C3/CCC Sermon Transcript for February 25, 2007 I would like to begin by saying: Some of my best friends are men. I do not dis-like men. I am not a man-basher. In fact, I love the chemistry men bring to the mix. I need the men in my life to know how to become a fully integrated woman. How I treat men, how I view men is how I treat the masculine qualities which live in me. And the reverse is true. How men treat the women in their lives points to how they care for their own feminine qualities. Just as the Chinese yin/yang symbol demonstrates, as men or women, we have varying degrees of feminine and masculine qualities which make up who we are and together complete the circle. As members of this community most of us know how it feels to be marginalized. We understand the plight of women living in a male-dominated society, we understand that lesbians and gays live in a predominately hetero-sexual world, we understand what it means to be excluded. Today I would like to offer the progressive and evolutionary view that we are all dependant on each other in a mutual web of relationships. And further, that individually and communally our journey is to become fully human beings. Iranaeus in the 2nd century claimed, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Fully alive. Fully human. Living free. Free to become, free to evolve into all of our magnificent human potential. As we began the service with only women processing and proclaiming, what were you experiencing? What is it about our current culture that women need a special Sunday ? How did the feminine and masculine ever get out of balance? The disparity we feel and see in culture begins with giving birth. For many ages, conceiving and giving birth were misunderstood. Women were suspect in their ability to create and carry life. They paid a price for this power. Women became identified only with their bodies. Women became unclean and profane. The erotic became profane. Celibacy became the “higher” spiritual practice. The profanity of women was a direct response of Christianity to pagan fertility rites and goddess worship, earth worship. The Egyptians and Greeks further compounded this duality when they segregated heaven from earth in their view of the cosmos. Heaven and the spiritual became “higher”; earth and bodies became “lower”. Gloria Karpinski calls this segregation the “dangerous divide” and as humans we became divided within ourselves. How do we heal this divide? How do we restore the feminine in balance to the masculine? We need to begin to live out of the profound beauty of being human. We begin to find the sacred in every day ordinary experiences. We need to come home to our bodies. Our bodies are microcosms of the universe. If the universe is vast and mysterious then so are we. When we come home to our bodies we explore all of who we are. If we honor our bodies, we honor the earth and Gaia, our Earth Mother. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and international speaker on human rights, is one of the women I most admire in the world. When the pope tried to silence her from speaking out, she and her religious community wouldn’t back down and the pope had to withdraw his demand. Joan makes this point – it is useless to blame men or men in particular for the wounding of women. We should blame patriarchy. The system of patriarchy is to blame for keeping women unfree and thereby keeping men unfree. Everyone has paid a price under patriarchy. Patriarchy is foremost a culture of fear. Men at the top of the corporate competitive ladder “swim with the sharks” and have paid the price with heart disease, ulcers, and other stress-related diseases. As women break through glass ceilings they too begin to suffer the same dis-eases. Today many young men contemplate, attempt, or commit suicide. I believe that these sensitive young men carry the cultural wound. They sense that culturally something is dying or needs to die. It is not their life which needs to end. It is the system which needs to end. Even older men speak about living with a low-grade functional type of depression. It doesn’t help to blame. Blaming only polarizes. As we look at women’s wounding and the end of patriarchy we are invited to look again at our culture, our structures, and see them for what they are. Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout history, they have also been excluded from theory formation. We’ve been excluded from creating symbol and myth, from the meaning-making process that explains and interprets reality. It has been pointed out that institutional Christianity, which has shaped Western civilization for two thousand years, has been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine – a theological “San Andreas Fault” in denying the feminine. Our task as women is to birth ourselves – to bring forth a true, instinctual, powerful person who is rooted in her own feminine center, who honors the sacredness of the feminine, and who speaks the feminine language of her own soul. [Sue Monk Kidd]. To become balanced and whole, women need to become clear about their own inner authority. Culture, especially religion, needs to include women, honor women to re-balance the masculine to the feminine. What the feminine offers in restoring the human condition is: contemplation, stillness - like the space between your exhale and the next inhale, waiting, being, yielding - like a shore waiting for the next wave, receiving. The feminine offers living with ambiguity, the absorbing, the intangible, the hidden, the secret - like moonlight and the power of the moon to move oceans of water. We think of roundness, softness, the circular - which is living in many directions at the same time, the earthy - as in the flow of seasons, nurture, patience, cooperation, incubation - like winter holding within it the magnificence of the spring and summer to come. We think of wisdom, the poetic as too intangible, or as something belonging only to women, or as unimportant. But all these qualities are the yin in the construct of wholeness and belong to us all. Men and women need to recognize them as equal in value, though different in nature. The energy and the direction of the energy is different and I’d like to emphasize that no where did you hear the word “passive”. We recognize feminine values (waiting, the interior, receptivity, the ambiguous, the poetic) as being equal to masculine values (the active, exterior, productive, goal-oriented). [Gertrude Mueller Nelson]. Restoring the feminine invites us to the interior and to integrate our very human stories. We have heard something of Ian’s birth story. It has become an archetypal story for him and has given his life meaning. Which fables or myths or story characters have been present throughout most of your life? Have you tried to make sense of them? Have you taken the time to peel back the layers of what your story, your own life is presenting you? This morning I’d like to share one of my archetypal stories. It is a kind of birth story. How many of you recall the story of the Little Match Girl? Do you remember how it goes? A small young orphan girl is out selling matches to survive. It is winter and she is starving and slowly freezing. The selling doesn’t go well. It is Christmas eve and people are too busy shopping to pay attention to one small girl selling insignificant wares. In desperation she finds her way into an alley out of the cold winter wind and begins to light