June 7 2015

A new bookcase was moved into our living, entertainment, dining room. At times I look up to gaze at an old friendly book. Some from my university days and some from mom or a colorful rock & roll one. Today a shadow of mantis took my focus towards a book entitled; She Who Is; The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. A book from a course taught by a Catholic mother / professor from the east coast making a change on the west coast. Supervised  by a fascist nun who looked the other way claiming not to know of such a course, yet whispering to a Priest, head of the department, that it was in fact a humanities course. Confusing? It was to me too. Gay young nuns and intellectual theologians hiding under the holiness of a patriarchal religious university confused me very much; yet this course was fantastic. I am experienced with dysfunctional family dynamics. Anyway,  this is the book that came forth today… a very interesting and-insightful one to boot. Taken and opened randomly to a paragraph and then typed down here for a display post.

“There is yet more to the situation. Physically is constitutive of human persons. As spirit-in-the-world, women are embodied differently from men; the physical difference is not extrinsic to self-identity or relationship with others. The range of experiences associated with a personal embodiment capable of physically bearing, delivering and nourishing new life shapes women’s subjectivity in unique ways. Moreover, actually giving life and rearing children are formative experiences which affect not only individual women but the whole fabric of society. This is a realm belonging to more than half the human race that has seldom been articulated by those whose experience it actually is, until now. Feminist theory is thus working two sides of the barricade a once. It critiques patriarchal  ideology that idealizes motherhood as a universal norm but that simultaneously relegates the role of mother to the private order. At the same time it seeks to honor the distinctiveness of women’s embodiment and creativity, including the powerful experience of being mothers. It seeks to see with new eyes the worth of what has been trivialized and devalued in patriarchal judgment on female experience, and to avoid the trap of holding make experience to be the norm.” ~ Mother-Sophia Pg. 177 Elizabeth A. Johnson (1941)