Ecofeminism

I am reading Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies at the moment and weirdly they sound like the voices of my mother and grandmother, the voices of faith which could be quite stubborn and sometimes even off-putting but spoke to me of God. Mies in particular is anti-abortion, anti-contraception and I can’t quite see things her way although her critique of liberal feminism in many ways hits home.

But the call from both of these women to treat life as sacred, to treat the human as more than a consumer-producer, to be fair there is a sense of “walk humbly with our God” even if they are not specifically talking to me of faith, or at least not a Christian one.

The part I felt I would share and reflect on is a small section of a chapter called “Liberating the Consumer” by Maria Mies. Mies says that part of the problem is capitalist patriarchy has taught us that we have to buy things and consume them to meet our needs. The fact that humans have needs is undeniable (I have never had much patience with the idea of asceticism and I always saw it as a form of anorexia when all the “virgins” in the medieval period starved themselves holy. I felt resentful for the way faith and popular society, while presented to me as two oppositional things both wanted to control women by starving them into passivity!

So for me I am very ready to believe that I have needs (and wants)and Mies admits that some needs are “fundamental” and reframes to that we need to look at the “satisfiers” to open up that there might be more than one way to satisfy a need (and in fact answers other than capitalist ones might work better).

So if fundamental needs are

subsistence- health, food, shelter, clothing, etc
protection- care,solidarity, meaningful and reliable work, etc
affection- self-esteem, love, care, friendship
understanding- being accepted, studying, learning, analysis
participation- responsibilities, sharing, rights, duties, decision making
leisure/idleness- curiosity, imagination, games, fun, relaxation
creation- intuition, imagination, work, play, curiosity
identity- belonging, differentiation, self-esteem, autonomy
freedom- autonomy, self-esteem, dignity, self-determination, equality

Elsewhere she an Shiva deconstruct and deeply critique a capitalist or neoliberal conception of “freedom” as individual, apolitical (or claiming to be), value-free and without moral duties.

I like these nine needs because to me they make up a rich and worthwhile life not just a life spent labouring. Material/biological needs are acknowledged, but so is the need to belong, to contribute, to critique, to create. Mies goes on to show us that these needs are behind consumerism, that we have been mesmerised into assuming a shopaholic version of these needs.

subsistence becomes- fancier foods, magical remedies for things (including equating health with narrow constructions of beauty), fashion etc
protection- border protections, surveillance cultures, passwords, enclosure of the commons etc. “private” is from the Latin to deprive.
affection is reduced to dating, networking, trying to impress people, social media, beauty products and the weight loss industry (many of these observations are my own extrapolations so for goodness sakes don’t blame Mies for them but read her chapter if you want)

and so on.

How do we look for ways to meet our real, genuine needs (which we should not feel guilty for having) without overusing the world or exploiting others? Because the woman in a slum in India or Africa has the same needs and as much right to have them granted as I, a middle-class white Australian do.

There is not an easy checklist but there are things that fill multiple needs. Communities do a lot of good things. Let’s consider a community garden (I hate gardening, but arguably I need to get over that or find a way to cook or babysit for community gardeners or something). A community garden produces subsistence (food). affection (because friendships may develop), participation, creation…etc. Joining a union we can insist we get freedom, leisure, identity, participation, etc. Public libraries give protection, understanding,identity etc (which reminds me when I finish this book to see if Sophia library want it.

Mies shows though that unlike shopaholism which is geared at soothing but not really satisfying a need; rich, strong communities are able to fill multiple needs and the filling of my needs becomes not a competition against you but can actually make me part of filling your needs too. Other writers like Monbiot and any sensible economist are saying similar things too in terms of sustainable, equitable futures (the only sort of future we will survive).

Dare I wonder if this is quite similar to the message and praxis of Jesus? Actual Jesus not the Constantined version.

This was not in the lectionary, I have not made myself angry or sick by looking at that patriarchal framing this week. I will go out on a limb though and assert that this IS very much the Word of Godde.

Thanks be to Godde.

