Feminism and Religion

From the Archives: Embracing Fierceness by Mary Sharratt

This was originally published on September 9, 2015

This essay is inspired by Donna Henes’s brilliant post, I am Mad. Too often as spiritual women, we are told we have to perform niceness all the time, even if it means compromising our boundaries and principles.

Mainstream religions tell us we must forgive those who mistreat us. Too many women in very abusive situations literally turn the other cheek–to their extreme detriment. As Sherrie Campbell points out in her essay The 5 Faults of Forgiveness, the obligation of forgiveness oppresses survivors of abuse because it makes it all about the perpetrator and not about the healing, dignity, or boundaries of the survivor.

In my own Catholic upbringing I learned to swallow my anger and rage until it erupted in depression and burning bladder infections. My background did not teach me to skillfully dance with anger and it’s been a difficult learning curve for me. But I learned the hard way that owning my anger was crucial if I wanted to stand in my power and speak my truth.

Once when I felt a particularly strong need to break out of a dysfunctional situation, I had a powerful dream of a black snake, as beautiful as it was terrifying. In the course of the dream, I realized that the huge black snake was my own repressed anger, power, and strength. The beautiful inner self longing to be claimed.

Meek and mild women don’t make history. Hildegard von Bingen, whose feast is coming up on September 17, famously spoke her mind and ferociously stuck up for what she thought was right, famously locking horns with Emperor Barbarossa himself. She also defied her archbishop and suffered an interdict as a consequence, nearly dying an excommunicant. But she was a strong woman who would not be silenced. We should all be so brave and bold.

Claiming our true spiritual power means claiming each part of ourselves, including our fierceness. Our scary side.

Fierceness means embracing our gut wisdom. Voicing the sacred NO to protect ourselves and our loved ones from compromising situations.

I see modern day women like holistic healer Susun Weed embodying this fierceness as she empowers women and girls to recognize the sacredness of their own bodies, the holy mysteries inherent in menstruation, childbirth, and menopause, which are too often pathologized in male-dominated medicine.

Over the years I’ve learned to trust and act on my own inner knowing and discernment. To know when to say NO. By using strong, no bullshit women like Hildegard and Susun Weed as my role models.

Each time I trusted myself enough to act on my gut wisdom, to trust the inner NO, and speak my truth, it has served me well, although it’s sometimes been a painful learning process.

Anger and fierceness wake us up to what is wrong and needs to be changed. There is so much energy in anger that can be harnessed for healing and transformation. Fierceness is the strongest, most protective form of love, the ferocity with which a mother bear defends her cubs.

Coiled inside each one of us is a snake of great power. Let us all dance in our power and strength.

Minoan Snake Goddess, ca 1600 BCE, Knossos, Crete

Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. Please check out her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, and her new novel Revelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich. Visit her website .

From the Archives: A Feminist Retelling of Noah’s Ark

This was originally posted on May 4, 2018

My daughters came to me after Sunday School one day, concerned about a story they had heard in which God drowned almost everyone on Earth. So I sat down and thought about why a community might want to tell that story, and what valuable wisdom might be lifted from it for my children. Here is what I told them:

God/ess has many faces, which help us understand different things we need to know at different times. Sometimes we think of God/ess as Crone, an old, old woman crowned with silver hair as an emblem of her wisdom, who helps us learn to let go of anything that is holding back the wellness of our community and ourselves.

The Gift of Hospitality by Carolyn Lee Boyd

The Earth’s abundant gifts of hospitality

Hospitality is the way of Nature. Every spring, the Earth provides us with warmth, beauty, water, and nourishment. In winter, the Earth offers tools to heat and shelter ourselves. When we are sick, medicine is as close as the forest and meadow. She has welcomed a variety of life forms as the environment changes over our planet’s many geologic ages. Living beings have always been the wanderer in need knocking at Earth’s door and She always gives Her all to us.

