Opening Words    

Come let us gather together as a loving spiritual community as we light our chalice.  Today, let us remember that we are here to celebrate Women's History Month and think back to the many women throughout the ages who have shaped our lives.  Think back to the ancient mythological goddesses and their cultural contributions.  Think of the goddesses of our earth-centered religions whose spirits inspire us.  Think mostly of the many courageous women of this past century whose enlightened bravery provided the pathway for today's women to lead a far more meaningful and enriched life.  Honor the many outstanding UU women whose leadership has changed the way we educate our children as  well as the way we worship.  And most of all, think of the women, important in your own life, who contributed so much and asked for so little in return.  Come let us worship together.

Why I contribute
by Beth Pepper

Manish asked me to do this 2 weeks ago - why I contribute to the church - and I said, "Sure."  I thought it would be easy … Well, it wasn't exactly hard, but it wasn't exactly easy, either.  

So I've been thinking about it over these 2 weeks, sort of trying on lots of theories - some stuck and some didn't.

One theory was that the church - you guys - are kind of like my rugby team from years past.  Rugby was important to me, as is this church, and I had to pay team dues and had to pay for all my own travel.    

So yeah, it's kind of like that... but not quite.  

So then I thought, well, maybe I contribute to the church because it's like the Tragedy of the Commons where everyone thinks everyone else is going to care for the field they "own" in common - but no one does, so it goes all to hell in a handbasket.  That's not what I want here, so yeah, maybe that's why I contribute.   

Well, I was getting warmer, but that wasn't quite it either.  

So then I thought about it some more and another thought came to mind, this one related to my Coast Guard experience.  

It has to do with the age of our bases and ships - or cutters, as we call them.  The Commandant of the Coast Guard tells Congress when he's testifying on Capitol Hill that we have cutters that are old enough for social security.  Now the usual shipboard tour is 2 years, so if you're on one of those cutters, you can guesstimate that there are around 30 guys who came before you, all who did your very job.  You met one of them - the guy you relieved - and maybe you know another one just by chance, but lots and lots of folks before you all put their blood, sweat and tears into that cutter, so today, you could report on board, have a cutter that is safe, that runs, and that can go out and do the Coast Guard's business.  That first crew might never have imagined the current crew on board 60 years later, but because they - and everyone who came after them - did their individual part, you've got a cutter to report to today.  

This church was founded 90+ years ago and because people over those 90 years have contributed their blood, sweat and tears - and money - I have this wonderful church to come to.  None of my predecessors here knew me, but they all contributed, so today, I can reap these benefits.  They took care of this church so it would be here for me - and all of you - without knowing us.  So I contribute to join the legacy they left to me - to us - and leave this church to those who will come after me - tomorrow, next year, and next lifetime.  

OK, OK, OK, I haven't spent the past 2 weeks thinking all these lofty thoughts about legacies and Tragedy of the Commons … I'm a down-to-earth kind of gal, and I'll finish with a much more grounded thought about why I contribute to this church.  

Because it means enough to me.  

I pay my cable bill, my high-speed internet bill, my gym membership … and this church means more to me than being able to surf the net or work out at the gym or even watch ESPN's Sports Center.  It means more to me than renting a couple movies each week or getting a couple of cups of coffee from Starbuck's - all things I happily spend my money on … so given the importance of this church in my life, I'm quite happy to spend my money on it too.

Reading

The experience of difference has many forms, but despite its varied forms, it frequently comes with similar kinds of feelings.  People of diverse backgrounds and struggles are often able to relate to one another because they understand what it feels like to be misunderstood, or powerless, or disenfranchised.  

Our reading today lifts up the struggle of two identities: that of being African-American and that of being a woman, the intersection of race and gender.  

No doubt some of you are already familiar with Maya Angelou's poem Still I Rise.  It is a profound testament to the resiliency of the human spirit; a resiliency that has grappled with the legacy of the slave trade and the patriarchal structure of our society.  Still I Rise is a tribute to our ability to continually lift ourselves up, no matter how often and in what ways we are pushed down.  Because of this, Maya Angelou's poem has a universal ring to it - despite our different backgrounds, we can empathize with the experience of being an outsider, of someone struggling against the odds.  

I invite you to enter into one such experience of struggle and resiliency, as described in the poem Still I Rise:  

"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise."

                                                      -  Maya Angelou

Sermon
by Rev. Mishra

There is something powerful, almost subversive about Maya Angelou's poem.  It's as if she's delighting in doing the unexpected for an African-American woman - not just surviving, but thriving.  She turns her oppressions inside out, denying them and defying them.  One can admire the conviction and self-assurance that takes.  

