Tag: Embodiment

January 2020 Poetry Selection
God, did you have to walk gingerly
after giving birth to me
Had you grown heavy with the weight
of my becoming

January 16, 2017 As the new year gets underway and we start filling in the blank spaces of our new calendars, it’s a good time...

I think this book is of value for anyone, particularly women, struggling without or within their religious tradition and anyone interested in feminist theology. Younger people, especially, might benefit from the perspective of time it provides. From Christ’s and Plaskow’s examples, challenges clearly exist on any path, but they also present a hopeful model of continuing engagement, intellectual rigor, and self-empowerment.

Returning to ourselves is not some huge, life changing decision or action. It’s not a one-off, or something that happens to you after some kind of crisis, though there’s nothing like a good crisis to shake us out of our complacency. Returning to ourselves is something that must happen over and over again. If we are brave enough, we make it a practice.

I’m grateful that in today’s world, we can “have it all”; we can have careers and families—but this also worries me. Are we as feminists not simply buying into another of our culture’s lies, the promise of ever-more, of consumption and waste, of degradation and disposal?"

We keep getting stuck. We keep getting stuck in the concept and tradition of God as we learned it. And in doing so, we miss the chance to experience the living God, that deep inspiration that can transform us, body and soul.

My partner, my friend in recovery, and my therapist all tell me that anger doesn’t have to look like yelling and shaming and ruining things. That there’s no chance mine ever would. But the anger I’ve seen wrecks things and people, and explodes into so many sharp little pieces that you can never hope to clean all of them up from inside you.

As the choir sang, and the ministers spoke, and the candles flickered, for the first time I saw Mary in all of it. A young woman in need of a safe place. A young woman denied entrance. A young woman giving birth to the Human One anyway, in an inauspicious tangle of blood, fear, and pain.

Shame does everything it can to crowd Her out. Shame tries to fill up all the space in my heart and mind. Shame finds God's resting place and throws an obnoxious party. Shame looks for stillness and fills it with trembling and all the wrong words. Shame knows, I think, that surrender to the sacred is best thwarted by addictions and by believing the lie that there is urgency to the mundane.

In the end, "Embodying the Sacred" allowed me to dream of a time when we go a step further yet and see gathered believers together embracing Conway’s wise insights into pregnancy and laboring, letting God speak through flesh and blood women and their partners who are experiencing it rather than talking about it abstractly and poetically every once in a while.

My joy for the little butterfly was also the joy of breaking out of my own chrysalis. In the ashes of my loss, I found a crown of beauty, my own voice, which had enormous value all by itself. My body hadn’t birthed a baby this time, but it had conceived something else: the belief that I am valuable and that my voice should be heard, loud and clear.

It is my prayer that all of us will eventually learn to recognize and revere the image of God in every person of every conceivable gender identity, along with the many other diversities of appearance, belief systems, preferences, and whatsoever differences may occur to us.

So, it is no surprise to me that Azusa Pacific University has asked Heath Adam Ackley to go away. And it is no surprise to me that the people who asked him to do so were apparently not concerned about the justice or righteousness of the request. As is usual, capitalistic considerations trumped all others.

She writes delicious paragraphs about how yoga changed her relationship with her own body—paragraphs that would make even the most cynical reader want to sign up for a class. Pasquale also derives healing from her work as a trauma therapist.

Interviews with forty women from a variety of religious traditions—Taosim, Judaism, Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, Indigenous, Hindu, Religious Science, and Christianity, including several women who are part of Ebenezer Lutheran Church, more commonly known as “herchurch.”

The child-like wonder and delight in nature is recaptured, and the healing power of the Divine in nature comes through clearly in their words. Chickerneo refers to these times as finding those “metaphors-in-waiting,” and reflecting on them for self-discovery and understanding.

“Peace is built as men and women learn to have historical perspectives. Uncovering and recovering women’s stories can contribute to a more egalitarian, less domineering world. Stories of ancient women travelers give people today courage to travel. Women’s history is as important for men as for women”

Moreover, Barger labels androgyny as an "obscuring [of] the true nature of oneself" (140) which is an "assault on the female body" (25); drag as the "mocking of gender" (141); and same-sex relationships as contributing to the "frayed edges" of community (73).