Fiction – Page 10 – Feminism and Religion

The Wages of Greed and Hubris by Barbara Ardinger

Historical note: I took the name Formosus (r. 891-896) from one of the popes of the Dark Ages. After his death, his body was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, and put on trial for political crimes. The corpse was found guilty, and the vestments were torn off it. Then it was thrown into the Tiber. A monk pulled it out, and it is said that the corpse was then burned.

Of course, if the fisherman in this story resembles anyone in modern politics….

Near the bend of the great blue river where it empties into dark sea, there once lived a fisherman and his wife. Although they were so poor they lived in a rickety hovel on the bluff above of the river, the fisherman’s wife was smart and thrifty and the fisherman himself was unusually devout. He always managed to save a brass coin to drop into the basket at the church of the new religion in the town. Of course, the fisherman also found time to pay frequent visits to the public house in the town, where he had many friends with whom he often sang long into the night. He had also gained a bosom companion at the new church. This was a dwarf named Formosus, who held an ambiguous ecclesiastical office. The fisherman visited Formosus whenever he had a new thought, and the pair often retired to the public house to continue thinking together.

Every morning the fisherman climbed down the path to the riverbank to catch fish for his wife to sell. One morning, when he cast his line into the sparkling blue water, he felt something heavy on the hook. He pulled and pulled, and eventually a great, shiny dolphin rose out of the water. Now everyone knows that dolphins almost never leave the dark sea or swim in inland rivers. dolphin

“This is a great miracle!” said the fisherman. “I’ll have to tell my friend Formosus about this and get his interpretation of this miracle.” He took great care to pull the hook out of the dolphin’s lip without tearing it. After apologizing to the fish for hooking it, he released it back into the river. During that afternoon, he caught only a few small fish. “Oh, well, At least we can eat them for supper.”

When he stopped at the church to see Formosus on his way home, the dwarf was not there. The fisherman soon found his friend at the public house. When he told him about the dolphin, the first words the dwarf said were, “Fool! It must have been a magical fish. When you released it, why didn’t you ask it for a favor?” Continue reading “The Wages of Greed and Hubris by Barbara Ardinger”

How the Dark Fairy Carabosse Found the Light by Barbara Ardinger

The dark fairy Carabosse was in a snit. “Here I am,” she fumed, “the smartest, most literate, least mischievous fairy in any world, and no one will listen to me. I’m the best of all possible fairies in the best of all possible worlds. And do I receive my due respect? Why am I not Goddess of the Sun?”

“Hush, dear,” said Carabosse’s amanuensis. “There’s already a sun god. There can’t ever be a sun goddess. The sun shoots out masculine energy—that’s what the mortals say. The moon absorbs and reflects the masculine energy. The moon is the feminine planet.”

“Well, I’m tired of reflecting men’s power. I’m also tired of being ruled by the phases of the moon. I demand to be a sun goddess so I can rule the moon! Grimmella, what’s the moon phase today?”

Grimmella looked at her handy pocket calculator. “It’s eleven percent waning, Almost dark. Which might explain your mood.” As Carabosse sniffed and glared at her, she added, “You can’t be a sun goddess. It’s just not done!”

“Oh, Grimmella,” the dark fairy exclaimed, “don’t be so old-fashioned! Wake up! We’re done with all that reflected light business. I want to be the source of light. Besides, it’s a new century! Even for the mortals. And I’ve done so much for them—for us fairies, too—that I deserve a reward. I deserve to the Goddess of the Sun.” When Grimmella laid her pen down and frowned, the dark fairy went on with her rant. “Do you know who that hubristic Apollo really is?” Continue reading “How the Dark Fairy Carabosse Found the Light by Barbara Ardinger”

Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham

When the press began using I.S.I.S. as a perhaps inaccurate and now obsolete acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, diverse groups made a connection with the Egyptian goddess who was once worshiped all over the Greco- Roman empire. A pagan organization protested the appropriation of the goddess’s name. Others took it as a sign that the self-declared Islamic State represented the anti-Christ or confirmed a conspiracy by the Illuminati. (Divinity of any kind seems to attract human projection.)

When I was doing research for my novel, The Passion of Mary Magdalen, Isis found a special place in my heart. A lover and mother goddess, later associated with both Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary, Isis appealed to people from all classes and cultures, especially to women, respectable Roman matrons and prostitutes alike. Continue reading “Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham”

Exhaustion and Inspiration by Ivy Helman

Wading in the waters of Prince Edward Island.

