Tag: Carol P. Christ

My Body, My Self by Carol P. Christ

The other night I was invited out by a new friend to meet a group of his friends. It was a lovely gathering, and I felt welcomed. As we hugged good night outside the restaurant, one of the women commented, “Wow you really are tall.” Without missing a beat, I responded, “Yes it has been the bane of my life.” As the words tumbled out of my mouth I was aware that I spoke them dispassionately, not as is usual with a catch in my throat.

Don’t get me wrong about this. I don’t go around hating myself or my body. I know I am striking. I know I stand out in a crowd. I believe I am beautiful even as I age. Still, it is difficult to be singled out as different—especially when you are just going about your business. Moreover, comments about a woman’s height are never neutral: women who are taller than men challenge gender norms by our sheer physical being. Part of what is being said is almost always: you shouldn’t be so tall.

One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn’t the same. Continue reading “My Body, My Self by Carol P. Christ”

Kassiani’s Song: Woman at the Center of the Easter Drama by Carol P. Christ

Today I am reposting the song and story of Kassiani, the Byzantine composer, poet, and hymnographer, who is not well-known to western feminists or in western history in general. In Christian Orthodox tradition, Kassiani’s most famous song will be sung this week on Easter Tuesday night or very early Easter Wednesday morning, placing a woman’s love for Jesus at the heart of the Easter drama.

For many this song is the high point of Easter week.

Kassiani, also known as St. Kassia, was a Greek woman born into a wealthy family in Constantinople (now Istanbul) about 805 to 810 AD. According to three historians of the time, she was intelligent and beautiful and selected as a potential bride for the Emperor Theophilos. The chroniclers state that the Theophilos approached her and said: “Through woman, the worst,” referring to the sin of Eve. Clever Kassiani responded, “Through woman, the best,” referring to the birth of the Savior through Mary.

Apparently unable to accept being put in his place by a woman, Theophilos chose another bride. Perhaps relieved, Kassiani founded a monastery in Constantinople becoming its first abbess. She was an outspoken theological advocate of icons during the iconoclastic crisis (for which she was flogged). One of only two women to publish under her own name during the Byzantine Middle Ages, Kassiani wrote both poetry and hymns. Up to 50 of her hymns are known today, with 23 of them being part of the Greek Orthodox liturgy. Continue reading “Kassiani’s Song: Woman at the Center of the Easter Drama by Carol P. Christ”

The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ

Last week, In the Room of Undressing where women strip themselves to the bone, my great-great-grandmothers on my father’s side spoke in me. I had been afraid they would judge me for not being a wife and mother like they were, but they did not.

The story continues with my great-great-grandmothers on my mother’s side.

Ingrid Mattsdottor, born 1829, Överhogdal, Jämtlands Län, Sweden, died 1918, Kansas City, Missouri, proprietor of a boarding house, mother of five daughters:

I was the oldest of eight children. Our father died when I was eleven. At sixteen I was sent to work as a servant in a village far from home. I stayed for six years. After that, I worked for two years on a farm in our village. I was twenty-nine, and wondering if I would be an old maid, when Olof and I married. Our five daughters came quickly. I knew a lot more about work and children he did, so I took charge. When the crops failed all over Sweden for two years running, I said enough was enough. As soon as our last daughter was born, I sold the farm, and we left for America.

Iowa was worse than Sweden. Our little Carin died the first year. Olof gave Ingrid to a wealthy Swedish couple without so much as a word to me. He kept talking about going back to Sweden. One day he took the money I set aside and bought his ticket.

By the time he came back for us, Anna, Sarah, Belle, and I had moved to Kansas City. I was running a boarding house. I told Olof that we had no intention of going back to Sweden with him. When Anna married, instead of moving out, she brought her husband and his children to live with us. Belle became quite the business woman and took over my role as provider. Sarah and her family were always close by.

I worked as hard as any man and Belle did too. “Far better off on our own,” we would often say. We are proud to have another strong woman in our family. I am sorry you didn’t get to meet Belle. You would have liked her.

Continue reading “The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ”

The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ

Over the past year or so I have been reciting my mother line, seven generations back, as a mantra of gratitude that helps me sleep at night. Sometimes I also name my sixteen great-great-grandparents, though I often fall asleep before finishing.

I have gained courage from the strength of their lives, but I never wondered what my eight great-great grandmothers would think of me. My life feels so different from theirs. Perhaps I feared they would judge me and my life.

This weekend, while re-reading Woman and Nature, I followed the narrator through a Passage to the Room of Dressing:

Where the women are not close. Where the women keep themselves at a distance.  . . . where the women tell each other that they are happy.  . . . The room where the daughter denies she is anything like her mother. (156)

Continue reading “The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ”

“Calling All Women” to Save the Earth, signed and shared by Carol P. Christ

I contend therefore that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advanced investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Wangari Maathai

I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. Greta Thunberg

We are calling all women and our allies to come together to save the earth that sustains us all. Is it any wonder that from Rachel Carson to Wangari Maathai to the emerging young leader Greta Thunberg, women have been in the forefront of environmental movements for a century? As daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, we have long cared and advocated for the most vulnerable among us, the very young, the very old, the disabled, those who are the first to suffer the consequences of climate catastrophe and the many kinds of pollution that are poisoning the earth we share.

As cooks, gardeners, and small farmers providing sustenance for our families throughout the world, we speak for the soil and the water, the air and the crops that feed us. As Congresswomen, diplomats, lawyers, doctors, CEOs, artists and scientists we are calling for fair and equitable public policies that address the crises we are facing together. As those who create homes and maintain households, we are speaking out for our first and only home, the planet earth we share.

Today as never before we are witnessing the destruction of the intricate and delicate balance, the miraculous conditions on earth on which all life depends. At this moment as a drastically changing climate and a deluge of poisonous substances, from plastic to coal to pesticides threaten the habitats of living creatures world wide, we are confronted by unprecedented loss of species, what some are calling “the sixth extinction,” a tragic loss reflected in the epidemic of disease in our families and communities.

Like indigenous communities and people of color, because women are so often marginalized, as outsiders we have a crucial perspective including valuable insights into what has caused the frightening and destructive events we are witnessing. We see a world too often governed by ruthless attempts to dominate and win, placing profit above every other value, framed by a world view that describes nature as inferior, lacking in intelligence or the inviolable integrity that all living beings possess. In response we call for an ethic of peaceful cooperation with nature and between nations.

Faced with the consequences of heedless, ignorant and ultimately violent policies that threaten our lives and all we love, wild fires burning our forests and homes, floods and mudslides destroying our towns, fierce storms battering our coastline, lakes and rivers becoming too toxic to drink, as our oceans and the fish that swim in them are choked with plastic, as our air becomes heavy with particles that threaten human health, we are calling for women to unite in an effort to recognize and respond to the failures of political, economic and moral vision behind these crises.

As nurses, teachers, waitresses, secretaries, wives, partners, those who respect and nurture life, we understand we are all dependent on each other and every other living being on earth. And we know too that together we have the creative vision to stop the advance of climate change and the sixth extinction, to put an end to the poisoning of our earth, to build societies that, taking inspiration from indigenous cultures, respect nature’s rights and learn from nature’s wisdom. In this light we urge you now to speak out, organize, rally, protest and step up in every way you can to protect the future of life on earth.

Susan Griffin, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Alice Waters, Vijaya Nagarajan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Deirdre English, Ayelet Waldman, Jane Hirshfield, Arlie Hochschild, Joanna Macy, Jodie Evans, Medea Benjamin, Claire Greensfelder, Belvie Rooks, Jennifer Berezan, Ruth Rosen, Elizabeth Rosner, Joyce Jenkins, Nancy Shelby, Anita Barrows, Rebecca Foust, Joan Miura, Carol P. Christ

Here are some actions you can take and organizations you can join and support:

Learn about the environmental issues in your own neighborhood. Educate your community and organize to while demanding an end to pollution and the emission of CO2 in every form. Work to empower our communities to allow us to make decisions that protect the environment and our families and all lives Ask your senators and representatives to support The Green New Deal. Call for and support public transportation. Ask the businesses in your communities and chains such as Trader Joe’s to adopt practices that support the environment and cease those that are destructive, such as the use of plastic. Take action to ban poisons such as Glyphosate found in Monsanto’s Round Up from our communities. Boycott Monsanto and companies that fail to adopt green policies. Ask your governments to stop exporting environmental destruction, in every form including dumping waste, mining, drilling for oil, selling pesticides, altering and patenting seeds, internationally. Oppose war and investments in warfare. As the largest source of pollution on the planet, armed conflict and the manufacture and storage of weapons cause irreparable and vast damage all over the earth.

Below is a list just a few of the organizations working to save our planet that can support your efforts and which you can join and support.

350.org, Bioneers, Black Belt Citizens, Greenpeace, Mothers out Front, Rain Forest Action, Seed Sovereignty, The Nature Conservancy, The Southern Environmental Law Center, Women Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), Women’s Environmental Action, Women’s Voices for the Earth, Collaborative on Health and the Environment, CODEPINK.

Call: written by Susan Griffin with Vandana Shiva

Painting: Mother Earth by Jennifer Cortez-Perlmutter

Note from Carol P. Christ: “Women’s knowledge” that we are part of the earth stems from women’s work: caring for the weak and the vulnerable in all cultures and caring for plants and trees in horticultural and forest-cultural societies. This knowledge is available to men as well but only if they are willing to challenge long-standing cultural assumptions about “manhood” based in the separation of men from women and nature.

