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A Serpentine Path: The Dance Is About To Begin by Carol P. Christ

Entering the archaeological site of Kato Zakros, which includes a Sacred Center and part of a town on a small hill above it, I felt too tired to continue with the others. As we passed a stone bench to the north and west of the open court, I lay down and closed my eyes. I don’t know if I actually slept, but when I opened my eyes, I was in a trance.

I could see the air vibrating, and as I looked up the hill, I could almost see women walking up and down the stepped paths. My eyes were fixed on the path where women I could not quite see with my eyes went about their daily tasks. After a while Cathleen joined me. “I don’t want to talk,” I said, “but if you sit quietly beside me, you will see women walking in the village. She sat down and said nothing, but smiled broadly and nodded when I asked her if she could see what I saw.

After a while, I moved and sat facing the Central Court. I could still see the vibrations of the air, and as I looked across the court, I felt a sense of anticipation. “The dance is about to begin,” I told Cathleen when she joined me a few minutes later. She nodded. It was an hour before sunset, and the ancient stones were bathed in the last light of day. Jana and Patricia were talking in the central shrine room, while the others leaned over the ancient cistern watching turtles and turtle babies dive into the water and emerge again. “The dance is about to begin,” I said again.

kato-zakros-central-court

Cathleen exclaimed, “I see the path of the dance rising up in the court. It looks like the Processional Paths we saw at Knossos, Phaistos, and Malia. Do you see it?” Though I did not “see” it, I was moved to the court, where I could “feel” it. I raised my arms, bent at the elbows, and slowly wove my way back and forth across the court, following a snakelike path I could feel with my feet. As I neared the center of the court, I almost lost my footing. Turning to face Cathleen, I gazed at her solemnly, sending energy through my palms. Cathleen raised her arms in greeting. I turned again, continuing to trace the snakelike path, back and forth, across the court. When I reached the south end of the court, I turned again to greet Cathleen and Robin who was sitting next to her. “The path you followed was exactly the path I saw,” Cathleen cried out with astonishment. “You were meant to stop at the center.” “It was an ancient path,” I said solemnly.

Jana and Patricia, who must have been watching, entered from the northwest entrance to the court. Jana was leading, arms upraised, tracing another path, walking with the same slow rhythm in which I had been led. I turned and slowly walked towards Jana until I could sense the energy flowing between our palms, then we softly touched our upraised hands. Carol, Patricia, Cathleen, and Robin formed a circle around us, and stood, arms upraised one in each of the four directions. Sensing that we were meant to share the blessing with the others, Jana and I turned, walking slowly towards the women standing in the north and south, feeling the energy, then touching their palms. Back to the center, we turned to the east and the west, completing the ceremony. As we turned to face each other again, I whispered to Jana, “We were called to this dance. It was an initiation.”

. . .

[A few days later] thinking of the snakelike path I had traced on the ancient stones, my eyes fixed on the gold snake bracelet on my right arm. I reviewed the many meanings the symbol of the snake held in ancient cultures. Goddess temples were used for storing grain, the harvest returned to She who presided over it. Snakes were guardians of the temples, eating the mice and rats that came to take the grain. The coiled snake and the snake biting its tail are symbols of wholeness. Snakes shedding their skins are images of rebirth and regeneration. Snakes hibernate under the earth and are reborn. But there was more: the rhythm of the snake in movement. I picked up a pen and wrote: “a serpentine path.”

These words described our initiation in the dance at Zakros: the serpentine path is the path of life, a snakelike, meandering path, winding in and out, up and down, with no beginning and no end, into the darkness, into the light. There is no goal, only the journey.

A cycle was coming to completion in my life. Through hard work and amazing grace, I found my way back to the Goddess, to myself. The mystery that was revealed to me as my mother died was unfolding in my life. Love had never abandoned me and never would. The Goddess would be with me at every turn in the path, and in that knowledge. I could give up control and open myself to life.

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This is an excerpt from A Serpentine Path, Carol P. Christ’s newly released, moving memoir of transformation. Order it now in paperback or on Kindle. Carol’s other new book written with Judith Plaskow is Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Carol also wrote the first Goddess feminist theology, Rebirth of the Goddess.

