A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
September 7, 2003
The beginning of a circle is also its end…
Change alone is unchanging.
(Singing The Living Tradition, 655)
These words of Heraklietos of Ephesos 2500 years ago remind us once again that we inherit a wealth of wisdom through the ages. I would have chosen words from a woman’s writings 2500 years ago if I could have easily laid my hands on them. But as we all know, much of women’s writings, women’s lives, women’s wisdom has been ignored and lost over the eons of Patriarchy. It is not that everything has been lost; it just looks that way, if you were, say, to read an elementary school textbook from the middle part of this century. It would appear that women had never written anything worth sharing at all.
People have managed to keep some women’s heritage alive, guarded, protected. We have the words of Sappho, the Greek poet who lived just a little earlier than Heraklietos, around the 6th century BCE (Before the Christian Era). She perhaps expresses a truth for all people, but in the context of women in history, her words speak eerily of prophecy:
Someone, I tell you
will remember us.
We are oppressed by
fears of oblivion.
(The Beacon Book of Quotations By Women, Maggio)
Part of the work of the Women’s Movement of the last few decades has been to research and reclaim women’s writings and heritage. In the seventies, in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix where I grew up, we spent the first part of the worship services degenderizing the hymns. It’s hard to turn Our Lord God back into a god both male and female, the g-d of the ancient Jews whose name was not speakable nor writable and whose image was not the image of man! We are, in a way, completing a 2500 plus year old circle, coming back to an ancient teaching that captured the imaginations of a people, but which has been corrupted throughout the ages since, though strands remain. Women are reclaiming the divine female, in both god and themselves.
“Spirit of Life” was written as a prayer by Unitarian Universalist Carolyn McDade during those transitional years of our movement. Since she copyrighted it in 1981, and shared it at Women’s Conferences and General Assemblies, “Spirit of Life” has become one of the most beloved hymns in our hymnal, even used as part of the weekly liturgy in some congregations. Women (and men) are changing religion just as women and men have been changing religion over the centuries. Contrary to how it may appear, people have always been challenging and changing religion, and many millions have died in the effort. Millions more have merely been suppressed, oppressed, and in the end, depressed! And there are those that made a difference for us all.
Part of the effort in our movement to uplift women’s heritage resulted in a curriculum called “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” by my colleague the Rev. Shirley Ranck, who, by the way, still produces the newsletter for the Ministerial Sisterhood Unitarian Universalist, acronym MSUU! I took the “Cakes” class in the late eighties when I moved back to Phoenix with two small babies. It wasn’t the first time I learned about the early Goddess religions that predated and influenced the mythology of Judaism and Christianity. In college, my mother had given me Judy Chicago’s book on The Dinner Party, a record of her art and listing the accomplishments of hundreds of women throughout history, including Sappho, of course. I had also read Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade which dealt in a researched way with the theory of the matriarchies and partnership cultures that predated patriarchy. Here in this congregation we have used the latest curriculum called “Rise Up and Call Her Name,” also covering goddesses in cultures around the world.
I had become, over the years, very aware of how much has been twisted and hidden and annihilated in religious history. Even today, we suffer in this country under the oppression, real or perceived, of the radical religious right with its attempts to ban books like Harry Potter (for God’s sake!), suppress knowledge in our schools such as the Theory of Evolution, and build a culture of fear to the extent that politicians feel they must end every speech with “God bless you!” in case they might be branded as atheists and kicked out of congress in the same way atheists are kicked out of the Boy Scouts!
Walking around last Spring in one of the icons of freedom of thought that remain to us, Barnes and Noble Bookstore, I was amazed to come across Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I was looking for a CD for Curtiss to listen to on his long drives across Tucson to work, and the red cover caught my eye (so outer appearances are important!). The jacket was so interesting I decided to buy the book for myself, and what a book! I love mysteries anyway, but this was my cup of tea, being about religion, and Leonardo Da Vinci, and a secret organization that guarded an even bigger secret, the secret of the Holy Grail. It was feminist theology in a new twist, with Mary Magdalene as the grail, the sacred chalice of female power.
I didn’t realize I would write a sermon about it, or I would have taken notes, so you will have to read it yourself. What I was so amazed about in reading this book was the way the author wove feminist theology throughout the book, in a teaching way, through the explanations of the main character who is a symbologist. It’s fascinating. One detail that I do remember and need to check out is that Brown said that Da Vinci painted clues to the grail and the secret society into his paintings, and that the disciple who stands behind Jesus in the Last Supper is actually a woman, Mary Magdalene. The discipleship of Mary Magdalene was suppressed by the misogynist church and her character betrayed, but this secret society kept her secret alive.
