Feminism and Religion

REVELATIONS: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe

My new novel REVELATIONS is drawn from the lives of two medieval mystics who changed history—Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, two very different women whose paths converged and who, I believe, have much to teach us today.

Women’s spiritual experience is a theme that keeps coming up in my novels. Perhaps some of you have read my novel ILLUMINATIONS, about the visionary abbess, composer and polymath, Hildegard von Bingen.

As a spiritual person myself, I’ve always found it frustrating how women have been side-lined and marginalized in every established religion in the world. Yet from time out of mind, mystic and visionary women of all faith traditions have offered radical resistance. They have subverted institutional patriarchal religion from within and found their own direct path to the divine by plunging into the deep mysteries of the soul on a path of inner revelation. Julian of Norwich called God Mother and devoted her life to writing about the Motherhood of God. Similarly, Hildegard of Bingen wrote about her visions of the Feminine Divine. This isn’t a modern feminist interpretation. It’s right there in the original texts.

Like us today, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe lived in a time of pandemic and social upheaval, yet both women bore witness to the divine promise that ultimately all shall be well.

BFF – Or, The Delicate Dance of Female Friendship by Joyce Zonana

Like so many others, I learned this jingle, actually the opening of a lovely poem by Joseph Parry, during a brief stint in the Girl Scouts when I was nine or ten. I’m not sure I understood it then—what was wine, after all? what did it mean for it to “mellow and refine”?—but the words stayed with me, echoing unbidden through the years and shaping many of my choices.

Make new friends, but keep the old;

Those are silver, these are gold.

New-made friendships, like new wine,

Age will mellow and refine.

Like so many others, I learned this little jingle, actually the opening of a lovely poem by Joseph Parry, during a brief stint in the Girl Scouts when I was nine or ten. I’m not sure I understood it then—what was wine, after all? what did it mean for it to “mellow and refine”?—but the words stayed with me, echoing unbidden through the years and shaping many of my choices.

I’m sure it was thanks to these words that, three years ago, I found myself dancing at the wedding of my childhood best friend. Deb lives in Southern California; I live in New York. Yet I never had the slightest hesitation about saying “yes,” I’d attend. This was to be her second marriage, after a painfully failed first. For years she’d sworn she would never remarry; the wonderful man she’d been living with for two decades finally persuaded her. Clearly, a moment to celebrate. And although we’d missed all the other milestones in each other’s lives, I knew I had to be there for this one.

I’ve known Deb since we were seven; we’re now both in our seventies. For nearly forty years we had no contact—different cities, different lifestyles, different choices. But when Deb sought me out after Hurricane Katrina (I’d been living in New Orleans and somehow she knew that); when she came to see me in New York and we revisited our childhood haunts; when she took to phoning me regularly on Jewish holidays—I was irresistibly drawn back into this relationship that linked me not only with her but with my own self over time. (“For ’mid old friends, tried and true / Once more we our youth renew.”)

Continue reading “BFF – Or, The Delicate Dance of Female Friendship by Joyce Zonana”

Wren, Herald of Dawn by Judith Shaw

Wren, the first bird to sing at dawn, is known as the Herald of Dawn. It calls out its joy as each day begins.

One-In-A-Million by Marcia Mount Shoop

Today I am fully vaccinated. It’s been two weeks since I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The day after I got the vaccine was the day the New York Times headline read, “Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Paused After Rare Clotting Cases Emerge.” People told me not to worry, “it happens to only one in a million people.”

That “one-in-a-million” argument isn’t what calmed me down. The “one-in-a-million” odds had already struck once in our household over the pandemic when my husband was diagnosed with a rare kind of cancer. A one-in-a-million kind of cancer. And to top it off, it was his second cancer diagnosis during the pandemic. He turned 51 years old this past August and has spent most of the pandemic either waiting for treatment, receiving treatment, or in recovery from treatment. A lot of the year he has been and continues to be in considerable pain and discomfort.

“Finding The Mother Tree” by Sara Wright

Susan Simard received her PhD in Forest Science and is a research scientist who works primarily in the field. Part of her dissertation was published in the prestigious journal Nature. Currently she is a professor in the department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia where she is the director of The Mother Tree Project. She is designing forest renewal practices, investigating the ecological resilience of forests, and studying the importance of mycorrhizal networks during this time of climate change.

Susan’s research over the past 30 plus years has changed how many scientists perceive the relationship between trees, plants, and the soil. Her intuitive ideas about the importance of underground mycorrhizal networks inspired a whole new line of research that has overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems as a whole. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root systems of plants providing water and nutrients while the plant provides the fungus with carbohydrates. The formation of these networks is context dependent.

