Category: Ritual

Earth’s Mystery School by Molly Remer

“Earth is a mystery school complete with initiations and discoveries that you only experience by september-2015-123living with your feelings, touching the earth, and embracing the fullness of your humanity.”

–Queen Guenivere

(awakewoman)

On Samhain morning, I wake early and mist is rising out of the forest and dancing through the field and out of the trees. I have a moment of sheer awe to see it…the veil was literally thin.

Over the weekend, I visit the nearby river to connect in personal ceremony in appreciation before the park closes for the year and also symbolically to those at Standing Rock. This river eventually meets the Missouri River. I run my hands through the water. I anoint my brow, neck, and hands. I whisper my prayers into the ripples. I sing: “I am water. I am water…I am flowing like the water, like the water I am flowing, like the water.”october-2016-065

I am hurrying outside to get some work done. I feel tight and hurried with the length of my to-do list and my superhuman plans for the day. The bright red flame of a bloom on my pineapple sage plant catches my eye and then…the perfection of a bright yellow butterfly alighting on one slender stamen. My breath catches and I stop in wonder. I smell the flower and it smells of pineapple, just as the leaves do. I can hardly believe this treasure and the tightness melts into nothing. The rest of the day is full of joy.

I am once again healed by flowers.

About twenty feet outside my house, there is a small building with a little porch and a peaked roof. Inside, there is red carpet and a purple wall, goddess tapestries draped from floor to ceiling, and goddess sculptures in abundance. march-2016-002In this building I write, work, create, and hold small rituals with a circle of friends. I call it my Tiny Temple and it is the proverbial, “room of one’s own” described by Virginia Woolf in 1929. Having a dedicated work and ceremony space in the midst of a home-based life, which includes a home business shared with my husband, and four homeschooled children, has changed my life profoundly. In the tiny temple, I feel most wholly myself: connected, powerful, free, authentic, and completely alive.

One morning, as I walk to the temple, this beautiful rose makes me drop to my knees with delight. Yes. This right here. This is a beautiful moment. As I kneel beside the rose, the Body Prayer song* wells out of me until I have tears in my eyes.

september-2016-077  “We may need to be cured by flowers. 

We may need to strip naked and let the petals fall on our shoulders, down our bellies, against our thighs. We may need to lie naked in fields of wildflowers. We may need to walk naked through beauty. We may need to walk naked through color. We may need to walk naked through scent. We may need to walk naked through sex and death. We may need to feel beauty on our skin. We may need to walk the pollen path, among the flowers that are everywhere. 

We can still smell our grandmother’s garden. Our grandmother is still alive.”

–Sharman Apt Russell, in Sisters of the Earth

I create personal ritual almost every day in my tiny temple, sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, sometimes tearful, sometimes joyful, sometimes hurried, sometimes leisurely, sometimes distracted, sometimes astonished at the wonder of it all. The week of my rose worship experience, I smudge the temple with sage I grew in the flowerboxes by my front porch. I ring my bell 13 times. I sing “I Am Fire.” I lay out cards and tiny goddesses and create a mandala out of fallen leaves. I leave an offering of flowers from the herbs and let rose petals drop from my fingers. Ritual captivates all the senses…in this sacred space, I invoke my own senses of smell, touch, sight, sound, and wonder and the result is magic.

“Through ceremony we learn how to give back. When we sing, we give energy through our voice; when we drum, we allow the earth’s heartbeat to join with our own; when we dance, we bring the energy of earth and sky together in our bodies and give it out; when we pray, we give energy through our hearts; when we look upon our relations, we give blessings through our eyes. When we put all these activities together, we have a ceremony, one of the most powerful forms of gift-giving we humans possess.”

–Sun Bear and Wabun Wind

May we each be healed by flowers, time to ourselves to sit on the earth and sing, and the simple, every day beauties and miracles that surround us each day.

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Notes:

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Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Brigid’s Grove. 

Moving Forward and into a New Season by Elise M. Edwards

elise-edwardsIt’s only been a month and I am still reeling from the US presidential election.  I feel like I’m just beginning to emerge from the sense of loss and futility that has cloaked me.  But I am beginning to move forward.

I don’t feel better.  I’m still confused and discouraged about why people voted for Donald Trump.  I’m very concerned about his cabinet picks and his proposed policies.  But I am actively seeking a path forward and a path of resistance.  I’m finding support in my spiritual practices and communities.

