Womenspirit
A Sermon By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
March 6, 2005
There was a time when I didn’t think I should celebrate Women’s History month by preaching a sermon on women. I was keenly aware of the way I was uplifting women’s place in religion and society simply by standing in a pulpit and preaching. I remember when I preached a candidating sermon about women and ministry at the West Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Glendale, and one man came up to me and wanted to be reassured that, if I was going to be their minister, I could preach on subjects other than women’s issues, right, heh heh? Tongue-in-cheek statements are still evidence of discomfort on the part of those who make them.
So, perhaps I have carried the sensitivity of that experience into my ministry and wanted to acknowledge to myself that just being present and accounted for is enough on a week by week basis; a statement that is made in body rather than voice. On the other hand, people have asked me to speak about women’s issues, and I have, but probably not enough—not enough for my own heart, at any rate. Being visible and vocal in this role as woman minister is just a part of what needs to be said and done on a regular basis if women are going to continue to regain and keep their identity and place as equal members of society and equal partners in the religious realm.
I spoke about such issues over fifteen years ago in that sermon I gave at West Valley. I called it “Visibility, Voice, and Value: Conflicts Between Motherhood and the Ministry.” I preached it at the Valley of the Sun churches and even preached it down here during the first year this congregation existed. In 1989, it won the Ministerial Sisterhood UU Sermon Award and I preached it at General Assembly. Now it’s in a new book the Sisterhood has published, along with seventeen other sermons awarded over the last twenty years of the MSUU Sermon Award Contest. The book is called Glorious Women and was edited by Dorothy May Emerson, who has spoken here on occasion and is founder of the UU Women’s Heritage Society.
As I reread my sermon in this book I found that I had ended it with the wish that one day we would no longer need a Women’s History Month to speak on women’s issues, and that such issues would be spoken of throughout the year, as human issues. Perhaps that is what I have hoped to be doing in these years of my ministry, but it still doesn’t take the place of addressing women’s issues directly on Sundays devoted to women, celebrating women. So today, we begin Women’s History Month with a service to hopefully do just that.
Some of you remember David Johnson. He was the minister for many years of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson over there on 22nd Street. He was my first minister after growing up with my father as minister in my Phoenix church. I considered David my first “real” minister, since he wasn’t related to me. Curtiss and I were members over there in our young adult years of the early eighties. Anyway, David has always been interested in hymnody and he began to research Unitarian and Universalist women hymnodists, and while he was still minister here in Tucson, he created a worship service to celebrate those women and sing those hymns. It won the MSUU sermon award in 1991. He called it “Singing the Women’s Living Tradition.” You may notice that our new hymnal is called Singing the Living Tradition. It was due to David’s work that much of the history of women hymn writers has been collected, because, as David described it, it was due to his winning the MSUU award and presenting the service at GA that people began asking him about women writers in our movement and people have been sending him hymns and hymn references so that he is about to publish a Bibliography of UU Women’s Hymnody.
I found in our hymnal one of the hymns David talks about in his service, one by Frances Whitmarsh Wile called “All Beautiful the March of Days,” number 57. It was the only hymn of those David had included which was also in our new hymnal, and I almost had us sing it, but then I got to flipping through the pages and remembering all the wonderful new hymns we sing by women like Caroline McDade who wrote “Spirit of Life,” and Joyce Poley who wrote, “One More Step,” one of my favorite hymns of all, and Grace Lewis-McLaren who composed the harmony for both of them.
So, instead, I chose a couple of hymns we don’t sing as often but which were actually written in the late 80’s for the Hymnbook Resources Commission’s competitions designed to spur people to write hymns which celebrated feminine imagery of the divine. “Earth Was Given as a Garden,” number 207, which we sang while the children were still here, was written by Roberta Bard, a Quaker UU from Evanston, Illinois, who was concerned that we use gender-inclusive and spiritually-inclusive language. The second hymn we sang, “Lady of the Season’s Laughter,” number 51, was written by Kendyl Gibbons, who was President of the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association for the last three years before this one. We will end the service with my favorite, “One More Step,” number 168, written by Joyce Poley of the Beacon Unitarian Church in Coquitlam, British Columbia, for a worship service packet to be distributed by the UU Peace Network in 1986.
