trauma – Feminism and Religion

Let’s Have The Talk – What Does “The Birds and The Bees” Actually Mean: By Zoe Carlin

Recently, I have thought about a common idiom that has been used to refer to sexual reproduction, the birds and the bees. I became curious why animals that appear in most gardens were used as an example to explain where babies come from, until I did some research. It turns out that since the birds lay eggs, that is their representation of the female body and the bees represent the sperm due to pollination. It is a very subtle, overlooked message that can be disguised as being more age-appropriate to young children. However, I decided to dig a bit deeper. Ed Finegan, a USC professor of linguistics and law, has stated that this phrase has existed a lot longer than one might think. There is evidence of it being used in a somewhat sexual context going back to at least two authors, Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1825) and an entry from John Evelyn’s The Evelyn Diary (1644).

In Work Without Hope, Samuel Coleridge Taylor quotes, “All nature seems at work . . . The bees are stirring, birds are on the wing . . . and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.” This separation of the birds and bees is indicating the loneliness and sadness of missing out on a potential romantic connection. When going even further back in time to 1644, it was noticed in the Evelyn Diary that there was an entry discussing the interior design of St. Peter’s in Rome: “That stupendous canopy of Corinthian brasse; it consists of 4 wreath’d columns, incircl’d with vines, on which hang little putti [cherubs], birds and bees.” This description is illustrating that there is a possible sensual or sexual meaning of the architecture in St. Peters.

Patriarchy, Thy Name is Cruelty by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Andrew Young famously said that ‘anything is legal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.” I would add a more modern take. Nothing is too low, too immoral, too illegal if 5 or 6 Supreme Court justices decide to allow it.

Their recent decisions could fill a book on how corrupt they are. (I’ve discussed this before. But this post is looking at immigration and the cruelty that this administration is fomenting. We have always been a cruel nation. Patriarchy has honed cruelty as its worked to crush women’s bodies while silencing women. How else would women have agreed to our loss of power? Carol Christ has written eloquently about this. Immigration policy has blown the lid off this pot. Perhaps because it is too new, too shocking. Because ICE is in our faces with agents flooding neighborhoods and engaging in unfettered cruelty.

For example, when ICE raided an apartment building in the Bronx on Feb 24th, they arrested 19 year old Merwil Gutiérrez. When they realized they had the wrong person, their response was “take him anyway.” Read that again, “take him anyway.”

Merwil Gutiérrez was then deported to the notorious prison CECOT in El Salvador. For months, his family couldn’t find him. He was eventually sent to his native Venezuela.

Broken Human Bonds by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: I originally wrote this in the fall when Andrea Robin Skinner started going public with her own story. It has taken me a while to contemplate posting it. It feels like this is such a common story that it needs to be shared. We all need to know that we are not alone and that each of us is lovable.

Whenever I hit a personal and/or emotionally raw topic, my first instinct is to turn to Tarot cards to see what lessons I need to learn. I use Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe deck (more on that later). I have been finding myself in this situation recently with the revelations of Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of the renowned Nobel Prize winning writer Alice Munro. Andea waited until her mother died before she revealed publicly that her step-father began sexually abusing her when she was nine years old. When she had told her mother about it, Munro blamed Andrea for damaging her marriage. The stepfather at issue publicly called Skinner even though a child at the time, a “homewrecker.” He did this in a letter which included death threats. Abuse, blame, threats tools of patriarchy all. Skinner’s own mother didn’t seek to protect daughter but chose instead to shield the abuser. A betrayal of the most primal sort!

CrossFit, Spirituality, and Trauma: An Introduction by Stephanie Arel with Ashleigh Gibb

We met online. Saram College hosted a theology and trauma workshop that Stephanie taught. Ashleigh asked a question. An immediate connection emerged.

The connection consists of mutual interest and passion around bodies, their strength, their vulnerability; around the spirit, its expressions and its intrinsic materiality; and trauma, what violations to our bodies cause to disrupt and annihilate us. Our interests intersect. Stephanie teaches Scripture and the Human Response to Trauma at Fordham; Ashleigh is a Crossfit Coach and Personal Trainer currently pursuing her PhD. She has nine years of experience working with survivors of trafficking and sexual violence. Together, we recorded a few YouTubes on CrossFit and Spirituality, on Crossfit and Community, and one forthcoming with a topic in the works.

