Last month (September 17 to be exact) saw the 10th anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. It gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the United States and around the world.
As well as sharing her insights on the significance of the Occupy movement, Marianne also talks more broadly about the spiritual and moral nature of social justice movements. It’s a 13-minute interview that’s well-worth watching.
In putting together the most recent installment of The Wild Reed’s "In the Garden of Spirituality" series, I discovered that theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann died earlier this year.
I first became aware of Uta when on Australian TV back in the early 1990s, I viewed the British documentary, Through the Devil’s Gateway: Women, Religion and Taboo. Uta was one of a number of female scholars and writers interviewed for this series. I was immediately impressed and inspired by her theological insights and the direct (some might say confrontational) way she shared them.
Armstrong’s comment highlights the fact that Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s writings were radical in the truest sense of the word; they went to the heart or root of the Christian story, and thus of human religious experience. Her writings can rightly be described as trailblazing. Not surprisingly, they were (and remain) controversial for some. Yet for others, myself included, they were liberating. As such, they definitely influenced the expansion of my thinking on gender, sexuality, and church authority. And for that I’m grateful.
There’s not much online about Uta’s passing or the important theological contributions she made in her lifetime. Accordingly, I’ve put together the following which is drawn from Wikipedia and from this article published shortly after her death.
Rest in peace and power, Uta. And thank you for your prophetic witness through your liberating writings.
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She was the world’s first female professor of Catholic theology and quickly became a vocal critic of the Roman Catholic hierachy: Uta Ranke-Heinemann, the eldest daughter of former Federal Republic of Germany President Gustav Heinemann, died at her home in Essen, Germany on Thursday, March 25, 2021. She was 93.
Her son Andreas Ranke announced her death to the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur, saying his mother “fell asleep peacefully in front of relatives.”
Uta Heinemann was born on October 2, 1927 in Essen; her parents were Calvinist Protestants. Her father Gustav Heinemann was the third President of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was the first member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to hold the presidency.
In 1945 Heinemann was the only female to attend the Burggymnasium in Essen, where she graduated from high school. She went on to study Protestant Theology. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1953 when she married a Catholic religion teacher, Edmund Ranke. The couple had two sons. She was promoted to doctor in 1954 in Munich, making her the first woman to be so (together with Elisabeth Gössmann). One of her fellow students and a friend at that time was Joseph Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict XVI, about whom she later said, “[He] always had the aura of a cardinal, and the highest intelligence, with a total absence of the erotic.”
In 1969, Ranke-Heinemann became the first woman in the world to be habilitated in Catholic theology, at the University of Munich. She subsequently held the Essen University chair of ancient Church history and the New Testament from 1970.
About her relationship with the Catholic hierachy, Ranke-Heinemann would later remark: “But I went from bad to worse with the Catholics.” She was a vocal critic of the papal ban on contraception, describimg the fact that African women were threatened with hell for using a condom to have sex with their HIV-infected husbands as a “fatal deception on humanity.”
Ranke-Heinemann was a dedicated peace activist. During the Vietnam War she supported the ban on napalm bombs and visited Communist North Vietnam.
In 1979, she organized food for Cambodia which at the time was experiencing a famine.
She taught Catholic theology from 1980 in Duisburg, and from 1985 in Essen. In 1987 Ranke-Heinemann contradicted the church dogma of the Virgin Birth, saying that the stories of Mary’s virginity should not be taken literally but rather as “models of the imagination at the time.” The then Essen bishop, Franz Hengsbach, subsequently withdrew her education license. She lost her chair in Essen, but was given a church-independent chair for religious history. In 1988 she published her principal book dealing critically with sexuality in the Catholic Church, in English Eunuchs For the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Many editions followed, and it was translated into twelve languages.
In 1999, the renowned pacifist was a candidate for President of Germany, without party membership, but lost to Johannes Rau, the husband of her niece Christina.
Ranke-Heinemann did not deviate from her criticism of the church in her later life. The election of her former fellow student Joseph Ratzinger as pope did not change this. “I am disappointed,” she said a year after Benedict XVI took office. “I was hoping he would finally get rid of celibacy.”
In another interview, she declared: “I don’t see any future for a church in which all shepherds are men, and all women are sheep. How could that be a universal church?”
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In closing, here’s a TV news story about Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s passing. It’s from a German news show, and, as I don’t speak German, I just have to assume it does a good job of summarizing and honoring her life. If you’re reading this and know German, please feel free to translate the audio of this video and share it in the comments section of this post. Thanks!
I spent yesterday afternoon seeking and experiencing the truth of Edward Hays’s words, “Everything is saturated with the sacred, is a tabernacle of your presence.” These words are from one of Hays’s autumn morning prayers in his book, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim.
Since the autumn equinox, I’ve been incorporating these prayers into my morning prayer time. They became more than words, however, when I experienced their deeper truth yesterday as I very intentionally immersed myself in the beauty of the natural world. Specifically, I spent time by Diamond Lake and at the Prayer Tree by Minnehaha Creek. Both these places of urban wildreness are located in south Minneapolis, and both have become very special to me in the past few years. (I hope my photographs attest to this!)
As is so often the case when I allow myself a “sacred pause” to be fully present in nature, I not only feel my body, mind, and spirit come into alignment, but I also sense in every leaf and stone, every wave of water and ray of light, the sustaining and transforming energy of the sacred. In ways that can only be described as mystical, I recognize my connection to – and oneness with – all within and around me.
This experience of oneness, of the Divine Presencesaturating all the different aspects of the natural world, is for me one of renewal; it restores within me balance and harmony, clarity and hope.
May I see your holiness in the golden beauty of this day. May I touch with reverence all things, since everything is saturated with the sacred, is a tabernacle of your presence. Broaden the boundaries of my heart that it may encompass more than it did yesterday, as I begin this day with you.
Yesterday afternoon I joined with about 50 others in south Minneapolis to rally against the “endless wars” of the United States government, wars instigated and waged regardless of which of the two main political parties hold power.
In its promotional material, the organizers of yesterday’s rally noted that October 2021 marks 20 years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an event which launched a seemingly endless series of U.S. wars and military interventions. These wars explode not only on the streets of foreign cities but also, as the organizers put it, “on the streets at home with militarized policing and growing inequality.”
Of course, related to this “growing inequality” is the obscenely bloated U.S. military budget, which the majority of politicians from both parties unquestionably support year after year.
Richard Eskow recently penned an informative piece on this very issue, noting that:
[Congress recently] authorized a one-year military budget of $768 billion. If that amount remains the same over the next decade, the ten-year cost would come to $7.7 trillion, more than twice the amount of the Democrats’ so-called “sweeping budget package” designed to help working people and address climate change. . . . The massive expenditure for war is not merely a fiscal issue. It reflects a system of governance that values war. That system was produced by a failure of political vision and an electoral process corrupted by corporate money.
Writing in the latest issue of the WAMM (Women Against Military Madness) newsletter, my friend Marie Braun questions where the humanity is in an “exploding national ‘defense’ budget.”
The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout provide ample reason for our country to reconsider what truly constitutes national security. The massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed worldwide are powerless against grave, non-military threats to national security -- from a raging pandemic to the fact that tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay for food, housing, and healthcare.
. . . Moving money from the military budget to meeting human needs will not be easy because of the many vested interests, especially weapons contractors and their powerful lobbies. And there are military contracts in almost every state.
Frequently when there is an opportunity to get rid of out-dated equipment, the cry from states and local communities is “Jobs! We will lose jobs!” However, it has been known for decades that federal spending on domestic programs in healthcare, education, clean energy, and infrastructure creates more jobs, dollar for dollar, than military spending.
In her 2019 study, Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project at Boston University’s Watson Institute, found that $1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with the jobs $1 billion creates in other areas: 26, 700 in education, 16, 800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in healthcare.
I close this post with some more images of yesterday’s rally calling for an end to U.S. militarism at home and abroad. These images are accompanied by an excerpt from Julian Borger’s article, “How 9/11 Led the U.S. to Forever Wars, Eroded Rights – and Insurrection,” published one month ago today on September 10, 2021 in The Guardian.
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Over the past few weeks, the Biden administration has launched drone strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Somalia and Afghanistan, based on congressional authority dating to September 2001. This week, five terror suspects have been in court for pre-trial hearings now entering their ninth year in Guantánamo Bay, which opened its prison gates in January 2002.
The aftershocks of 9/11 are everywhere. The families of the nearly 3,000 victims are still struggling with the justice department to lift the secrecy over the FBI investigation into the attacks and the possible complicity of Saudi officials. Last week they asked the department’s inspector general to look into FBI claims to have lost critical evidence, including pictures and video footage.
[This year’s] 20th anniversary of 9/11 [. . .] is clearly not just about history. More than a decade since the last attempted al-Qaida attack against the country, America’s society and its democracy are shaped – and arguably badly corroded – by how it responded in the first few weeks after the twin towers fell.
The Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that became law on September 18, 2001 was supposed to give the president the tools he needed to combat al-Qaida. But it is still used as the legal underpinning for drone strikes and other military operations ordered by Joe Biden around the world, most with nothing to do with al-Qaida.
The torture of suspects carried out by the CIA and allowed by legal memos issued by the Bush administration has mired the case of the 9/11 suspects at Guantánamo in tainted evidence, leaving the prosecution unable to move forward or abandon the process.
New books argue that lines can be drawn tracing the spread of disinformation on the internet and the direct challenge to democracy posed by Donald Trump and his supporters – culminating in the January 6 insurrection – all the way back to decisions taken in the febrile atmosphere that followed the attacks on New York and Washington two decades ago.
Their conclusion echoes what civil liberties organisations have been saying for the past two decades, that 9/11 is America’s auto-immune disease: the response did far more damage than the original attack.
“The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror,” Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s non-fiction book critic, [recently] wrote.
Ackerman, a former Guardian journalist, contrasts the political response to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, by the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh, to the al-Qaida plane hijacking attacks six years later.
In the Oklahoma case, Republicans in Congress disputed any suggestion of wider complicity of the far right. To the extent anti-terror legislation was strengthened, it was directed against foreign groups. Patriotism was identified with whiteness.
“One of the most important lessons of the war on terror is that a white man with a flag and a gun is told by the culture of the war on terror that he is a counter-terrorist, not a terrorist,” said Ackerman, adding that a direct line can be drawn between the war on terror and the January 6 pro-Trump insurrection in Washington.
“You can see from the iconography of who is in that crowd, who’s storming the Capitol,” Ackerman said. “There are a lot of people in hard-knuckle gloves and tactical gear basically cosplaying as the warriors that the war on terror and its media portrayals convinced them is the mark of valorous American behavior.”
Some of the excesses of the 9/11 era have been pruned. The National Security Agency is more constrained in its ability to collect bulk phone data, which was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court last year. The Patriot Act has been overtaken by the less ambitious USA Freedom Reauthorization Act.
But even after laws expire, the habits and reflexes of the 9/11 era remain. Karen Greenberg, the director of the centre of national security at Fordham University school of law, calls them “subtle tools”: secrecy, deliberately imprecise legal language aimed at expanding executive power, blurred lines between government agencies, and the overturning of norms. “You can get rid of all these policies, but if you don’t get rid of the tools that created those policies, forget it. It doesn’t matter,” Greenberg said.
“All these things that were created in the name of national security, we’ve seen them time and time again bleed into things that are not about the war on terror and national security.”
“This wilful evasion of the limits on presidential power is something we are going to have to figure out how to address sooner rather than later,” she said.
“We are not on earth to guard a museum,
but to cultivate a flowering garden of life.”
– Pope John XXIII
It’s been quite some time since I visited the “garden of spirituality,” my series of reflections on key ideas, experiences, and practices in the spiritual life.
Joseph Campbell once suggested that we are not searching for the meaning of life. We are searching for the experience of being alive. Centering is the art of being fully alive. And wherever the art of centering is practiced, things change dramatically.
. . . Centering is not an abstract term, but rather a practical tool available to all of us. . . . Centering happens as the mind, body, and spirit begin to align. Our muscles noticeably relax, our body straightens, clarity of thought and action become more prevalent, and vitality builds. Centering is not a stoic tightrope through life keeping us from our feelings and passions. Instead, centering is a spacious field in which we can embrace emotions and events with awareness and compassion. Centering will allow us to fully feel emotions and will at the same time give us strength to take action not from the ever-changing weather patterns of emotions but from our higher purpose.
We have each had the experience of being centered hundreds of times in our lives (often without being mindful of it). Centering happens in shades, in degrees of intensity. We don’t have to be perfect about it, because each shade makes a difference. Centering is “the zone” spoken of by great athletes. It can also be a barefoot run on the grass on a summer’s eve, with the wind in your face and the senses wide open. Center is a focus so present that time seems to stop as it does for a child at play. Center is a connection so deep that there is no separation between subject and object, an awareness so heightened that beauty and truth, the form and formless, melt together. It is like a delicate flower growing out of solid rock. Center can be a cosmic laugh rippling out to the ends of the universe. It can be simply relaxing in rush-hour traffic. Center is returning home. It is always a choice we can make.
. . . Our centering ability grows with practice. And isn’t life itself the ideal practice time? The challenges and chaos that we live in can be the sandpaper to smooth out our rough edges. And centering is a tool to help us get the job done with maximum joy and minimum effort. Life is worthy of our awe, our focus, and our laughter. A Christian monk, Brother Lawrence, once said, “It is not necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God.”
. . . We are immersed in a world of major transition, both planetary and personal. Many of us are confused about our profession, our relationships, our purpose, our world. By staying busy, we can avoid taking a deep look and unveiling the truth about our cluttered lives and deepest fears. We can hide from the confusion, the uncertainty. But we do have a choice. We can be courageous enough each day to go inside, to our own center. We can discover who we really are and take a stand on our deepest values. This is how we mindfully live a life of center.
Center is about accepting the pressures of life. Center is about inviting change, not mindlessly holding on to a position. It takes courage to change our perspectives. It takes courage to examine which beliefs really work for us. It takes guts to get off a limiting, but often comfortable, point of view and shift to a larger viewing point. When we’re lost in a densely wooded area, it helps our perspective to move to higher ground. This enables us to witness our position – not in isolation but in relation to everything around us.
We can learn, each moment, to pierce through our cluttered thoughts to a higher purpose, and journey to higher ground. It is a path of learning and magic. It is the center of the storm.
Recently my friend Karla and I visited Oheyawahe (also known as Pilot Knob), a hill in Mendota Heights, Minnesota that is considered especially sacred to the Dakota people. I too found myself experiencing it as a very special place.
The image above shows the north slope of Oheyawahe, “a hill much visited,” also known as Wotakuye Pahá, “the hill of all the relatives.” These names were given to this place by Dakota people centuries ago.
Oheyawahe (which can also be spelt “Oheyawahi”) overlooks the confluence of the Minnesota (or Mnísota Wakpá) River and the Mississippi River, which for the Dakota is the center of the world. The hill has long been a gathering place for Dakota, Objibe, and Iowa people, and a place for ceremonies and burials. In the 1830s, for instance, Charles La Trobe described a “tomb of an Indian chief” at the summit of Oheyawahe.
The area is currently undergoing restoration to oak savanna, led by Great River Greening, a local non-profit. Conservation grazing (using horses, goats, and sheep), has been used to help restore and maintain native grassland. A trail system has been established, including three scenic overlooks, which connects to the Big Rivers Regional Trail. Oheyawahe is also situated within the Mississippi Flyway, a bird migratory route that goes from central Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
Above: My friend Karla at Oheyawahe – Saturday, September 25, 2021.
Above: That’s downtown Minneapolis pictured behind me on the horizon. The Mendota Bridge can be seen at left. It crosses the Minnesota River just before if flows into the Mississippi River.
The Medicine Wheel, sometimes known as the Sacred Hoop, has been used by generations of various Native American tribes for health and healing. It embodies the Four Directions, as well as Father Sky, Mother Earth, and Spirit Tree – all of which symbolize dimensions of health and the cycles of life.
The Medicine Wheel can take many different forms. It can be an artwork such as artifact or painting, or it can be a physical construction on the land. Hundreds or even thousands of Medicine Wheels have been built on Native lands in North America over the last several centuries.
The Treaty of Mendota was signed at Pilot Knob in 1851. The treaty ceded 25 million acres of land west of the Mississippi (much of southern Minnesota) to the U.S. government. During the Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people were forced into an internment camp on nearby Pike Island (below). Some of the many Dakota who died that winter were buried on Pilot Knob.
In his recent piece for OccupyDemocrats.com, Colin Taylor offers a timely analysis of the “Democratic Party’s inherent ideological schizophrenia” and “the oligarchy’s ability to outright purchase the votes of our elected politicians.” Of course, neither of these problems are anything new, yet as Taylor reminds us, both are currently being played out in a way that threatens to derail President Joe Biden’s overwhelmingly popular “Build Back Better” plan, which Taylor says is the “first real chance that the Democratic party has had in a decade – and quite possibly the last chance it might ever have – to enact meaningful material change in the lives of the American people.”
As Taylor points out, two “conservative Democrats” – Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema – are key players in this looming threat, as both are obstructing the Democratic party from passing the policy platform it got elected on in 2020.
Following is an excerpt from Taylor’s piece, one that’s entitled “Joe Manchin and Sinema’s Sabotage of Biden’s Agenda Is a Moral Obscenity.”
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The humiliating debacle currently playing out in the United States Senate is a perfect illustration of the shameless corruption and deep-rooted dysfunction that rots in the core of American politics. The Democratic Party is faced with the first real chance it has had in a decade – and quite possibly the last chance it might ever have – to enact meaningful material change in the lives of the American people and prove to a disillusioned and disgusted nation that the government is actually capable of doing something to make people’s lives better.
But instead of eagerly and enthusiastically seizing at the chance to transform American society for the better, the Democratic Party’s inherent ideological schizophrenia and the oligarchy’s ability to outright purchase the votes of our elected politicians are poised to collapse the precarious house of cards that President Biden’s agenda rests upon.
Democratic leadership loves to tout the “big tent” of competing interests and ideologies that make up the party’s political body, but time and time again a tiny minority of conservative DINOs [Democrats in Name Only], deep in the pockets of lobbyists and oligarchs, successfully obstruct the Democratic Party from passing the policy platform it got elected on.
This time, it comes down to two conservative Senators, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, both wealthy and deeply beholden to dark money donors. They have decided to throw a tantrum over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that contains the bulk of the Biden administration’s political agenda because they’re “worried about spending.” This is preposterous given their unquestioning support for spending $7.5 trillion on the military and defense corporation contracts over the past ten years, but their excuses are by default accepted as both reasonable and appropriate by the corporate media jackals whose superiors are also “worried about spending,” which in this case translates to “having to raise taxes on the wealthy to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.”
If there is one thing that the pitiless reaper of American capitalism is actually efficient at doing, it is severing society’s human connection to its victims. The homeless are driven away from public areas by force, minorities segregated into ghettoes, poor families gentrified out of their communities by the inexorable march of capital; they are put out of sight, out of mind so the rest of us don’t have to trouble our consciences. It is the same with the human element of our political negotiations; all this obsessive fixation on the numbers and performative pearl-clutching over “how are we gonna pay for it” completely divorce the issue from the transformative effects that it would have on the wellbeing of the American people.
. . . While the media loves to portray Manchin as a “moderate” and a “centrist,” there is nothing moderate about the unforgivable moral obscenity he’s committing by opposing this bill – and we need to start treating him and every other greedy self-serving “centrist” willing to sell out our nation to the wealthy with the same disgust as we would any terrorist; they are holding the well-being of our people and the future of our planet hostage and are making it very clear they’re willing to crash this plane.
To read Colin Taylor's article in its entirety, click here.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
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"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
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