Women’s Spirituality – Page 15 – Feminism and Religion

Goddess Lost: How the Downfall of Female Deities Degraded Women’s Status in World Cultures by Rachel S. McCoppin; book review by Margot Van Sluytman

What then is my repentance?
If not, by rote this repetition?
“Godde is.”
“Godde is.”
“Godde is.”
“Love.”
And my face tastes
The beating heart
Of the sun’s call
For reclamation of
SHE Who Is.
SHE Who Is: knows me.
She, who also, is.
©Margot Van Sluytman

From the moment I saw the title, Goddess Lost: How the Downfall of Female Deities Degraded Women’s Status in World Cultures, by Rachel S. McCoppin, I knew I would have to read it. When it arrived in my mailbox and I saw the cover, I was imbued with inspiration. Then I read two sentences in the Preface, which articulate what for me, and for many, is one of the most vital, powerful, and, as yet, under-addressed, facts.

Channeling the Divine: A Creative Process by Brenda Edgar

Last year, I completed a life-changing yoga teacher training and spiritual development program at Supreme Peace Yoga and Wellness in Louisville, KY. One of its components was the creation of Soul Collage cards which were prompted by facilitator Jodie Tingle-Willis’s guided meditations.

The Soul Collage process is not only a profound way of connecting to the divine within and around us; for me, it is also a powerful vehicle for channeling poetry from this same source. My results from this multi-step creative process have led me to explore some pleasantly surprising spiritual terrain.

As an example, the card above was created after a visualization exercise around the idea of community—specifically, the small cohort of women in our training program, and the influence they had on me as we worked and learned together:

After some time had passed, I revisited the card and asked it once again to inspire me creatively. The result was this poem, which evokes an indigenous vision quest—an experience I have not had outside of this creative journey.

Remember! by Mary Gelfand

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that.
You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied.
You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember! ….
You say there are no words to describe it;
You say it does not exist.
But remember. Make an effort to remember.
Or, failing that, invent.”

From Les Guerilleres, by Monique Wittig, mid-20^th Century French feminist writer

The first time I heard this quote from Wittig was in the mid-1990s when I took ‘Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,’ an introduction to feminist thealogy and the Great Goddess, created by the Women & Religion committee of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Cakes was my introduction to Carol Christ, feminist thealogy, and the Goddess. It changed my life forever. I’ve been teaching this program for close to twenty years now and as my understanding of women’s history and the role of patriarchy in our suppression has deepened, I continue to find new resonances with Wittig’s words.

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that.” This statement is relevant to all oppressed peoples and especially to women. History tells us that enslavement was a part of European culture long before Africans were kidnapped into slavery on this continent. Enslavement of the defeated was a common aspect of war, dating back to Biblical times. Many aspects of the feudal system dominant in western Europe for centuries were little better than slavery.

Dancing for Rain: Life-Giving Gift from Heaven to Earth by Laura Shannon

Image 1: Berber women dancers and musicians of Taroudant, Southern Morocco. The long red fringes of their headscarves connote fertility and rainfall. Photo: Liz Hammer, 2014.

Since ancient times people have danced for rain, the life-giving gift from heaven to earth. Rain rituals were seen as important work and were usually performed by women, traditional bringers of life and fertility. Both bearing and raising children, and cultivating the land to nourish the community, are activities dependent on, and psychically equated to, rainfall. Women’s ability to bring rain when necessary was a key belief of indigenous European culture and is found in many places today. Many women’s dances, songs and rituals in Eastern Europe and the Near East express this connection, and women’s folk costumes often feature long fringes representing water.

The Vows We Make, by Molly Remer

I make a vow of self-sovereignty,
a declaration of wholeness,
a promise to myself that I will keep:
I vow to listen to my heart,
to claim my power and my voice.
I vow to live my own magic,
to step into the center of my own life
and live from there.
I vow to live a life
that includes space for me,
to stand up for what I need,
to listen to my longings,
to honor my inner call,
to do my own work with trust.
I vow to never abandon myself.
I vow to inhabit my own wholeness
in all ways.

