herstory – Page 13 – Feminism and Religion

Your Body Knows Before You Do by Andrea Penner

Our interstate move of 325 miles due east on U.S. Highway 40, formerly Route 66, that iconic highway through the American Southwest, took us from one rental home to another. A month later, I sat in a closed graduate seminar, having received a coveted “yellow card.” By some stroke of magic, the professor had read my master’s thesis.

“I know your work,” he said, signing the over-enrollment waiver.

For the next several years, I studied, wrote, taught, ate, slept, and moved through marriage and motherhood (and one more rental)—all toward the goal of completing the PhD in English while my then-husband cycled through professional jobs and both of us recovered from eight years of cross-cultural Christian ministry.

Herstory Profiles: Honoring Queen Lili’uokalani by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

My first post of 2024 is still celebrating women who are not celebrated enough. This post sees us in the Hawaiian Islands. A leader, visionary, and pillar of the community; Queen Lili’uokalani was the last reigning monarch of the unified Hawaiian Kingdom. She spent her entire adult life trying to improve the lives of her people. Her legacy is one of beauty and of heartbreak for she would be forced to abdicate and live under house arrest when the United States illegally seized the Hawaiian Islands. Yet it is one of her many hymns, Aloha ‘Oe that continues to remind us of her unbreakable spirit, her legacy, and her dedication to duty and service.

Queen Lili’uokalani (1838-1917), born Lydia Lili‘u Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamaka‘eha would be hānai (honorarily adopted) into the Kamehameha royal family. She was baptized into the Christian faith at an incredibly early age and was educated at the Royal School which would make her eligible to become one of King Kamehameha III’s heirs. She married John Owen Dominis in 1862 who would later become the Governor of O’ahu. Both Lydia and John Owen would become high ranking Free Masons. When her brother David Kalākaua become King, Lili was announced as his immediate heir, became Princess, adopted her royal name Lili’uokalani, and the Official Envoy for the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1878, Lili’uokalani would pen one of the most famous songs of the Hawaiian Islands, Aloha ‘Oe. *

The Sky Dancers by Sara Wright

December is a poignant month for many people, including me. Although I find the darkness comforting, winter stillness a gift, I do not celebrate the season as others do.

I begin December by bringing in the dawn each morning (if it’s clear) by standing outdoors in the cold watching Sirius, the dog star fade…Some mornings the sky turns rose, tangerine, or gold as clouds slide over the horizon or billow up like cottony balls of fluff. The air is fresh, fragrant, and clean. I listen for the first birds, the female cardinal’s chirp, the chickadees, and doves have yet to appear – these daily ‘morning mysteries’ are spontaneous and acted out in gratitude without thought.

This month is a time of remembrance … I think of people I loved, some I did not, those I lost…

First Call to Ceremony by Sara Wright

I prepare for winter by tipping sweet balsam to make my wreath. Always an intentional undertaking, I honor all evergreens during this month and next as I weave myself into the Circle of Life with fragrant boughs…

I gather my balsam candles and put lights on my little Norfolk Island Pine in preparation for the Festival of Fire, scattering crimson cranberries around her base. Adding acorns, hemlock cones, moss and lichen attach me to ‘All There Is’.

Inside and outside are One…

“I am a lady in waiting”… I have learned that Nature decides when it’s time to engage in any ceremony that helps spin the wheel – I listen for the call.

The Unbearable Sweetness of Being by Vibha Shetiya

I watched with confusion and a guilty sense of disgust – maybe this was the way things were done in India? My aunt had reached across to the cluster of letters strung together by a single piece of wire twirled around a nail on the wall, and gently dislodged one of them. They were from my father to his mother. I didn’t know what to think. After all, she went on to say, Your father is so good with language; just listen to this, just how beautifully he writes, before reading out aloud a lengthy passage. She was a good reader; gentle, perfect cadence with pauses in the right places. But I wanted to turn away on this intrusion of privacy, on this emotional voyeurism, but then thought, Wait, just last evening and the evening before that, and the many evenings before that she had spent the only free time she would get – from the large extended family who, hearing of her generous spirit, had congregated in her home in Bombay, that city of big dreams but of tiny square footage (blissfully unaware that they were now indebted to her for life) – on her rudrakshamala, deep in meditation, in union with god. So pious a woman! So pure a heart! Such a giving soul! Surely then there can’t be anything wrong here. Especially if it’s to say something nice about someone you cared for. And, after all, those letters were right there in the kitchen above the dining table, weren’t they? Not tucked away in some corner of a chest of drawers hidden from sunlight.

The Dark Tunnel by Sara Wright

Recently I had a very strange experience. I had fallen and was dumped into a nursing home to ‘recover’.

Since I have written about other aspects of this terrifying experience on this blog and published some pieces elsewhere, I am turning my attention to what happened to me after being drugged senseless, and then being stripped of every aspect of personal autonomy.

After I refused the 17 drugs, I incurred hostility from some nurses and aides who blamed me for having diarrhea and many other infractions none worth mentioning (one of the consequences of stopping the drugs was loose bowels).

The one medication I needed was routinely withheld. Each time this happened I became more frightened and anxious. Shaky. These same caregivers either ignored me or intoned “all you have to do is relax, breathe”. They dismissed my PTSD/Anxiety disorder as some kind of psychological problem or were too ignorant or indifferent to care.

Keeping an Open Heart: My Ode to Father Ted by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

***Trigger Warning: Discussion includes sexual violence***

Father Ted and his friends helped me move in 1978. I have a bandanna on my head and Father Ted is behind me.

In early 1977 when I was 21 years old, I was followed into a building and attacked with a knife. I was raped. It is hard to express the rent in your soul when something like that happens. And yet it is a common trauma in our patriarchal world, used as a weapon of war and, in general, to control women’s bodies. When I think of Israeli women being raped even as they were murdered, I don’t even know how to process that level of evil. As for myself, I was an easy mark as victim because I had been groomed to be meek by childhood abuse.

Branwen, Goddess of Grief by Kelle ban Dea

This midwinter has been a time of sadness so far. Two major deaths in the family, and two baby losses, the grief has come thick and fast for me and my kin this season. At a time when we are usually all gathering to celebrate the rebirth of the light in the dark, my spiritual practice is all at sea, leaving me wondering how I can call on Goddess, on Mother of God, at this time.

Then I remember Branwen.

Archive of Silence by Sara Wright

It is well documented by conservative science how a human being deals with trauma.

Trauma first overwhelms and then destroys the body’s nervous system.

It affects cognitive ability –

the ability to translate experience into meaning –

it steals the ability to imagine a different way of being in the world.*

Trauma affects memory creating blanks – holes in the fabric that cannot be recovered except perhaps through dreams visions, sensing, intuiting, having experiences with Nature that the rational mind does its best to resist.

Better Than a Rainy Norwegian Cruise: the Divine Feminine App Comes to Another Fork in the Road by Caryn MacGrandle

I have just recently taken on debt with the divine feminine app. I made the decision to go to the Parliament of World Religions. We added a weekly email feature and an affiliate program. I have been investing in some other features in an attempt to make the app sustainable. I find myself $13,000 in debt.

And I’m not done. Both the Operating System that the app is built on and the smartphone apps need to be updated. In technological terms, they are ancient, and we are starting to have different issues pop up with them.

If I am lucky and continue to work without a paycheck as I have the past ten years and with the company in India who is about 1/8 the cost of doing this state side, this will cost us about $7,000.

In other words, I need $20,000.

I ask myself, is it worth it?

Yes.