The Gospel According to Moana – what’s the good news?
Think about Motonue. It’s like the church. It’s been good. But it’s dying from the inside out. It provides life and meaning for its people, but it can’t sustain itself. It’s embedded in the deep sea of the Holy Spirit, but it cannot find the courage to dive in and follow the current. They used to be voyagers… but they forgot the way.
Then you have the origin story – Tefiti, the creative spirit, the living one and life-giver, the sacred feminine, loses her heart to the son of man – Maui – with the best of intentions, but also the desire to control, to take power. And once the heart of the sacred feminine gets stolen and taken, the feminine turns into a ruthless lava monster, Teka, who is stuck and leaching poison back into creation. But she knocks him out, the heart goes missing into the depths of the ocean, the Holy Spirit, and the hook – the power of man – gets lost in the consumeristic, gold-hungry depths of the realm of the Crab.
It takes a courageous young woman, to rediscover the call of the sea. To follow the leading of the Spirit of the Deep to give her the heart and sail across the sea to find Maui – to make right what he did wrong. She couldn’t do it herself, it took the balance of the male and female. It took everybody in it for the right reasons.
And they did it. With the help of the wise women who had gone before, and the courage of the man to shape-shift and be all things to all people, but also to listen to women’s wisdom and be self-sacrificial to protect. But Moana KNEW who Tefiti was. She saw her and saw the need for the restoration of the heart of the Sacred Feminine. She sang her back into life.
People used to be voyagers, WayFinders. They used to follow the Flow of the Source into the unknown with the knowledge that they were headign somewhere with purpose, with meaning. We have that invitation again.