Christmas shopping

For those of you who like the specific faith-aspect of my posts, I apologise this is a fairly secular one…I still think it is important and I still thinks it fits with my faith

 

Dear Human,
I know how important Christmas is to you, how it is a time for expressing love for all the people in your life. It is a time for generosity and sharing, a time for celebration and beauty, a time for joy and peace. Please know that I do not want to take these things away from you- love, relationships, generosity, sharing, celebration, beauty, joy and peace. All I ask is that you put me on your Christmas list and remember all the ways I have nurtured and supported you over the years.
I will give you oxygen, water, food and beauty always including Christmas Day. May I make some suggestions about how to give me something meaningful?
Dearest human, I am choking. There is so much plastic and paper and disposable thingies caught up in my skin, in my pores, buried into me. So before you buy that oh-so-cute new ornament, or a different shape of light, or a vat or two of non-biodegradable glitter I beg you, can you fucking not? Before getting out the polystyrene whatevers and the glue and the spangles to occupy your kids with a craptivity I ask you- is there some way they can be creative that will not shorten their future? Is it (maybe) possible to use last years decorations?
We are at that point human, where I could get so sick that you will die.
I hope we are not past the point of no return.
Can you please fucking not? Can you not buy some sort of rubbish that no one really wants? Can you not fill stockings with something that will entertain for less than a day? Can you not over-cater and have to throw out good food?
By all means have a beautiful Christmas. Can you use last-year’s decorations? Can you simplify what your real “needs” are, what adds to the celebration versus what is just showing off? Can you cater a realistic amount of food? Can your family do an activity together? Can you buy a present for a group of people? Can you give something that won’t sit and collect dust? Can you be secure in your relationships without showering each other with crap?
Can you use fewer cards, less wrap, less ribbons and bows? NO TO THE GLITTER I MEAN IT!!!!! Or try to make it biodegradable. Do you really need all the new outfits and novelty t-shirts? Does “Santa” need that sign? Will you child play with that toy more than once? Do they even notice the gifts when there are so many?
Dear human, there are so many things you could do for me- like taking up composting or going vegan or planting a tree but my main ask remains the same. Before you shop please ask yourself honestly, can you fucking not?
Sing your songs, hug your loved ones and take a well deserved day off doing anything “productive” if you can. Bask in wellbeing and love. Be at peace and know you are loved. Declutter your Christmas and I will know that you love me.
Sincerely
The only Earth you will ever have.

After I wrote this, I talked to my youngest son about Christmas. He was criticising an ad that said “make Christmas special”.

“Isn’t Christmas a Christian thing?” he asked, “People are getting it all wrong. You don’t make it special, you don’t need to. It’s already special because of the whole ‘central to the whole religion thing'” He said it uncomfortably. He comes to church but he does not like to talk about faith.

“What do you mean?” I asked

“Well there is no Christmas if we have to make it special. You know like Jesus already made it special. it’s special before we get to it. It just is. And that is why we celebrate.”

Can we still our frantic worrying about “making” Christmas? Might he be right?

It just is.

The “better part” in a world that doesn’t get it

It seems like over the centuries nothing much has changed. As Amos had God saying back in the time of the first reading, so we could easily believe God would start an angry rant today:

” Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,”

These are “good business-men” according to the values of 2016, they are very concerned with efficiency. They want the holidays (holy days) to be over so they can get back to making money, they alter the measures to give themselves a better profit margin. Any multi-national of today would gladly welcome such canny entrepreneurs into its fold! But these days the disease has spread. Schools and hospitals, care centres, churches and even charities feel the pressure to behave the same way. Everything we have is commodified and then watered down to make it cheap to produce and sell.

The needy are trampled upon, the land is ruined like never before. So if God was angry then, what might God be feeling now (no point in saying Jesus’ death cancelled out all of that, since Jesus never said that social justice was obsolete, or that his death came to replace our responsibility for how we live).

But we do slowly compromise our beliefs to get along in this very difficult and cynical society: “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

God notices and God does not overlook this. The rest of the reading is full of dire threats against the escapist sties of excess of the rich.:”The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.”

