Please Note: Sermon drafts are provided to aid in following along, and for those unable to attend. Though the drafts are used in delivery, our ministers may do some final writing and editing after the draft is distributed, or diverge and speak extemporaneously when appropriate to the situation. They re not intended as scripts. Thank you. The Prophetic Sisterhood and the Sacred Feminine Sermon Draft by Rev. LoraKim Joyner The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville March 1, 2009 Part I Today is the first day of Women s History Month and yesterday was the end of Black History Month. Why isn t there a White History Month? A Men s History Month? The answer in part is this: We emphasize certain groups to counterbalance that history has been written by the powerful, who have largely been white men. This is not to say that the situation of men isn t of concern as well. They ve been trapped in the myths of masculinity as women have in the myths of femininity. The details of this are for another time, but as a metaphor we can say the same for all genders: culture constructs who we are and what we are for, and this is a boon as well as a burden. It s been such a burden. The feminine doesn t count, or count s too much, so women are relegated to the margins or condemned for not living up to unrealistic expectations. Just in the last week we have heard reports of the brutal raping of thousands of women by soldiers and militias in the Congo, and the world has remained largely indifferent. Close to home, domestic violence impacts 1.5 million women in the US a year and nearly 25% of all women have been raped or attached violently by an intimate partner. And in our own back yard, on March 24 th this city will vote whether to repeal nondiscrimination protections for our GLBT people. Our lack of healing and fear around gender is hurting people here, now, that we love and care for. It hurts us all. Therefore there are healing tasks before us all. How can we knit our fragmented selves together when we have heard a false story that to be a good woman you must do X, and not just have XX, and to be a good man you must do Y, and not just have XY? 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 1 of 6
For healings sake, I want to tell you the story of the women Unitarian and Universalist ministers in the 1800s so it won t be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as the Prophetic Sisterhood. It began when the Universalist Church of America, which was the first religion to sanction a woman minister, ordained Olympia Brown in 1863. This number slowly grew and by the 1870s-1890 s, 20 or so women in the West took pulpits that no men wanted, and that were shaky, tough, and low paying. There was a shortage of men because of the Civil War and the West, now our Midwest, was tough, calling on the toughness of humanity to respond. The women minister did. They didn t just speak of families in the sermon, but got into the family business. The congregants didn t want orators, but sympathizers. Congregations needed this on Western frontier with all the difficulties of a violent and transitional society. The women s churches had strong congregational life, impressive membership growth, and financial prosperity. These women ministers were responsible for the growth of Unitarianism for most of 2 decades in liberal religion, and by 1920 they were all gone. What happened? They were isolated and rebuked at nearly every turn. Despite this, these early women ministers offered care and love and a different kind of ministry than before. Rev. Mary Safford, one of the leaders of the sisterhood, said that the world of the divine wasn t in theology, but in day-to-day lived experience. She and others strove to make daily life holier and more whole. They spoke to unreasonable expectations of the married life and when they performed marriage ceremonies, they took out obey in marriage vows. They initiated child dedications that were sprinkled with practical advice, and not godly unreasonable expectations. They dedicated homes in rituals not all that much different than church building dedications. They strove to make a happy home the social idea throughout their communities. The church was the place to grow an egalitarian social consciousness and not just an institution to oppose orthodoxy, though they did that too. They reinstated the feminine facet of the mother-father God. Their expression of the maternal aspect of the divine carried with it the fundamental idea that humans felt God most immediately as the binding force that held them together and made their relationships possible (Cynthia Tucker in the Prophetic Sisterhood). 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 2 of 6
In fact Safford said their mission as pastors and feminists must be a ministry that emerged from an understanding of God as the harmonizing power that worked toward a larger state of love in communities, families, and friendships. This is basically what James Luther Adams said, and who was he? He was a famous 20 th century Unitarian theologian. He wrote of God as a harmonizing power of love nearly 100 years after Mary Safford, and he got credit for it. What these women did and said has been largely silenced until recently. For in the 1880s Americans wanted more masculinity in their private and public lives. Men clergy felt excluded from the virile world of male power and leadership, so they turned to Samuel Eliot, head of the American Unitarian Association, to make a manlier ministry. He and other church leaders thought the women were doing harm and edged them out of the ministry. The women also left in part because they were tired of congregations not taking up the social gospel for radical changes in structures of business and government. They were frustrated by laity s failure to take their sermons to heart. When edged out they looked to William Ellery Channing, considered the founder of Unitarianism in this country. He lost the support of his solidly middle-class worshipers as he became more radical, drawing closer to the working classes, the poor, and the blacks and coming out on the