More Joan Chittister highlights, provocative enough to keep me blogging. Besides it’s too hot to unpack more post-moving boxes.
-Christianity is the most anthropocentric and androcentric religion of the major faiths. BUT in the West....................(Christianity exiled its feminine mostly to church domestics.)
-We’ve lost touch with Incarnation: divine presence in ALL created things, animals and nature, not just humanity.
-We’ve lost the the Godde of Genesis who declares ALL of it GOOD and says ALL of it requires care, not sovereignty.
-We’ve lost the sacramentality of the universe.
-We’ve lost the awareness of human finiteness and human dependence on everything in nature‚ exclude oil! We have abused our environment with our demand for moreness and our inability to know enoughness.
-We’ve lost the wholeness of biblical story. Genesis 1, the creation story, and Genesis 2, the companionship story, must be read as a whole.
-We’ve forgotten that Adam named and included all the animals. We turned naming into ownership and control. Any of you with children? Do you name them? How much control does that give you? LOL.
-We’ve lost what science and ecofeminism have retrieved: the interrelatedness and interdependence of all people and things. The Christian Church must catch up to the fact that life is a weave not a ladder and that autonomy and rugged individualism are dangerous illusions.
-We’ve lost the omnipresence of Godde, aka the Holy One.
-We’ve lost our femininity and with it our full humanity.
-We’ve lost the Sabbath, the contemplative mind of Godde, as the crown of all creation.
-We’ve lost our Jewish roots. “If you believe that Godde build inequality into creation you are party to the gassing of the next generation of Jews.”
Chittister closed with a wrap-up parable from Buddhism. The Buddha one day asked a notorious bandit if he could pull a branch off a nearby tree. Of course said the bandit, flexing his muscles and strutting toward the tree. Snap! Now, challenged the Buddha, can you put it back? Are you crazy said the bandit. I can’t do that?
Can we do this? Can we teach it, talk it, preach it, write it, live it?
Joan Chittister nurtured us with her humor and her spiritual vitality. She challenged us with not a brand new but a restored vision, a vision in line with feminist values, common sense religious thinking, and an ethic of mutuality in league with a wholistic spirituality grounded in relationship, humility and sacramentality.
Is there hope?
Chittister says that male feminists give her hope that the dream is realizable. We are not the same but differences can be valued as contributing to the whole while we claim our sacred human lives together to build a new world view.
I strongly believe this is and has always been Godde’s work into which we join come-lately but not too lately if we wake up to the task, the ministry of transformation. And we don’t have to ask any more, Is it broken? Or rationalize saying, If it’s not broken don’t fix it? Patriarchy as mindset, domination politics, policy and practice is broken and breaking us. With Godde’s grace working in us that which is enlivening for the common good we can fix it.
I am grateful to Chittister’s prophetic mission and person for: no reference to the sexual abuse scandal in her church (too easy a scapegoat for a larger issues); no reference to denominations or any thought of one true church; taking on the risk of a celebrity status for the sake of the prophetic message.
I am grateful for: my own Episcopal Church risking rifts in the Anglican Communion of which it is a part to elect a woman, Katherine Jefferts Schori, as our Presiding Bishop, and consecrate a non-celibate gay man, Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire; my Roman Catholic friends some of whom make home sabbaths and some of whom go to Episcopal or Lutheran churches on Sundays but still call themselves Catholic; Roman Catholic women who are getting ordained, excommunicated, and living out their vocations in a variety of non-traditional ways; my sisters and brothers in all faith traditions who are not afraid to explore new ways of telling the story and new ways of doing church; feminist theologians in all traditions.
(P.S. The title of these posts is borrowed. It is the identifying “motto” for St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Apparently in the age of marketing tyranny everyone needs a brand. I’ve seen cattle branding. Not fun. But to be serious I suppose it’s a good exercise for a community, in this case a Christian parish, to come together to attempt to sloganize its particular spirituality and charism. Thank you St. John’s.)
NEWS FLASH: We have a Rabba. She is Sara Hurwitz, the thirty-two year old mother of three children. She is the first woman ordained in American Orthodox Judaism. The ordaining Rabbi is Avi Weiss of Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York. In March of last year Weiss ordained Sara and dramatically proclaimed in the presence of witnesses: “The authority of Torah will rest upon your shoulders to spread the knowledge of God throughout the land.” She carries the title Rabbi or Rabba.