 

Carol P. Christ is an internationally known feminist writer, activist, and educator living in Lasithi, Crete. Carol’s recent book written with Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, is on Amazon. A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess is on sale for $9.99 on Amazon. Carol  has been leading Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete for over twenty years: join her in Crete. Carol’s photo by Michael Honneger.

Listen to Carol’s a-mazing interview with Mary Hynes on CBC’s Tapestry recorded in conjunction with her keynote address to the Parliament of World’s Religions.

 

His Terror by Carol P. Christ

The first two parts of Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature, “MATTER” and “SEPARATION,” are written in the authoritative voice of western philosophy and science that declares matter to be dead and the body an impediment to thought, and proceeds to separate the mind from the body. All of this, Griffin suggests, is based in the fear of death.

As Griffin notes, in this equation woman is identified with the body and her voice is silenced. Re-reading these parts of Woman and Nature for the umpteenth time for a class I am teaching felt even more painful than it had before. I was reliving parts of my own story. Continue reading “His Terror by Carol P. Christ”

A Matter of Life and Death: The Military or the Green New Deal? by Carol P. Christ

“I have set before you life and death . . .  Choose life.” (Deut. 30:19)

Scientists tell us that an environmental catastrophe which has already begun threatens every aspect of life as we know it on planet earth. The choice could not be clearer. Will we choose life? Or will we choose death?

On March 6, 2019, William Barber and Phyllis Bennis published an opinion piece titled: “If America can find $716 bn for the military, it can fund the Green New Deal.” In it, they note that politicians in both parties are rushing to dismiss the Green New Deal as an unrealistic pipe dream, stating that there simply is no money to fund it. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s response is characteristic of the Democratic Party’s so-called moderate and pro-military wing. As Barber and Bennis report:

When young organizers from the Sunrise Movement recently challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein to support a Green New Deal, she told them “there’s no money to pay for it”. She probably didn’t expect those eight- and 10- and 11-year-old kids to respond immediately: “Yes, there is, there’s tons of money going to the military.”

Feinstein responded condescendingly that the military does “important things” with that money.

Continue reading “A Matter of Life and Death: The Military or the Green New Deal? by Carol P. Christ”

Tree-Hugging Is About Trees and So Much More Than Trees by Carol P. Christ

Not too long ago I heard someone deride members of a seminar who were building labyrinths in the olive groves of Greece as “a bunch of tree-huggers.”  I bristled! I probably first heard of the Chipko tree-hugging movement which is led by women in the 1970s and 1980s. Because I love nature, I naturally assumed hugging trees is a good thing. Originally, I had no idea that the tree-hugging movement was about much more than saving trees from being felled in the interests of short-term profit.

I did not know that the deeper purpose of the movement is to save a way of life based on forest-culture that is being threatened by the imposition of western ideas and practices promoted by colonialism and its successor, the green revolution. Nor did I know that the traditional forest-culture of India is the provenance of women: more than 4000 years of observing and experimenting created a “women’s knowledge” passed down from mother to daughter. Continue reading “Tree-Hugging Is About Trees and So Much More Than Trees by Carol P. Christ”

Meeting the Windigo by Carol P. Christ

Towards the end of Braiding Sweetgrass, mother, biologist, and member of the Citizen Potawami Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer sets out at the end of winter to visit a forest area near her home that she considers hers not in name but in virtue of her love and care for it. On arriving, she discovers that the forest is no more, having been clear-cut by the owner. The wildflowers and the plants she has harvested over the years have sprouted up, but Kimmerer knows that without the forest cover they will be burned by the sun and their places taken by brambles. Continue reading “Meeting the Windigo by Carol P. Christ”

Time to Dismantle the Myth of the Nation State? by Carol P. Christ

I am a citizen of two countries currently being torn apart by popular nationalism. In Greece, the cry is “Macedonia is only Greek,” while in the United States a nation of immigrants is being told that it must fear being invaded by immigrants. The truth is that the idea of a nation state is a fiction created in the nineteenth century. It is high time to dismantle it.

Here is the Greek case. Phillip of Macedon invaded from the north and created a federation of Greek states in 338 BCE. His son Alexander the (so-called) Great conquered territories extending as far as India before his death in 323 BCE, establishing the seat of his empire in the newly founded city of Alexandria in Egypt. Phillip and Alexander are claimed as Greek, but in fact Phillip forced independent Greek-speaking city states into union under his rule.

Although the Greek language became the lingua franca of the Alexandrian Empire, the people who spoke forms of Greek did not become an ethnically pure free Greek nation under Alexander. Rather they became subjects in an empire ruled by a king that united people of different cultural traditions under a newly imposed Greek language. It is probable that Phillip and Alexander originally spoke a form of Greek, but even this is debated by experts. Continue reading “Time to Dismantle the Myth of the Nation State? by Carol P. Christ”