side of abolition. The women also turned to the working classes. They worked in settlement houses, embraced socialism, and worked towards suffrage. They saw social ills as economic and social, not a matter of character where people fell from grace or individual needs where humans are seen as disempowered beings. They wanted to make society a better home for the larger family out in the community. They went east for a lot of this work, including Eleanor Gordon who started a new church in Orlando 1912-1918, which is now known as the First Unitarian Church of Orlando. Though the women worked toward suffrage, the 19 th amendment didn t give them equal rights and protection, and for the next 50 years we hardly had any women in the UU ministries. There is much to mourn of what we lost, and there is also much to celebrate, for where humans cast their lives in the terms that they and not others have set for them, their stories of struggle will speak to us of inspiring human achievement. 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 3 of 6
The Prophetic Sisterhood and The Sacred Feminine Part II No matter your gender, how does the story of the prophetic sisterhood call your feminine aspects to rise up? Women physiology and brain patterns differ from men, but there is a continuum and a complexity that leaves me with this conclusion: We are all really androgynous. The sacred feminine lies within us all, too often denied. What are the sacred feminine do we deny in ourselves and others because it is at war with other attributes of our species? We offer care and empathy for ourselves and others, but is it a sign of weakness? What if we get taken advantage of? We have domestic responsibilities, but how can home life count when it doesn t accumulate resources in the public realm? We all experience the tragedy of the commons. That what hurts one of us, hurts us all. If any child or woman, or nonhuman animal is hurt in oppression and war, we all are hurt. But how do we allow ourselves to connect to the suffering of others and mourn when we have been taught that the only way to get what we want and need is to value our needs over others? How would we deal with the pain if we suffered when others do? The prophetic sisterhood began the process of finding the way to meld our sacred feminine and masculine, our left and right brains, our gifts of nature, nurture, and culture, and to be tough in the midst of vulnerability. These women sought to abolish hierarchical systems that tended to impede good domestic relations. They liked circular rather than top down management style. They wanted more lay presence in the pulpit, more peer support groups, and intergenerational services. This sounds like what is happening in our own congregations, businesses, and government, over a hundred years hence. Their idea of a church home comes as a timely corrective to the growing consumer mentality that wants its religion catered. Theirs was a religion of being and doing that is discovered, formed, and performed among the people, all people. This is challenging work because our world also needs the virtues of protection, courage, and strength. How do we protect ourselves while also staying engaged and empathetic with those that might harm us? To utilize the whole of human possibility, we embrace within us our masculinity, our femininity, and all the gender variations. Where in you is your inner woman striving to express herself? What do you deny and deify? 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 4 of 6
We live in such a sacred world and by sacred I mean that there are things that should not be happening, that offend our sense of this earth being our home. We draw the line about what is acceptable, we mourn, we care, we protect, and we stay engaged cleaning up the mess we re in. I visited Chiapas Mexico a few years back and witnessed such human degradation and suffering. Reverence for Mary was everywhere and often in the form of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I believe people looked to her as the Universal Sacred Feminine that abides with us, that is with us in our suffering and loss, and calls on us to remember that it is a blessing we were born, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. While there I heard a song called Mary. At one level it is the story of the Christian Mary and Jesus, but it is a much older story, of the tension between the sacred masculine and feminine that seeks wholeness through mourning. For the Marys of the world, the sacred feminine, the earth, ourselves are covered in roses, we re covered in ashes. We re covered in rain, we re covered in babies, we re covered in slashes We re covered in wilderness, we re covered in stains We re covered in roses, We re covered in ruin We re covered in secrets, We re covered in treetops, we re covered in birds who can sing a million songs without any words We cast aside the sheet, we cast aside the shroud Of other men, who serve the world proud We greet another son, we lose another one On some sunny day and always we stay. The son says Mother I couldn't stay another day longer Flies right by us and leaves a kiss upon our face While the angels are singin' his praises in a blaze of glory We stay behind and start cleaning up the place And what a mess we have to clean up. There is much work to do to defeat the Gainesville Charter Amendment and to end the gender wars and all wars so that we can all be good neighbors a hundred years hence. We need not go it alone. Mary, the sacred feminine, she moves behind us She leaves her fingerprints everywhere Every time the snow drifts, every time the sand shifts Even when the night lifts, she's always there In us. For all of us. 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 5 of 6
For the hope of all, let us now share this time of musical/visual reflection. It is the song Mary set to images, some of which are heart aching and graphic. Together let us find a way to face the world in all it s glory and suffering, so that together we may find a way to hold and to heal our neighbors as ourselves. Blessed Be. 2009. Rev. LoraKim Joyner Page 6 of 6