Mary Sharratt – Page 3 – Feminism and Religion

Margery Kempe: The Self-Made Mystic

*In the 15th century, as now, independent female travelers faced harassment and suspicion.*

I’ve always been fascinated with the women mystics, such as 12th century powerfrau and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, the heroine of my 2012 novel, ILLUMINATIONS. Likewise my new novel, REVELATIONS, which will be published in April 2021, is centered on two 15th century English mystics, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Like Hildegard, they were women of faith facing the roadblock of institutional, male-dominated religion that sidelined them. But instead of letting this beat them down, they found within their own hearts a vision of the divine that mirrored their female experience. I believe it’s no mere coincidence that both Hildegard and Julian dared to create a theology of the Feminine Divine, of God the Mother. All three women seized their power and their voice to write about their encounters with the sacred, preserving their revelations to inspire us today.

While Hildegard and Julian are iconic, Margery Kempe is a more marginal figure–well-known among medievalists but much less known to a general audience. I first encountered Margery in a post-grad course entitled Late Medieval Belief and Superstition. I was blown away by the story of this enterprising woman who survived postnatal depression and a soul-destroying marriage to become an intrepid world traveler and literary pioneer. The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436–38) is the first autobiography in the English language.

Margery’s story explodes our every stereotype about medieval women.

She was not just a desperate housewife and mother of fourteen. She rebelled against the straightjacket of an abusive marriage by becoming an entrepreneurial businesswoman. First she ran a brewery, then a grain mill. When both businesses failed and she’d had enough, she left her husband behind and took to the road as a pilgrim, traveling to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. This in an age when very few women traveled even in the company of their husbands, Margery blazed her own trail across Europe and the Near East.

Alas, like strong women throughout history, her independence and eccentricities drew suspicion. Before long she found herself on trial for heresy. A guilty verdict would have seen her burned at the stake, yet she kept her spirits high by regaling the Archbishop of York with a parable of a defecating bear and a priest.

Before leaving on her monumental pilgrimage, Margery sought the counsel of her sister mystic, Julian of Norwich. This was an exceedingly vulnerable time in Margery’s life. In leaving her husband and children behind, she had broken all the rules, and she was filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. Julian’s advice to trust her inner calling and not worry too much about what other people thought seemed to have a profound and empowering impact on Margery. While Julian had chosen to wall herself into a cell and live as an anchoress, she gave Margery her blessing to wander the wide world.

Sadly, some historians and theologians try to pit Julian and Margery against each other. Julian is held up as the real saint, the real deal, while Margery is dismissed as a hysterical wanna-be. Because she had the habit of copious weeping when in the throes of mystical experience, many people, both in her time and ours, have refused to take her seriously.

Yet a number of fascinating synchronicities connect Margery and Julian. In so many ways, their stories intertwine and complement each other.

Margery was born in 1373, the same year that thirty-year-old Julian received her “showings”—the divine visions that would inspire her landmark book Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in English by a woman. Both women lived in Norfolk, in cities less than 45 miles away from each other. Both women were literary pioneers whose lifework was lost to obscurity, only to resurface in the twentieth century.

Immersing myself in Julian’s radical theology of the primacy of divine love was a profound experience. Like Margery, I often found myself moved to tears by the beauty of Julian’s visions, by her absolute assurance that no matter how dire things may seem, all will be well.

But what took me by surprise was how revelatory Margery’s dance with self-doubt was for me. In writing this book and delving into medieval mystical texts, I discovered that our doubts, as painful and wrenching as they are, aren’t a flaw or hindrance. In fact, they lead us deeper into the divine mystery, the vast “Cloud of Unknowing” where God dwells. Only when we set aside our preconceived notions of what we think we believe the divine to be, can we enter this numinous place.

As a mystic, Margery’s especially fascinating to me, because she found her spiritual bliss not in the cloister, but as a laywoman, in the full stream of worldly life with all its wonders and perils. May we all have the power to reinvent ourselves as courageously as Margery did.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the globe-trotting mystic and rabble-rouser, Margery Kempe, will be published in April 2021. Visit her website .

