Chalice Lighting
If I do not burn,
If you do not burn,
If we do not burn,
How shall the shadows
Become light?
-Nazim Hikmet
Words for Meditation
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. –Rainer Maria Rilke
Reading
As a way of introducing Mary Daly to you, I’ll read parts of an Interview with her which was printed in What is Enlightenment? Magazine.
WIE: What is your concept of spiritual liberation?
MD: It’s not an expression I ever use.
WIE: Another way to approach this would be to speak about spiritual aspiration.
MD: Radical feminists who talk to me ask questions in my language. You’re asking: “What is your concept of…?” Well, I don’t have a concept of that because I’m not one of you. There was a point a few years ago when I stopped using the word “spiritual.”
WIE: Why is that?
MD: Because it sounds too much like dichotomizing mind/body. I think matter is extremely alive and spiritual in the deepest sense. So whenever possible I use the word, ”elemental.” By elemental I mean a lot of things; the four elements: earth, air, fire, water—but also the ether. And the universe, the earth, stars, other planets were also called elements. It’s something vast. My work follows in that tradition of bonding—recognizing, realizing, and actualizing our connection with the universe. So the word I use for the ultimate reality—I won’t say “god.” That’s dead!—is “the universe.” I’ll say “spirit,” but meaning a principle of life within all being, including rocks. And I have used capital “B,” Be-ing, to represent the verb God.
WIE: Can you explain that a bit further?
MD: A thousand years ago, when I was studying standard scholastic philosophy, God was called the “supreme being.” And that made him a noun and something on high. Hierarchical. Yahweh. The hairy claw coming down. It always has images hanging around that are undesirable. Then I realized, with the help of a friend of mine, Nelle Morton, that “being” is a verb, and it should be hyphenated [be-ing]. When you do that, everything changes. I would also say that the universe is a verb. Here are other ways of describing this ultimate/intimate reality. It’s a mode of existence in which we profoundly realize and actualize our connectedness in multiple ways. I think it’s beyond spiritual. I mean, my cat wouldn’t be concerned with “spiritual liberation;” she’s all spirit, she’s probably in-spirited. I used to talk about “liberation” to me. But then I got over that, too, and moved on.
WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?
MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It’s a description of an alternative future. It’s there partly as a device and partly because it’s a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with.
WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, “The Future—If There is One—Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?
MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.
WIE: Yes, I find myself now thinking that’s a bit shocking.
MD: Well, it’s shocking that it would be shocking.
WIE: So it doesn’t sound like your vision of a separate nation for women is something you see as an interim stage that would eventually lead to men and women living together in true equality.
MD: No. That’s a very old question. I answered that to audiences twenty-five, thirty years ago. I just don’t think that way. See, right now, I would be totally joyous to have a great community of women—whether men are somewhere out on the periphery or not. I don’t have this goal of: “Oh, then we can all get together again!” That doesn’t seem to be a very promising future. So why would I think about it? I think it’s pretty evident that men are not central to my thought.
WIE: I have one last question. At the beginning of this interview, you spoke about the experience of being deeply at one with that which animates all of life. I wanted to ask you what you think about the possibility of becoming identified with that as who one ultimately is, having that as one’s ultimate resting place, or ground, so to speak, and where one’s gender would no longer be a primary reference point.
MD: I don’t know if that has anything to do with my experience. I have my own experience of oneness. Sometimes I have ecstasy and a kind of active repose in connection with nature. It’s tremendous. But I never forget that I’m a woman, because this is me. I know who I am. I have Female integrity.
Search For Meaning
“Women’s Liberation and Ethics: Crossing Paths with Mary Daly” -- Pat Bodnar
I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church and attended Catholic elementary school in a small town a few miles north of New York City. The Latin Mass, uniforms, incense, ritual -- all were comforting certainties. My religious training began with memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, which laid out the tenets of the Church in question and answer form. In school, the nuns drilled it, and it still comes to mind easily: Who made you? "God made me." Why did God make you? "God made me in His image, to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world."