This welcoming attitude has been reflected in customs of offering strangers food, water, and shelter in ancient and contemporary cultures and religions around the world, including goddess reverence. We see the influence of hospitality in the many goddess temples that welcomed and, for living traditions, still welcome, anyone in need of healing. These include those of the Egyptian Neith, the Italian Angitia, Idemili of the Nnobi Igbo people, the Yoruba Oshun, and others. We also see it in stories of women caring for one another like that of the Greek Maenads, ecstatic women worshippers who were unable to return home after attending rites and fell asleep in a town along the way. During the night, the town’s women silently encircled them, holding hands, for their protection.

My Daily MEDS by Xochitl Alvizo

After a spring semester-long sabbatical this year, I am back to campus and to teaching. I was effectively off from January to August and the timing could not have been better. After my dad’s death last July (2021), my world was turned upside down. One of the things that happened with his death was a deep realization that he had a lot to do with my sense of grounding. I wrote about this in a previous post, but I hadn’t quite realized how much he was a source of affirmation and grounding for me, an external one—his death was a catalyst for me to learn how to access that grounding more fully for myself, from within.

Having been on sabbatical, then, was helpful in terms of regaining my brain for research and writing, which was its objective, but also for giving me the time and mental space to work on the grounding aspect of my internal life. A few things came together for me during this time. Leading up to the sabbatical and overlapping with it, I got to participate in the Latinas in Leadership (LIL) program with the Hispanic Theological Initiative – a program designed to strengthen the professional development of the Latina women participants.

Peaceful Winding Endurance Road by Sara Wright

I personally think the quality of endurance is underrated. Remember Celie in The Color Purple? After living through hell this woman became who she was meant to be. Sometimes endurance does seem to be the way through. Just now the Woman’s Movement seems to be quite dead, but perhaps if we can just endure in time this situation may shift. That at least is my fervent hope.

Endurance and the Long Winding Road

From the day I bought this property almost 40 years ago I walked down this lovely road with a sense of the deepest pleasure. The trees were young then. In spring wild cherries burst with pure white or rosy pink blossoms, the bark of each a different hue, emerald pines bore startling white candles, chattering poplars multiplied, pale gray and pearl white birches leaned in for intimate conversation, smooth barked red maples graced open spaces all lemony lime in spring – leaves and needles etched against cobalt blue. The trees were healthy then.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: “We Say the Silence Has Been Broken”

We treat the physical assault and the silencing after as two separate things, but they are the same, both bent on annihilation. Rebecca Solnit

When I was in my twenties and in therapy I had a recurrent dream in which a strange man was chasing me and caught up with me and started to strangle me and I could not scream. I was asked to act this dream out by my therapist, who told me that this time I would scream. I could not. She got up and came over and put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze. I still could not scream.

Two decades later I had a dream in which I was a baby and suffocating in my crib. I asked my current therapist if she thought someone had tried to suffocate me when I was an infant. Her answer was simple: “There is no need to think about this happening when you were an infant. You have been silenced all your life.”

When I was a child, my father used to punish us by taking off his belt, sitting down, asking us to pull down our pants and lie across his lap, and then lashing our bare bottoms with his belt. This was typical child-rearing practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Rita Nakashima Brock was the first to name it for me as child abuse. Nonetheless, when we got older, my brother and I preferred to be spanked, rather than to have our 25 cents a week allowance taken away from us. At least, we thought, being spanked was over in a minute, while losing your allowance was something you would suffer for a long time.

Government Workings in Misogynyland by Barbara Ardinger

Dazed by the breakneck speed of the descending subway ride, the girl collapsed on the marble floor and just sat there for a while. Eventually she noticed a table with two full cups sitting on it and a sign that said Drink Me. “No no no,’ she said aloud. “Auntie said never drink what you don’t know you’re drinking because you never know what’s gonna happen to you.” She sat for another long minute, then said, “So where am I? I know where I was headed. To a committee meeting. But that’s not where I am. Where am I?” No reply. She looked around. To her left was a fancy garden gate, but she could see no garden beyond it, only lots of steps. To her right was a long corridor with office doors on both sides. All the doors she could see had names on them.

“Alice.” Where was that voice coming from? “Alice, you’re here for a meeting. You’re late! Hurry up! We can’t be late!” She stood up, but all she could see was a long-eared shadow (how curious!) running down the corridor. “I’m late, I’m late,” came the echoing voice.