In the Christian calendar, we are in the season of Advent.  Advent carries profound symbolism, and this year it is especially poignant for me.  The word advent bears meanings of arrival, birth, and emergence.  It’s the beginning of the Christian year, which is patterned on the life of Christ, but the year does not begin Jesus’ birth.  That celebration is observed at Christmas, four weeks into the church year.  The weeks preceding Christmas are a time of preparation and reflection on the need for the Incarnation.  The Incarnation of God in the Christ Child may be a distinctly Christian doctrine, but I believe the need for it–even the idea of it–is found in other spiritual and religious teachings.

Continue reading “Moving Forward and into a New Season by Elise M. Edwards”

A Midwinter Ritual by Barbara Ardinger

Midwinter, the winter solstice (December 21), is the shortest day and longest night of the year. I like to think of Yule, an old pagan name for the solstice season, as a time when we get to take a nice, long, peaceful nap between all those holiday parties. For this ritual, you need two candles (silver and gold), a blanket, and a small gift for yourself.

santaSanta Claus is really a shaman. He wears red and white and black (the three sacred colors of the so-called ancient triple goddess) and he’s fat because he’s well-fed. (A traditional shaman once told me never to trust a skinny shaman; if his people don’t provide for him, he’s not doing his job.) Santa flies from the frozen north, where the Saami (or Lapp) shamans still wield their full traditional powers. He’s drawn through the air by magical reindeer whose antlers symbolize the surging force of life. The Christmas tree is the world pole. From Mongolia to the American Southwest, shamans traditionally ascend the world pole to make their astral journeys. Santa knows everything, especially if we’ve been good or bad, and like karma itself, he brings us our just desserts. His gifts are the gifts of the spirit made material. His attendants, the toy-making elves, are the Old Ones who help the deserving and play tricks on the undeserving. Santa is not a god, but let’s honor him along with the solar gods and goddesses in our midwinter ritual. Continue reading “A Midwinter Ritual by Barbara Ardinger”

Rituals for Our Sons, by Molly Remer

“…There, he found a piece of glass and began to tell a story. He was telling one of his tribe’s men’s stories. It was a story for boys to become men, and it was not shared with women. The women had their own stories, not for men to know. I read that and thought, no one took me out into the desert; no one told me stories. That’s what I needed, a passing of history and the ways of living, from one man to another.”

–Christopher Penczak, Sons of the Goddess, p. 51

Our oldest son is rapidly sliding into manhood. Creaky voice. Height stretching on a near-daily basis. Fuzz on upper lip. I am finding it hard to hold august-2016-096-768x768
space for his transition as a teenager while still caring for a not-quite-two year old small boy as well, one who reminds me regularly of my first baby boy and what it was like to be a mother to only one, focused on each stage of development, each new word, each successful identification of a new color. Now that first baby boy swings that last baby boy onto one hip with practiced ease, washes dishes, helps to cook, pours milk for his sister.

Several years ago, I was asked to work on a coming of age/manhood ceremony for a friend’s son. It never quite came together—I didn’t feel like I could do it and I still feel regret about having let that boy down. At the time though, and still now, I felt that I’m not “qualified” for the job—I don’t know the men’s stories either. The council of men needs to prepare his ceremony. Where is the men’s council, the circle of men? I think we have them around us, but that there is much less cultural permission for them to gather in groups to honor transitions in sacred ways. Much as women’s circle work feels radical and transformative and even threatening to patriarchal culture, men gathering in circle to honor and guide one another, that is perhaps even more so. I see Red Tents around the world. I see women’s circles springing up with a glorious passion and far flung expression. I am guiding other priestesses in circle work, and Red Tents and Pink Tents, and holding ceremoniesjuly-2016-822-1080x675 for our daughters coming of age. What about our sons? Where are their ceremonies and welcomes into manhood? Where are their stories in the desert? Is it a mother’s job to provide the container for those stories? Can I call the circle for my son and then step back? I know what it means to be a girl reaching into womanhood. I know what it means to circle with other women. Does it have to be different for boys and men?

