Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee

FlorenceInEcstasy3DBook

 

Jessie Chaffee‘s Florence in Ecstasy is the most luminous debut novel I have read in a very long time. Imagine, if you will, a darker and more literary version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular spiritual seeker’s memoir, Eat Pray Love. This is not to diminish Gilbert’s memoir, which I loved, but Chaffee offers a much deeper dive into the dark night of a woman’s soul.

Hannah, a young American from Boston, goes to Florence, Italy to heal herself after her professional and personal life back home has disintegrated due to her anorexia. Surely, in life-loving Italy, where every meal is a celebration, Hannah can heal her disturbed relationship with food and her own body. Similarly, Eat Pray Love, with its luscious descriptions of Italian cuisine and Gilbert’s rejection of dieting in favor of buying a bigger pair of jeans, deals with body image issues and is often recommended reading for women and girls recovering from eating disorders.

But Chaffee’s novel, unlike Gilbert’s memoir, is no easy-going, feel-good read. Continue reading “Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee”

Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver

I don’t know if I could be a deep-sea welder.  I don’t know what the risks of lethal electrocution, broken limbs, or the bends would be.  I suspect it can be a dangerous occupation, like operating heavy equipment on good old dry land or fishing for crab or even collecting garbage from the neighbors’ driveways.  So too is this the case with window washing, paving, disposing of medical waste, brick making, driving a giant tanker truck, and more.  There are aspects of the world I know I take for granted, but the moment I stop to consider what those aspects might be, I am humbled and reminded of the privilege it is to philosophize and ponder the functions of religion in the shaping and making of society.

I have a newfound, barely there insight, both on my privilege and my need to be wiser, derived from the use of (hold your breath) a yardstick.  In what is either a desperate gambit for meaning or the fulfillment of a dream long deferred, I returned to school to take some art classes this fall.  I have my own homework, assignments, a syllabus, and, gasp, grades to worry about for the first time since 2003.  As I drove in the dark and rain for almost an hour this morning at 6:00 am, to a parking lot that sits a solid half hour away from the bus I need to take, which deposits me a fifteen minute walk from the building where I study, in order to make a 7:45 am start time, I wondered briefly what I was doing and why.  But, as soon as I took out my yardstick to measure and represent objects in perspective, I remembered why I undertook such an errand. Continue reading “Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver”

Shame and the Caregiving Relationship by Stephanie Arel

I was asked recently to present my work on shame and guilt for a documentary about the experience of being in a caregiving relationship. Initially, I felt concerned. My conceptualization of the idea of caregiving circulated around 1) aspects of parenthood and 2) the inevitable life situation of witnessing a parent’s death. I have no experience with either of these. I expressed my concern to the producer and one of the cameramen as we discussed the protocol for the shoot. They suggested I try to tell stories. This perplexed me a little further. Then, in order to offer me a context, they posed questions about times I might have cared for people in the past. Their inquiry uncovered a large range of possible, personal caregiving experiences upon which I could draw. For me, these include experiences involving my in-laws, my aunt’s dying of cancer when I was a child, and, most currently, my tending to a friend who had a massive stroke at the brain stem at the age of 40.

What struck me most during the conversation was the way that I eschewed being called a “caregiver.” The cameraman noted that this was not an unusual phenomenon. Apparently, people consider the word “caregiver” somehow stigmatizing and resist its use. AARP has tried to come up with an alternative term but has not been successful. (As an aside, AARP’s website has useful resources for the caregiver.) The stigma undulating beneath the undertaking of caregiving aligns it with the experience of shame. Continue reading “Shame and the Caregiving Relationship by Stephanie Arel”

SHEELA-NA-GIG by Carol P. Christ

On a trip to Ireland several years ago, I was fortunate to have been able to see the Sheela-na-gigs in the National Museum of Dublin.  Two of these Sheelas including the one removed from the Seir Kieran Church of County Offaly, pictured below, are currently on display.  They stand at the doorway of a room dedicated to items from the medieval period and easily missed.  As there was little interest in them and they are not in cases, I was able to silently commune without interruption.

Continue reading “SHEELA-NA-GIG by Carol P. Christ”

Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger

Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new dystopia. It’s very sad and very scary.

I’ve recently reread three novels that I think may be both prophetic and inspiring. I’m hoping that if you read them, too, you’ll inspired by their brave heras to keep on resisting. The novels are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1996) by Sheri S. Tepper, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy, and The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk.

The woman who is on the edge of time is Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a Mexican-American who lives in a New York barrio and has a life so dreadful that even as Piercy describes the poverty and the abuse in exquisite detail, I can’t really see it…though I bet any homeless person who lives on or under a freeway overpass could add more horrific details. Connie’s father beat her, two of her three husbands beat her, her daughter’s pimp beats her. Her brother has anglicized himself by changing his name from Luis to Lewis. Her third husband was a blind black musician named Claud; it was while she was deep in mourning (and withdrawal) that she struck out at her daughter and injured her, which led to her first imprisonment (Lewis signed the committal forms) in an insane asylum that is immeasurably worse than, say, Dotheboys Hall in Oliver Twist. The bureaucrats who run the asylums have zero interest in their patients. If a patient complains of a burnt back (the pimp knocked Connie into a hot stove) or a headache, that patient is accused of making a “medical diagnosis.” The favored treatment? Huge doses of Thorazine, which has terrible side-effects. Connie finds herself “stymied, trapped, and drugged with Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.”

