Women’s Voices – Page 19 – Feminism and Religion

REMEMBERING THE MAGIC OF MAMA DONNA HENES: 1945-2024 by Diane Saarinen

For those who don’t know who Donna Henes was, her official bio:

Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, spiritual teacher, award-winning author, popular speaker and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions since 1972. More at her Wikipedia page here.

Donna, known affectionately to many as Mama Donna, was so in tune with the seasons (even putting out a quarterly publication for a time called Always in Season), that when her time came to leave this sparkling, stunning incarnation of hers, she left on Autumn Equinox Eve 2024, just two days after her 79^th birthday.

Sad news to those she left behind and sad news to the planet. But as we approach Samhain, Halloween and Day of the Dead, what wonderful memories my friend Donna Henes left me with! And “what is remembered, lives.” So live on, Mama Donna!

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From the Archives: In Memory of Margot Adler (1946-2014) Priestess, Journalist, Skeptic, Mystic by Elizabeth Cunningham

This was originally posted on October 22, 2014

“Ritual has the power to end our alienation from the earth and from each other. It allows us to enter a world where we are at home with the trees and the stars and other beings, and even with the carefully hidden and protected parts of ourselves that we sometime contact in dreams or in art.” –Margot Adler

Margot Adler died of cancer on July 28, 2014. A Pagan priestess, she asked for memorial events to be held in the season of Samhain, also known as Halloween. At this time of year, the rituals of many religious traditions remind us that we are all connected, the living, the dead, and those to come, one continuous communion. In this spirit, I offer a tribute to the late Margot Adler.

Ariadne and Me – The .5% by Arianne MacBean

When I travelled to Crete on a Goddess Pilgrimage last year, we were asked to introduce ourselves by our matrilineal lines. I am Arianne, daughter of Bernadette, granddaughter of Helen and a long line of women, known and unknown, stretching back to Africa. Many of the women in the group were able to intone long lists of names in their matrilineal lines. I was not able to go further than my Grandmother, Helen. No one in my mother’s large Polish family could remember my Great Grandmother’s name.

My journey toward Ariadne has been as circuitous as the labyrinth itself. In many ways, I have been searching for her since those first bedtime stories my father used to tell me as a child, when Theseus was the main character and Ariadne, merely a stop on his road. I longed for her, even then, to have her own heroine’s journey. I tried to imagine what that might look like but, without models, could not conjure anything beyond holding the red thread so others could triumph. Later, I began a more conscious search for Ariadne as I became curious about the connections between her choices, feelings, expressions and my own longings, betrayals, and outbursts. Since then, there have been moments when I let myself fantasize about being connected to her in some real way, beyond being named after her, or feeling and acting as she may have. In these fleeting moments when I imagine we are bonded, I am awash in an intense sense of belonging, something I never felt as an only child of divorced parents. But then in a flash, my mind takes a sharp turn, as in a labyrinth, and I negate those feelings with logic. You want to be connected to Her, so you are finding ways to make it true.

Women’s Bodies As Battlefield by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the introduction to her book The Women’s Bible:

The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgement seat of Heaven, tried, convicted and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity, a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants . .

We are facing the long-term results of these biblical writings. This upcoming election is so unsettling because it is showing patriarchy in all its ugliness. We see how this is being played out, especially regarding abortion, but in all areas of the functioning of women’s bodies. The reason abortion is at the foundation of it all is that the drive to police women’s bodies is the crux which justifies all sorts of cruelties. It is the same with racism. These are issues that span the pantheon of rights; human, economic, healthcare, bodily autonomy. It takes a police state to quell all of these.

Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A Novel by Joan Koster

“I would lay down my life for the cause of sex reform, but I don’t want to be swept away. A useless sacrifice.” Ida C. Craddock, Letter to Edward Bond Foote, June 6, 1898

In 1882, Ida C. Craddock applied to the all-male undergraduate school of University of Pennsylvania. With the highest results on the entrance tests, the faculty voted to admit her. But her admission was rejected by the Board of Trustees, who said the university was not suitably prepared for a female. (U of P only became co-ed in 1974)

With her aspirations blocked, Ida left home determined to leave her mark on women’s lives by studying and writing about Female Sex Worship in early cultures. At the time, little information was available to women about sexual relations. To do her research, Ida resorted to having male friends take books forbidden to females, such as the Karma Sutra, out of the library for her.

An unmarried woman, she turned to spirituality and the practice of yoga, a newly introduced practice to the American public at the time, as a way to learn about sex. In her journals, she describes her interaction with angels from the borderlands, and in particular, her sexual experiences with Soph, her angel husband through what was likely tantric sex.