It give me chills and thrills. There is hope for a new world view, the story told another way.
Showing posts with label JOan chittister. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JOan chittister. Show all posts
Friday, July 23, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Nurture and Challenge Your Spirit with Joan Chittister, Part II
It’s the feast of Mary Magdalene. How appropriate, a woman besmirched for centuries of Christian history as a prostitute (no where in scripture btw!) She was a woman whose reputation was scarred and still is in some circles just because of patriarchal interpretation of her healing by Jesus of “seven demons.” Maybe she had been sexually abused and suffered dissociative disorder? Apparently some male interpreters assumed she was a sexual sinner. A common projection I’d say!
BUT many in the church knew better. Mary Magdalene was declared a saint, a woman identified in John’s gospel as given the call through a vision of the risen Christ to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection to her brothers, a woman restored to dignity by Christian feminist theologians who recognize her as the apostle to the apostles—a prophet in her own right, whose day should be celebrated in all Christian churches and seldom is even if it happen to fall on a Sunday. The beat goes on.
Back to Joan Chittister: highlights.
-In 1827, public use of the microscope allowed people to see what they had always suspected was there but only as locker room talk: THE OVA. Imagine! Heretofore it was thought and taught that seed, read semen, was deposited into women and made life all by itself.
-Men make about 25 million sperm for fertility. Women make about 250 eggs. 25 million sperm to chase one little egg around. And a lot of the little sharpshooters miss the mark! No wonder they want guns.
-But if you think sperm makes life on its own just collect some—somehow— plant it in your back yard and see if anything grows.
-We struggled for years to get the male pronouns out and now they’re putting them back in. “Give ‘em pronouns and they’ll want ordination.” Is this a likely suspected rationale from male hierarchy? (In the Episcopal Church a simple italicizing of he made it inclusive of she. It all depends whose pronoun gets subsumed under whose.)
-It seems that pink and blue souls are flying round out there like balloons—but one of them leaks!
-Medical school shelves are lined with shelves and shelves of books written to prove blacks are inferior, most of it based on facial features.
-Women, made to believe in their own inferiority, have been complicit: It’s always been that way. I’m happy. My husband lets me go out alone.
-Sexism also warps male development. Under the guise of privilege and superiority men are expected to : pay, provide, produce and be perfect. If a man decides to quit his job and try something new or something of his passion, a sexist woman may remind him coyly that her sister’s husband has just bought her a “mc’mansion” somewhere. What do we still tell a boy about crying, about fear, about becoming the little man in the family after a father dies or leaves, about taking care of his sister five years older than he is, about not being in touch with feelings when he’s been trained not to be??
-Mothering became a lifelong vocation and process; fathering a one shot event.
-Philosopher John Stuart Mill said women could be educated yes but to preserve the social order and maintain social standards set by men. There went educational policy and curricula were organized for women to study tatting, scripture, homemaking and the like. Why? Because they thought/taught that too much learning could render a woman sterile. (Pedagogy designed to keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant—and powerless.)
- The transformation of patriarchal thought is not about male-bashing or even blaming. True feminism is not about male-bashing either.
-Telling the story in another way is about the reconciliation of theology, science, ecology and feminism. It is about cooperation and re-rooting ourselves in a new world view. To become wholly human must be a wholly human endeavor with each and all involved wholeheartedly.
Final installment tomorrow.
BUT many in the church knew better. Mary Magdalene was declared a saint, a woman identified in John’s gospel as given the call through a vision of the risen Christ to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection to her brothers, a woman restored to dignity by Christian feminist theologians who recognize her as the apostle to the apostles—a prophet in her own right, whose day should be celebrated in all Christian churches and seldom is even if it happen to fall on a Sunday. The beat goes on.
Back to Joan Chittister: highlights.
-In 1827, public use of the microscope allowed people to see what they had always suspected was there but only as locker room talk: THE OVA. Imagine! Heretofore it was thought and taught that seed, read semen, was deposited into women and made life all by itself.
-Men make about 25 million sperm for fertility. Women make about 250 eggs. 25 million sperm to chase one little egg around. And a lot of the little sharpshooters miss the mark! No wonder they want guns.
