2 – english syntesis

National seminar of the Italian Grassroots Communities Castel San Pietro Terme (Bologna), november 1st-3rd, 2013

“It’s easy to say God …” The aim of the seminar was to promote a better awareness around the subject of God/The Divine in the Italian CdBs, taking stock of the current scientifical research, which is concerning us not only as believers but also as human beings who live on this planet. We also wanted to understand the value of our being on earth while “caring” for one another and for every living creature, starting from our everyday life and spirituality. As well as listening to scholars, men and women of science, philosophy, and theology, we have hosted the Women Groups operating within the CdBs, who, together with other women groups, have been for years following a path of faith and freedom starting “from their own selves”. In the afternoon of the first day, we have been listening to the reports by prof. Gianfranco Biondi, full professor in Anthropology at the Università de L’Aquila, and by prof. Giulio Giorello, full professor in Philosophy of Science at the Università di Milano. The former developed his speech (“Products of mere evolution”) around the idea that life in the universe is an accidental phenomenon, not depending on any outer project. Selection instead is not accidental: it is a mechanism that chooses organisms based on the most suitable characteristics to their environment, and by so choosing, it perpetuates life. When we say “evolution”, we are not giving a moral opinion or judgement of value, but simply mean change. In this sense, a bacterium is not inferior to us, only less complex. The line of descent that led to the homo sapiens separated from the one that led to the current chimpanzees six million years ago. From that moment, different species have succeded one another, but also lived together, forming an “evolutionary bush”. Down to some decades ago, it was believed that we and the Neanderthalians were two varieties of the same species; now it has been proved that we are two different species: Homo neandethalensis and Homo sapiens. As far as the evolution-faith theme is concerned, prof. Biondi made clear he was solely referring to the position of the Vatican, the one he knows better, and the one that has an influence on the debate all over the country. Whereas Pius XII recognised that “both evolutionism and creationism are hypothesis with which to discuss”, John Paul II has accepted evolutionism for all living beings but Man, because in this case there would be an “ontological leap”. Within the human being there would coexist a biological nature ruled by evolution, and a non-biological nature, the soul, originating from God. For evolutionists, instead, the moral side too has an evolutionary nature, and there are experimental proofs of this statement. For example, feelings of compassion (“emotional contagion”) and empathy can be found also in the primates. In the humans, there has later been a large development of moral attitudes related to the social and political history of popluations, but these have just grown over an evoluntionary root. Prof. Giorello’s report (“Atheism between justice and freedom”) started with the statement that the copernican revolution was one of the turning points in modern culture, and not just in the scientifical field, as it marked the emerging centrality of moral matters. He then went on to quote Giordano Bruno, who, in his Cena delle Ceneri, almost reached the point of atheism: there is no need to look for God in the heavens anymore, because if God exists, he is within us, more intimate to us than what we are to ourselves. Already Augustine, in the fourth book of his Confessions, had said: “I sought Thou my Lord, and did not understand Thou were within me more than I thought”. Prof. Giorello asks himself a double question: whether a form of religion that doesn’t rhyme with servitude is possible, and on the other hand, whether the idea of a militant atheism may not also run the risk of turning into a form of servitude, if pursued in a dogmatic, intolerant way, based for instance on a sort of religion of science and technology. He then went on to talk about his personal relationship with Cardinal Martini, whom he knew in 1987 by means of the Nonbelievers’ Chairs. These courses were treating such subjects as the origin and developement of the universe, nature and physical knowledge, evolutionism and evolutionary psychology : central topics for nowadays’ cultural debate. Cardinal Martini found it very important that nonbelievers could teach and discuss with believers in front of an