Sisterhood by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Author’s Note: I write this in honor and celebration of my sister, Jeannie, who is turning 80 today, this third day of September, 2022. My thanks to the editors of FAR for letting me post this on her day.

I was born into sisterhood. My sister, Jeannie, who is ten years older than I am, loves to tell the story of how, in the days before prenatal testing, she told her 4^th grade teacher that she was going to have a sister. She already had two brothers, and was convinced that the baby our mother was carrying – me – would be a girl. She welcomed my presence on this earth even before I was born. Jeannie has shown me the best of sisterhood – affirming and supporting me in all of my endeavors, giving me a trusted confidante with whom I could share the truths of my life, showing up when I have needed her emotional and physical care and support, celebrating the moments of triumph and joy, and understanding me in a way that few have. So, when I came into feminism in my twenties, I was deeply drawn to the feminist ideal of sisterhood.

I first found nascent notions of the feminist concept of sisterhood when studying early nineteenth century feminists. For Sarah Grimké[i], who closed each of her “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” with, “Thine in the bonds of sisterhood,” those bonds were primarily of shared oppression. She regarded men’s oppression of women to be universal, knowing no boundaries of race, class, or culture, and wrote at length of the oppressed condition of women in the U.S., Asia, Africa, and Europe. In her abolitionist work she condemned the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of enslaved females and called on white women to act in solidarity with their enslaved sisters, and refuse their complicity in such abuse.

The Uses of Color On Screen by Freia Serafina

We have to thank a woman named Natalie M. Kalmus for her contributions to the development of color on screen. Being a woman and the executive head of the Technicolor art department in the 1930’s was nothing short of extraordinary, and, in 1935 she released a document titled Color Consciousness in which she explored color theory and the use of color on screen. And, while this was illuminating and groundbreaking at a time, we also have some serious problems with the document that need to be re-examined from an anti-racist and feminist perspective.

Kalmus tells us how and when to use color given that particular color’s moral and psychological associations. She tells us that different colors evoke emotional reactions from the audience because these colors paint a realistic worldview. This presents a problem because, if, as Kalmus suggests, the usage of color and its associations represent a realistic worldview then the worldview Kalmus presents is an inherently racist one. Kalmus writes that black “… has a distinctly negative and destructive aspect. Black instinctively recalls night, fear, darkness, crime. It suggests funerals, mourning. It is impenetrable, comfortless, secretive.” In stark contrast to the color black, Kalmus writes that white “… reflects the greatest amount of light, it emanates a luminosity which symbolizes spirit. White represents purity, cleanliness, peace, marriage… White uplifts and ennobles, while black lowers and renders more base and evil any color.” To put it simply: black is evil and white is good. What does any of this have to do with spirituality? Well, the way we think and feel about color and how characters are depicted on screen taps into our psychological understanding of how “good” or “bad” a color is. This trickles over into our magical and spiritual practices with the notions of “Black Magic” vs. “White Magic.” We often associate someone who practices black magic as someone who works with dark or evil forces, and white magic with someone who practices magic for the good of others.

Redefining Sex and Intimacy in the New World We Are Making by Caryn MacGrandle

TRIGGER WARNING: Post divorce, I find myself redefining my relationships and want to share some discoveries I have made about sex and intimacy, and how that relates to my spirituality and identity as a feminist. I freely admit they might be a bit shocking.

Post divorce, I have had three ‘relationships’. Okay who am I kidding, I’ve had sex with three men. I suppose you could call them ‘relationships’. We talked. We texted. We fucked.

All three were painful in their own way. All three were pleasurable in their own way.

I’m redefining this area of my life just like I am redefining all the areas in my life. ‘Cernunnos’ points the way. This is one of my favorite cards in my Druid Craft Tarot deck, and I pull it often.

‘Cernunnos’ is the Lord of the Animals. “This card represents the raw power of the instincts and of Nature, and also the dangers of delusion and excess, but offers the potential for achieving both freedom and abundance.”

Like so much else in life, it’s all about the balance.