Women Rising: Hopes and Challenges, A Spring Retreat – WATER – Womens Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual

Women Rising: Hopes and Challenges

A Spring Retreat

Saturday, March 6, 2021

12 noon – 2 PM ET by Zoom

For Catholic lesbian/bisexual/queer/trans/

non-binary women & women friends worldwide

Before we begin: Please gather bread and wine or another drink for Eucharist.

* * * *

Welcome

Put your name and city where you live in the chat box.

Song: “One Woman’s Welcome” by Chris Connors

Seems like so long ago we first came through those doors.
Our hearts were full of fear of the unknown.
We slipped into a back row, trying not to look so scared
Unaware that seeds were being sown
And a woman across the way, she smiled and seemed to say
Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.

Chorus: One woman’s welcome heals another woman’s fears
One woman’s struggle brings us hope as well as tears
The courage in one woman’s heart will free the world to see
As hands reach out to hands, we show the world we are one.

We came to share our stories, we stayed to share our strength
We left when pain was just too much to heal.
Some women share their struggles, still others share their joys.
Together we blessed bread and shared the meal.
And sometimes our hearts would ache with an anger we couldn’t shake
But we held on for one more day.

Chorus: One woman joins the circle now, another drifts away
Both freely give a gift we can’t replace
Sometimes this gift is courage to face the world renewed,
Sometimes a simple laugh or a warm embrace.
And together we define a world where love can shine
Rejoicing that God is here.

Welcoming Ritual

As we come together here today, we are gathering with lesbian/bisexual/ queer/trans catholic women & women friends worldwide. What a blessing!

We open our retreat with a Welcoming Ritual that was first created by our dear San Antonio friend Deb Myers and her beloved partner Nickie Valdez who died on Christmas day 2020. We’ve adapted the Welcoming Ritual for Women Rising: Hopes and Challenges to honor Nickie and Deb. We are so glad you are with us today, Deb, and we know Nickie is here too surrounding us with all of the LGBTQIA angels and saints.

We are women rising in different stages of our lives, and we are in a wide variety of seasons on our journey. We bring so much with us to this space today: our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our struggles, our challenges, our memories, our hopes, our dreams. So, let us celebrate and honor our journeys as we bring into our retreat symbols of women rising.

WATER for Life: Water represents our spiritual journey, a symbol of our birth and baptism. Water is essential for life, yet hurricanes can be destructive. Our bodies are made mostly of water. We use water to clean, cook, wash our hands, refresh, and give birth.

Pause. We give thanks for children born this year, especially Calvin Kane Donahue, the precious grandson of Kathleen and Honour.

ROSEMARY to Remember: This rosemary represents our past and our memories which, like the smell of rosemary, can transport us in time. Our past and our memories have helped to shape who we are today, the good and not so good!

Pause. We remember our zoom times together during Covid: our Monday evenings with Dignity Women; WATERteas, WATERrituals, WATERtalks, and WATERmeditations with international colleagues; and Come to the Table liturgies.

CROCUSES for Ancestors: These crocuses symbolize those who have gone before us, especially the women in our lives, our biological, cultural, and spiritual ancestors, those who have made it possible for us to be able to gather in this space as lesbian/bisexual/queer/trans catholic women & women friends.

Pause. We remember our dear Nickie Valdez and we remember her introducing Mary E. Hunt at the Dignity 50^th Anniversary in Chicago in 2019.

BREAD of Eucharist: Like bread, we are rising with hopes and challenges. We work daily through ups and downs to produce spiritual nourishment for Catholic LGBTQIA communities. This bread is our Eucharist.

Pause. We give thanks for our Eucharistic communities in Dignity, WATER, Women-Church, and all Intentional Eucharistic Communities. Like bread, we are rising, nourishing one another, and keeping faith alive.

STONES: Symbols of Our Hearts: These stones represent each one of us. They are symbols of our hearts: different shapes, different colors, broken in different places and at different times. They have been formed by the forces that they experienced in their time on Earth, just like we have been shaped by our experiences in our journey to this place today.

Pause. We give thanks for each of us and for our communities.

OIL for Healing and Anointing: This oil symbolizes healing, anointing, and hope. Oil makes things smooth and soft. It rejuvenates and reminds us of our Baptismal call to priesthood.

Pause. We pray for healing from Covid for our family members, our colleagues, and especially women in religious communities.