When I was reading books, looking for ideas for my friend’s son, I noticed that most pagan rituals described for boys include the element of the son being “kidnapped” from the mother, women, and girls and being taken away by the men and left alone. I hate these rituals. Every time I read one like it, my heart screams, “NO, we want more than that for our sons.” Despite being promoted as part of an alternative spiritual framework, how does this type of ceremony support and honor the type of world we wish our children to grow up in? Why do boys need to be kidnapped from their mothers and left alone in order to be men? Isn’t that the very root of patriarchy on this earth? No thank you.

I bought another book specifically because it mentioned including a rite of passage ceremony for boys. I read it with eagerness and was dismayed at august-2016-073-300x300what I found. The circle was called, held at dusk, and each person was instructed to bring a rock for the newly fledgling boy. They were to go around the circle and share what they learned, what they were imbuing into the stone…so far, so good, right?…and then, throw it into the darkness and say, “find it for yourself.” When I read this, I had an epiphany. If this was a ceremony for girls, we each would have handed her the stone and welcomed her into the circle with our wisdom, we would have made sure she knew that she was strong, powerful, and capable, but also that part of that power meant that we were standing with her and offering our wisdom in support. She would not have to crawl in the darkness alone looking for rocks, because we’re there. And, that is the core message of most women’s circles and ceremonies for girls. We’re there. You are not alone. So, then I knew…a ceremony for a boy need look no different. Maybe I do not know the stories from the men’s desert, but I do know what it is like to celebrate someone for their unique gifts and strengths, look them in the eye and affirm their power, and sing to them with love of my support of their dreams. This is not a gendered thing, this is humanity. How do we want to welcome boys into the world of adults? By casting away our wisdom and telling them to search in the darkness for themselves? Or by standing next to them, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, and offering all that we have, all that we are, in support, and trust, and honor of their evolving selves?

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This summer, we gathered in sacred circle for a chanting workshop and a summer ceremony. The men at the chanting workshop sang just as wonderfully together as the women do in the Red Tent. The boys in the summer circle joined hands just like anyone else.

We do know how to do this.

This song below was recorded during the chanting workshop and feels appropriate for this occasion…

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Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Brigid’s Grove. 

The Red Thread, the Red Heifer, and Red Ritual by Jill Hammer

Jill Hammer

There is an old Jewish custom to use a red thread, tied around a bedpost or a child’s wrist, to keep away demons.  In particular, the red thread is said to keep away Lilith, the female demon who steals children.  Women still give away red threads at the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a segulah, or protection amulet.  Feminist poet Alicia Ostriker reclaims this symbol as a reminder of the umbilical cord, the connection between a human childbearer and a child, and an intimation of the cosmic interconnectedness of all things.  She writes:

the disturbing red thread
invisible yet warm
travels between earth and heaven,
vibrates through starless void…

does it carry the pulse
of our prayers
like a bulge in a snake 

dozing, like a stream
of hungry, bloody hope, do all
the red threads join 

form a web

Alicia Ostriker, The Volcano Sequence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), p.11-12.

Continue reading “The Red Thread, the Red Heifer, and Red Ritual by Jill Hammer”

Continuing Pre-Christian Traditions in the Czech Republic by Ivy Helman

20151004_161012Pelišky was one of the first movies I watched in the Czech Republic.  It takes place in the year (maybe years) before the Soviet Occupation.  It follows the lives and struggles of ordinary families.  One of the best and funniest scenes takes place at a small post-wedding dinner.  The couple receives some new-fangled plastic spoons as a wedding present.  The gift-giver is very proud of the fact that they were made in Eastern Germany.  One of the characters stirs her tea with the spoon and is about to lick it but as she takes it out of the hot tea it bends as if it was made of rubber.  Soon the scene dissolves into arguments, frustrations and disappointments.

Another memorable scene I remember was around New Year’s Day.  An older couple pour melted aluminum into a bowl of water then pull it out and examine its shape in an attempt to divine what the new year will hold.  Neither can agree on its shape or its meaning. Continue reading “Continuing Pre-Christian Traditions in the Czech Republic by Ivy Helman”

Facing the Moon Alone by Molly Remer

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“When all is said and done I think every Witch should, at some time, face the moon alone, feet planted on the ground, with only his or her voice chanting in the starry night.”

–Laurie Cabot, Power of the Witch

I will never forget the first time I heard someone recite the Charge of the Goddess from memory. Bare-breasted, she strode around the fire in sacred circle at a large goddess festival in Kansas, delivering the words with power, grace, and confident resonance. I thought: I will do that someday.

