by The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
1st Reading:
A
Creed for Free Women (and such men as feel happy with it)
by Elsa Gidlow
I am.
I am from
and of The Mother.
I am as I
am.
Wilfully harming none, none may question me.
As no
free-growing tree serves another or requires to be served.
As no lion
or lamb or mouse is bound or binds,
No plant or
blade of grass nor ocean fish,
So I am not here to serve or be served.
I am Child
of every Mother,
Mother of
each daughter,
Sister of
every woman,
And lover of whom I choose or chooses me.
Together or
alone we dance Her Dance,
We do the work
of The Mother,
She we called Goddess for human comprehension.
She, the
Source, never-to-be-grasped Mystery,
Terrible
Cauldron, Womb,
Spinning out
of her the unimaginably small
And the
immeasurably vast--
Galaxies,
worlds, flaming suns--
And our
Earth, fertile with her beneficence,
Here, offering
tenderest flowers.
(Yet flowers whose roots may split rock.)
I, we,
Mother, Sisters, Lovers,
Infinitely
small out of her vastness,
Yet our
roots too may split rock,
Rock of the
rigid, the oppressive
In human affairs.
Thus is She
And being of
Her
Thus am I.
Powered by
Her,
As she
gives, I may give,
Even of my
blood and breath:
But none may
require it;
And none may question me.
I am. I am That I am.
2nd Reading:
i sat up one
night by ntozake shange
i sat up one
nite walkin a boardin house
screamin/cryin/the
ghost of another woman
who waz
missin what i waz missin
i wanted to jump outta my bones
& be
done wit myself
leave me
alone
& go on
in the wind
it waz too much
I fell into
a numbness
til the only
tree i cd see
took me up
in her branches
held me in
the breeze
made me dawn
dew
that chill
at daybreak
the sun
wrapped me up swingin rose light everywhere
the sky laid
over me like a million men
i waz cold/I
waz burnin up/a child
& endlessly
weavin garments for the moon
wit my tears
i found god
in myself
& i loved her/I loved her fiercely
Sermon:
In honor of Women’s History Month, we take up a topic that has been
suppressed and repressed over centuries, and only in the last 50 years or so
has been rising again from the second wave of the women’s rights movement. In this sermon we look the refeminization of the divine. That our congregation is currently
hosting the new, updated version of “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” the UUA
curricula on feminist spirituality first published and brought to this church back
in the 1980s, is an additional good reason for us to look at this phenomenon.
“Feminist spirituality” – now there’s an interesting term. By that I mean the notion
of the divine feminine, God as female. I believe that it is important for us religious liberals to incorporate feminist spirituality into our worship, practice, and religious education.
For some UUs, especially
but not limited to those of older generations, the idea of God itself is
suspect, and thus it seems extra meaningless to try to imagine God as
female. But many other UUs are
finding, sometimes to their surprise, that learning about early goddess
religions and visualizing the Divine as feminine has profound effects. And these profound effects can cross
age, gender, culture, and orientation boundary lines, opening up not only new
perceptions but also widening a person’s internal view of themselves. The original "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven" curricula had an introduction entitled "Why Women Need the Goddess." But in this sermon, I am asserting that
we ALL need the goddess – not just women, but men and children, and the earth,
too.
After all the insights of the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s, it might be obvious that women need the metaphor of the Goddess for 3
basic reasons:
1) to celebrate and affirm the female body
and its rhythms and cycles;
2) to legitimate female power and to value
female will; and
3) to reflect the sacred power within
women and children and nature, of birth and death, of creation and destruction,
and to see their essential interconnectedness.
