"Goddess So Loved the World"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
April 19, 2009

Reading: What If Men are Included?, excerpt         by Elizabeth Fisher

“I believe both men and women will gain strength and understanding from positive images of the female….Whether or not individuals believe in extra human intelligence-such as deities – the fact that the female is not and has not been globally and universally viewed as secondary and servile is still a profound revelation to most who live within a traditional Western religious construct.

[The curriculum called Rise Up and Call Her Name: A Woman Honoring Journey into Global Earth Based Spiritualities, ] is an effort to build respect for a more balance imagery of divinity by bringing into focus the richness of the divine feminine for both sexes to benefit from.  The female was and is honored and the Earth was, and still is, considered sacred by numerous spiritual traditions.  When women become aware of the divine female, they report they feel freed from abuse created by misinformation.  When men become aware of the divine female, they often feel much more comfortable expressing some of their feelings and outlooks which, in dominant Western society, are considered feminine - for example, compassion for others and valuing relationship.

The appreciation of goddesses is not about female versus male biological traits.  Understanding the cycle of physical creation from conception through birthing vitality, maturity, waning, death and a recycling into new form is not primarily about physical reproduction.  Honoring female process is so much broader; it concerns a range of behavior that touches people’s deepest concerns.

Most men and women, at some time in their lives, experience the need to nurture, provide protection, relate to others, love, be cared for, bring some form of new life into the world and release that which has been expended - in other words, to work with the cyclical process of Nature. This cyclical process, often associated with the female and female deities, can be a powerful metaphor designed to teach all of us about realizing our creative and compassionate potential in every avenue of endeavor.”

Sermon:  Goddess So Loved the World              by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Today’s sermon topic was “bought” at last year’s church auction.  We are offering the same opportunity this year at our auction this coming Saturday evening.  I encourage you to come, enjoy the fellowship, and bid on a sermon for next year. The deal is you get to choose a topic and I get to preach on it.  In addition, I will buy you a meal during which we can discuss your subject.  And, as is the case today, you can be part of the service if you want to.  Today’s sermon topic, chosen by 3 thoroughly progressive women, is an ancient religious idea.  As is often the case in worship, we contend with a theme present in our culture in an attempt to discern its relevance for us.  In today’s sermon Kimberly Tenai, Ellen Shores, and Liz Wilson asked me to preach on what significance primordial Goddess theology can have for our modern-day lives.
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Kimberly, Ellen, and Liz didn’t come up with this subject out of the blue; they already know a lot about the Goddess.  The same is true for several women and men in our congregation. Unitarian Universalism has been incorporating feminine aspects of spirituality into worship for quite some time.  In the 1970s many UUs were active in the feminist movement protesting historical prejudices and treatment of women, and demanding American institutions to take them seriously.    The 1977 UUA General Assembly passed a Resolution on Women and Religion stating in brief: “WHEREAS, some models of human relationships arising from religious myths, historical materials, and other teachings still create and perpetuate attitudes that cause women everywhere to be overlooked and undervalued;
THEREFORE [we] call upon all Unitarian Universalists to examine carefully their own religious beliefs and the extent to which these beliefs influence sex-role stereotypes within their own families; and … UUA officers and staff, religious leaders within societies, UU theological schools, etc. make every effort to: (a) put traditional assumptions and language in perspective, and (b) avoid sexist assumptions and language in the future.

Nancy Irons, of the UU Women’s Federation claims: “The impact of this resolution has been profound; ranging from the establishment of women’s spiritual retreats, to the rapid increase in the number of female UU ministers. It has prompted incorporation of more ritual, such as chalice lighting and “Joys and Sorrows” into our services, as well as the review and revision of our Principles and Purposes.”   I’ll brag that a majority of UU ministers are women; no other church comes close to our accomplishment.

Northern Hills Fellowship has a long history of participation in women’s issues and has incorporated the Goddess in worship for decades.  In fact, Northern Hills’ first called minister back in 1980, the Rev. Dr. Shirley Ann Ranck, began writing a curriculum for the study of feminine theology while she was here.  In it she examined pre-Christian cultures that revered goddesses.  I’m sure the members of Northern Hills at the time heard a lot about Goddesses from her, and there have been strong women’s groups here ever since. Her workbook, called Cakes for the Queen of Heaven, was published by the Unitarian Universalist Association (or UUA for short) in 1986, and it has been taught in over 80% of UU churches.  Rev. Ranck’s update of the Cakes curriculum was published in 2005; maybe it’s time to teach it again here.  Many Cakes participants learned for the first time about religions which held the values of equality and reverence for women.  If you were not a UU when growing up, can you imagine how your life would have been different if the divine had been imaged as female?

UUs draw inspiration from many sources, including one added to our list in 1995 which reads: “Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”  While we don’t endorse one official set of scriptures, Mary Oliver’s nature poetry may be the closest thing there is to a UU Bible.  Listen to her 1979 poem, Aunt Leaf , as she expresses her felt need for connection to a feminine spirit.
Aunt Leaf
“Needing one, I invented her-
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker-
­two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish-
and all day we'd travel.

At day’s end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back
scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;
or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream,
this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.”

How many people have felt such a need – to have a direct and visceral connection with nature?  Nature should not be hard to find.  Connecting with nature does not require special knowledge reserved for the few, to be interpreted by the priests and priestesses.  Although reading Mary Oliver’s poems can help us connect with nature – something all our spirits need.  This is why UUs have been incorporating nature in worship and have been walking labyrinths, and retreating to The Mountain and Ferry Beach camp and conference centers – to commune with Mother Nature.
 
