Myths to Live By, Part 2: the Dependent Goddesses

10 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER: An Invocation to Three Goddesses

For our prayer, I want to recapture some of the prayers of ancient Greeks, to three of the female figures that became goddesses: Persephone the daughter, Demeter the mother, and Hera the wife. They are simple prayers, but hear what simple human things they are praying for:

PERSEPHONE – help me to stay open and receptive.

DEMETER – teach me to be patient and generous, help me to be a good mother.

HERA – help me to make a commitment and be faithful.

Let us claim those petitions as our own:

Help us to stay open and receptive.

Help us to be patient and generous, to be good mothers.

Help us to make a commitment and be faithful.

Help us reclaim these gentle parts of ourselves, that we might become more whole.

Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By”, Part Two

According to Greek mythology, the three Fates spin out the thread of our lives, stretch that thread as far as they choose, and cut it when they will. That was their way of saying life is a gift of unknown length. During the little span of life we are allotted by the Fates, we often puzzle over just what kind of gift it is, this gift of life. We wonder who we think we are, or who we should be, what we think we’re doing with our few years, and how to pull it all together in a better way. We try to find the path that feels most true, most worthy of a gift so short, yet so precious. We try to live a life that makes a story worth telling.

The question of who we are is complicated because there are so many levels to it, so many competing scripts. Babies in the crib have personality styles that are still a part of them twenty, fifty, eighty years later. Some of them whine, some gurgle and coo, and the odds are those dispositions will remain parts of their characteristic styles. This is what makes children become later attracted to some stories and myths, but not to others. In some, they recognize a part of themselves, and the story gives it words and form. In other stories, they see nothing but senseless make-believe.

I’ve been aware of much of this in my own life. The stories that have been most important to me stories like ‘The Little Red Hen,’ ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and the story of the Greek god Proteus who remained something sacred even when he changed shape’these are nearly all expressions of styles that my parents and relatives assure me I had exhibited while I was still in early childhood. The stories were attractive because they gave voice to parts of my own soul. And the stories and proverbs that are most important to you probably also reflect personality traits that have been yours since infancy.

So if we look at our dominant scripts, or myths, and then look within, at our own psychobiography and whatever innate styles life has given us, we see several layers, some reinforcing and some conflicting with the others, like the voices of the three goddesses in the invocation I read you. And when we look outside of ourselves toward our larger world, there are also many scripts in which we play large or small roles. Family, friends, and peer groups have their own ideas of how things should be, so we learn to play parts in many different kinds of scripts. Some of them feel unnatural or wrong, but we get used to them: we learn to play roles that we would not have chosen, and in which we never feel fully comfortable. A society also has myths it lives by, and roles it assigns to its citizens: consumer, follower, warrior.

The picture of who we are and why we are living the lives we are living is a picture made complicated by the fact that there are so many different roles thrust upon us, so many levels of scripts in which we play small or large parts. And the best way we have of finding our way through this maze, of getting a better picture of who we are and what parts of our life fit or do not fit, is by sorting out the stories we are living out.

We could do this by talking about fairy tales, children’s stories, movie or television scripts, or even the words to popular songs. But this subject is so full it can get out of hand almost immediately, so I thought it would be more manageable, and perhaps more helpful, to spend two sermons going back to some of the classic character styles that the Greeks molded into their Olympian deities that show some of the enduring attitudes with which women in all eras have been able to identify.

Three of these seven goddesses form a kind of trinity. Jean Shinoda-Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, calls them the Vulnerable Goddesses, because all were either seduced or raped by male gods. You could also call them the Dependent Goddesses, because they required men or families in order to be complete. These goddesses were Hera, Demeter, and Persephone, whom the Romans called Juno, Ceres, and Proserpine. Together, they form the trinity of wife, mother, and daughter, and if the majority of men wrote the scripts, these would be the main roles assigned to women.

If you’re my age, you grew up when these were the roles all women were expected to fill: the age of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed and the rest of them.

After World War II, our society strongly endorsed the submissive and compliant roles of daughter, wife and mother for women. Women went to college to get their ‘Mrs. Degree’ and, once married, often dropped out of school. American women were not stopping at having two children, but were having three, four, five, or six. By 1950 the birthrate in the United States equaled India’s for the first and only time (Jean Shinoda-Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman, p. 28-29). These were the years of Hera and Demeter.

