Reverend Darcey Laine
10/27/2002
Palo Alto, CA
When I was growing up in the 1970s, everyone knew that God was a man. Even the atheists at the Unitarian Universalist church my family attended, which was just about everybody at the church I attended, knew that the god they didn't believe in was a white bearded old man who meted out punishment and judgment, or granted favors for humans born into original sin.
Our hymnals used male pronouns to refer to human kind, and to God. Even in what I like to think of as a progressive church, many people rolled their eyes when we ordered new hymnals with inclusive language. It seemed a bit silly, was the thinking, since everyone understood that the words "he" and "man" already referred to everyone. At that time, even in our liberal faith, most ministers were men. And though there was no prohibition against women in the pulpit, the voice you heard as speaking about God the Father, and mankind, was a male voice.
But as in so many faiths and traditions, the women who had begun to question the authority of men, began to reject a paradigm of theology in which they could not find themselves. Imagine the courage of women who questioned or even to rejected the unquestionable. Remember that even the Unitarian Universalists thought that the word "man" said everything that needed to be said when talking about humankind. There was at this time not a church or temple or mosque in the country that based its teachings in women's experience, but women began to believe that such a thing was possible, was necessary for the full personhood of both women and men.
So women began to remind one another, as they reminded themselves, that they did in fact exist. Feminists are women reminding one another "you are a self." Mary Daly, in her 1973 book "Beyond God the Father" writes about the experience of standing on the edge of this paradigm:
"Seeing means that everything changes: the old identifications and the old securities are gone. Therefore the ethic emerging in the women's movement is not an ethic of prudence but one whose dominant theme is existential courage. This is the courage to see and to be in the face of the nameless anxieties that surface when a woman begins to see through the masks of sexist society and to confront the horrifying fact of her own alienation FROM HER AUTHENTIC SELF." Daley p. 4.
Because we have now lived through the birth of feminist theology, because there are seminaries that will teach a feminist hermeneutic if not at the center of their teaching, at least as a compensatory element of theological education, it is hard to really imagine or remember the courage it took to seek something entirely unprecedented in modern history, to be again and again the only person at the table who believed that women, where they differed from men, could experience and embody the divine in a different but equally vital way.
This is one of the central themes of Unitarian Universalism, that each individual has the innate wisdom to understand for him or herself what is true. We believe that the revelation of truth in the world did not end with the last of the Jewish prophets, or with Newtonian Physics. We agree that the individual has a unique and valuable perspective on the reality we all share. And this was one of the primary gifts of Feminist Theology, to open a door for me and for hundreds of thousands of other women and men so that we could believe that the authentic self has value, and holds for each an ultimate authority. If the image of God the Father seems oppressive to me, untenable, in some way out of harmony with my own sense of what is true, I must dissent. My own voice, my own wisdom is worth standing against thousands of years of patriarchal traditions.
Now once women began to stand in their own truth as women, the truths they proclaimed were inherently diverse. This is why when you see graduate course titles in this area, you will often see feminist or womanist "thea/ologies" (since the o is masculine and the a is feminine) in recognition that neither the fact of being female, nor the choice to address your social location as a woman in your theology… neither creates a single monolith called "feminist theology"
One strand of Feminist Thea/ology was spun by women who stayed in the faith of their families, choosing to promote change from the inside. Since so many Unitarian Universalists changed religious affiliation later in life, we often overlook the women who choose, for example, the strict gender roles of Islam, or those feminists who remain in the Catholic church, where even women who have dedicated their lives to serving a religious order cannot lead worship when men are present. And there are indeed remarkable women who have stayed in traditional religious communities and worked for change.
First I want to mention the scholars who participate in traditions where scripture is a source of religious authority. To mention scholars like Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger) who remove the shackles of traditional interpretation from passages which have been used to oppress women, such as the Genesis story. Douglas notices that God creates man from the soil, and gives him dominion over the earth, she notices that God creates woman from Adam's rib, which logically follows that this gives Eve dominion over Adam.
But more exciting to me than these semantic arguments is the excavation of women's history and tradition from the cannon composed and maintained by men. Remember that for much of history and in many cultures, only men were taught to read, or even allowed to read. The Jewish and Christian scriptures, therefore, were created primarily by and for men. We also know that women and men in the Jewish tradition had certain prohibitions against worshiping together. This points to a separate oral and ritual tradition for women which was practiced concurrently from the written and ritual traditions of the men.
For example: in the book of Judges, a father commits to sacrifice his daughter in fulfillment of a vow that lead him to victory. In response to this sacrifice the story concludes "So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite." [Judges 11:40] This is one of the passages which Feminist Scholar Phyllis Tribble calls a "Text of Terror" because it is just one example of violence against women in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet we find even in this violent narrative evidence of a women's worshiping community that observed a four day festival apart from the traditions and company of men, in order to memorialize such tragedy.
This school of feminist thought may be characterized as reclaiming the power and wisdom of women within their tradition. This has been a remarkable gift to me and to many other women. We are searching Judeo-Christian tradition from a perspective of our own experience and authority. We claim our right to speak from the pulpit, to interpret scripture, and to find truth in our own experience as women within this tradition.
For other women and men the patriarchal construction of religious institution and the male aspects of Yahweh or Jesus are insurmountable. Some have lost hope in religion. Others have turned to a genderless construction of the divine as characterizes the mystic traditions. These are the responses you will hear most often from this pulpit, so I will leave them for another day.
