Foremothers – Page 20 – Feminism and Religion

Painting Sappho by Angela Yarber

“Someone, I say, will remember us in the future,” she once wrote. To my knowledge, she was never dubbed a prophet. A muse, yes. A romantic, perhaps. But never a prophet, rarely holy, and nary an icon. Until now. Hailed as one of the best Greek lyric poets, many have tried to forget her, or at least the more provocative elements of her life. The passionate poet Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos around 620 BCE (sometime between 630-612 BCE). The word lesbian stems from the place of her birth and her name is the origin of the word sapphic, though most scholars assert that little is known of her actual life and that the majority of her poetry is not autobiographical. Yet her lyric poetry speaks of love for both sexes and myriad people.

What is more, the idea of homo and heterosexuality are not transhistorical essences, but instead are relatively recent socio-historical constructs. To say that there were strict sexual binaries in the ancient world in which Sappho lived would be an anachronism. Sexuality was much more fluid. Not surprisingly, many scholars have tried to name and claim male lovers for Sappho, a heteronormative attempt to erase her fluid sexuality, her hope to be remembered in the future dashed, demeaned, forgotten. In fact, during the Victorian Era, many asserted that Sappho was the headmistress of a girls’ school, another attempt to straighten out her memory, her poetry, her love. Continue reading “Painting Sappho by Angela Yarber”

SACRED RHYTHMS OF THE OLIVE HARVEST by Carol P. Christ

Olives are being harvested in the fields outside my town these days. We have been having the first rains of the season. The roads are wet and muddy, and the trees are partially shrouded in mist. The fields are spread with black plastic nets, and people are hard at work, the men hitting the trees to make the olives fall, and the women picking up the olives from the nets. The harvest will continue throughout the winter.

The olive press is busy. Cars and trucks come and go, unloading heavy bags filled with olives. These days the bags are white, made of sturdy woven plastic. In Crete this fall several of us bought canvas olive bags, hand-woven by women. These, along with baskets hand-woven by men, were still in use only a few decades ago.

olive harvest in Lesbos early 20th century by Theofilos Hajimichael

A friend who died a few years ago told me that “in the old days” there were no nets. The women and the children had to pick the olives up from the ground, often cutting their hands on thorns and stones. The nets are a Goddess-send. Between harvests, the nets are simply folded up and placed in the crotch of the tree. Here no one steals them.

In the fields where I walk some of the trees have enormous trunks. Some of them have two trunks, growing like sisters. Many of them are 300, some perhaps 500, years old. A man emerges from a field that has some particularly old trees. I ask him how old they are. “Older than I am,” he replies. “They were here before I was born. They will be here after I die.” Continue reading “SACRED RHYTHMS OF THE OLIVE HARVEST by Carol P. Christ”

Painting Dorothy Day by Angela Yarber

Radical Revolutionary. One with the workers. Daily works of mercy. One who challenged the status quo. She never wanted to be called a saint, though the Claretian Missionaries proposed that she be canonized in 1983. The Catholic Church calls her a “Servant of God.” I call her a Holy Woman Icon. She joins the myriad other Holy Woman Icons with a folk feminist twist that I feature each month: Virginia Woolf , the Shulamite, Mary Daly, Baby Suggs, Pachamama and Gaia, Frida Kahlo, Salome, Guadalupe and Mary, Fatima, Sojourner Truth, Saraswati, Jarena Lee, Isadora Duncan, Miriam, Lilith, Georgia O’Keeffe, Guanyin.

Born on November 8, 1897 Dorothy Day’s radical spirit, her development of the Catholic Worker Movement, and her solidarity with the poor have taught countless women what it means to be a revolutionary. This American anarchist and activist converted to Catholicism as an adult after living what many describe as a bohemian lifestyle. She advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, daily works of mercy, pacifism, and solidarity with the poor. Continue reading “Painting Dorothy Day by Angela Yarber”

Feeding the Dead by Deanne Quarrie

Most people really love this time of year and I share much of that. Living in South Central Texas we actually only have two seasons, with a perhaps two to three weeks in between what we laughingly call spring and fall. Because the winters are not harsh here, the step into spring feels different from those whose winters are frozen for months on end. We do experience some relief when our temperatures finally drop a bit in October. Even then those drops are only teasers. When we do finally get a briskness in the air in the wee, early morning hours of dawn but when the sun rises overhead, any memory of that coolness is forgotten. This morning at 5:30 am, when I woke, it was 54 degrees. I stepped outside to smell and feel the air, so clean and cool. And yet, now it is 85 degrees and rising, it once more feels like summer. We don’t have the sudden frosts that turn our trees to vibrant reds, yellows and browns. Yes, the leaves eventually turn and fall to the ground, but we have no heavy freeze and so our colors are pale compared to those in the North and colder climates.