And is that not what we experience when we bury ourselves in lavish but empty lifestyles and pursuits? Having been quite well off, and recently having experienced a lack of many things that would make life easier, I have been brought face to face with the best and worst in people. Many people have dealt very generously with me, and that puts me to shame because I know that when I am well off, I forget a little about the suffering of others.

But none of us should forget the homeless in this hideous winter weather (a bus station is better than the street but still woefully inadequate when the wind howls and the rain floods). None of us should forget the children in large classes, with inadequate learning materials and exhausted teachers. It may not be my child, but it ought not to be anyone’s child. None of us should neglect the ill or the old or the mentally ill, or those who were kicked off their centrelink payments just in time for the school holidays, so that their children will go back to school with nothing to talk about the holidays apart from how cold and hungry and scared they were.

My challenge is to help people more than I do, but our collective challenge also is to change these systems, because increasingly there is too much hardship for one person’s charity to reach (and world-wide the situation is even more bleak). As God (via Amos) reminds us that the land itself has been oppressed we need to look at atrocities like fracking, nuclear weapons, excessive consumption, genetic manipulation of seeds to maximise control and profit, cynical versions of medical research, fossil fuels….the reality that we have already changed the global climate in extremely dangerous ways.

The apocalyptic message of night and day becoming skewed and wide-spread lamenting seems quite close to hand and God in the reading seems to vow that the wilfully blindly privileged will not remain untouched by this curse they are calling down. The psalm jeers at those who are foolish enough to take refuge in their excessive wealth instead of God. But the “righteous”, presumably the one who seeks God’s values for living is like an olive (judging by the olive trees I never planted, that are taking over my yard this means tenacious and resilient). Somehow withing all the apocalyptic possibilities before us we trust in the steadfast LOVE of God.

That love has never meant easy answers, or that we are off the hook. But in some way we may not yet be able to grasp it translates into hope for those who DO speak up for the poor and for the earth. The second reading adds evidence for this. We have Christ’s headship and ongoing presence making the best out of us, turning us back from evil ways to redeemed possibilities (I cannot see how, but the hope is there). But our hope is part of or faith, both things we need to steadfastly hold onto. Some aspects of this are mystery, we do not know everything. Wisdom in the second reading consists of trusting God and turning toward God’s way of life, listening to the warnings and teachings to achieve a “mature” faith.

Finally the gospel.

This is one of the ones that at times I have grappled with. Because what makes Mary so special? It seems really rough on Martha that she is excluded from the ease of Jesus and the apostles. Granted I can’t see that it would be better if Mary also had to do the “shit work”. But I can’t blame Martha for being angry that she has been left with all the work. I enjoyed a book called “Through a Woman’s eyes: encounters with Jesus” by Chris Burke that I read several years ago that put a different possibility on this story, with some of the male apostles being less entitled and helping Martha out so that Mary could have her connection and teaching from Jesus. To me those sort of imaginative possibilities are helpful but in the context of today’s readings I can see another twist to it too.

Ignoring questions of gender (and I realise we can’t always do this) and relegating Jesus and the apostles to background in the power-play between Mary and Martha, I put myself into the place of Martha (easy for someone like me to do). I am resentful, jealous, tired. I resort to judging because I am not getting what I need. If I then read Mary as a special little flower who has more important things to do than help me then I remain angry! But the fact is I don’t know about Mary. I have not walked in her shoes. I do not know her inner battles, her exhaustion, her background or why she needs to simply sit at the feet of Jesus, drawing in healing, life, teaching.

So my challenge (still as Martha) is to get my needs met in a way that does not judge Mary. I don’t think that this is a perfect way of reading this episode of the gospels, but it becomes relevant to the other readings of the week if we consider our society’s suspicious and grudging attitudes towards artists, thinkers, “dole bludgers”, the disabled or single parents. We feel envy and resentment at how hard we need to work and the fact that others are given what they need whether they appear (to us) to have earned it or not. We are beginning to teach ourselves to see taxes NOT as a public good, but as our hard-earned cash that ought to deliver a measurable good to ME the individual consumer. Instead of thinking about what is missing in our own lives (more family time, leisure, creative expression, meaningful connection, spirituality) we can get caught up in feeling self-righteous about how unpleasant it feels to “have to” be an economic participant in such a flawed society and losing our compassion in the fear that added pressures will be put on us, or that something will be taken away.

