Introductory Words

The Woman in the Ordinary by Marge Piercy

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other's eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a hand grenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.

Sermon

Imagine that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. One day long ago the Martians, looking through their telescopes, discovered the Venusians. Just glimpsing the Venusians awakened feelings they had never known. They fell in love and quickly invented space travel and flew to Venus.

The Venusians welcomed the Martians with open arms. They had intuitively known that this day would come. Their hearts opened wide to a love they had never felt before.

The love between the Venusians and the Martians was magical. They delighted in being together, doing things together, and sharing together. Though from different worlds, they reveled in their differences. They spent months learning about each other, exploring and appreciating their different needs, preferences, and behavior patterns. For years they lived together in love and harmony.

Then they decided to fly to Earth. In the beginning everything was wonderful and beautiful. But the effects of Earth's atmosphere took hold, and one morning everyone woke up with a peculiar kind of amnesia - selective amnesia!

Both the Martians and Venusians forgot they were from different planets and were supposed to be different. In one morning everything they had learned about their differences was erased from their memory. And from that day men and women have been in conflict.[1]

Yes, it does seem like we are from different planets at times, but we seem not to be able to accept this reality. Men and women are different in ways that go beyond our biology. In general, men and women communicate differently. Our emotional responses are different. Our problem-solving techniques are different. Our learning styles are different. Our visions of the meaning of relationships and family are different. To not recognize and accommodate these differences creates many a fight.

The problem is that both male and female perspectives are not equally valued. There is a temptation to evaluate one side as better than the other. If only men could be more like women! If only women could be more like men! For much of recorded Western history, the differences found in men have been evaluated as superior to their complement found in women.

Well, women aren't going to take it any more! Right? Women know that their values are needed to keep us from destroying ourselves. One of the central struggles of the 20th century in Western Civilization has been the changing views of women's place in the world. In the United States, the abolitionist movement to free the African from slavery opened women's eyes to their own slavery and the possibility of freedom. "If a Negro can gain the rights of a white man, why not a woman?" they asked themselves.

Much intellectual energy of the last thirty years during the rise of feminism has been consumed advocating equal opportunity for women in the marketplace, home and bedroom. The truth that a female worker can do a job as well as a male worker has confused us, I think, in the issues of male and female identity. Women have had to enter the male world and be judged by male standards of performance. In order to succeed, many women have abandoned what we might term the feminine and emphasized the masculine parts of their personality. When in Rome, behave like the Romans.

As women have fought for the vote, for equal rights, for equal opportunity in the workplace, to control their own bodies, they have challenged the cultural norms of the feminine. The traditional view of women as passive, submissive and compliant don't fit the new liberated woman. In any such large cultural shift, a sense of rootlessness can develop. The values and meaning for today's woman do not have many roots in Western Culture. "Femininity, in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations. Even as it hurries forward ... putting on lipstick and high heels to appear well dressed, it trips on the ruffled petticoats and hoop skirts of an era gone by.[2]" Many women today seek historical rootedness for their femininity that says, "I'm woman, and I'm proud!"

The first stop on a path seeking to redefine the feminine must be the Bible, a key source of Western Culture. One doesn't need to read more than the first few pages to see that women are not going to be the ones who are celebrated as images of the divine. In fact, the source of sin in the world gets placed on poor Eve's shoulders in the first few chapters. And the status of women degenerates from there.

There isn't much inspiration for an understanding of the feminine in the Christian scriptures. To give you a feeling for why women might not like the theology that comes out of the letters of Paul, I will quote one or two offensive passages. In First Timothy, we find "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent" (2:11-12). In First Corinthians we find "As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church." (14:33-36). How many women think this way here today? What is the proper place for women in Paul's view? Just two chapters earlier he laid it out. "But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God." (11:3) The chain of command starts with God and ends with women at the bottom.

Well, the Bible was written a long time ago. Certainly theologians have seen and corrected the bias. To use a popular colloquialism, "NOT!" Here, some of the distinguished theologians of the 20th century speak to the issue. In Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, he writes: "Properly speaking, the business of woman, her task and function, is to actualize the fellowship in which man can only precede her, stimulating, leading, and inspiring . . . To wish to replace him in this, or to do it with him, would be to wish not to be a woman." Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, writes "A rationalistic feminism is undoubtedly inclined to transgress inexorable bounds set by nature.[3]"

One of the feminist visionaries who saw the destruction these stories wreak on women's sense of value was Mary Daly. She recognized that these stories about women robbed them of their power to name, to define themselves independent of male judgment. "Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God." She asserts "To exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God.[4]" The solution? "The method of liberation, then, involves a castrating of language and images that reflect and perpetuate the structures of a sexist world."[5] Ms. Daly doesn't mince words.

