Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Feminist Parenting About Sexuality Part 2 – pornography by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

As I said in Part 1 – this topic will be difficult to discuss. As I said, I promise I AM NOT SAYING ALL MEN ARE BAD. Please re-read Part 1 if this post causes you to feel defensive or protective toward males.

Unfortunately, we live in a deeply, horrifically misogynist culture. Our culture is so dystopian that it has normalized a mass butchery of violence against females. I can say these words, and most people either nod or look skeptical, but they don’t actually understand what I am talking about. People do not understand because they have so normalized horrific misogynist violence – they have been so brainwashed – that they cannot recognize brutal attacks against women, even when those attacks are right before their eyes… or happen to their own bodies.

Feminist Parenting About Sexuality – Hold on, because this is going to hurt by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

I have been asked numerous times by numerous people over the years to write about feminist issues, especially regarding teaching kids about consent, pornography, and healthy sexuality. The reason I have not tackled this project yet is that I know full well most people—even people who think they want to know what I have to say, who think they probably agree with me to a large degree—will find what I have to say too overwhelming, depressing, and painful to handle.

People have interesting perceptions of me, which shape their expectations of what I will say. I am generally cheerful and affirming to be around. I frequently advocate for justice issues by speaking with passion and blunt honesty in ways people find uncomfortable or comforting, depending on where they stand on that particular issue. People want to feel safe and affirmed by me personally, but they also want me to keep speaking out about justice—so long as I do not make them too uncomfortable.

Feminist Holy Week Vaginal Christology Daily Devotional — Part 2 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

See here to read Part I of the Devotional.

Friday:

Thought for the day:

The Roman authorities executed Jesus for sedition because he posed a threat to their hegemony: their wealth and their oppressive, imperial domination system of exploiting others for profit. Jesus spoke out against their injustice, and his message resonated with the 99%. People were beginning to listen; momentum was growing. So the Empire snuffed out that “Rebel Scum” in their most excruciating, punishing, degrading form of execution. According to the logic of imperial domination, Jesus’ death should have been a humiliating, final defeat.

Instead, his movement lived on and on, grew and grew. The symbol of Imperial execution — the cross — should have symbolized the wrongness, the lack of Divine sanction, the complete Divine rejection of Jesus’ ideas, according to Empire. Instead, the Jesus Movement reclaimed the cross from an Imperial symbol of shame and turned it into a symbol of victory. Paul, the feminist liberationist prophet most responsible for the survival and spread of the Jesus Movement, repeatedly wrote that the Jesus Movement follows Christ Crucified. Paul’s message seemed scandalous and confusing— lifting up a symbol of horror, death, and defeat as proof of victory? Why? How?

Feminist Holy Week Vaginal Christology Devotional, Part 1 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Monday:

Thought for the day:

In Matthew 21, Jesus rides a mother donkey, her baby beside her, into Jerusalem in blatant condemnation and contrast to the militaristic entry of Roman military leaders and soldiers on war horses through a different gate. The point of Palm Sunday was activism: a political protest against war and the domination systems of oppression. The symbol Jesus chose for his protest was a mother and child. When the people shouted “Hosannah,” which means “save us,” they were asking to be liberated from the terrible economic and political oppression of imperial injustice. Jesus’ message of egalitarian Common Good and a kin-dom of JustPeace brought people hope and inspiration for a better future of mutual thriving and wellness.

Prayer:

Divine Source, You who Conceive and Birth and Nourish all Creation, open our hearts to the Way of Salvation that will bring liberation and mutual thriving to our Earth today. To honor Christ with Palm branches, may we protect Palm forest habitats for the orangutans who cry “Hosanna! Save us!” To honor the mother donkey and her baby, may we advocate for mothers everywhere, who are the most impoverished people in our society. May we always remember that You are Mother of All, ever ready to embrace us, cradle us, tend our wounds, nourish our spirits, and remind us that we, ourselves, are the Way of Salvation, growing over and over from your Dark Soil to your Light and back, nourished and nourishing, healed and healing, always giving away the Love we receive, and becoming our true, Divine selves through the power of healing Love.

Breathe with me by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Breathe with me.

I know. I know. I understand.
Breathe with me anyway.
It hurts. It’s scary. It’s horrible. It’s relentless. I know.
Just breathe.
Every time we breathe out, our bodies release things we do not want.
So breathe it out. All of it. Let it go.
Deep breath. However you prefer—mouth, nose—just breathe.
What do you need to let go?

