Category: Women’s Spirituality

A FEMINIST TAOIST VOICE PART 1: MY DIALOGUE WITH ELISA FON, ACUPUNCTURIST, TAOIST, FEMINIST AND FRIEND by Sara Frykenberg

“So it all kind of depends… even in men compared to men, and women compared to women, you would have to have a counterpart to judge something as yin or yang—you are never statically just yin or just yang…”

Elisa Fon is a student of acupuncture, graduating this semester from Yo San University in Santa Monica, CA.  She also studies reiki, energy healing, meditation and yoga.  Elisa and I have known each other for most of our lives as friends, as one another’s support and as chosen family.  Over the last few years, however, we have more consciously fostered an intentional aspect of our intimacy: a challenge to each other to live more authentically, to walk counter-abusively and to live towards physical, spiritual and emotional empowerment.  One privilege of this relationship has been the opportunity to create a language together in order to speak across our differences and share our respective passions: feminist theo/alogies (mine) and Chinese medicine/ healing arts (Elisa’s).

Searching for a way to better understand and teach feminist Taoism, I reached out to Elisa for dialogue and language, which gave birth to the following interview about the relationship of one feminist to Taoism, or a Taoist to feminism. Continue reading “A FEMINIST TAOIST VOICE PART 1: MY DIALOGUE WITH ELISA FON, ACUPUNCTURIST, TAOIST, FEMINIST AND FRIEND by Sara Frykenberg”

RE-SOULING ON SHABBAT BY IVY HELMAN

I attended a service at Congregation Shalom in Chelmsford, MA two Fridays ago.  During the service, Rabbi Shoshana Perry spent a few minutes addressing the last word of a Hebrew prayer found in the Reform siddur, Mishkan T’filah.  It was translated in the siddur as “God rested” but the Hebrew word used was vayinafash, which comes from the word nefesh, or soul.  The prayer emphasizes on the seventh day that God did not rest as much as God took time out to re-soul.  Rabbi Perry believes that our Shabbat should be spent doing things that help us also re-soul.

Initially, I spent quite a long time considering why God would need to re-soul and what exactly God would do to re-soul.  When I realized the futility of trying to sort that out, I moved a little closer to home: what do I do on Shabbat to re-soul?  I was quite overwhelmed trying to answer this question as well.

Traditionally, Shabbat is about study, rest, prayer and family among other things.  In fact, many Jews avoid creative processes like writing, cooking, painting, driving and working because God rested from creative work on the seventh day.  (Incidentally, our creativity is also how we are considered to be made in the image of God).  Part of the reason this idea struck me so deeply is because I often find painting, cooking and writing rejuvenating. Continue reading “RE-SOULING ON SHABBAT BY IVY HELMAN”

A Personal Journey of Embodiment by Stacia Guzzo

My struggle and fascination with the subject of embodiment began at a young age. Perhaps my first sense of the nuances of being an embodied being began with the realization that my younger brother was considered “different” as a result of being born microcephalic (having an abnormally small head and brain) and therefore having lifelong developmental delay. I remember wondering: How is it that the body can work so perfectly sometimes and yet have so many complications other times? What had happened to make his development so starkly contrast my own? And why can’t it fix itself?

As a high school student, my struggle manifested in the forms of anorexia and bulimia. The anorexia came first, and began almost as if a switch had been thrown. I dieted severely and dropped 60 pounds in a little under 3 months, in the end making it a goal to lose a pound a day. My cheeks sunk in. I slept through lunch. I found little occasion to laugh. And still I could not see an ounce of beauty or satisfaction when I looked at my body. I poked at the jutting bones of my pelvis and wished my bones were smaller. I saw my body as a devious enemy. During my junior year, I became bulimic as a means of coping with increasing pressures by family and friends to eat. Continue reading “A Personal Journey of Embodiment by Stacia Guzzo”

