The Life Impulse & The Divine Feminine

Here is this year's Alternative Advent Calendar, with all-ages-friendly daily prompts to help you experience this sacred season with more mindfulness and joy. Print it out on pretty paper and stick on your fridge. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good in practicing your Advent.

As always, church peeps: feel free to print/share/use this for your communities, with attribution. It all belongs to the Holy Spirit, but it's nice if people know where it comes from so they can sign themselves up for future offerings from me! 

CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTABLE CALENDAR! 
{and read on for a little essay on this year's theme}

[Caveat lector: if you read the words "The Divine Feminine" and you are tempted to move on and not read further, ask yourself why. Call yourself in. See that there might be something good for you here, especially if you ID as male. If you don’t feel it immediately, try a little harder. Stay with this practice through Advent. See what happens, and let me know. I’m so curious!]
TW: sexual assault and The Patriarchy in General
Something broke in me just about two years ago, when I couldn’t tear myself away from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, his petulant tears contrasted with Christine Blasey Ford’s quiet, steady, halting strength in telling how he had sexually assaulted her while his friend watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter...the uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense,” she said.
Whatever broke open in me, stayed broken. The fact that I am raising a girl child who has to worry about sexual assault, who experiences/witnesses sexual harassment in high school every day, and who knows she is growing up into a professional world still stacked against her is also fuelling my fury. I haven’t been so on fire since my freshman year in college, when I first took feminist theory and began to understand that patriarchy was no accident. It was intentionally funded, built, and has been meticulously maintained by steady infrastructure spending over almost the entire length of homo sapiens’ career so far (with the exception of a few remote mythological islands and tribes where women and nonbinary people got to experiment with executive power). And patriarchy’s crowning achievement was to convince us that God is male. 
Christians have been the best at fomenting this fiction--because, frankly, Jesus being male-bodied gave them a head start. [I always assumed God-as-Jesus, being a pragmatist and seeing how things were, chose a male body to avoid a few headwinds on an already difficult task.] 
A while back I started invariably using She pronouns for God, just to put a thumb on the scale of patriarchy. I figured I’d do this for 2,000 years or so. [More recently, I also started using They pronouns, which makes the most sense--the book of Genesis has God speak about Themselves in the plural. And if God really is in everything/everyone, including all of what it might mean to be male or female or nonbinary, They covers it. But just for this month...let’s talk about She.] 
Wendell Berry wrote in his marvelous poem, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front: 
So long as women do not go cheap 
For power, please women more than men. 

He goes on, in a seeming non sequitur: 
Ask yourself: will this satisfy 
A woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep 
Of a woman near to giving birth?
But it’s not a non sequitur. Think of Mary, belly round, trying to sleep through the din of the stable before the pains started. Think of her singing the Magnificat, another non sequitur--what, after all, does being pregnant have to do with “tearing down the mighty from their thrones?” 
Think of every woman who has taken her own life in her hands, handed over her body (not always willingly) to grow another human inside of her. Think of what childbearing costs a woman physically, emotionally & economically. Even in the 21st century, in the United States of America, women still regularly lose their lives giving birth. Especially Black women. And yet women keep being willing to give birth, even into a world such as this: climate chaos, racial terror, extreme gerrymandered income inequality. They do this because of the Life Impulse. 
The Life Impulse is the desire to create, protect, defend (without weapons! but with our own flesh) all that is vulnerable and tender and beautiful and possible. 
You don’t need a uterus to be fueled by the Life Impulse. Any of us can give birth, in the grandest sense. 
All of us contain divine feminine energy (even you, straight men!), which we can each define as we like (because, honestly, what the hell even is gender?). For the purposes of this calendar I want to name feminine energy as the Life Impulse: protective, procreative Big Structural Mom Energy. 

It is fierce. It does not violate the integrity of bodies, but grows them, nourishes and feeds them. It is not self-sacrificing, but symbiotic. It has strength, but knows when to yield; it has flexibility and “give.” Think of the epic stretchiness of belly skin, the wonder of a tiny cervix that can pass a baby watermelon. But don’t mistake its flexibility for hypocrisy or meekness! Here’s an except from Bess Kalb’s recent hilarious op-ed on paid family leave that is in a larger sense about the fierceness and flexibility of the Life Impulse: 
“Imagine the following medical hypothetical:
DOCTOR: We ran some tests and there is a watermelon growing inside you.
PATIENT: How do we get it out?
One of two ways. We either perform major abdominal surgery while you’re awake and hold your internal organs in front of a room of strangers that includes your romantic partner …
WHAT’S THE OTHER WAY?
It comes out a hole in your body the size of a gumball.
How long does it take to recover from that?
For the surgery? Best case, six weeks. You bleed and can’t walk up a flight of stairs. Longer if anything goes wrong. Downtime is shorter on the gumball path. 
What could go wrong?
Among other things, hemorrhage, pre-eclampsia, cardiomyopathy, thrombotic pulmonary embolism …. Then there’s the odd seizure and —--
OK! OK! Then it’s over? Life goes on?
Not really. The watermelon casts one of two spells on you.
What are the spells?
The first is the good spell: You will be willing to sacrifice your life to the watermelon and tend to its every need (it is a watermelon and can’t do anything) and if you don’t, it will die. You also cannot sleep more than three hours in a row because the watermelon needs to eat. And it eats your body.
What’s the bad spell?
Everything in the first spell plus you spiral into depression.
What are the chances of that happening?
About one in seven.
OK. So … what do you expect my employer to say about this?
Congratulations! See you Monday!”
~The Life Impulse is the willingness to have the “good spell” cast upon you. It strives, but never for itself alone, always for the good of all Creation. It draws power from the Divine Feminine and thrives in darkness, gestation, moontime. It stays hidden and protected in the early stages necessary for germination, but explodes outward at the right moment. The Divine Feminine knows how to morph, waxing and waning across the month, and changing across time from maiden, mother, queen, crone, each mode with its gifts. The Divine Feminine knows it will die, as will all created things. And at its best it is not afraid to die. It knows that its death, in fact, will give life to others. 

This year’s Advent calendar invites you to put the thumb on your own God-gendering scale, to spend time with the Divine Feminine, the Life Impulse in all of us. Some of the prompts are about doing traditionally “female” tasks; others are about gender-bending and gender-busting. You will read lost stories about women heroes, do activities that invite deep embodiment, spend time in the dark to germinate and spark your own Big Structural Mom Energy. 
From my Life Impulse to Yours, Beloved,
Rev. Molly

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