On the Religious Nature of Connection in Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, by Ivy Helman

For the past two months, I have been exploring the religious elements of Star Trek: Discovery.  Both seasons one and two have considerable religious elements.  Of course that depends on how one exactly defines religion as well as how one interprets the actions of the characters.  Season three is no different as the principle of connection becomes associated with religious rituals, behaviours, beliefs, and discussions.

By far, the most recognisably religious element of the season is the ritual bath that Adira participates in episode 4 in order to be able to commune (connect) with the symbiote.  The ritual bath occurs in the sacred caves of Mak’ala.  Adira, robed in white, enters the pool and spends considerable time learning to commune with the symbiote and its past hosts. After emerging from the pool of water, Adira is wrapped in a cloth that very much resembles a tallit.   

Continue reading “On the Religious Nature of Connection in Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, by Ivy Helman”

Embracing Darkness by Mary Sharratt

 

I have long struggled with winter. I grew in Minnesota where winters were long and brutally cold. I remember hauling myself through hip-deep snowdrifts on my walk to elementary school and that was in the suburbs! The North of England, where I lived for nearly twenty years, has a much milder climate. But being so far north, I was plunged into infernal darkness from Halloween to Candlemas. It started getting dark at 3:30 in the afternoon and by 4:00 it was pitch dark. Remember those horror movies where it’s dark ALL THE TIME?? That’s Lancashire in midwinter. I felt I was trapped inside some brooding gothic novel.  

Now that I’ve moved to the Silver Coast of Portugal, I get a lot more daylight in winter, but also storm winds and torrential rain. My Welsh pony was not impressed and her companion, a Lusitano gelding who came up from Southern Portugal, was so grumpy that he looked like he wanted to jump on the next horse trailer back to the Alentejo!

Yet no matter where I’ve lived geographically, I have always faced the same struggle. I find I just can’t get as much done in winter as I do in the summer. Winter’s short days and long nights seem to drain my energy and drive. While summer is expansive with so many sun-filled hours to fill, in winter everything seems to shrink to the size of a single candleflame. Every year I fought tooth and nail against that contraction. But winter always won.

This winter, curled up by the fireplace on a stormy night, I plunged into Katherine May’s highly recommended book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. In her book, she refers to winter not just as a season in the year, but any fallow or difficult period in our life when we must withdraw, lick our wounds, and replenish ourselves. Our personal winter might be an illness, a relationship break-up, the death of a loved one, a feeling of spiritual dryness, or a time of burnout when we just have to stop and rest.

In Nature, darkness and winter are absolutely necessary for life’s regeneration. May adds that our personal winters, though we would never seek them out, are likewise regenerating and ultimately healing if we can be present with them, as scary and painful as they seem, without seeing them as some personal failure we brought upon ourselves for not being strong enough to resist the natural cycles of death, dissolution, and fallowness.

We live in a culture deep in denial about winter and wintering, where we’re supposed to be “on” all the time, as if we existed in a perpetual summer, full of summer’s buzz, energy, and busy-ness. But if we try to doggedly maintain this level of intense activity during winter when all the elements, as well as our internal rhythms, are telling us to slow down and rest, we get ill, we get burn out, we get depressed.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter,” May reminds us. “They don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in summer. . . . They adapt.” She adds that once we stop fighting the winter, it can be a most blessed season of reflection and recuperation. In an age when even getting enough sleep and rest feels like a radical act, May teaches us to invite the winter in.

Artwork by Jessica Boehman

May’s book taught me the importance of welcoming the most wintery aspects of my own psyche, all the shadowy stuff I like to repress. Winter is a time of welcoming the shadows. No part of myself needs to be left out in the cold. Anger, doubt, sadness, and uncertainty are not flaws that need to be “fixed.” Just stay present with them in compassionate awareness.

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere finds ourselves nearly at the threshold of the Spring Equinox. Yet we are still deep in the collective winter of the Covid pandemic, a winter that’s dragged on for over a year. All of us are hitting the pandemic wall. How much more of this can we take? It’s not so easy to rest and regenerate if you’re a mother working remotely while simultaneously trying to homeschool your kids. The pandemic has hit women and girls especially hard, as they carry the brunt of domestic tasks. Girls’ schoolwork is suffering as they take on more and more housework during lockdown. Family violence rates are soaring across the world. In this pandemic winter we meet not only our personal shadows, but the horrors that were lurking in the collective that we can no longer afford to ignore.

