Feminism and Religion

Thrice-Born Athena, Pt. 2 by Barbara Ardinger

Note: This part of the story concerns what nearly everybody who has read the mythology knows about the Goddess of Wisdom. But what you’ve read in, say, Edith Hamilton or Robert Graves is the patriarchal version. What would the story be like if Athena told it herself? That’s what I imagined as I wrote her story. Read on to learn more about her Greek incarnation.

After our tribe was conquered by the warriors who lived across the seas, I wished to die, and I was indeed close to death when I was carried off by the bloody hero who fancied me. I longed to die every time he violated my body, every time he crushed my mind. But I was carried away alive, a living trophy for that warrior-king. I was secured in his warship as it sailed across the sea to his hard and stony land. Weak though I was, men still fought over me. Eventually I was claimed by their god-king Dyaus, whom you may know by his commoner name, Zeus. I was claimed as his prize of war, dragged up the stony mountain that came to be called Olympus, and flung into his harem until I should become strong enough to bear his weight upon me in mating. And still I longed to die.

Continue reading “Thrice-Born Athena, Pt. 2 by Barbara Ardinger”

Thrice-Born Athena: A Secret History (Part 1) by Barbara Ardinger

Note: Inspired by Mary Sharratt’s excellent post on February 13 about the heroine’s journey and by Elizabeth Cunningham’s beautiful novel The Wild Mother (who is Lilith), I took a dive into my archives and found this story about Athena, which I first wrote back in the late 1980s. That was about the time the Goddess rapped me on the head, so to speak, and said, “Pay attention.” The story is based on research I did at the time. I’ve now done some rewriting for FAR. Read on and hear the voice of Athena not as a player in the usual Greek myths but as a goddess of wisdom who is one-unto-herself.

My first birth was in the dark continent to the south of the Black Sea, always described by Homer (who invented much of what you take as true in his two long stories) as the wine-dark sea. That is, I was born in what is now Libya in northern Africa. I was born in a many-chambered palace beside a clear lake and received into the world by a tribe of strong women. I was the first-born child of Metis the Wise. You may have read that Metis was the daughter of Oceanus and a Titaness of great cunning; that’s what the “traditional wisdom” says about her. Not true. Metis was one-unto-herself, the queen of a great tribe, holder of the sacred serpents, and painter of wild scenes on tall red cliffs that exist into your day. I was the daughter of daughters from the beginning of the earth, whom some have called Amazons. I knew nothing of that name, however, for I was simply a much beloved child of a thousand thousand foremothers and a hundred living mothers.

Continue reading “Thrice-Born Athena: A Secret History (Part 1) by Barbara Ardinger”

Feminist Holy Week Vaginal Christology Daily Devotional — Part 2 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

See here to read Part I of the Devotional.

Friday:

Thought for the day:

The Roman authorities executed Jesus for sedition because he posed a threat to their hegemony: their wealth and their oppressive, imperial domination system of exploiting others for profit. Jesus spoke out against their injustice, and his message resonated with the 99%. People were beginning to listen; momentum was growing. So the Empire snuffed out that “Rebel Scum” in their most excruciating, punishing, degrading form of execution. According to the logic of imperial domination, Jesus’ death should have been a humiliating, final defeat.

Instead, his movement lived on and on, grew and grew. The symbol of Imperial execution — the cross — should have symbolized the wrongness, the lack of Divine sanction, the complete Divine rejection of Jesus’ ideas, according to Empire. Instead, the Jesus Movement reclaimed the cross from an Imperial symbol of shame and turned it into a symbol of victory. Paul, the feminist liberationist prophet most responsible for the survival and spread of the Jesus Movement, repeatedly wrote that the Jesus Movement follows Christ Crucified. Paul’s message seemed scandalous and confusing— lifting up a symbol of horror, death, and defeat as proof of victory? Why? How?

Red on Blue by Sara Wright

I dreamed her name

not long before light –

Pages fell out

of a story

written in blood.

Every spring

the words repeat

as mist rises

over the river.

Harsh white light

burns violet blue.

She changes everything

she touches

and changes nothing

at all.

An Untitled Poem for Unanswerable Questions by Eva Espinoza

Thinking about the discourse between spiritualists and victims of harm
Thinking about accountability and prison abolition
Thinking about how white supremacy tells us people are disposable
That they–that we, don’t matter
Thinking about “don’t speak ill of the dead”
Thinking about “honor your ancestors”
Thinking about what else is possible beyond prisons, cages, and borders
Thinking about abusers who refuse to take accountability
Thinking about where that leaves us when we die
Throat’s closed
Stories Untold
Thinking about how death is possible for the living
Thinking about how redemption is possible for the dead
Thinking about, what the fuck even is Salvation, anyway?
Thinking about binaries and how exhausting it is to think of these two things as mutually exclusive to each other
Thinking about how many of us are dissociating because cognitive dissonance is hell on earth
Thinking about the waging of war and how it lives in the body
Thinking about how rage turned inwards is depression
Thinking about the will to live and the will to die
Thinking about the sleep of death and the dreams that come from dying
Thinking about regret
Thinking about when an abuser becomes an ancestor
Thinking about where the guilt goes in the afterlife
Thinking about hell
Thinking about eternal suffering
Thinking about conversations of the reconciliation that is possible between an abusive ancestor and those they’ve abused
Thinking about who the hell said this shit was tied to the land of the living

This poem is a birthing after months of sitting in grief circles and bible studies and with the ancestors.This poem is short but holds so many wrestlings. It holds the wrestling between me and my daddy, now an ancestor, who I could never come out to while he walked this earth. It holds the waiting for my biological father’s passing to reconcile the ways in which he harmed me and my mother and my sister, the ways in which he abandoned and neglected us. It holds the wrestlings of iconizing Kobe Bryant after his death while also naming and recognizing him as the sexual predator he was. It holds the wrestlings of what happens in the afterlife, blending theologies of indigeneity and christianity.

