As a new mother, something that is constantly on my mind is how to teach my daughter morals and values. She just turned three and has a strong awareness of what is going on around her. Her vocabulary is vast and continues to grow daily. I know that if I don’t start teaching her values now, I am missing out on an important opportunity.
Although I was raised Catholic and consider myself a “cultural Catholic,” I am uncomfortable with Catholic traditional prayers because of their lack of gender inclusiveness, among other things. We don’t attend church as we have not yet found a community that we feel is a good fit for our family.
Thus, I have found myself creating new prayers to recite at dinner and bed time; prayers that encompass our family values, are feminist in nature, and are simple enough that our daughter can remember and recite them on her own. Continue reading “Feminist Family Values by Gina Messina-Dysert”
The depth of life’s interconnection is our greatest vulnerability and our greatest hope. We are beings in relation.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. Drenched in some strange amalgam of consumerism and genuine desire to nurture the ones who have nurtured us, we buy flowers and gift cards. We plan Sunday brunches or make that extra-long phone call to our mothers living far from us. My own mother, to whom I owe my courage and creativity, lives two thousand miles away. It was she whose breath gave rise to my own, whose gentle strength and fierce passion made way for my being in the world. It is my mother to whom I trace my beginning, and yet, if life is as Anais Nin imagines it, a “process of becoming” are we not ever-beginning? If all life itself is in process, if the powers of destruction and creation flow, creating and re-creating all that is, I wonder at the wombs that make and re-make us.
This process of becoming is an adventure through the whirlwind, a tour of the chaosmos. Our becoming, wrapped up with the becoming of Creation itself, is an unwinding of the fibers of the universe and our own souls, spiraling toward liberation. And so, on this Mother’s Day, I offer gratitude and honor toward all that gives us birth, to all who take part in our process of becoming.
Wave Womb by Galen Dara
In honor of ourselves. There is a sense that each of our beginnings emerges out of a wound, out of a dying. The day I was born was the day I received my first scar. I was a C-Section baby and the doctor nicked the edge of my forehead narrowly missing my eye. Soon enough, the wound healed and I still have a tiny scar by my right eye. Today, many years and many scars later, I marvel at our ability to heal. We give life to ourselves, after the movements of death have swept through us, after long nights of grief and the collapse of all we knew. In the quiet stillness of a soul razed, creativity moves. Continue reading “In Honor of All that Gives Life by Ashley Anderson”
What does it mean to be created through the scars of a (m)other? And what does it mean to be made new—to be recreated—by them?
It is my first Easter without my mother. My sister Jody reminded me of how much my mother loved religious holidays, especially Easter. One of my striking last moments with my mother was in the hospital operating room when the nurse was preparing her for a surgical procedure. As the nurse opened up the back of the hospital gown, she exclaimed: “What beautiful markings you have.” She was referring to the scars on my mother’s back from a previous heart surgery. “It’s like a work of art.” My mother never viewed them like that. Instead, she often kept her multiple scars hidden from us. But there were moments, as a young girl, when I would glimpse them, those in the front between the buttons of her tightly starched blouses, and those on her back when she’d be ironing her Sunday dress in her satin slip. I was both intrigued and scared by these tracks on my mother’s body, just as I was by the ticking of her mechanical heart valve that I could hear when I stood next to her, the traffic in the house at a standstill. Both were reminders to us that her life was sustained yet fragile.
As I had written about in a previous post, my husband and I had a very long struggle with infertility. After nine years, multiple failed rounds of infertility treatments, and much heartache, we decided to look at alternative options to grow our family. Once we had made the decision to adopt, I felt new hope. There was a light at the end of the tunnel and I knew a child would be coming home to us before long. I had a dream that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had come to me and told me that I would be a mother. She promised that a child was waiting that needed our love and would arrive soon. I began praying to a shrine of Mary at a local parish near my home; she became my source of strength and solace.
Not long after we had been approved for the adoption waiting list, we took a family trip to Italy to visit my father’s hometown and meet our relatives. It was quite an adventure and during our excursion I stopped in every church we passed to say a prayer to Mary. Half way through the trip we received a call that a child had been matched with us. To say we were overjoyed would be a complete understatement. We tried to catch an earlier flight home but were unable. A once in a lifetime trip to Italy was suddenly of no interest to us as we sat around our hotel room looking at baby items, reading parenting info, and preparing for the homecoming of our first child. Continue reading “A Family Conceived, Lost, and Resurrected by Gina Messina-Dysert”
Quite a number of years ago I had a conversation with one of my professors, a feminist theologian, who posed the question “Why do I need a man to purify my baby with the waters of baptism? Is there something wrong or impure about the blood and water from a mother’s womb – my womb?” Before you jump and shout the words Sacrament or removal of original sin, this question bears merit in exploring, especially in today’s world where women are taking a serious beating religiously, politically, and socially. In today’s world, violations and rants are causing women to stand up and say STOP! This is MY Body. This outcry was provoked by chants of ethical slurs against women– Slut! Prostitute! Whore! The cry got even louder when the issue of religion and government was raised in the fight of healthcare coverage of contraception. The cry got even louder with the enactment of the laws in Virginia and Texas (and many other states to follow suit) that forces women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds in early stage abortions. The mandatory insertion of a wand into a woman’s vagina (mandated by the government, mind you), is a violation and has women crying RAPE!