In February, I signed up for a Vow of Faithfulness class with WomanSpirit Reclamation. Guided by Patricia Lynn Reilly (of “Imagine a Woman” and A God Who Looks Like Me fame) and Monette Chilson, the class was based on Patricia’s book, I Promise Myself: making a commitment to yourself and your dreams. Structured as a seven week online women’s circle, the class took us on a deep dive into vow-making, culminating in a vow ceremony in which we made a public (to the class that is) declaration of our own vows to ourselves. As the class unfolded, I found myself reviewing past vows as well as sensing new vows bumping up against my consciousness, whispering to be heard.

From the Archives: Awakening to the Mystery of Absolute Beginnings by Carolyn Lee Boyd

This was originally posted on February 1, 2013

As I rise at 5:30 each morning, my spirit reawakens in a between-the-worlds realm of absolute beginnings. For those few minutes of quiet and slowly revealing dawn light, I revel in mystical newness, endless possibility, a horizon that is only the future. By 7 am, when I can hear cars on the road and see television screens through windows as I walk to work, normal, plodding space-time has taken over, leaving just a shimmer to linger in my memory.

I remember living all day with this feeling of being at the very beginning of my world when I was a young child and everything that I did and thought was for the first time. I believed this sense was lost forever when I was later taught by society, as so many of us are, that I was only the tiniest, most ordinary mite in a world already built many eons ago by people with a much brighter genius than me.

And then, on my 25^th birthday, I heard Merlin Stone speak about When God Was a Woman. As I truly envisioned the Divine with a female face for the first time in my life, I felt a joyful excitement as if I had been transported back to that first second in human history when the insight dawned that a sacred presence exists within ourselves and all of creation that is unseen, but real, and that it can be expressed and shared. Because I had never been taught about Goddess or how to interact with Her, I was able to discover and act on what I knew intuitively within myself about Her in a way that was completely my own. With great fervor I began my own individual journey of the spirit and found that this exhilarating profound newness never left me because the territory I was exploring was completely unfamiliar to me in my own experience.

From the Archives: Who Owns the Sacred? A Personal Search beyond (European) Indigenous Knowledge by Eline Kieft

This was originally posted on Jan 17, 2020

For almost 35 years nature has been my sacred place. As an 8-year old, I started to pray to Mother Earth even though the protestant tradition in which I grew up only recognised ‘God the Father’. I went outside in my inflatable rowing boat to seek solitude (as an only child in a quiet family!) on a small island in the lake of our local park. I practised rowing and walking quietly to not break the sacred silence. I collected herbs to brew infusions in my little thermos flask with boiled water brought from home. I sung to the moon, and danced my love for all creation back through my moving body. Over the last 15 or so years, I spent many days and nights at Neolithic monuments, dreaming in ancestral burial mounds, time traveling in stone circles in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, England, Ireland and Brittany. This nature-based practice evolved naturally, and later incorporated my training with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Nature is where I reconnect most easily with the Sacred, and listen to the whispers on the great web of life in which all of nature is a great teacher. Nature, for me, is a strong place of prayer, solace, awe, reverence, gratitude, joy, guidance, reconnection, healing and transformation.

Hope Is Giving Birth in the Face of the Dragon by Beth Bartlett

The image of the baby born under the rubble of the earthquake in Syria has been haunting me. So has the image in my mind of her mother, giving birth to her baby while trapped after the building, where she, her husband, and their children were sleeping, collapsed. The baby’s uncle, when digging through the debris hoping to reach his brother and family, found the baby alive, her umbilical cord still attached to her mother. When he cut the cord, the baby let out a cry. Tragically, her mother had died after giving birth, as had her father and siblings.

That Old, Old, OLD Story – The Warts and Wisdom of the Ancient

My grandmother Clarine was an incredible human being. I absolutely could not be more proud to be her granddaughter. She started her first teaching position in 1927 at age 17. She met my grandfather in seminary; but despite her clear talent and call, the church apparently felt one minister was enough for the family and refused to ordain her. Undaunted, she famously wrote a one line reply to the bishop: Well, Moses got along fine without it, and Jesus got along fine without it, so I’ll be fine without it, too.