Resources:  Spiral Three, especially Chapter 9

Materials:  Pens and journals; newsprint and marker, a goddess figure on the chalice table.

Chalice Lighting:  Light the chalice and read the following quotes:

We do not want a piece of the pie.
It is still a patriarchal pie.
We want to change the recipe.

– Rosemary Matson

I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder.

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Reflections:  Allow up to five minutes for comments and questions that may have come up since the previous session.

Introduction:  Read or put into your own words the following: The feminist imperative is the one that says that women and men are created equal in value.  If wise old women were visible and powerful, perhaps we would all be well-educated about the female half of our human history.  Whatever attitude or belief you may hold about God or the divine, it is a symbol that is a powerful part of our human heritage.  In our dominant culture we grow up hearing this symbol spoken of only in masculine terms such as Lord and King and always referred to with masculine pronouns.  In the last thirty years a growing number of women and men have been trying to change that by using inclusive language.  But even today many worship services slip back into sexist language by using familiar old songs and readings in which the language has not been changed.

Many people do not notice sexist language because most of us still don’t know that for many thousands of years  human beings, men as well as women, imagined the divine as female.  In later times human beings imagined great pantheons of gods and goddesses.  Eventually as we know from recorded history the male gods grew more and more powerful and became the chief deities in the pantheons.  In our Western tradition, however, the Great Father replaced the Great Mother.  Even if we are humanists we need to understand what that has done to our thinking, our language, our institutions, all of which reflect this assumption that the male is God.  The mythology of a culture reflects its social arrangements.  When you have a myth of God the Father and God the Son with barely a mention of any female, even the humanists in that society will carry an assumption of male supremacy.  We need to keep examining our behavior and the assumptions which are still carved into our imaginations.  Unexamined assumptions can affect our behavior even when our conscious intentions are good.

Journaling:  Have the following questions on newsprint:

1. Who are the old women in your life?
2. How well do you know them?
3. Are they powerful?

Allow about ten minutes for writing.  Then ask for responses and put them on the newsprint and discuss them briefly.

Break

Information:  Read or present in your own words the following: A picture of the earth taken from the moon may be the longed-for symbol of a world-view as new as the space age yet as old as the earth itself.  If so, what religion will recognize the psychological, sociological and cosmological potential in that symbol?  The picture has sometimes been centrally and prominently displayed at women’s conferences.

Among a growing number of women there may be a new religion in the making.  In recent years many women have been saying that the Great Goddess is re-emerging.  That statement appears to have several meanings:

1. Women have discovered the Goddess within and are asserting themselves in the expression of their full human potential.
2. Through the findings of modern archeology women have been researching their pre-patriarchal roots and discovering that female images of divine power pervaded the entire ancient world. This research grounds us all in a religious history which spanned thousands of years and was based upon female creativity and life stages.
3. Goddess religion reminds us that we are all born of woman.
4. The Goddess also reminds us that we are all born of the earth. She is a symbol of the life-supporting delicate ecological balance of the earth.

The rituals and celebrations of the Goddess religion focus on two universal themes: the life stages of woman and the beauty and wonder of the natural world.  The symbols for a contemporary and future world-view may already be at hand in the re-emergence of the Goddess and in that photo of the earth taken from the moon.  Is feminist spirituality articulating the religion of the future?

Journaling:  Have the following questions on newsprint:

1. Has feminist or Goddess spirituality been meaningful to you? In what ways?
2. How do you feel about its possibilities for the future?

Allow about ten minutes for writing.  Then put responses on newsprint and have the group discuss them.

Extinguishing the Chalice: Extinguish the chalice and read the following quote by Barbara G. Walker:  “Thealogy is both new and old: a new view of Woman, her spirituality, and her achievements, plus a much-needed return to her roots.  Underneath the surface of our patriarchal society, there are female voices calling out for this—more and more of them each year…Suppose we were free to recognize deity for what it really is, an archetypal symbol in some sense evolved by the mind of every individual born of woman: a human phenomenon only, but an important and powerful one.  That would be thealogy, and it would be new.  And it would lead us back to the Mother.”

Resources:  Introduction and Spirals One and Two of the book.

Materials:  Small notebook and pen for each person; easel with newsprint and marker; chalice on small table; name tags; refreshments.

Chalice Lighting:  Light the chalice and read the following quote:

The wonder of being together, so close yet so apart—
Each hidden in our own secret chamber,
Each listening, each trying to speak—
Yet none fully understanding, none fully understood.

– Sophia Lyon Fahs

Introducing the Course:  Ask participants to say their names and tell briefly why they are interested in this class.  When all have spoken, say to participants:  We will be reading and discussing parts of The Grandmother Galaxy, but the class is also about your spiritual journey, your responses to some of the ideas presented in the book.  We will take time during each session to write in our journals and to discuss our responses.  The first two spirals or sections of the book are about the author’s early life.  But let’s begin with your early life.

Journaling: Have the following questions on newsprint:

1. Who was the person in your early life who influenced your spiritual growth the most? How?
2. What event in your early life most affected the direction of your spiritual growth?
3. What personal or social issues became important to you as you became an adult?

Allow ten minutes for writing.  Then ask participants who wish to do so to share responses to the first question; then allow the group to discuss the responses briefly.  Do the same for each of the questions.

Break

Information:  Gather the group again and read or present in your own words the following:  Poets always see their world and their times with a vision that their less observant contemporaries lack.  They often see the connections between disparate events, or the overall trends of the culture long before others are aware of them.  Or at the very least, poets often gather up the experiences, the fears or the hopes of a generation and give them expression.  T. S. Eliot, writing in the 1920s and 1930s described the breakdown of all the old securities and beliefs.  He saw people struggling to find meaning in a wasteland of broken images.  He wrote:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images…

In the decades since then many writers have suggested that a whole new world-view was needed, a completely different way of perceiving our world and our place in it.  Some theologians even declared that God was dead, a concept no longer relevant to modern life.  But how should we find our way to a new world-view and what would it be?  Unitarian Universalists used to have a statement we made to the world in the form of a bumper sticker.  It said, “To question is the answer.”  That statement baffled most people.  And if we were to write down our own interpretations of it, we would surely have a great variety of meanings.  And yet when we saw it on a bumper we would smile a smile of recognition.  We knew.  What did we know?

Journaling:  Have the following questions on newsprint:

1. What did we know?
2. What does that bumper sticker mean to you?

Allow about ten minutes for writing.  Then ask those who wish to do so to share.  Put the responses on newsprint and discuss.  Emphasize that we must question in order to discover a new world-view and new issues.

Information cont’d.  Have on newsprint the three large issues or imperatives described in the introduction to the book:  feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.  Explain that we will spend one session on each issue, one session on a possible new world-view and a final session on the symbols and stories that might support and reinforce such a worldview.

Extinguishing the Chalice:  Extinguish the chalice and read the following quote:

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

– Adrienne Rich