goddess – Page 19 – Feminism and Religion

Birth, Death, and Regeneration: Why I Am Only a Kind of a Buddhist by Carol P. Christ

In a recent blog describing conversations with my friend Rita Gross, I said that I think of myself as a “kind of a Buddhist” because I have given up a great deal of the ego(tism) described by Buddhists. I also remarked that “I must be a Buddhist after all” because I accept my finitude and do not fear death. At the same time, I said that the idea of a relational world coheres with my experience and is more satisfying to me than the Buddhist theory of nondualism. When I speak of a relational world, I am referring to the worldview of process philosophy.

One of the central insights of Buddhism is the concept of “dependent origination.” This means that “no thing” exists in and of itself: “all things” are related to and dependent upon “other things.” One of the key assumptions of western philosophy is that “things” exist in and of themselves: all things have an single, unchangeable “essence” or “nature.” Buddhism considers this assumption to be false: if all things are dependent on other things, then they cannot finally be separated from the web of dependence in which they exist. Buddhism insists, moreover, that the interdependent world is in flux. This means that what a thing-in-relationship is in one moment changes in the next.

Process philosophers, including Whitehead and Hartshorne, recognized that Buddhism affirms a central truth that western philosophy has denied: the truth that life is in flux and that no individual exists apart from or independent of others. Continue reading “Birth, Death, and Regeneration: Why I Am Only a Kind of a Buddhist by Carol P. Christ”

Friendships That Save Lives: For Rita M. Gross 1943-2015, by Carol P. Christ

When Rita Gross visited me in Lesbos two summers ago, we spent many long hours discussing our lives and work. Rita and I met at the Conference of Women Theologians at Alverno College in June, 1971 when we were young women. We did not know it then, but our lives would continue to be intertwined through our common interests, first in the Women and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion, and then through our work on Goddesses and feminist theology.

When we met, Rita was a convert to Judaism working on her dissertation on Australian Aboriginal women’s religious lives, and I was a Christian about to begin a dissertation on Elie Wiesel’s stories that would lead me to express my own anger at God. Continue reading “Friendships That Save Lives: For Rita M. Gross 1943-2015, by Carol P. Christ”

Dionysian Rites by Carol P. Christ

In today’s blog, I offer an excerpt from A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess. The setting is Zaros, Crete, the time of year is mid-October.

We had a scrumptious dinner of fresh fish, salad, fried potatoes, local amber-colored wine, and tiny olives. Later the two waiters, Themis and Nikos, bearing another pitcher of wine, sat down at our table.

They told us they were best friends and had just gotten out of the army. When they discovered that we were writers, the two young men were intrigued. “Our village has a very interesting history and many interesting customs,” they told us. “If you would like to come back and write about it, we will introduce you to all of the old people.” This conversation was in Greek, but I translated for Naomi. “This must indeed be a very interesting village,” I said to her, “because when they learn that I am a writer, most Greek men will say ‘write about me, I have a very interesting story.’ These men, in contrast, want us to write about their village.”

When we finished our wine, the young men offered to give us a lift back to our hotel on their motorbikes, suggesting we could have a coffee at the hotel bar. When we got to the hotel, they didn’t stop. “What happened?” I asked. “The bar wasn’t open at the hotel, so we’re looking for another place.” I wondered what Naomi, perched on the back of a motorbike and unable to speak Greek, must be thinking—especially since she was afraid of the unknown. We drove through the town and turned down a dirt road, arriving at the Zaros water factory. “We wanted to show you this,” they said sheepishly. “People drink our water all over Crete.” “O.K., “Naomi said, “but then you must take us back.” There were a few workers on the night shift, and the boys told us they had worked there too, before going into the army.

Leaving the factory, we continued down the dirt road heading away from the town. “Where are we going?” I asked, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. “Just a minute,” Themis said, as he got off the bike in front of what looked like a small house in the middle of nowhere. “We need to go back,” Naomi said definitively. “Yes, I already said that,” I answered. “Come inside,” Themis beckoned. “We want to show you how they make the raki (the colorless alcoholic drink that had been offered to us in shot glasses us after meals). This is the still,” he continued, as he showed us into a small dark room with a glowing fire. “After the wine is pressed, they put the skins and stems into barrels like those you see in the corner. The mixture takes six weeks to ferment, and then they bring it to a still, where it is heated over a fire. The steam that rises is directed through long curved pipes, and comes out as raki,” he said, pointing to various parts of the mechanism. Continue reading “Dionysian Rites by Carol P. Christ”

Life’s a Garden by Jassy Watson

Gardening is one of my greatest loves. The rhythm of the earth revealed in this little piece of Eden in sunny Queensland Australia, pulses in the cells of my being. Through close observation of the natural cycle of all life in my garden and atuning into the greater cosmological ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes I have come to know intimately not only this ‘outer’ space, but the inner as well.

