Women’s Voices – Page 9 – Feminism and Religion

Sacred Secrets: The Legacy of Women’s Wisdom Across Generations by Rabbi Nadya Gross

From my earliest memories, I saw things that others didn’t see and knew things I had no business knowing. But at the time, I didn’t realize that others didn’t witness the dance of light around their bodies or the life forms at the base of trees. I didn’t know that the insights I had into people’s emotions were not universally shared. My curiosity led me to ask questions about these things… until my grandmother, Savta (Heb), took me into the kitchen (where everything important happened), closed the doors, and told me never to talk about these things with anyone except her. And so, my training began.

Savta was gifted in ways different from mine. She had grown up in a circle of women and their daughters, a circle where women educated each other, shared their unique gifts and insights, and passed down a legacy of wisdom.

The wisdom she shared with me was as ancient as the land on which we lived. We began with reverence for the Earth and all her elements—pre-patriarchal Goddess wisdom. We explored what it means to be intimately connected to all aspects of Creation, understanding that we are interdependent. Harm to a tree, an insect, or the water harms us. We learned that the respect we wish to receive from others must first be shown by us. I learned to never pick up a beautiful stone that caught my attention without first asking permission to remove it from its resting place. When harvesting fruit from one of the many trees in my grandparent’ yard, I expressed deep gratitude to the mother-tree whose body nurtured that fruit to ripeness.

Practicing Mistakes in Karate by Xochitl Alvizo

One of my earliest lessons from karate, which I am still working to integrate, is about the necessity of making mistakes. I used to apologize every time I make a mistake, “I’m sorry,” I’d immediately say to my instructor. She would smile at me and at the end of class would say, “You don’t have to apologize for making a mistake; your body is just learning to do this for the first time, so of course you’re going to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the process.”

The necessity of making mistakes was something I needed to learn to embrace. As with other areas of life, making mistakes in karate made me feel like a fool. I would get frustrated with myself and would feel embarrassed, and would feel like my teachers were disappointed in me too. But one of the things that has helped me embrace my mistakes is seeing how I have indeed improved in my practice. The mistakes I now make are new ones and are about higher level forms and techniques—things that used to absolutely seem impossible for me.

WHEN I SAY THAT I MISS MY MOTHER (THIRTY YEARS AFTER HER DEATH), WHAT PRECISELY AM I MISSING? by Rebe Huntman

On the eve of my 50th birthday, I found myself longing for my mother. She’d been dead thirty years—so long that I’d forgotten the sound of her voice or the temperature of her skin. And yet I missed her. Desperately. Shamefully.

The shape of that missing had something to do with the fact that I was nearing the age she’d been when she died. As a child, I’d watched my mother dress for a night of dancing with my father, lining her lips with red and stringing her neck with beads—sure signs she knew the secrets of being a woman: self-possessed; striding through the world with confidence and self-assurance; a real badass!

By now, I’d expected to feel that same sense of largesse. But the truth was that I still felt like the nineteen-year-old version of myself who had lost her mother, a child still waiting for someone to show me the way.

~*~

I wasn’t alone. My whole country seemed to have lost our way. We were surrounded by images of the feminine—pop icons and underwear models, feminists and porn stars, soccer moms and saints—all of them flashing large but pointing in different directions, unglued from whatever architecture might give them a coherent narrative: A blueprint that might hold us through the waters of our deepest anxieties. A guide who might answer our deepest questions: Who am I? Am I part of something larger than my own life? And if so, how do I fit within it?

~*~

The Gift of Enduring Friendship by Sara Wright

Mathias Klang from Göteborg, Sweden, Wikimedia Commons

After I experienced a sudden shattering break in a friendship with a woman writer/editor that I loved (that I believed would endure any personal difficulty) I was unable to process the event. I wrote a short poem to express my disbelief in which I likened this betrayal to the cutting down of this woman’s tree and left it at that. Silence is a killer of soul. There is no place to go.

The profound rupture of this woman thread felt catastrophic (I have never had a woman friend like her), and in retrospect I still see and experience our friendship in this light. At the time my life was in crisis. I had other consuming worries. Because I had learned at my mother’s knee that silence is literally the end of the road the bottomless chasm that separated us did not lessen in intensity, but I lived on.

Six years later that rupture has been healed. How did this happen? My friend, who happens to be something of a genius, intellectual, professional editor writer/poet wrote a book that she offered to anyone who wanted to read it for free. This act of great generosity was so typical of this woman’s behavior that it galvanized me into action. I took the risk and contacted her directly asking for a copy. I don’t recall just what I said except that I wished we could be friends again, never believing the impossible would happen but it did.

Three Women by Beth Bartlett

In the first ten days of the Trump administration, when his sycophants are purring and praising, private corporate execs are rolling over and doing his bidding, and even many of his opponents in Congress have been somewhat muted in their response to his actions, three women – Phyllis Fong, Judge Loren AliKhan, and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde — have been audacious in their visible and vocal resistance.

On Friday, January 24^th, just four days after taking office, Trump fired seventeen Inspector Generals, the federal watchdogs over government agencies. Among these was Phyllis Fong, the Inspector General of the US Department of Agriculture. But Ms. Fong refused the firing, citing the position of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency that these firings “’did not comply with the requirements set out in law and therefore are ineffective at this time.’”[i] Having served in the USDA for twenty-two years under four presidents, she returned defiantly to her office on Monday morning, only to be escorted out by federal security agents.

Preaching with a Predator in the First Pew by Angela Yarber

Seeing him in the first pew was distracting. Legs splayed in expert manspreading fashion, both arms draped unaware across either side of the backrest, belly protruding over a worn leather belt. He wasn’t a tall man, yet his sprawling body occupied nearly six feet of space. A slight smirk was always smeared across his lips and his eyes were fixed on me.

Preaching to a predator is never easy. So, while I could never imagine what it would be like to speak truth to power like Bishop Budde at the National Prayer Service, I’m confident that, like me, every clergywoman in America knows what it’s like for a pussy grabber to leer at you from the first pew. Even the finest vestments, highest clerical honors, and the divine herself cannot protect you from that.

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.

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.

Oh, California, My California by Marie Cartier

Marie in the Pacific Palisades, circa 2000

This is my home—California…I moved here from New Hampshire, Boston, upstate New York, Ohio, Colorado…why did I move here? I kept moving West…I used to say I came as far as I could without falling into the ocean.

California. My wife is a native Californian. She says people come here for “the California promise.” And we’ll say it often –what is that? Oh yes, the California promise. The sunset drops into the ocean. A true orange ball of spreading colors into pinks, reds…and then it slips into the ocean.

I take my dog Zuma, named after a California beach…to Huntington Dog Beach where she can run two miles before she even has to turn around. A life “other dogs just dream about” says travel mags. I make a wish on every sunset I see that slides into the Pacific. Past the edge of my world into the deep ocean…A moon will rise. A waxing gibbous, a full, a waning gibbous, a new, a dark, a crescent…and I will walk under those, too, and make wishes, too.