Herstory – Page 4 – Feminism and Religion

Grief, Grace, and the Eco-Feminist Legacy of Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, part 1 by Elanur Williams

Bridge to Terabithia, First Edition (1977), by Katherine Paterson. Illustrated by Donna Diamond.

There are stories that define our childhoods, and then there are the rare narratives that teach us how to survive the contradictions of adulthood. When my family relocated from Istanbul to a Philadelphia suburb during my elementary school years, I remember feeling suspended between two universes. My efforts to map suburbia onto the vibrant textures of the home I had left behind corresponded with my encounter with Katherine Paterson’s classic novel, Bridge to Terabithia, and its sibling text, Jacob Have I Loved. I remember being completely mesmerized by Leslie Burke’s house, specifically the room she and her parents painted gold. To a child who felt uprooted and out of place, that golden room was a sanctuary of pure possibility. The book was also one of the first I’d encountered that dared to tackle the complexities of grief.

Published in 1977, Bridge to Terabithia reflects the burgeoning spirit of Second-Wave Feminism, a movement that championed the personal as political and sought to dismantle the rigid gender roles of the post-war era. Leslie’s rebellion, however, carries a bittersweet resonance for the modern reader; while her struggle fits the Second-Wave pursuit of liberation, her eventual “fridging” reflects the persistent literary habit of the era to treat female autonomy as a temporary, tragic catalyst for the male hero’s journey.

She Changes Everything She Touches: A Reflection on Love and Loss, part 1 by Sara Wright

I reflect upon this year as the sun star rises in a northeastern sky. ‘He’ has reached the end of his northeastern journey.

Wave after wave – oceans of grief break over me at dawn – tempered by the same cycle during which I have been graced by a most powerful love in the form of a young canine companion. Love and Loss are such intimate companions.

‘She changes everything she touches, changes…’ during cycles of grief S/he changes nothing at all.

As the solstice bears down on us under a hard blue dome so does the fire. It is hard to believe that three weeks ago temperatures hovered in the 40’s. I resist the stifling heat of June coupled with days of torrential rain, cold, and wind that are presently drowning a field of lilies, wild lupine and roses. Fire and Ice. On good days there is the increased noise flow of man-made machines. Slow down please, I plead. Let me listen to the wood thrush, experience this space in between without bouncing between extremes.

I am feeling resentful, cross over the loss of spring and the relentless rains that destroy every flower just as it begins to bloom. I must honor the child who is heartbroken or I will make things worse. Wildflowers bring her the greatest joy and most have been under perpetual siege by inclement weather. Many plants were not pollinated. Too cold for bees.

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All (American Woman Writer 1939-1995), part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on August 11th, 2020. You can see more of their posts here.

While reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism for #NastyWomenWriters, I was stopped in my tracks by the praise coming forward in that book for black feminist, writer, activist, film maker and mentor Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995).

brown writes:

“Toni Cade Bambara, author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible. Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways she wove community, the way she supported other writers and organizers, the way she engaged in healing work” (45).

In the chapter “The Sweetness of Salt,” author and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, archivist and scholar of Bambara’s work, writes about five women who have been instrumental in her life and work: “scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin, filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons, artist and abolitionist Kai Lumumba Barrow, healer and organizer Cara Page, and editor and intellectual activist Cheryll Y. Greene”(46), who were all personally influenced, mentored, “sistered” and “mothered” by Bambara. It was these women’s recounting of their experiences with Bambara that caused me to go find her for myself.

Patriarchy Unbound by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Some new terms in our language have been after people. Both the terms sadism and masochism were so named according to etymologyonline.

Here is what the site says about sadism: “love of cruelty,” especially as evidence of a subconscious lust that the cruelty satisfies, 1888, from French sadisme, from the name of Count Donatien A.F. de Sade (1740-1815). Not a marquis, though usually now called one, he was notorious for the cruel sexual practices described in his novels.”

And here is what the site says about masochism: “The word masochism originates from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian novelist best known for his 1869 novel Venus in Furs, which explored themes of submissive sexuality and domination.”

I have a new term to add that I would like to add to our vocabulary: Robertism to be named after John Roberts. Here is my definition: love of cruelty, not just cruelty by itself but by spreading cruel acts as widely and far as possible while giving them the authority of legality. Robertism encourages the most base and ugly parts of human behavior, brings them to the surface to be expressed in actions that are given permission through legal cover.

How We ALL Need the Goddesses Now . . . by Annie Finch

Carol Christ, in her 1978 clarion call “Why Women Need the Goddess,” summarized four powerful, foundational ways that the Sacred Feminine urgently matters for women crawling out from under patriarchy. Each way helps to heal the psychic damage of our upbringings and surmount the profound losses of our violated herstory. Christ shows how Goddess belief and worship affirms the legitimacy of our power, the sacredness of our bodies, the honoring of our will—and the centrality of our connections with our foremothers and each other.

All this is still so true. All so important.

AND . . . Christ’s framing of Goddessness as a precious path of women’s transformation is not enough anymore.

Times have changed in the forty years since Christ published her essay. Today’s world has been fast plummeting into an even more blatantly hellish (no, I don’t want to insult the source of that word, Goddess Hel, guardian of life and death—so I will change the adjective!) into an even more blatantly patriarchal state of affairs.

