faith – Susan Feathers

Church and State

I am old enough to witness and experience the deleterious impact of religious oppression on the lives of individuals, communities and a nation.

In 1961 my family moved back to east Tennessee after 16 years in the U.S. Air Force. We had lived in Texas, California, Hawai’i Michigan, New York, Kansas, Virginia, and Tennessee.

I was 16 when we returned to Johnson City, Tennessee near the Appalachian mountains and birthplace of my father and me. My paternal grandparents lived just outside of town in the small rural community of Watauga. Their hilltop home and farm were my personal touchstones in an otherwise migratory life.

At the base of the hill was a little white church at which Grandad was custodian and carpenter of pews, altar pieces and other furniture made in his shop in the old red barn.

I remember as a child a kind of freedom in worship. My parents, both raised in Christian faiths, explored many faiths as a practice, learning something from each to form what I learned was my responsibility: to form my own values based on my experience growing up in a democracy. To test them against the moral laws of the country as a guide and bulwark against tyranny.

These dear memories stand in contrast to what life in a small southern town was like for a teenager, for a woman. The church exerted a controlling influence espousing different freedoms for men than for women. From behavior to choice of avocation to personal freedom, there was a code for women much more circumscribed than for men. I never went to church without gloves, hose, garter, and garter belt, without behavior in deference to men. This is the white male hegemony that current MAGA leaders seek to reestablish. Repression of women, Black individuals, and immigrants is concurrent with building back an imagined past.

While the Bible teaches tolerance, the South practiced racism, while women are revered by Jesus, Southern men used vulgarities when referring to women’s bodies while requiring them to be virgins at the same time. It was common for young women to be touched inappropriately by relatives or strange men. A girl thus treated could not speak out about it without being tagged a slut.

Our early founders dealt with much greater religious domination. Having personally witnessed and experienced religious oppression by a state religion, our founders and early Americans of the Revolutionary times, wisely chose to keep religious preference in the personal realm. At the founding, there was a diversity of religious beliefs and diversity of people from Native Americans to far eastern, European, African and Islander living together in the British colonies. Diversity is the seedbed of our Creed: E pluribus unam, from many, one.

In 2025, a Christian nationalist cabal has seized control of the American government, a democracy founded on laws. This Christmas, it chose to impose Christian religious symbols and religious language on a nation founded on religious freedom and separation of church and state.

I abhor and reject this regime’s imposition of a particular faith on all, declaring it a state religion. IT IS NOT. Christianity is a personal religious choice. but not exclusive of any other religious tradition including the right not to embrace a religious faith.

Make no mistake. Trump et al intend to destroy the United States of America and install a king and minions in the name of Christ. Just as we helped Europe rid itself of a demagogue, we must ourselves rid the country of Maga ideology and ideologues before they take what is ours.

We are a nation of many faiths including Christianity. About 60% of Americans embrace Christianity. But it is not, nor was it ever a state religion. Nor are we a white nation. We are a nation of many peoples and beliefs and that is the great strength of our democracy and the hope of the world.

In the arms of the Earth Mother

I ride the celestial star ways, shaped and awakened atop Earth’s long arc across the heavens. Lit by fire. Oh, the wonder! Oh, the human frailty.

The Earth, al0ng her celestial path, pulled by centripetal forces out among its neighbors. Then, on the far reaches of her path, turns toward home, ablaze and wanting. Solstice. A human marking of the turning.

We ride upon her shoulders, a veil of living matter beneath the unknowable sky.

In our fragile coats of protoplasm, our beating hearts fill and flow, fill and flow, attuned to Earth. Flung on the arc of heaven, we offer our faith.

Oh, to be ALIVE! ALIVE!

Photo by Tobias Bju00f8rkli on Pexels.com

The Path of Plentitude

For a new beginning. In out of the way places of the heart, where your thoughts never think to wonder, this beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you. Noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispered, heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight when your courage kindled and out you stepped onto new ground your eyes young again with energy and dream. A path of plentitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear, you can trust the promise of this opening, unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life’s desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure, holding nothing back. Learn to find ease in risk, soon you will be home in a new rhythm, for your soul senses the world that awaits you. ~ John O’Donohue, The Space Between Us

Dear Readers,

On my walk this morning, I chose to listen again to readings from John O’Donohue’s great works of poetry, spirit and landscape. John’s deep faith and philosophy emanate from his first experiences as a child growing up in Western Ireland in the landscape of the Burren.