In bringing these symbols to our table may we each feel blessed, honored, rejuvenated, and healed as we reflect on and celebrate Women Rising: Hopes and Challenges. We are with one another on the journey.

Song and Video: “I Am with You on the Journey” by Kathy Sherman, CSJ, video by Patricia Russell https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pJpVZMdxgkjVNSKrWyAA2c3uMODQISEd

I am with you on the journey and I will never leave you,

I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Break-out Groups

Say your name and where you are from. Share one of the symbols from the Welcoming Ritual that gives you hope.

Listen to the Hopes and Challenges of Women Rising
Reader 1: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! —Sojourner Truth, an African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 2: “Hope is a song in a weary throat.” —Pauli Murray, title poem, Dark Testament, 1970, Black Queer Feminist Civil Rights Lawyer, Episcopal priest, cofounder of NOW
Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 3: “Hope is a very unruly emotion.” —Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 2019; journalist, feminist leader, and spokeswoman of the women’s rights movement

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 4: “Hope is the thing with feathers | That perches in the soul | And sings the tune without the words | And never stops at all.” —Emily Dickinson, 1861, in T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, eds. Poems by Emily Dickinson, (1861), American poet

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 5: “We’re at a moment where we’re being confronted by multiple crises that have converged — a public health crisis, an economic crisis, a long overdue reckoning on racial injustice, and a climate crisis. We have a lot we need to handle in the days ahead but I know together we can get it done.” —Kamala Harris, first woman and the first African American and first Asian American Vice President. She had previously served in the U.S. Senate and as Attorney General of California

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 6: “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” —Maya Angelou, singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Reader 7: “You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it’s important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.” —Michelle Obama, lawyer, writer, and the first African American First Lady of the United States

Solo Refrain and meditative gesture: I am with you on the journey, always with you.

Video: Amanda Gorman Rising
edited by Patricia Russell

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pJpVZMdxgkjVNSKrWyAA2c3uMODQISEd

Inspirational Reflection from Mary E. Hunt

It is wonderful to be with all of you in this setting. Thanks to the planning team for another good Women of Dignity and WATER event. It comes at just the right time for so many of us who need the refreshment and support that this group provides.

I was asked to provide “inspirational remarks,” a notion that makes me laugh. I have no idea whether anything I say will inspire you or not. If it does, great; if it doesn’t, enjoy your own thoughts and inspire us with what you think.

As we finish a full year of pandemic living, I focus on hope both as a habit and commitment. The alternative, despair, is an easy route to getting waylaid and distracted by the dreadful moment in which we find ourselves. I fear the consequences of that choice and am glad I live with a habit of hope at a time like this.

More than 520,00 people are dead from Covid-19 in this country, more than 2 million dead worldwide, and millions more infected with the disease. The pandemic alone is enough to take one’s breath away, literally. 42,000 more people died of dementia-related causes last year, a 16% rise over the averages of the previous five years.

Add to those numbing numbers what we have been through politically as a country and as a world in the face of neofascism and the erosion of truth. Frost the cake with an economic scandal of the richest people hauling in more money than they can count while the number of people who need basic food assistance has skyrocketed. Isolation, children out of school buildings for a year, colleges disrupted, bank accounts emptied, offices vacant, all of this has created a crisis in mental and spiritual health for which we have no easy fix.

In the face of this dire scene, who needs Lent this year?

I am glad to have the habit of hope kick in.

I hear that familiar Holly Near refrain from her song I Am Willing:
            “I am open, and I am willing,
            For to be hopeless would seem so strange.
            It dishonors those who come before us.
            So lift me up to the light of change.”

I offer three insights into hope for your consideration—dare I say your inspiration? They come from trusted sources that have shaped my own habit of hope. While the challenges of the day are blatant, hope is a more subtle matter.

The first is from Gloria Steinem whose feminist work for equity and justice shines like a new star. In a recent conversation with Sally Roach Wagner on women and the vote, Gloria Steinem caught my attention when she said, “Hope is a form of planning.”

What she meant, if I understood her correctly, is that hope is not simply an abstract or spiritual notion, but something very concrete. If you are hopeful, you plan. If you are not, you don’t.

I recall a dear friend who, on receiving a terminal diagnosis, said, “At least I don’t have to buy any more underwear.” She was right. She was planning how she would spend her days and shopping for lingerie was not on her agenda. She had better things to do.