If we go through a personal or a collective winter, we need a refuge. A mature spirituality that meets us where we are, that’s robust enough to carry us through the Dark Night of the Soul. Spiritual bypassing and trite tropes like “everything happens for a reason” have no place here. A good litmus test for mature spirituality is to see how spiritual spokespeople from this tradition have responded to the pandemic. Unfortunately, I’ve heard several variations of “God/dess is punishing us for climate change.” While climate change is real and undoubtedly the biggest crisis we face today, I don’t think this punitive imagining of the divine is a helpful or enlightening paradigm for anyone. Life under Covid is hard enough without being told we’re being punished for our sins.

Mature spirituality gives us the courage us look deep into the darkness without flinching. Without seeing it as evil or as punishment but as the deep, compelling, beautiful mystery that surrounds the divine. The fertile darkness. May we all find rest and regeneration here.

 

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the globe-trotting mystic and rabble-rouser, Margery Kempe, will be published in April 2021. Visit her website.

 

 

A Shared Bridge by Lou Hartmann and Diana


A fellow college classmate, Diana, and I wrote this poem together as we were inspired by the likes of Adrienne Rich and Sara Ahmed. We wanted to touch on the animosity between trans folk and cis women that often exists between them, and bridge our collective and often shared feelings of joy, rage and injustice into writing. We welcome you to walk the bridge with us. 

Pt. 1

What is a woman? A woman can’t satisfy.
Because if she’s not “woman” enough in one aspect or the other she’s not deserving of that title at all.
Gender is a societal construct so I wouldn’t really know how to define a woman.
For many, being a woman means that her brain is in between her legs but how do we persuade them that it’s fucking not?
I know a lot of women who aren’t born with the biology of what a woman is expected to be
I know a lot of women who don’t have breasts, who don’t carry typical reproductive organs within their systems.

Continue reading “A Shared Bridge by Lou Hartmann and Diana”

Wings by Sara Wright


Early in January I discovered a chickadee with a broken wing floundering in the snow. I rescued him, providing him with a safe haven in the house, hoping he might recover use of his wing. For the first couple of days we conversed at the edge of the mesh that covered the sides of his cage and he seemed pleased to be with me. I named him Blue.

On the third morning, a solitary chickadee chirped just behind me outside the window. I immediately suspected it was his mate because Blue became almost frantic jumping back and forth on the mesh that faced the window.

After that incident, things changed radically. Blue bit me hard whenever I changed his water. He tried to escape repeatedly. I knew that to let him go was to consign him to death because sub-zero temperatures were the norm for this time of year. I resisted. It took a few more days to face the truth. I could feel and sense it. I had to let him go although I knew he would die. Continue reading “Wings by Sara Wright”

What’s Done Is Really Done by Barbara Ardinger

This is an encore performance of a satire I wrote in November 2019, when I thought Trump’s sociopathic behavior was at its height. Little did I know. Little did we know. Only a year later, following the 2020 election, we watched him lie and deny, spread conspiracy theories, and finally encourage his true believers to invade the Capital and “stop the steal.” It’s good to see that President Biden is a normal person who knows what presidential behavior and work really are. A small example: right after the inauguration, we watched him signing executive orders. Did he use a Sharpie? No. Biden used (and still uses) a normal pen to sign his name. And he doesn’t wave an illegible signature at the TV cameras.

Two brief notes: In his novel Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka does not say the protagonist is turned into a cockroach. He’s an ungeheures Ungeziefer, i.e., a “monstrous vermin.” But if you want to see Trump as a roach, that’s fine. Note also that Trump’s answers are spoken by Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Dogberry, Messina’s police constable, is probably the stupidest character Shakespeare created. And so, here’s the encore. Enjoy! (And let’s squash that bug!) Continue reading “What’s Done Is Really Done by Barbara Ardinger”

Toadwise: A Tale for a Life Lover – Part II by Sara Wright

Read Part I here…

In the Americas I found more recent Indigenous mythology on the Toad as Goddess. Tlaltecuhtli is a Pre–Columbian (1200–1519) goddess belonging to the Mexica. Although Tlaltecuhtli’s name is masculine modern scholars interpret this toad figure as female because she is squatting giving birth. Some see her as crouching under the earth, mouth open waiting to devour the dead. Since the Aztec culture was a warring male dominated Patriarchal one I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the Earth Goddess/Toad was seen as masculine to the Mexica.