Imagery and metaphor are effective tools for personal growth and transformation and the metaphor of gardening is a powerful way of looking at and experiencing the process of inner growth. I only need to look to my garden to see what needs tending, weeding, pruning, tilling, feeding, harvesting and composting in my life. Continue reading “Life’s a Garden by Jassy Watson”

Holding On Too Tightly by Sara Frykenberg

Raised in an evangelical, Protestant Christian tradition, I was repeatedly told that “God is love.” God is love. While much of my Christian experience was difficult and even abusive, I have always interpreted this teaching—while sometimes confusing to me, and other times, fueling my spiritual inquiry—as a positive thing. When learning to shed the abusive contexts in my life, I did so encouraged by those who knew that love and god/dess shouldn’t be abusive. When challenging and responding to abusive paradigms within Christianity through my dissertation writing process, I reflected on how leaving an abusive cycle can feel like a hiccup from love, a frozen breathlessness and confusion on how to access love in new ways; but I also had to conclude that love hadn’t really been absent, even if hard to find.

God/dess is love—even when the dominating power celebrated within a particular religion, family or society distorts access to god/dess-loving. Yet, this issue with access, the trained approach to receiving love that is taught in an abusive context, is a habit that I have had to continually and consciously shed. I catch myself falling into patterns of get-love-through-control or get-love-through-performance behaviors. I try to be someone or something to ensure my access to what I perceive as love, sometimes finding it hard to accept that I am loveable without performance, role-playing or being someone that somebody else wants me to be. The more I experience mutual loving—or as Carter Heyward puts it, “godding” –the less I fall into this trap of performance; and the more I realize that my “performing” who I think others want me to be actually hinders my most loving relationships. However, while living outside of the abusive context has become easier in my life, sometimes I panic. Sometimes I hold on too tightly, afraid of the reality of loving without (the illusion of) control. Continue reading “Holding On Too Tightly by Sara Frykenberg”

A Dance Between Fear and Trust by Jassy Watson

I have been deep in thought about TRUST.

There was a moment of realization recently when I saw clearly how in every moment of every day we place trust in the hands of others, many of whom we do not even know. Every time we step onto a bus, train or plane or take a ride in a taxi, we are doing so in faith that they will get us to our destination safely. Every time we drive a car we trust that all those driving on the road with us are safe drivers. We place trust in schoolteachers and childcare workers to care for our children often without knowing anything of their background. We place trust in doctors and healthcare workers, many of us never even questioning treatments or procedures.

Every moment of our lives requires some level of trust and faith. Of course, I know this – we all do, but I have never really questioned this trust or taken the time to think about how much trust it actually takes just to do the everyday. Our lives are immeasurably built on trust. But what happens when fear and doubt start taking over? Continue reading “A Dance Between Fear and Trust by Jassy Watson”

Restoring Ourselves to Ceremony: Red Tent Circles, by Molly

April 2015 103 — At a Red Tent Circle this spring.

“I believe that these circles of women around us weave invisible nets of love that carry us when we’re weak and sing with us when we’re strong.”

–SARK, Succulent Wild Woman

Seven years ago, a small postcard at the local Unitarian Universalist church caught my eye. It was for a Cakes for the Queen of Heaven facilitator training at Eliot Chapel in St. Louis. I registered for the training and went, driving alone into an unknown neighborhood. There, I circled in ceremony and sisterhood with women I’d never met, exploring an area that was new for me, and yet that felt so right and so familiar.

I’d left my two young sons home for the day with my husband and it was the first time in what felt like a long time that I’d been on my own, as a woman and not someone’s mother. At the end of the day, each of us draped in beautiful fabric and sitting in a circle around a lovely altar covered with goddess art and symbols of personal empowerment, I looked around at the circle of women and I knew: THIS is what else there is for me. Continue reading “Restoring Ourselves to Ceremony: Red Tent Circles, by Molly”

No Longer Moved … by Symbols that Once Moved Me Profoundly by Carol P. Christ

This week Judith Plaskow and I submitted the final version of our new book Goddess and God in the World to our publisher at Fortress Press. Just before completion, I added a shorter version of the following passage to my final chapter. In it I tried to describe the odd feeling of not being moved any longer by a religion that once moved me profoundly. Our book, which explores an embodied theological method, will be out in the summer of 2016.

