'Church' from a different perspective

Feb 17, 2006 18:23

I've been meaning to update my LJ for the past week, having been completely blown away (in the good sense) by attending a concert performance of the Soweto Gospel Choir last Friday night.

Some Seriously Fun 'Churching' Going On )

vocation, religion

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nzlaura February 18 2006, 04:12:27 UTC
Fascinating post! The Soweto Gospel Choir sounds like an amazing experience.

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revdorothyl February 21 2006, 05:13:48 UTC
Definitely! See it if you get the chance!

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willowgreen February 18 2006, 04:41:51 UTC
I'm not talking about "churching" in the sense of performing a ritual to re-admit a woman who's recently been through childbirth back into the public worship of a Catholic church (yes, one of my Roman Catholic professors in seminary told us she'd actually been "churched" after the birth of her first child, before her growing feminist consciousness brought the implications about ritual impurity and women's reproductive systems into unpleasant focus for her).Fascinating. I don't know if I'd ever heard of this ritual before. But it made me think how cool it might be, if there were some kind of positive, public ritual acknowledgment of the changes a woman goes through when she gives birth. After you have a baby, complete strangers walk up to you and say how beautiful your baby is, and that feels great. But hardly anyone walks up to you and says what a beautiful *mother* you are. Any acknowledgment a woman does get is almost invariably private. I wonder whether women who went through this ritual in years past might have experienced it like ( ... )

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revdorothyl February 21 2006, 05:12:22 UTC
...it made me think how cool it might be, if there were some kind of positive, public ritual acknowledgment of the changes a woman goes through when she gives birth.

Actually, that's what my professor had intended, when she and her friends revived the medieval (I think she said it was medieval) Catholic ritual of "churching" the new mother. It was only later that the possible "dark side" of the particular way that ritual was set up and its underlying rationale caught up to her.

I think you're right, that what the Church in all its forms needs is a ritual that -- without raising imaginary issues of ritual impurity, etc. -- recognizes that a woman has been spiritually as well as physically transformed, to some extent, by the experience of becoming a mother.

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