December 12, 2010

Different Voices of Our Time

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

READINGS

From Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly

The biblical and popular image of God as a great patriarch in heaven, and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will, has dominated the imaginations of millions over thousands of years. The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. If God in “his” heaven is a father ruling “his” people, then it is in the “nature” of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society by male-dominated. . . .

As the women’s movement begins to have its effect upon the fabric of society, transforming it from patriarchy into something that never existed before – into a diarchal situation that is radically new – it can become the greatest single challenge to the major religious of the world, Western and Eastern. Beliefs and values that have held sway from thousands of years will be questioned as never before. This revolution may well be also the greatest single hope for survival of spiritual consciousness on this planet.

AN ACT OF FAITH by Barbara Jordan

In the water I see stars, among the reeds the mountain of my face,

and across a distance two geese in the twilight of a lake, like stilettos.

So many touchstones. I lean toward life,

I unbuckle the flowers’ roots, hold birds and know the privilege,

know the trees as vessels of shadow.

And if the sky is gray and anguished gray above a field, before a storm

and the leaves shake, shake, shake with a spiritual palsy,

I look over my shoulder unsure: am I observed, or do I observe?

Let show all things splendid, in their darker nature splendid also.

Lord, you know the mask of my face,

how I peer at  the world from under a leaf,

from under the squint of my intelligence.

I can’t comprehend, or find contradiction in evidence of past millenniums,

the broken ancient skills, galaxies behind the sun.

Certainly all creatures pause, and gaze benignly into the air,

into the light where birds fly and are gone: this is the light I lean toward.

SERMON

Last week we ended our exploration of the role of women in our movement by reflecting on the influence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “A Woman’s Bible.” Published in the late 1890s, the eighth decade of her life, the book attempted to advance Stanton’s work on the 19th century women’s movement by applying her earlier critique of how the nation’s laws and mores had subjugated women to religion.

She recruited 25 women scholars and ministers, several of them Unitarians or Universalists, to help her examine the Bible and weigh the interpretations of male scholars who had used the Bible to diminished women’s role. Her project, though, was more than most, not only men but also many women, could stomach, and Stanton found herself widely condemned.

At about the same time, a cultural shift across religions turned against the emerging leadership of women. Denominational leaders discouraged women from seeking ministry and little room was made for those who did. Demand arose for a tougher, more “manly” ministry, and religion itself took a more conservative turn, away from social gospel preachers who sought to build interfaith bridges and work for “the least of these,” and toward a strict demand for a “true faith” centered on a more distant hope of salvation.

After more than a half century of war and economic upheaval, though, the 50s and 60s saw an awakening in American society. Ripples from an emerging youth culture washed over every part of society and shook its most established institutions, religion no less than any other.

Liberal religion reached a high tide in this time. The Unitarian Church saw an extraordinary growth, with long-standing churches adding members while dozens of new lay-led fellowships were started in areas that had never had much of a Unitarian presence. This church was among those.

Universalists had not fared so well in numerical growth, but they, too, saw a resurgence of energy and a revisioning of their message and their hope. The consolidation in 1961 was seen a way for these two liberal religions to join their strengths, to leverage the upsurge they had each experienced into a liberal faith with greater influence and visibility.

In the larger culture, many women began chafing at long-standing patterns of discrimination against them, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique brought attention to many women’s frustration with restrictive roles demanded of them in the home and society.

As in the 19th century, this movement eventually moved into religion, and in many ways Mary Daly, who we heard from earlier, introduced the opening wedge. Raised a Catholic, she was drawn to religion early in life but was repeatedly hindered by the church in her efforts to study it.

Eventually she completed a doctorate in the U.S. and then went to Europe where she completed two more. On returning, she turned her attention to women’s experience in religion. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, argued that the Catholic church had systematically oppressed women for ages. But it was her second book, Beyond God the Father, written in 1973, which Joy read from earlier, that had the wider impact.

In it, she argued that for centuries religion, and particularly Christianity, has been shot through with patriarchy, essentially rule by and for men. As such, she argued, it has made the oppression of women, in her words, “appear right and fitting.” In fact, Daly said, the very image of God itself was infected with this patriarchal perspective.

She argued for abandoning the notion of God as some kind of objective personage and instead understanding the divine as a verb, an evolving sense of being, informed by each person’s individual experience.

Like Stanton’s A Woman’s Bible in the 1890s, Daly’s book was marginalized by mainstream theologians, who saw its arguments as too radical. But coming at a time when the women’s rights movement was rising, it had a profound influence.

Earlier this year, shortly after Mary Daly’s death, Meg Barnhouse, former minister of the UU church in Spartanburg, wrote in the UU world that Daly’s book came out while she was in seminary and had a strong impact on her.

“I began thinking,” she writes, “that’s why men were in charge of so much of the world. Maybe that’s why when I want to look up a married woman friend in the phone book I have to know her husband’s name. Maybe that’s why I can pass a house with toys in the yard and two cars in the driveway, but can only see the name ‘Steve Bobo’ on the mailbox. Maybe that’s why the Senate was mostly men, there wasn’t a national holiday named after a woman, and there hadn’t ever been a U.S. President who was a woman.”

Daly’s book, she said, “helped me see the maze that was patriarchy, and helped me attempt to step out of it.” So it was for a growing number of women, including many in Unitarian Universalist churches.

