Feminism and Religion

Wood Frog Mother by Sara Wright

Dead Cedar
Week after week
heat, wind, sun,
shrinks vernal pools.
Ditches are dry.
Denizens
of wet forest,
masked gold leaves,
seek shallow depressions
fed by Spring.

One night the
heat wave breaks
I smell rain,
hear hoarse croaks.
I stand there
swallowing sound
inhaling fragrant air
Lamenting absence –
so many voices stolen
by drought.

Feeling Weary about US Politics by Carol P. Christ

Carol by Honegger cropped

Like many of you, I was anxious and angry during most of the Trump administration years. I watched MSNBC avidly, hoping against hope that a) he could be stopped or b) he would be impeached. Now that he is gone, it would be nice to be able to take a “breather” (I wasn’t breathing regularly during the Trump years), a break from thinking about US politics all the time, but sadly, the political situation in the United States continues to require attention.

President Biden has pleasantly surprised me with his progressive domestic agenda and his decision to remove troops from the heretofore endless war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, he has proposed an increase in the military budget. Dwight David Eisenhower, who warned of the increasing power of “the military-industrial complex” as he left office, must be turning over in his grave.

Most worrying of all is the fact that so many Americans voted for Donald Trump, believe that the election was stolen from him, and support white supremacy, while the Republican party refuses to deviate from the Trumpian worldview.

As if it could not be any worse, police killings of innocent black men by white officers and mass killings by young white men with easy access to automatic weapons are proliferating. Moreover, Republican-inspired voting restriction legislation is once again threatening the foundations of our democracy. Continue reading “Feeling Weary about US Politics by Carol P. Christ”

ctrl F: goddess, women, woman. Selected poems 2012-2021 by Elizabeth Cunningham

I began writing quarterly posts for FAR in July 2012. The poems below are selected from journals kept during these nine years. As indicated, I searched for the words goddess, women, woman. April is poetry month, but I also realize that right now I don’t have any essays in me. Sometime this year, I may embark on my first nonfiction project. In spite of and/or because of that new focus, this post is my last as a regular FAR contributor. I am grateful for having been a reader and writer in this community. Thank you and much love to you all.

Every Bird in the Mountains: Wisdom for this Climate Moment by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

I found a bird’s nest the other day. A perfect, round little nest, with five pale blue speckled eggs. I’ve been working for several years to figure out how to support the birds who share our yard, with bird feeders, leaf litter and better soil for caterpillars and worms to feed the baby birds, yellow LED outdoor lights, and native plantings to attract more insects and pollinators. I knew that songbird populations are struggling, but lately I’ve learned even more about their truly worrying decline, and how we can all create ‘homegrown natural parks’ to help. It’s been a deep source of joy and hope, through the long pandemic, to see the tufted titmice, dapper chickadees, and bright red cardinals at our feeders, and the soft gray juncos hopping about on the ground. When we moved here a few years ago, a bird’s nest appeared right above the floodlight on our deck, and we got to see and hear the wee fledglings that spring, as if they were welcoming us to our common home. We loved those baby birds, and I’ve often wondered whether they are now among the visitors that seem drawn to the window feeder whenever we start to play music.

Broken Mothers by Sara Wright

I awakened under clouds
feeling respite from fierce
heat in April that
forced maple, birch,
beech, and poplar
to bud and burst.

First we planted
Balsam seedlings;
He climbed birch
to saw off
dying trunks,
some broken
beyond recognition,
wreckage from
the ice storm
a winter holocaust
that stole my peace,
my trust in white,
deep restful sleep.

Biblical Poetry by Janet MaiKa’i Rudolph

This blogpost is about biblical verses and uncovering the magic and spirit behind its words. Why, you might ask, is this a project that belongs on a blog dedicated to feminism?

I believe it does because it helps us to strip away the many layers of patriarchy with its attempts to hide and/or change original teachings. Remember; these stories were originally oral wisdom teachings of the “folk.” They weren’t written down until the Babylonian exile, hundreds if not thousands of years removed from their origins. And who was doing the writing? Priests, scribes, and prophets, all with their own agenda. Even the earliest writings we have, the Dead Sea Scrolls, were still written in patriarchal times.

Finding the Antler, by Molly Remer

May you witness
a growing trust
in the guidance around you.
May you allow magic to find you
where you are.

Seven years ago, I did a drum-guided meditation in which I journeyed deep into the forest. On my head as I walked, antlers grew, curving above me. As I followed the sound of drums and the glimmer of firelight, I kept raising my hand to check to see if they were still there, firm beneath my hand. I reached the fire and met the Goddess there, she reached up and took the antlers off my head and cast them into the flames, where they twisted and glowed until they became a golden ring, which she removed and placed on my finger, antlers now wrapped around my index finger. In waking life, I scoured etsy and two years later located a bronze antler ring extremely similar to my vision, which I bought and placed on my own finger in the woods as a symbol of my earth based path, my priestess vows, and some kind of unspoken dedication, felt within but not able to be fully verbalized at the time.

