Category: Women’s Spirituality

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”

Women Created in the Image of God By Karen Torjesen

The following is a guest post written by Karen Torjesen, Ph.D., Margo L. Goldsmith Professor of Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University where she has helped establish graduate programs in Women’s Studies in Religion and Applied Women’s Studies. For ten years she served as Dean of the School of Religion, partnering with religious communities to create programs in comparative religion. She has published extensively on women, gender and sexuality within Christianity.

Originally posted at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-torjesen/torjesen-women-image-of-god_b_893367.html

Last month I preached — in South Africa — in Johannesburg — in a township — in a Pentecostal church. In Pentecostal worship, preaching is giving your testimony. So how do I translate my life into a testimony, find the threads that connect to their experience, speak in a spiritual vocabulary to these human needs, and be honest about the depths of my unknowing? I am an American academic, a historian of the early church, a professor of Women’s Studies. Where would I find the points of connection?

I could speak of my own struggling with what it meant to be a woman — inferior, valued less, silenced, excluded, constrained, exhorted to be submissive–and my discovery of the American women’s movement. However, for the context of African Christianities, where traditional tribal patriarchies merged with colonial European patriarchies, there would be little resonance. I would need an alternate framework to human rights feminism. Western notions of equality, individualism, and rights have little resonance in cultures with a strong sense of kinship and communal identity and of responsibilities based on age and gender rather than rights based on citizenship. Continue reading “Women Created in the Image of God By Karen Torjesen”

In Search of My Religious Identity By Gina Messina-Dysert

I try to avoid watching too much television – it feels like there are so many other things I should be focused on; but I was quite engrossed in the show Big Love during its run on HBO.  Its concluding season was by far my favorite because of its focus on women and faith.  In one of the final episodes the character Barbara Hendrickson struggled with whether or not to be baptized into a new church and it was a struggle I identified with greatly.  Although her faith had changed and she no longer felt connected to the doctrine of her previous church, moving on to a new community that fit her beliefs meant abandoning her family.

I was raised in a very traditional Italian/Sicilian Roman Catholic household, attended Catholic schools, and was married in the Catholic Church.  As a child, being Catholic offered me a sense of pride; however growing up I began to question the Church as I recognized the many ways it is abusive to women.  Becoming a graduate student of religion led me on a roller coaster journey that allowed me to further explore my religious identity. Continue reading “In Search of My Religious Identity By Gina Messina-Dysert”

M’rahemet Shel Olam: The Emwomber of the Universe By Theresa Yugar

The following is a guest post written by Theresa A. Yugar, Ph.D. Candidate in women studies in religion at Claremont Graduate University.

This poem was written modeled on a Hebrew understanding of the world and God. In contrast to an Occidental or Western understanding of God, which elevates the noun of a sentence, a Semitic understanding of God highlights the “verb” of a sentence. In this way, God is a more active presence in the creation of a more just world.

M’rahemet  Shel Olam: The Emwomber of the Universe

In the beginning the primal womb gave birth to all living creatures . . .

She gave birth to us . . . her daughters and her sons.

She is the great mother. Continue reading “M’rahemet Shel Olam: The Emwomber of the Universe By Theresa Yugar”

Artemisia Gentileschi: Baroque artist and rape survivor painted strong Biblical women, By Kittredge Cherry

Kittredge Cherry

The following is a guest post written by Rev. Kittredge Cherry, lesbian Christian author and art historian who blogs about LGBT spirituality and the arts at the Jesus in Love Blog.  Her books include “Equal Rites” and “Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More“.

Originally posted at Jesus in Love.

Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi inspires many with her paintings of strong Biblical women — created despite the discrimination and sexual violence that she faced as a woman in 17th-century Italy.

Gentileschi (1593–1652) was successful in her own day, but was mostly written out of art history until the 1970s, when feminist scholars rediscovered her work. Now she is celebrated in many books, films and plays, and her work is widely reproduced. Her greatest paintings include “Judith Beheading Holofernes” and “Susanna and the Elders.”

Many women and queer people can relate to her battles against prejudice and sexual violence, documented in her rape trial in 1612. She could be considered the patron saint of women artists.

"Judith and Her Maidservant" by Artemisia Gentileschi

Although Gentileschi was apparently heterosexual, lesbians have drawn energy from her life and art.

Lesbians who have created tributes to Gentileschi include painter Becki Jayne Harrelson and playwright Carolyn Gage. In the play “Artemisia and Hildegard,” Gage has two of history’s great women artists debate their contrasting survival strategies: Gentileschi battled to achieve in the male-dominated art world while Hildegard of Bingen found support for her art in the women-only community of a medieval German nunnery.

The daughter of a painter, Gentileschi was born in Rome and trained as a painter in her father’s workshop there. She was refused admission to the art academy because she was a woman, so her father arranged for her to have a private painting teacher — who raped her when she was about 19. Gentileschi herself was tortured by thumbscrews during the seven-month rape trial, but she stuck to her testimony. The teacher was convicted, but received a suspended sentence. Continue reading “Artemisia Gentileschi: Baroque artist and rape survivor painted strong Biblical women, By Kittredge Cherry”

Why am I a witch? By Zsuzsanna E. Budapest

Zsuzsanna E. Budapest is the founder of the Dianic tradition and the Women’s Spirituality Movement and is the author of seven books including Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.

I was born to a witch mother, who happened to be an artist of sacred art, creating simple home altars that the peasants used in their “clean” room; used only on special occasions. We made our living from selling these Madonna’s with child, Triple Goddess altars. Goddess loving, primitive city folk and country folks bought them to pray in front of. Her art re-inspired an ancient pagan faith. Mother’s sacred art was legendary. Nobody ever bought an image of a male saint or even St. Joseph to pray in front of. When the hardships were upon Hungarians, they turned to the great Mother. Our pre-Christian Boldogassznony (Glad Woman).

All this happened during the so called Communists occupation, which lasted many decades. I grew up in a city that was filled with statues of the Goddesses and Dianads. With all the churches we have in Hungary, not one of them is dedicated to Jesus Christ, but they are dedicated to his mother Goddess, Mary and her relatives; St. Ann, St. Kathryn, St. Elizabeth (a homegrown saint), along with St. Margaret.

During the bombing, much of this art was destroyed, but enough of them remained to pass on to the new generation the message: We stand proud on our past, we knew once  beauty and civilization. Continue reading “Why am I a witch? By Zsuzsanna E. Budapest”