Beth Bartlett – Page 2 – Feminism and Religion

I went to the lake this morning . . . by Beth Bartlett

I went to the lake this morning, seeking the peace, sustenance, and perspective it so often provides. I had been particularly distressed and distraught the day before after watching the documentary on Christian Nationalism, “Bad Faith.” It was chilling to say the least. Among other things, the film demonstrates the longevity of Christian Nationalism in this country, dating back at least to the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865. However, the central theme of the documentary is the staggering influence of conservative political operative Paul Weyrich, who orchestrated the merger of conservative Evangelical Christians with the Republican Party in the 1980s. He founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, the Heritage Foundation which authored Project 2025, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Council for National Policy – all of which seek to undermine democracy in order to bring about what these organizations and their followers call a “Christian nation,” by force if necessary. But as former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt states in the film, there is nothing “Christian” about this movement. It is pure nationalism, a striving for power requiring the dismantling of the institutions of democratic government as we know them. These extremist Republican strategists found a powerful base of voters by tapping into Evangelical Christians and manipulating the messages they received to fill them with fear, and found just the puppet they needed in the charismatic and amoral figure of Donald Trump. As we’ve seen in recent years, they have been quite successful in the destruction of government. After filling the Supreme Court with their chosen nominees during Trump’s first term, getting Christian Nationalist Mike Johnson installed as Speaker of the House, and getting Trump elected a second time despite the January 6^th insurrection, or perhaps because of it, they are now successfully dismantling or otherwise destroying the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Defense, Agriculture, Justice and more along with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Regulatory Agency. . . the list goes on. It’s all part of the plan to fulfill the “Seven Mountain Mandate” of dominionism[i], which seeks to impose its beliefs in seven spheres of influence: religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. As one of the Christian Nationalists interviewed in the film proudly said, “It’s the Christian Taliban.”

Lessons from a Tragedy by Beth Bartlett

It’s been over a week now since I first heard the news on MPR that four people had been shot in their homes near a golf course in Brooklyn Park where my son once lived. My first thought was that I was glad my son was no longer living there. A little while later I learned that this was not a random act of violence, but rather political violence targeting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses. Gradually the details came in. The lawmakers were Democratic lawmakers, former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and State Senator John Hoffman and their spouses. And then came the tragic news that Hortman and her husband had been killed. As I drove to pick up a friend to attend the “No Kings” protest downtown, I listened to the news reports of warnings not to attend the protests out of an abundance of caution, with the shooter still at large, as well as the voices of protest leaders saying the tragic events of the morning only strengthened their resolve. In the first few moments of the protest, we observed a moment of silence for Hortman and her husband, and for the recovery of Hoffman and his wife. The entire rally felt like a strange mix of grief and rebellious revelry.

As the identification and eventual arrest of the suspected shooter became known, the tragic events took on an even more ominous tone. The suspect, Vance Boelter, is a far-right Christian nationalist extremist who had preached against abortion and gay rights. He was schooled in his religious beliefs at the Christ for Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas[i] and was aligned with a charismatic Christian movement whose leaders, in the words of The Atlantic columnist Stephanie McCrummen, “speak of spiritual warfare, an army of God, and demon-possessed politicians.”[ii]

Of Waterfalls and Wonder by Beth Bartlett

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder . . . . If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life . . . .”[i] – Rachel Carson

When I flipped my wall calendar on May 1^st, the accompanying photo was of a waterfall. My two-year-old grandson noticed it immediately, and said “waterfall!” I asked him if wanted to go see waterfalls, and ever since then we’ve been hiking local trails along rivers and streams in search of waterfalls. Fortunately, we live in a city and surrounding area with a wealth of waterfalls, many within a few minutes of our home. Each one is unique and changes with the volume of water as it varies from day to day.

