Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Why We All Need The Goddess

A Sermon for Women's History Month
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!