3 Eras, Man, Woman & Union

We’re in the era of Woman. It’s Her turn now to design her own rituals, her own religion, interpret scriptures her way. “Feminist religion” they call it. Man controlled religion alone, cruelly excluded Woman from religion and ritual for thousands of years. That was the era of Man. We are just now at the beginning of the era of Woman. Perhaps 90 percent of earth is still in Man’s grip. Woman’s voice is finally being heard, myths and rituals are being revised, reinterpreted, even new ones created by Woman. But what about a time of Union? Wouldn’t it be lovely to reach the final stage of our evolution as a spiritual species? We’ve got to get thru this newly born era of Woman before we reach the era of Union, the 3rd and hopefully final era. So here we are, you, me, all of us, living when Woman has just barely gotten her Voice. It’s a great time to be alive, we are picking up momentum, the Sacred Feminine is taking off her veils.

But. Sigh. We’ve got a long way to go, “baby,” until we end up inventing and creating TOGETHER with our male teammates in the era of Union. Another thousand years?

It feels like the Dark Ages right before the Renaissance, yet it also feels like the beginning of the new Renaissance, the Woman Renaissance.

I have been reading the Flame Bearers by Kim Chernin (thank you Siobhan Houston for sending me this book!) and it’s triggered these kinds of ruminations and ponderings. I read this paragraph in an article about Jewish feminine spirituality:

“It is in the voices of women in the past three decades that we are discovering new disclosures of Torah in newly heard ways. Feminists are adding women’s points of view to the cornucopia of male-centered interpretations. Not only are they doing so in the area of exegesis, but also in the area of allegory and story-telling. E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women, Kim Chernin’s The Flame Bearers, and Anita Diamont’s The Red Tent are examples of novels whose themes reflect revisioned fictional tales of Jewish women in the past, present, and future. These feminist stories empower contemporary Jewish [and Christian, in my opinion] women through their fictional rendering of Jewish heroines and their creative visions of meaningful Jewish women’s ceremonies and ritual all within the context of Jewish tradition and Torah narrative.” http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-5713388_ITM

After reading the above I was struck with the idea that we’ve got a three era situation, but it isn’t Father, Son and Holy Spirit, like that Catholic mystic (what’s his name?) predicted. Rather it’s Man, Woman and Both; the latter of which I later thought would be better titled Union. [Added in: the Catholic mystic is Joachim of Fiore, just remembered!]

How long O Lord, O Lady, How long before we reach Union? We can’t heal the wasteland, can’t heal the nations, the earth, until we get both halves of the human race as equal participators in spirituality. At least we’re getting the world literate. Although I’ve read on the UN’s website we’ve got a long way to go there, too. Some of ’em gotta go thru the masculine era for how many centuries I wonder, before they can even accept the Sacred Feminine. Then it’s on to Union….

I’m hangin’ in there. How about you? (No sighing allowed).