Healing – Page 16 – Feminism and Religion

Pride by John Erickson

When we come together, we are the Divine. I didn’t think I could experience that twice in one year; clearly, I was wrong.

If you’re anything like me you not only hate opening up your Twitter feed each morning but also feel compelled to in order to make sure you didn’t miss whatever new atrocity to come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After the Women’s March, I felt charged. I felt that whatever this administration threw at the proverbial “us,” I knew we could and would overcome it. Although that charge kept me going for a few months, there came a time where I just couldn’t go on anymore and that I was completely drained; then walked in a man named Brian Pendleton.

After the Women’s March on January 21, I didn’t know what to expect. The event was truly so successful that many of the organizers and coordinators were on an activist high as a result of what was a truly magical and divine moment. A few months came and went and the 45^th President of the United States continued (much to our surprise) to be as awful as we all knew and expected. However, while I am able to exist in a world, no matter how oppressive, as a cisgendered white male and the full on privilege and power that comes along with that territory, many of the individuals and communities being attacked did not have those same freedoms; and like with the Women’s March and how that all took shape, in walked Brian Pendleton to my life to talk to me about the #ResistMarch.

Although my involvement during the 120 days or more that led up to the #ResistMarch happened in a flash, one thing is for certain: miracles exist not because of divine intervention but because G-d places people on this Earth to make positive impacts. The beauty of the #ResistMarch was not just the passion of the organizers but the beauty of the rainbow that came out in full force on June 11

The strength shown by our community was one that, for all intensive purposes, proves that love does conquer all. RuPaul couldn’t have expressed the common and conquering theme better than when he said: “It’s all about love; giving love and being able to receive love. That’s our secret weapon; that’s the one thing they don’t have: our love and our music. That is our activism. That is what we use and what we always use to fight the ugliness.”

That is the one experience that I took most out of the #ResistMarch: the power of love and friendship; the beauty in the unexpected conversation that leads to changing the world, again. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, for bringing us all together to resist, recharge, and love.

When we come together, we are the Divine. I didn’t think I could experience that twice in one year; clearly, I was wrong.

John Erickson is the President of the Hollywood Chapter of the National Organization for Women. John is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Religious History at Claremont Graduate University where he is finishing up his dissertation tentatively titled “Step Sons and Step Daughter”: Chosen Communities, Religion, and LGBT Liberation.” John holds a MA in Women’s Studies in Religion; an MA in Applied Women’s Studies; and a BA in English and Women’s Studies. He is the Founding and Past President of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s LGBTQA+ Alumni Association and currently serves as the Chair of the Legislative Committee for the Stonewall Democratic Club, a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. He is a permanent contributor to the blog Feminism and Religion, a Co-Founder of the blog The Engaged Gaze, and the Co-Chair of the Queer Studies in Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion’s Western Region, the only regional section of the American Academy of Religion that is dedicated to the exploration of queer studies in religion and other relevant fields in the nation. In April 2017, he was the first openly gay athlete to be inducted into the Wisconsin Volleyball Conference Hall of Fame. Most recently, John was one of the coordinators of the Women’s March Los Angeles, which brought together 750,000 people in downtown Los Angeles on January 21, 2017, and a Committee Member for the #ResistMarch, which brought together 100,000 people from Hollywood to West Hollywood in honor of LA Pride on June 11, 2017.

Medusa and Athena: Ancient Allies in Healing Women’s Trauma by Laura Shannon

‘Rather than being a bleeding image of female disempowerment, Medusa may be read as…one of the most ancient European symbols of women’s spiritual abilities… [and] an empowering image of feminine potential.’

–Patricia Monaghan, O Mother Sun! (1994:244)

The name Medusa means ‘sovereign female wisdom,’ ‘guardian / protrectress,’ ‘the one who knows’ or ‘the one who rules.’ It derives from the same Indo-European root as the Sanskrit Medha and the Greek Metis, meaning ‘wisdom’ and ‘intelligence.’ (1) Metis, ‘the clever one’, is Athena’s mother. Corretti identifies Athena, Metis, and Medusa as aspects of an ancient triple Goddess corresponding respectively to the new, full, and dark phases of the moon. (2) All three are Goddesses of wisdom, protection, and healing.

