Of faith and feminism….
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
May 7, 2006
Meditation
How do you invoke a greater spirit of peace?
What do you invoke when you need to find the courage to speak a truth that has been gnawing a hole in your heart?
Where do you turn to invoke a sense of connection, a sustenance to nurture you in your greatest triumphs and your hardest shames?
How do you invoke a sense of comfort when you have done all that you can do and need your own struggle to be folded into the embrace of the eternal struggles?
Where do you name that which has gone unnamed in your life?
May we open our hearts to connect to that larger hope, that deeper ask, that power that encompasses a broader view than ours. In the name of humanity, the spirit of life, a god, a goddess; in the spirit of hope, humility, power, presence and peace, this we ask. Amen.
Sermon: Part I: Of Faith….
“Dear God, are boys really better than girls? I know you are one but try to be fair.” This plea is from a book of children’s letters to God. No doubt intended to be cute: it reminds me of all the stories I have heard from women who were that little girl, unable to see herself in a male image of the divine. God the father, Jesus the son.
I have been thinking recently about how our faith is shaped by the stories we tell. The story behind this statement on marriage (exclusively heterosexual in this context) from the conservative Focus on the Family-- “A husband needs respect like he needs air to breathe, while love is by far a wife's greatest need--” is different from the story behind a Unitarian Universalist course that says the first principle of successful relationships is “Honoring--deep, mutual respect.” Different stories, different questions, different world views, different faiths and radically different ideas of whom one makes that deep ask.
When we look at feminism’s journeys with faith, many stories require telling. And our own personal stories slip inside these larger stories. Our religious foremother, Margaret Fuller, whose history of women in the 19th century greatly informed the suffrage movement, in her story, gave us permission to expand our image of the sacred, even if we are not sure we need one at all. She wrote, in 1842 that she believed in Christ "because I can do without him . . . but I do not wish to do without him. He is constantly aiding and answering me." And Christ was not enough for her. "We have all had the Messiah to reconcile and teach, let us have another to live out all the symbolical forms of human life with the calm beauty and physical fullness of a Greek god, with the deep consciousness of a Moses, with the holy love and purity of Jesus. Amen!" As Fuller reveals, behind the divine presence is the idea that we wish to invoke something and that we need something—or someone or some force—to hold our deepest asking with us. And who we ask for our aid and answers is tied to the nature of our faith.
…For in this first
story, the women were asking questions—about being told them they didn’t have
minds worth using or ideas worth hearing, asking for aid for their families
torn apart by the evils of drink, by violence too often turned on them.
If the first wave of feminism was suffrage with its tale of victory in 1920, the second was the movement for women’s liberation begun in the 1960s. Rita Nakashima Brock tells a story of the five strategies she believes this feminism passed through as it journeyed through the Christian religions. In the first, the “Just Like A Man Strategy”, a few women broke into the male leadership cadres of the church and did so by trying to be better at behaving like the men around her than they were themselves. In this period, women began to take positions, including serving as religious leaders, previously held by men. The second option Brock tags as “Add Women and Stir,” when women looked for proof that women could be just as good, doing so by looking for role models from the past and fighting to get their contributions recognized. As part of this story, in the 1970s, when dark-skinned Jesuses and angels and apostles appeared in some African American Christian churches as an outgrowth of the black empowerment movement—goddesses appeared at our altars as a part of the consciousness raising done by women. They were not welcomed by all. Religious scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether remembers how horrified her female Harvard students were at these dome-breasted, ample-thighed images that were almost caricatures of the maternal, nurturing image they were fighting to overcome.
And from my story, in 1978, my mother and I rode a bus
without a bathroom—I remember that distinctly—from
Naming is part of this story. How many of the names on the front of the
order of service—the names we heard in the beautiful piece by our women
singers—do you know? More likely you,
like I, have heard of their male consorts—Hades of the underworld, Adam of Eden’s
Garden, Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction who had a number of goddesses as
lesser spouses? The feminist influence
on religion was to demand that the lost female stories of so many religious
traditions be reclaimed. And that naming
and language not leave women out. Laura Wallace tells of coming into the church
and seeing
…And in this second
story, the women were naming truths around them, about why they couldn’t walk
safely in the streets, about pornography, about sexuality. They were naming the small blessings of daily
life as being as important as the great festivals. They were naming sadnesses and dreams and
realities…
An emphasis on hearing new voices, on naming power where it could be seen and on honoring different ways of knowing emerged. Perhaps some of you came in at this point, through a Cakes for the Queen of Heaven class or a women’s group of some sort. The approach was not just to change who could lead in church: it was to change the very nature of belief and what images of even the divine should and could be invoked. Yet they didn’t get validated which led to the third path Brock identifies, “Women as Victims”, and a period of anger and breaking silence about the domination of women in the church and about those who had been left to be forgotten. As my colleague, Shirley Ranck, wrote in 1994,
At the foot of the steps of the Aztec temple in Mexico City, there was found an oval stone eleven feet long, carved with the image of a dismembered goddess…. We do not need to know her story to know her fate. There she lies, dismembered, for all the world to see. Is there a woman of any color or culture who does not understand and suffer with her?
So in the 1980s and 1990s, a search for what some scholars call “original matriarchy” or the search for women-led utopian societies began as part of what Brock calls the “Woman-Centered” strategy. Lost female divinities were sought. We “rediscovered” Lady Wisdom, seen in the Hebrew Bible books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes who is almost like a second—female—manifestation of Yahweh. And Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who was said to have demanded equality and thus was cast out of the garden to leave space for the more submissive Eve. And also reclaimed were female medieval mystics such as Hildegarde of Bingen and ancient goddesses such as those listed on our cover and venerated in our song. Some enthusiasts went so far as to talk about an idyllic time when women ruled the world.
For as the story
continues, the women were asking why this all would have been destroyed. They were invoking the ancient mothers to
help them understand and remember the power they know – their connections to
the earth, the rhythms of their bodies and the sacred in daily tasks.
Sermon Part II: And feminism…..
“Goddess, is it true that girls are better than boys, I know you are one but try to be fair?”
In my story, I was swept away with the power at the festivities that surrounded the ERA march. Yet back at home, I was less convinced that I wanted to be part of a movement that seemed to be about being angry and mad at men. I was a heterosexual kid just starting my dating life, sure no one was going to try patriarchy on me. Later, as I started my professional life, I was surrounded by women who were out to show me who wore the pants and what Brock calls “man masks”. I became the mother of a girl and grew angry that the world was still not as safe for her as I would like. I became the mother of a boy and mourned how much he would have to be taught against the still prevailing messages of the day.
As this story continues, for some, the connection between loving and affirming women and hating men was too strong. The ideal of an “original matriarchy” was increasingly challenged and debunked by other women, anthropologists and religious scholars such as Rosemary Radford Ruether who concludes this at the end of her 300 plus page study, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, “I doubt the existence if female-dominated societies in which the relations between men and women, humans and nature, were totally harmonious. I suspect that some of the tensions from which later hierarchy developed were present in nascent forms.”
As yet, the wisdom of women’s ways of knowing is now firmly woven into our collective story, the way the altar cloth hanging above us combines individual contributions into a whole. The altar cloth and the votives here this morning, created by the women who went on our women’s retreat in February, remind me of the deep questions that women need to ask together and the challenges of doing that in a world where we aren’t as sure of our collective anger or whether we want enough the same thing to work together, to open up, to trust one another as fellow journeyers.
So now we pass sentences one to another as a third story begins. How does this story develop, if goddesses are, in some ways, as exclusive as gods; if we have no real evidence that women did or would do things better than men; and if we are no closer to having a single, unifying image of the holy and sacred in our lives? If we are, as Rita Nakashima Brock suggests now in an “Include Everyone” era where we acknowledge that there has always been more than one women’s movement and where we strain to hear the stories of women of color, poor women, lesbian and bisexual women, and disabled women? This is a story we have yet to tell.
Everywoman has her own theology –and every man as well. And still the core values of feminism of claiming voice, claiming power, naming what needs to be named and all these are part of our faith story. In the realm of religion, what feminism brought was a willingness to challenge orthodoxy, to name basic conflicts that had gone unsaid, and to affirm a wider range of the holy, including making the daily divine and to remember the earth as a shrine. These stories remind us that the divine is in the daily struggles to eat, to keep clean, to shelter and these teach us to believe and encourage us to invoke. Rosemary Radford suggests that the lost feminist images may be more theological than historical. They expand our vision for all genders, giving us a range of ways to see and understand the world.
Truth be told, we continue to struggle to make these ideal real in our lives, the same way that the ideals of Buddha or Jesus are still merely a goal. Our next teacher might be a child, forming her own prayer:
“Spirit of life, is it true that all life is holy, that we are created in our own best image and so is the whale, the wolf, the bird, the snake?”
May we hear the deep asking of our children and may their children tell stories more profound of which we can not even conceive. May we never stop asking and never stop naming. Blessed be.
Benediction Rosemary Radford Ruether
The lost feminist alternative is not so much a literal historical era of the past as it is a symbol of faith in the possibility of a better self and society.