For those of us who are able, planning is a form of hope. Where will you go on your first post-Covid trip? What will you do next Christmas? How does your summer look? When will you return to a favorite restaurant with a favorite friend? Just thinking about these plans are ways that we express hope.

Another insight into hope comes from Sister Mary Luke Tobin, the late president of the Loretto Community and the 1964 president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Luke was one of the few women auditors (they could hear but not speak) at Vatican II, an experience of exclusion by men and the camaraderie with women that shaped the rest of her life.

She wrote a book entitled Hope is an Open Door that I recommend as a short, simple, direct statement about the various doors of hope we all face. She looked at the door of her beloved Loretto Community, the door of global involvement, the door of friendship, among other doors waiting to be opened. We each have our own doors. Think of your open doors.

Luke Tobin was a close friend and neighbor of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. She referred to his meditation on “the door,” when she wrote, “We know that we do not go through the door alone, or first. First through the door into the Kin(g) dom, says Jesus, will go the poor, the blind, the lame, the oppressed. But if we have accepted the invitation to accompany them by compassion, and to relieve their oppression by action, this door will welcome us too.” (Hope is an Open Door, Nashville; Abingdon, 1981, p. 139).

Those words of 40 years ago have deep resonance for us today, written by one of our own sisters, one of those “who went before us” whose memory we dishonor if we leave aside hope.

My third insight into hope is what I have boiled down for myself about it. With Gloria Steinem, I affirm the planning, and with Luke Tobin I welcome the doors. But for me, hope is a longshot worth betting on.

I am not much of a gambler, but we make choices every day about how to posture, what to spend our time and resources on. In these complicated times, I have more questions than answers. Still, Holly Near is right—it would seem so strange to come from where most of us come from and not be hopeful. The habit kicks in when we need it, and that is helpful in these hard times.

We come from a religious tradition that has hope at its center: the hope that love will triumph, that justice will reign, that our collective self is much more than our individual selves taken together. The problem is that hope never looks like the obvious way to go. The smart money is on the biggest, richest, strongest ones. Yet time and again, the weakest turn out to be the strongest, the tortoise outruns the hare, the spirits of the dead rise up among the living, and the sun returns after the night.

All of that experience, plus Gloria Steinem and Luke Tobin’s say so, help me to conclude that hope is a longshot worth betting on despite the odds. Or so I hope.

Personal Reflection: Let’s take 5 minutes of quiet to think about what we have heard and to reflect on these questions.

Where do you find hope? What are the challenges you face? How are you sharing hope across generations? Type a word or phrase in the chat of anything from your personal reflection you want to share with the group.

Break-out Groups

What actions can we take to support one another? What specific actions can you suggest that we can bring back to the entire group? What commitment will you make to bring about hope? Type your commitments into the chat.

General Sharing

Divine Wisdom, Spirit of Compassion, Justice-seeker,
We place our commitments and hopes in your hands.
Strengthen us to do your work.
Empower us to be bold and brave.
Enlighten us that we may bring about your kin-dom for LGBTQIA people
and all creation.
With gratitude and hope, we pray. Amen. *Ashe. May it be so.

*Ashe – means “So Let It Be.”
In Yoruba tradition, it is the spiritual life force flowing through all things,
the power to make things happen and produce change.

Eucharistic Prayer of Women Rising: Hopes and Challenges © Diann L. Neu, 2021

Blesser 1: As we come to Eucharist, we invite you to bring your gifts of bread and wine or juice to our shared table. As women rising, we come with open hearts, bringing our hopes and challenges, confident that our loving Creator, Divine Wisdom, Spirit Sophia, welcomes us just as we are… for who we are… wherever we are. You may raise your gifts, or your open hands to symbolize the unique, rare, and precious gift you are and share.

Raise gifts in silence.

Blesser 2: Together, we lift up your hearts with gratitude. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, dwells with us and in us. We are women rising! Let us give thanks to the Giver of All Good Gifts. It is right for us to give thanks and praise.

Blesser 3: Blessed are you, Loving Holy One, Spirit Rising,
For gathering us around this Eucharistic table from New York to Seattle, from Chicago to Boston, from Washington DC to Canada, from San Antonio and places in between.
With joy we give you thanks for creating a diverse world
And for creating Catholic lesbian/bisexual/queer/trans/non-binary women
& women friends in your image.
You call us to share your story of community,
So, we join all creation in singing your praises:

Solo Acclamation © Marsie Silvestro 2021

We honor you Sophia for the wisdom you reveal.