Theopoetics – Feminism and Religion

Last week I traveled to Leuven, Belgium for the 9^th Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology conference. I have been to this conference before, and I find that my perspective is generously enlarged by hearing voices that emerge from contexts and concerns that differ from my own in the USA. This year, the conference theme was “Mediating Mysteries: Understanding Liturgies.” The keynote speakers offered inspiring investigations into what “full, active, and conscious” participation of people in the Catholic liturgy means today (for, such were the goals for liturgy articulated at the Second Vatican Council). Some provided critical evaluation of the newly revived Roman missal. One speaker offered a searing critique of the distinction between true mystery and fabricated mystique in the Mass. The breakout sessions were exceptionally well designed. Here I noticed a common thread of people searching beyond the formal magisterial liturgies and studying the value of those mediated mysteries that are celebrated and communicated in culture, literature, and art. Continue reading “Theopoesis and the Interior Divine by Natalie Weaver”

I think there is a poet in me

she’s been hiding

I didn’t know she was there

I didn’t see her
I didn’t hear her

I didn’t watch for her
wait for her
listen to her
or know her

and yet, when I come to this place in the woods
and I sit down
and I open my mouth

poetry comes out

and I really think
she’s been here all along.

In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as theapoetics—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.” Continue reading “Theapoetics by Molly”