I have felt like this. It is related to the panic that people from overseas will come and drive down our minimum wage and take away our (seemingly) inadequate share of the cake.

Martha’s thinking is twisted because she says “make Mary work” instead of “I need to find a way to spend less effort so that I too can come and connect in with the Word and have Life”. We ought to have compassion for Martha because I feel that we all make that mistake one way or the other when we look at “others”. But as Jesus explains, Martha does not fully understand what is going on with Mary (or the possibility that she could and should have it too).

Jesus reminds us to look at ourselves, and get our own priorities right instead of trying to take away the joys, interests and vocation of others. I don’t think he is endorsing the exploitation of Martha (and if he is I would quarrel with him). In Amos we see the devastation that comes when people’s wrong priorities are allowed to fester into selfishness, and their skills go into getting ahead instead of getting along. The psalm echoes this and reminds us that our safety is in God not in wealth. Colossians reminded us that hope comes from coming to Jesus with a steadfastness.

All of us have things in our lives we could cut back on or slow down on to focus on relating and to redirect ourselves toward hope. All of us have people like Martha, who judge us when we don’t “look busy” or compete at mundane things. Perhaps we also have the tendency to show off unimportant things instead of just relating, and to try to control the contribution of others.

What is the “better part” and how do we choose it? How do we also free up our sisters (Marthas) and others to have some “better part” in their own lives too?

 

 

 

Not doing justice to Wisdom Herself

Please note I seem to have departed from the Revised Common Lectionary by speaking to the readings that I heard at church instead of working ahead. I am not sure where the readings this church used came from but the preacher spoke as if they were from the lectionary. I liked the readings and used them for reflection. The first reading was excerpts of Proverbs 8. The second (gospel) was either Matthew or Luke (which is puzzling because we are in Year B).

Last Sunday’s reading was about Lady Wisdom calling through the streets, nagging like a fishwife. Tenaciously reminding us to pay her attention, to not be seduced away from her. I actually went to church and listened to a sermon, where the preacher consoled us that even though this reading can seem insignificant and reads as “gibberish” (I disagree on both counts) it has a context. In the context Wisdom is the contrast to the evil seductress who has tried to entrap the naïve young man. At this point, caught between two female stereotypes and asked to inhabit the consciousness of a young man having to choose between them waves of depression rolled over me again. Because I have never read Lady Wisdom as the goody-goody slut shamer. I have not read her as an enemy or rival to the “other” woman in her desirability. I’ve read her as powerful, determined, active, voiced (oh so loudly and persistently) and desirable within her power and the beauty of her unflagging persistence.

I read myself as desiring her (of course) but also as being asked to watch and learn, to emulate her to allow her into my life and body, to allow her to move me to become part of her household; but not as a protection against other scary and impure women but because she herself is everything, demands attention- calls, commands and seduces.

So my response to the nagging call of that old Wisdom that I have successfully shut out of my life and heart for so many years? Learned deafness and a bunch of lame excuses apparently, because I did not even write my blog post on this beloved reading. As usual I regretfully turn my back on Wisdom. She is not for me. I do not measure up. I had a burst water pipe, a blocked toilet, extra hours at work, a transition, an opportunity to see my sons, visitors from overseas, and huge exhaustion and maybe a little bit of despair that my voice may be insignificant, unheard or plain wrong. I rationalised it thus “If wisdom is already calling, how presumptuous, how arrogant of me to chime in with my foolishness and twisted thinking. Wisdom herself will call to the people, I am not her.” Which is true enough, but riddled with the sort of defeatism Jesus (surprisingly) said God takes a dim view of  which fits more ancient portrayals of God as well. I am not saying I am hellbound for my laziness and lack of confidence, just acknowledging that it is not respectful of my call.