Athena with Gorgoneion in her heart. 5th C BCE.

Athena and Medusa are particularly linked: indeed, one may have been an aspect of the other, ‘two indissociable aspects of the same sacred power.’ (3) Their many common elements include snakes, wings, a formidable appearance, fierce eyes and powerful gaze. The serpent, like the Goddess, has been cast as an embodiment of evil in patriarchal retellings; yet as Merlin Stone points out, serpents were ‘generally linked to wisdom and prophetic counsel’, associated with ‘the female deity’ and ‘entwined about accounts of oracular revelation…throughout the Near and Middle East.’ (4) According to Ovid, the poisonous vipers of the Sahara ‘arose from spilt drops of Medusa’s blood.’ (5) Although this is presented as a further sign of Medusa’s horrifying character, the original Berber inhabitants of North Africa – where Herodotus reports that the Medusa myth began – viewed snakes as bringers of luck and portents of joy. (6)

Despite Medusa’s fearsome appearance, she herself does not personify evil or demonic forces. According to Miriam Robbins Dexter, Medusa is a manifestation of the Neolithic serpent/bird Goddess of life, death, and regeneration. (7) Jane Harrison explains that the ancient Goddess wore the Gorgon mask to warn the uninitiated away from her rites (8), most likely mysteries of the great cosmic cycles of heaven and earth. Patricia Monaghan sees the snakelike rays streaming out from Medusa’s countenance as a sign of a solar Goddess (9), while Joan Marler, citing her connection with Hecate, identifies Medusa more with the moon than the sun (10); either way, Medusa is a heavenly deity ruling over the powers of the cosmos and the rhythms of time. Continue reading “Medusa and Athena: Ancient Allies in Healing Women’s Trauma by Laura Shannon”

The Universe Is on Your Side by Elisabeth Schilling

While I am sure this articulation is on an “inspirational” meme somewhere, my thoughts coalesced to form it while I was looking at the mid-afternoon blue sky in a moment of rare optimism. Too often can I become confused and despondent about the situation of our earth and humanity, myself. “We want healing too,” it whispered. If we are for the sustainable restoration and support of our earth, then we have a whole universe on our side that moves toward this direction as well. Our bodies, one with the universe, join in this want of healing.

Matthew Sanford is a yoga instructor whom I heard speak during an NPR interview. He explained how any reference to “our bodies failing us” does not feel true to him. He explained: Continue reading “The Universe Is on Your Side by Elisabeth Schilling”

How do you feel about me now? by Natalie Weaver

How do you feel about me now?

I was talking to an old friend the other day, and when I asked how he was, he said, “I’m getting by.” “Getting by? Not tearing it up, not taking ‘em down, and taking names?” I joked. “No,” he replied too dryly, “not at my age.”

“Well, how old are you now?” I inquired playfully. “Eighty-three,” he said. “Oh,” I paused. “And, I tell you, Nat,” he continued, “I don’t know about these last twenty years. I just don’t know what happened to me. Never imagined my life would turn out like this…” he spoke, trailing off.

His talk prompted me to wonder about the girl I once was, the woman I used to be, the mother I had imagined in myself at the outset, the scholar I prepared, the indefatigable friend I was to my peers as a teenager, the filial duty I felt in my youth, the honor I ascribed to my vocation as an educator, the family I tried to create. I have changed too, I realized. These last twenty years have been markedly transformational for me as well. As I considered, I saw in all of the things I tried to do how my spirit and my faith walked alongside my life unfolding as companion and guide and interlocutor.

At each step along the way, my faith both informed and framed the meaning of my choices and my disposition toward the outcomes of my efforts. For a long time, there was a harmony and an alignment between my meaning, my disposition, and my experience of living purposefully. But then, sure as rain, the wheel turned, and I began to lose clarity on that alignment. The idealism I had brought to each of my roles and endeavors was tested and tried as a matter of course. But, in some instances, the trial was egregious.