In a society -- our society! -- where certain properties and characteristics labeled female
are devalued, where a particular kind of female body is objectified and made
into a commodity for the marketplace, where women and girls are
disproportionately at risk as victims of violent behavior in the home, at school, at work and on the street, women
and girls surely need the transforming symbol of the Goddess. The concept of the Goddess has much to
offer women who are struggling to be rid of the established prejudices of the
patriarchal system – that female power is evil, that the female body is a
product, that female willpower and assertiveness is
"bitchiness." Hardly a
week goes by when we don’t see in the news media stories of women being denied
jobs or promotions or equal pay, or of sexual harassment on the job or at
school. And it’s not just “out of
the world” where this is a problem – women UU ministers still don’t receive the
same compensation as male ministers with the same level of training and experience,
and are still not given the opportunity to be senior minister of our largest and most
prosperous congregations at the same rates as male ministers. (We've even lost ground in this area, as three of our largest congregations that had women Senior Ministers have chosen to call men as their successors.) Fifty years after the second wave of
feminism, we are still fighting some of the same old
battles.
Patriarchal religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam,
are based on assumptions of male domination and female inferiority, despite
relatively recent efforts in all three to mitigate women's position. (While there are many positive aspects
in all 4 religions, attempts at mitigation without addressing the underlying
problem amounts to simply striving to make women more comfortable within
their inferiority. As Archbishop
Tutu of South Africa once said of apartheid,, "We don't want our chains made more comfortable – we
want our chains removed.")
So we can agree that women need the Goddess, but what about men? In a patriarchal structure, men, even
those who are atheists, have a Father-God made in their own image, their
father-son relationships are made sacred, and their primacy in the world made
divine right. So the thinking
might be: Men are just fine,
they've got all the power – it’s women who need help, woman who need the
Goddess. Those men ready, through
their own social or spiritual development, to reject the patriarchy and its
religion can now move on ahead to agnosticism or atheism without considering
anything else.
But that would be wrong. The devaluation of
the human body, the spirit/flesh, sacred/ secular false dichotomy, the
relegation of caring and nurturing solely to women, the glorification of
violence as both erotica and entertainment, and the perception of nature as
something to be used and consumed (thus bringing us to our current ecological
crisis) – all of these have been just as injurious to men as to women. (In The Temple of My Familiar, Alice
Walker has one female character tell another, “Men are damaged by the system,
as we are.”) Oppressions always
damage the group on top as much as the group on the bottom, only in different
ways. Assumed superiority is just as
hurtful in its way as assumed inferiority.
Perhaps the saddest of the list of damages suffered by men under
patriarchy is the separation of men from the processes of birth and the raising
of children. We are fortunate
that, at least in some progressive families, this situation is beginning to
change, although it is true that while men shoulder more of the responsibility
than their fathers and grandfathers did, it is still overwhelmingly the woman’s
job, even if she works outside the home.
But only when men are equally, lovingly involved in all aspects of
childcare and child rearing that the children of our world will be valued and
properly cared for. As a matter of politics, workplace rules about time off for childcare will not change until men are more involved. The nurturance
of the next generation is truly human work, fit for all genders, and needing to be honored.
Finally, men need the
Goddess and the power of that symbol in order to reclaim and value inside
themselves those qualities that our patriarchal culture has categorized
negatively as "feminine":
the powers of connection and realtionship, of birthing and creativity,
of relating, of caring and feeling and emotion. These are human qualities, and need to be developed and
promoted in every person. The current
Men's Movement is beginning to address some of the issues involved in
patriarchal assumptions, and how these have damaged men, and men's
relationships with children and women as well as with each other. But, still, how often have you seen a
“joke” on a sit-com or a commercial about a man having to “turn in his man-card” for being too
emotional or caring too much about some topic deemed strictly female?
But it is not only adult women and men who need the balancing corrective
of the feminine divine. Our
children too need to know about the Goddess. While many children strive to form their own views about God,
especially lucky UU children, they are still members of a popular culture that
places men on the top and claims that God is male. It is both affirming and empowering for children to learn
that there are many different ideas of God. UU children need to be armed with liberal spiritual insights
to counter the ones so prevalent in our culture. Unitarian Universalist kids need to be able to see God
as invisible "like the wind," God as animal, such as a lion or an
eagle, God as mother, God as grandfather, God as a fellow child. As adults, children with this kind of
religious background might be expected to be open and welcoming to theological
viewpoints different from their own—an important quality in adult Unitarian
Universalists, and greatly needed in 21st century America.