For me right now, there’s rage.
All the people refusing the masks, refusing the vaccine, even friends of mine who have watched me suffer with post-COVID syndrome for almost a year, still blaming me somehow for my illness.
Breathe. Let it out. Don’t have to carry it anymore.
There’s fear, too — friends, family, fighting COVID, or taking dangerous, unnecessary risks.
Long, slow breaths. Release. Into the loving matrix of Creation-Life-Love. I can’t hold this anymore. I release it.

There’s grief. Loss. Suffering. Isolation. Pain. Oh, breathe, let the tears flow, let the breaths and the tears just be what they are.
Stress. So much stress. We’re all frayed, so far beyond our limits. Breathe it out. Breathe it out again. Deep breaths – make noise if you want. Moan.
She cradles us in breath, the Divine Womb. She is the Source of our breath, and She is always cradling us, always breathing with us.
Breathe again. Close your eyes. Let your Holy Spirit bathe you in its healing power.
But it doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t DO anything!
I know. But it is enough. Just let it be. Be breath breathing itself.
What if you deserve to let go?
What if you deserve to be cradled in healing Love?
What if you deserve just to be?

Breathe. It sometimes feels so nice. Breath in, breath out.
Your body is letting go of anything you do not want.
You can release it now. Breathe it out. It’s ok.
Anywhere you want to feel your breath is ok. Wherever you want it to go, just breathe it there, and then release.
There’s no way to do this wrong. It’s your breath. It’s your breathing. A gift your body has, a magical, powerful, simple, holy gift. Breathe however feels good and right to you.
No rush. Take your time. As long as you want. As often as you want.
What if you deserve compassion?
What if you deserve to be bathed in healing Love?
What if you deserve to rest in your breath?
Breathe, darling. Close your eyes if you like. With every breath, you are holy.

In my Methodist tradition, which focuses heavily on the Holy Spirit, we sing a breathing hymn I love. Here is my rewritten version:

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
fill me with Life anew,
restore my soul with ev’ry breath,
to do what Love wouldst do.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
so shall I rest, secure,
cradled in Love’s bright healing peace,
and held in compassion pure.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
till I am wholly thine,
till body, spirit, all of me,
glows with thy Fire divine.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
until my heart is free,
and I perceive my ev’ry breath
is thine Eternity.

—Edwin Hatch (1878), revised.

Our world is so frayed right now. We are all at the end of our rope. We feel the same way most new mothers feel in capitalist patriarchies, in which motherhood means financial strain (or poverty), isolation, anxiety, constant demands, an inability to meet basic physical and mental health needs, and no escape from continuous, relentless emotional and physical labor. Women are expected to embrace this level of self-sacrificial stress in motherhood, as part of our female slave role in capitalist patriarchy, which defines our unpaid, unvalued labor as a natural extension of our biological sex. The burden on women is higher than ever these days, with women and even girls taking the lion’s share of extra household duties so that boys and men can continue in their education and careers. Women are suffering 100% of job losses as well.

In times like these, I keep turning to my faith for comfort and strength. In my tradition, the Holy Spirit is the Divine Breath, the Source of Life, which animates all living things and all Creation as sacred. It comes originally from the Hebrew “ruach,” a feminine noun. So when I take time just to breathe, that is sacred time, allowing my true, divine self to feel its divinity (as Methodism’s founder John Wesley might say). I do not take breathing for granted. After my COVID experience, how could I ever take it for granted again? So, for me, breathing time is holy — “set apart” as a communion, a Eucharist of Grace: life-giving, healing, restorative, and liberative. Almost every night for the past eleven months, I have spent time lying in bed just breathing: feeling the breath of the trees behind me in the woods, allowing their wellness to enter me, breathing out to them whatever I want to let go. In breathing this way, I am able to understand bodily that my breath is Goddess. Goddess who is ever birthing Love and Liberation. The Divine Source of All, who is every justice, every healing, every restoration. My breath is fair economies and safe respected female bodies; it is just relationships and female thriving. This is my breath. This is the Source of the Healing that rebirths every death into Life. This is Goddess.

So, breathe with me, sisters. And brothers. She is here, and we are the ones who breathe her. What if we deserve to be bathed in Healing Love? She knows. She understands.

Just breathe.

Trelawney Grenfell-Muir teaches courses about Sex, Dating, Marriage, and Work in the Religion and Theological Studies Department at Merrimack College and about Cross Cultural Conflict in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A Senior Discussant at the Religion and the Practices of Peace Initiative at Harvard University, she holds an M.Div. from the Boston University School of Theology with a concentration in Religion and Conflict, and a Ph.D. in Conflict Studies and Religion with the University Professors Program at Boston University. She currently writes articles, book chapters, and liturgical resources about feminist, nature-based Christianity.