Myanmar’s Dangerous Military Coup by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

On February 1^st, a successful military coup took place in South Asia. The national military of Myanmar arrested top non-military officials and seized all power. While this February coup happened in South Asia, it could have happened on our very shores. Myanmar’s successful military coup d’état took place almost a month after the unsuccessful January 6^th attack on the US Capitol.

Sleeping Beauty: An ancient tale for these challenging times by Diane Perazzo

Fairy tales are intwined in our imagination and our spirituality. As Jane Yolan writes, one of the subtlest and yet most important functions of myth and fantasy is to “provide a framework or model for an individual’s belief system.” (1)

In the Reclaiming spiritual tradition, we often use fairy tales in healing and self development work. These stories act as warp and weft as we weave and spin complex ritual arcs and other events that take place at extended Witch Camp sessions. In Twelve Wild Swans, Starhawk points out that fairy stories are “more than just encouraging and inspiring. They are also templates for soul healing from Europe’s ancestral wise women and healers. When the ancient Earth-based cultures of Europe were destroyed, these stories remained.” (2)

How I Learned to Grow Wings by Marie Cartier

April 2021, Poem

Visibility is

this body opening against itself over and over… an existence moving through fibers was

the one thing I had. When was the time…breathe in? Breathe out.

My existence to myself was the most political act. You can’t erase me. I exist for myself.

I am thirteen. I stand next to my father and say, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again.” My mother stands by the sink, her hand reaches out and clutches its edge. My father sits and looks up

at me. He opens his mouth and closes it. I turn away, expecting his hand to land across my back.

I imagine me falling. But that doesn’t happen. Not that day.

That day I stood up. Said no, turned my back and walked away. I am a political act.

I am a body with a voice and I heard myself speaking for myself when no one else would, I said no.

No is the most beautiful word in the English language for a woman who learns its power.

The spell of no. I cast it when I was thirteen.

The gaze is

when they saw me. I started to erase myself, I was without fingers first. They kept finding me, so

I erased my hands. They kept seeing me, so I erased my arms. They kept locating me, so I erased my feet and my legs. But they kept finding me. I erased my secret places between my legs—what they most wanted. I erased my belly so I wouldn’t be seen eating, and my breasts so I would not be noticed as

a girl. But they found me anyway. I erased my neck and my head disappeared.

All that was left was my shoulders. I felt the weight of their gaze, and everything they wanted and took. And so, I lifted my shoulders, and I found my wings.

And I flew, and in flight, I let all of my parts come home.

A woman flying was the one thing they never thought to look for. But I found her. And she was me.

Touch the Earth by Chasity Jones

I was recently asked how I reconcile being a Christian with also being a critic of Christian theology, traditions, and culture. I am asked this often and my answer is always the same. I have not found reconciliation and might always be finding a way to reconcile this – an endless cycle of trying to make my heart fit into a structure in which centers whiteness and domination.

This time is different though. When I was asked my mind immediately returned to the Earth. Nature. Creation. How I have always longed for a plot of sacred Earth of my own in which I would continually give birth to and create life in various ways. How so far this dream has seemed from my brown fingertips. Never in my almost twenty-nine years, have I imagined I would have the opportunity to own my own land. However, in the last few years since I worked and lived on a farm and have been manifesting with lunar energy and ritual that one day I would harvest and care for a land of my own. A land that I would pass down to my children. A land in which we would find God. A land which would sustain us.

The Healing Spirit of Sacred Play by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Many years ago I participated in seasonal, Goddess-focused celebrations featuring handmade decorations, including some by enormously talented artists who attended. One year, our spring fete was graced with gorgeous paintings, intricately woven and colorful fabric art, sensuous sculptures, and exquisitely painted eggs. I brought a Peeps diorama depicting the reunion of Demeter and Persephone. (For anyone wondering, Peeps are brightly colored marshmallows in the shape of bunnies, chicks and other shapes and are sometimes made into dioramas for contests in schools and libraries.) The reason I brought the diorama was partly because, though my own artistic talent is somewhere between extremely questionable and non-existent, I thought people might enjoy a little bit of whimsy to honor spring’s exuberance. In addition, however, I was also going through a time of great personal and professional stress and my soul deeply needed to be creative with just a little outrageous fun.

To recap the story, Persephone had been abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Her mother, Demeter, made the Earth barren until the gods agreed to Persephone’s release. Demeter is the purple Peep and Persephone is yellow, and they are about to be reunited. Hades is pinkly enraged as he stands at the gateway to Hades. Gummi bears are romping while green humans dance in a circle. Snow is on the trees to show that winter is giving way to spring as Demeter returns abundance to the world.