As a sign to humanity, his own beloved, his own cherished and long awaited lover, the beautiful story of the Marriage at Cana is God's love song. It takes us on a journey into the heart, into a deeper space within ourselves, a place where a profound and important marriage occurs.
It is the ultimate love story, revealing the passion and bliss of ecstatic union with our true lover, one who will never betray, abandon or oppress us, one who waits for us to see, awaken, to the only real love and the only true marriage, one that we are shown through the lens of a lovely primal marriage image.
The scripture from the Gospel of John is often used at weddings, suggesting that the marriage of human to human is and was God's primary interest. In the church, marriage is a sacrament because it symbolizes that sacred union of God and human being, the wedding of ourselves, our souls and spirits, which is then reflected out into the world, in the love between two human beings, radiating the light and power of love, changing everything forever.
Jesus, at the request of His mother, who is, in my opinion the Blessed Mother of us all, the Goddess (if you will open your minds to that suggestion), and is the handmaiden to the Lord, the creator of all of us, changes six large jugs of water, ordinary water, into wine. While scholars have played with this story, discussing why Cana, why six jars, etc. etc. some of those details are of value.
The number six in Jewish gematria, for example, symbolizes the human being, the imperfect, unfinished, half of the whole. If there are 12 months, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples, then six would be half of that perfect number. So, the six jugs in the story symbolize the human being, the archetypal human being. And, wine is another word for the spirit. Clearly, Jesus used wine as a symbol of the transformative power of the spirit to teach us something about that real marriage to the divine. The spirit of God changes us, His spirit merges, or marries, with our ordinary everyday humanity to make us vessels of delight, of power and light, of joy and wonder, filled with a supernatural love that transcends the ordinary of human life, which does get dull and old and eventually dies.
Water, the most sacred substance on our planet, the substance in which all of life, grows and over which the power of God hovered in the beginning of creation, is the medium for our own transformation. As babies are cradled in their mother's womb in a gently swaying inner lake, growing until they are ready to come out as newborns, another birth occurs symbolized by the changing of the water for birth into wine, into spirit, in and through which that new birth occurs. It is the means and substance for a life immersed in God's love, a larger love, a larger life, one that transcends time and space and dimension.
Wine also becomes a symbol of the spirit of Goddess since it was His mother's insistence that he perform this miracle, suggesting that it is the Holy Spirit, the Holy Sophia, the spirit of the Divine Mother, who changes us, gives us new birth as divinized human beings, changing from being half of a whole into being part of THE whole, which is what marriage does. Two people come together in love, merge their lives based on that love and become another being, a whole being. Through that spirit, we, who are only half of the whole, that "6", now become whole as we are merged with the source of our creation.
And, as wine will remove the dullness of our lives, the Holy Spirit of God(dess) will lift us to a place of so much joy, a feast, a wedding party, a celebration that extends for ever, and ever.
Perhaps, in the magic of that moment in a wedding, when two people joyously embrace and share the beauty and hope of their love, we are closest to heaven on Earth. Certainly without being in love, without being with the one you love, whether that person has turned away or is incapable of receiving and returning an other's love, only shows us the darkness of a life without love. In that powerful image, we realize how much we need each other and in that union of two lovers, a spiritual alchemy occurs which changes us, making us more beautiful, more peaceful, more than who we are alone.
While mystics love the Gnostic imagery in the Wedding at Cana, lovers love it more as they understand in their hearts in a "physical meets spiritual" way the real meaning of love, its transformative power which stirs the inner harbors of our souls, changing us forever. It is in that wine, in that spirit of love, that our human nature is changed, uniting the human with the divine, making us whole and in love, joyous and more than we could ever be alone. We are all meant to be joined with another, held and loved and seated at the banquet of life, together with our lover, each other and our creator.
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