-But if you think sperm makes life on its own just collect some—somehow— plant it in your back yard and see if anything grows.
-We struggled for years to get the male pronouns out and now they’re putting them back in. “Give ‘em pronouns and they’ll want ordination.” Is this a likely suspected rationale from male hierarchy? (In the Episcopal Church a simple italicizing of he made it inclusive of she. It all depends whose pronoun gets subsumed under whose.)
-It seems that pink and blue souls are flying round out there like balloons—but one of them leaks!
-Medical school shelves are lined with shelves and shelves of books written to prove blacks are inferior, most of it based on facial features.
-Women, made to believe in their own inferiority, have been complicit: It’s always been that way. I’m happy. My husband lets me go out alone.
-Sexism also warps male development. Under the guise of privilege and superiority men are expected to : pay, provide, produce and be perfect. If a man decides to quit his job and try something new or something of his passion, a sexist woman may remind him coyly that her sister’s husband has just bought her a “mc’mansion” somewhere. What do we still tell a boy about crying, about fear, about becoming the little man in the family after a father dies or leaves, about taking care of his sister five years older than he is, about not being in touch with feelings when he’s been trained not to be??
-Mothering became a lifelong vocation and process; fathering a one shot event.
-Philosopher John Stuart Mill said women could be educated yes but to preserve the social order and maintain social standards set by men. There went educational policy and curricula were organized for women to study tatting, scripture, homemaking and the like. Why? Because they thought/taught that too much learning could render a woman sterile. (Pedagogy designed to keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant—and powerless.)
- The transformation of patriarchal thought is not about male-bashing or even blaming. True feminism is not about male-bashing either.
-Telling the story in another way is about the reconciliation of theology, science, ecology and feminism. It is about cooperation and re-rooting ourselves in a new world view. To become wholly human must be a wholly human endeavor with each and all involved wholeheartedly.
Final installment tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Nurture and Challenge Your Spirit With Joan Chittister: Part I
Hundreds of excited, chattering women poured out of the lecture hall at Regis College last Monday, and headed like lemings for the ladies room.
Inspired by the prophetic call they had just heard from Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., prophet not yet martyred, the women, seeing the usual long line stretching out from the door of their gendered destination, spilled over and flooded the men’s room without hesitation.
We had been told we needed to create a new world, because patriarchy was killing all of us and our planet. And we had heard that we needed to cooperate in order to do this effectively, men and women together—no blaming or shaming.
Women flooding the men’s room made me chuckle. How many times have I stood in long lines watching men next door whip in, pee and whip out—no line? What was wrong with female bladders, or was it the hauling up and down of our clothing instead of a simple zip zip?
But this day the unabashed action of women seemed to me not to be about either bladder desperation or long-awaited revenge or even, god forbid, the famous organ envy Freud made part of the female psyche. No, this felt like a sign of spiritual empowerment—eagerness to abandon rigid and divisive categories for the sake of a gospel of interconnectedness, inclusion and mutuality.
As we all filed happily into the stalls-with-doors, one woman suddenly gave a little shriek and lifted her event program to the side of her face while gesturing with her pointy finger. I glanced over to see a man standing at a urinal. (Now who the heck invented such insults to male modesty?) The woman made a giggly half-hearted attempt to stop the territorial invasion but the women kept coming, undaunted.
Now perhaps I should tell you more about the instigator. Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun, member of the order of the Benedictine sisters in Erie, PA. She is also a prolific author and sought after speaker. She, or better said Godde’s Spirit through her, invited this revolution. Chittister’s talk was titled “God, Women and the World: Telling the Story Another Way.”
The event was sponsored by Sacred Threads, an organization of spiritual companioning for women through programs and gatherings for education, sharing and re-imagining.
Chittister, after disclaiming a “too effulgent” introduction, requested house lights so she could see her audience:mostly women, mostly edging into aging, likely mostly Roman Catholic, and all white—alas, but why not? We whities have been both fodder, enablers, and chief benefactors of patriarchal policy, the target for Chittister’s demand for justice.
I have spelled Godde in the Christian feminist way throughout. I don’t know how Joan Chittister would spell it but I know she loves Godde by whatever name. I have put quotation marks around her own exact words and parentheses around mine where possible.
