women’s journeys – Page 6 – Feminism and Religion

Two Poems by Alice Bullard, PhD

Dear FAR Community, These poems arise from feminist spiritual practice with syncretic dimensions. The Irish-American Catholicism of my family mixes with the popular American confessional-style that charts and embodies emerging spirit, yet this very American path of self-styling and narrative self-creation has been refined via the influence of Zen practices, originally via the influence of the Soto practictioners of Green Gulch in Marin and then later via the teachings of Vietnamese refugee and Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. The feminism here is deeply personal, political, and spiritual.

This post was inspired by one written my Janet Maika’i Rudolph about Alice Munro which you can read here.

About Alice Munro: I experienced the revelations of her daughter very personally … I’ve read Alice Munro since I was very young and used to read my parent’s copy of the New Yorker. Because we shared the name Alice and also shared the cold Midwestern prairie though she was further north and across the border, I had always felt some affinity for her but also I felt something I really didn’t get. To me her stories took inexplicable turns and now we know why. Her daughter’s experience is dreadful and probably much more common than anyone would care to admit. That Alice Munro was famous doesn’t make that type of negligent mothering something rare.

From Competition to Community – Creating a Business in the Feminine Model by Lucy H. Pearce

I was standing in a supermarket car park, packing my groceries into the car when I had a light bulb moment.

It was the sort of moment where it feels like the sun has come out from behind the clouds and the birds are about to start dancing around my head with ribbons a la Cinderella.

I had been working from a city coffee shop for a couple of hours whilst I waited for my child who is struggling with school right now. This was followed by a harried grocery shop around the aisles laden down with Christmas produce.

Whilst I was waiting in the queue at the supermarket, I was reading through and responding to woman after woman who had reached out to me with such beautiful words of recognition and support for my vulnerable sharing about what I have learned and struggled with personally running Womancraft for the last decade.

To anyone in that supermarket I was just a middle-aged woman doing her shopping. They didn’t know I was at that moment also running my successful publishing business and weaving community.

Standing Under the Stars by Sara Wright

one winter night
a velvet cloak
wrapped herself
around me
starry cosmos
poured down
points of light.

kindled a planetary fire
casting a circle
inviting Spirit to hover
recovering
abandoned Body…

once embraced
Winged Animal
Presence
Guided me Home.

A little Story about How Nature Heals

Opening All the Windows and Returning the Goddess to Her Rightful Place by Caryn MacGrandle

The quote that describes Jesus as the “front door of God” is found in the Bible, John 10:7, where Jesus says, “I am the door of the sheep”; essentially meaning that the only way to access God is through Jesus, as he is the entrance point to God’s presence.

I have been calling on Hathor, and last night, She came.

Ah, let me back up a few steps.

I have up to now not given much thought to Egyptian Goddesses instead preferring my Celtic and Greek ones. But a few days ago, I attended this lovely workshop by Tahya who has developed a modern day systrum, the percussion instrument used by Priestesses in honor of Hathor. And as so often happens on my path, when you crack the window, She comes.

The last two days I have been listening to Hathor meditations, the Mother of all creation, the Goddess of Love, an Egyptian Goddess whose worship may have begun in the Predynastic Era over 5,000 years ago.

The Need for Roots: Mutual Aid by Beth Bartlett

In those first few days after the holidays, when the togetherness, warmth, and happy times with family and friends came to an abrupt end, a song my son used to sing as a small child kept running through my mind:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year.
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you all through the year..

The simple glee of my 21-month-old grandson finding ways to scoot and slide down the small icy slope in our backyard was enough to keep the grief over the loss of my sister and my recent loss of my dearest friend at bay. But in the days after their departure, as I spent time with my friend’s family planning her memorial gathering and visited another dear friend who has chosen to enter hospice in her final days of a terminal illness, coupled with the hooded ogre of the approaching Project 2025, saving Christmas cheer has had its challenges.

But my son found a way. He and his wife decided they didn’t want the precious times to end, and within a week had decided to pull up stakes from their home 150 miles away, found and signed on to buy a house just five minutes from our home so that the precious moments could continue.

I Am Wicked by Chaz J.

*When I refer to Black women, I am referring specifically to descendants of African peoples that were forced to experience the dehumanization of chattel slavery in the United States. I refer to those who would build the foundation of the country, uncredited. Those whose descendants continue the legacy of fighting for liberation.

When a sister-friend invited me to see Wicked, I was hesitant. I’d never seen the show, and my attention span hadn’t even allowed me to finish The Wizard of Oz or The Wiz (the Black rendition). However, seeing the wicked witch, Elphaba, portrayed as a Black woman changed everything. It felt deeply personal; a reflection of my own life as a Black woman in predominantly white environments. As a womanist theologian, centering Black women’s experiences is central to my daily and theological framework, and this felt like a powerful synchronicity and spiritual experience aligning with my newly entered villain era!