In the early1960's, the Church held the Second Vatican Council, which fostered efforts for significant institutional changes. The rituals of worship were transformed. The Liturgy was spoken in English now, not Latin. Mass sometimes included folk songs, not just hymns. The altar was turned to face the parishioners and the priest turned toward the congregation to address them directly. Many of the trappings: the altar cloths, statues, traditional religious clothing were simplified, updated.
Over the next few years, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-War movement, Feminism, and Liberation Theology, all began to develop. Each of these movements separately and in combination had its own influence on thinking in the Church, as well as on those of us who were in it. These changes were frightening for some and invigorating for others.
For me, and for many of my friends, now teens or young adults, they did no go far enough. Like millions of others, by the end of the 60's, I began to challenge authority and tradition: questioning my government, my teachers, my parents, my Church.
I saw college as an opportunity to develop and live by my free thought. Even so, I chose a Catholic university, Boston College, but one run by Jesuits who had a history of discord with the Pope and Rome. Despite its reputation for liberal thinking, I soon found out that in many ways, BC remained a traditional Catholic institution. In our required freshman theology course, our Jesuit professor led us in prayer at the beginning and end of class.
After a brief flirtation with non-traditional campus services that focused on more directly personal worship, I stopped going to Church altogether, except when I was with my family on holidays.
My experience was very similar to others of my generation. But being a woman at BC - a profoundly male-dominated environment deeply affected me. My class of women at BC was the first permitted to attend the College of Arts and Sciences rather than only the schools of nursing and education. Of course, women were still a small minority on campus, and a tinier part of the tenured faculty. When a group of us decided to found a campus Women's Center, we only got space by "liberating" a women's restroom.
It was no wonder that I was eager to hear what the only woman in the BC Theology Department had to say. After all, she was already a small legend as author of the book, "The Church and the Second Sex" -- and she had already been fired by BC for the first time, and then reinstated after protests by her all male students and others. When Mary Daly returned from sabbatical in 1973, I signed up for her course on "Women's Liberation and Ethics."
I expected something on the order of that first angry yet hopeful book, which exposed the Catholic Church's deep and long-standing animosity toward women. This was a call for reform from a "catholic feminist" and classically trained scholar who held a doctorate in theology from the University of Fribourg, where Daly trained when no Catholic university in the United States would admit a women for the degree.
However, by the time I met her, Daly had moved beyond an attempt to rescue Christianity from the Church patriarchs. Her second major book, "Beyond God the Father" was published during our semester, and our class gave her a chance to talk through its themes and spring off into current issues we confronted. What an experience!
Now Daly wrote and spoke clearly as a radical feminist post-Christian. She identified deep roots of patriarchy in the Bible, misogyny in basic Christian doctrine. From its very roots, the Judeo-Christian tradition had been male dominated, and supported a male-dominated society. It was a belief system that formed the justification for sexism and racism in the world.
And yet, while her written language was angry and revolutionary, Mary Daly in person, was a soft-spoken, smiling, self-possessed woman. She welcomed her student's thinking. Daly was a woman on a quest, who was re-defining language, Christian symbolism, Roman Catholic taboos on abortion as well as sexuality, and ultimately the very essence of theology itself. She was trying now to rescue the possibility of transcendence from patriarchal religion.
Mary Daly's thinking resonated with me. She showed me that what is "holy in the world" can be redefined. One can reassess the nature of Jesus, not as a re-incarnation of the divinity, but as a human who showed us the possibility of the divine we could all achieve. She also enabled me to re-think other Church symbols, and consider creating new myths that were not hierarchical, but "diarcal". She showed that "humanism" can easily become superficial and disconnected from the realities of life in the world for women and for all those outside dominant social groups.
I interpreted her teaching in my own life. I began to incorporate the new ideas of Feminism into what was a developing spirituality that took me outside the Catholic Church and on a long spiritual journey that eventually brought me to Unitarian Universalism. Today I continue to grapple with "the God experience" in my own life, and where it takes me.
In the twenty-five years since I knew her, Mary Daly has voyaged onward, creating a radical feminist philosophy and vision, which is original, always provocative and often wondrous. While that is not my own vision, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to cross her path at such a formative period in my own spiritual life.
