“Women of Spirit and Strength”
by Reverend Judy Tomlinson
May 13, 2007
READINGS:
Our first reading is from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd:
August said, “Listen to me now, Lily. I’m going to tell you something I want you always to remember, all right?”
Her face had grown serious. Intent. Her eyes did not blink.
“All right,” I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.
“Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Our Lady is inside me,” I repeated, not sure I did.
“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.”
Our second reading is is by by Lydia Hoyt Farmer:
Happy is that mother whose ability to help her children continues on from babyhood and manhood (or womanhood) into maturity. Blessed is the son (or daughter) who need not leave their mother at the threshold of the world’s activities, but may always and everywhere have her blessing and her help. Thrice blessed are the son (and daughter) and the mother between whom there exists an association not only physical and affectional, but spiritual and intellectual, and broad and wise as is the scope of each being.
SERMON: “Women of Spirit and Strength”
Let me begin with full disclosure. I am not a birth mother or an adoptive mother.
I have helped raise two step-sons, I’ve been an Auntie
and now have two more adult step- children.
I’ve always considered the children and youth in the Religious Education Program as,
at least partially mine, as they are all of ours.
And I do share your experiences, as you work very hard to raise your children
and give them strong values.
The evidence from the Coming of Age program and the Sr. Youth service year after year,
shows that you, we, all of us, are doing a marvelous job.
And I know that raising children is the hardest job you’ll ever love –
full of proud moments intertwined with the happy, sad, tiring and frustrating ones.
Moments when you bite your tongue; moments when you pull out your hair.
Times when you are so absorbed in helping them develop their own identity,
that you lose yours.
Some say that all of us – man or woman – are mothers in a way.
Any time we create something – a piece of art, an idea, an insight –
any time we are involved in any type of serious and intense creative process
that absorbs us fully – body, mind and spirit – at those times,
we experience the process of birth, both painful and rewarding.
And when we have birthed something – anything – it becomes our responsibility,
to care for and to nurture.
And, while I may or may not be a full-fledged mother, I do have a mother.
My mother had six children. As a step-mother, I have shared the responsibility for two children
with two other people for many years.
In that context, I find the idea of raising six children daunting and difficult to imagine.
Children don’t always appreciate their parents, and I know I haven’t always
appreciated my mother. I remember clearly my teenage years –
the irritation when she wanted me to wash the dinner dishes
or to stop seeing a boyfriend she had qualms about.
Some women have the ‘my mother is my best friend’ kind of relationship.
That wasn’t my experience. I can remember when I was developing into a young woman
and I asked my mother a question about my body. She pled ignorance.
I was so disappointed.
I felt I couldn’t ask her for certain kinds of information.
Instead, from that day on, while I knew that my mother and I loved each other – and we still do – I relied on my older sisters for advice.
But I still wonder why my mother wouldn’t or couldn’t answer my questions.
She was in her mid-forties. She had borne six children. Was she just uncomfortable?
Could she have really been unaware? What was the issue, the barrier, the problem?
During my recent sabbatical, it became clear to me that these may actually be
much larger questions than I ever expected.
While enjoying a book on women’s spirituality, I read about the experience
of Rabbi Laura Geller, the spiritual leader at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, CA.
The third woman in the world to be ordained a Reform rabbi,
Rabbi Geller is as an activist and role model for women throughout
the international Jewish community.
Rabbi Geller tells a story about her mother’s first experience of womanhood.
When her mother had her first period, Rabbi Geller’s grandmother
slapped Rabbi Geller’s mother in the face.
When she heard about it, Rabbi Geller was confused and upset,
knowing her grandmother to be a wonderful person.
She asked her grandmother why she had done this.
The Grandmother said it was a traditional way to awaken a young girl
to her new role in life. Perhaps it was to ‘slap sense’ into a newly fertile girl,
warning her not to disgrace the family by becoming pregnant
out of wedlock.
Possibly it was to ‘awaken’ her out of her childhood slumber
and into her role as a Jewish woman.
As I read this story, I imagined how frightening and humiliating this experience must have been
for a young girl coming to her mother at a vulnerable time.
Over the years, as I’ve read books on women’s history and spirituality,
many of those authors referred to Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was A Woman.
Having time on my sabbatical I decided that I had best go to the source.
Hers is a detailed and scholarly account of the history of the evidence for
matriarchal societies where the principle religion was centered on worship of the Goddess.
The more I learned, the more I doubted that the kind of tradition experienced
by Rabbi Geller’s mother would have existed in a more matriarchal society.
As I went farther into my research, I was struck by the fact that widespread patriarchy
is a relatively modern phenomenon.