I concluded that some disappointments run so deep they change who we are. Some wounds are structural enough that they scar the tissue permanently and alter the curvature of our spines. Some blows are so devastating that our speech transforms and our thinking must be rewired to survive. Whether they are inflicted by the self or by others, whether by accident or intent or illness, injury has a common thread – it calls the Spirit to awaken and challenges it with the question: “How do you feel about me now?” Continue reading “How do you feel about me now? by Natalie Weaver”

Holding Two Truths by Chris Ash

Christy Croft Last month, I attended a series of workshops on self-care, family dynamics, and recovery from complex trauma. In one session, someone asked the facilitator, a counselor with over 30 years of experience in mental health fields, how to balance faith, confidence, and belief in recovery with the reality that sometimes healing can be a rocky road, with missteps, false starts, and restarts. The counselor noted that one of the key concepts he’s reinforced in working with people on their recoveries is that to keep moving forward – to forgive ourselves when we make mistakes, to not give up on ourselves when old patterns resurface, to sustain the energy needed to continue The Work in the face of obstacles, doubt, and fear – we need to be able to hold two truths at once. We need to expand ourselves such that we can hold two realities – that our hope in ourselves is not misplaced, that we are strong and can overcome adversity, and that we can move through our lives with grace and skill; and also that we may slip up and fall short of our ideals, that we sometimes may feel fragile and overwhelmed, and that recovery (from trauma, grief, substance abuse, or illness) may include steps backward intermixed with the forward movement.

This concept was especially powerful for me. As someone who spent my childhood and young adult years mired in black-or-white thinking, my personal healing and much of my spiritual practice has been built around reconciling seeming opposites, not by blurring difference such that the unlike becomes like, but by digging into the ways in which the tension between opposites is itself fertile soil for the activity of creation and growth, art and brilliance. Since creation is, for me, the sacred in action, and understanding of self in the context of the cosmos is sacred practice, this gives the tension of two truths a spiritual meaning and the fluid give-and-take that holds them in balance a spiritual wisdom. Continue reading “Holding Two Truths by Chris Ash”

Honoring the Earth in our Rituals of Well-Being by Elisabeth Schilling

plants Much of our lives lack the rich culture of ritual that I think would help us repair the relationships we have with our own bodies and with the earth. The Rg Veda is one of the oldest collection of hymns from India. In them, I find a playful and introspective expression of desires and fears that, at first, did not seem to me to hold much wisdom for a modern contemplative. But lately, I have been noticing how the speakers communicate to or about the earth, and how their lives seem centered around trying to take a part in creation. Mostly, these hymns are stories and supplications for rain, cows, victory in battle, and a long life. But there is a deep understanding of the power and divinity in the universe that is the very earth-based wisdom that our humanity-in- crisis needs. If the Qur’an is God calling for humanity to be grateful, the Rg Veda is a model of a humanity that could be nothing else.

I love one incantation, for instance, found in the tenth mandala, that seems to be from a compounding physician, praying to the healing herbs that might make her client well again. I imagine her alone, in a greenhouse pharmacy, on a damp late afternoon, fingering stems and leaves before crushing them with her mortar and pestle to make a bespoke tincture that holds a cure. She knows the plants intimately, and works as if she is on holy ground: Continue reading “Honoring the Earth in our Rituals of Well-Being by Elisabeth Schilling”

Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel

In my last post, Trump’s Misogyny – A Case for the Contempt-Oriented Personality, I wrote about disgust, claiming that media diagnosticians failed to identify disgust- contempt as part of Donald Trump’s psychological profile. At the end of the piece, I said that the statement “Make America Great Again” was misogynistic. I maintain this claim but now want to consider disgust a little more closely – particularly when it constitutes self-disgust underlying or complicit in misogyny. Confronting and ameliorating self-disgust provides an entrance into combating misogyny.