It was perhaps in this spirit - one of defying gender oppressions and stereotypes - that I found myself a few years ago as a faculty member, at a liberal private school, participating in a gender defying school ritual.  At the beginning of the academic year, I had been informed that the largest, most popular dance at the school took place every spring, and that I would be one of its primary organizers - I was going to help organize and chaperone the school's annual "Gender Bender" dance.  What is a 'gender bender' dance?  It's a dance at which the attendees, students and faculty alike, show up dressed as the opposite gender.  Guys dress up as girls, and girls as guys.  (Yes, perhaps only in liberal New England, would football players don dresses and miniskirts, and go to a school dance!)  It was marvelously subversive, and I looked forward to this one event the entire school year.  

My then partner and I got into the spirit of things and spent months looking for just the right outfits.  We eventually found 1950's style dresses that looked appropriately school-marm'ish, befitting our role as chaperones for the dance.  The night of the big party eventually came, and hundreds of students turned up for this gender-defying dance.  About mid-way through the event, my partner turns to me and says, "Have you noticed a pattern…?"  "What pattern?" I asked, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about.  "Look around," he said, "How are the straight guys dressed?"  Well, nobody has the word 'straight' tattooed on their forehead, but I looked around, and as best as I could tell, it seemed like many of them were wearing very tight miniskirts and blouses - the kind Brittany Spears or Jennifer Lopez wear in their music videos.  "Now, look at what the gay kids are wearing…" he said. I looked at the handful of gay kids in our gay-straight student alliance, and the guys were all wearing immaculate flowing gowns, ones that had undoubtedly taken weeks to pick out, just as our ensembles had.  The straight men were dressed up like the type of women they were attracted to; the gay ones, apparently, were much more concerned about color-coordination and fabric choice.  

We learn about gender images and stereotypes from our respective cultures.  Images of what it means to be a man or a woman surround us at every turn, and without even thinking about it, we internalize these messages.  As liberal as we Unitarian Universalists are, we, too, buy into cultural expectations related to gender.  I have no plan on doing this, but consider for just a moment the possibility of my showing up to lead worship on a Sunday in a nice looking red dress.  Many would look at me askance, some might even be alarmed, worried about what's going on with me.  If I showed up wearing dresses several weeks in a row, you might feel embarrassed that your minister was behaving this way, you might even be tempted to stop attending church in protest of such outrageous behavior.   

Truth be told, I would probably be fighting similar emotions if the shoes were reversed.  But why would we potentially have such strong reactions?  Clothing has nothing to do, inherently, with biological gender - we human beings create clothing, and we create the definitions of who wears what.  And, yet, we are deeply wedded to those external symbols of masculinity and femininity.  We are taught, from a young age, to be wedded to those symbols.  

Religion is one source of how we define the masculine and feminine, and it's in that vein that I'd like to examine a handful of archetypes that inform us, starting with a familiar one, one grounded in the Jewish and Christian faiths, the story of Adam and Eve.  As told in the Book of Genesis, we find our main character, Adam, in a glorious garden, having just been created by God, fashioned out of dirt.  God tells Adam that he can enjoy everything in the garden, except for the fruit of one prominent tree in the center of the garden, The Tree of Knowledge.  Everything else is fair game, just not that tree.  Adam is told that if he eats from the Tree of Knowledge, he will die.  A short time afterwards, Adam apparently gets lonely, so God takes a piece of Adam, his rib, and uses that to create a companion, a woman called Eve.  God doesn't speak to Eve directly, but through Adam she learns of God's commandment to leave that one glorious tree alone.   

Then, perhaps the most infamous snake in human mythology appears, and begins questioning Eve about the tree.  The snake seductively tells Eve that God has lied, that she will not die if she eats the fruit, on the contrary, she will gain ultimate knowledge of the universe.  What happens next is well known, Eve takes a bite of the fruit, and then offers it to Adam, who passively, without protest, also takes a bite.  The knowledge they gain rocks their world, because suddenly they realize they are naked and they begin frantically knitting fig leaves together, trying to hide their nakedness.  When God furiously appears to pronounce judgment, excuses abound.  Adam says Eve made him do it; Eve says the snake made her do it; and the accursed snake is nowhere in sight.  

Creative interpretations of the Adam and Eve story hold out the hope that this isn't really a story that denigrates women.  But, in my own understanding of this text, I tend to lean towards the principle that the most straightforward explanation is usually right.   