Readers who have followed my blog over the years know that I, too, take my inspiration from the enduring spirit imbued withing each distinct landscape. For me that has always been the limestone region of East Tennessee and particularly along the Watauga River where my grandparent’s home was my spiritual center. I grew up in a military family, moving as frequently as once a year. But, every year possible, my parents brought my sisters and me back to the “Hilltop Farm” for summers or Christmas celebrations. Like John, this landscape form the warp and weft of me.

What brought me to remember John’s blessing quoted above, is the reminder that the path of plentitude is within us. We only have to awaken our imagination to it.

In this time in America …

The power of the people in a democracy lies within each citizen, each person living on this sacred landscape. We must return to our deepest convictions that a free people must act together in eternal vigilance against an evil that hates liberty, wishes to slash and burn the spirit that we hold as an educated and free people whose combined efforts and guardianship has made this nation great, not perfect, but striving always toward the values it holds as our sacred trust.

For Spacious Skies

We are a mosaic of people, places and stories. Liberty’s flame welcomes all to these shores where E Pluribus Unam (many out of one) is our purpose. Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness (the welfare of the people ) our promise.

The American mosaic began with people who came from the East over a landbridge during an Ice Age. It was a time when nature was free. the rule one of reciprocity among species living in a landscape of soaring mountains, crystal rivers, lakes and oceans full of life. and forests trembling with the movements of animals, birds, insects and a few people. Though old by our planet’s account, it was brand new to the first people who wondered in its force of life surging at its own accord. They are still among us, and their memories are longlasting. If we listen, we can here the wisdom they developed living among their kin.

Oh! How I wish to be born again when America was new to us human beings. Reverence for life, the will to live so strong in all. Rivers free to run their courses, lakes shimmering like mirrors, towering clouds and lightening striking all across the open plain, the bone deep terror of its awesome vigor.

Ah, so, I hear the naysayers refuting this idyllic description, but what if it was just that way? What if the air was so clear you could see for miles, what if every body of water was drinkable? What would it feel like in virgin woods with the whole pageant of living things vigorous and free? What sounds, fragrances and piercing colors would we see agasp in the virgin wood? I wonder…

Much much later the new European immigrants, hungry for land and the very freedom they denied its Native People, a young teacher penned this poem which became the source for America the Beautiful, beloved song of our nation.

Oh beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self, their country loved
And mercy more than life

America, America may God thy gold refine
‘Til all success be nobleness
And every gain divined

And you know when I was in school
We used to sing it something like this, listen here

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain

But now wait a minute, I’m talking about
America, sweet America
You know, God done shed his grace on thee
He crowned thy good, yes he did, in brotherhood
From sea to shining sea

You know, I wish I had somebody to help me sing this
(America, America, God shed his grace on thee)
America, I love you America, you see
My God he done shed his grace on thee
And you oughta love him for it
‘Cause he, he, he, he crowned thy good
He told me he would, with brotherhood
(From sea to shining Sea)
Oh Lord, oh Lord, I thank you Lord
(Shining sea)

Alexander Courage and Samuel Ward wrote what came to be the song best loved among hundreds written – each inspired by the poem by Katherine Lee Bates. She penned the poem after a trip during which she observed the stunning beauty of the West. She was a professor at Wellesley College on her way to teach in Colorado Springs.

I hope with all the strength in me that this anthem can spur a rebirth of the original land and its people, and that us late comers, immigrants all, will make room for our multicultural society, our E Pluribus Unam. You see, we became the great idea stimulated by this Land, this Place. May we restore Her, restore Ourselves to higher purpose, to make that American Quilt we dreamed of when we sought to govern ourselves anew. Oh America! Oh, Liberty, may we breathe that fulsome air again and may we obtain that clarity of mind to see who we are today and who we must become again so that freedom reigns among us all.