In February of this year, we took a family trip to Dauphin Island. While there, the afternoon of the full moon, I February 2016 148
decided that the time had come. I was going to memorize the Charge of the Goddess. First, I thought I would only memorize it a piece at a time. It seemed “too big” to do in a single sitting. I had it printed out on a piece of paper that rapidly became damp with the salty sea air. I drew a labyrinth in the sand with my toes, set one of my goddess sculptures at its entrance, and drew a Womanrunes card.

One stanza at a time, slowly I began to repeat the poem* aloud:

hear ye, the words of the star goddess
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven...

Over and over, I said the words, letting them twine around my tongue and in the air, experimenting with cadence and rhythm. After I could reliably repeat one section, I’d move to the next, letting it build in my memory until I could put the two together confidently and then moving to the next.

I am the beauty of the green earth
the white moon amongst the stars..

I stared into the waves, listening to them rise and fall along with my words. My three older children dug in the sand. February 2016 073
My husband fished. My toddler toddled around and then came to sit on my lap and nursed to sleep for nap time:

before my face
beloved of all…

I whispered into his damp hair. I felt in an altered state of consciousness. The words began to wind their way through me, becoming a part of me, embedded in me. I danced with them as I have never danced with another piece of writing. I felt them merging with me. I sang them aloud. I stated them fast and slow and I built, adding the next line and then the next…

for behold, all acts of love and pleasure
all my rituals.

I turned over hard thealogical questions as the words spun their magic through the air. What does it really mean that “all your learning and seeking shall avail you not, lest your know the mystery.” Do I really feel the goddess within? Do I find her within myself or is she only outside and if she is only outside, does she really exist at all? Tears came to my eyes: do I even like myself?

Two hours passed. My baby awoke and returned to digging in the sand. My husband packed up his fishing gear. The sky began to darken and spit rain. I stood and danced the words into the sand with my feet.

let your divine innermost self
be enfolded
in the rapture
of the infinite

I felt rapturous. I felt triumphant. I had done it. Faster and faster my feet stamped the sand as I called the words into the waves. I spun in circles with my toddler chanting and laughing and offering my devotion before the sea, beneath the moon.

the mystery of the waters
the desire in human hearts…

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*I used Shekhinah Mountainwater’s adaptation of the Charge, originally by Doreen Valiente, as included in the book Ariadne’s Thread. Molly 180

Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW and M.Div degrees and recently finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit. She writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at her Woodspriestess blog. 

Women Keepers of Ritual and the Caloian by Lori Tiron-Pandit

LTPPortrait10_15As a child, I learned all about my religion from my grandmother, in her small and remote Romanian village. She told me many Bible stories from our Christian Orthodox tradition, often disguised as bedtime fairytales, but it was not doctrine that I learned from her, as much as ritual. She taught me the prayers to say at night so I don’t have nightmares, the candles to light in church for luck, the list of dead and living to give the priest for blessings, the making and delivering of food as offerings in memory of the recently deceased.

So many of the spiritual rituals I learned from my grandmother involved food. She taught me when and how to fast, as well as how to prepare the ritual Christmas and Easter feasts: kneading and baking the traditional sweet bread filled with cocoa and walnuts or sweet cheese, cooking the celebratory pork or lamb-based dishes.

In my family, my grandmother was the keeper of rituals, many of them Christian, and many carried from a “primitive”, pagan, pre-Christian time. After growing up, as I distanced myself from my rigid Christian roots, I began to look with more appreciation back at these older traditions, some almost extinct, that had been passed down to me. Continue reading “Women Keepers of Ritual and the Caloian by Lori Tiron-Pandit”

A Complicated History by Elise M. Edwards

Elise EdwardsIn my previous post, I wrote about my participation in planning a memorial event for the lynching of a man named Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas one hundred years ago. It prompted me to reflect on the challenge of faithfully remembering a conflicted past.  It’s important that we don’t just remember past events, but that we remember them appropriately.