I was lucky enough to be raised by parents with a love of waterfalls, so they were a staple of my childhood. We lived near waterfalls on the Cuyahoga River, where we would sometimes go for picnics and hikes, and our family vacations when I was young were often to visit waterfalls – Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite, Tahquamenon Falls in the UP of Michigan, and of course, Niagara Falls.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Beth Barlett

Hope is the thing with feathers . . .
Emily Dickinson

I awoke this morning to bird song, and for a moment I was lifted beyond the despair that has caught me in its grip — despair for the country, for the earth, for loved ones whose lives are increasingly tossed into the chaos, for the future The disappearance of persons into labyrinths of prisons in this country, Guantanamo, and the tortuous CECOT prison complex in El Salvador has broken what was left of my spirit. Then this morning I heard a report that the State Department has changed what it considers to be human rights abuses in order to align with recent Executive Orders, deleting critiques of such practices as retaining political prisoners without due process of law, restrictions on free and fair elections, violence against LGBTQ persons, threats against people with disabilities, restrictions on political participation, coercive medical or psychological practices, and extensive gender-based violence. Ostensibly these changes are to lift restrictions on sanctions toward other countries, but I fear they portend clearing the way for such abuses in the US as well.

My heart is heavy in ways I have not previously known, so I am grateful for that brief moment of delight in the early morning. Later in the day, I found myself wondering whether those who suffered and died in concentration camps, whose despair certainly was beyond comparison with my own, found any solace in the sight and sound of birds who flew freely over the walls of the camps in ways they could not. The daughter of survivors of Auschwitz, Toby Saltzman, recalled that her mother, who often suffered bouts of despair over the Holocaust, found her spirits lifted by the songs of birds. When Toby later visited Auschwitz, she was greeted by flocks of birds. Upon her return, she reflected, “I left Auschwitz feeling a surge of triumph that my parents survived, and gratitude to the birds that gave my mother spiritual sustenance and hope.” We are sorely in need of such sustenance in these times.

Uprising! by Beth Bartlett

“ . . . the uprising of [our] nature is but the effort to give to [our] whole being the opportunity to expand into all [our] essential nobility.” – Sarah Grimké [i]

It wasn’t the first time I had stood in protest on that street corner. I’m sure it won’t be the last. But the gathered crowd was by far the largest I’d been a part of there, covering not just the plaza on the western corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street, but all the other corners as well, and up and down the sidewalks for half a block. We were a motley crew, from young people perhaps at their first protest to the many well-seasoned grey-haired. Though I met a few indigenous friends there, I was struck by the overwhelming perceived whiteness of the crowd. I imagine Black and Brown people were more reluctant to join a street protest where they might be targeted. Indeed, on my way home I heard a report that the number of “driving while Black and Brown” traffic stops has increased in recent days.

Standing in the wet snow, chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” and “What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now!,” the atmosphere was more of a party than of a wake.[ii] Yet, when the chants began, I found myself near tears, wanting to sob rather than shout. As some report seeing their lives flash before their eyes when facing imminent death, I saw my protest life flashing before my eyes – all the anti-war marches – from Vietnam to Iraq to the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, the marches for the ERA, the Take Back the Night marches, the MMIW marches, the Standing Rock and Line 3 protests, the Women’s Marches, the march for science, the vigils after school shootings and nightclub shootings and the murder of George Floyd, the rallies to protect trans rights, . . . the list goes on and on. And I felt like weeping, for all these efforts to bring peace and justice and equality to this land were being trampled on and were under threat of being destroyed.

The Need for Roots: Mutual Aid by Beth Bartlett

In those first few days after the holidays, when the togetherness, warmth, and happy times with family and friends came to an abrupt end, a song my son used to sing as a small child kept running through my mind:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year.
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you all through the year..

The simple glee of my 21-month-old grandson finding ways to scoot and slide down the small icy slope in our backyard was enough to keep the grief over the loss of my sister and my recent loss of my dearest friend at bay. But in the days after their departure, as I spent time with my friend’s family planning her memorial gathering and visited another dear friend who has chosen to enter hospice in her final days of a terminal illness, coupled with the hooded ogre of the approaching Project 2025, saving Christmas cheer has had its challenges.

But my son found a way. He and his wife decided they didn’t want the precious times to end, and within a week had decided to pull up stakes from their home 150 miles away, found and signed on to buy a house just five minutes from our home so that the precious moments could continue.

Into the Light by Beth Bartlett

I looked for my friend, Pamela’s email the morning after she died. Every morning I have looked forward to her email from the day before — the last one sent at 4:37 on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. Did she ever see my response sent at 6 AM the next morning – my wish for her to know joy this Thanksgiving, my sending much love? The bulk of it was full of mundanities. How differently might I have written it had I known it would be the last she would see? Our ongoing call and response email conversation — now without response, forever without response.