As recently as 4,000 years ago, things were much more balanced between women and men.
Extensive archeological finds, dating back to 7,000 years Before the Common Era,
show that the gods in many highly-developed societies were predominantly female.
There is similar, if less complete evidence dating as far back as the Upper Paleolithic cultures
25,000 years BCE. In these cultures, women’s bodies were celebrated
as the manifestation of the universal creative life force.
Women were generally credited with developing agriculture and thus civilization.
Merlin Stone writes in her book that many of these earlier cultures believed in
creation goddesses who brought forth not only the first people,
but the entire earth and heavens. Some of her names were Queen of Heaven,
Gaia, Tiamat, Yemaya, Spider Woman, Hathor, Astarte, Nut, Tara, Aditi,
Chang O, Amaterasu, Birra Nula, Juno, Oshun and many more.
These “goddess societies” existed in places as diverse as Babylon, Egypt, Africa,
Australia and China.
I learned that in various places around the globe female deities often were seen as healers
and their priestesses were the first physicians.
Goddesses are credited with bringing forth the original alphabet and language,
and priestesses served as scribes and accountants in the goddess’s temples.
Goddesses were even warriors. We are all familiar with the Amazon women.
Some of us know of the Celtic goddess warriors, courageous and daring in battle.
In many of these cultures, priestesses were prophets and wise counselors.
The Greeks visited the Oracle at Delphi. The Romans visited the temple of the goddess
Fortuna near Rome, to hear what fate had in store for them.
The Goddess was worshiped because she was the origin of all life on earth.
Women were honored because – through some mysterious process – they,
like the Goddess, could also produce life. The Goddess was celebrated because,
through agriculture, there was a regular and abundant food supply,
which produced in turn economic wealth, social status and prestige.
And so, women had status. They had religious, social and political power. They had legal standing and freedom. They controlled their own bodies.
The Goddess religions were practiced in many parts of the Neolithic world
from Europe to Russia, from India to the Mediterranean
and the whole of the Near and Middle East.
There is documentation showing goddess worship in Northern Africa
in Ethiopia, Lybia and Egypt.
These cultures were matrilineal. Archeologists theorize that this is stems from
the great mystery of procreation – in other words, our early ancestors’ ignorance
of the man’s role in conception. Lacking an understanding of the process of fertilization,
the mother was seen as the sole parent in the family.
For this reason, in these cultures, possessions, wealth and titles
were passed down through the mother.
Again, lacking understanding of paternity, ancestor worship focused naturally
on their women ancestors,
crediting them with the origin of the whole tribe.
There are countless excavations of small female figurines
that apparently were centerpieces of household shrines.
An excellent example of an organized cosmopolitan city can be found in the ruins
of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, part of modern day Turkey.
Archeological evidence reveals that this early city may have been
a primary source of the great Goddess religions.
Extensive artwork, representing the Goddess in her three aspects of maiden, mother and crone,
dating from 6500 BCE, has been unearthed.
Other archeological finds show that worship of the Goddess continued down
through the ages, even into the historic period that began in 3000 BCE,
when written records began.
In fact, Goddess worship even survived into the classical periods of the Greeks and Romans
and was not totally suppressed until the time of Christianity.
The last temple to the Goddess finally closed around year 500 of the Common Era.
In my research, I learned that the shift away from matriarchy first began in about 4500 BCE.
At that time, hordes of men with iron weapons riding on horseback and in horse-drawn
war chariots came thundering out of Russia, the Caucasus region and the Iran plateau.
They came as warriors. They came with priests.
And they came with an understanding of paternity.
Once these invasions began, they continued in waves lasting from one to three thousand years.
With their superior fighting power, these nomadic warriors overwhelmed the Goddess culture.
With time, using brutal violence and co-opting local religious mythology,
the invaders turned the role and status of women on its head.
Then paternity became paramount.
These men knew that the only way to ensure knowledge of that paternity
was to control women’s sexuality and their entire fertile period.
When the shift was completed, women were viewed in a new way.
Instead of being seen as a powerful, creative, life-sustaining force,
the mothers of life itself, they were seen as physically weak.
They were told they were mentally inferior,
told they lacked ability in math and science,
that they were illogical and overly emotional.
They were told that they lacked skill to be political or religious leaders.
They were unable to fight in armies.
They were especially robbed of their right to choose if and when to have children.
While this new system was enforced to varying degrees, with women finding ways around it, there have been periods of particularly cruel enforcement.
The era of the Inquisitions, which lasted from 1185 into the 1700s, was just such a time.
Millions of women and girls were terrorized for healing,
for having any personal power and even for free thinking.