We know that at the time the Hebrew scriptures were written, Jewish priests and scholars were all men, men living in a patriarchal society that tended to promote those structures of patriarchy.  Such was the status quo.  Given that type of social framework, it is not surprising to find that Genesis describes the creation of women as an afterthought, one that occurred after man was created.  The existence of women is also described as dependent on men - women exist because of Adam's rib.  The man existed independently of a woman, but a woman cannot exist independently from a man, she comes from his rib.  In relationship to God, we're told that God doesn't bother to speak directly to Eve.  God spoke with Adam, and that was good enough.  

We also have the peculiar fact that the snake does not attempt to seduce and mislead the man, but the woman.  It is Eve who is led down the wrong path because she is easily swayed by temptation.  We literally have in this story an act of 'original sin,' one perpetrated by Eve.  The man's sin is secondary, it is derivative, based on Eve's initiative and decision.  In fact, one can even read into this a message that the men of years long gone might have been sending one another - 'do not go along with everything the women in your life want you to do, they have unreliable judgment.'  

We are thus told, that Eve was foolish, and because of her poor judgment all human beings must now live a life of hardship and strife.  This theme, that women are potentially a source of danger or trouble, repeats itself throughout the Jewish scripture.  A United Church of Christ minister, Rev. Barbara Essex, in fact has a book titled Bad Girls of the Bible, the very first chapter of which is about Eve.  The book acknowledges the traditional, perhaps troubling ways in which the women of the bible are understood, and then offers a modern day, liberal reinterpretation.  In relation to Adam and Eve, for example, she points out, among other things, that God made the snake, so why does everybody blame Eve for the first sin?  In creating the snake, God set into motion everything else that happened.  

Traveling to a different cultural context, my native religion of Hinduism has many diverse images of women - everything from a serene peace-loving goddess of the arts, to several that can shake the foundations of the universe with their wrath, goddesses like Kali.  Kali's an interesting figure, because here too, who she is says a lot about the men who helped record and tell her stories.  (In this Hindu context, as well, all the priests are men.)   

Some useful background.  There are three primary male Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.  Out of these three, Shiva is the destroyer of creation, he is an extremely powerful god, but also quite even tempered in the use of his power.  He is frequently shown in a posture of meditation, on mountain tops and elsewhere, centering himself and gathering strength.  When the right time comes, Shiva will destroy the universe and set into motion a new creation, a new universe.  There is thus a cycle of birth, death, and re-birth, and Shiva plays a central role in that cosmology.  

The goddess Kali is one of Shiva's wives.  In order to understand her, you need to picture her, no one story will suffice.  Kali, like her husband, is also a destroyer, but her destruction is not calm and calculated, it is frenzied.  Her hair sticks out, unkempt, flying wildly in all directions.  She is so overcome with the intensity of destruction that her red tongue lolls out of her mouth, uncontrollably, almost insanely.  She has destroyed so many demons, that she wears their skulls as a necklace, and their hands as a belt around her waist.  Her husband destroys, and therefore helps recreate the universe, but Kali's destructive ability is on another order of magnitude altogether.  In the Hindu worldview, time is cyclical - there are cycles of birth, death, and re-birth.  Kali is the only Hindu deity that can destroy that entire cycle, she can destroy time itself.   

Given this absolute power of annihilation, Kali is a feared goddess, she is the one deity you would never, under any circumstances, want to offend.  Her lust for death is so complete that, in a country full of vegetarians, in a religion that reveres all animal life, Kali is the one Hindu god to whom blood sacrifices are made.  At her largest temple, in Calcutta, goats are slaughtered on the temple grounds as an offering to placate Kali's insatiable thirst for blood.  

How, pray tell, does a goddess like this have a marriage, much less relate to a husband?  Well, a Hindu myth describes this relationship between the male and female gods of destruction.  In this myth, Kali is sent into a berserker rage in order to destroy a demon.  The problem is, that even after destroying the demon, she keeps destroying everything else in creation, as well.  Her husband, Shiva, is sent to stop her.  And in one of the most famous of Hindu iconographies, even Shiva succumbs to Kali.  Kali is depicted as triumphant, with Shiva lying on the ground in front of her.  She has one foot disrespectfully on top of Shiva's chest, and is pinning him down, leaving it unclear whether he is passed out or dead.  It is said that Shiva's sacrifice of his male dignity calms Kali down and thereby saves the cosmos from destruction.  

The phrase "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," comes easily to mind.  (A phrase authored by a man, by the way...)  Kali embodies this concept of female fury.  It is a cultural and religious message that men would be wise to fear the power of women - 'no matter what, don't piss them off.'  On one hand we have weak-willed Eve, who is so foolishly led astray, and on the other hand the terrible Kali, in front of whom all men quake.  