Feminist Holy Week Vaginal Christology Devotional, Part 1 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Monday:

Thought for the day:

In Matthew 21, Jesus rides a mother donkey, her baby beside her, into Jerusalem in blatant condemnation and contrast to the militaristic entry of Roman military leaders and soldiers on war horses through a different gate. The point of Palm Sunday was activism: a political protest against war and the domination systems of oppression. The symbol Jesus chose for his protest was a mother and child. When the people shouted “Hosannah,” which means “save us,” they were asking to be liberated from the terrible economic and political oppression of imperial injustice. Jesus’ message of egalitarian Common Good and a kin-dom of JustPeace brought people hope and inspiration for a better future of mutual thriving and wellness.

Prayer:

Divine Source, You who Conceive and Birth and Nourish all Creation, open our hearts to the Way of Salvation that will bring liberation and mutual thriving to our Earth today. To honor Christ with Palm branches, may we protect Palm forest habitats for the orangutans who cry “Hosanna! Save us!” To honor the mother donkey and her baby, may we advocate for mothers everywhere, who are the most impoverished people in our society. May we always remember that You are Mother of All, ever ready to embrace us, cradle us, tend our wounds, nourish our spirits, and remind us that we, ourselves, are the Way of Salvation, growing over and over from your Dark Soil to your Light and back, nourished and nourishing, healed and healing, always giving away the Love we receive, and becoming our true, Divine selves through the power of healing Love.

I Heard my Own Siren Song, and Followed It (a poem) by Marie Cartier

They didn’t know I was a mermaid.

That I had a siren song.

That I could lure, and I could kill.

And that I would eventually

because – I was a mermaid.

When my father tried to throw my brother

down a flight of stairs, I jumped on him.

Six feet tall. I was ten years old.

But I had the tail. He had

nothing. Against. All. I. was.

I was a sea creature. I was kind,

but I was still a sea creature. So, when another

brother asked, who do you think you are?

I hit him hard so he would know

he had to listen. If I told him to hide, he had to hide. I

was a mermaid. I had a tail.

I wouldn’t be there forever.

Reflections on Miriam’s Cup by Rabbi Jill Hammer

For many years, I’ve had a Miriam’s Cup on my Passover seder table, next to the Cup of Elijah. Our cup of Elijah is a kiddush cup belonging to my great-grandfather Joseph Frankel and inscribed with his name. Our cup of Miriam was created by a ceramic artist and bears the word “Miriam” at its base. The Cup of Elijah, filled with wine, is an old tradition—a cup on the seder table for the prophet Elijah, who according to legend visits every Passover seder. The cup of Miriam, filled with water, is a custom only a few decades old, honoring the prophetess Miriam, who watched over the infant Moses, danced in celebration at the crossing of the Sea, and who according to a famous ancient tale had a well of water that followed her through the wilderness.

According to scholar Annette Boeckler, the custom of the Cup of Miriam began at a Shabbat table in Boston in 1989, made its way to the post-Sabbath Havdalah ceremony, and eventually found its way to the seder table. The custom was intended to honor the prophetess Miriam as well as the contributions of women to the Exodus and to Jewish life. Many of the heroes early in the book of Exodus are women, yet their stories are not part of the seder. The Miriam’s Cup at the seder is a way to give the participants an opportunity to include those stories. Continue reading “Reflections on Miriam’s Cup by Rabbi Jill Hammer”

Rabbit, The Feminine, and The Moon by Judith Shaw

Rabbit plays in tall grasses, dances in the moonlight, nibbles on nature’s greens, then freezes if danger is sensed. With a thump as a warning, rabbit hops away in a flash, disappearing down its rabbit hole.

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Lily B and Messages From the Beyond by Sara Wright

The night before last I had a dream that has stayed with me. My dreams rise out of my body to teach and to comfort me so I pay close attention. I had recently written tributes for two men, Lynn Rogers, bear biologist, and Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and plant physicist. Both of these men mentored me like a “father” each encouraged me to believe in myself, celebrated my original thinking and told me to trust my intuition. Writing about these mentors reminded me of my own father with whom I had a most difficult relationship…

I am talking to my mother (she has been dead for 13 years) about having found someone who could help me with math and stuff I can’t do because of dyslexia. In this conversation my mother is not a personal figure (when she appears as herself it usually means that I am going to face some difficulty – As an impersonal ‘great mother’ figure she is very helpful). She replies that my father wanted to teach me all these things but he just couldn’t. So many problems were in the way. I choke up weeping over this knowing (and my tears carry over into waking) because I know that “my mother” is speaking the truth. I feel such heartbreak for both my dad and for me. Neither of us had a chance… as I awaken from this dream in the middle of the night Lily b., my dove, is bellowing. He is reiterating the truth of the dream.

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