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audience, and he would not oppose believers to nonbelievers, so much as thinking believers/nonbelievers to non-believers/believers who give up the responsibilty of using their brain. This was quite an opening towards a sort of ecumenism in which Christianity doesn’t feel it owns something more than other religions. In the face of big topics like the “Big-Bang theory” or the “intelligent design”, Martini used to wonder whether in such a pluralistic society as ours one could find, within Islam, or Buddhism, or even Woodoo, ways of life with the same paradoxical value of Christianity, as seen through the centrality of the eucharistic experience and the eccentricity of the social context. On Saturday morning, the writer and researcher at the Libera Università delle Donne di Milano Luciana Percovich has centred her report on the tenth chapter of Merlin Stone’s book When God Was a Woman (“Decoding the myth of Adam and Eve”), although with some premises. In the long course of human history, at least in the last one hundred thousand years – and well documented in the last ten thousand – Sacred was the dimension including what is now owned by science and religion, and by religion we here mean the three monotheisms born around the Mediterranean. Remaining within this area, we have a great amount of archaeological evidence, from cave paintings, to various instruments, to female figurines. Among the so-called “Paleolithic Venus figurines”, the earliest known instrument for measuring time (see above: sacred which include science and religion), was found in Laussel, France. It represents a naked woman, her right arm up and holding a horn, on which 13 dents are carved, representing a lunar calendar of 13 months corresponding to the 13 moons of a season cycle, and 13 are also the periods happening in the female body in relation to the lunar cycles. This goddess dates back to about 30,000 years ago, and is the symbloical translation of the cyclic flowing of time, based on the phases of the moon, and relating to the cycles in female bodies. In Europe, during the time when continents were still greatly covered by ice, we find steatopygias (“with large buttocks”) Venus figurines in un uninterrupted sequence, going from Spain through Italy to Siberia. It is undeniable that the female body, especially while pregnant – and in some of the figurines this is quite evident – represents the continuity of life, the promise of life renewal, the source of nourishment and abundance: basically, it is the metaphore of the aknowledged fact that all of us, male and female, animals and not, come to life through a female body, as through a “threshold” to this here dimension. It is reductive to interpret these images as just symbols of fertility and fecundity, as these “goddesses” are also the symbol of the regulating principle of self-renovating existence. In her reasearch about myths of creation in the different continents, Luciana Percovich has discovered that these myths, albeit using different names, all describe the creation of the world as performed by a female entity. The powerful female deities worshipped on the Zagros Mountains, at Jericho, at Gobelki Tepe, Catal Huyuk and in Egypt, have later come together in the goddess Isis, carved as alone first, and later with the little figure of the Pharaoh in her lap, like an early representation of our Madonnas, until the goddess disappears into the simplified styling of the throne, symbol of the Pharaoh’s power. This example alone shows the passage from a civilisation centred on a female principle, to a patriarchal civilisation, through a process of transformation, sometimes a violent one, taking place around the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age, between 3,000 and 1,000 b.C. It is during this phase that the concept of the divine as detached from that of the cosmos takes place, down to the invention of the idea of transcendence. In the myth of Adam and Eve, Luciana Percovich analizes some symbols. First of all the snake, which was originally worshipped as feminine, and was often related to wisdom and prophecy rather than to fertility. It is firstly a symbol of regeneration (in spring, when the cycle of life starts again, it chanegs its skin). A lot of goddesses are linked to the snake, either because they hold it in their hand or wear it around their neck, or because part of their body is in the shape of a snake. In the Greek temples of the oracle, a “pythoness” used to prophesy, and maybe it is surprising to know that the terms “pythoness” and “prophetess” have later become synonyms of “prostitute”. In the tale of Adam and Eve, what was so far considered a positive symbol is turned to negative. To follow the advice of the snake means to lose Eden, to lose everything.