Memorializing Grief and Trauma by Stephanie Arel

On Monday, March 18^th, I joined a webinar developed by Dr. John Seitz and Sonia de Silva Monteiro at Fordham University. The panel included myself, Dr. Layla Karst, Assistant Professor of Theological Studies from Loyola Marymount, and Dr. Alana Harris, Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural and Gender History at King’s College London. All offered valuable insights to the topic: “Memorializing Clergy Sexual Abuse: An Interdisciplinary Conversation about the Ethics, Means, and Meanings of Sex Abuse Memorials.” The panel represented one of a series you can follow here.

My presentation featured some things I learned from researching my last book Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Trauma at Memorial Museums. The text focuses on memorial museums, illuminating methods of memorializing human suffering, suffering that penetrates workers’ personal lives. In fact, people preserving painful memories and histories often labor (physically and emotionally) from a place of personal wounding. From nine sites across the globe, 82 interviews revealed that 35% of the people engaged in memorializing mass trauma in a museum setting are survivors of the event they commemorate; 35% are family members of those who suffered or died; and the remaining signify community members, who are not impacted directly by the event or events commemorated but care deeply about those who were.

Activate your Body to Navigate Overwhelm

We live in a time of radical change, in a steam cooker of accelerated alchemy. No wonder most of us struggle with chronic overwhelm.

Beliefs, habits, thought patterns and organisational structures don’t change overnight, and we need ways to boost our resilience in the long arc of paradigm shifts. How can we look after ourselves during this personal and collective dance of change?

In this post I reflect on the connection between movement and health, breathing, and the role of our nervous system. I propose 5 simple steps to minimise and transform overwhelm when it happens.

Archive of Silence by Sara Wright

It is well documented by conservative science how a human being deals with trauma.

Trauma first overwhelms and then destroys the body’s nervous system.

It affects cognitive ability –

the ability to translate experience into meaning –

it steals the ability to imagine a different way of being in the world.*

Trauma affects memory creating blanks – holes in the fabric that cannot be recovered except perhaps through dreams visions, sensing, intuiting, having experiences with Nature that the rational mind does its best to resist.

On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

This is an excerpt of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, which comes out in paperback on September 12th. Called “A must-read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing.” by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, it applies Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance to contemporary personal and systemic issues. This is an excerpt from Chapter Four, which addresses institutional repentance.

Most of us are part of many institutions—places of work, our own and/or our children’s schools and universities, houses of worship, co-working spaces, community organizations, sports leagues, social networking websites, the list goes on. And these institutions can and do perpetrate harm. Sometimes, that harm impacts us as individuals—as stakeholders or beneficiaries of those institutions, or as those excluded or hurt by them—and sometimes it can impact our local or national culture.

The Patriarchy Strikes Back by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I suppose no one is all that surprised but it is still stunning how quickly certain politicians are rushing to pull back women’s rights. It’s become a race to regulate women’s bodies of with draconian and cruel laws.

Each law is more extreme than the next. In South Carolina it has even been proposed to make abortion a crime subject to the death penalty.

Commentators say the bill isn’t going anywhere. But it was still proposed. It is now in the eco-system of abortion politics. It is being imagined and that opens up all possibilities of where it can go from here. We never thought, after all, that Roe would be overturned.

From the Archives: Christmastime for the Self by John Erickson

This was originally posted on December 25, 2018

We’ve all been there.

Sitting around the tree watching the kids open presents. Attempting to enjoy a holiday meal with extended and immediate family that you may or may not have traveled thousands of miles to see. Trying with every fiber of your being to not talk about the elephant, or red hat, in the room.

I get it. It is hard to not go home for the holidays. It’s also hard to sit at home and watch every one of your friends post online about their dinners, get-togethers, and other joyous events while you sit at home. I also understand that many of us, as a result of our sexual and/or gender identity, or maybe our political preference, don’t feel comfortable going home or, can’t go home. This is not ok and that is why it is so important that we all have our chosen families to be with during these times of communal gathering or more importantly, ways to cope while we are at home in these uncomfortable situations to make sure we take care of ourselves and make it out the other end.