I’m convinced that when we remember the past, we must avoid oversimplifying the stories of what occurred to suit our present day agendas and sensibilities.  We have to acknowledge the complexity, tension and conflict in what occurred, and perhaps even our own guilt and complicity in what is still occurring.  As a black feminist Christian ethicist, I face this challenge when one aspect of my identity seeks to address a particular issue through a narrative that implicates or denigrates another aspect of my identity. Uncomfortable as it is, I recognize Christianity’s complicity in its defenses of chattel slavery.  I recognize women’s support of patriarchy.

I went to a lecture a few weeks ago by Walter Brueggemann, a well-respected Old Testament theologian, titled “The Risks of Nostalgia.” Brueggemann warned us of the dangers of mis-remembering the past.  Pointing to texts from the prophets and Psalms, he demonstrated how the people of Israel remembered a past before exile without remembering the difficulties, the exploitative conditions, and the tensions of that time.  Excluding these harsher realities allowed them to gloss over the differences among them to unite in hatred and distrust in a common enemy—the one responsible of their present situation.  By misremembering, they lamented a version of past that didn’t belong to all of them because it didn’t include their diverse histories.  But the singular narrative served a purpose—it furthered their cause, their yearning and motivation to return to the way things were before.  Did this cause really serve all those who were yearning for it? It’s a question that comes to mind when I hear women yearn for a pre-feminist era or Christians yearn for an era of Christendom.

Like the Old Testament people of exile, we are in moral danger when we remember the past with a nostalgia that sweeps over the real stories of what happened in the past.  We risk buying into a narrative that harms us in its oversimplifcation.  A simple solution will suffice if we believe we have a simple problem.

Lynching was not a simplistic problem and the Waco Horror is not a simplistic story.  A black man was lynched for raping and murdering a white woman named Lucy Fryer.  I’ll admit it. The realities of the story make me uneasy. Jesse Washington confessed to a crime and was found guilty in the court proceedings that preceded his murder.  It makes sense to question whether the criminal proceedings were biased and whether his confession was coerced or illegitimate in some other manner.  But even if we question his confession or conviction, we shouldn’t gloss over them as if they never occurred. To present him as a purely innocent victim would be to distort the past to serve a cause – and even a cause as noble as community unity or racial justice should not be attained through lies.  People of integrity must guard against distorting the past for “the good” because the distortions themselves cause pain and harm.

Fryer’s family is still experiencing pain over her murder which precipitated the lynching.  Sadly, their pain is made worse by the remembrances of Jesse Washington.  Their pain does not mean we should not remember, but it does mean we cannot, as people of good conscience, romanticize violence or idealize its victims.  Some people might make Washington out to be a hero or a martyr, but the organizers of the memorial service didn’t remember him that way.  We didn’t cast him as a blameless victim.  But we remembered him as a victim, nonetheless.

We didn’t romanticize the lynching crowds and their pursuit of justice, either. Washington was brutally tortured and killed before a crowd of thousands.  If Christians are a people who embrace the love and mercy of a God who forgives the worst of sinners, they have to condemn even those crimes committed in the name of justice; crimes committed against criminals.

Noble causes, if they are just, must stand in the truth – the messy, complicated truth that resists casting all our heroes as saints, all our villains as irredeemable sinners.  Real humans aren’t characters who wear the white hats and black hats of the old Westerns (or even the white hats of Olivia Pope & Associates on ABC’s Scandal).

When we resist remembering simplistic, nostalgic stories, we can begin to grapple with the reality of how difficult it really is to achieve justice.  We can see humankind for who we really are. And maybe then we can ask for help.

We can ask victims to help us heal the wounds that persist.  We need their help to understand their pain and the underlying causes we seek to solve.

We can ask for the help of those who study the various aspects of our world and culture—the economists, the sociologists, the historians, the artists, the theologians and ethicists, the criminologists, and the scientists. We can be humble enough to learn what we don’t know about what’s really going on.

And I hope we also ask for divine assistance.  Despite their own complicated histories, wrongs, and imperfections, our faith traditions can enable us to do more than merely rightly remember, consider, and observe the problems in the world. They can embolden us with the courage of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to speak a complicated truth and yet still dare to fight to make this a better world.

Elise M. Edwards, PhD is a Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Baylor University and a graduate of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a registered architect in the State of Florida. Her interdisciplinary work examines issues of civic engagement and how beliefs and commitments are expressed publicly. As a black feminist, she primarily focuses on cultural expressions by, for, and about women and marginalized communities. Follow her on twitter, google+ or academia.edu.