A Deep Ecology of Horse Manure by Mary Sharratt

My recent move from Northern England to the Silver Coast of Portugal has been a radical change on so many levels. Not only am I coming to grips with a different climate and culture and immersed in learning a very challenging new language, I have embraced a completely different lifestyle.

For the first time ever, I can keep my beloved Welsh mare and matriarch, Ms. Boo, at home, along with her companion, the dashing Zinco, a very handsome but sometimes aloof Lusitano gelding. My pet name for him is Mr. Darcy.

I could have taken the easy route and put Boo on a livery yard that did all the care for me, but I wanted to give Boo a lifestyle with daily year round turn out in a big field and none of my local livery yards offered this, though I talked to some very kind and helpful people at these establishments. It’s just a different approach to horse care in Portugal, which prioritizes stabling horses and using their energy for training exercises and riding.

My life now literally revolves around horse care and feeding. As soon as it’s daylight, I’m out bringing them their morning feed before I even have my human breakfast or coffee. I bring them their evening feed some time before sunset. So my writing, intensive Portuguese classes, or whatever else I’m doing is necessarily book-ended by horse care. My “productivity” can suffer as a result. If you have animals or children or other care-taking duties, the care-taking always has to come first. My change in lifestyle prompted me to question precisely why our culture privileges such a narrow view of productivity in terms of working for and selling ourselves to the corporate world rather than caring for the land and beings all around us.

I addition, I poo-pick the field twice daily, a very time-consuming task. I was in a bit of a quandary whether all this meticulous poo-picking was actually necessary. Many UK-based sites insists it is an obligatory part of horse welfare to control both flies and the spreading of parasites. However, my Portuguese farmer neighbor and my farrier both hinted that I could just leave the stuff on the ground and it might actually be better for the soil if I did.

I actually don’t mind poo-picking. It’s good exercise and very meditative, especially in early morning when the sun is rising above the mist and the dew is sparkling on each blade of grass. The other morning I saw a magnificent full moon setting majestically over the Atlantic Ocean on the far Western horizon. It’s so serene and peaceful, just listening to the birds and the horses munching their hay. I feel like I’m entering a slower, more authentic world where time is measured not by smart phones bleeping at you but by the deep cycles of nature, the sun and the moon, and the distant chiming of village church bells.

I think if certain world leaders got up early to poo pick, they would spend far less time spreading verbal horse sh*t on Twitter.

In many ways this feels like a homecoming, a return to my roots. On both sides of my family, my grandparents were farmers and many of my first cousins and their children are still farmers. Although I’m not an actual farmer, keeping horses at home has made me an accidental small holder.

Alas, the consequence of my poo-picking habit is an ever-growing mountain of a muck heap. What to do with all this manure is a perplexing problem if you don’t have a manure spreader and other fields to spread it on. I offered it to the farmer next door, only to receive a lecture on his view that chicken poo, sheep poo, goat poo, and cow poo are all superior to horse manure! A hierarchy of poo! (It was this gentleman who hinted that I was better off just leaving the stuff where the horses dumped it.)

Nonetheless I have a most imposing muck heap that will only get bigger unless some action is taken. I posted that I had free horse manure to collect on some local gardening sites. So far two people have taken me up on it. Both people took as much manure as they could possibly squeeze into their cars–it hardly made a dent on my manure pile! But from them I learned some valuable tips on composting and have been inspired to dig out the mature stuff at the bottom of the pile to put on my roses and hydrangeas. Hint: if you ever have insomnia, spending a day carting wheelbarrows full of horse manure all around your garden will insure you sleep like a rock.

It’s something sad if horse manure is just viewed as an unwanted waste product instead of being recognized as part of the deep ecology of animal-keeping and gardening. Manure is compost in the making.

In the meantime, my “manure friends” who have collected the stuff for their gardens have gifted me with organic produce and homemade fig jam. I still have a lot to learn but this new life is teaching me so much. Living in harmony with nature isn’t just posting pictures of pretty flowers on Instagram. It’s getting actual dirt under your fingernails.

The Grace of Letting Things End by Mary Sharratt

Ms. Boo, aka Queen Boudicca, in the heart of Pendle Witch Country.

