Fick just en läsvärd artikel som känns extra aktuell just nu av någon anledning....
"Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men" av Joan Chittister, O.S.B.
Här ett kort utdrag ur början - där textförfattaren får några reflektioner efter att ha studerat några minnesmärken lite närmare:
"There it was, carved in stone, embossed in gold: the total invisibility of women -- even when women were noticed, even when a woman was supposedly being honored. How can that happen, I thought. What is that saying to us about our spirituality? And what must we do about it if we ourselves are truly to be a spiritual people? What does the invisibility of women have to do with our need -- our ability -- to scale our own mountains in search of a contemporary spirituality in a changed world?
Scripture is very clear about the answer: Ezechiel 36:26 reads, "I will take from you your stony hearts and give you hearts of flesh..." The implications of the passage are overwhelming. A world without a soft heart lacks any reason to exist. Otherwise, the important things -- natural beauty, human bondedness, honor, honesty, suffering, kindness -- will get lost in the shuffle somewhere along the line. The world will go blind with business, lose sight of the human dimensions of the daily, forget that life rides a cycle of gain and loss until all the bric-a-brac of time which we collect as we go along drops away and only the important things are left. Bank accounts, for instance, have nothing to do with a person's last hours, let alone the quality of their lives. Power melts between our fingers like sand in an hourglass, worth nothing when we need it most. And, at the end, reason gives way to feeling with terrible intensity. Then, only the self remains. Whatever that is. Whatever by then composes it. Whatever makes a person what they have become -- hard or soft, loving or rigid, intolerant or receptive, self-righteous or accepting. A spirituality that lacks heart lacks quality of life.
Heartlessness is the terminal disease of a patriarchal society. Heartlessness barters the soul for the system: for America's sweatshop shame, for high tech intimidation, for welfare reform without educational reform, for an ecclesiastical sexism that cripples both sexes -- and all in the name of God. The fact is that the world has never known so much poverty, so much violence, so much oppression, so much institutionalized injustice. But we go to church -- and we go to church -- and we go to church. Paul Kennedy, Yale University Professor of History, calls ecological ruin, the automation of industry, the biotechnology of agriculture, the monopolization of resources and the globalization of finances, the global time bombs and tombstones of the 21st century. There has got to be something drastically wrong with a spirituality that exists in that kind of world and substitutes ritual for righteousness."
Läs hela artikeln här.Etiketter: katolska kyrkan, kvinnor, män, spiritualitet |