her matches to keep from freezing. As she lights each of three matches, she has visions in their fleeting glow – in the first comes a feeling of warmth, the second of food, Christmas trees, presents, ... – and finally in the last match’s glow – the deceased grandmother whom she knows has always loved her, comes to comfort her and take her to herself. My childhood growing up in a violent alcoholic household was like being orphaned. My parents had so many problems they didn’t have time to meet the needs of their seven children – physically, emotionally, or spiritually. It was a cold winter reality. I had to turn to my grandmother for comfort. When I was sixteen, in my last conversation with my mother as she lay dying of an eight-year battle with cancer, she spoke to me in Latvian. She called me “nabadziet” which means “poor little beggar.” Other people: school officials, neighbors, priests and nuns, knew the situation in our family but were too busy, or didn’t want to interfere. Many times there was no food, no safety, no lovely holidays. So this small girl went through life offering small flashes of brilliance, small glimmers of light to whomever might notice. School became a place of safety and performing in school became a space for these small flashes. When she was nineteen her grandmother died. Eventually she married and found someone who loved her. She had children and desired for them what she hadn’t had for herself. She volunteered in her children’s school, knowing what it might be like at home for some them. Her father committed suicide when she was thirty-six and with that event began her journey into herself. She truly was an orphan. She had to make her way alone. Once she began to search for her own way out, she was gifted with friends, therapists, employers, mentors, spiritual directors, and circles of women who mirrored the light which she couldn’t see in herself. Ultimately she had to do it herself. She had to learn how to warm and feed herself, and be her own security. She became a grandmother to herself. She found healing by bringing the Little Match Girl from the shadows into the light. She had to name the pain by embracing the Little Match Girl and all she had suffered. She became capable of more than small flashes of brilliance. She became free. She chose to become a warrior and champion for others who suffer. She became aware of great suffering in the world. She learned how to become a light and unexpectedly... found joy waiting. She recovered her magical child – the child who dances with fireflies and converses with hummingbirds. She continues to learn about light. Sometimes she still forgets about the light... My friends, if someone like me can find my story, embrace my shadow, and claim my light, I know that each of you can do the same. And if you think the Little Match Girl is only about women, how many men have left their feminine qualities to die frozen out in the cold? How do each of us, men and women become the warriors or heroes in our lives, how do each of us live into the light of being fully who we can be? Today is the first Sunday in Lent. What if during the next few weeks we gave ourselves the time to explore our individual stories and consider what blocks us from living out of our light? Simply time to reflect on our life as a whole? Leaving aside any judgment we notice: What patterns have always been there? What has always been missing? The next evolution or transformation or development of humanity is the interior journey. Heaven outside of us cannot rescue us or heal the world. Jesus taught this new reality – the heaven within ourselves. He radicalized the Torah and Judaic law by speaking of the law written on the heart, about the inner being, about interior motivation being more important than exterior behavior. [Marcus Borg]. The re-balance of the feminine invites us to embrace all the wounded places, all the tight places, all the compulsions for security, approval, or control, as we search for the golden shadow of discovering the More of who we really are. We let go of fear. What the feminine offers the human journey is a re-balance, a re-birth of the harmony of the Universe itself. Self-knowledge is key. All spiritual traditions consider self-knowledge essential. We don’t get there simply by skimming the surface of our thoughts and feelings. We need to dive deep. When we access our interior we begin to live the humility and compassion of being One with others. Our boundaries become permeable. We become more vulnerable to others. And in the process we become more authentic and comfortable in our own skins. Our capacities increase, we become more complex without being complicated. This awareness or consciousness allows for even greater intimacy. We do this by creating a path of our own. By looking within yourself and listening at your deepest level. You cultivate your own ways of experiencing the sacred, you birth the sacred within you. You begin to listen for the “singing underneath”, the song of the universe itself. You then begin to practice it and you keeping practicing it until “you make it a song that sings you”. [Sue Monk Kidd]. Until the Universe sings you. When we descend into our individual hero’s journey, we discover the treasure or the healing elixir, and we carry it back to our community. We then begin to live out of the light of our integration. This is the next leap of evolution: when each of us becomes free enough, we give permission to each other to be all that we can be. We encourage, cajole, beckon, and support each other into being More. To be fully human, fully free. We come home to our bodies, we honor the feminine, we find transcendence and enlightenment within, we heal our divided selves, and begin to heal the world and the planet. The “simpler way” and feminine way is to end domination and competition, to express our diversity and creativity in cooperation with every living thing. [Meg Wheately]. Relationships become critical. Our communities become critical. I am profoundly grateful to this community, to Ian, and to my family. This community has supported and shaped me. Each of you has a share in my journey. In closing, when my theology professor at Aquinas offered the following parable to me in one of our conversations about religion, it brought me home to this community. It is from Tolkiens’ Fellowship of the Ring from the Lord of the Rings. It is called the “Farewell to Lorien”. This passage from the story comes after Gimli the dwarf has been stricken by the beauty of the fairy queen: “The travelers now turned their faces to the journey; the sun was before them, and their eyes were dazzled, for all were filled with tears. Gimli the dwarf wept openly and addressed his elf companion, ‘Tell me Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! We could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of Light and Joy. Now, I have taken my worst wound.” Dear Ones, I, too, have been wounded with the light. I have a sense, a vision, a dream of what this world can be. I also have a dream of what this community can yet be. I recognize and take great delight in the heroes in our midst. The heroes of the Quest. The ones who have suffered in danger and darkness, who know their wounds, but are now willing to live into the danger of light and joy. They know the glory of how to live: living well, living fully as human beings, living free.
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