Channel: Episcopal Life Online  Author: Anne Carson

[Episcopal News Service] On Valentine’s Day weekend, about 1,300 participants gathered at Washington National Cathedral for the Sacred Circles Women’s Spirituality Conference, which explored the theme of love in action as a collective and powerful force that could reshape the world and save the planet.
From February 13 through February 14, the conference included such topics as Rediscovering Ancient Paths of the Divine Feminine, Inspiration from the Soul, and Dancing with Shakti, which is the Sanskrit name for sacred feminine creative power.

Since 1996, Sacred Circles has made a difference in the lives of women. Created by Cathedral senior programmer Grace Ogden to honor the divine feminine spirit, the biennial conference has grown in global dimension and historic outreach, with the presenters this year coming from as far away as Afghanistan.

Designed to celebrate all faiths, the opening plenary began with Jewish Renewal Movement leader Rabbi Phyllis Berman conducting a sacred interfaith Shabbat in tandem with cantor Holly Taya Shere, whose “Holy, Holy, Holy” chant resonated deeply throughout the cavernous Gothic spaces.

Keynote speaker Karen Armstrong, author and religious historian, declared that “unless we learn to practice the Golden Rule globally, we are unlikely to have a viable world to pass on to the next generation. . . . What we need in our world is a change of heart and mind to allow compassion to penetrate our thinking.”

Following her as second keynoter was Afghani activist Sakena Yacoobi, who has helped bring education and health care to more then 350,000 women and young girls in her ravaged country. After receiving an education at a Christian school in the U.S., she returned to Afghanistan and recommitted to Islam, to empower women with the Koran. “Every day there is danger but I know that God is with me,” Ms. Yacoobi said, to thunderous applause.

The acknowledgment of love’s fervor reached a climatic note on Valentine’s Day morning of the conference when the featured speaker, Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, the largest retreat center in America, declared, “It was a sense of calling to come to this city, on this day, at this time. . . . Your tender heart—this is what is going to save our world,” she urged the audience. “No matter what you do in the world, you can make a difference with your heart,” Ms. Lesser concluded.

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Three quick thoughts: First, I have long found the ontologization of “the feminine” - like any other identity - to be rather curious at best, and idolatrous at worst (idols being defined here as ideas taken out of the historical flux in which they originate and transformed into ahistorical categories that are given some sort of transhistorical agency, i.e., Feuerbach’s critique of religion and Marx’s repetition thereof).  Historicize, historicize, historicize - that will take the ideological idols down!  Second, from an orthodoxy theological perspective, we ought to revive the apophatic theology of the Cappadocians, so that we might move beyond the God-as-male/God-as-female bifurcation.  Feminine language about God is important and very much a part of the Christian tradition; it is a shame (and oftentimes an idolatrous shame) that we do not make greater use of it!

Third, I would be fascinated to get some demographic information here.  What age groups, political affiliations, etc., were in attendance?  Did it represent a growing demographic or a demographic that is still living in the golden days of its ideological youth?  In other words, did this conference represent a feminism that has managed to capture the minds and hearts of the young, or one that could never move past its initial points of critique?

I try not to go too close to the Office of Women’s Ministries too often; it gives me flashbacks of the socio-theological dilettancy I ran into in college thirty years ago, and I start thinking of footnote 47 of chapter 10 in Gyn/Ecology. (Mary Daly quotes animals. With quotation marks.) Some years back they put up a eucharistic liturgy “for discussion”, and I gave them some. What particularly struck me was the number of changes which I couldn’t explain by recourse to the supposed program of “Using Female Nouns and Pronouns”. I’m wandering over some of the worship resources the list now and finding lots of stuff I cannot bring myself to pray, not just because of dubious theology, but also because I cannot find a reason to abandon the unity of praying what we have always prayed. And as usual, the writing is awful.

I thought I remember there being at least one woman on the “official team” of Covenant.  However, I don’t see a woman’s name among the editors.  Is there a woman who is on the editorial board of Covenant?  Or is a major contributor?  I’d love to hear more from her.  Especially on a topic such as this.

In Christ,
Shawn

Shawn,
We do have women among our growing list of Covenant Contributors.  We do not have a number of women that is anywhere close to being proportional to the ratio of male/female in TEC or in our society. That’s because we did not begin with gender balance as a primary value, and therefore did not consider gender as a factor in inviting theologians to participate.  The Revd Dr. Jean Meade, the Rev. Canon Victoria Heard, and Sarah Dylan Breuer are the active Covenant Contributors at this time.

Hi Craig,

I thought I remember reading their profiles somewhere.  Am I missing their contributions to the group or are they just not as prolific as some of us? 

In Christ,
Shawn

Shawn,
They are quite prolific, but their Covenant contributions are less in the area of the Covenant web site and more in the aspects of our non-public work.  And of course they are quite prolific in their professional roles, working towards the same ends.

Ah ok.  Sorry, I should have qualified.  I meant prolific here in the Covenant forums.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the names of many of the contributors here as authors in other arenas.  I truly believe we are only just beginning to see the huge effects that women will have in the Church as theologians, priests and bishops.  The Church has suffered without their perspective and energy in those areas for far too long!