But if you grew up when Jonobie did, it was a world of very different expectations for women, as she learned from her mother: very different goddesses, which we’ll talk about in two weeks.

We all know the roles and stereotypes of wife, mother and daughter so well, it’s hard to see what we could hear that’s new. While wondering how I could get your attention, I remembered a conservative friend I used to have who hated to have her assumptions challenged. Once she said to me in exasperation, ‘I hate it when people make me think – it’s irritating!’ But everyone is irritated when their comfortable assumptions are challenged. So that’s what I want to do this morning: irritate you and, hopefully, let us see some things differently.

To do it, I’ll combine these ancient mythic roles with modern biology. Liberals like to quote biological studies showing that homosexuality is encoded in our brains before we are born, because it makes homosexuality as natural as left-handedness. There, science is on the side of liberals.

But on the subject of woman being designed for nurturing roles like motherhood, the same biologists using the same methods have supported conservative biases.

The biases of social and political liberals of the past thirty years have said women can compete with men, that it’s just cultural conditioning that makes women seem designed for roles of motherhood and homemaker.

No, the biases of liberal social and political ideology have been much stronger and more arrogant than that. They have made it clear that choosing a career is preferable to choosing the ‘old’ roles of wife and mother. After the first service this morning, a woman came through the line to tell me she had been a Unitarian for over fifty years. She grew up in the 50s, went to college to get her Mrs. degree, got married, and raised a family ‘ which she found profoundly fulfilling. But for about two decades in her Unitarian churches, she heard her choices reviled from the pulpits, in adult programs, and during coffee hour. Looking back, the liberal song of the 70s seems to have been ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ It was a dumb song, and did violence to some of our own women.

And it was ironic that, from about the 1960s through perhaps the 1980s, when it was politically and academically incorrect to suggest that we, like all other animals on earth, came with biologically shaped and directed behavioral programs, social scientists in psychology, sociology and anthropology were studying and publishing a large number of papers showing that without the role of biology, we simply can’t explain the difference between men and women. (For an excellent and dispassionate book on this, see Carl Degler’s 1991 In Search of Human Nature.) The sexes are profoundly different in deep ways that are not the result of education but biology. Women are made for relating with others, caring about them, nurturing them ‘ all the traits that we identify with the role of Mother.

The differences between boys and girls are apparent in the first hours after birth. Girl babies are much more interested than boys in people and faces; the boys seem just as happy with an object dangled in front of them.

From the outset of life, girl babies show a greater interest in communicating with other people. One study involves babies of only 2-4 days old. It shows that girls spend almost twice as long as boys maintaining eye contact with a silent adult, and girls also look longer than boys when the adult is talking. The boys’ attention span was the same, whether the adult was talking or not’showing a relative bias towards what they could see, rather than what they could hear. . .

This female bias towards the personal shows itself in other ways. At four months old, most baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers; boys usually cannot. A one-week-old baby girl can distinguish a baby’s cry from a background of general noise of a similar volume. Baby boys cannot. (Anne Moir, Brain Sex, p. 56)

Boys will make up stories full of zap, pow, and villainy. Girls’ narratives focus on home, friendship, emotions; the boy will tell the story of the robber, while the girls tell the same tale from the point of view of the victim . . .

Of course we all remember, from the playground, girls and boys who did not conform to this pattern. Indeed, they stick in the mind precisely because they were so different from most of the other girls and boys.’ (Brain Sex, pp. 59-60)

What all the innate differences add up to is what poets and regular people alike have been saying for centuries. Women are the gender with a higher awareness of and sensitivity to the existence and needs of other people. They come wired to care about the needs of their children. Both biologists and religious conservatives say it is very significant that there is no known culture in which childrearing is done mostly by men. This recognition that females have a natural role as mates and mothers is so widespread, so obvious, it describes females of every species we know, including ours.

So when religious or political conservatives fight for laws that define and defend women’s roles as mothers and wives, when they oppose abortion as violating a natural law so ancient it could be called the will of the gods ‘ when they do this, they are standing on some solid ground. And they would say what biologists say: that when we find exceptions to these rules, they stand out precisely because they are so unlike the norms. And laws, they say, should be grounded not in exceptions but in the rules, the norms, the deep voice of gods of nature, reflected in the way things really are.

Are you irritated yet? We liberals always assume that science is on the side of our political biases, but sometimes it is not.