The Dark Half: Reflections on the Winter Solstice By Xochitl Alvizo

Photo by Chris Pinkham

I’m a Capricorn. People seem not to be surprised when they find out. I’m also the oldest of three siblings and a keeper of people’s secrets. Stories and secrets – my family’s included – I hear them all, take them all in. Sometimes someone will share something with me that involves another and afterward say, Now, don’t you go telling so and so that I said this. And of course I always reply, I don’t tell no one nothin’. And it’s true, I don’t tell – I simply take it in. I listen and I take it all in. The stories shared, stories of joy and of love, excitement and disappointment, of hurt feelings and misunderstandings, all of them inform me. They all cause me to reflect and consider the fragility of us all, the precariousness of life. We affect each other so much, from the smallest moment to the largest system, all of it makes such a difference to us.

Tonight we celebrate the Winter Solstice – it marks the boundary of darkness and light – it is the shortest day and longest night of the year.  Continue reading “The Dark Half: Reflections on the Winter Solstice By Xochitl Alvizo”

Women Blogging Thealogy By Gina Messina-Dysert

In Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, Carol Christ offers a thealogy that is grounded in embodied thinking and begins with personal experience. She explains that experience is “embodied, relational, communal, social, and historical” (p. 37),  and that experiences of the Goddess are shaped and inspired by the experiences of others. Consequently her thealogy, in addition to being personal, is also communal.

According to Christ, the “voices of women are a lifeline” (Rebirth of the Goddess, p. 41), a sentiment that has been loudly echoed by women in blogging communities. Although some may claim that a blog is nothing more than an online diary, it is a powerful tool that offers individuals the opportunity to express their thoughts and experiences in a public forum; blogging gives a voice to anyone who wants it. Recent statistics have Continue reading “Women Blogging Thealogy By Gina Messina-Dysert”

Does My Faith Have Gender? By Brooke Nelson

The following is a guest post by Brooke Nelson, a  Ph.D student in Religion at Claremont Graduate University. She is interested in themes of feminine agency, authority, and textual representation in early Church texts, and how these themes intersect with the contemporary need to create a canon of legitimate examples. Her current research project is focusing on the ways that women were represented as taking control of their lives, their deaths, and their salvation through feminine martyr narratives.

For many people, the academic study of religion may provide an opportunity to pursue (or find) a theology in which women play a major role. I, however, hit the books for a very different reason. I grew up in a “Christmas and Easter” Catholic family that subscribed to the larger sense of the faith without worrying too much about the details. I went to Catholic schools, learned my catechism, memorized the ways to spot a heretic, and associated predominantly with my Roman Catholic schoolmates. I never, however, boldly flew the Papist flag. I often failed to identify with the larger Catholic community because I took a rather free, grab bag approach to the Latin Church, taking what I wanted and leaving behind the strictures that I thought were too backwards to apply to modern life. Continue reading “Does My Faith Have Gender? By Brooke Nelson”

Part I: Advent as the Active Wait By Cynthie Garrity-Bond

In the Advent reading of the Annunciation we are silent witnesses to the conversation between the Angel Gabriel and Mary  (Luke 1: 26- 40).

I would like to bring to the surface two ways of looking at the season of Advent though the scriptural story of the Annunciation.  Both require waiting, one in the stillness of surrender and the other in what I call the active wait. While we know that Advent is a season of waiting, it is also one of expectation and hope.  It is suggested we pullback from the busyness of our hectic lives, in the anticipation of renewing our connection to God and therefore ourselves in prayerful silence leading to interior excavation.  The 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity.  But if it takes place not in me, what avails it?”  And so like Mary, we wait for the Blessed Unknown to take shape within us. Continue reading “Part I: Advent as the Active Wait By Cynthie Garrity-Bond”

Between the Newness of Life and the Slipping of Moments By Christie Havey Smith

The following is a guest post written by Christie Havey Smith, M.A., a Spiritual Director and a mother of three.  She teaches spiritual writing workshops in the community and through Loyola Marymount University’s extension program.  She has been a Youth Minister for St. Monica’s parish community and a volunteer at WriteGirl in Los Angeles, an organization dedicated to empowering teen girls through creative writing. 