Change takes time. If society takes years to change, religious institutions seem to take decades, maybe centuries. That ubiquitous intersection of religion and feminism seems neck high in mud and muck. Some religious institutions claim divine inspiration for keeping their chins down, jaws clenched and footings strongly moored in damaging sexist ideologies. This is wrong. But I’m tired. I feel as if the feminist movement is draining too much out of me for not enough change.

Perhaps an example will clarify. This Tuesday I taught the first session of a six-week long summer course entitled, “Theology through Women’s Eyes.” An odd title that could mean many things, right? It does not even imply a feminist approach to religion and the college’s course description did not either. I learned from my department’s chair that the last professor to have taught the class shied away from the course having any specific reference to feminism as she was a practicing Catholic theologian and she worried about the effects of that association for her professional career at Catholic universities.

Are you kidding? We are stuck there? Still? I personally know a great number of Catholics in academia and outside of it who wear their feminism proudly like Margaret Farley, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Rosemary Radford Ruether to name just a few. Obviously, not everyone does. Yet, when religious institutions threaten to and actually excommunicate those who dissent from their teachings, I can see genuine issues with being an “out,” so to speak, feminist. At the same time, I’ve always thought that the minute someone censures me I’m finally doing something right. I’m being heard by my intended audience. Thank G-d, right? Those are the people who need to listen anyway. That is my measure of success. Continue reading “Exhaustion and Inspiration by Ivy Helman”

Book Review: Hild & The Patron Saint of Ugly by Mary Sharratt

Literature touches our spirit in a way that film, television, and even art cannot. Instead of presenting the passive viewer with a visual image, good writing demands our participation and co-creation. The words become the springboard for our own imagined vision of other worlds and other lives. In this imagined space, we can experience profound insights and revelations–soul-growing experiences we carry with us forever.

Books that try too hard to be spiritual can have the opposite effect. Discerning women demand books that respect us instead of preaching to us. Too often religion has been interpreted by and for men, but when women writers reveal their spiritual truths, a whole other landscape emerges, one we haven’t seen enough of.

Marie Manilla’s The Patron Saint of Ugly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 17, 2014) and Nicola Griffith’s Hild (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013) are two such transporting novels. They both draw on the lives of female saints in fresh and evocative ways.

Continue reading “Book Review: Hild & The Patron Saint of Ugly by Mary Sharratt”

Loss of Soul: Identity and The Stories We Tell by Kaalii Cargill

The effects on the world of the loss of the Feminine, the loss of Soul, are incalculable. Instinctive knowledge of the holy unity of things, reverence for the interconnection of all aspects of life, trust in the power of the imagination and the faculty of the intuition — all this as a way of relating to life through participation rather than through dominance and control, has almost been lost. We can see the effects of this loss of soul everywhere today, not only in the devastation and pollution of vast swathes of the earth, but in the unhappy, impoverished and hopeless existence that people endure in the hideous and ever-expanding suburbs of our cities, in the increase of diseases like cancer, diabetes and mental illness — particularly depression. The old are neglected and even ill-treated in a culture more interested in achieving targets than caring for people. The young are offered nothing to aspire to beyond the material goals promoted by the media.

– Anne Baring, 2013. Awakening to the Feminine. Archive Publishing. Extract from Chapter 10 in “The Dream of the Cosmos: a Quest for the Soul.”

Continue reading “Loss of Soul: Identity and The Stories We Tell by Kaalii Cargill”

A Thanksgiving Story by Barbara Ardinger

A Turkey Tail Tale

Once upon a time, oh, maybe five hundred years ago, there lived a little girl and her brother in a small village at the foot of a high, flat hill, on the crown of which stood the palace of the Prince and Princess and the large city that surrounded the palace. The two children were practically orphans. This was because their ethereally beautiful mother had died as the result of the misapprehension of an impetuous unicorn, and their father, who was a printer, had to frequently leave their little cottage and climb the hill. This was because no one in the village knew that printing had recently been invented, so, slinging his incunabula and foul copies across his back, the printer had to leave his sub-urban village and climb the hill to the city and the palace to secure printing work. Fortunately, the Prince employed a highly literate and prolific dwarf who was always composing epic tales that just called out to be printed and preserved in folio editions with highly decorated covers. The printer’s two children were thus neglected and often hungry; they would, in fact, have starved if not for the generous neighbor women who took pity on them and fed and washed them and patched their clothes at least once every seven days.