I have never regretted my decision to leave Christianity. Although I have a sentimental attachment to Christmas trees, Christmas dinners, Christmas carols, and some hymns, I miss little else about Christianity. At a distance of several decades, I find that I quite simply have no feeling for the Christian edifice of doctrines and rituals based on the life and death of a single individual. Jesus was a visionary, but there have been many others like him—including Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Gandhi, all of them flawed, as Jesus must have been as well.

A few years ago, I decided to participate in the Greek Orthodox Easter week services, because they are attended by so many of my neighbors. But while enjoying the company of the women who decorated the epitaphios (tomb for Jesus), the procession through the streets of our town on Friday night, and the lighting of candles at midnight on Saturday, I came to a clear understanding that the Easter drama is no longer my drama. During the Thursday night services, I realized that many of the women were openly grieving the death of Jesus. Though intellectually I could understand that the Easter drama allowed my friends to release pent-up and repressed feelings, I found their deeply emotional response to the re-enactment of the death of Jesus bizarre.

In leaving Christianity, I had gained the freedom to name the sacred in my own experience, confirmed my deep inner knowing about the human connection to nature, and found the power to create and participate in rituals that have meaning in my life. For me now, the rituals on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete are at the center of my spiritual life. To listen to Alice Walker’s words, “We have a beautiful/mother/Her green lap/immense/Her brown embrace/eternal/Her blue body/everything we know”* on a mountaintop or to repeat Ntozake Shange’s cry, “we need a god who bleeds now/whose wounds are not the end of anything”** at the mouth of a cave, moves me more than any passage from the Bible.

Singing “Light and Darkness” in the depths of caves is an embodied act of reclaiming the womb as a symbol of creation and the darkness as a place of transformation. I still enjoy singing the Doxology (Hymn of Praise)—and doing so connects me to my history. But I now sing it in front of altars laden with summer fruits or winter vegetables and with words that express my spirituality: “Praise Her from whom all blessings flow/Praise Her all creatures here below/Praise Her above in wings of flight/Praise Her in darkness and in light.”***

*Alice Walker, “We Have a Beautiful Mother,” Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 (New York City and Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 1991), 459-460.
**Ntozake Shange, “we need a god who bleeds now,” A Daughter’s Geography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 51.
***See Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-imagining God in the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003), 238, for a discussion of the meaning of the new words.

Carol P. Christ leads the life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (facebook and twitter). Carol’s books include She Who Changes and and Rebirth of the Goddess; with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions and forthcoming in 2016 from Fortress Press, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Explore Carol’s writing. Photo of Carol by Maureen Murphy. Photo of Idean Cave by PJ Livingstone.

The Wonder that is Being Born: How to Live Out Loud? Sacrilegious or Evolution? by Karen Moon

Yesterday, I went to a Women’s Circle, the description follows:

Our next circle will honor this journey of Venus or Innana as she was known by the ancient Sumerians. We will gather on Sunday, July 26th at 3 PM at my house. We will celebrate the divine feminine energy of Innana/Venus through meditation, song and dance. I encourage you to dress as your inner goddess, embracing your personal divine feminine energy. We will have our usual potluck munchies afterward.

I had spoken to the host on the phone previously and know her via Social Media. My husband gave his helpful advice to be sure that it was not a “cult,” and yes, I do think any time you find things via social media, a big dose of common sense is needed. Continue reading “The Wonder that is Being Born: How to Live Out Loud? Sacrilegious or Evolution? by Karen Moon”

Rosmerta, the Great Provider – a Celtic Goddess of Abundance by Judith Shaw

As we near August 2, known to the ancient Celts as Lughnasadh or Lammas, examples of abundance are everywhere. Gardens and farms are in full bloom with some crops ready for harvest and others very near. Lambs born in spring are now reaching maturity. Days are still long and we are full of energy. It is a perfect time to remember the Celtic Goddess, Rosmerta.

Rosmerta, a goddess loved by both Celtic and Roman Gauls was known as ”The Great Provider”. She is a goddess of fertility and wealth. She was worshipped in South-western Britain, Gaul, and along the Rhone and the Rhine rivers.

Continue reading “Rosmerta, the Great Provider – a Celtic Goddess of Abundance by Judith Shaw”