I come from a long line of amazing women.  I had two great aunts with impassioned spirits.  In neither case did that passion find its way into marriage, but instead found romance in literature and in travels; they married poetry, theology and their gardens.  They gave birth to ideas and lavished love upon their sister and her children.

Their sister is my grandmother.  She was widowed when her three children were still small, and she rose above every kind of challenge a needy mother can face.  She is now ninety-five years old.  Her sisters and friends have passed away, and she is the last of the greats of her generation.  She is the Elizabeth Taylor of her community; when she dies it will be the end of an era.  And it will leave quite a hole in our family. Continue reading “Between the Newness of Life and the Slipping of Moments By Christie Havey Smith”

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ

A founding mother of the study of women and religion and feminist thealogy, Carol has been active in social justice, anti-war, feminist, anti-nuclear, and environmental causes for many years.  Her books include  She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologiesWomanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

In my last blog I wrote that the image of God as a dominating other who enforces his will through violence–found in the Bible and in the Christian tradition up to the present day–is one of the reasons I do not choose to work within the Christian tradition.  To be fair, there is another image of God in Christian tradition that I continue to embrace.  “Love divine, all loves excelling” is the opening line of a well-known hymn by Charles Wesley.  Charles Hartshorne invoked these words and by implication the melody with which they are sung as expressing the feelings at the heart of the understanding of God that he wrote about in The Divine Relativity.

Love divine, all loves excelling also expresses my understanding of Goddess or as I sometimes write Goddess/God.  Though I am no longer a Christian, but rather an earth-based Goddess feminist, I freely admit that I learned about the love of God while singing in Christian churches.  Hartshorne wrote that he knew the love of God best through the love of his own mother, and I can say that this is true for me as well.  My mother was not perfect, and she did not understand why I wanted to go to graduate school, my feminism, or my adult political views, but I never doubted her love or my grandmothers’ love for me.  (I count myself lucky.  I know others did not have this experience.)  Like Hartshorne, I also learned about the love of God through the world that I always understood to be God’s body.  Running in fields and hills, swimming in the sea, standing under redwood trees, and encountering peacocks in my grandmother’s garden, I felt connected to a power greater than myself.   Continue reading “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ”

A Meditation on a Mantra: Sat-Nam By Sara Frykenberg

The following is a guest post written by Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D., graduate of the women studies in religion program at Claremont Graduate University.  Her research considers the way in which process feminist theo/alogies reveal a kind transitory violence present in the liminal space between abusive paradigms and new non-abusive creations: a counter-necessary violence.  In addition to her feminist, theo/alogical and pedagogical pursuits, Sara is also an avid fan of science fiction and fantasy literature, and a level one Kundalini yoga teacher. 

Sat-Nam.  It means, “My name is truth.”  Or if you will, I am who I am.  It is an affirmation in the Kundalini Yogic tradition, a greeting and a mantra.  According to one of my teachers, saying the phrase “Sat-Nam” even once changes something inside of you and accesses a resonant power attached to the vibration of the mantra.  Sat Nam.  I am speaking myself.  I am authentically me.

Sat-Nam. “I am who I am”… “I am that I am”… I write this interpretation of the mantra twice because it is uncomfortable for me.  It sometimes still feels blasphemous to utter this phrase: a phrase that I was taught in my Christian upbringing belonged to God and was the name He gave Himself (sic).  But when I feel this way, I am now inclined to ask myself, what is wrong with saying that I am me?  Do I really feel like this is a power that god/dess reserves for herself?  No.  I affirm me.  I exist. “I am,” means to me that I am living, breathing, lively and thriving in this space between life now and life later that I like to think of as an event horizon full of gravity and opportunity. Continue reading “A Meditation on a Mantra: Sat-Nam By Sara Frykenberg”