Ours was a friendship of words — words in the cards she has given me over the years, in her detailed responses to my blog posts, in the thousands of emails passed between us over several years. I’ve saved them all. They were too precious ever to delete. How we both loved words — their poetry, their capacity to communicate, convey, confound, console, comfort. I eagerly anticipated her words every day. For years I have entrusted my daily thoughts, worries, joys, activities, hopes, and the occasional dream to her tender care, always knowing her response would be a mirror, reflecting me back to myself, she reflecting on all I had written – giving witness and testimony, always with the deepest of care and affirmation. As Adrienne Rich wrote in the poem we both loved — “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” – I have never seen/my own forces so taken up and shared/and given back. Yes, this – the immensity, the intensity, the profound reciprocity of our sharing.

Thanksgiving by Beth Bartlett

When I offered to write the FAR post for Thanksgiving a month ago, I had no idea how difficult I would find that task to be. I suppose I had a different vision of what these days would be like. I had no idea how heartsick and wordless I would become in the wake of a second and even more bizarre and dangerous Trump presidency. It hardly feels like a time for celebrating a national holiday.

Thanksgiving in the United States and the colonies before has gone through several iterations – from the mythologized feast of the Puritan colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts with the indigenous Wampanoag following the successful corn harvest – corn the Wampanoag had taught the Puritans how to plant after half of them had starved to death the previous winter; to George Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation giving thanks for the successful ratification of the US Constitution; to Abraham Lincoln in 1863 acceding to Sarah Josepha Hale’s 36-year quest to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday — “to heal the wounds of the nation.” Goddess knows we could use that now, but it seems farther out of reach than ever.

Lesser known is the proclamation of a day of thanksgiving by the Massachusetts Bay Company to celebrate their defeat of the Pequot nation following the Pequot Wars of 1636-1638 in which most of the Pequot peoples were killed or enslaved, giving rise to many indigenous peoples observing Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning.

Mourning by Beth Bartlett

Grief is the experiencing . . . Mourning is the process,
when we take the grief we have on the inside and express it outside ourselves –
writing, planting, burying, burning, rising up
ceremony, ritual, community[i]

A glimpse of our cottage as I drove away.

“As long as I stayed there, I could keep you with me. . . .” Those words kept repeating in my mind throughout my long drive home from my sister, Jeannie’s, “Celebration of Life” service. I’d stopped midway on my thousand-mile journey at the cabin our family has shared for sixty years. There I could still feel her presence — on the hillside where we so often sat with our morning cups of tea, or watching the sunset, or chatting away the afternoon; on the dock where we’d lie in the sun or sit late at night and watch the stars come out, or cuddle up in blankets on windy, fall days; in the circle of couches and chairs where we played telephone Pictionary, charades, and CatchPhrase; in the kitchen where we’d cooked and eaten and played card games together; in the bedroom we often shared with a dog between our beds; the road where we’d go for family walks – eight, ten, twelve of us all together, and always two, three, or four dogs; even the driveway where we’d greet and hold each other with great gladness after months of separation, and where we’d hug and say goodbye, and then hug once more because in the back of our minds we’d be wondering if this was the last time. . . .

The Purpose of Women by Beth Bartlett

12^th century theologian Thomas Aquinas didn’t think much of women. He’d known less than a handful during his lifetime – his mother, who sent him off to a Benedictine monastery when he was five, as was the custom at the time, and later abducted and imprisoned him, with the help of her other sons, seeking to “rescue” him from his choice of becoming a Dominican priest; his two sisters who were sent to him while imprisoned to dissuade him from his choice; and the prostitute his brothers sent into his prison cell to try to tempt him to sin and break his vows – unsuccessfully. So perhaps it is no wonder that Question 92 of his Summa Theologica asks, “Should woman have been made in the original creation?” Though more likely his question was prompted by the milieu of misogyny in which he was raised and lived, having been educated in the theological tradition of Augustine who believed women to be the “lesser” sex and necessarily subject to men, and highly schooled in and known for reviving the thought of Aristotle, who said of women, “a woman is a misbegotten man.”[i]