The memory of this conversation did not re-appear by chance, it was prompted by a book I read for my History of Sexuality Class – Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context by Anne McClintock who addresses the notion of baptism through origins, property, and power. So many things are currently being taken away from women and reading McClintock’s assertion regarding male baptism is perplexing. She believes that male baptism or baptism by a man takes women’s role in child bearing and diminishes it. These are the same men who historically treated and regarded women as vessels. She further asserts that this act is a proactive removal of creative agency with respect to a woman’s ability to have the power to name. That is, the last name of the child belongs to the husband. A point that supports the notion that patrimony marks the denial of women. Anyone doing genealogy encounters a perplexing struggle to identify mothers because their names are essentially erased from memory and rarely attached to a child’s name. Continue reading “Is Baptism a Male Birthing Ritual? By Michele Stopera Freyhauf”
I am Cynthia, daughter of Pauline, daughter of Ellen, daughter of Mary. I first spoke this litany of names at a retreat given by Carol Christ. As we entered the chapel, each woman was given a rose to place in the center of the circle after she recited her own mother line. Simple but incredibly powerful, a beautiful reminder of our matriarchal inheritance.
The reflection of this ritual is all the more rich because today is my birthday. Especially since my mother’s death in 1990, March 9 is a day of reflection on our complicated mother-daughter relationship with all its highs and lows that marked our lives. But what I really miss from her are the stories told around the kitchen table, starting with the uniqueness of each of our births. With each one, the hope and expectation of both parents was for a daughter. Not until the fourth birth did their plea to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (and our family’s most depended on saint), bring forth their highly anticipated girl. Continue reading “The Naming of Our Mother-Lines by Cynthia Garrity-Bond”
After considering Virginia’s Transvaginal Utrasound Bill in light of the womanist critique, I wonder if religiously-motivated lawmakers considered that they alone do not have access to God’s intentions, but that the divine spirit is operative in a pregnant woman as well, would they be so willing to negate her moral agency?
On Tuesday, the senate in Virginia approved a law that would require women to get an external ultrasound before an abortion. This is a scaled-back version of an original bill that mandated transvaginal ultrasounds prior to abortions. According to this Washington Post article, opponents like Sen. Janet D. Howell describe the measure as “state rape,” since it is the state, not the woman and her doctor who decides that she must undergo this procedure requiring the insertion of a probe into the vagina. Although proponents of the bill say that it is designed to give women more information about a fetus’ gestational age and development, most would agree that it is ultimately intended to discourage the women from having an abortion. This is why bloggers like Kendra Hamilton believe that religion is the motivation behind this and the other 5 abortion-related bills introduced in the Virginia General Assembly connected to issues of women’s sovereignty over their bodies. Yet, as I heard about these bills, another religious response came to mind – one that expresses horror and condemnation of coercive practices regarding women’s childbearing. Continue reading “Get Your Laws off my Body! by Elise Edwards”
I have often heard people speak of times when “life stood still,” where the activity of others continues while yours comes to a sudden halt.
I love the sound of lyrics to the Skylar Grey song “Coming Home.” It has a mantra type melody that allows me to find my center when I am off kilter.
I’m coming home
I’m coming home
Tell the World I’m coming home
Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday
I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Tell the World that I’m coming
It speaks to me often when I am in the midst of interior conflict roused by change, growth, transition, disappointment etc. Each personal encounter causes a shift in my interior landscape which in turn requires me to find my center again. Sometimes the homecoming takes longer, depending on the cause of the axis shifting.
March 15th, 2012 will mark the 3 year anniversary of my mother’s death. A day that caused me much turmoil within and a life event from which I continue to search for my center. I would never have thought that this life event would shake me to the core as it did, causing me to question everything I ever thought to have known about my mother. Continue reading “Coming Home by Catherine Gorey”
I explained that this is one of Whitehead’s more frequently cited sentences because he succinctly and poetically describes his position that life entails loss, and you can’t go back and get what you lose.
I said the same thing to one of my girlfriends as we chatted in my kitchen a couple of weeks ago. I was cooking and catching up with a friend I had not seen in nearly twenty years. As we chronicled our lives from the intervening decades, my friend said: “I have a religious question.”
In moments like these, I curse the fact that even my closest friends think that I have some special kind of knowledge as a minister and professional theologian. I took a deep breath because that phrase usually precedes some difficult, heart-wrenching question that has no satisfying answer.
The stork is delivering as we speak! I hope you can join me in celebrating this joyous news – although you should know, the stork is the United States Postal Service, and I am expecting my first book, not my first baby!
It sounds somewhat crass (even to me whose book this is) to even try and pass off a book in the same way in which women announce they are expecting baby/babies. Sadly, writing books, which is one use of a woman’s creative energy, does not seem to be as valued as a woman’s ability to procreate, another use of a woman’s creative energy. Among the circle of friends I grew up with, children still seem to hold a more cherished place. On facebook.com, my “friends” post weekly updates as to the progress of their babies, pictures of their “baby bumps” and pictures of their newborns. Just through reading comments, the excitement is palpable. Continue reading “Motherhood: Still Women’s Most Valued Creative Contribution to Society? by Ivy Helman”
As a new mother, something that is constantly on my mind is how to teach my daughter morals and values. She just turned three and has a strong awareness of what is going on around her. Her vocabulary is vast and continues to grow daily. I know that if I don’t start teaching her values now, I am missing out on an important opportunity.
Feminism and Religion 