Ariadne & Me – Mother Magic by Arianne MacBean

The fortune teller stood at a square park table, her hair wrapped in a gold scarf, stacking perfectly formed human fingernails. Across from her, I watched as she methodically piled and unpiled the fingernails according to some obscure but precise calculation known only to her. She measured them against a line carved into the wood marked with tiny incremental notches.

Reading the messages she found there, she spoke.

“Your mother and father are not one, but All.”

My friend Jacqueline, standing between us, immediately blurted out, “What the fuck does that mean? That doesn’t make any sense!”

But I answered with unexpected certainty.

“No. She’s right. They are the archetypal Mother and Father. They are not mine alone.”

The fortune teller waved us closer.

“Come on. I have to finish these visions so I can go to heaven.”

This was the dream I had the night I arrived on the Isle of Mull in western Scotland for a two-week Goddess Pilgrimage. I believed I was traveling to my fatherland, the home of Clan MacBean, to heal old wounds and unbind myself from contracts unknowingly inherited through my patrilineal line.

The Creative Divine: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon by Elanur Williams

Montgomery, L. M. *Anne of Green Gables*. Bantam Books, 1982 edition.

Long before I lived in Montréal, the lands known to the Kanienʼkehá:ka Nation as Tiohtià:ke, Canada lived in my heart. When I moved there as a young adult, the reality beautifully exceeded my imagination; yet in the years before experiencing those landscapes firsthand, they existed for me purely through books. I was an avid reader and an aspiring writer, searching for characters who felt the same strong and sometimes overwhelming pull toward self-expression that I did. I found that mirror in the windswept shores of Prince Edward Island, through L.M. Montgomery’s fiercely imaginative protagonists, Anne Shirley and Emily Byrd Starr. In her Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon books, Montgomery dismantles the rigid, punitive theology of her upbringing and offers a sharp, proto-feminist interrogation of late 19th-century Canadian Presbyterianism. In doing so, she constructs a deeply personal, feminist spirituality that equates creativity and autonomy with the divine.

DeeDee & Helen—A Trans Love Story, Part II by Mary Gelfand

Part 1 was posted yesterday

Being a lifelong spiritual seeker, DeeDee began searching for a church community where she could be herself. Fortunately, she found a Unitarian Universalist Church which had long welcomed the LGBTQ community. DeeDee felt very welcome in this community and it was there that I first met her, in the fall of 2002.

At that time I was doing a lot of teaching around paganism and goddess religions. DeeDee started signing up for my classes and we became friends. She was the first trans person I came to know deeply. Much of my understanding of the struggles trans people face comes from my relationship with DeeDee. For example, in one class I taught, students were asked to engage in an activity that involved braiding 3 pieces of yarn together. Most of the students were women, and they immediately began braiding. I took time to teach the one man in the class how to braid, and turned to find DeeDee at my elbow. She took me aside and shyly whispered—”I never learned how to braid. It’s not something that boys are taught. Can you help me?” This came in the category of “It never occurred to me,” and over the years DeeDee corrected both my assumptions and my language around what it meant to be trans. I was always grateful for her wisdom and insight.

DeeDee & Helen—A Trans Love Story, Part I by Mary Gelfand

Author’s Note: I am a cis woman writing about a trans woman who was my friend. What I know about her experience comes from stories she told me, and things I learned from her wife Helen, who has given me permission to share this story. So I am not writing from a position of personal knowledge of what it means to be trans. I am writing out of compassion for and sensitivity to the lived experience of my friend DeeDee and of trans individuals across the globe.

***

I first met DeeDee when I stopped by my Unitarian Universalist church to drop off a colorful triangular hand-woven shawl I had made for the upcoming auction. DeeDee was sitting behind the desk, recording the items that were being donated and we chatted a for a few minutes. In those days, I was teaching a variety of classes on Paganism and the Divine Feminine at the church. She asked if I was the Mary who taught these classes and expressed interest in joining one That is how our friendship began. I later learned that she made the winning bid on the shawl I donated that day.

DeeDee was assigned male at birth–the oldest child in a large Catholic family residing in New Orleans, Louisiana. Naturally she attended Catholic schools. DeeDee briefly considered a life of religious service and enrolled in St. Joseph’s Seminary. However, being extremely intelligent and given to questioning everything, DeeDee was soon pegged as a troublemaker and she and the Brothers parted ways.

Memorial Day Reflection 26 by Sara Wright

Every year I dread this weekend that honors dead soldiers. Let me make it clear that I have lost relatives to wars – uncles I loved including my first cousin who was killed six weeks after arriving in Vietnam having just graduated from West Point. I grieve too but Patriarchy and Nationalism have brought us to this dark door that we pass through each spring when the rest of nature is celebrating renewal.

We honor the fallen in war even as we indoctrinate our young boys and girls into the next generation of patriarchal power, hatred for the enemy, and war games. All this patriotism indicates that we choose to learn nothing from the past.

A couple of nights ago I watched Bob Dylan performing with others in The Rolling Thunder Revue for the first time. By 1975 the earnest/ peaceful/nature focused folk era was over. Dylan was playing electric/rock and roll and had lost some of his followers. Nixon was president and war was back in the game. The so called ‘hippies’ were outlawed, ridiculed and dismissed as druggies. This generation whose protests ended the war in Vietnam.