Join Carol on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2017. Save $200.

Read two more the chapters in the book: Mysteries and Dionysian Rites.

Thanks to Judith Shaw for the cover art “Downward Serpent.”

If the paperback is unavailable on Amazon, you can order it from Barnes and Noble.

Alice Paul & the Women Who Will Keep Marching by Kay Bee

Hedwig Reicher as Columbia on the steps of the Treasury Building in Washington, DC, March 3, 1913.

The day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade took place in Washington, D.C. to demand the attention of the incoming administration and advance the cause of suffrage. Organized primarily by Alice Paul, 8,000 women marched on Washington on March 3, 1913.

Alice Paul is an often overlooked figure in American suffragette history. She’s no longer as common a name as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her early feminist contemporaries weren’t always very fond of her, for that matter. Many found her “too radical,” especially after her return from training with the British suffragettes, where she was arrested multiple times. But Alice Paul knew how to get things done. Continue reading “Alice Paul & the Women Who Will Keep Marching by Kay Bee”

Encountering Spirit: A Ritual of Blessing for an Abortion Clinic by Katey Zeh

For the last year I have had the honor of serving as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). This leadership role often requires great personal and professional sacrifices and yet blesses me tenfold in return. At this moment in history I can think of no more important organization to offer my time and gifts than on behalf of RCRC.

Last week RCRC partnered with Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington (PPMW) to hold an Interfaith Unity Ceremony to honor their brand new health center in southeast D.C. I had the privilege of joining more than sixty clergy, justice leaders, and clinic staff as were led by the Reverend Doctors Dennis and Christine Wiley, co-pastors of the Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ, through an interfaith service of blessing. There was drumming from the all female percussion band Balatá, testimonies from providers and patients, poetry, liturgical dance, a Hindu chant, and a ritual of healing from the shame and stigma surrounding abortion.

At one point during the service a colleague of mine turned to me and whispered, “I’ve got goose bumps. Something is happening here, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes, Spirit is here.”

Many might find an encounter with the sacred at a Planned Parenthood surprising to say the least. It might have been for me had I not experienced something quite similar ten years ago. At the time I was a seminary student at Yale, and I had recently participated in RCRC’s pastoral care training on how to walk alongside women making decisions about their unplanned pregnancies. Before I offered any kind of counseling I wanted to see for myself what went on in abortion clinic. After taking a tour of the local Planned Parenthood health center I was so moved by the love and kindness of the doctors and support staff that I decided to volunteer on days when abortions were provided. Through that experience I felt the holy nudge to dedicate my ministry to supporting the work of abortion providers like Planned Parenthood and standing up for the rights and dignity of those who need access to safe, legal abortion care.

Now, almost a decade later, I found myself back in a health center. That time of being amongst my people, surrounded by words and sounds of truth affirming the sacred decisions of women about their bodies and lives, felt like I had tasted my first bite of food after a long, difficult fast. I didn’t realize how much over these last few months I had been starving for hope, love, and life-giving energy until that ritual of blessing held within the walls of the Planned Parenthood health center.

Later that night on my drive back to the airport I found myself repeating the same simple prayer, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the way that ritual had restored my spirit and affirmed my call to ministry. For the first time I felt prepared to take on the heavy burden of the next four years. I am ready. Are you?

Katey Zeh, M.Div is a thought leader, strategist, and connector who inspires intentional communities to create a more just, compassionate world through building connection, sacred truth telling, and striving for the common good. She has written for outlets including Huffington Post, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, Response magazine, the Good Mother Project, the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion, and the United Methodist News Service. Her book Women Rising will be published by the FAR Press in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @kateyzeh or on her website kateyzeh.com.

The Power of Silence by Mary Sharratt

winter-stillness

In darkest midwinter, in the hectic rush of the holiday season and its often anticlimactic aftermath, I find myself craving silence and solitude. I’m in hibernation mode and want to curl up in a cave like a bear and sleep. But our modern culture is all about doingness rather than beingness. About action. And noise. Lots of noise. First the giddy celebrations and consumerist frenzy of the December holidays and then the rigorous Puritanical expectations of New Year’s resolutions. Leaping into a better, more virtuous, and hard-working self with both feet.