In Christ,
Shawn

It is a strange - and, I believe, deeply problematic - metaphysical essentialism which posits that women have a particular gift to offer precisely because they are women.  Such a perspective, shared by both patriarchs and many feminists, assumes the existence of an ontological femaleness that is, at bottom, entirely separate from male ontology.  The whole point of adopting, as the Fathers did, an apophatic theology vis-a-vis God’s “Fatherhood” was to make way for the redemption of women not because they were women, but because they are human.  Otherwise, Christ has assumed maleness rather than humanity, and therefore redeemed only men, rather than women as well.  To address the matter here raised, I must protest Shawn’s point and argue that women have nothing to offer as women, just as men have nothing to offer as men.  Rather, each has something to offer as a human being - a historically thrown and conditioned person - whose own being is a nexus of glory and fallenness, grace and transgression.  While certain cultural practices have undoubtedly been exacted upon women - womanhood, like manhood, being signified by the body - it is only as the historical agents working in, with, and/or against these cultural practices that women can bring something to the table as women.  The same is true of men, of children, and of every other human identity.  We have got to get away from identity politics and the sloppy - not to mention heretical - essentialism that they foster and just as often attempt to preserve.

Hi Ben,

An interesting concept.  Perhaps the beginning of a theology regarding transsexualism?  An area I will admit to struggling with myself.  Many in the “queer movement” (to be distinguished from such tight boxes as “gay” and “lesbian”) have been arguing that gender is quite fluid and certainly not an essential difference.  Of course, postmodernists would agree with you completely suggesting that gender is a social construct and most definitely not an essential difference.  (You will notice I have not yet thrown in my own personal thoughts on the matter because I remain unconvinced on any side.)  I have to wonder if this is the kind of talk that Craig’s essay on liberal protestantism addresses.  The kind that suggests that there really are no differences between us so I don’t have to address those differences.

Nonetheless, where I am convinced is in the historic witness.  Whether or not women are essentially different than men.  (And what do we really mean by “essential” anyway?)  I do believe that the road traveled by women throughout history has been a VERY, VERY different road than that of men.  Thus, I look forward to their contributions having traveled such a different road than I have traveled.  And I do believe that the Church will take on a different shape due to those experiences.  It already has begun.

In Christ,
Shawn

I hope that what I am offering is not the beginning of a theology of transsexualism.  The body as given is the body as given; part of growing into maturity means coming to love oneself as oneself has been given - and selfhood is given with, by, in, and to our bodies.  I consider transsexualism, particularly in its most contemporary form, to be an exacting of technology against nature, which does not result in a clear way of signifying the Godhead that is beyond the male/female binary, but in fact reduces the body - and, therefore, the God that the body is intended to signify - to a conflation of maleness and femaleness.  In other words, as far as I am concerned, nothing more restricts God to the male/female binary than transsexualism.

Thus, while I agree that gender, as the cultural construction of biological sex, is fluid by definition (and I don’t think that postmodernists have a corner on the market of this idea, although I welcome correction on point), I entirely deny that biological sex is fluid, because the body itself is not fluid.  A reduction of transsexualism to gender (social construction)rather than sex (biologically given) is a conflation of categories that ought to be kept distinct.  The existence within nature of hermaphrodites only proves this as a general rule of nature.  In other words, borrowing from the language of statistics, the existence of humans as either male or female is a nearly absolute general statistical trend which renders all statistical outliers (i.e., hermaphrodites) in need of explanation, but not as determinative of whether or not human existence is defined as anything other than either male or female.

Furthermore, it is the general consensus of biological psychologists (at least as of a few years ago, when I took my intro. course on point), that if one’s child is born hermaphroditic, their genitalia should not be surgically - technologically! - altered into a male or female form, but should instead be left to develop on their own.  Thus, in at least some cases - and, perhaps in most - the question of being hermaphroditic is not a question of being some sort of “third” gender that deconstructs or destabilizes the male or female body.  Instead, it is a simple question of physical development that usually resolves itself.  Thus, in using the language of statistical outliers to describe the distribution of biological sex within the human population, I do not mean that the hermaphrodite is a moral outlier!  Every person is owed charity, not least because God demands it; the charity given to a child whose genitalia has not fully developed must be unique - custom-tailored, so to speak - to that child.  Of course, this is the very nature of charity, is it not?  Charity - love - is always personal, and given to every person as that particular person is, and not as if they are simply representatives of a sexed ontology.

Hi Benjamin,

Have you taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?  If so, did you score like 100% on the side of “Thinking” (vs. “Feeling”)?  I’m a “T” also but a little more in the middle of the spectrum.  You must be completely on the other side!!  (big grin)  Wow!  I have never seen such an analytically conceived reply in my life!  And I tend toward the analytical as well.

But what of the historic witness Benjamin?  Regardless of ontology (and what is that really?  what is the “stuff” that “really” makes us who we are?), we cannot deny the journey that we and those that have come before us have walked.  The journey that women have walked through the centuries has been a very, very tough one!  The Church has not been kind to women over the centuries.  Not at all.

In Christ,
Shawn

P.S. And, yes, I’m completely avoiding the topic of transsexualism!