In Mesoamerica we find Toad widely represented in art, often with feline or other non-naturalistic attributes, including jaguar claws and fangs. These images can be regarded as versions of Tlaltecuhtli. In contemporary Mexico, as in Guatemala, and throughout South America toads play a role in myth, sorcery, shamanism, and in curing/healing. Continue reading “Toadwise: A Tale for a Life Lover – Part II by Sara Wright”

Toadwise: A Tale for a Life Lover – Part I by Sara Wright


Last night I was thinking about the giant western toad that is living in my garden when I had a peculiar thought: Write a story about the Toad and an Old Woman and call it A Tale for a Life Lover. At this very moment I heard my toad’s rasping guttural cry outside my window. I was so shocked I got up and went out on the porch, hoping to hear the call again, but the toad only spoke once. Afterwards, I wondered if I had imagined it.

When the giant western toad appeared in my yard last week I had been in a state bordering on despair over baffling health issues and the ravages of Climate Change. Maybe it is no longer possible for me to separate the two? After the visitation I sensed that the toad’s abrupt appearance meant something beyond the amazing fact that I had met a giant toad who apparently had been living here all along. Continue reading “Toadwise: A Tale for a Life Lover – Part I by Sara Wright”

Breathe with me by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir


Breathe with me.

I know. I know. I understand.
Breathe with me anyway.
It hurts. It’s scary. It’s horrible. It’s relentless. I know.
Just breathe.
Every time we breathe out, our bodies release things we do not want.
So breathe it out. All of it. Let it go.
Deep breath. However you prefer—mouth, nose—just breathe.
What do you need to let go?

For me right now, there’s rage.
All the people refusing the masks, refusing the vaccine, even friends of mine who have watched me suffer with post-COVID syndrome for almost a year, still blaming me somehow for my illness.
Breathe. Let it out. Don’t have to carry it anymore.
There’s fear, too — friends, family, fighting COVID, or taking dangerous, unnecessary risks.
Long, slow breaths. Release. Into the loving matrix of Creation-Life-Love. I can’t hold this anymore. I release it.

There’s grief. Loss. Suffering. Isolation. Pain. Oh, breathe, let the tears flow, let the breaths and the tears just be what they are.
Stress. So much stress. We’re all frayed, so far beyond our limits. Breathe it out. Breathe it out again. Deep breaths – make noise if you want. Moan.
She cradles us in breath, the Divine Womb. She is the Source of our breath, and She is always cradling us, always breathing with us.
Breathe again. Close your eyes. Let your Holy Spirit bathe you in its healing power.
But it doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t DO anything!
I know. But it is enough. Just let it be. Be breath breathing itself.
What if you deserve to let go?
What if you deserve to be cradled in healing Love?
What if you deserve just to be?

Breathe. It sometimes feels so nice. Breath in, breath out.
Your body is letting go of anything you do not want.
You can release it now. Breathe it out. It’s ok.
Anywhere you want to feel your breath is ok. Wherever you want it to go, just breathe it there, and then release.
There’s no way to do this wrong. It’s your breath. It’s your breathing. A gift your body has, a magical, powerful, simple, holy gift. Breathe however feels good and right to you.
No rush. Take your time. As long as you want. As often as you want.
What if you deserve compassion?
What if you deserve to be bathed in healing Love?
What if you deserve to rest in your breath?
Breathe, darling. Close your eyes if you like. With every breath, you are holy.

In my Methodist tradition, which focuses heavily on the Holy Spirit, we sing a breathing hymn I love. Here is my rewritten version:

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
fill me with Life anew,
restore my soul with ev’ry breath,
to do what Love wouldst do.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
so shall I rest, secure,
cradled in Love’s bright healing peace,
and held in compassion pure.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
till I am wholly thine,
till body, spirit, all of me,
glows with thy Fire divine.

