herstory – Page 5 – Feminism and Religion

As a Hen Gathers by Elanur Williams

**Gustav Klimt, *Garden Path with Chickens*, 1916**

In the early years of my childhood, my family lived for a short time on a poultry farm in Bandırma. Hens wandered freely, unconfined. The contours of that land have long since changed, replaced by refrigerated depots and industrial freezers that hum along the highways, the relentless march of capital. In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus laments: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” These days, I find myself returning to the image of the mother hen—a figure who embodies a special wisdom that is seldom named, yet deeply and instinctively known.

Although I did not have a religious upbringing, I grew up embracing aspects of many faiths. My spiritual background is Alevi, and after inviting the Presbyterian faith into my life following my marriage, I find these layered identities influence each other in ways that are both intricate and transformative. In her sermon Who Is Jesus? Mother Hen, Reverend Agnes Norfleet lingers on the vulnerability of the mother hen metaphor, questioning what strength a hen can possibly offer in the face of the fox—Herod—and, more broadly, in the face of violence at large. Reverend Norfleet asks why Jesus does not invoke a more forceful or fiercer maternal figure—a lion, perhaps, or a bear? What does this choice imply for our activism and understandings of leadership? What unique wisdom does the mother hen offer?

Three poems by Rebecca Rogerson

Don’t Take Me to Church

He never let me eat communion because I wasn’t a catholic, but it was okay for me to eat his dick. My tiny palms forced to stroke him, the same dextrous hands that coloured in the lines.

I knew his God wasn’t my God. I knew she saw everything there was to see and that he wouldn’t reach salvation; no matter how many Hail Marys he said at mass in Ireland.

The Virgin Mary knew what he stole from me, what they steal from all of us.

I couldn’t fall apart on Sundays at noon when he took me to church—before he took me home after he did what he did—to the little Jewish girl who didn’t know she was Jewish.

I couldn’t remember it because I buried it in Survive, until, it was resurrected by nightmares and demons who professed caring and brought me to altars of despair to vomit up all the darkness, and when there was no more left to cleanse or tear out; light ripped in.

No one talks about the embarrassment that goes along with the telling, sharing and surfacing of sexual violence. How it comes up, how it comes back. How we’re always haunted by the deadbeat dead and grabby grandfathers who try to reach from there into here, pretending they are made of heaven.

I fled a friend’s choir concert because perpetrators keep stealing time, moments, sleep, joy, and friendship, in churches and baths. On my flight, I hunted for nature, soil and anything else that felt most alive in the hilly town of Nelson. Pretending I was like everyone else, I hid the panic that strikes broken hearts.

Two Poems by Rebecca Rogerson

ROSE WATER

I am the holy place somewhere in the stars of eternity,
someone’s daughter who seeks reprieve somewhere.

Yetta changed her name to Mary. She tried to erase her past, not as a Jew, well maybe some of that, but more as a Jew molested by her father—a frum[1], “Monster”, his daughters called him.

On my altar sits my tallit alongside a Menorah with seven brass holders. No stars of David—before or after the decimation of Gaza. Can rose water sweeten our hearts? We pour it graciously in our hands, hoping the lost petals heal our guts and brighten our thoughts. She searches hungrily for hope in glass bottles adorned with Farsi, that cost $4.29 each.

Herstory Profiles: Tending the Flame with Pema Chödrön By Anjeanette LeBoeuf

While the early days of the nation of America is seeped with Christianity, the West has also had an illustrious relationship with Buddhism. Western Buddhism and especially American Buddhisms has grown exponentially since the 1960s. One of the benefits of American Buddhism is the inclusion, reintegration of Women Religious. One of the most known Buddhist nuns is that of Pema Chödrön.

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936 in New York City to Catholic Parents. She would receive her English Literature Degree from Sarah Lawerence College and a Master’s in Elementary Education from University of California, Berkeley. She would be an elementary teacher for many years in New Mexico and California. Deirdre was married and divorced twice. She has two children and three grandchildren. In the 1970s. Deirdre would start to study and practice Buddhism under Lama Chime Rinpoche. This would be the start of her journey to become Pema Chödrön. Under the guidance and practice of Chögyam Trungpa, Deidre was given a new name, Pema Chödrön which means ‘lotus torch of the dharma’ when she took the refuge vows.

Long Live Queer Nightlife! by Amin Ghaziani – Book Review by Marie Cartier

I was invited to be on a panel for the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) in San Francisco this past March for a new book by Amin Ghaziani, Long Live Queer Night life (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Since I wrote Baby, You Are My Religion – Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall and have discussed aspects of this work here I thought the FAR family would also enjoy this conversation on where queer nightlife is now.

The book is interspersed with visits to club nights, something Ghaziani says helps widen the possibilities for communities—different communities can have their own nights and these chapters where he visits these various hot spots are exciting and first person.

Sacred Secrets: The Legacy of Women’s Wisdom Across Generations by Rabbi Nadya Gross

From my earliest memories, I saw things that others didn’t see and knew things I had no business knowing. But at the time, I didn’t realize that others didn’t witness the dance of light around their bodies or the life forms at the base of trees. I didn’t know that the insights I had into people’s emotions were not universally shared. My curiosity led me to ask questions about these things… until my grandmother, Savta (Heb), took me into the kitchen (where everything important happened), closed the doors, and told me never to talk about these things with anyone except her. And so, my training began.