Looking around their congregations, many of these women saw the same phenomenon of patriarchy playing itself out. Often, men held a lock on leadership, and the ministry was overwhelmingly male.

Yet, increasing numbers of women were making their way into seminary, and by the mid 70s a nucleus had begun gathering to consider the deeper consequences of the role of women in religion.

A key moment came in 1975 when Lucile Schuck Longview, a laywoman from Lexington, Massachusetts, attended an international conference in Mexico City celebrating the Year of the Woman as UU delegate. Returning, she led an effort to draft a resolution for General Assembly calling on UUs to examine their beliefs and consider how they might be influenced by sex-role stereotypes.

Supporters were surprised to see the resolution pass unanimously in 1977, wondering if those in attendance had paid serious attention to what they were adopting. But they moved ahead, and at another conference in 1979 they took a deep look at every aspect of our religion. From our organizing documents, with their celebration of “the dignity of man,” to our hymns, with phrases like “love and human brotherhood,” they found wording that was either sexist or simply shut out women.

These concerns were the start of two drives that over the next decade and a half saw the revision of our founding principles and the revamping of our main hymnal.

In important ways, we owe the breadth and inclusiveness of both our hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, and the Purposes and Principles that we celebrate today to those women who called us to task to ensure that the covenant we make includes all of us.

But even more, as women entered our ministry they transformed our practices in worship. Rituals such as the annual water ceremony celebrated at many churches – including ours – the regular lighting of the chalice, and the sharing of joys and concerns were introduced by women and later adopted in congregations across the association.

Women also listened carefully to the critique of traditional religion by theologians like Mary Daly and began exploring the dimensions of religion understood from a feminist perspective.

Examining pre-Christian traditions they discovered cultures that celebrated a divine motherhood, not fatherhood, that saw in the female form and the rhythms of a woman’s life a source of the holy. The Rev. Shirley Ann Ranck researched ancient traditions in depth and from her work developed an adult education curriculum, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” that explore the ancient myths of pagan cultures as well as female imagery in Jewish and Christian traditions.

As Ranck put it, those classes “started us on a spiritual journey. New things happened when women came together to study our own history and to share our personal experiences with each other. We were not just studying the past. We were evolving a whole new world view for the future.”

Since that curriculum came out in the mid 1980s, women have taken leading roles in other theological inquiries as well: some pursuing a feminist perspective on the liberal Christian tradition, others exploring women’s connections to the earth in eco-feminism or making a case for a feminist viewpoint on humanism.

In the meantime women have entered our ministry in growing numbers, now accounting for more than half of our ordained clergy. Yet, many still struggle to be taken seriously or to be accepted in positions of leadership. Their numbers are few in our largest churches, and while they have held positions of responsibility in our national headquarters, after 50 years this liberal religious body has yet to elect a woman as its president.

Let me pause at this point and acknowledge that so far, this has been more history lecture than sermon. I could justify this by saying that we need to get clear on our history before we can decide what to make of it, and this is history not widely told. Yet, speaking in this way, as if from my former vantage as a journalist, I also adopt a perspective that conveniently distances me from the material. And the truth is that, like it or not, I am inevitably bound up in this story. As a life-long Unitarian Universalist and son and brother to women UU ministers and husband, father and grandfather to Unitarian Universalist women I have a stake here as well as an opinion. At the same time, as a white, middle-aged male clergyperson, I am also bound up with the status quo and all the privileges that these days still attach to people like me.

It is a complicated place to stand. But accepting the limitations that such a perspective imposes on me, I do have a thought on the way ahead for us: a focus that preserves our integrity and offers each of us a meeting place to wrestle with and explore who we are in the context of community.

Curiously enough I begin with a reference back to Mary Daly. In Beyond God the Father, Daly mulls over how to describe the sisterhood that she hopes to see take shape among women who have abandoned the patriarchal religion of their forebears and are prepared to name the faith that is truly theirs. The word that she settles on is “covenant.”

The moving center of this group, she says, is people who are able to see, in her words, “the promise of ourselves,” the promise of women finding their own voices and taken ownership for their own being.

Having gathered, she envisions these women joining in what she calls “a deep agreement present within the self and among selves who are increasingly in harmony with an environment that is beyond, beneath, and all around the nonenvironment of patriarchal splits and barriers.”

Risking the charge of overreaching, I can’t help but see the parallel to the covenant that gathers this congregation and our entire association. It is a deep agreement grounded in the “promise” that we each embody as individuals – women and men – with inherent worth and dignity.

When we live in that covenant, we learn to approach each other with curiosity and compassion, with open minds and hearts. We see in the diversity among us of age, race, gender, heritage, sexual orientation, ability, a richness that feeds us all. We are freed to engage the world as who we are, not out of an identity others would impose on us.

“In the water I see stars, among the reeds the mountain of my face,” writes Barbara Jordan. How do we, any of us, learn who we are? “So many touchstones,” the poem continues. “I lean toward life, I unbuckle the flowers’ roots, hold birds and know the privilege, know the trees as vessels of shadow.”

Where do we fit in this amazing world? Where do we find, how do we name that unnamable something that links us all, that drives and connects and upholds us?

It is, all of it, the work of a lifetime, and it is work that we need the embrace of community to pursue. The covenant we make in this place with each other and the life that links us provides the context, and we in all our baffling complexity provide the content.