pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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A NEW DARK AGES OR REMEMBERING AWE?

(No. 303 � Monday � 6 March 2006) My new weed-wacker is assembled and working just fine. My flowerbeds are weeded and mulched and sporting some new creeping phlox. My daffodils are all erect and shiny. My yard is aerated and fertilized and neatly trimmed just in time for today�s rain and next weekend�s grass seed. My patio umbrellas� canvasses are in a pile by the washer waiting to be cleaned and inspected. My car is vacuumed and no longer needs to be washed thanks to this cold rain. Three fingers are blistered and slathered with antibiotic cream and bandaged.

Interesting to itemize all the things I get done when I spend a weekend at home alone.

I worked hard all weekend, so decided to go have some fun last night. Spent the evening at a dyke club, playing pool and darts with a lawyer from Durham and laughing with a table of women that Operagrrl invited to join us. We watched the Academy Awards�except for during the one hour when we watched The L Word), which means that we watched a straight man fuck a dyke against an attractive Arts & Crafts door in much the same manner as I fucked a woman against my bedroom wall not so very long ago.

Hard to watch Dana (on L) go through chemo and an infection, given how severely Tree is reacting to her first treatment. I suspect they�re killing off her character next week too, which will be difficult to watch.

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I�m always contemplating something when I do manual labor and spent part of the weekend planning a large grandmother sculpture that I plan to assemble from parts of a wooden church pew that�s been out on the deck warping and chipping. I�ll incorporate what's left of my guitar that Sandiva drove over with her Jeep, plus a 1960s handmade polyester coat that my tiny grandmother liked to wear, and I�ll do something with the symbolic wire hanger from which it will hang. I�ll also incorporate Baptist hymns, some Bible verses, and pictures such as the Greensboro Woolsworth counter and the National Guard admitting black students at Little Rock High and Klan photos into the work�a sort of historic representation of my own past and significant events of the past fifty years in the Bible twitch Belt.

This got me thinking about what it means that, in the last forty-some years, New Age crystal-squeezing spirituality has grown alongside fundamentalism and feminism in our country. Fundamentalism/the rise of the Religious New Right was clearly a reaction to second-wave feminism, to women�s changing role in society. So many people were threatened by this new cultural landscape. I could go on and on about sermons opposed to new laws making it a crime for men to beat or rape their wives and children, since who are we to take away a man's so-called Gawd-given right to do what he will with his property?)

Instead, I'll just remind everyone that Jerry Falwell insisted that a minister who placed his two toddlers on a hot floor heater vent "to send them back to the fires of Hell� was supported by the Religious Right, who asserted that he should not be held accountable for this crime because God "gave him the right to do as he chooses with his own property.")

Have also been thinking about Catholicism, how so many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and the mysticism, but cannot in good conscience participate in such a repressive, greedy organization. Instead, they have turned to more spiritual practices and worship the moon and the earth mother and the spiderwoman weaving our world and look to energy work and meditation to fill the void.

When I was in graduate school, I worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings then used their apartments as stealth offices.

A priest or nun lived in each apartment and their bedroom was off limits, but otherwise the doors were open and we walked freely among the many offices, setting up women�s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and sending humanitarian aid to Central America; writing nonsexist, non-hierarchical, inclusive lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death sentence and free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing an inclusive New Testament; working to thwart the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who actively opposed women�s equality, etc. etc.

The founders of this organization�a Jesuit priest and a nun�have since been excommunicated for refusing to cease their work, but the organization and its many umbrella groups still thrive and the little inclusive new testament that I started is now a whole alternative bible.

One of the many things we talked about as we ate our hummus and sprout sandwiches was the fact that the now-rabidly-anti-choice Catholic church allowed abortions until the late 1800s. Abortion was only made an excommunicable offense after France�s diminishing birth rates threatened the country�s ability to maintain a strong army, in fact. Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible and the ultimate authority on religious matters soon after he issued this decree.

The anti-choice movement is still, at base, about maintaining a man�s will to power. Women bear children and soldiers breed them into soldiers, but men lack the ability to create life. This goes a long way toward explaining why the Christianity that replaced matriarchal religion introduced a man born who offers life and a long list of instructions on how to shackle women and destroy our autonomy.

Matthew Fox, a radical Catholic, said

There are two Christianities in our midst. One worships a punitive father and seeks obedience at all costs. It is patriarchal, demonizes woman, the earth, science, gays, lesbians and deep thought. It builds on fear and it supports empire-builders. Its theology includes a Punitive Father in the Sky and teaches original sin.

The other Christianity recognizes the Original Blessing that all beings derive from. We recognize awe, not sin, not guilt, as the starting point of true religion. We recognize a Divinity who is source of all things and is as much mother as father, as much female as male. We honor creation and diversity. When God created everything, He pronounced it all good. We are here to make love to life. Yes, we are here to make love to life� Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions�.

We live in the midst of a suicidal economy, motivated by love of money. We have reached a dead end. What we need to turn it around are hearts in love with life. How do we do it? We first must move from domination to partnership and we begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence which leads to gratitude which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation, to regain awe. The 3 R�s need to be balanced by the 10 C�s; contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony and character.

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I don�t recognize a divinity as the source of all things�believe, instead, that we all, people and plants and animals and horses too, make up a larger soul�and I like the notion of honoring creation and diversity, of being here to make love to life and delight in creation and to take our dreams into our politics and institutions.

LISTENING TO: Ferron (Beware you sagging diplomats for there will not be one gun and though oceans lie between us, we will not be undone.)

11:11 a.m. - 2006-03-06

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