Sermon “Change Agents in the Church;
A Series on Contemporary Voices for Reform”
#3 - Mary Daly
I remember the late sixties and seventies. I remember the whirlwind effect of feminism on my life. I had just joined a Unitarian Universalist Church in 1966, so I had no one to blame but myself for opening the door to radical new thoughts and possibilities which could, and did, change my life.
I wasn’t going to be open to the full possibilities of my life as a woman in that place where the old God, Yahweh, and His persistent patriarchy held sway. I needed to find a boundary faith where I could challenge and be challenged.
Unitarian Universalists, not having a particular allegiance to God the Father, or rigid dogma, or maintaining oppressive anything, let alone institutional religion, would be among the first to welcome into their minds and hearts the new wave of feminist thinking. Not the “First Wave,” mind you, because that came ashore in the late 19th century, with the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Margaret Fuller. No, this was the Second Wave which appeared sometime in the 1960’s, with the likes of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millet. I wasn’t even really aware of the First Wave, when the Second Wave hit me like a Tsunami.
In the early seventies, we formed a women’s Consciousness-Raising Group in church (anyone remember those?), and read the new feminist books and shared our ideas and experiences. I subscribed to Ms Magazine when it began to publish. I would openly challenge the use of gender-exclusive language in church, to the point of people rolling their eyes, especially the choir. Once, on a Sunday morning, Roger Guthrie, who must have been Chairperson of the Board of Trustees at that time, was up in the pulpit to make an announcement. He included some joke about exploding personhole covers in the street – while staring right at me. Joan-the-Ridiculous! And, it’s true that fledgling feminists can be pure pain-in-the-butt. But, the eyes of my eyes were opening and the ears of my ears were beginning to hear things they hadn’t heard before. I could no longer say, or listen to, words like “Man,” and “mankind,” and “brotherhood,” without understanding their patriarchal roots.
My favorite joke at the time was a drawing of a bearded white male minister pictured high up in a pulpit pontificating about Man and Mankind. The next drawing showed a cosmic-sized handbag that appeared out of nowhere, above him, and gave him a whop across the side of his head!
It was during this time that I attended a UU course entitled, “Employing Your Total Self.” It was designed to help people in transition with jobs or careers, to help understand better what they might want to do with the rest of their lives. In it, participants would write what was called a “Life-Work Narrative,” describing schooling, their work history, their volunteer work, hobbies, dreams; it was all about the choices we make in our lives, and what that shows about us.
The Narratives were turned in to the Facilitator who was, in this case, a bearded white male minister. Each member of the class also got a copy. The facilitator read them over, and did a lot of highlighting of what he saw as significant patterns. After they were returned, we’d get a chance to talk about each one in class, and give each other feedback.
What I remember, vividly, is the Facilitator pointing out to me, among other things, an obvious pattern of church involvement and leadership and a love for creating and presenting worship experiences. He said to me, “Why don’t you become a para-professional worship consultant?” That was in 1975. I was partially conscious enough at that point to realize that there was another suggestion for a career that he could have given me, and the reason he didn’t was because I’m a woman. The Unitarian Universalist ministry was, then, at least 95% male.
It took the wave of women into the UU ministry in the 1980’s – which included me – to change that standard. His suggestion to me of “para-professional worship consultation” is what actually sparked my sense of calling to the professional ministry. It was something I hadn’t consciously thought of before, and so, I’m very grateful to him for having made it so clear to me, in a back-handed way, what I wanted to do with my life. My potentials as a woman were not going to be invested in para-anything!
But, I really was just beginning to wake up to feminism. It’s a process for women who open up to feminist thinking and being – a profound life-long becoming -- into unknown territory.
And, there was Mary Daly, the self-proclaimed “Revolting Hag” (meaning, in her re-interpretation of language – a Revolutionary Wise Woman!).
I read her first two books, “The Church and the Second Sex,” and “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.” They presented the church as co-conspirator in the oppression of women and provided the seeds for the formulation of a uniquely feminist theology. In both books she attacked the essentially masculine symbolism and language at the heart of Christianity.