But are we going against nature in our mad pursuit of busyness and self improvement in this dark ebb of the year? Why not lie fallow and bask in a day or two of silence, or whatever retreat from the maddening world we can manage? After all, January is a traditional detox month, and silent meditation is the ultimate mental and spiritual detox technique.

Over the holidays, while traveling in the Azores with my husband, I went on a two week social media, internet, and news fast in an attempt to recover from my post US election trauma. Once I returned home, I embraced my silent meditation practice and allowed myself to rest in retreat mode until January 6, the traditional Twelfth Day of Christmas, when Yuletide ends. Continue reading “The Power of Silence by Mary Sharratt”

The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women by Vibha Shetiya

vibpic Although “the” Ramayana is a fluid narrative, scholarship has traditionally recognized the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana as the most authoritative of Ramayanas. But recent studies have brought to light the hundreds of regional stories of Rama and Sita which are more popular with the masses. These would include Krittibasa’s Ramayana in Bengal, Kamban’s Tamil Iramavataram in South India, notably in the state of Tamil Nadu, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitamanas among the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India, and so on. But even here, a pattern seems to emerge; all the above-mentioned authors are male. Within this scenario, a rather unique text stands out, and that is Chandravati’s sixteenth century Bengali Ramayana, for its author was a woman. Even more fascinating is the double-toned nature of the narrative – through Chandravati’s own voice and through the voice of its tragic heroine, Sita.

Chandravati (ca.1550-1600) was born in a village in eastern Bengal, today in Bangladesh. It is impossible to ignore the tragedy of her own life which perhaps played a role in her re-fashioning a well-loved epic; her Ramayana is built on a recurring theme that defines women’s lives – the theme of sorrow. Born the daughter of a poor fisherman, legend has it that on the eve of her wedding, her fiancé ditched her for another woman. A devastated Chandravati vows to never marry, instead becoming a devotee of Shiva, and at the urging of her father, takes to re-writing the Ramayana. But rather than simply recount the traditional tale, Chandravati, through the Ramayana – that symbol of Hindu patriarchy – turns the story into one lamenting the pitiful lives of women by centering it on Sita. That it is a story by a woman and for women is evident in the fact that Chandravati addresses her narrative with the vocative, “Suno Sakhijana!” or “Listen, my girlfriends!” rather than to members of the court as was the traditional salutation for stories involving mythological characters. Continue reading “The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women by Vibha Shetiya”

As It Might Have Been: Ancestor Stories in the Dreamtime by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas In the middle of the night in waking sleep, I asked my great-great grandmother Annie Corliss to tell me the story of how she met and married James Inglis. This story came through me in a place I have come to call the Dreamtime. The Aboriginal term feels right. As I understand it, this is not a place where the dead speak to the living but rather a space where boundaries blur as the ancestors speak in us.

Annie Corliss’s Story: As It Might Have Been

My mother decided to come to America after my father died. My brother Hudson was 7 and my brother Hugh was a baby. I was 13. Mother had a little money, and she said we would have a better life in America. We left Ireland on a boat that took us to Liverpool. There we boarded the big ship Continent that took us to America. The trip took about 6 weeks. While we were at sea, first Hudson, and then Hugh died. Their bodies were wrapped in the blankets that had covered them in the filthy cabins on the ship. The priest said a few words of blessing, and they were dumped into the cold angry sea. Every day, another body was thrown overboard, sometimes two. So much grief, so many tears in the night. After Hudson died, Mother wouldn’t let go of Hugh, so afraid was she of losing him. After he died, she would not stop crying. I kept telling her she still had me. She didn’t care anymore. “America is cursed,” she kept repeating. (1) Continue reading “As It Might Have Been: Ancestor Stories in the Dreamtime by Carol P. Christ”

The Importance of Religion for Eco-Feminism by Ivy Helman

“Why is religion important to ecofeminism?” A student, in the Master’s course I teach at Charles University, asked this as we began the class session dedicated to the topic. Given the overwhelming presence of atheism in the Czech Republic, I wasn’t too surprised by the inquiry. Nonetheless, the idea has been at the back of my mind ever since: what does religion have to do with ending patriarchy and bolstering the health of the planet? While I may take the connection as obvious, it is clearly not for many feminists out there. Here is how I understand it.

