Fiction – Page 9 – Feminism and Religion

Sense8: The Show No One is Talking About, But Everyone Needs to Watch by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

Anjeanette Netflix released a new Sci-Fi drama series called Sense8 in June. This original series was created, written, and produced by Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix) partnered with J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) to bring to life a world where certain humans were born with the ability to communicate and share through a mental link with other humans. They wanted to attempt to do something that had never been done before in TV, to change the “vocabulary for television production”* , the same way The Matrix became a major influence for action movies.** One of the main goals decided on was exploring the relationship between empathy and evolution in the human race.

The way Sense8 explores empathy and evolution is in the eight main characters, or sensates. All eight span the globe: culturally, religiously, and economically: Sun, Nomi, Riley, Kala, Will, Wolfgang, Lito, and Capheus. Continue reading “Sense8: The Show No One is Talking About, But Everyone Needs to Watch by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”

The Importance of Rituals (Part 2) by Elise M. Edwards

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In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of rituals. The rituals of the Easter season helped me process some difficult emotions. The way that rituals mark time and demonstrate consistency has been a comfort for me when facing new challenges and settings. But I am quite aware that rituals can become empty. In one of the comments to that post, a woman named Barbara responded, “There came a time for me when familiar and meaningful ritual no longer made sense. I had changed in understanding of what the ritual symbolized and celebrated. And haven’t found new rituals that make sense for me now…or at least I’m not aware of any.” Barbara’s remarks capture not only the loss from no longer being able to relate to existing rituals after life changes, but also the difficulty in finding or creating new rituals to take their place. I thanked Barbara for her honesty and decided that this post would continue the discussion, focusing more on discovery and creation of new rituals.

As I was preparing that post, I watched an episode of Call the Midwife that prompted me to reflect on the need to create rituals when existing ones just don’t work. Call the Midwife is a BBC-PBS show about nurses and midwives living in a convent in London’s East End at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. The show is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, and it does a better job than most primetime dramas of showing female characters’ experiences the joys and challenges of their professional lives and personal lives. As it is set in a convent with several characters who are both nuns and midwives, the show also explores the theme of vocation. What does it mean to be called to the religious life? Called to nursing? What does motherhood demand? Continue reading “The Importance of Rituals (Part 2) by Elise M. Edwards”

Traumatic Narrative on the Screen: Is there a Grey Area? by Stephanie Arel

Arel - AAUW Headshot On May 8, Fifty Shades of Grey became available in DVD format. Marking its release, this post reflects on the mass consumer consumption of this provocative film and the abuse inherent in its script previously discussed here by Michele Stopera Freyhauf. Grossing $500 million dollars at the box office, Fifty Shades will most certainly sell as an unedited DVD. While some self-proclaimed feminists like Emilie Spiegel commend the story, feminists and conservatives slam it, often pressing viewers to reject the film and deny it financial support. Nonetheless, The Fifty Shade of Grey franchise will most probably have a sequel in 2016, continuing to amass hundreds of millions of dollars.

Concerns about the book and film include how the storyline presents a romantic ideal for women wrapped surreptitiously in abuse. Peering deeper at the narrative reveals the potential for conflicted emotional responses including feelings of guilt and shame, revulsion and interest, disgust and seduction. Confronted with the writing of this post, I responded in turn, torn between whether to watch the film or not. While wanting to deny the franchise any monetary gain, I also wanted to both know what I was rejecting and what, if any, value existed in viewing. Continue reading “Traumatic Narrative on the Screen: Is there a Grey Area? by Stephanie Arel”

Howl: A Mashup Story by Barbara Ardinger

Howl!

For centuries, the wolves were the lords of the forests, ruling wisely and carefully culling the herds of the dumber animals, which actually helped to preserve many species. The wolf packs, led by their alpha females, worked to maintain the balance established by Great Mother Earth. But now a new predator was coming into the forests. Men were cutting down trees and making farms and towns and cities. They were forgetting the stewardship assigned to them by Great Mother Earth, upsetting the natural balance, making enemies of the wild creatures.

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Something had to be done to save the wild places and the wild creatures. The great wolf packs called a World Parliament of Lupine Peoples, which met in a secret location in Mitteleuropa. The werewolves who attended had their own breakout session later in the week, but the men who cast wolf whistles at young women were chased away, as were all wolves in sheeps’ clothing and all wolves of Wall Street. Although there was some discussion about admitting the medieval English queens called she-wolves after a queen in one of Shakespeare’s plays (if you’re curious, it’s in Henry VI, Pt. 3), they were admitted because they were intelligent, brave, and cunning women. The Princess Lupa, stepmother of Romulus and Remus, was a special guest.