On Tazria-Metzora and Covid: Saving Lives, Saving Worlds, and Saving the World by Ivy Helman

It is often said that every year when you read the same Torah passages, you are in a different place, spiritually and otherwise. Therefore, one will always be learning new meanings and discovering new insights from them. No more is that true than in this week’s Torah parshah Tazria-Metzora.

Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1- 15:33) is a double parshah containing a list of rules concerning ritual purity and impurity, mostly having to do with leprosy. The parshah begins with the requirement for women a certain number of days after childbirth to immerse in a mikvah as well as offer animals for sacrifice at the temple. Then, it commands the circumcision of a boy child at 8 days of age. The next three chapters discuss an extensive list of what has to be all possible encounters with leprosy, including the infection of a home itself. The parshah prescribes various interactions between lepers, homes with leprosy, and the kohenim. Mostly, the kohenim decide if the skin lesions people or houses have are leprosy, another skin disease or harmless. If diseased or if the lesions are inconclusive, the people and houses enter quarantine. The kohenim also consult on whether a leper or house is healed and how to go about atonement. For atonement, former lepers immerse in the mikvah and pay for the kohenim to offer specific sacrifices at the temple. Homes also undergo a type of ritual purification by the kohenim when they have been healed of leprosy. This double parshah ends with immersion requirements for emissions of semen and menstrual blood.

Historically, there are two considerations, which I have discussed in other posts, to address first. To begin with, there is the ancient world’s understanding of disease as punishment for sin. This sin can either be the sin of the diseased person or punishment from generations past. For more about how this cycle of sin, punishment, repentance and atonement work as well as my thoughts on it, see here.

C.G. Jung and the Heroine’s Journey by Sally Abbott

I was intrigued by the discussions of Jung and Jungian motifs, such as the sacred marriage, that sprang up in response to Mary Sharratt’s wonderful post “The Via Feminina: Revisioning the Heroine’s Journey,” partly based on Maureen Murdock’s book. Carol Christ pointed out the problematical nature of the whole notion of the sacred marriage, relying as it does on our stereotypes of the masculine and feminine.

Sara Wright reported that her sense of the dangers of Jungian thought led her to change her profession; she had once been a Jungian analyst. Barbara McHugh put forward a well-thought out and articulate version of the Heroine’s Journey, corrected for sexist thought.

The Way of the Mystic

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are coming out of a long pandemic winter and entering a new season of waxing light, hope, and growth. Yet these continue to be turbulent times. Even with the progress of the Covid vaccine, none of us truly knows when life will ever return to “normal.”

Like us today, the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the heroines of my new novel REVELATIONS, which will be published on April 27, lived in a time of pandemic and social upheaval, yet both women bore witness to the divine promise that ultimately all shall be well.

During a near-death experience, Julian received a series of divine visions and spent the next forty years unpacking them in her luminous theology of an unconditionally loving God who is both Mother and Father. Julian offered radical counsel to Margery Kempe, a failed businesswoman and mother of fourteen, who was haunted by her own visceral mystic experience. With Julian’s blessing, Margery walked away from a soul-destroying marriage and became a globe-trotting pilgrim-preacher and rabble rouser. Though these two women might seem like polar opposites—Julian, the enclosed anchoress, and free-roving Margery experiencing her visions in the full stream of worldly life—they complement each other. Together their lives and work form a Via Feminina, a distinctly female path to the divine.

The women mystics have always fascinated me. I identify very powerfully with Hildegard of Bingen, the heroine of my previous novel ILLUMINATIONS, as well as with Margery and Julian as spiritual women facing the roadblock of an institutional, male-dominated religion that side-lined them precisely because they were women. But instead of letting this beat them down, they found within their own hearts a vision of the divine that mirrored their female experience. I believe it’s no mere coincidence that both Hildegard and Julian dared to create a theology of the Feminine Divine, of God the Mother. All three women seized their power and their voice to write about their encounters with the sacred, preserving their revelations to inspire us today.

In our modern world, when many traditional religious institutions are crumbling, we can follow in these women’s footsteps and seek the divine—however we perceive the divine—within the sanctuary of our own hearts. This is the birthright no one can take from us, our eternal refuge. This is the Way of the Mystic.

Learn more about Margery and Julian as I discuss these mystics in a series of free virtual events.

My virtual tour kicks off with a very special Literature Lover’s event, sponsored by Valley Bookseller and Excelsior Bay Books in Minnesota. You can watch the video above. I am in conversation with acclaimed author, Elissa Elliot .

For a deep dive into Julian of Norwich’s spirituality, I am teaming up with Christine Valters Paintner of Abbey of the Arts to offer a Virtual Mini-Retreat on May 13, Julian’s Feast Day. You can learn more and register here.

To stretch body and mind in a creative virtual retreat that combines Yoga, women’s spirituality, and writing women back into history, please join me and Stephanie Renee dos Santos for SHEStories + Saraswati Flow on May 15 – 16.

REVELATIONS may be pre-ordered through any of the links below. As a midlist author, I am profoundly grateful for every single purchase.

PRE-ORDER AUDIOBOOK: Amazon / Audible | Kobo

Read an EXCERPT.

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 on April 27. Visit her website .