First, it is true: many of our inherited religious traditions have been and still are considerably patriarchal. Because of that, some feminists outright reject religion. In fact, some feminists even consider religion dangerous and threatening, as it is often utilized to contradict many feminist aims. Yet, there are many, many feminists who find, within their given or chosen tradition, non-patriarchal elements that can be recovered, remembered and/or (re)created. Religious feminists work tirelessly to transform religions in life-sustaining and post-patriarchal ways not just for themselves but also for those women and men who belong to the same communities. Continue reading “The Importance of Religion for Eco-Feminism by Ivy Helman”

New Year and Sustainable Resolution by Sara Frykenberg

At the end of 2016, my foot hurt—my body telling me: it is painful to move forward as you have been. You have to walk differently. Yow have to walk with more support, and sometimes, carrying less weight.

I am writing this blog on New Year’s Day, so Happy New Year! Today I say these words as both a statement of hope and as invocation. Happy New Year: may it be! My twin sister told me that our horoscope said that 2017 would be a party: we should throw our energies into anything and everything we want to see happen in our worlds because it can and will happen this year—may it be! Because it certainly doesn’t feel like a time for flourishing. I echo the introductory sentiments of Kate’s blog last Friday:

“ I am fried. These last two years proved personally & professionally exhausting. And yet, another year looms ahead unavoidably — another incredibly demanding year which will require more than I can fathom I actually have to give at this moment.”

Yes Kate. Oh my god/dess yes. This is exactly how I feel… and sitting down to write this blog this morning, I felt overcome with a wave of anxiety and stress, focused on all the things I have to do, the lack of time I have to do them, and the lack of energy I feel. Lurking beneath this stress is real pain and fear. What should we expect this year, in light of what’s already happening, in light of the hate already ignited? I think I have been locked in this pain and this fear. Continue reading “New Year and Sustainable Resolution by Sara Frykenberg”

Life in the Tenements by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas During my ancestor research, I have seen the word “tenement”—with the implication of poverty, filth, and disease–handwritten onto more than one death certificate. Last month, I visited the Lower East Side where my Irish 2x great-grandmother Annie Corliss lived in the tenements near the docks with her husband the Scottish seaman James Inglis and their nine children.

Though the tenements where they lived in the vicinity of Cherry Street a block from the East River have been torn down to build public housing, my newly discovered third cousin Hattie Murphy still lives in the area. She arranged for me to visit the “Irish Outsiders” house in the Tenement Museum on nearby Orchard Street in order to gain an understanding the conditions of life in the tenements in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Tenement housing, which was a euphemism for apartment living in crowded and impoverished conditions, was often built on 25 x 100 foot lots that had been intended for single family homes. These several story buildings with four windows on the front of each floor were divided into small three-room apartments eight to a floor, each with one window facing the street or the back alley.

montrose-st-across-from-170 — Buildings like this may look charming from the outside, until you imagine living your whole life in a small apartment set behind only one of these windows.

In the apartment we visited, the window was in the sitting room in the front, the bedroom was in the back, and the kitchen was in the center. The kitchen included a coal stove that was the only heating for the house. Laundry hung above the stove, and, as our guide explained, dirty diapers with only “number one” were simply pinned up to dry. Coal dust hung in the air and fell upon everything. Even in the summer when the windows were open, fresh air rarely reached to the kitchen, let alone to the bedroom in the back. Our guide remarked that the smells of cooking, coal, babies, and unwashed bodies would have been overpowering. Despite their poverty, the women purchased pretty dishes, often chipped, at second hand stores, and proudly displayed them.

tenement-museum-irish-house-kitchen-and-bedroom — This photo shows the communal staircase, the open door of the apartment, kitchen and bedroom. The window inside the apartment was added to improve air circulation due to health regulations. Blue Willow pattern dishes on display upper left.