Rescuing Purity from Patriarchy — With Candlemas Vagina Candles by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

I was invited to give a Dharma Talk at a Buddhist temple service in Hawai’i recently. Last time these folks invited me to speak, I explained my Christian feminist theory of Christ the Cosmic Vagina, so I was glad they invited me back! But that was the classroom – for temple service, I decided to talk about Candlemas.

This Buddhist community chants a beautiful prayer together every week:

“I am a link in Amida Buddha’s Golden Chain of Love that stretches around the world. I must keep my link bright and strong. I will try to be kind and gentle to every living thing and protect all who are weaker than myself.

I will try to think pure and beautiful thoughts, to say pure and beautiful words, and to do pure and beautiful deeds, knowing that on what I do now depends not only my happiness or unhappiness, but also that of others.

May every link in Amida’s Golden Chain of Love be bright and strong, and may we all attain perfect peace.”

Continue reading “Rescuing Purity from Patriarchy — With Candlemas Vagina Candles by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Bridgerton: The Next Wrong Thing in Misogynist Television

Why can’t we have nice things? Because the porn industry has infected media, that’s why.

I have read several of Julia Quinn’s fanciful romance novels. They contain entertaining and sympathetic stories about the economic and social pressures on gentlewomen of early 19th century Britain. The females are creative, courageous, intelligent, and honorable. The males are… well, they are somewhat sexist, of course, but no more sexist than most men I know. The books do a mediocre job of challenging gender roles or stereotypes (especially in their cookie cutter portrayals of male heroes), but they directly challenge overt sexism and misogyny. Quinn calls herself a feminist. Continue reading “Bridgerton: The Next Wrong Thing in Misogynist Television”

Sappy modern carols won’t cut it; Gritty Advent Hope is what we need this year. — by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

As we careen toward ever more terrifying surges in the Covid pandemic, with experts predicting apocalyptic catastrophes by Christmas time, I find myself reacting to the vast majority of modern Christmas songs, stories, movies, and cultural norms with increasing distaste. In these scary, painful weeks leading up to Christmas, my culture has very little to offer other than distraction and superficial jollity. Ho ho ho, Santa Claus is comin’ to town.

Distraction does help, a little. It’s addictive, of course. We turn more and more to social media, with its carefully designed dopamine boosts from each “like” and “love” reaction, each funny cat video, each smug political joke, to keep us from confronting the terror and trauma of our current reality. It’s a legitimate coping mechanism, a crutch that can be useful in many ways. Continue reading “Sappy modern carols won’t cut it; Gritty Advent Hope is what we need this year. — by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Feminist Parenting Part 3—Les Misérable Mothers, why is this so %$@# haaaaard?! by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Life has been challenging lately – I’m sure you can relate. Normal emotional and financial stress are worsened by COVID-19 and the election— and I’ve often said that there’s nothing like motherhood for making us feel like failures… It’s as though our brains are incapable of seeing anything but the things we have left undone or done badly. And it is often excruciatingly hard to be a calm, patient parent when the kids start getting wild, or someone breaks something, or the <expletive> online form won’t <expletive> work on my <expletive> phone.

…Why is it so hard to feel “good enough?” Could it be because patriarchy benefits from making the female class feel constantly insecure and unworthy? Continue reading “Feminist Parenting Part 3—Les Misérable Mothers, why is this so %$@# haaaaard?! by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Feminist Parenting, Part 2 — What are Children? Are Children Human? by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

The first thing I do in parenting courses is ask students their most basic beliefs about children. Students are startled by this opening slide, “what are children?” The obvious, knee-jerk response to the question, “Are children human?” is “Of course!” It seems like an unnecessary, bizarre question to ask.

However, many parents and societies treat children as though they are not fully human. Children are valuable, but they are not given the respect, trust, and basic human rights that we generally say humans should receive. Actually, most people treat children with coercion, humiliation, and distrust – as though children are willfully bad and thoughtless. Every time parents give a “consequence” (imposed punishment) for “bad behavior,” they are telling the child that she is a bad person, who needs to be “kept in line” by punitive measures. Every time parents tell children to eat this before they can eat that, or that they must put on a coat if they are to go outside, parents are sending the message that children do not deserve bodily autonomy, do not have the right to make basic decisions about their own bodies, are incompetent. That is anti-feminist parenting. Continue reading “Feminist Parenting, Part 2 — What are Children? Are Children Human? by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”