine of the book, has an intense heart connection to this Black Mary, she says,
She is a muscle of love, this Mary. I felt her in unexpected moments, her Assumption into heaven happening in places inside me. She suddenly rises, and when she does, she does not go up, up into the sky, but further and further inside me….She goes into all the holes life has gouged out of us.
And the divine feminine also shows up in all the maternal, nurturing, protective, loving female figures in the book. At the Bee Party, the stations that were set up each told the story of one of these women, and asked participants to ponder on the questions generated by each character’s story:
· Lily says that Rosaleen has the kind of fire inside her that “burns down the house, if necessary, to clean up the mess inside it.” Rosaleen’s station was a voter registration table and participants were asked “What about your fire?”
· June's area was especially meaningful for me. I used some of my mother's purple glass to float gardenia blossoms, something my mother always used to do so that our house smelled divine. August reminds June that life is for living, “Don’t sort of maybe live, but live like you’re going all out." We hung my mother's wedding dress here, since June finally says yes to getting married and living her life "all out." On a full-length mirror, a sign at June’s station reads, “Who is this woman and what does she want most in the world?”
· We had a wailing wall for May where participants could write down their sorrows and place the pieces of paper amongst the stones for safe keeping. And an altar honoring May’s deceased twin April with candles to light in memory of lost loved ones.
· Brenda’s playhouse for her granddaughters served as a honey house complete with individual jars of honey and the question, “Where is the honey in your life?”
· Maybe my favorite station was Lily’s, a table on which sat an open jar lying on its side, with two paper bees, one inside, one out. Beside the jar was the quote from the book in which Lily says she hears a clear voice saying, “Lily Melissa Owens your jar is open.” And with the voice came the clarity of just what she needed to do next. The question for us that day was “Exactly what is it that you need to do?”
If you haven’t read The Secret Life of Bees, I hope you will. Or read it again. There is a power in this story that when embraced, will help us explore these questions of our heart’s deepest desires. And a reminder that our mothers and mother-figures, as well as the Great Mother herself, are here to support, nurture, and guide us along the path.