Our visit began in the back “garden” where there were four toilets for twenty-two families. I shuddered to imagine trying to clean them or to run down to use them in the middle of the night. There was a pump for fresh water. The guide handed around a bucket filled with pebbles to give us an idea of the weight the housewives and their children had to lug up flights of stairs numerous times each day. No wonder baths were infrequent. I remember an older Greek friend telling me how they used to wash with a cloth from the waist up one day and from the waist down the next. Annie’s family may not even have managed that.

tenement-museum-toilets-outside — Outdoor toilets in the back “garden” serving twenty-two families.

Our tour included a description of a sick and dying baby and a funeral with the baby’s body laid out in the sitting room. My 2x great-grandmother gave birth to nine children of whom, unusually, the first eight lived to adulthood. Annie must have understood that hygiene is heath. Her days would have been spent fighting to keep her house and her children as clean as she could.

tenement-housing-boy-at-sink — Boy washing in tenement kitchen. The sink doubled as a work space.

The bedroom in the apartment we visited had a small double bed pushed up against two walls, with just enough room to walk past it to get to a small closet and a few trunks crammed in the space against the back wall. When James the seaman was home, this would have been the marital bed, but when he was gone, the younger children slept with their mother, while the older ones wrapped themselves in sheets and blankets near the stove or in the sitting room.

annie-corliss-young — Annie, at the time of her marriage

Anne, age 20, and James “Ingles,” mariner, age 25, husband and wife, living in the area of the docks, appear on the 1855 New York State census. In fact, Annie was perhaps 15, while James was 17. I suspected this was an unusually young age to marry, and research proved me right. The average age for Irish marriages at the time was 20 for the bride and 25 for the groom. Annie would have had every reason to lie about her age for reasons of propriety.

Documents I have only recently found show that Ann “Carless,” age 13 arrived in New York with her mother Mary on January 16, 1854. Her two younger brothers, one 7 and the other an infant, died on the ship. As I could not find Ann’s mother Mary after that, I assume she died soon after arriving, leaving her young daughter on her own.

Annie lived her whole life in America in tenements in the the unsavory area near the docks—filled with bars, drunken sailors, prostitution, and crime. She died at the age of forty-five of a stroke, leaving her husband and eight children. Because of her, I am here.

Also see “The Careless Spirit of Annie Corliss.”

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Be among the first to order A Serpentine Path, Carol P. Christ’s moving memoir of transformation. Carol’s other new book written with Judith Plaskow is Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Carol also wrote the first Goddess feminist theology, Rebirth of the Goddess.

Join Carol on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2017. Save $200.

Read two of the chapters in the book: Mysteries and Dionysian Rites.

Thanks to Judith Shaw for the cover art “Downward Serpent.”

This Time by Joyce Zonana

And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Passing of Arthur,” Idylls of the King

It’s arbitrary, of course, this designation of January 1^st as New Year’s Day on the Gregorian Calendar, but it’s also unavoidable. Everywhere around us, people are gathering, celebrating, making resolutions, ringing out the old, ringing in the new.

The Jewish calendar’s Rosh Hashanah, near the Autumnal Equinox, always feels like the real New Year to me, with its time-honored rituals of renewal and return. The ancient Persian New Year, observed at the Vernal Equinox and recalled in in the Jewish and Christian celebrations of Purim and Mardi Gras, also moves me. And, like so many of my brother and sister pagans, I experience the Winter Solstice as a truly numinous moment, a time to release the past and welcome the future as the sun dies and is reborn.

This year, it’s especially meaningful to find Chanukah so close to the solstice, filling the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I’ve been lighting my candles each night with particular pleasure. Yet I’m happy, too, to join the rituals associated with the secular, popular New Year. In my view, there can never be too many moments of renewal and return.

Continue reading “This Time by Joyce Zonana”