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Another symbol Percovich takes as an example is that of the tree, always considered in the past as the element of communication betweeen the three levels of the world (underworld, earth, and heaven). The sycamore tree was planted nearby the altar of the Goddess. To put the snake on the tree, and have it talk with a woman, meant to take the three central elements of the previous civlisations’ sacred world, and present them from an upside down perspective: from symbols of life, they are turned into symbols of death. The “fall” of Man has represented the end of being part of a whole, in which the divine was not separated from the natural because everything was sacred, from the preparation of food, to the relationship with animals, to sexuality. Before that time, sexual pleasure related to the body and the encounter of bodies were considered the most sacred practice. In order to talk about Mary Daly, Letizia Tomassone (waldesian theologian and pastor) has followed the latter’s activity as theologian since the time when, after having clamorously abandoned the Church at Harvard in 1971, her separatism started to get more and more profound, to the point of declaring that anything that has to do with the Church is the embodiment of a “Patriarchal Farce”. But before leaving classical theology completely behind, she presented us with a feminist analysis of the concept of God, which has in itself become a classic: Beyond God the Father. Theological language, according to Mary Daly, has taken the power of speech away from women, leaving them dumb, and so producing a colossal lie. “In the beginning was the word”, that same word extorted from the women burnt alive at the stake, that same word that is sealing eyes and mouth and mummifying the believers, male or female. Jesus opens the eyes of the blind and makes the dumb speak, whereas the Pauline tradition is keeping the women silent in the churches. Only the rage of the Furies and of the Amazons can re-open eyes and lips for the women, and especially their Third Eye, whose vision irradiates towards new directions, new ways of being. The work of the theologian goes behind the Christian dogmas, and turns them upside down. If God is male – Daly reveals – then the male is God, and everything opposing the God, like rebellion or sin, is then female. Moreover, the suggestion of conceving God not trough a name, which reifies and encloses, but as a verb, which moves and transforms the collective and cosmic dimension, is a crucial point in Beyond God the Father. Later on, Daly will state the the same word “God” is irretrievably patriarchal, and therefore we must go beyond God. Letizia Tomassone then refers to a recent article in which a black female theologian thanks Mary for not having publicly shared her reply to a letter which the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde wrote to her and then published in the 1980s. She says that Daly prefered not to use her pride and authority to silence the young and yet unknown poet who had dared oppose her. The letter in fact was critical towards white western feminism for taking itself as its own and only measure, and was relating the efforts of native and black women for making themselves heard without being interpeted or used instrumentally. After Mary Daly’s death, her reply to Lorde was found, together with the request of keeping the conversation private. Even in this way Daly makes space for another from herself: this is the space that lets the divine flourish, as well as the wild, the witchy, and all that moves and transforms, and travels towards the Archaic Future. Giovanni Franzoni, of CdB San Paolo in Rome, in his report about Jesus’ God, has underlined how in the years between Jesus’ life and the first writings about him, his figure is progressively integrated with other representations, according to the different recipients of the evangelical message. Together with this, he also proposed to dig into the Jewish concept of God by referring to a Jewish literature beyond that of the “canonical” books, a literature later gathered in the Mishnà and stabilised in the Talmud. Franzoni articulated his speech around four points, with the premise that he agrees with the evolutionism experts: evolution in the universe doesn’t need God, and on this topic he thinks a lot has been said which is very interesting. Yet, he defines himself as believing in God, a God he likes to define as foreign, as foreign is also Jesus himself, the emissary, and as foreign are his followers in this world. In the logic of economy, to spend energy, money or time for those who have little to live and can only do it badly, is a waste. No wonder if, at a certain point, wise people like the priests of the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate sent Jesus to the cross. The “pathology” has entered society