Though I was born and raised in Minnesota, I have wandered the world as an expat writer nearly my entire adult life, living in Belgium, Austria, and Germany, before moving to Pendle Witch country in northern England in 2002. I fell in love with the beautiful, rugged moorland, haunted by its history of the Pendle Witches, who cast their everlasting spell on the land. This was the landscape that inspired my 2010 novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which casts the Pendle Witches in their historical context as cunning women and healers. Indeed I was inspired enough to write seven out of my eight published novels in Lancashire. The mythic name for that part of Northern England is Brigantia–simultaneously the name of the Celtic Goddess of the land, the tribe of people who made their home there, and the land itself.

As a novelist, evocation of place is my passion. The question I ask myself is what makes this place I’m in now unique, unlike any other place I’ve ever been? What song does the land sing? What stories does it have to tell? What ancestors and elders cry out from the depths of the earth? I am obsessed with local history and regional folklore and myth, and how these stories merge with the landscape itself. History is a fluid thing that, together with folklore and myth, continually shapes the present. As contemporary storyteller Hugh Lupton has said, if you go deep enough into the old tales and can present them in an evocative and meaningful way to a modern audience, you become the living voice in an ancient tradition—every storyteller’s dream. This is what I aspire to do in my life’s work. Continue reading “The Grace of Letting Things End by Mary Sharratt”

Fierce Grace in Frightening Times by Mary Sharratt

The Covid 19 pandemic had turned our lives upside down on a global scale. What we as a collective could not possibly have anticipated ever happening to privileged Western people has become our new normal as we are forced into lockdown and social isolation.

Ironically, apart from travel plans being canceled, my day-to-day life hasn’t changed that much. As a freelance writer, I’ve always worked from home and my workload and deadlines remain unchanged. In fact, many freelancers and remote workers feel pressured into greater productivity now that they are “stuck at home” with few other diversions. To me, this pressure to carry on business as usual amid a news stream of ever increasing infection and deaths feels sickeningly schizoid. Jocelyn K. Glei, in her brilliant podcast series Hurry Slowly, discusses this phenomenon of productivity shame. Continue reading “Fierce Grace in Frightening Times by Mary Sharratt”

The Company We Keep by Mary Sharratt

Mary shares an uplifting moment with a dear friend’s gorgeous cat. Photo by Kris Waldherr.

As a New Year rolls in, many of us make New Year’s resolutions, often based on the received perception that we are not good enough as we are. We look for ways to improve ourselves in terms of fitness, weight loss, and other measurable habits. And while these goals may be very worthy ones, in 2020 I’m turning my attention to something more subtle and fundamental to my basic well being–the company I keep.

Women have been socialized to be far too tolerant of people who diminish and undermine us. Whatever happens or however badly the other person behaves, we want to be seen as “nice” and not make a fuss.

We don’t always get to choose our relationships. If we work at a company, we will inevitably encounter conflict on some level with people whom we can’t so easily avoid. The same is true in co-housing situations and kinship groups.

But in our leisure time, we DO get to choose who we hang out with. And we need to pick our friends and companions with care.

A friend of mine who is a realtor gives the following advice to people who are moving to a new area and wanting to make friends and integrate in the local community: “Don’t hang out in the pub with the losers and the people who are always complaining. Join some group focused around positive activity like hiking or tennis or yoga. These are the positive people looking to do something good.”

I’ve noticed similar effects in groups I’ve belonged to in my local community. My writers group is a powerhouse of inspiration and support and always lifts me higher. The same is true for my yoga and meditation classes with Blair Read. These are completely uplifting and filled with positive people who sincerely want to be in harmony with others. People who have set their course on both physical health and spiritual liberation.

The biggest culprit for mean and negative behavior these days seems to be social media. For this reason, I have given up Facebook and Twitter to a large extent and only use it for book promotion and networking with other writers. However, I can still receive personal messages from Facebook “friends.” An acquaintance from the stable yard where I used to keep my horse sent me–apropos nothing–a nasty text message on New Year’s Day! At this time I was on vacation in Portugal, enjoying the time of my life, not even on the same landmass as this negative person. Talk about a wake up call to be more mindful of the company I keep.

So what’s up with negative people? Is the damage they cause all in our heads?