Reading The Da Vinci Code brought back memories of a theory I had heard concerning people living in Europe who claim to trace their lineage to Jesus, saying that he had escaped with Mary Magdalene to cross the Mediterranean and settle in Southern France. Then I remembered a book my sister had given me a number of years ago, which I had loaned immediately to someone in the congregation and never gotten around to reading when I got it back. So, I searched for it: The Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed, by Laurence Gardner, Prior of the Celtic Church’s Sacred Kindred of St. Columba and a sovereign and chivalric genealogist. I read it from cover to cover, and, believe me, some of it was like reading Kings: so and so begat so and so who begat so and so, and on and on.
But…it was also chock full of very intriguing information, some totally new to me! Yes, according to Bloodline, Jesus had escaped the crucifixion alive and Mary Magdalene, his wife, had traveled to the area of Southern France to have his children and start the royal bloodlines of Europe. It’s interesting to me that the person that wrote the forward to the book, Prince Michael of Albany, benefits by this royal succession from Jesus, and in my mind, makes the purpose of the book quite suspicious. In spite of that, what I learned most was a different view. It’s a different view of the Hebrew culture in whose context the Bible stories were written, and a way of living that translators of the Bible apparently misinterpreted to a great extent. I’m going to try to see if the Jesus Seminar writes anything in response to Bloodline, at least in terms of Gardner’s interpretations of Biblical passages and their meanings.
The most fascinating bit of information for me was Gardner’s explanation that in Hebrew culture, people took on certain names depending on the roles they had in society. So Mary and Martha were common names that women took on as they changed their position in the religious culture. There were lots of Marys and lots of Marthas. Levis and Josephs were another one. In reading the gospels, then, sometimes a person with one name is also another, depending on the time and place of the story. He also points out that the books were written under the oppression of the Romans, and so hidden meanings were couched in letters in case they were confiscated. There is a theory of esoteric interpretations of the Bible that people have apparently held for centuries, including such notables as Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci.
Gardner shows the passages in the Gospels that, interpreted correctly, tell the story of Jesus’s marriage to Mary Magdalene. He explains the way the disciples fooled the authorities and made them believe Jesus had died on the cross, when he had only been poisoned and then revived. And he tells how the believers of these interpretations of the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were suppressed by the Catholic church, even to the point of entire exterminations of peoples living in Southern France. Popular stories are the hardest to squash!
Whether it’s true or not (and how could we ever truly know?), what we learn about religion is not necessarily what really happened or is happening now. This may be a time when people are more open to these theories, and the book-burners are lying quiescent for a while. For a book like The Da Vinci Code to become so popular is also so hopeful, that all those people who only read fiction are getting feminist theology (and not just the Mary Magdalene/Holy Grail theory) while they read a great mystery.
When I think of the popularity of Harry Potter, I feel reassured that my impression of society as bigoted and close-minded is wrong, just an image portrayed by the media in response to our political situation today. For so many people to love reading Harry Potter, about witches and wizards and children fighting evil, about pagan celebrations and a total absence of Christian theology, is refreshing. It’s refreshing in the face of today’s radical Christian Right and the oppressions so many of its followers are trying to perpetuate. And we know lots of Christians, liberal and conservative, are reading Harry Potter, in spite of the book banners.
One person who is rewriting theology is Anita Diamant. She is Jewish and has written books about contemporary Jewish life. Her popular book The Red Tent is a rewrite of the story in Genesis of Jacob and his sons, including Joseph -- remember his many-colored coat? My version of the Bible only says his “long robe with sleeves,” (37:3) but that is how we change religion. In keeping with feminism’s current attempts to recapture women’s experience, Diamant decided to write the story of Jacob from his daughter, Dinah’s, perspective. It’s a wonderful tale, close to the version in Genesis, but based on what we know of women’s culture and experience of that time, including the ancient Goddess religion Jacob’s wives most likely followed. In the story, they make cakes for the Queen of Heaven and place them at the feet of their idols for hope and goodness. The red tent is where the women retreat during their menstruations, which they all have at the same time in sync with the moons, and there Dinah learns of her female heritage, even as she is being written out of the lives of men, invisible and insignificant to her father and brothers.
Women are reclaiming their religious heritage and experience, and in this way are men, too, and this is a very good thing. We have lost so much through the centuries, wisdom and experience and perspective that cannot be reclaimed, but it is also good to remember that what we have inherited is also not necessarily the True story. Our religious inheritance is an amalgamation of the perspective of the powerful and the oppressive, as well as the meek and the hopeful. To understand our religious heritage is to peel away the layers of an infinite palimpsest, and who knows if there is a beginning to what is an always changing circle. Our roots will hold us close in the end, even as our wings set us free in the Spirit of Life. May compassion and justice be yours in your search for truth and meaning.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson