Friday, January 07, 2005
MISCELLANEOUS WEBSITES ON SUFISM AND SOPHIOLOGY
At his People with a History website, "Chapter 8: Islam", Paul Halsall of Fordham Univ. writes:
Islam was the last of the great world cultures to emerge. With regard to homosexuality there are polar contrasts. On the one hand The Qur'an seems to condemn homosexuality unequivocally, on the other Muslim societies have shown a great deal of tolerance. From the sexually explicit poems of Al-Andulus [Muslim Spain], to the sexual comedy of The Arabian Nights, to the ecstatic loving of Sufi mystics, to modern Morocco and Tunisia - the Islamic world looked benevolently on men who love [usually younger] men. In India, according to Richard Burton, it was among Muslims, not Hindus, that homosexual eros was most accepted.
The first thing to note is that in some respects Islam has been the most sex-positive of the great world religions: the Christ and the Buddha were both sexually abstinent, but Muhammad was sexually active with a number of wives, and had children. Sex itself was not a bad thing, nor was abstinence desirable.
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Dianne Peck, Sydney, writing for "The Journal" of Corpus Canada, Winter 2003, discusses the books of Eugene Kennedy (_The Unhealed Wound_), and Thomas Moore (_The Soul of Sex_). Despite the fact that "Sophia" is the title of her article, she uses the word "Sophia" only once near the end where she writes:
The word of healing is not allowed. There is no mistaking the reality that the Church has mercilessly blocked the healing words "What is it that ails thee?" and thrust back with its own death-dealing words, "Roma locuta est." Rome has spoken. The matter is finished.
And so, that there is the need to ask, "Why do I stay in this Church?" lacks no evidence. But Kennedy also spends several chapters giving evidence for hope. He reminds us that Parzival's question, the words that would open the floodgates of healing for the Church and the world, has been asked before. Pope John XXIII asked it, and then convened Vatican II for the purpose of answering it. For a brief moment the clouds parted, brilliant golden sunlight shone through, and the healing of the Church's wound began. The blind passion of the current hierarchy to close every open window and eradicate every healing ray is evidence of the profound depth of its wound.
Kennedy believes the Church still has the capacity to heal itself, and will again remember its pastoral/mystical identity. He believes the Church as Mystic can heal the Church as Institution. That hope is also the reason I choose to remain connected to it.
Keep that reference to Parzival and grail questing in mind, because it has implications for a study of Sufism as well, something I will get to soon.
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Next is the website of Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet, and specifically an article titled "Homosexual Bishops: A Theological Oxymoron", where this appears:
In the final sermon at the Convention in August, 2003, when Robinson was voted in, presiding bishop Frank Griswold said: “This Convention has been about love…something has happened that is larger than any one perspective…” Here, in perfectly Postmodern fashion, truth and falsehood have become “perspectives,” and a new kind of church unity is unveiled. Citing not the Bible but the Sufi (pagan) poet Rumi, Griswold declared: “Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Runi is a prominent Sufi poet. I find it interesting that Griswold has to reach into Islam in order to justify this action that is splitting ECUSA.
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The Re-imaging conference of the World Council of Churches which took place in November 1993 has come in for lots of criticism. The website of Way of Life outlines some of the events at that conference including this one:
Worshipping Sophia
The Nov. 3, 1993, Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that "throughout the conference worship experiences will celebrate Sophia, the biblical goddess of creation." Sue Seid-Martin of the University of St. Thomas School of Divinity in St. Paul, Minn., claimed that this Sophia is "the suppressed part of the biblical tradition, and clearly the female face of the human psyche." Seid-Martin believes Sophia is found in Proverbs 1-9, Matt. 11; Lk. 3:35; 11:49; and 1 Cor. 1-2, and she identifies Jesus Christ with this Sophia. ...
Naked sophia goddess
A painting displayed at the Re-imagining conference supposedly depicted this Sophia. The painting contained the picture of a bald, frowning woman with large naked breasts. The middle of her forehead is adorned with a mark that appears to be a Hindu "tika" or tilaka, the same mark women in Nepal and India receive from their priests when they do "puja" (worship) at pagan shrines. (It is interesting that one of the speakers at this conference encouraged the wearing of the tika. Aruna Gnanadason, South Asian feminist, "lashed out against alleged oppression by Christian missionary teachings in India," and she invited participants to put red dots on their foreheads to "represent the divine" in them.)
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At the Women for Faith & Family website, Donna Steichen presents her address to the 1999 WFF Conference which includes this passage:
The most stunningly arrogant feminist campaign is an increasingly overt effort to replace God the Father with God the Mother. Because this enterprise is still under construction, Goddess "theology" is still fluid. Sometimes She is identified as a feminine Holy Spirit, sometime as the fullness of Divinity, spelled GODDE. Feminist leaders including Rosemary Radford Reuther and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza tried for years to invent a God/ess they could sell to the faithful.
In her 1992 book, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, Sister Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, makes the fullest argument for a female image of God. Recapitulating what she calls the theological "trajectory" of her feminist predecessors, but using a less abrasive voice, she begins from the premise that God, as pure spirit, has no gender. Reduced to its simplest terms, her claim is that to know one's deepest self is to know God; therefore revelation is the interpretation of one's own experience. Thus, calling God by masculine titles is an arbitrary choice, which has led people to think of Him as literally male, a situation Johnson denounces as inherently unfair.
The patriarchs had their turn at the wheel, she says, and they used it to justify oppression of women. So now, in reparation, "classical Christian theology" must be passed "through the fire of critical feminist principles." Feminists (the only women deserving a voice) must mandate, at least for now, exclusively female names for God, like "Sophia/Wisdom" and "She Who Is." To avoid a risk that Sophia might be seen as an inferior feminine aspect of God, Johnson re-interprets the Blessed Trinity to make Sophia into all three Persons, whom she calls "Abyss, Word and Spirit."
Sophia seems to be a very useful entity who can be called on to suit whatever purpose you have in mind, be it women priests, or homosexuality, or goddess worship. There is a significant stake in making sure that Sophia is never accurately defined as a personification of wisdom in Scripture. Sophia, to be useful, must be a living breathing womyn.