Author and life coach Lisa Romano says that when we are around negative, backbiting people, we must use the following mantra, “Hold on to your Self. Hold on to your Self.” Meaning our higher Self that can never be dragged down.

Narcissists and other negative people make up stories in their heads, then accuse you of that made up story. Then you feel, “Oh no, I must prove to her that’s not true!” No, you do not, according to Romano. We must not entertain their accusatory invented stories.

To have healthy relationships with people who support us, we must learn to detach from negative people, set boundaries, and love ourselves. If you feel like you’re being manipulated by someone, you probably are. Accept what you feel, feel what you feel, and decide what you want to do about it.

If you need to seek validation from others, then you tend to attract narcissists. Likewise, if you are an empath, you will attract them, because they lack empathy and want yours. They enjoy upsetting us because they need to feel they have power over us.

If someone keeps trying to undermine you until you have to struggle to trust your own perceptions, you are experiencing narcissistic abuse and need to distance yourself from this person. You absolutely need to listen to your perceptions and intuition to keep yourself safe. Your pain and disappointment are valid. Your anger is valid.

Romano believes that when we are around narcissists, they try to drag us down to their level of being and behaving. The core of the suffering we experience in these relationships is that we’ve been dragged down to a negative state of being that is not natural for us. We can’t change their behavior or raise their frequency. Being with a narcissistic person can bring us far away from who we really are. To survive in an environment ruled by negative people, we have to be in a state of perpetual anger, defensiveness, and (self)hatred that is ultimately soul-destroying.

This kind of environment damages our neural pathways. To heal ourselves, we need to break away from these people and see them for who they are. We need to surround ourselves by positive people.

Quarantine yourself from toxic people. Grow your own wings and soar with the true friends who lift you higher.

Cal Newport, author of the life-changing book, Digital Minimalism, offers a strategy for an “Analog January” to boost our real world connections with positive people.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her most recent novel Ecstasy is about the composer Alma Schindler Mahler. If you enjoyed this article, sign up for Mary’s newsletter or visit her website.

The Fierce Initiation of Menopause by Mary Sharratt

Modern Western culture despises aging. Aging women are held in particular contempt. Menopause is meant to be something embarrassing and uncomfortable. The pharma industry peddles hormones and other drugs meant to mask our symptoms. Few women see menopause as something to even talk about, let alone celebrate. But some women are reclaiming the dignity and transformation of menopause as a passage to power. Author and herbalist Susun Weed portrays menopause as a spiritual awakening. She likens the fierce waves of heat traveling upward to our brains to the Eastern concept of a Kundalini awakening that ultimately leads to enlightenment and spiritual liberation. Whether or not you agree with this, you will not make it through menopause without some kind of radical change taking place inside you.

I’ve experienced menopause as an initiation by fire. Having chosen not to have children, menopause has proved the most intense and radical embodied experience and transformation I’ve undergone since menarche and puberty. When a hot flash seizes me, I can no longer continue my train of monkey-mind thinking or be an efficient worker bee of global capitalism. All my old ingrained thought patterns are interrupted and come to a halt as I’m forced to focus on the embodied experience of burning up from within. What if this internal fire is literally burning through old ways of thinking and being that no longer serve me? Maybe we’re supposed to be rattled and disturbed so we can change. It’s even called The Change. So many tired old patterns are falling away from me, because I can’t keep up with them anymore. There’s this profound deepening. A sense of what truly matters.

I resist change so much. I long to remain in the comfortable old rut of the familiar, but menopause makes that impossible. It’s a take-no-prisoners wake up call to the reality of passing time and impermanence. It forces me to reexamine my values, where I truly want to spend the remaining time I have on earth. I’ve always been spiritual, but menopause has deepened my commitment to daily spiritual practice. It’s also taught me to embrace my own fierceness. To say what I mean and mean what I say. Menopausal women might find themselves losing the superficial prettiness of youth. We can no longer pass as objectified eye candy in male-stream culture. With our wrinkles and gray hair, we become something scary but also powerful. Crones and witches. We truly do become wise women if we answer the spiritual call of menopause. If we resist the lure of male-stream medicine to brainwash us into reframing this profound transformation and path of power into a disease that must be treated with hormones and face lifts. While some women benefit from hormone therapy and allopathic medicine, I’m against the generic medicalization of the natural processes in women’s lives.