Listen to the wise women by Molly Remer

In 2012, shortly after I finished my priestess ordination process and I’d been facilitating women’s retreats for two years, I got a wild idea to go to a goddess festival of some kind. I did a google search and found one that sounded great—Gaea Goddess Gathering–and it was happening in just two weeks. Imagine my surprise to then look at the bottom of the screen and see that it was located only a five-hour drive from me, just over the border into Kansas. I decided it was “meant to be.” My mom and a friend signed up with me (and my then 18 month old daughter) and we packed up my van and went! The night before we left on our adventure, I sat down at the kitchen table and felt a knife-like stinging pain on the back of my leg. I’d accidentally sat on a European giant hornet (these are not regular hornets, they are literally giant hornets about two inches long).

On Being Apolitical or Neutral by Karen Tate

I believe we are all One and part of the cosmic web. Chaos theory, the butterfly wings moving in Oregon can affect a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Or quantum entanglement, two or more objects can affect each other no matter how far apart they are. Yes, we are all inter-connected whether we believe or understand it. So the crazy neighbor or uncle we can’t stand and roll our eyes every time they spew sh*t out of their mouth, well they are part of us. As are rich and poor, black and white, male/female/trans, Left and Right, American and French, Christian and Pagan, educated and less educated, religious and atheist, etc. If we are more tolerant and inclusive, if we focus on love, joy and being in the grace of the Light we might evolve or ascend as so many are talking about these days. The “deplorables” like the uncle or neighbor would do better if they knew better.

Can you remember when you had the self awareness to know you just didn’t know what you didn’t know? They don’t yet. I think, we, as a part of them, we have to “hold space” and move forward in love until they educate themselves, self correct and rein in their hate or bad behavior or thoughts. As One, it’s as if one of our appendages is broken. We don’t cut it off. We tend it until it’s healed and healthy through all the pain and physical therapy. Eventually we’re whole.

Unless this “part of us” is threatening our way of life…

Poetry, Plays, Pens, Persistence, Underpin Voice: Both Jean & Eleanor Live by Margot Van Sluytman

Stepping into the autumn season offers time to think about summer. Time to think about what happened during those hazy, lazy, crazy days. Digesting. Re-wording. Steeping one’s self in recent memories and drawing forth, indeed permitting to re-surface, what touched us most deeply. For me, The Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, was conjured. That imagined woman. That fictional woman. And her voice and her voicing. Buried she was, in a church, along with her name. Nobody came.

What is it that invites this negation of voice? Voices? Voice-ing? Particularly those of womyn? No matter class, culture, creed. This question continues to journey with me, as I myself, note the accumulation of years. As I breathe the beauty of my Grand-Children’s energies. And with-ness their lives unfold. Unfold in a world that is slowly, ever so slowly, yet determinately, and with unceasing tenacity, resurrecting the lost voices of womyn. Too long buried and silenced.

Even Now: Creativity, Possibility and the Renewal of the World by Rabbi Adina Allen

October 3, 2024 // 1 Tishre, 5785

“Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the world,” wrote the Eish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Writing at a time of unimaginable suffering, even against the backdrop of impossible circumstances, he knew this moment, the day in which we inhabit right now, to be one of creativity, possibility and renewal.

This theme of creativity and Rosh Hashanah is perhaps expressed nowhere more poignantly than in the phrase Hayom Harat Olam. One of the many names by which Rosh Hashanah is known, these words come from one of the holiday’s most ancient piyyutim, recited in the sacred center of the Rosh Hashanah service, the haunting, evocative Musaf Amidah. To conclude each of the three special sections for Rosh Hashanah: Malchuyot (Sovereignty), Zichronot (Remembrances), and Shofarot (marking the appearances and meanings of shofar across Torah), the shofar is sounded in the proscribed pattern — wholeness, breakage, shattering, wholeness, followed by Hayom Harat Olam.

Archive From the FAR Founders: Qu(e)erying Our Lady By Xochitl Alvizo

This post was originally published on July 6, 2011. Xochitl’s very first FAR post!

I love art. I especially love women’s art – women such as Frida Kahlo, Cathy Ashworth, Sudie Rakusin, and Alma Lopez. To me, their art is a reflection of women’s strength, creativity, and beauty. Frida Kahlo, for example, expressed so many aspects of herself and her experience through her art. In it one can glimpse her passionate love for Diego Rivera, her continuous physical pain, her search for meaning, and the unending hopefulness she maintained throughout it all. Frida Kahlo’s art, like her person, was vibrant and full of life, colorful and yet broken. She expressed the wide spectrum of her experience not in words only but in color and images, texture, paint and print. As she put it, “I paint my own reality” – her own reality is what she knew and it is what she painted.