Many Texans think the emotional feel for our two seasons is backwards, believing that summer, with its blazing sun, is the time to withdraw. Then in winter, when the weather is mostly mild, that’s the time to come out to play. This is a reversal of pagan thinking about the seasons in North America. Continue reading “Feeding the Dead by Deanne Quarrie”

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”

Painting Holy Women By Angela Yarber

Each month, I focus on one of my Holy Woman Icons with a folk feminist twist, highlighting the often unsung stories of feminism’s heroines: Virginia Woolf , the Shulamite, Mary Daly, Baby Suggs, Pachamama and Gaia, Frida Kahlo, Salome, Guadalupe and Mary, Fatima, Sojourner Truth, Saraswati, Jarena Lee, Isadora Duncan, Miriam, Lilith, Georgia O’Keeffe, Guanyin, and many others who will be featured in the months to come. While some of these holy women may not be incredibly famous to the wider public, most of their names and stories are familiar to the readers of Feminism and Religion. They are goddesses, saints, artists, dancers, scholars, clergy, and pillars of the faith. We tell their stories in our classrooms. Their stories embolden us to stand tall, stay strong, and continue working for justice and equality. But what of the women whose songs really are unsung, whose stories never grace the pages of our textbooks? What about the women who have, indeed, emboldened us, paved the way for us to be who we are, but who our readers have never heard of? This month I would like to focus on one of these women. You’ve probably never heard her name, but I know her very well. It is her courage that has given me strength, her compassion that has taught me to love. Her name is Mary Harrell and she is my mother.

In her seminal work that highlights the importance of telling women’s stories, FAR’s own Carol Christ begins by saying:

Women’s stories have not been told. And without stories there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions of her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to celebrate her strengths, to comprehend her pain. Without stories she cannot understand herself. Without stories she is alienated from those experiences of self and world that have been called spiritual or religious. She is closed in silence. The expression of women’s spiritual quest is integrally related to the telling of women’s stories. If women’s stories are not told, the depth of women’s souls will not be known. (Carol Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980) Continue reading “Painting Holy Women By Angela Yarber”

Birth Song, Life Song, Death Song by Molly

“A woman can spin a primal umbilical rope within her womb through which she passes life-energy to the future.” –Melissa Raphael

“In some indigenous cultures of the Americas there is the practice of finding one’s death song while alive. This song becomes the ally of the person throughout their lives, so that they become very acquainted with what the song means in their lifetime. Death then, is a companion of life, and is never forgotten. In the hour of death, these people would, if they were able to, sing their death song–exiting this world with song on their lips and no doubt feeling the power their ally-song had gathered by being with them in their life. I can see that a death song would provide a connection between the person and the cycles of life, guiding the dying person into the next world and helping to allay fear…” –Leslene della-Madre, Midwifing Death

I was introduced to blessingways, or mother blessing ceremonies, as a girl when my mother’s group of friends hosted them for each other during their pregnancies. I loved attending the ceremonies for my mom during her pregnancies with my younger brother and sister and witnessing the web of love, support, and commitment woven around her. They touched me deeply with their sacred, magical, and mysterious flavor. When I was twelve, the same group of friends had a coming of age blessingway ritual for the daughters of the group, ranging in age from 10-16. It was a mystical, beautiful experience. We wore wreaths of flowers in our hair and were blessed with wisdom and tokens from the wise women of our tribe. At 34 years old now, I still have my folder of prayers, quotes, and messages from that day. For years it smelled faintly of rose petals.

Continue reading “Birth Song, Life Song, Death Song by Molly”

Painting Guanyin by Angela Yarber

As hundreds of thousands of people are dying in Syria and myriad individuals suffer from political unrest in Egypt, as we continue to debate the sexuality of young women (yes, we’re still talking about Miley Cyrus) in the face of America’s rape culture and as countless nameless victims are ravaged by war, poverty, racism, and violence, I sometimes find myself overwhelmed, as though my two hands are never enough to reach out, help, rage, change. And I find myself—and our world—in need of mercy and compassion. Since I always focus on one of my Holy Woman Icons with a folk feminist twist, I am drawn this month to the Goddess of Mercy. So, Guanyin joins this great cloud of witnesses who inspire, embolden, and surround us: Virginia Woolf , the Shulamite, Mary Daly, Baby Suggs, Pachamama and Gaia, Frida Kahlo, Salome, Guadalupe and Mary, Fatima, Sojourner Truth, Saraswati, Jarena Lee, Isadora Duncan, Miriam, Lilith, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