Then came Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, published in 1978. I picked it up when I was starting seminary and I remember vividly having to put it down. It was too much for me. I couldn’t handle it; couldn’t hold it. I read some of the book, but wasn’t ready for all of it. I remember having the sense that if I took in everything she was saying, some of which I knew had a good deal of truth to it, my life might begin to change, and it frightened me. I was just barely out of the starting gate. I was going to have to assimilate just plain old feminism before I could take on Radical Feminism.
Daly wrote, in Gyn/Ecology, that she had changed. She was no longer a Christian looking to reform the church. She went beyond Christianity – she left the church. She called herself “Post-Christian.” For women, she would create a new theology, and not rehabilitate the old.
Daly has, for more than three decades, committed her every waking breath to a single purpose: seeing, naming and dissecting the structures of patriarchy in order to liberate women’s minds, bodies, and spirits from its oppression.
Her strict differentiation of the experiences of woman from the experiences of men, have drawn criticism. Daly’s separatism is evidenced by her refusal to accept question (much less criticism) from men. She says, “Radical feminism is not a reconciliation with the father. Rather it is affirming our original birth, our original source, movement, surge of living.” Daly feels that the very presence of men eliminates the possibility of any such affirmation.
Re-forming language is very important to her. In her books, she practices the re-appropriation of language from its male biases. Her books are, says Daly, “an act of dispossession and hence…are absolutely anti-andocrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.”
If you are a woman, getting to know Mary Daly’s work is like meeting a muse, a siren who beckons you to step through the mists of time into an enchanted, gynocentric other reality, an Avalon of only women’s making. If you are a man….well, hold on tight! Her exposition of male behavior over the centuries is brilliant and horrifying. To accept some of Mary Daly’s arguments is to be made angry. As a woman, I can emerge from some of the long and difficult passages of the books feeling stimulated, but as a man, I would feel shattered.
I can tell you that discussions about Mary Daly’s views, at the breakfast table in the Gelbein home, have been anything but calm, cool and objective! If you want to see smoke come out of Abe’s ears, just bring up Daly’s vision of a future world made up mostly of women who procreate by means of parthenogenesis!
For Daly, conflict is a way of life. In 1999, a writer in the yale daily news magazine said this of her: “Regarded by many scholars as a prophet and by others as an irate, obsolete crank, she seems to seek controversy with a voracity borne of either passion or pathology.”
Her first two books – Beyond God the Father, and Gyn/Ecology – helped define the world view of cultural-radical feminists who called for a woman-led social and spiritual revolution. She is acknowledged as a founding mother of contemporary feminism, an originator of feminist religious thought.
Born in 1929, Mary Daly holds six graduate degrees, including three doctorates in religion, theology, and philosophy. She is the author of seven ground-breaking works of feminist philosophy. After the first three I mentioned, she went on to write Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, Outercourse: the Be-Dazzling Voyage, and, her latest, Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future, A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto. She lectures around the world.
Daly’s employer of 33 years was the Jesuit university, Boston College. In 1974, just four years after the college first admitted women, she began refusing to admit men into her classes on feminist ethics. In 1998, Duane Naquin, a male senior, threatened to sue the school for discrimination, and the university decided to call an end to Daly’s practice. She was told to admit Naquin to her class or resign. What she did was to take a leave of absence. But unlike previous dissatisfied students, the young man would not go away. He refused Daly’s offer to teach him one-on-one, and enlisted the help of the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative-libertarian Washington law firm and think-tank. Daly was eventually forced to retire.
Not without a fight, of course; Daly has many supporters as well as detractors. Two of her students at the time walked around wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “Where’s Mary Daly?” in white type.
When the young women picked up their new shirts, the guy working behind the desk said, “Oh, just so you know, the dean of student development call us about these shirts to see if you guys are going to protest or something, so you might get a call. It’s just a warning.”
One of the young women said, “The T-shirts are a problem?”
The answer came back, “Everything’s a problem. You know, feminism. Period.”