Pregnant women give birth to new souls. Menopausal women give birth to their wiser selves. Like motherhood, menopause sidelines us on the relentless march towards capitalist achievement and forces us to reexamine our true priorities. We live in a 24/7 culture that expects us to be switched on and working at maximum efficiency every day of the year, as if the cycles of the seasons, sun, and moon didn’t exist. Menopause is an invitation to live in harmony with the tides and seasons of our lives. To claim our time and attention and take our lives back.

If older women truly knew how fierce and powerful we were, we could change the world.

Readers might also want to check out my essay: “Life Begins at 42: Saint Hildegard’s Guide to Becoming a Midlife Powerfrau.”

Embracing Darkness: All Hallows Eve in Old Lancashire

Come Halloween, the popular imagination turns to witches. Especially in Pendle Witch Country, the rugged Pennine landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, once home to twelve individuals arrested for witchcraft in 1612. The most notorious was Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike, cunning woman of long-standing repute and the heroine of my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill.

How did these historical cunning folk celebrate All Hallows Eve?

All Hallows has its roots in the ancient feast of Samhain, which marked the end of the pastoral year and was considered particularly numinous, a time when the faery folk and the spirits of the dead roved abroad. Many of these beliefs were preserved in the Christian feast of All Hallows, which had developed into a spectacular affair by the late Middle Ages, with church bells ringing all night to comfort the souls thought to be in purgatory. Did this custom have its origin in much older rites of ancestor veneration? This threshold feast opening the season of cold and darkness allowed people to confront their deepest fears—that of death and what lay beyond. And their deepest longings—reunion with their cherished departed.

Continue reading “Embracing Darkness: All Hallows Eve in Old Lancashire”

Declaration of INTER-Dependence by Mary Sharratt

On July 4 countless people in the United States celebrated Independence Day and many enjoyed a long leisurely Independence Day weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with celebrating freedom and all that is good in your country, I’ve become increasingly nervous about any form of unchecked, uncritical nationalism. Lately in global politics there’s been a resurgence of nationalism, populism, and isolationism of the ugliest kind. The kind that says, “Our own people first,” and “We need to build a wall,” and “Let’s drive out the immigrants,” and “Let’s start a trade war with China.” In Europe this sort of nationalism manifests itself in political movements like Brexit and in right wing populist parties like Front National in France.

To counter these divisive trends, I believe we need a new global holiday and a global Declaration of INTER-dependence. Our stark reality is that we inhabit an increasingly densely populated and fragile planet with finite resources. All human and non-human life on the planet is facing the specter of climate change and other environmental factors that threaten the fabric of our very existence. We live in an increasingly interdependent global economy. If China crashes, we will all feel the repercussions. Russian interference tipped the 2016 US election. A war in Syria and wars and grinding poverty in Africa have flooded Europe with refugees, which, in part, gave rise to this right wing, populist, anti-immigration push back. But if people in the developing world continue to suffer the worst ravages of climate change and the resulting famine, war, and poverty, our global refugee crisis is only going to escalate. Continue reading “Declaration of INTER-Dependence by Mary Sharratt”

Missing from History: Women Composers by Mary Sharratt

Clara Schumann

To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Any surviving record of female accomplishment is often trivialized or dismissed. This seems especially true in the male-dominated world of classical music. When asked to name a single female composer, many people draw a blank. This isn’t because they’re ignorant, but because women’s music has been buried and neglected for far too long. Even pioneering women composers themselves lived and worked in ignorance of their foremothers.

Clara Wieck Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann, composed her first piano concerto at the age of fourteen and wrote a significant body of work in her early life. Mother of eight children and family breadwinner, she became the foremost concert pianist of 19th century Europe. In her sixty-one-year performance career, she interpreted the work of contemporary composers such as Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Yet when it came to establishing herself as a composer in her own right, she was crippled with self-doubt. “I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea,” she wrote in her diary in 1839. “A woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it.” She was only twenty when she wrote these words that condemned her music to obscurity. Continue reading “Missing from History: Women Composers by Mary Sharratt”