Like a choir mistress, Wisdom is not interested in the fact that my voice is not as good as someone else’s and in no way approaches the purity and beauty of hers. She may sing the solo, but she needs many voices to harmonise and counter-melody and build up a roaring sound of a great festival of wisdom to roll through a more than ever foolish world and bring some hope, some hints of green in the cracks of the neoliberal façade, a beginning of a way forward, a dance beyond despair.

“You need to lift your voice, sing louder. Listen hard and then sing” she might tell me. I can rehearse what my voice will let out but at some point comes the time to voice it, to quit fear and dare to speak with her, sing with her and even to try to speak for her (trusting her not to ever be limited by the limits of my thinking). Beautiful, forgiving Wisdom who returns again and again and begs us to try harder; to take some responsibility for the relationship for a change.

And attempting to at least begin to acknowledge Wisdom’s claim on me, or at the very least my desire for her- I turn to the gospel. The gospel reminds me that the foolish man builds his house on the sand. Disposable, transient, novelty house- planned obsolescence, a huge waste of the labour and materials that go into building something that will not stand up to time and weather. The economy (oikonomia) is also like a house/household (I don’t remember all my biblical Greek, but oikos was house). I can see the foolishness of building the economy upon the sands of capitalism, upon the ticking time-bomb of exploiting the earth who will eventually kick back at us way mightier than we give this ball of minerals, gases and mystery credit for.

We build relationships on the sands of conspicuous consumption, of performative encounters online or of fear of ourselves and the desire to possess, manipulate, exploit another and then when marriage (for example) becomes a joke, more about dresses and flowers; cars and honeymoons than about people then we blame the queer community because of course it was “them” that undermined the sanctity of marriage (isn’t it nice that when I was searching for a link to this all I could find at first were arguments against the fundamentalists and sarcastic spoofs). Because we could never, ever, not-ever blame capitalism for doing that (apparently you need ironclad evidence to indict capitalism as opposed to the vague rumours needed to accuse gays). We can’t blame capitalism for anything (unemployment, austerity, despair, refugee crises, climate change) because it is such a foundation of our day to day life. It is the sand we have built our multi-storey home on for many generations and denial bids us to insist that it IS rock – steady, immovable, inevitable.

And then even where we see rock we blast it open in strip mining and fracking to take even more from earth, to build another gable on our capitalist mausoleum of denial build on shifting sands. It’s crumbling and we spray in some sort of polymer in the cracks and insist we can’t feel the wind and rain through them. We use anyone poorer and weaker than us as human shields to protect us from the cracks in our capitalist way of life.

We are foolish, but we have nice wine and beautiful clothing and 1000 friends on facebook who all felt jealous at the dessert we ate last night. Because friends of course are people to instil envy in, and life is about flitting around the globe as fast as possible sampling everything- food, wine, people, experiences, places and fuelling our narcissm  with the well-roundedness we feel we have bought. And after all you know we are nice and charitable people and we sip “fair trade” coffee which means the workers may have been paid a tenth of a fair wage instead of nothing at all. And how would they survive if we stopped buying from their masters?

But now that I have constructed this dystopian vision of the society founded on sand where is wisdom? What is the rock we ought to build our society/home on instead? There are voices of wisdom advocating for compassion, justice, love, peace, sustainability, resistance. On the large scale, immense change is needed but on the small scale I hear wise voices each week at work when I think I am leading “group time” but the children demand that I change the written story I am reading them and remake the story more compassionately, more justly or with an idealism that only a child would have the courage to admit to!

When will we become idealists like children? When will we demand that that which is inevitable, which is written and already settled be rewritten to bring in what we know of compassion and of justice?

Does not Wisdom keep demanding that we follow her lead? Can we not let her begin a movement for change, for more solid values at the foundation of our society? “ Take my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold; for wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare with her..” (Proverbs 8:10-11). Might be worth taking her instruction on board then.

Because I am adding the links, it’s taking me a couple of hours just to post the articles (additional time to actual writing) so with uni starting back I am thinking of reducing or eliminating links. Even though it can help me clarify my thinking to do them.

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