True!! Feminism has always been a controversial subject. And Mary Daly makes a fine art of creating a highly provocative radical feminist philosophy that is guaranteed to shock.
She speaks the unspoken, cataloging with razor-like acuity and freight-train force the history of ritualized oppression and violence against women, and drawing clear causal connections to patriarchal religions and gods with male names and male faces. Lauded as a “demolition derbyist of patriarchal ‘mindbindings,’” she has penetrated into the structures of language, thought, and image; she tears away veils upon veils; she confronts, rattles, inspires – and demands that the issues she raises be dealt with.
Daly writes, “I came to see that all of the so-called major religions, from buddhism and hinduism to islam, judaism, and christianity, as well as such secular derivatives as freudianism, jungianism, marxism, and maoism – are mere sects, infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy. … That revelation continues to work subliminally, inspiring my humor and stoking the Fires of my Fury not merely against the catholic church and all other religions and institutions that are the tentacles of patriarchy but against everything that dulls and diminishes women. Through me, it shouts messages meant for women within earshot: ‘Tell on them! Laugh out loud at their pompous XXXXX (censored) processions! Reverse their reversals! Decode their ‘mysteries!’ Break their taboos! Spin tapestries of your own creations! Sin big!’”
Let me tell you what I like about Mary Daly. I certainly don’t find her message frightening any more – I’m able to accept what is moving and meaningful for me, and put aside what I can’t use.
I like her feminist analysis of religion. It is now one of several books I have on the subject that I find inspiring, groundbreaking, and courageous.
I love her word play; her creation of a new language, which celebrates women’s experience. It’s poetic; it’s clever; it’s shocking and humorous. Her weaving and spinning of meanings is refreshing and eye-opening. Daly researches the history of meanings of words, and then recasts them to support the beauty and power of a woman’s life. Making us conscious of our taken-for-granted language, challenging patriarchal meanings, is a marvelous contribution, whether you agree on all the new definitions or not.
For instance – what about the title of her book, Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language? Here is what Mary Daly says: “The word, webster, according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, is derived from the Old English webbestra, meaning female weaver. According to the Wickedary, Webster means ‘a woman whose occupation is to weave, esp. a Weaver of Words and Word-Webs.’ Wickedary … is defined as ‘Wicked/Wiccen dictionary; dictionary for Wicked/Wiccen women; Metamysterious Web-Work Spun by Websters.’”
I also like the fact that she is part of the feminist spectrum. Her voice adds a rich dimension to the debate.
I am not an extremist. I’m not a separatist. – I believe that feminism is about a more humane life for everybody.
What I dearly wish is that men will read Mary Daly (and the thoughts of other excellent feminist writers) and do their own work in honestly assessing patriarchy, it’s effects on women and our world; its effects on men’s roles and men’s lives, and -- through the patience and pain of that search -- decide what kind of men they want to be and what they want for our sons, and daughters.
I really am sure that the Men’s Movement hasn’t been well-organized, extensive enough, or effective in encouraging a proactive paradigm shift.
It’s time men read feminist thought in their groups, and approached it openly and seriously, as if it matters to them. Because it does.
This UU religion of ours, that decries sexism in human relationships and is aware of its pernicious effects on our lives and in our world, has been actively engaged in the work of dismantling sexism and re-envisioning our future as a human race. But the work is far from finished.
Think of the “Religious Right,” – think of the stadiums filled with The Promise Keepers who would turn the clocks back on women’s rights. Think of a recent Baptist decree that said women shall be subservient to their husbands. Where are the men of the “Religious Left???”
We may not want to follow Mary Daly’s anger into the kind of future she sets out, but each one of us has much to learn from her scholarship and creativity – and from her sense of something gone very wrong.
The world is still abundantly blessed with beauty, wonder, and love. Cherish the goodness, protect it, and go with hope in your hearts.
Benediction
Life is forever questioned and forever answered; it is forever dying and forever born anew. Yet another tomorrow, it will stand upon the earth as upon a footstool and reach upward through the stars. –Todd J. Taylor
-Amen and shalom!