When the printer came down from the city one day at the beginning of summer, he was accompanied by a large, loud woman and her two young, loud daughters. “Children,” he said, “this is your new stepmother. And your new stepsisters.” The woman and her daughters took one look at the grubby children and the grubbier hovel (not to mention the cluttered printing room next to it) and raised their noses into the air. This printer, said the woman to herself, promised me a nice cottage! I got the distinct impression that he was rich! Or at least well-off and able to provide good dowries for my daughters. And just look at this! I don’t think my daughters and myself will be able to bear such wretched surroundings. But all she said out loud was, “Well, well, well. Two children. How nice.” But her two daughters pointed at the children and laughed at them. “Why are you even here?” they shouted. “You belong in a cave in the woods with the other filthy wild animals!” Continue reading “A Thanksgiving Story by Barbara Ardinger”

Dreaming the dream on . . . by Kaalii Cargill

I am author, writing fiction and non-fiction. My short stories have been published in various magazines and I have won an international writing prize. When my work was first published, I wanted to write a best-seller and earn enough from my books to retire from my ‘day job’ and write full time. I know the formula: open fast and strong, pick up the reader and carry her along until the last page, action, action, action…

Instead I found myself writing about balance, about land in need of healing and about the people called to defend the balance. My stories are as much about meaning and value as about action, and the same themes cycle though: cooperation vs. domination, defending the Earth, being an integral part of the world around us, cooperation with the rest of Nature. Continue reading “Dreaming the dream on . . . by Kaalii Cargill”

God the Father or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? by Linn Marie Tonstad

In the second season of the television show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer [spoiler alert!], Buffy is faced with an agonizing dilemma. She is condemned to save the world “again.” Buffy’s former lover is the evil Angelus. Angelus – once the good Angel – has awoken a demon that will swallow up the whole world into an eternity of suffering. In what follows, I read Buffy as God the Father. Angelus represents sinful humanity, Angel is Jesus, and the Spirit is the sword in Buffy’s hand. Buffy attempts to destroy Angelus. But at the moment that she is about to kill Angelus, his soul is returned to him. Unfortunately, only Angel’s blood will close the gaping mouth of the demon. The shift from Angelus to Angel gives a vivid representation of the shifting positions of the first and second Adam in the Christian narrative of redemption. Angelus is evil. Angel carries the weight of Angelus’s guilt without any of the responsibility belonging, strictly speaking, to him. Yet finally, the innocent Angel must bear the consequences of Angelus’s evil for the salvation of the world.

The gender dynamics of this scene complicate and illuminate traditional readings of the involvement of the Father in the crucifixion. Gender subordination and the subordination of the Son to the Father go together, and are ultimately justified by the same theological logic. Reading the Father as an 18-year old girl helps to mark the inadequacy of language to capture God. The evident implausibility, even absurdity, of the image, makes visible the theological truth that God is not a father among other fathers. Continue reading “God the Father or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? by Linn Marie Tonstad”

Longing for Hermitage by Elizabeth Cunningham

At least since the days of the Desert Mothers in the 4^th and 5^th centuries CE, there have been women in the Christian tradition (and doubtless other traditions) who have lived lives in religious solitude, whether by choice or circumstance. In Medieval Europe many churches had anchorholds, small enclosures inhabited by men or women dedicated to a life of solitude and prayer. The word anchorhold implies that the presence of the anchoress or anchorite grounded the church community, but the word derives from the ancient Greek verb (pronounced anachōreō) for to retire or withdraw. Anchoress Julian of Norwich is still revered as the author Revelations of Divine Love, possibly the earliest surviving book written by a woman in the English language. Six centuries after her death, her vision of Jesus our Mother continues to challenge, comfort, and inspire.

I grew up in an Episcopal rectory, daughter of a secretly agnostic mother who loathed being a minister’s wife (living in a fishbowl, she said) and a father who preached and practiced the social gospel as had his father before him. If you weren’t directly feeding, clothing, visiting “the least of these my brethren,” your pieties (as my father dismissed them) were worthless. At every meal we prayed, “make us always mindful of the needs of others.” Selfishness and individualism were synonymous. The pronoun “I” was frowned upon. The only route to salvation was social and/or political activism. My father walked his talk, literally, taking part in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

Continue reading “Longing for Hermitage by Elizabeth Cunningham”