You asked me what it felt like to be back in a Catholic church service again. I thought about it for a while. It was a pragmatic question.
It’s like going back and visiting tha farm. Lots of memories, good ones and vital learning ones for me, and spiritual ones, too. For example, in farm life or anywhere, we don’t control Mother Nature; and She applies equally to all. Natural, universal laws, like gravity, always drew me because of that. A connection to animals was there, also.
Tha home farm belongs to someone else now, though I’m still family and welcome whenever. Bryan and Kelly host summer farm market days there, making it easy and fun to revisit and bring friends. It’s a place I visit, a foundational, important part of my story. It’s not where I live anymore, though, or want to.
Being at a Catholic church service is a bit like that for me: lots of good memories and vital learnings there; good people, too. However, it’s not where I fit or feel at home anymore. I’ve grown, my worldview has grown, to include spiritual aspects beyond traditional Catholic teachings. Everything I learned and experienced there was and is part of what and who I’ve evolved into. A natural process.
I witnessed the unprecedented transforming changes of Vatican II as a parochial grade school student, especially hearing church services in English instead of Latin, and later experienced multiple social justice and cultural revolutions of those 60s, 70s, and 80s decades. Lots of awareness; and then studying for ministry as a single woman in her 30s.
I know, it’s not a safe, comfortable place for women like me. Tha church burned us at tha stake once. Somewhere in our souls we remember, feel it… (I did; others, too…)
Somewhere in our souls, we remember the burning time, when women were persecuted and burned alive as witches. This went on for three hundred years of the Inquisition. In what has been referred to in contemporary times as “the women’s holocaust,” more women were burned at the stake than were killed in the Nazi gas ovens during the Holocaust in World War II. First the midwives were burned for easing the pains of childbirth (which went against the biblical injunction that women were supposed to suffer), then the healers who knew the medicinal uses of herbs, women who celebrated the seasons, eccentric women, women with possessions someone coveted, outspoken women, bright women, women without protection. This collective memory has an effect much as any personal repressed trauma does; it makes women anxious when we discover our own sacred experiences and find words for them. We need courage to bring forth what we know. Somewhere in our souls, women remember a time when divinity was called Goddess and Mother. – Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
Thank you for asking tha question. It was so fun to meet with you that day. I want to meet again, because we’re cousins and our lives have taken us on parallel paths, and both of us are mostly retired now, and I like meeting for coffee much better than funerals, and it’s a joy getting to know you as you now.
Warmest regards, Anne