Continue reading “Howl: A Mashup Story by Barbara Ardinger”

Gretchen at Her Spinning Wheel by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited In my continuing music education, I was recently introduced to Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (hear, for example, Renee Flemming’s performance of this work). The song is a setting of Goethe’s poem “Gretchens Stube,” in which Gretchen, a poor but upright maiden, sits alone in her room at the wheel, thinking longingly of Faust. Gretchen spins her mind and her threads on the cusp of ruin.

Faust desires Gretchen and with the help of his demonic wingman Mephistopheles (to whom he has bartered his soul in exchange for worldly favors), Faust has laid a trap to seduce Gretchen. Faust eventually gives Gretchen a sleeping potion to administer to her mother so he can come to Gretchen at night undisturbed. Contrary to the assurances of Faust, the potion kills Gretchen’s mother, even as Gretchen is conceiving a child from the illicit union, with the voyeur-devil panting in the wings. Gretchen’s enraged soldier-brother is subsequently fatally wounded in a brawl over the sordid matter, living just long enough to tell Gretchen exactly what he thinks of her. Destitute, Gretchen drowns her illegitimate child, is imprisoned, and dies burdened with grief. In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen is ultimately saved because she was once so stainless a figure and in her failings became so sufficiently penitential. Stripped of her name and transformed as una poenitentium, her soul re-appears in the final scene of the second act of the tragedy among the choir of angels receiving Faust in his own redemption, who, by those same angels, is himself bewilderingly whisked away from the clutches of a very confused Mephistopheles.

Leaving off for the time being the interesting and important question of men writing women’s stories, the whole of Faust, and specifically Gretchen’s song within it, engaged me in a feminist religious critique in ways I found counter-intuitive. On one level, I could not help but read Faust as a Promethean sort of hero. Here you have an accomplished scholar who is simply exhausted by the futility of his work, and especially the shortcomings of theology. He is seeking empirical knowledge from any place that it can at last be found. Minus his grandiose local stature, he kind of reminds me of myself (and lots of other academicians in theology who have glimpsed religious faith and myth in their most tiresome and dangerous social distortions). I incline to commend Faust for entertaining the background, the darkness, the animal, the bodily, the elemental, the unspeakable – for, that is also classically the “feminine,” yes? Continue reading “Gretchen at Her Spinning Wheel by Natalie Weaver”

Holy Well and Sacred Thread by Nancy Vedder-Shults

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I usually share this myth as a storyteller and singer. After introducing each of the goddesses, I sing a verse pertaining to that goddess from Starhawk’s chant, “No End to the Circle.” When I’ve finished the tale, I sing the chorus one more time: “There is no end to the circle, no end. There is no end to life, there is no end.”

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Before the very beginning were the Norns. Older than the oldest gods, they sat from the very beginning of time and even before at the root of the World Tree Yggdrasill. There they spun the web of life and watered the World Tree from their holy spring, the Urdarbrunnr.

This story, like all good stories, has a beginning, a middle and an end. But unlike most stories, the ending is not the end of the story, but a new beginning. The beginning, of course, is Urth, the first Norn, She who started the spindle turning and who spins the thread of life to this very day. You might guess from the sound of Her name that Urth was the Earth Mother. As the Earth Mother, She knew no temperance. She was a creator, so She created. She spun the thread of life, and spun and spun and spun some more. Soon there was thread everywhere. As far as the eye could see thread curled and tangled, twisted and twined, criss-crossed and matted itself into little balls. Thread coiled around Her feet, becoming knotted and dirty, then wound around the tree Yggdrasill, looping through its branches and getting caught in its leaves and on its tiniest twigs. Finally the thread began to clog the Urdarbrunnr, the holy well at the foot of the ash tree. Continue reading “Holy Well and Sacred Thread by Nancy Vedder-Shults”

Fragment. From Delphi. Part Two by Barbara Ardinger

Read Part One of this story here.