Today, women are turning to other sources of meaning besides the religions of the patriarchs. Other religious traditions existed before and have co-existed with old time religion against every attempt to destroy them. Archeologists have noted that early religious artifacts of primitive European civilization almost always depict divine figures in the feminine. This and other discoveries have led to speculation that these early cultures were matriarchally based. Charlene Spretnak, in her book, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, argues that the Goddess traditions of ancient Greece were distorted by the invading cultures of the Ionians, the Achaeans, and finally the Dorians between 2500 and 1000 B.C.E., bringing male images of the Divine, headed by Zeus, the thunderbolt God. The matriarchal Grecian culture was subdued and the Goddesses robbed of their power. Their names - Gaia, Themis Rhea, Pandora, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hecate, Hera, Athena, Demeter and Persephone - are recognizable in the Olympian legends but are not presented in their original identity and power. Spretnak has a good description of the differences between the Greek Gods and Goddesses:

The pre-Hellenic Goddesses are enmeshed with people's daily experiencing of the energy forces in life; Olympian Gods are distant, removed, "up there." Unlike the flowing, protective love of a Mother-Goddess, the character of the Olympian Gods is judgmental. Olympian Gods are much more warlike than their predecessors and are often involved in strife. The pre-Hellenic Goddesses are powerful and compassionate, yet those whom the Greeks incorporated into the new order were transformed severely. The great Hera was made into a disagreeable, jealous wife; Athena was made into a cold, masculine daughter; Aphrodite was made into a frivolous sexual creature; Artemis was made into the quite forgettable sister of Apollo; and Pandora was made into the troublesome, treacherous source of human woes.[6]

To give you an idea how one culture subjugates the religion of the other, take the myth about Pandora. It was her box that was the source of all the evil and woe in the world, in the version of the story we have received. Now listen to Spretnak's reconstruction of this myth from what we know of the original Pandora:

Earth-mother had given the mortals life. This puzzled them greatly. They would stare curiously at one another, then turn away to forage for food. Slowly they found that hunger has many forms. One morning the humans followed an unusually plump bear cub to a hillside covered with bushes that hung heavy with red berries. They began to feast at once, hardly aware of the tremors beginning beneath their feet. As the quaking increased, a chasm gaped at the crest of the hill. From it arose Pandora with her earthen pithos. The mortals were paralyzed with fear but the Goddess drew them into Her aura. I am Pandora, Giver of All Gifts. She lifted the lid from the large jar. From it She took a pomegranate, which became an apple, which became a lemon, which became a pear. I bring you flowering trees that bear fruit, gnarled trees hung with olives, and, this, the grapevine that will sustain you. She reached into the jar for a handful of seeds and sprinkled them over the hillside. I bring you plants for hunger and illness, for weaving and for dyeing. Hidden beneath My surface you will find minerals, ore, and clay of endless form. She took from a jar two flat stones. Attend with care My plainest gift: I bring you flint. Then Pandora turned the jar on its side, inundating the hillside with Her flowing grace. The mortals were bathed in the changing colors of Her aura. I bring you wonder, curiosity, memory. I bring you wisdom. I bring you justice with mercy. I bring you caring and communal bonds. I bring you courage, strength, endurance. I bring you loving kindness for all beings. I bring you the seeds of peace.[7]

This in microcosm is the dilemma of the image of the feminine. Women have not created the image of the feminine. Men have created it out of the projection of their desires. Women today are not looking through men's eyes to determine what is feminine, but discovering it in their own bodies. Most important, they are discovering a positive, creative vision of the feminine, not the negative, limiting, and destructive one that our culture has transmitted to us.

This new femininity is body-affirming. As the earth welcomes a seed and brings it to life, so the womb is the symbol of the receiving and nurturing of new life. This power to bring forth life is not just a passive, receptive energy but also an energetic, forceful power which ejects its creation into the world through the birth canal.

This new femininity affirms the earth as its root, not the sky. The earth is the source of the sustenance of the world, the nurturer of the seed that lies in the dark moist earth. To understand the feminine, one must descend, with Persephone, into the darkness of the earth rather than fly away into the sky.

The new femininity has a vision of power not expressed through dominance, but rather through intimate relationship. Feminine power is expressed in collaboration with others not through subordination of others.

The feminine principle is not concerned with breaking the world into polarities and affirming one while rejecting the other. The feminine principle is concerned with affirming the whole, with the unity of all existence.

The goal of revisioning the feminine principle is not to make the masculine principle wrong that comes through loud and clear in the hero's journey visible in the patriarchal religious traditions. We must recognize and accept the characteristics which arise from our sex as valuable and meaningful - even if it may be difficult for the other to understand.

When we recognize that men are from Mars and women are from Venus - perhaps we can settle the ongoing conflict between the sexes.

Closing Words

Everywoman Her Own Theology

Alicia Ostriker

I am nailing them up to the cathedral door
Like Martin Luther. Actually, no,
I don't want to resemble that Schmutzkopf
(See Erik Erikson and N O. Brown
On the Reformer's anal aberrations,
Not to mention his hatred of Jews and peasants),
So I am thumb tacking these ninety-five
Theses to the bulletin board in my kitchen

My proposals, or should I say requirements,
Include at least one image of a god,
Virile, beard optional, one of a goddess,
Nubile, breast size approximating mine,
One divine baby, one lion, one lamb,
All nude as figs, all dancing wildly,
All shining Reproducible
In marble, metal, in fact any material

Ethically, I am looking for
An absolute endorsement of loving-kindness.
No loopholes except maybe mosquitoes.
Virtue and sin will henceforth be discouraged,
Along with suffering and martyrdom.
There will be no concept of infidels;
Consequently the faithful must entertain
Themselves some other way than killing infidels

And so forth and so on. I understand
This piece of paper is going to be
Spattered with wine one night at a party
And covered over with newer pieces of paper.
That is how it goes with bulletin boards
Nevertheless it will be there
Like an invitation, like a chalk pentangle,
It will emanate certain occult vibrations.

If something sacred wants to swoop from the universe
Through a ceiling, and materialize,
Folding its silver wings,
In a kitchen, and bump its chest against mine,
My paper will tell this being where to find me.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.