Gazing out at hundreds of faces Chittister told us that this event began as an invitation to come to a coffee break affair with about thirty women. “This is the largest coffee break in history!” I suspect, however, that the original idea inflated after the inviters heard how much this might cost and also how important it was that this message reach large crowds. (Today’s prophets may get silenced but so far their voices continue to reach droves as the, Roman Catholic at least, hierarchy implodes.) Sacred Threads responded, did the good work of promotion, and we grew.
I can not do justice to the hour and a half talk, packed with humor, resource and stats, so I will give highlights I loved. Some of them might not be absolutely correctly noted in spite of my compulsive note taking. Sacred Threads will make a DVD of this talk available for lending purposes, and it will also be available through Joan Chittister's company Benetvision.
In a way Chittister’s ideas were not new to me nor certainly is feminist theology and ecofeminism, but it was lovely to hear such a big celebrity voice in religion asking:
"How can one be a Christian and not a feminist?"
-The creativity required for big change calls for making right hand turns from the left lane—regularly.
-Saints see just what everyone else sees, but see it differently, according to Jonathan Edwards.
-It’s time to make the connections between male-dominated disciplines like theology, philosophy, science, psychology, sociology, education, et. al. that have conspired to make patriarchy successful, ie. it’s no accident that two-thirds of the world’s poor are women. IT’S POLICY.
- According to an essay by Lynn White, the Judaeo-Christian ethic justifies domination policies and thought, not just for humanity but for nature and animals. For example, water is there for my use therefore I can dam it. Animals can be used to research for cosmetics. And in Genesis, the earlier-written story about human sin and hubris in Genesis 2 was placed second, while the grand and beloved later-written Creation story in Genesis 1, “In the beginning.......”, was placed first. Why? It glorifies rank ordering. (The created order is policy disguised as poetry.) We are carefully taught to think in superior and inferior categories.
-Life is not a ladder but a weave, a process of changes. (Quakers call the process unfoldment.) But man (understood but NOT written to include woman) ends up as the crowning glory and gets to dominate nature. Now the Caribbean Sea is being raped, just like so many women in their own homes continue to be raped with the idea that the marriage bond is really bondage. (Latter is my addition as someone who has worked to try to prevent and educate about domestic violence, a clear product of a patriarchal world view. )
-On the creation of Eve: Ezer kenegdo which appears 30 times in scripture is never translated “a helpmate fit for man, Adam" except in Genesis 2:18. What a great ecclesiastical scam. The Hebrew words mean “a power equal to Adam.” How different does that sound from a helpmate FIT for Adam? (No wonder we women have trouble getting ordained!) Does no one notice that there could not have been an Adam without an Eve?
-As to the rib: Adam is ha adam, Hebrew meaning the stuff of humanity. Not until Eve is created do they become full human beings called Adam and Eve. Note!
-The patriarchal world view is sinfully partial, incomplete. “We are thinking with half the human mind and it shows.”
-”Everything written about us was written without us. And they call it theology!” The “us” would include women, Native Americans, African Americans, aborigenes, homosexuals, Iraquis, on and on.
-Science came along to support theology’s platform. Galileo wasn’t arrested for his science but for his theology. “They never even looked in his telescope!”
Read more Chittister wisdom tomorrow on this blog site.
Inspired by the prophetic call they had just heard from Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., prophet not yet martyred, the women, seeing the usual long line stretching out from the door of their gendered destination, spilled over and flooded the men’s room without hesitation.
We had been told we needed to create a new world, because patriarchy was killing all of us and our planet. And we had heard that we needed to cooperate in order to do this effectively, men and women together—no blaming or shaming.
Women flooding the men’s room made me chuckle. How many times have I stood in long lines watching men next door whip in, pee and whip out—no line? What was wrong with female bladders, or was it the hauling up and down of our clothing instead of a simple zip zip?
But this day the unabashed action of women seemed to me not to be about either bladder desperation or long-awaited revenge or even, god forbid, the famous organ envy Freud made part of the female psyche. No, this felt like a sign of spiritual empowerment—eagerness to abandon rigid and divisive categories for the sake of a gospel of interconnectedness, inclusion and mutuality.
As we all filed happily into the stalls-with-doors, one woman suddenly gave a little shriek and lifted her event program to the side of her face while gesturing with her pointy finger. I glanced over to see a man standing at a urinal. (Now who the heck invented such insults to male modesty?) The woman made a giggly half-hearted attempt to stop the territorial invasion but the women kept coming, undaunted.