Breathe on me, Breath of Love,
until my heart is free,
and I perceive my ev’ry breath
is thine Eternity.

—Edwin Hatch (1878), revised.

Our world is so frayed right now. We are all at the end of our rope. We feel the same way most new mothers feel in capitalist patriarchies, in which motherhood means financial strain (or poverty), isolation, anxiety, constant demands, an inability to meet basic physical and mental health needs, and no escape from continuous, relentless emotional and physical labor. Women are expected to embrace this level of self-sacrificial stress in motherhood, as part of our female slave role in capitalist patriarchy, which defines our unpaid, unvalued labor as a natural extension of our biological sex. The burden on women is higher than ever these days, with women and even girls taking the lion’s share of extra household duties so that boys and men can continue in their education and careers. Women are suffering 100% of job losses as well.

In times like these, I keep turning to my faith for comfort and strength. In my tradition, the Holy Spirit is the Divine Breath, the Source of Life, which animates all living things and all Creation as sacred. It comes originally from the Hebrew “ruach,” a feminine noun. So when I take time just to breathe, that is sacred time, allowing my true, divine self to feel its divinity (as Methodism’s founder John Wesley might say). I do not take breathing for granted. After my COVID experience, how could I ever take it for granted again? So, for me, breathing time is holy — “set apart” as a communion, a Eucharist of Grace: life-giving, healing, restorative, and liberative. Almost every night for the past eleven months, I have spent time lying in bed just breathing: feeling the breath of the trees behind me in the woods, allowing their wellness to enter me, breathing out to them whatever I want to let go. In breathing this way, I am able to understand bodily that my breath is Goddess. Goddess who is ever birthing Love and Liberation. The Divine Source of All, who is every justice, every healing, every restoration. My breath is fair economies and safe respected female bodies; it is just relationships and female thriving. This is my breath. This is the Source of the Healing that rebirths every death into Life. This is Goddess.

So, breathe with me, sisters. And brothers. She is here, and we are the ones who breathe her. What if we deserve to be bathed in Healing Love? She knows. She understands.

Just breathe.

 

Trelawney Grenfell-Muir teaches courses about Sex, Dating, Marriage, and Work in the Religion and Theological Studies Department at Merrimack College and about Cross Cultural Conflict in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A Senior Discussant at the Religion and the Practices of Peace Initiative at Harvard University, she holds an M.Div. from the Boston University School of Theology with a concentration in Religion and Conflict, and a Ph.D. in Conflict Studies and Religion with the University Professors Program at Boston University. She currently writes articles, book chapters, and liturgical resources about feminist, nature-based Christianity.

Grown Little Girl, Grow Little Girl by Chasity Jones Selenga


I have newly found myself a wife and in the throes of motherhood. In many feminist circles, I have encountered anti-family and anti-wifehood sentiments. The understanding is that to be a wife, and, to be a wife that chooses to start a family, is an oppressive position to occupy as well as the antithesis of the feminist movement. Though I am not typically a fan of tough physical, emotional, soulful labor, these two positions have been the highlights of my life so far.

My daughter embodies both my husband and me, physically. However, she is and will become her own person-soul. She is so young, but her soul is eternal, and has experienced eternity. I am here to help her navigate remembering who she is. She inhabits the intersection of Blackness, divinity, femininity, and infinity. Motherhood has greatly increased my capacity of appreciation for women and what women are capable of doing. Especially from the intersection of Blackness and woman-ness. From the capacity to create, labor, and deliver life to the task of raising Black children in a country that would have them annihilated, emotionally traumatized, and made to accept they are inferior.

Continue reading “Grown Little Girl, Grow Little Girl by Chasity Jones Selenga”

The largest protest in the world: India’s Farmers Protest by Anjeanette LeBoeuf


So much has happened since my last post. From the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the GameStop Investment, the military coup of Myanmar, the 2nd Impeachment Trial and Republican Acquittal of Donald Trump, a catastrophic Artic Freeze of Texas, and other states, and the upcoming “no holding back, tell all” from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But what I really want to focus on this month is on something that is struggling to maintain publicity and support despite its importance; The Farmer’s Protest/Strike in India.

Continue reading “The largest protest in the world: India’s Farmers Protest by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”