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through a “foreign” God, a God who may have sent others than Jesus, like Buddha or Ghandi, trying to conatct us with meekness and mercy, not domination . But let’s come to the points Giovanni Franzoni has treated. The first point in question is about God as spirit (Ruah), breathing, blowing, moving. By the by, he wondered what is meant by “in the beginning” (In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth). It doesn’t necessarily mean “the beginning of the world”. In the Talmud, for example, it is to be intended as “the beginning of the human condition”. For the human condition of the time (the Hebrew deported to Babylon, the exile) creation started when God began to breathe and promote love, proximity. The moment when listening and acceptance of the word starts, is the moment when bereshit start to exist (“in the beginning”), and the heavens get closer to the earth. God wants a free response, and can only have it by creating a void in which to make space for his creatures, without suffocating them with his love; from them God sometimes gets away, to return as a beggar for love, in search of a free reply. The first representation of God that Jesus is giving us, is on the banks of the Jordan river, where Jesus, as an observant Jew, goes to be baptised, and then feels the Spirit within himself. It’s a spirit inviting him to announce that the Kingdom is near. Here again is the concept of proximity: the heavens are getting closer to the earth. The second point is concerning God as tempter, tempting because he wants convincing, free, disinterested replies. Tales about Moses and the same Book of Job are interwoven with the idea of a continuous defiance, even to the risk that God may be reproved and may repent. In the Talmud it is not uncommon to see God caught red-handed by his children, and exclaiming: “my children have won me”; so, God is happy when he is won by his own children’s freedom. The third point shows God as chaser of souls, pushing us to seek rather than wait til we get to him. Jesus doesn’t stop in one place to teach, but goes from the Jordan to Samaria, and by the longest route, getting tired even, in order to go and find people. If Jesus gives himself this duty of looking for sinners, for the lost, the marginal, the impure, it is because he feels that God gave him this mission of making the heavens become closer to the earth. The fourth point is about the God whom Jesus calls Abbà, the God of closeness, of trust, of abandon. Jesus has faith in God and knows that, having fulfilled his mission of proximity, the Father will resurrect him. Maybe this was the faith of Jesus. Originally, resurrection is just the consequence of having accepted the kingdom and of announcing it in the concreteness of life. So people are invited to eat and drink Jesus, not only in the eucharist, but also by assimilating his thought; and those who assimilate, those who eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus, will also follow him in the resurrection. The fruit of the faith in God is to remain into life in a different dimension, in a way of being completely “other”, immersed in the Divine. By the Cdb Women groups, and others, a two-voices report has been offered (“A thin line of future”), alternated by the reciting of short writings about the topics of previous conventions. Their speech will only briefly be related, as the women intend to send the whole report to the CdB European Convention. To tell their story, the women started from the latest national meeting, “Dismantling cages, weaving relationships. Where will the light winds of the Divine take us?”, held in 2012 at Cattolica, 25 years after an important seminar had for the first time addressed the issue “jewish-christian religion/women”, by the title The troublesome daughters of Eve. After that seminar, the CdB Women groups started to be born all over Italy, later met on the way by other researching female groups. The women told how their story has always been characterised by the practice of “dismantling cages” connected with the “weaving of relationships”. While in the early years their work was mostly aimed at reconnecting with the women of the Christian tradition of the previous centuries, or at finding biblical images of a motherly God to comfort their wish for freedom, at a certain point this was not enough anymore. A deeper need made them want to go further, and start investigating about God. Some important meetings on this subject have been recalled. The first, held at Monteortone (PD) in 2001 by the title “The divine: how to liberate it, how to say it, how to share it. Beyond Our Father”, in which the women started to contest the idea of a patriarchal God used to

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support wars and violence of all kinds. In the national meeting of 2002 “The divine: how to liberate it, how to say it, how to share it. In an asexual body”, they wondered about how to express “the divine in bodies who are hungry and thirsty, who are raped in time of war and peace, who are veiled in a burqa or violently unveiled on a screen, maimed by genital mutilations, exposed in the forced sexuality of prostitution, killed in the name of love”. In the meeting of Trent, in 2004, the Women groups have talked about how to share the Divine with the other women of the present times, and - in a debt of gratitude – with many women of the past who, by their experience and their writings, have helped them along the way. The title, “That Divine among us light-footed” was chosen because “we had experienced that the Divine is like a light wind, a breeze, refreshing and not annoying, a possibility never strictly conditioning, a desire donating freedom of thought and of travel…”. And in 2006, in Genoa, the Groups have meditated about “The Divine: to inhabit the void”. In that meeting a new phase of research was started, where the return to one’s wholeness as body-mind-emotions has become the way to defeat the “false full” surrounding us: to make void in order to discover a different spirituality. Women know it won’t be easy to use their “wisdom” in creating new dynamics in interpersonal as well as socio-political relationships, but it is exactly on this field they intend to prove themselves, aware that all over the world many women are liberating themselves and are working to this purpose together, so that, albeit slowly and among many contradictions, “a thin line of future” can advance further. On Sunday morning, after a communal moment of spirituality in breaking and sharing the bread, a plenary meeting took place, where lecturers answered questions from the participants and debated with them. The techincal Secretariat of the Italian Grassroots Communities Rome, 30 march 2014

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