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WOMEN AND HEALING IN NORTH AMERICA l 1255 As each person speaks, she plants some crocus seeds in a pot of earth. With their fingers they feel the potential of dirt to nourish these seeds; they remember that seeds begin in darkness and emerge with both predictable and surprising characteristics. The plant is a gift for the daughter. As it blooms, the women want her to remember their collective bonding and care, the daring of her mother and her own willingness to dare. The members end by singing a chant about change, the change wrought in them by their divine mother, by the exigencies of life and death, and by their own actions. Future Directions New Feminist Ritual is a young movement. Like every struggle for justice, it requires persistence and imagination. Its future depends on sharing the burden of its rigors: listening carefully to one another, speaking honestly about what happens, paying attention to details , trying what is not comfortable, pushing beyond boundaries, regular evaluation, correction of what does not help, studying what scholars are writing, developing new leaders, and time, lots of time needed to plan and lead new ritual forms. Already some changes are institutionalized in some churches and synagogues, such as language to describe human beings, ordained women, and corrections and additions to sacred texts where the interpretations are blatantly inaccurate, such as expanding a genealogy to include the names of the mothers (Remembering the Women). However, words for God are still overwhelmingly male; female metaphors are still verboten, and the eagerness or even willingness to learn from the daily stuff of life experiences of each person in any community, large or small, which leads to all these changes, is minimal. The vision of New Feminist Ritual requires changing fiercely protected truths and traditions. As illustrated in the above examples, New Feminist Ritual is not about a wholesale disregard of traditions but rather is a careful critique of them, keeping what is good and true, letting go what is not. As with other deeply ingrained attitudes that perpetuate injustice, such as racism, homophobia, and classism, this kind of change is not easy. It is about transforming a way of life. New Feminist Ritual embodies practices where power is shared rather than centralized , where claims of truth evolve rather than remain static, and where all our experiences, of pain and pleasure , are acknowledged as essential components of our ritual expressions. SOURCES: From the beginning of the New Feminist Ritual movement, Ann Pat Ware and Marjorie Procter-Smith have been pivotal in its development. Ware’s publication New Words for Old Hymns and Songs (2000) and her research to add the names of the mothers in the genealogy in the book of Matthew, as published in J. Frank Henderson’s Remembering the Women (1999), are examples of some of her work. Procter-Smith’s books In Her Own Rite (2000) and Praying With Our Eyes Open (1995) have offered both critique and imagination to provide concrete directions for change. Ritual examples help as well. Those cited in this essay can be found in full in Janet Walton’s Feminist Liturgy (2000), or in the case of Big Woman, from artist Elizabeth Schell. WOMEN AND HEALING IN NORTH AMERICA Susan M. Setta IN NORTH AMERICAN history and throughout the world, healing has been predominantly a woman’s art. Nevertheless, historical studies undervalue and underrepresent women’s healing arts. Regardless of the time or place, women’s healing systems share common characteristics. First, women develop faith systems that support believers in times of sickness and in times of health; physical illness is never their only concern. Second, women’s healing arts distinguish themselves from scientific medicine by focusing on the totality of a person’s experience of a particular illness rather than solely on the disease. Because they see a connection between the ailments of the body, the ills of the soul, and disruption of community bonds, women combine palliative treatments for the body, spiritual comfort for the soul, and community rituals to empower the patient. Many women’s systems favor natural remedies, but others comfortably combine science and natural healing. Women healers view the spiritual cause of disease as more important than its physical symptoms; the first step toward a cure is spiritual diagnosis. Illness arises from any combination of sin, spirit or demon possession , or bad thought. Most religious healing systems see breach of their law as the main cause of disease—some go so far as...

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