In 1994, a second curriculum, Rise Up and Call Her Name: A Woman-honoring Journey into Global Earth-based Spiritualities, was published by the UU Women’s Federation.  It sought to go beyond mere intellectual learning by incorporating rituals, allowing participants to experience some of the music, dance, prayers and so on of the spiritualities from around the world.  Mindful that colonial occupations almost always resulted in desecration of native religions, Rise Up attempted to respectfully embody the essence of each of the woman and earth honoring religions without mis-appropriating its practices.  This is something we must be careful to avoid when we explore other religions in our own worship services.  Rise Up’s goals included bringing awareness of nature into our spiritual life, and making known that many contemporary world religions honor female deities and respect women and men as equals in religious practice.  We can feel proud of Northern Hills’ and the UUA’s historical efforts to lift up the importance of women in our movement.
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Before we become too self-congratulatory about our UU Association’s support of women’s issues and explorations of feminine theology, let me read you an excerpt from a very long email I received this week from someone who saw today’s sermon topic on our website:  “Behind all the silly goddess stuff is an unhealthy and bizarrely anachronistic obsession with gender.  Women of my generation have been living and working shoulder to shoulder with men—many of them now our very close friends—for over a quarter century now.  We don’t imagine we are very different and much better than they are because we know from experience that we are not.  All this narcissistic woman-worship seems very childish and 1968-ish for the post Title 9 generation.”

Today’s working women are part of the “post Title 9 generation;” that’s the federal law mandating equality for women in the workplace.  For some, the issue of gender equality has pretty much been resolved, and the work remaining to be done will come as a result of capable women and men working hard to finish the job -  not as a result of recognizing the special qualities of women as superior to those of men.  My email correspondent seems to be saying, “Been there, done that, don’t want another tie die T-shirt.”  I understand some people have approached gender issues in ways that have felt exclusionary to others, and as a result they have been put off feminism and explorations of the Goddess.

As someone who has participated over a period of years in many UU anti-oppression workshops, the welcoming congregation process, and in both the Cakes and Rise Up courses, I have found most of the curricula to be enlightening and open to hearing everyone’s points of view, but some of it has not worked so well.  As we continue our anti-oppression work, we need to remember these are emotional issues and remain sensitive to everyone’s feelings.  The women who asked me to speak on the Goddess demanded there be no “Male-bashing.”  Male-bashing coming from me would be not a little strange, but I’m sure they’d heard it before and it’s a good thing for all of us to remember.  As I’ve said before, all of our points of view are valid; at NHF, we remain open to hear each individual’s story.  Women and men and children are treated with equality and compassion.
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In order to escape Biblical interpretations which promote the subjugation of women UU women and men looked deeply into the traditions and theologies of woman and earth honoring religions, and there they found goddess mythologies with powerful messages for our lives.  According to Joseph Campbell, foremost authority on mythology, “The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact you are born from your mother.  The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants.  She gives nourishment, as the plants do.  So woman magic and earth magic are the same.”   The Goddess is typically seen as the creator, and her own body is the universe.  She is a symbol for all time and space. She contains everything; there is no mystery beyond her.  She is the giver of wisdom and creator of all forms, birthing and nurturing both sexes.

Many people are fairly comfortable associating these ideas with the mythical figure we call “Mother Nature.”  As long as she’s just a fairy tale and you don’t try to make her really compete with God as the creator of all things Judeo Christian Westerners can play along.  UUs can go a bit further, proposing we say that God (if there is one) contains both male and female.  This seems a reasonable way to prevent starting a gender war, and allows us to hold up some of the more feminine traits which have been neglected in the past.  And if you are an atheist, you can still appreciate the positive messages for living which come from goddess ideals – just as long as we don’t forget this is all myth.

I say that tongue in cheek because as I said in my sermon last week, I don’t see mythology as the opposite of reason, and in the way we approach our spiritual lives mythology is of utmost importance.  Take the story of the virgin birth of Jesus for example.  First of all, virgin birth was brought into Christianity from Greek mythology where it was part of many legends.  So we know not to get hung up on the literalness of the story because it was a commonly used metaphor.   Second, being mysteriously impregnated by a god was meant to result in a spiritual birth, not a physical one.  Buddha was said to have been born from the side of his mother – at the level of the heart chakra.  This symbolizes being born out of the compassion of the heart.   The Buddha birth story is similar to the Jesus virgin birth story in that both of them are allegories meant to convey the idea that a spiritual man was born who would rise above his animal instincts.  Thirdly, and the point most often missed is, the characters in these stories are you!  You are meant to identify with Jesus, with Buddha, and with the mother, the Goddess.

Joseph Campbell says, “All of these symbols in mythology refer to you.  You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there.  So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered-out there.  But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn?  Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?”   The very purpose of mythology is to get us to put ourselves in the place of the hero or goddess and to think how we would react in their circumstances.  Mythology is a means of transcending our ordinary everyday lives so we can focus on essential things  - and nurture our mind and spirit.
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There are many themes from feminine theology to explore, including relationships, non-violent behavior, the cycles of life and more.  The goddesses call us to include in our spiritual lives attributes such as nurturing, creativity, and collaboration.  But for today, in honor of Earth Day, we will close by emphasizing the compassion of the Goddess, the mother of all things, who has love for all her progeny.  Following her example would mean caring for all of nature as if it were our own.  We need to do more for nature than is required just for our own self preservation.  We can use Goddess mythology to help us feel compassion for all living things, to take us beyond simple respect for the interdependent web to feeling love for it as if it were our own child.  This is a spiritual leap I know.  That is where the message of the Goddess can help us to view every part of nature as part of us.  So might it be that we should love the world so.
Blessed Be