Now perhaps I should tell you more about the instigator. Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun, member of the order of the Benedictine sisters in Erie, PA. She is also a prolific author and sought after speaker. She, or better said Godde’s Spirit through her, invited this revolution. Chittister’s talk was titled “God, Women and the World: Telling the Story Another Way.”
The event was sponsored by Sacred Threads, an organization of spiritual companioning for women through programs and gatherings for education, sharing and re-imagining.
Chittister, after disclaiming a “too effulgent” introduction, requested house lights so she could see her audience:mostly women, mostly edging into aging, likely mostly Roman Catholic, and all white—alas, but why not? We whities have been both fodder, enablers, and chief benefactors of patriarchal policy, the target for Chittister’s demand for justice.
I have spelled Godde in the Christian feminist way throughout. I don’t know how Joan Chittister would spell it but I know she loves Godde by whatever name. I have put quotation marks around her own exact words and parentheses around mine where possible.
Gazing out at hundreds of faces Chittister told us that this event began as an invitation to come to a coffee break affair with about thirty women. “This is the largest coffee break in history!” I suspect, however, that the original idea inflated after the inviters heard how much this might cost and also how important it was that this message reach large crowds. (Today’s prophets may get silenced but so far their voices continue to reach droves as the, Roman Catholic at least, hierarchy implodes.) Sacred Threads responded, did the good work of promotion, and we grew.
I can not do justice to the hour and a half talk, packed with humor, resource and stats, so I will give highlights I loved. Some of them might not be absolutely correctly noted in spite of my compulsive note taking. Sacred Threads will make a DVD of this talk available for lending purposes, and it will also be available through Joan Chittister's company Benetvision.
In a way Chittister’s ideas were not new to me nor certainly is feminist theology and ecofeminism, but it was lovely to hear such a big celebrity voice in religion asking:
"How can one be a Christian and not a feminist?"
-The creativity required for big change calls for making right hand turns from the left lane—regularly.
-Saints see just what everyone else sees, but see it differently, according to Jonathan Edwards.
-It’s time to make the connections between male-dominated disciplines like theology, philosophy, science, psychology, sociology, education, et. al. that have conspired to make patriarchy successful, ie. it’s no accident that two-thirds of the world’s poor are women. IT’S POLICY.
- According to an essay by Lynn White, the Judaeo-Christian ethic justifies domination policies and thought, not just for humanity but for nature and animals. For example, water is there for my use therefore I can dam it. Animals can be used to research for cosmetics. And in Genesis, the earlier-written story about human sin and hubris in Genesis 2 was placed second, while the grand and beloved later-written Creation story in Genesis 1, “In the beginning.......”, was placed first. Why? It glorifies rank ordering. (The created order is policy disguised as poetry.) We are carefully taught to think in superior and inferior categories.
-Life is not a ladder but a weave, a process of changes. (Quakers call the process unfoldment.) But man (understood but NOT written to include woman) ends up as the crowning glory and gets to dominate nature. Now the Caribbean Sea is being raped, just like so many women in their own homes continue to be raped with the idea that the marriage bond is really bondage. (Latter is my addition as someone who has worked to try to prevent and educate about domestic violence, a clear product of a patriarchal world view. )
-On the creation of Eve: Ezer kenegdo which appears 30 times in scripture is never translated “a helpmate fit for man, Adam" except in Genesis 2:18. What a great ecclesiastical scam. The Hebrew words mean “a power equal to Adam.” How different does that sound from a helpmate FIT for Adam? (No wonder we women have trouble getting ordained!) Does no one notice that there could not have been an Adam without an Eve?
-As to the rib: Adam is ha adam, Hebrew meaning the stuff of humanity. Not until Eve is created do they become full human beings called Adam and Eve. Note!
-The patriarchal world view is sinfully partial, incomplete. “We are thinking with half the human mind and it shows.”
-”Everything written about us was written without us. And they call it theology!” The “us” would include women, Native Americans, African Americans, aborigenes, homosexuals, Iraquis, on and on.
-Science came along to support theology’s platform. Galileo wasn’t arrested for his science but for his theology. “They never even looked in his telescope!”
Read more Chittister wisdom tomorrow on this blog site.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