Since the great shift occurred, women have waged a slow, relentless, uphill struggle
to reclaim the rights, freedoms and privileges that were originally theirs.
They have not been silent.
Against the odds, women made sure the Catholic Church had a feminine icon.
More recently, we have fought in waves for the vote, for educational opportunity,
for the right to be political and religious leaders
and for our place in the legal and business world.
Our Unitarian and Universalist foremothers were leaders and an integral part of this movement
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
They argued that women need education and an expanded role in society
so that they could be good mothers and raise strong independent children
who would grow into loyal and productive citizens
and thus strengthen our country.
In the last few years I have been disturbed as men I know have confided in me
how grateful they feel to their mothers for buffering them from their fathers.
These men spent their childhoods with fathers who were abusive,
or distant or just scary and intimidating.
For these men, mothers were the people who taught them about love
and the good things in the world.
It is only through their mothers that these men know how to be in relationship.
There are women that I know who have complicated relationships with their mothers.
They may be in competition with them.
Their mothers may have abandoned them or been absent.
Some of us have so many things we wanted from our mothers
that we simply did not get.
Yet, as I have been talking with women and men about their mothers I’m finding that,
at least in middle age, we are learning to appreciate our mothers for who they are or were.
I heard one woman say that she has come to terms with the fact
that she is not going to get certain things from her mother
that she has longed for all her life.
Somehow, this realization is helping her to have a better feeling about her mom.
A friend of mine was able to reconcile with her mother and have a good relationship with her for a few years before her mother passed just two years ago.
My friend writes, “All the emotional dirt was cleaned by then and we were
two beautiful women, a mother and a daughter
who will never have enough time to talk to each other,
never have enough time to sit . . . looking at each other’s eyes
and doing the best to translate love into words.”
After 4,000 years we, as women, are in various states of reclaiming our often secret heritage.
Here in the United States we have a new and first time woman Speaker of the House.
We have a woman running for President who is a viable candidate.
These are important steps.
And yet we are still battling over a woman’s right to decide when and how often
she will give birth.
Move-on.org states that, “Few people realize that mothers make about 27 percent less
than a man with equivalent education and experience,
and single mothers make about 40 percent less.
Or that there are 40,000 kindergartners at home alone after school in this country.”
And yet, today, on Mother’s Day, our country claims to honor and celebrate motherhood.
So, here we are on a beautiful, sunny Mother’s Day morning.
And I find that my questions and my reading have led to more questions, and deeper oncerns.
I can see that our complex relationships with our mothers may have their beginnings
in a long and complicated historical narrative.
Today’s children are the heirs of a that distorted heritage.
And I have wondered, while preparing this sermon, what it would have been like for us,
for women – and for men – what it would have been like for all of us
if God were still a woman?
Or even if a goddess shared an exalted place on an equal footing with a male counterpart?
What would it have been like for my mother and yours if we had in our mythology,
and thus in our minds, the image of the feminine divine principle?
Perhaps we would have a different relationship with our bodies both women and men.
Perhaps we would not be so obsessed with our body image.
I’m doing a Tai Chi and meditation practice and my teacher is always telling us
to put our minds down into our bodies, to pay attention to our bodies,
to care for them.
It occurred to me during a meditation that I have often tried to be like a female John Wayne –
trying to just tough it out, just push through it. No pain no gain.
I realized that I needed to be more gentle with myself.
Maybe if God were a woman I would have learned that long ago.
Perhaps if God were a woman programs that support the health and well-being all of children
would garner the major portion of our national budget.
If God were a woman I think that women would hear their calling
and be able to respond to it freely. They would not,
as they have done in the past, live their lives through their male children,
thus building resentment and creating undue burdens.
If God were a woman, I think we might have treated our Mother Earth a little better.
Instead, we have exploited her in every way and she is beginning to let us know.
Perhaps if God were a woman and we in fact held an image in our minds
of the Earth as our mother we would all be more respectful.
Perhaps if God were a woman we would treat all life as sacred.
I am about to become a step-grandmother in November.
I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. I am full of joy and am already thinking
about how I can be in relationship to this new child and how I can contribute to this new life.
I want this child – girl or boy – to be strong of spirit, to be free to hear and respond to
that spirit, to be happy and joyful upon this earth.
And so I think we should begin to honor mothers right now.
It is fine to bring flowers and make breakfast in bed
but we also need to think about and effect public policy to ensure that
mothers are happy and healthy and have the resources
to develop their minds, bodies and spirits for themselves
and for their children, for this world.
Any day that we can begin to reclaim that ancient heritage is a good Mother’s Day.
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