And these deep predispositions in many women come up again and again. My favorite line in Jonobie’s Affirmation of Faith was when she said the reason she couldn’t succeed in a man’s world as her mother had done was not because of sexism, but because she had no passion inside of her for it. That kind of passion, as the Greeks knew, is the presence of a god. Jonobie has different goddesses directing her life than her mother did, and some of them are more like the traditional and biological tendencies of women than her mother’s were ‘ though as she and I discussed it, her guiding spirit, or goddess, isn’t Hera or Demeter, but Hestia: one we’ll talk about in two weeks.

Passion means the presence of a god. The word ‘enthusiasm’ contains the whole story. Look it up: it means to be filled with a god. And we must go where we are filled with gods, not where we have no passion for something.

I was reminded of a paragraph I read years ago by a Canadian psychologist named Sandra Witleson:

To have power, like riches or lovers, one has to want it, work for it, and strive to maintain it. Men will make the most extraordinary sacrifices of personal happiness, health, time, friendships and relationships in the pursuit and maintenance of power, status and success. Women won’t; most of them simply are not made that way.’ (Brain Sex, pp. 161-2). In other words, they have no passion for it.

Even at the simple chemical level, hormones play an important part in making woman the less aggressive sex. Estrogen, for instance, has a neutralizing effect on the aggression hormone, testosterone. Several clinical studies show how the female hormone can rescue violent males from extremes of aggressive behavior. It has even been used to control the behavior of male sex offenders.’ (Brain Sex, p. 79)

And another woman scientist wrote that ‘Marriages work, against all the odds, not because women are submissive, and accommodate their domineering males; marriages work because women’s natural social skills ‘ it’s been called ‘social intelligence’ ‘ enable them to manage a relationship so much better than a man. Women can predict and understand human behavior better than men, can sense the motives behind speech and behavior; so, if he is the engine of the ship, she is the rudder. She is also the navigator, because she alone has the chart and knows where the rocks are.’ (Brain Sex, p. 140) Notice there is no hint of inferiority in that woman’s description of women, just profound difference. But it’s a very different notion than seeking ‘sensitivity training’ to make men respond more like women, one of the dated liberal fads of the 70s and 80s. If you’re younger and have never heard of this, it’s because it didn’t work.

The message of biology is that there are sets of choices hard-wired, that we are not free to choose otherwise because it won’t feel natural or right to us. That’s almost exactly what the Greeks were trying to say by calling these things gods. They are eternal parts of the human condition. The Greeks saw the Dependent styles as the traits of being open, receptive and committed, the traits praised in the prayer this morning. And those, they identified with the female rather than the male styles of being ‘ as poets have always done, too.

So biology seems pretty strongly in the corner of political and religious conservatives on the subject of some of the roles nature or God have equipped women for. All this will bring a satisfied grin to the face of conservatives, and will often bring an irritated grimace to the faces of liberals, won’t it?

Now here we have ancient Greek myths of Hera, Demeter and Persephone ‘ the roles of wife, mother and daughter ‘ and findings of modern biology saying that yes indeed, these styles of being are programmed, hard-wired, into women. They are both natural and enduring parts of the human condition.

How would understanding this challenge our views of women, including some of the women here today? The liberal view of thirty years ago, that there are no permanent differences between the sexes, that it’s all about education rather than biology ‘ these views are wrong. They are not true to sciences, and not true to human nature.

I’ll continue this in two weeks when we consider the other kind of goddesses, the powerful and independent ones. There too, however, there will be an unpleasant surprise, for the most powerful of the independent goddesses is firmly in the camp of conservatives.

Jonobie’s mother sounds like she would fit in any Unitarian church in the country and be on the right side of most discussions about women. But Jonobie’s story is one of the very different stories characteristic of a great number of women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, as you can learn by talking with some of them in this church. Unitarianism has long been so identified with the assumptions of political liberalism that for many, it simply is liberal politics, with hymns and occasional candles. But I think cultural, political and religious liberals, in order to live in the present rather than the past, need to revisit and expand our understanding of the great range of spirits that guide the women among us and in the larger world.

I said I wanted to irritate you. But I don’t mean the kind of irritation that just causes a blister. I mean the kind of irritation that a grain of sand is, when it gets inside an oyster ‘ the kind of irritation that might, with time and work, produce a pearl of wisdom.