The two men nodded in mutual respect, and the priest pointed at the old woman, who was now sitting on a three-legged stool. “Your Grace, the Pythoness herself is in attendance today. The Eldest One. Because of your … ah … great generosity to the holy precinct of the College of Lord God Apollo, we—I, myself, I went down … down in the darkness … went down to fetch her. Under the command of the Lord God Himself. All has been explained to you?” As the general nodded, the priest hurried on. “You understand, then, that Lord God Apollo has received your inquiry? The Pythoness will reply. That is, she will convey the Lord God’s words, which I myself will translate. You understand that old women often speak gibberish that common men—that … ah … august personages such as yourself—do not … er … comprehend.” The general frowned. “It’s part of the mystery! It is as Lord God Apollo permits.” The general nodded again. “If Your Grace will kindly excuse me, I must prepare myself. Ordinarily, the younger priests carry out these duties … for the questions of common men … that is to say—”

“Get on with it, man. I’m waiting. My army is waiting. The enemy is waiting.”

The high priest bowed. “Yes. Of course. Waiting.” He bowed again, backed away, and walked with fussy dignity to his station, a pavilion just outside the shed where the veiled woman sat waiting. The pavilion had been especially constructed for this occasion. Gold and white cloths were draped across ebony poles to shade a wide ivory chair for the head priest and a low table for the stenographer, a skinny brown man who emerged from one of the marble outbuildings and stumbled down the slope.

Continue reading “Fragment. From Delphi. Part Two by Barbara Ardinger”

Fragment. From Delphi. Part One by Barbara Ardinger

The United States has not won a war by the surrender of its enemies since 1945, yet we keep going to war. Young men are committing acts of war to terrorize us at home. Our civilian police forces are becoming increasingly militarized. Who can remember what it was like when the warrior-priests of the mouse-god, Apollo Smintheus, took over Gaia’s ancient shrine?

Long before they came down, she could see the three men in their imitation women’s robes. Because she had no place to hide, she continued to sit calmly on her little stool. She stroked the serpent, which tended to become excitable when the priests were present. It coiled more snugly around her shoulders.

The oldest of the three men, the one right behind the warrior with the torch and the sword, was wheezing heavily as he explained the situation to the boy, whose first trip into the darkness this was. “She’s always back there,” he said, mopping his forehead. “Like a damn snake in a hole.” He paused to catch his breath, and the other two paused with him. “So we always have to run her to ground, so to speak.” He laughed. “Sometimes we have to bind her to bring her out. She’s old. Used to be quite dangerous—” Continue reading “Fragment. From Delphi. Part One by Barbara Ardinger”

Tiamat’s Tale by Nancy Vedder-Shults

nancymug_3 About 15 years ago, I was writing a book entitled Embracing the Dragon: A Myth for our Times. In it I critiqued the so-called heroic myth, which I call the dragon-slaying myth. My research led to the discovery of many Western dragon tales, which I retold from the dragon’s perspective. “Tiamat’s Tale,” transcribed below, was one that I offered orally – as a storyteller.

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“The ocean is the beginning of the earth. All life comes from the sea.” And at the outset Her name was Tiamat. Tiamat, the watery womb where all is amorphous and malleable. Tiamat, the primeval cauldron where one thing shapeshifts into another in the eternal whirlpool of creation. Tiamat, the unfathomable abyss. Before Her there was nothing. Without Her there is nothing. And after Her there will truly be nothing.

Those who learn to trust Her, discover Tiamat’s bliss, the creative ebb and flow of Her salt flood. Foremost among these was Apsu, Tiamat’s husband and lover, for he was the first to issue from Her tidal wave. His sweet waters mingled with Her salty brine, and together they brought forth gods and goddesses as silt precipitates from a stream or sand washes up on a shore. Tiamat’s undulations and Apsu’s wet dreams stirred the ardor of their children in turn, and soon there were many generations of gods and goddesses. Continue reading “Tiamat’s Tale by Nancy Vedder-Shults”

A New Yarn for a New Year by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger
Once upon a time there lived a smart but lonely woman named Wrenhilde who had had five husbands (but only one of them was her own) and was a single mother. Because she was seldom unwilling to speak her mind in public, she was either unliked or envied by the respectable women of the town, who were ordered by her husbands to avoid her company. So Wrenhilde did what she could to earn a pittance to pay the rent. She also grew as much of her food as she could. As she worked (or didn’t work), she sang to herself:

Bitter is my cup,
My life’s not worth a shtup,
I believe I need a new world—
I’ll have to make one up.

Well, with that kind of song and the attitude it betrayed, no one was surprised that her son Jack was a dropout by the time he was fifteen. Jack lazed around, acted stupid, stood up to the rich boys who tried to bully him, and secretly wished he had a pet for company. One of his chores at home was to milk the cow. This was the only thing he never neglected because the cow was big and white and warm and affectionate. She practically purred while she was being milked! Continue reading “A New Yarn for a New Year by Barbara Ardinger”