Self-disgust interferes with self-love. As a result, self-disgust impedes connection and empathy in human relationships. Self-disgust also attenuates intimacy –self and other directed. Self- disgust manifests in multiple ways – in withdrawal, refusal to engage, self and other directed violence, addictions (including those to negative affect), etc.: the list is a long one. Self-disgust which manifests as hubris motivates the projection of disgust onto others, so that the other becomes the source of disgust; the abject unwanted object present in the self – rejected and discarded –becomes transported, launched to rest on the back of another.

The simple way to describe this mechanism emerges in self-help literature that suggests that the thing that one dislikes most in others is that which one cannot tolerate in oneself. This negatively perceived part of self can also be conceptualized in terms of Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow – the unknown dark side of the personality which we all carry but whose integration into conscious life defines its denseness, or the weight of its impact. The more conscious we are of our shadow, the more we are able to identify that what we recognize as a deficiency in another is actually what we understand as a personal inferiority. Continue reading “Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel”

The Nature of Communal Pondering by Elise M. Edwards

Last week, I listened to an episode of Krista Tippett’s series On Being that featured an interview with poet Marilyn Nelson. I am not very knowledgeable about the world of modern poetry, but I am familiar with Nelson’s work. A couple years ago, I wrote about Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, Nelson’s poetic composition about Fortune, an enslaved man whose owner rendered his body into a skeleton for medical training. Fortune’s identity and history had been erased across centuries as his remains were displayed. Community concerns eventually led to a multi-disciplinary academic, artistic, and community effort to honor the man and, in 2013, put his bones to rest. Isaye M. Barnwell, a musician formerly of Sweet Honey in the Rock, developed a cantata and choral work for Fortune’s Bones. These developed into a series of artistic performances and community events that demonstrate the power of art to speak through and for those who are marginalized—even in death. Disparate communities joined together to ponder Fortune’s life, and it was powerful.

In the On Being interview, Nelson spoke about “communal pondering,” and I’ve been repeating this phrase to myself since then. It identifies a form of creative activity and a spiritual way of being that I am deeply committed to, and have not been able to name. Communal pondering occurs when a group of people are listening together and are opening up new paths for discourse and action by the engaged reflection that takes place within that listening.

Continue reading “The Nature of Communal Pondering by Elise M. Edwards”

Doctrine and Fidelity by Elise M. Edwards

This past week, I was listening to Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being as she spoke with Pádraig Ó Tuama. He is a poet, theologian, and leader in the Corrymeela community of Northern Ireland. As he spoke about several things related to the challenges of belonging, reconciliation, and fractured communities, he said, ”The measure of Christian fidelity is more than the positions we take.”

I agree. I interpreted his statement as a condemnation of the ways Christian doctrines and moral positions too often take priority over other matters of faith.

Continue reading “Doctrine and Fidelity by Elise M. Edwards”

Do You Know Why We Are Marching? by Marcia Mount Shoop

When we got into the car to go, I asked my twelve-year-old daughter, “Do you know why we are marching today?”

“To protest Donald Trump?” she replied.

I explained that some people may be going for that reason, but that was not the reason I was going.

“Are there any positive reasons you can think of for why we are marching?” I asked her.

She went on to name several things Donald Trump had said about women. “I guess those are all still anti-Trump things,” she said.

“I am marching because I am a mother, I am a sister, I am a daughter, I am a wife, and I am a survivor. That’s what I am saying if anyone asks me,” I told her.

10000-strong-in-asheville-january-2017

I had already thought through this question. As a pastor of a church with people who have diverse political affiliations I am committed to being able to minister to everyone in my congregation. I have served churches in which my political views are in the minority and I have served churches in which my political views are in the majority. Both have challenging aspects, but nothing that I have experienced previously in terms of partisanship feels like it relates to what is happening in the United States right now. Those old partisan dynamics were difficult to navigate—it took discipline, but not one ounce of moral compromise.

The decision to march was not a partisan one, it was a moral one, and it was a spiritual one. If I didn’t march it I would be listening to a frightening interlocutor—and his name is despair.

Party affiliations are not creating the alienation at the root of what is happening. The challenges are much more painful—and if I stay silent or still in the face of this situation I would not be doing my job as a pastor or a mother. Continue reading “Do You Know Why We Are Marching? by Marcia Mount Shoop”