These two examples contrast sharply with another well known religious depiction of femininity - that of the 'mother goddess.'  This concept exists in many different religions, in many different forms.  In Roman mythology it takes the form of Venus, who was considered the mother of the Roman people.  Out of Greek mythology, we have Gaia, a goddess that gave birth to the earth, and in fact is the earth.  And, in Christianity, for many, Mary plays the role of holy mother, a divine intercessionary.  In these mother goddess examples, women are revered, they are held to be holy, because of their social role as nurturers, but also because of their unique ability to give birth.  Mother goddesses represent maternal care and nurturing, and they give life to new possibilities.   

Out of the religious depictions we've looked at so far, these mother goddesses actually don't sound so bad...until one looks at it from the standpoint of social hierarchy.  Generations of young girls are raised with divine imagery that tells them that their ability to give birth is absolutely the most important thing about them.  Not their intellect, nor their hearts, but their wombs are the most profound thing they have to offer humanity.  There are other levels of analysis that could be offered, to be sure, but on this one level, such images seem to reinforce patriarchy by sanctifying the idea that a woman's primary purpose is to give birth, to procreate.  

Now, I don't want to leave us Unitarian Universalists out of the mix, because we have our own struggles with understanding femininity.  While our tradition doesn't have gods or goddesses, we do have some historical personalities that come close to our own version of sainthood, and in this holy cannon fall Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, our Transcendentalist forbearers from the mid-19th century.  While we hear a lot about Emerson and Thoreau, we don't hear as much about their female contemporary who was of equal prominence in the Transcendentalist movement, Margaret Fuller.  Fuller was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts politician, and had been encouraged from a young age to cultivate her intellect, and this was something at which she excelled.  She could easily have attended Harvard, except that the school did not yet admit women.  Without access to college, she pursued her own independent studies gaining, as a result, a reputation as one of New England's brightest thinkers.  

Living in an era in which women did not intellectually compete with men, her success came at a high price.  Her Transcendentalist peers, most of whom were Unitarian, accepted her as an intellectual equal, but none would look at her as a woman.  Fuller had no significant romantic relationships with men until she was 37, three years before she died.  Defying social convention as she did, none of the men in her circle could imagine marrying her.  Intellectual parity meant losing your womanhood.  

One could easily turn the examples I've given on their head - Eve can be seen to demonstrate initiative and independent thinking, Kali is an instrument of justice, mother goddesses are loving and protective, and Margaret Fuller was a social pioneer breaking down the barriers of rigid gender definition.  Such interpretations are equally valid, but valid in the way that while one could say that Brittany Spears and Jennifer Lopez are talented singers, it is no less true that the public images they put forth encourage the objectification of women.  Looking at one side of the coin does not make the other side go away.  I've highlighted the problematic side of the coin because, in my experience, as a culture we spend far less time examining how unhelpful archetypes of femininity are created and perpetuated.  This is why our children today are still buying into unhealthy images and stereotypes, ones that the feminist movement has been trying to dispel for decades.  

What I've come to appreciate in my ministry is that the patriarchal desire to define womanhood hasn't gone away.  Around us, everyday, movies, TV shows, magazines, and music videos all put forth images of femininity, images that are largely defined in response to what men want to see, what men consider beautiful and attractive.

This question of who defines femininity, men or women, is a spiritual problem of great magnitude.  It's practically cliche when we say that women should not let men define them, that they should determine for themselves who they want to be.  And, yet, many, many young women today decide what clothes to wear and what mannerisms are acceptable in response to male preferences.  Men continue to define femininity in very powerful ways, we see this in different religious archetypes, but also in the popular icons of our culture.   

The problem with this is that we end up with definitions of gender that are too narrow, both for femininity and for masculinity.  Those narrow definitions tend to be exclusionary.  In an effort to discourage non-conformist behavior, they leave some people out -- men who are somehow too feminine, women who are too masculine, and those who may not identify as male or female, or identify as both.  

We human beings like categories, 'male' and 'female' are two such categories.  What I would invite is an awareness of how culture, including religion, determines what it means to be a woman.  Who in the culture is creating the images and definitions of femininity?  How do those definitions limit the scope of human diversity?  I do think that we Unitarian Universalists are pretty good at asking these types of questions, but we are embedded in a culture that does not necessarily understand the ability of those with power to be definers.  This is where we Unitarian Universalists can continue giving good witness in the world - we are the ones, in Largo and beyond, who are standing up for the worth and dignity of every human being, however gender may be understood.  It is a spiritual message that is ours to offer one another, and the world around us.  May we continue that good ministry.