To Work and to Pray in Remembrance by Elise M. Edwards

Elise EdwardsOne hundred years ago, Jesse Washington was lynched downtown in Waco, Texas. Next week, on March 20th, some of my colleagues and I are organizing a memorial service to remember this horrific event and pray for a better future for our city.

We invited submissions of original prayers, poems, spoken-word pieces, music, drama, and other pieces of liturgy for this ecumenical memorial event.  We received a number of thoughtful, heartfelt submissions, but we also a question:

“Why in the world do we need a memorial for one person who was lynched?!?! In the reality of things, Jesse Washington was one of thousands of Blacks that were lynched in America during the time period.”

I thought the answer was so obvious that I initially brushed off the question. But as our group proceeded with the plans, I thought about the question and wondered whether our university community would understand why we are doing this. And honestly, in moments of exhaustion when I put off responding to emails, I wondered, too. Why am I doing this?

To remember. We memorialize one person who was lynched to remind us that every single one of the thousands who were lynched was a human being who was killed unjustly.

In the speech “Lynch Law in America,” from 1900, Ida B. Wells-Barnett describes the injustice: “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”

Wells-Barnett was an African-American journalist and activist for civil rights and women’s suffrage. Her writings and activism advanced anti-lynching campaigns adopted by Black women’s clubs and the NAACP. Unsurprisingly, her work was controversial, even among women’s groups. Wells-Barnett argued that lynching began after the emancipation of slaves to repress “race riots.” When a constitutional amendment permitted black men to vote, lynching was used to violently prevent their participation in state and national elections. When fraud, intimidation, and local policy succeeded in suppressing the black vote, the brutality continued in the name of avenging or preventing rape and assault of white women.[1] For this argument, lawmakers, ministers, and women’s groups accused Wells-Barnett of defending rapists and subverting “justice” for their alleged victims.

She did not defend rapists. (Neither do I.) She condemned a system that used allegations of rape of white women to legitimate hanging, burning alive, shooting, drowning, dismembering, dragging, and displaying black men’s bodies. Some allegations may have been true. Many were false. Despite the veracity of the allegations, the vigilantes tortured and killed men, women, and children in brutal, public ways, and we must not mistake that for any form of justice. Lynching apologists explicitly valued white lives over others. Lynching was, and remains a crime against humanity.

In our own age of campaigns against the impartiality of law and law enforcement, we should remember the lynching victims and the tensions within earlier waves of feminism and the temperance movement over anti-lynching campaigns. We do not have to condone criminal behavior to call for humane law enforcement or prison reform. We can affirm the humanity of accused and convicted criminals in the pursuit of justice. So we remember Jesse Washington and the other lynching victims to engage more consciously in the activism of our time. We remember so that we don’t lose sight of the complexities of our work. We work in remembrance of the many victims of injustice.

We also gather to pray. For some people, prayer is about making requests to the divine. But in a more expansive sense, prayer is communication with the divine. In prayer, we set time aside to connect to something greater than ourselves. It’s our hope that gathering as a community to pray for the future of our city prompts us to see beyond individual concerns. In a liberation ethics framework, as explained by Miguel De La Torre[2], prayer is not limited to individual, private conversations with God in hopes of gaining wisdom and guidance. De La Torre presents prayer as a communal activity that brings together different members of the spiritual body. It involves the critical application of the biblical text to the situation at hand. This involves critical analysis of the social context that gave rise to the text or its common interpretation. So we pray to give us time to come together, to read scripture, to seek God and hear God through other members of our community.

So why are we gathering? Why do we memorialize one person when there are so many others who have been harmed, not just in my local community but all of our communities?

To remember past wrongs.

To commemorate.

To honor.

To inspire.

To call attention to persisting injustices.

To make us mindful in our work.

To provoke us to pray.

[1] This argument about the reasons for lynching is found in several of Wells-Barnett’s essays, but is quite developed in The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895).

[2] See Miguel A. De La Torre’s Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2nd Edition, 2014).

Elise M. Edwards, PhD is a Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Baylor University and a graduate of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a registered architect in the State of Florida. Her interdisciplinary work examines issues of civic engagement and how beliefs and commitments are expressed publicly. As a black feminist, she primarily focuses on cultural expressions by, for, and about women and marginalized communities. Follow her on twitter, google+ or academia.edu.