The Grandfathers, part 1 by Sara Wright

Moderator’s Note: Sara wrote this in 2019. This is its first publication and has grown all the more pertinent now.

Sapawe is an ancestral Tewa Pueblo located outside of El Rito. Until this weekend I had never been to the ruin. I didn’t know, for example, that it was the largest ruin in New Mexico, and perhaps the entire Southwest or that during the period it was built and occupied (1300- 1500’s) that ten thousand people lived there. Estimates suggest that there were at least 1,800 ground rooms and twenty – three kivas. Walking around the huge compound is something I have yet to do. It was too hot for me to do more than take in the astonishing view or traverse a small part of the plateau, briefly. I did note that there were artifacts and planned to come back another time – soon.

Early yesterday morning I met with four other people to see the shrine that was located outside the pueblo. This was the place that secret ceremonies were held on behalf of all the people in the pueblo. On the surface all that could be seen was a large raised stone circle, but there was a sense of presencethere that felt both powerful and peaceful probably because few people knew about this shrine and the natural power of place had not had a chance to dissipate. After having explored a couple of other Tewa ruins, I learned that it was very important to allow place to speak in its own time, and to allow that to happen I had to return again and again with an open heart, eyes that could see beyond the obvious, and an active inner ear … The land speaks to those that can listen.

Guanyin: My Very Own Goddess of Compassion

It was a class that changed the course of a personal history. Mine. The year was 2001. I had arrived in the United States a couple of years earlier to study journalism. In my last term – after four semesters of trying hard to navigate the American education system, what with its confusing terminology of credit hours, electives, majors, minors, I decided to venture out of my comfort zone (this was my Breaking Bad moment) – and took a 3-credit grad course, Religion in China, as an elective (that word again; and oh, when I first arrived, I thought 3 credit hours meant dedication to a grand total of three hours of coursework over the entire semester; you get to choose when).

It was in this class I was first introduced to Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of Infinite Compassion and Mercy. Guanyin, a bodhisattva[i] who rushes to the aid of her devotees upon hearing their cries, herself has quite an interesting history. She arrived in China from India as Avalokiteshvara or “the lord who gazed down at the world” as a male. Little wonder then that this gender fluidity makes her a popular deity among members of the LGBTQ community. Somewhere along the journey, Avalokiteshvara transforms into Tara. Apparently, so moved was Avalokiteshwara by the suffering of those trapped in samsara[ii] that he wept copiously, his tears creating a lotus from which sprang the goddess Tara.

St. Brigid: Reproductive Justice and the Realms of the Miraculous by Elanur Williams

St Brigid being carried away by angels, in a painting by John
Duncan (1913)

One of my favorite saints is St. Brigid of Kildare, the patroness of poetry, learning, healing and protection. She is frequently called upon during childbirth. Brigid’s hagiographies are noteworthy for her remarkable abilities to heal and perform miracles—including her ability to make pregnancies vanish, for those who ask. In Vita Prima and Vita Brigitae (Life of Saint Brigit) published around 650 C.E. by Cogitosus, an Irish monk from Kildare, it is claimed that “Saint Brigid, by the very powerful strength of her faith, blessed a woman who had fallen [pregnant]…and the conception in the woman’s womb decreased and she restored her to health…without childbirth and its pangs.” The pregnant people in Brigid’s tales turned to Brigid to help them reclaim and restore their dignity. Consequently, their abortions served as catalysts for change. “Abortion miracles” have narrative and theological functions: they expose constructs of sexuality, chastity, purity, and sin. In addition, they test our understandings of healing—physical and spiritual—by revealing the intersectionality between medicine, pregnant people, power, and personal agency. Scholars have theorized the presence of “abortion miracles” in hagiographies, and whether they are to be read as a kind of defiance towards early Christian morality, or as a demonstration of chastity’s role and value in early medieval Irish Christianity. Some Irish penitentials view medieval abortions as malefic acts or as a kind of malevolent magic; however, according to Arica Roberts (2020), it can be argued the abortion miracles found in Irish hagiography can instead be read as “medicines of penance” and as contributing to healing.

“Now I Will Have Respect”; “Now I Will Be Looked Up To” – Women Assert Their Worth in the Christmas Story by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

“The Giver of Breath has looked upon me with kindness and has taken away my shame. Now I will have respect in the eyes of my people.” -Elizabeth (Luke 1:25, First Nations Version [FNV])

“From deep in my heart I dance with joy to honor the Great Spirit. Even though I am small and weak, he noticed me. Now I will be looked up to by all. The Mighty One has lifted me up!” -Mary (Luke 1:46-49a, FNV)

Two women, one older, one younger. Both unexpectedly pregnant. Both key players in the Christian Advent story. Both living in a world, not unlike ours today, where women were not fully acknowledged as complete human beings, with all the strength and agency this entails. And both, for this reason, starving for the respect of their loved ones and communities.