Dandelyon's Worlds

Thanks to <lj user="sweetmusic_27"> for prompting this walk down memory lane.  This isn't quite the same post as I put in her feminism thread.

My mother raised her girls to believe that we could grow up to be anything.  She started young, knowing that we would get other messages from society about what it means to be “a girl” and “a woman”, and not wanting those ideas to stunt us. 

People being inherently complex and contradictory, I was also raised Catholic, and my parents sent us to Catholic grade schools from the start.  When I was 6—still too young to be required to go to Mass—we lived next to a convent and across the alley from the rectory, and my parents were on the parish’s PTA.  The grade school’s playgound was right next to the rectory, where the priests lived (mind you, we were under strict orders to walk around the block to and from school, making that dozen feet or so of alley a forbidden shortcut.).  But we could stand in our yard and talk to the priests in their yard, across the alley, or to the nuns over the fence.

One day, I was standing in the alley (well, almost in the alley, I was a good little Catholic girl at the time).  I was talking to a very nice younger priest, I believe a newcomer to our parish, who asked me the perennial question adults ask young kids.  Now, at that time, I had figured out that priests are as close to God as you can get in this life, and had decided I wanted to be a priest when I grew up.  (The essential vocation never left me, though my understanding of deity, of religion, of the priesthood, and of my own vocation has changed a lot since I was 6.) 

I smiled up at him and answered his question.  Looking quite shocked, he blurted out ungracefully, “you can’t be a priest.” 

“Why not?” I demanded, equally shocked.  When he told me it was because I was a girl, I ran inside to find my mother to tell her a priest was lying to me.  Admittedly, it was unthinkable to my very young self that a priest would lie, but it was impossible that God wouldn’t want me to be a priest merely because I was female. 

Of course, my mother had to tell me the priest was not lying.  This really shook me.  Initially, I questioned my belief in God, but I have always felt a strong connection to the Divine, so I had to conclude instead that it was the men who’d been running the Church for 2000 years who got it wrong.  That led to me questioning everything I was taught.  If my elders and ancestors could be wrong about something so fundamental, and so important, they could be wrong about anything.

In my charitable moments, I noted that there was no reason God would have told a bunch of men in Judea thousands of years ago the things I, a girl in the 20^th century, needed to know—and even if such a God did try to tell them those things, how could they understand such advice?  But I also noted the power struggles and violence and veniality of so much of Christian religious history.  And in too many ways the Christian religion wasn’t a good fit to me (for instance, I was never willing to settle, as my High School Dominican teachers were, for the lesser role of "Sister" and a lifetime of working to try to change the Church from within).  And the Deity (or Deities) I sense didn't seem to be a part of the hierarchies that are so inherent to organized religion.

There’s lots of thought-paths I could travel from here, but I'm running out of lunch hour; I think I’ll end by sharing my two favorite word-images of Goddess.  The first is that of an artist, of course.  The second, an image that I’ve had atheists find intriguing and even say is compatible with their beliefs, is that Goddess is the universe, and people are the instruments of Her Consciousness.