In English we know Guanyin as the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion. Generally regarded among East Asian devotees as originating from Avalokitesvara, her name is shortened from Guanshiyin, which means “One who hears the sounds/cries of the world.” In the Lotus Sutra, Avalokitesvara is a bodhisattva who is androgynous and can take on the form of any female, male, adult, child, human, or non-human sentient being in order to teach the Dharma. Typically she is depicted in female form and she is widely venerated by East Asian Buddhists. Though she is particularly poignant for Buddhists, Guanyin is present in almost every facet of Chinese religion, from Buddhism to Taoism to shrines for local fishermen. Continue reading “Painting Guanyin by Angela Yarber”

On Reading, Not Reading, and Disagreeing by Linn Marie Tonstad

The theology blogosphere in all its glory has been alive in recent days with furor sparked by a blog post from Janice Rees at Women In Theology, where she discusses not reading Karl Barth, the heavyweight German 20^th-century Protestant theologian, as an act of resistance against his dominance in the theological academy and his status as a litmus test for serious scholarship. Reminding myself repeatedly of the great xkcd comic, I’ve resisted my urge to comment on this and a number of other recent debates. (See here for a list of links if you wish to catch up on the discussion, however.) So this is not a post on whether to read Karl Barth.* Rather, the debate made me take a look at some of my own reading practices, and the visions of theological discussion that they encode. It also brought me back to the question of feminist disagreement, which continues to lurk in the back of my mind as I pursue disagreements with some prominent feminist theologians in my current book project.

I’ve written here before about reading authors that I disagree with, and indeed working on theologians I think are wrong about certain issues. On the simplest level, as a feminist and queer theologian, many of the theologians I work on would have questioned or outright resisted my participation in the discipline to begin with – although we cannot always know whether and how they would have done so today (since many of them are dead – yes, the dreaded dead white European males). But I often – not always – find projects that I sincerely disagree with utterly fascinating. From what perspective does the system being developed in such a project make sense? Where would one have to stand to see what that author sees? What do I come to understand about my current context, or the author’s context, from the perspective of the debates and decisions that the author finds pressing? One fairly trivial example: any interest I might once have had in historical Jesus debates was settled forever by reading Albert Schweitzer as an undergraduate. I simply do not find such debates compelling in themselves. (That does not mean I think they are valueless, of course!) But reading theologians who were engaged in such debates teaches me a great deal about how the commonsense assumptions many of us today operate with came to be. And seeing how such debates accompany disagreement over right social relations, over the nature of transmission of Christian traditions, and over what counts as scholarship in theology and religious studies is simply fascinating. Continue reading “On Reading, Not Reading, and Disagreeing by Linn Marie Tonstad”

The Philadelphia Ordinations and Pope Francis in Rio by Alla Renée Bozarth

On July 29, 2013, I read the feminist theologian Mary Hunt’s fine account of Pope Francis’ visit to Brazil, with commentary on his informal conversation with press people on the way back to Rome.

When asked for a statement about the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church, a question which indirectly refers to women in the priesthood and episcopacy, he reiterated the position that the door to the ordination of women is closed. In response, I was inspired to write in the way that most intensely felt responses come out~ as a poem.

As I wrote, I couldn’t help but hear an older poem, “Water Women,” in the background. Perhaps the fact that Pope Francis had been to Rio, the Spanish word translated into English as river, inspired this association. Perhaps it was reinforced because Mary Hunt, whose article had moved me, was the co-founder and co-director of the organization WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual). I wrote the poem “Water Women” a few years after the historical Philadelphia Ordinations, in which eleven women put a significant crack in the stained glass ceiling barrier in the Episcopal Church by being ordained to the priesthood on July 29, 1974. That fait accompli event opened the doors to the ordination of women into all three Holy Orders. The Roman Catholic Women’s Ordination Conference began later that same summer. I wrote “Water Women” in response to a question asked of me and others in a small group of Roman Catholic and Episcopal feminists during a press conference, just as I wrote “Pope Francis in Rio” on the 39^th anniversary of the Philadelphia Ordinations because of a press conference, this time with Pope Francis during his flight back to Rome.

Continue reading “The Philadelphia Ordinations and Pope Francis in Rio by Alla Renée Bozarth”