Women, men, and children need the Goddess as a life-affirming symbol of
the power of the divine female.
But that’s not all. The
earth desperately needs the Goddess too.
One of the oldest names given to the earth, "Gaia," has also
become the name of a scientific theory and movement that holds that the earth's
matter – the air, water, and land surfaces, as well as the plant and animal
life upon it – forms the complex system of a unified whole, that in fact, that
we are all part of one living being. The Gaia scientific movement has inspired in turn a
religious movement, Creation Spirituality, and a political movement,
Eco-Feminism or the Green Movement, all 3 of which stress interdependence and
interrelationship, as does our 7th UU principle.
Women and men raised in patriarchal religions and secular cultures –
that is to say, we ourselves – have lost much of that sense of communion
with the earth and the wider universe, that feeling of unity, oneness with all
of creation, that our ancestors took for granted. The Bible’s notion of stewardship, of being responsible for
the upkeep of something that doesn't belong to you, has degenerated in our time
to domination and control, with men having dominion over women, children,
animals, and the fruits of the earth, as well as the earth itself. The perversion of
"stewardship" into "ownership" led directly to the
depredations of the Industrial Age, the effects of which we are still suffering.
Many secularists and many UUs have rejected the unacceptable Father-God
and all that goes with him – but ironically have nothing to take his place,
leaving a vacuum. Into this vacuum
rush all kinds of ways to deaden our pain, to silence the spiritual yearning
within. Cosmically alienated
individuals search for what they yearn for through mind-altering chemicals, the
numbness of alcohol, immersion in work, and the temporary respite of sexuality
without mutuality. Our modern
psychosis isolates us not only from ourselves and other humans, but also from the
wholeness of creation and the kingdom of the spirit, which we deny because we
associate it with the patriarchal religion we have rightly moved away
from.
In the lonely quest for they know-not-what, many estranged people fall
victim to the easy answers of fundamentalism or the just-as-easy eternal skepticism
of the irreligious. Where do we go
from here? I say instead, let us
reach out for the Goddess, to find out what it might mean for all of us, men
and children and women and the earth, to have a concept of female divinity.
There's a practical reason for UUs to include the divine feminine as part of our congregational lives. Younger people coming into our churches are not
afraid of spirituality and theistic language. They may well be dissatisfied with the religions of their
past, if they had one at all, but they have not rejected all
religion. They are not only willing
to explore diverse interpretations of the spiritual, they seem to realize
intuitively that more spirit is exactly what their lives of estrangement and
separation need. We will lose our
young people unless we are willing to explore feminist spirituality within the context
of our Unitarian Universalist "free and responsible search for truth and
meaning." That includes
the Goddess.
All of us, men and women and children, need the Goddess, for wholeness,
for healing, for transformation, for our present and for our future. We need the Goddess for she reveals something about ourselves
and our lives, something that has been missing, something we’ve been yearning
for. The realm of the spirit is
alive and it is oceanic in its diversity.
It is just as wrong to claim no name for it as it is to claim only
one. Marge Piercy speaks of the
challenge of naming in a poem:
Like any
poet I wrestle the holy name
and know
there is no wording finally
can map,
constrain or summon that fierce
voice
whose long wind lifts my hair
chills my skin
and fills my lungs
to
bursting. I serve the word
I cannot
name, who names me daily,
who speaks
me out by whispers and shouts.
Truly, the Shekinah – the spirit of God/dess – lives in each of us, if
we will only stop and listen to those "whispers and shouts." Grateful for the religious pluralism that is our heritage as Unitarian
Universalists, let us celebrate what we ALL might gain in knowing and honoring the
Goddess. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