Savta was gifted in ways different from mine. She had grown up in a circle of women and their daughters, a circle where women educated each other, shared their unique gifts and insights, and passed down a legacy of wisdom.

The wisdom she shared with me was as ancient as the land on which we lived. We began with reverence for the Earth and all her elements—pre-patriarchal Goddess wisdom. We explored what it means to be intimately connected to all aspects of Creation, understanding that we are interdependent. Harm to a tree, an insect, or the water harms us. We learned that the respect we wish to receive from others must first be shown by us. I learned to never pick up a beautiful stone that caught my attention without first asking permission to remove it from its resting place. When harvesting fruit from one of the many trees in my grandparent’ yard, I expressed deep gratitude to the mother-tree whose body nurtured that fruit to ripeness.

WHEN I SAY THAT I MISS MY MOTHER (THIRTY YEARS AFTER HER DEATH), WHAT PRECISELY AM I MISSING? by Rebe Huntman

On the eve of my 50th birthday, I found myself longing for my mother. She’d been dead thirty years—so long that I’d forgotten the sound of her voice or the temperature of her skin. And yet I missed her. Desperately. Shamefully.

The shape of that missing had something to do with the fact that I was nearing the age she’d been when she died. As a child, I’d watched my mother dress for a night of dancing with my father, lining her lips with red and stringing her neck with beads—sure signs she knew the secrets of being a woman: self-possessed; striding through the world with confidence and self-assurance; a real badass!

By now, I’d expected to feel that same sense of largesse. But the truth was that I still felt like the nineteen-year-old version of myself who had lost her mother, a child still waiting for someone to show me the way.

~*~

I wasn’t alone. My whole country seemed to have lost our way. We were surrounded by images of the feminine—pop icons and underwear models, feminists and porn stars, soccer moms and saints—all of them flashing large but pointing in different directions, unglued from whatever architecture might give them a coherent narrative: A blueprint that might hold us through the waters of our deepest anxieties. A guide who might answer our deepest questions: Who am I? Am I part of something larger than my own life? And if so, how do I fit within it?

~*~

The Gift of Enduring Friendship by Sara Wright

Mathias Klang from Göteborg, Sweden, Wikimedia Commons

After I experienced a sudden shattering break in a friendship with a woman writer/editor that I loved (that I believed would endure any personal difficulty) I was unable to process the event. I wrote a short poem to express my disbelief in which I likened this betrayal to the cutting down of this woman’s tree and left it at that. Silence is a killer of soul. There is no place to go.

The profound rupture of this woman thread felt catastrophic (I have never had a woman friend like her), and in retrospect I still see and experience our friendship in this light. At the time my life was in crisis. I had other consuming worries. Because I had learned at my mother’s knee that silence is literally the end of the road the bottomless chasm that separated us did not lessen in intensity, but I lived on.

Six years later that rupture has been healed. How did this happen? My friend, who happens to be something of a genius, intellectual, professional editor writer/poet wrote a book that she offered to anyone who wanted to read it for free. This act of great generosity was so typical of this woman’s behavior that it galvanized me into action. I took the risk and contacted her directly asking for a copy. I don’t recall just what I said except that I wished we could be friends again, never believing the impossible would happen but it did.

Opening All the Windows and Returning the Goddess to Her Rightful Place by Caryn MacGrandle

The quote that describes Jesus as the “front door of God” is found in the Bible, John 10:7, where Jesus says, “I am the door of the sheep”; essentially meaning that the only way to access God is through Jesus, as he is the entrance point to God’s presence.

I have been calling on Hathor, and last night, She came.

Ah, let me back up a few steps.

I have up to now not given much thought to Egyptian Goddesses instead preferring my Celtic and Greek ones. But a few days ago, I attended this lovely workshop by Tahya who has developed a modern day systrum, the percussion instrument used by Priestesses in honor of Hathor. And as so often happens on my path, when you crack the window, She comes.

The last two days I have been listening to Hathor meditations, the Mother of all creation, the Goddess of Love, an Egyptian Goddess whose worship may have begun in the Predynastic Era over 5,000 years ago.

Broken Human Bonds by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: I originally wrote this in the fall when Andrea Robin Skinner started going public with her own story. It has taken me a while to contemplate posting it. It feels like this is such a common story that it needs to be shared. We all need to know that we are not alone and that each of us is lovable.

Whenever I hit a personal and/or emotionally raw topic, my first instinct is to turn to Tarot cards to see what lessons I need to learn. I use Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe deck (more on that later). I have been finding myself in this situation recently with the revelations of Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of the renowned Nobel Prize winning writer Alice Munro. Andea waited until her mother died before she revealed publicly that her step-father began sexually abusing her when she was nine years old. When she had told her mother about it, Munro blamed Andrea for damaging her marriage. The stepfather at issue publicly called Skinner even though a child at the time, a “homewrecker.” He did this in a letter which included death threats. Abuse, blame, threats tools of patriarchy all. Skinner’s own mother didn’t seek to protect daughter but chose instead to shield the abuser. A betrayal of the most primal sort!