Continue reading “Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger”

Fostering Conversation and Connection in Community by Katie M. Deaver

I recently began a new job as the Associate Director of Admissions for the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, one of the seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.   This week was orientation for our new and returning students and much of the time has been focused on getting to know one another as well as getting to know the corner of Chicago in which we are located.  There have been so many life giving conversations as well as so many questions!

Our mornings featured speakers who helped us to engage one another in conversation as well as to start thinking about the unique reality of our place within not only the LSTC community but also within the rest of the Chicago community and the larger world.  Throughout these presentations  and getting to know you activities my thoughts continued to be pulled back to the question of how to have life-giving conversations in a time when so many of us feel emotionally and spiritually drained by the world around us.

Continue reading “Fostering Conversation and Connection in Community by Katie M. Deaver”

Embodying Gaia by Christy Sim

Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote a classic text: “Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.” Ever since I laid eyes on this amazing book and was convinced of the genius Ruether offered within these pages, I adored images of Gaia.

The great goddess is usually pictured holding the world as her womb, a loving representation of compassionately pulling all the hurt and agony to her abdomen for healing.

Ruether says in “Classical Western cultural traditions” of which “Christianity is a major expression,” we “have justified and sacralized” notions of God and domination (3). Such ideas teach us that domination is “the ‘natural order'” and “the will of God” for the “male monotheistic God” and his followers (3).

But Gaia is so much more and challenges these patriarchical messages in today’s culture. To imagine the divine with this motherly image helps with “ecological healing” (as Ruether says), and, being able to picture a “personified being” in the feminine (4). Gaia is truly special.

Continue reading “Embodying Gaia by Christy Sim”

Musings On My Recent Road Trip by Esther Nelson

I love a road trip.  It’s exciting to get behind the wheel of a car, get out on the highway (or bi-way), and just go.  The road seems to stretch out forever in front of me, full of possibilities, adventure, and fun.  Again, this summer I drove two thirds of the way across the United States from Virginia to New Mexico and back again.  I varied my route because why not?  The country is vast and diverse.  I want to see as much of it as I can.  The broad, open, colorful skies of Texas and New Mexico.  The wheat fields in Kansas.  The green, rolling hills of Kentucky and Tennessee.  On this particular trip back to Virginia, though, one of the sights disturbed me deeply.

The second day of my journey eastward, I drove from Amarillo, Texas, to Springfield, Missouri.  All along the panhandle of Texas and into Oklahoma, I encountered feedlots.  These are places where cattle live for several months in order to fatten up before slaughter.  The animals are fed grain (mainly corn), growth hormones, and antibiotics.  They live in crowded spaces and in the feedlots I saw, the cattle had difficulty walking due to the layers of muck, mire, and manure all over the ground.  I could smell a feedlot long before I saw one.  The stench nauseated me.

Continue reading “Musings On My Recent Road Trip by Esther Nelson”

Mary Daly: Can I Love the Luddite and Deplore the Transphobe? by Dirk von der Horst

David’s Loves, Jonathan’s Laments by Dirk von der Horst

Mary Daly was one of the most prescient voices of her time with regard to environmental disaster.

Daly was also an explicitly transphobic thinker.

These two facts are deeply related.

What links these two directions in her thought is a radically anti-interventionist ethic.  Daly repeatedly shows how the patriarchal impulse to control everything in the world not only destroys womens’ lives but is destroying the living, natural world.  She describes boundary violation as one of the key elements of control, and her concern for the ability of nature to be on its own terms extends to such unconscious phenomena as comets.  In Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future, she laments scientists “harpooning a comet, just to see what’s inside,” revealing the extent of her respect for the integrity of natural processes. (3)

In contrast to the technological use of science to bend nature to human purposes, Daly advocates participation in Be-ing.  Be-ing is a natural process of unconstrained movement, in which various Selves and Elemental forces unfold.  In an unalienated state of participation in Be-ing, connection is genuine and unforced, and the relations that emerge in this process further spur the development and creativity of a natural unfolding process.  Among the many words Daly reclaims and plays with, her use of “Wild” describes women’s participation in Be-ing, and it especially brings out a sense of uncontrolled creativity.

Continue reading “Mary Daly: Can I Love the Luddite and Deplore the Transphobe? by Dirk von der Horst”

Notes from A Goddess Pilgrimage by Joyce Zonana

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The solar eclipse has had me sensing deep alignment with earth, sea, and sky, with my sisters and brothers and Self. This, then, from my 1995 journal of my first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete with Carol Christ, a trip still engraved in my heart:

June 3  – Yesterday, anointing us with rose, lavender, or olive oil, Jana said, “Your journey has begun.” But for me it is this morning, with the purchase of this journal at the biblio on the square across from the hotel, where I sit now in the lobby, traffic noise outside, our group gathering, preparing for our journey . . . happy to be here . . .

Bleeding at the home of the Panagia, the all holy, the sacred mother, sacred myrtle, ancient tree of Aphrodite, Mary, black-bent nuns: we tie ribbons to the tree, sing, “all manner of things shall be well. Blessed be, walk in beauty.” And I am utterly in tears as I walk on the grounds of this ancient place, the birds singing everywhere, yet there is quiet, stillness, an ancient peace . . . A pilgrimage, a shrine, a very holy place.

Continue reading “Notes from A Goddess Pilgrimage by Joyce Zonana”