Posted on 04/25/2007 6:54:31 AM PDT by NYer
“WOW -- coming from RC tradition I thought I’d never return to the Rosary. But here it is and here SHE IS. Blessed be, Mairly.”
The “here” in this message, found on herchurch.org, is Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco. But the SHE is not the Mother of God. SHE is “God/dess.”
On Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Ebenezer opens its sanctuary for the “Christian Goddess Rosary.” The church says it offers “Goddess Rosary Beads” and that “prayers and suggested meditations will be on hand as well as incense, candles and bells.”
“The Goddess rosary is grounded in traditions of the Christian Church and the proclamation of the gospel which is a vision of release from bondage for a new creation,” says the church’s web site.
The Goddess Rosary page on herchurch.org says that though “God as Father plays an important role” in Christian tradition, its “exclusive emphasis... contributes to a limited understanding of God, an understanding that supports a domination structure that oppresses and subordinates women.” Jesus used “Abba” as a “revolutionary deconstruction of domination structures of his day in both religious and social institutions.” The modern task is to do the same with “Goddess.”
Ebenezer, however, does not want to eradicate masculine images of God but to balance them with feminine images to “confront the biblical texts, products of their day and cultures, for the blatant patriarchal biases and misogynist attitudes.” And herchurch.org cites three Catholic theologians in support this confrontation: Harvard’s Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fordham University’s Sister Elizabeth Johnson, and Rosemary Radford Ruether (who will lecture students in the course, “The History of God in Feminist Theological Discourse,” at LA’s Mount St. Mary’s College this spring.) Ruether calls the exclusive use of male imagery for God “idolatry.”
Herchurch.org offers a “Hail Goddess” prayer by feminist theologian Carol Christ, formerly of Harvard Divinity School but now director of the Ariadne Institute for Myth and Ritual in Greece. The prayer goes: “Hail Goddess full of grace. Blessed are you and blessed are all the fruits of your womb. For you are the MOTHER of us all. Hear us now and in all our needs. O blessed be, O blessed be. Amen.”
“I felt that I had stepped into a Presence, like a mother’s warm embrace,” wrote Dalyn Cook of Ebenezer’s Goddess Rosary. “The attendees were few in number, yet there was a sense of fullness in this welcoming space. I inhaled deeply the earthy scent of the incense, sending up delicate tendrils of smoke which curled around the altar in a nimbus visible against the warm rays of the evening sun filtering through the stained-glass windows....
“From the basket of rosaries, I took into my hand a strand of vibrantly-colored beads with a silver goddess icon in place of the traditional cross. The goddesses came in a variety of shapes and sizes, celebrating the beauty of the feminine form; I found reflections of my own figure in the full hips and Rubenesque curves of my goddess,” Cook wrote.
B.A., Scripps College
M.S., Claremont Graduate School
Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School
Rosemary Radford Ruether is the Carpenter Emerita Professor of Feminist Theology at Pacific School of Religion and the GTU, as well as the Georgia Harkness Emerita Professor of Applied Theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. She has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and activist in the Roman Catholic Church, and is well known as a groundbreaking figure in Christian feminist theology. Ruether has published numerous books, including Sexism and God-Talk, In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (ed. with Rosemary Skinner Keller), and The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Her most recent books include Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (May 2005), Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions (Nature's Meaning) (January 2005), and Mountain Sisters: From Convent To Community In Appalachia. Currently, she is collaborating on a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Women in American Religion with Rosemary Skinner Keller, a project funded by the Lilly Endowment, due in 2006.
Aaarghh! A “rosary” to the “god/dess” — it’s a two-fer!
There’s nothing more pitiful than an aging hippy.
The traditions of the Christian Church and the proclamation of the gospel all speak of ONLY ONE GOD, and only one mediator between God and Man -- Jesus Christ. There is no room for goddesses in the Christian faith.
Just add this to the list of heresies found in the ELCA these days. No wonder they decided to fellowship with ECUS. Leaders of these condemned sects naturally flock together.
Jesus says, “IF you hold to my Word, then you are really my disciples...” (John 8:31). That is basic to being a Christian, and these pretenders are no longer continuing to preach and teach Jesus Word.
Just goes to show you wackos exist among the Protestants and Catholics. I just hope the Ebenezer Lutheran Church and the Pacific School of Religion doesn’t sit on the California fault line.
A picture is worth a thousand words. You have to hand it to Rush.
“The warm embrace” — the warmth would be the fires of Hell.
So many reprobates, so little time left.
man, am I happy I left the wako ELCA and went home by
swimming the tibre to my RC Catholic roots.
This is what happens when you let radical feminists become
“priests”
This is vile beyond words. The Rosary is sacred and a powerful force as anyone who has really applied it knows. Without it, I know some dark days may have not been beaten back.
If you want to glorify your tonage added to your hips and such, go pray before an altar of Ben & Jerrys.
Isa 5:20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
***
“I felt that I had stepped into a Presence, like a mother’s warm embrace,”
2Corinthians 11:14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
Rush would certainly hand it back...
Really? In nearly 50 years in the church and 30 years of theological and biblical study, somehow I missed that one.
Not really Lutheran. It's ELCA.
Barf. Was it Ezekiel or Jeremiah that denounced the Israelites for “offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven?”
2500 years later, everything old is new again.
}:-)4
Why am I not surprised?
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