For many women who have been raised with the idea that god is de facto male, that all aspects of the divine have something of the masculine and nothing of the feminine, it has been important to search for a female aspect of God. *In the words of Ntozake Shange, .
"I found god in myself, I found god in myself
and i loved her fiercely".
We look to archeological evidence before written history for female images of the divine- and so increasingly these come to light. For example thousands of small statues of the female figure which have been historically classified as fertility symbols, are now seen by some to indicate a pervasive pre-historic goddess tradition. To the same end we have begun to turn as archeologists to the stories preserved in scripture, and to physical evidence of earlier days so that we may reconstruct times before and throughout history when God was envisioned as a woman.
One of the most oft cited examples is from the book of Jeremiah [44: 18] from the Hebrew scriptures:
… since we ceased burning incense to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour her libations, we have wanted everything and have been consumed by sword and famine." .
This is the image which gave name to a UU curriculum by Shirley Ann Ranck Cakes for the Queen of Heaven which helped a generation of women in our congregations to reclaim god. The process of re-examining archeological and mythic evidence gives us the opportunity to imagine a time when the Goddess was at the heart of religious tradition, when women were at the center of the structures of power rather than on the periphery
There is some debate about whether such a time existed. Monique Wittig in an oft cited passage (from "Les Guerilleres") writes
"There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember! You say there are no words to describe it; you say it does not exist. But remember! Make and effort to remember! Or failing that, invent.".
We know that the divine has been and continues to be worshiped in the female and the male forms. The practice of these religious impulses, however, requires some imagination, some extrapolation of our own lived experience as women and men. Can we even imagine a time when both women and men had equal access to power? This is the gift of contemporary Goddess-centered thea/ologies.
But I promised you I would talk about witches. Shirley Ranck suggests that Witchcraft is the practice of Goddess religion driven underground, and that therefore the persecution of witches in Europe and on this continent was essentially a persecution of women's religious practice. She writes
"There is only one word in the English language that connotes both women and power. That word is Witch. Consider for a minute that it was not magic or spells that motivated the killing of Witches, but the fear that they might have power-women's power-different and mysterious and uncontrolled by men, the church, or any other hierarchy."
If you push this line of thinking, that women have the same religious authority and wisdom as men, and that the lived experience of gender may lead to differing religious expression, the challenge becomes creating religious and thea/ological paradigms which are not burdened by the assumptions of old power structures. This is the line of thinking which has lead so many women to embrace Wicca in the last thirty years. Wiccans have restored a practice that is non-hierarchical, that honors each women's wisdom, and each stage of life. Star Hawk has been a major public figure in this movement, and worked on such projects as Circle Round, a book helping families who want to raise their children in the Wiccan tradition, so that children might grow up in a community that embodies new values about how power is shared. This non-hierarchical sharing of power is also the practice of the Women Spirit groups of this congregation.
The other essential thea/ological given that arises from this lineage, is the common theme, that god is not located out there somewhere, a transcendent deity such as a white bearded god of the sky. If instead the divine can be symbolized in the image of a full bellied woman, than perhaps God is immanent, residing in all living things, in the earth herself. Wicca, then, is a religious tradition that observes and honors the power of the natural world, the seed which becomes a flower, the cycles of the year, the pull of the moon on the waters of the world. Of course Wicca is only one of many traditions which honors the natural world and believes that God resides in all things, or that God is in fact the consciousness of all life. This is the belief which inspires many native American nations to strive to live in harmony and respect with the natural world. For centuries these ideas have been called animist, or pantheist, both deep insults when hurled Jewish or Christian theologians.
When we are referring to a philosophy of immanence and respect for our place in the natural world co-arising with a concern for the power relations between women and men, we call that Eco-Feminism. For those Americans who were raised in the Judeo-Christian culture, their practice of earth-centered spirituality is called Neo-Paganism. Currently Neo-Pagans are the second largest self-identified theology in Unitarian Universalism, the largest being Humanism.
These, then are I believe the three major gifts of the feminist movement to Unitarian Universalism: First a new path in the search for authentic self. Since our earliest days in the protestant reformation, this movement has been built on the individual's integrity to the truth of his experience. During the women's liberation movement, we learned once again the radical courage it takes to really free oneself from the expectations and limitations of society to live in integrity with the authentic self.
Second, feminism helped women reclaim their power within their own religious traditions. This is vital for all Unitarian Universalists who were raised in traditions experienced as oppressive. Feminist thinkers such as Phyllis Tribble or Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza model how all of us are empowered to claim our right to find our image and voice within our traditions of origin,
Finally, I believe that without the birth of these feminist thea/ologies, we would never have been compelled to add the most recent of our principles and purposes "Respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part" This principle represents a thea/ology in which all beings are sacred, and fundamentally relational.
These are the gifts into which I was born; a gift I owe to my mothers and aunts, the wise women, the witches, who had the courage to stretch the horizon of what women could be in this life, who taught me that the divine isin me, as in everything that is. These are the gifts of the goddess: to honor my authentic self, my power, and my connection to all beings. Blessed be.
Books recommended to me by members after this service on Sunday:
"Women Without Superstition" Annie Laurie Galyor
"Chalice and the Blade" Raine Eisler
"Mists of Avalon".
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Darcey Laine