As I flipped through this new hymnal of ours which was only published twelve years ago, I noted how many hymns were written by women; more than I thought. I didn’t count to get a percentage. But it is significantly more and reminds me of the years we used to get out our pens during the worship services at my father’s church in the late seventies and rewrite the words of the hymns to make them more gender-inclusive. Those old blue hymnals, as we called them, still referred to god as male and humanity as “men.” It’s a trick to degenderize them, and as you are well aware, some changes just don’t stick like the old words to Christmas carols.
It hasn’t been very many years since women have begun to feel some inclusion in our supposedly liberal Unitarian Universalist worship services. The women’s movement has had much to do with that. I called up my mother last week and asked her if I was remembering correctly that the womenspirit circles, as the women’s groups at that church were called, had influenced this change in our worship. She reminded me that it was in 1975 that the first Women’s Conference in Mexico City was held to kick off the United Nations Decade of Women. My parents and people from our church went to the UN Mid-Decade Conference of Women in Copenhagen in 1980 and then to the end of the decade celebration in Nairobi. My mother’s friend, Rosemary Matsen, got about 50 women to go with her, many of whom were UU. That whole period was one of tremendous change for the world. Our UU women brought back renewed convictions and strength to change the outdated traditions of even our “cutting-edge” religion.
The year before the UN Decade of Women, the Ministerial Sisterhood Unitarian Universalist was born, otherwise known as MSUU, an acronym appropriate for the early seventies when women were struggling to find an alternative to either Miss or Mrs. Women were only five percent of the UU ministry then. A member of our congregation, the Rev. Sandy Szelag, came up with the name, according to the book Glorious Women, so you can ask her about it when you see her next.
In 1999, when I was President of MSUU, we celebrated 25 years as an organization of women ministers. We had come from 5 percent of the ministry to 51 percent. What a change! I think when people are in the midst of such change, they don’t perceive it as historically important, but looking back over that quarter century I can see major transformations in the ways we do worship and who is included at the table, so to speak.
In the mid-seventies, when my father took me aside and asked me if it was true that women didn’t feel included in the hymns, I told him that I had always felt left out. I was left out of our images of the divine. At least the Catholics had Mary, as twisted as that feminine imagery was. We Unitarian Universalists had nothing other than a male god and a male Jesus, and when you’re singing about mankind, you don’t really feel all that included as a woman, not with the history and the socialization we have endured.
So today, we can sing of the “Lady of the season’s laughter” and the “Sister of the evening starlight,” the “Mother of the generations,” and the Goddess of all times’ progression.” These images Kendyl Gibbons has given us fill the cracks in the basically patriarchal religion we have inherited. Women who gathered in our congregations’ Womenspirit circles have explored feminist theology and written and shared curricula to explore the Goddess and other images of the female divine. In the 1980’s the popular curriculum was called “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” and then in the 1990’s it was “Rise Up and Call Her Name,” an exploration of Goddess images the world over. We taught that class shortly after I came to minister here in Tucson.
It is important to uncover the goddess images and traditions which have been buried or disparaged over the centuries. Women need to heal. They need to have a foundation upon which to build their self-esteem and sense of divine companionship.
Even for those who profess atheism, the theism they deny is a male theism. Just think the word “god” and you will think “he.” God is a male term, no matter how much people try to bring a genderless sense to it. And men, too, need the female divine in their lives to be whole and balanced persons. We are not creatures living in isolation but in community, male and female, together and interdependent. We need to respect the sacredness in each other, no matter what our gender, or even more, because of our gender, both male and female being sacred and powerful and beloved.
It wasn’t just women changing our worship over the last thirty years. Women and men worked together to change old ways and invite new rituals and images to grace our Sunday mornings and other worship experiences. As an Association, we voted in 1977 at the General Assembly to pass a Women and Religion Resolution which called for eliminating sexism in our language, religious beliefs and our organization. The transformation was growing like the squash plant that overruns the garden, as Marge Piercy describes in the reading “Connections Are Made Slowly.” (568) For us, I think the connections have been growing very rapidly. I just hope they are strong, like the roots of a tree spread out beneath our feet.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson