Relate not separate
We are so used to dividing the world into EITHER / OR for our own survival. So we need to separate our lives, most times, into 'Heterosoc' (Saint Derek's term) and 'Homo', and into safe space and danger, spiritual / material, rational / irrational. And here are we, manifested and separated off from the Gathered Faithful and the Market Place by our habits.
But we must also work against these oppositions. Sure, at times they make sense, but when we get into our habits, we can also make these dualisms (EITHER / OR) into something positive. We can see them as a process of relating, not separating. We know we are Sisters, in and out of habit.
After all, we recognise the 'little bit of the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence' in everyone. We see the potential of all to be saved from the pains of Heterosoc. We try to see that everyone has the potential to spread Perpetual Indulgence.
We learn from the feminist value of relationship which is deeply critical of separatist thought-barriers. Behold the witness of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, when she said that these categorical separations are inherently oppressive.
Relationship should be seen as a central value in our mission.
We need to shift our focus from what is separate and different to seeing significance in what is related to or what appeals to us as Sisters. We can do this all too easily for charvering purposes. And every nun's convent walls can bear witness to the diverse trade that has been dragged back there, even if it scratches the backs of their stiletto heels. Dingo only knows.
Two gargles of Malibu, and any nun is able to see a relationship with anything that has a pulse and might be capable of being pushed onto the night bus.
The established religions - what we call the 'Vulgar' - spend so much energy on separation. There's sinner and goodie-goodie, and the notorious attempt to deny us our charvering-bits, by claiming to separate the 'sinner from the sin'.
The Hebrew for 'holy' ('kadosh'), in the Old Testament, literally means 'separate' or 'set apart'. The Old Testament is full of references to the Jewish people as being 'set apart to your God'. We must join all together in the power of the habit.
When we look to other views of the sacred, especially in our Dingoma, we see the message of relationships. And this is especially true when the message is tied to social justice. In Judaism too, there is also the mission of 'tikkun olam', the 'repair of the world', the human task of reunifying a fragmented creation.
We constantly have to deal with diversity and difference. So we seek a holiness, a sacred which is relational. And alternative.
We share in our worship of the Perpetual Organ and in the missions of Perpetual Indulgence and ridding the world of Stigmatic Guilt. For some Sisters, this is a mystical task which opens them to visions, even and often, chemical visions.
We seek unity in our visions. So we invoke the Beyond in a variety of names and images. For some Sisters this means an inclusive belief in the Real Presence of the Dingo. For others, this Dingo is a Symbol of the God/dess. For yet others, this is a pile of Dingo-dirt. But the Dingo is there in our Consecration Prayer.
So we have translated the Jewish custom of male circumcision, 'milah', which separates Jewish men from Jewish women, and Jewish men from Gentiles, into a relationship. We have translated it, mystically, into body piercing and tattooing, and the even more recent beautifying and tittifying practice of scarification.
We have redefined the holiness of that ancient circumcision rule into a social ritual of identity which all can share in, and get their hands on. Sisters have a special duty to bless all piercings (individually) and all tattoos (ditto), and you might even get your hands on a completely scarified arse.
At the beginning of our rituals, we often light a candle. It is a symbol of the Light of the Fire at the Rendez-Vous of Victory. At the end of the ritual, we extinguish the candle and this is the return to living with / in / against Heterosoc. We relate to both the lighted candle and the extinguished, just as we smell the different smells of both. Jewish tradition describes the 'shabbat' (Sabbath) as 'a taste of the world to come'. All tastes and smells to us are connectedness - symbols of the mystical world we inhabit.
Let us think beyond separatedness. Just as our self-identity as a Sister, our 'Nun-Entity', flows from being in habit to the secular life. Let us think of ourselves not as solids, but as fluids. Let us joy in our sacral fluidities which merge across the boundaries.
Ultimately, the Rule of Separation cannot tolerate Difference. Heterosoc demands the Other, the polluted, the damned, the persecuted. We interchange, we relate, we find the deep connections.
Let us run with the Dingo and Azaria in the wilderness and share the secrets of their desert hearts. Oooooo!
Anonymous poem in the American rural gay magazine RFD
The shaman is the healer of the tribe who performs the rituals and leads the dances. S/he changes gender and goes on time-travel. The shaman trains the next shaman and often fucks her/him as well.
The nun is nun and nun-priest, and also nun-shaman. The habit links together the barriers of gender, sex, weakness, power, sickness, wellness.
Wearing the habit means wearing our beliefs, the Dingoma, all over you. You carry the provocative symbols of Sister-power into the People.
You force into the open the responses of Heterosoc, the violent controls they put on us all, and the hidden controls.
So you can greet the love of strangers and dance with them. So you can spy out the revulsion of the Middle Class who try to look past you. You meet with the mad who flock to you and seek to handle you roughly.
When they slam their door, and raise their hand, and pull your veil, do not stay in that place. Your mission is accomplished there. Heterosoc screams its tormented dominion and you must go minister elsewhere in another lattie. Move with the speed of the Dingo and Baby-Wonder Azaria when they fly to meet at Hanging Rock for a Picnic.
Always wear the shoes of the Dingo that will transport you swiftly away. And carry the Personal Alarm, that is the Magic Cry of the Dingo against Heterosoc. Ooooo!
Behold your Habit glorifies you as Gender-Variant Nun. You are inner and outer, you are nurturing Father and protecting Mother. You are Faggot-Witch-Camp.
You are not subjected and your veiling is the covering of power.
Radical beliefs call for radical religions. New cultures need new religions (or the revival of very old ones). They will prepare us for the New Millennium.
So hail the women-worshippers of the Goddess. And hail the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, dancers at the Cosmic Feast with the Wild Women.
Damn the liberals in the churches and pulpits. They claim to be 'above it all' but their message is the same old 'divide and rule'. They are the ones who will 'admit' gay candidates into their vetting procedure for vocations. But they commission psychiatrists to make clinical judgements on the 'maturity' of the applicants. Their 'maturity' means a heterosexual marriage or the freezing shut-down they require of their 'ecclesiatical eunuch'.
Homosex to them is only 'genital sex'. It is 'objectively evil'.
Damn their sermons. They deny they are against homosexuality in itself, but they oppose all sexual activity outside marriage, hetero and homo. When you cry unto them that they ban homosexual weddings in their churches, they reply, 'of course', as if this was natural and moral.
These religious liberals are morally bankrupt. They deny the collective rights of all homos. They see Christianity only as the property of the individual and deny the collective voice of our witness and our particular claims.
The only ones they receive unto their collecting plates are the passive and the self-denying homos. The 'closeted' have always had their place at the churches' hearth through all the ages. They pose no practical problem and can dress themselves in ecclesial frocks. They have always been there, and were the truth known, probably have been the majority of the enthused. Religions have always secretly known that there is a total connection between the religious life and the sex life. So hail the Order of Perpetual Indulgence who unite them both and liberate them both.
It is only a problem when the homos publicly challenge the churches' sexism and heterosexism. So hail the courage of the women and the homos who have come out and visibly put themselves on the line.
Guilt is the unavoidable reality of humankind. It cannot be denied. Guilt can drive some into unconscious defences - obsessions and neuroses. The churches claim to spare this from their members. But they turn it into hysteria.
The Sisters perform the rituals of purification from Stigmatic Guilt. Just to see a Sister in habit is to have Stigmatic Guilt loosened from its foundations deep within.
Hail the psychic release of the Sister. The ecstasy of the Sister on heat.
The struggle is endless, the aims are boundless. We will see visions: the total transformation of Heterosoc and bringing down its towers and defences. And the world is born anew.
Chant by American radical fairy Peter Sonderburg
Even the oldest nuns in our Order admit that the crowning veil endows them with youth. The veil represents subjection for Vulgar nuns, but also dignity, and this came from the veil of the Roman matron and widow.
For us it is also the mix of male-female: the androgyne, who has a long history before Boy George. There are androgynes in Greek myth who combine male and female and entwine them into a new category of gender. The prophet Teiresias was turned into a woman and then into a man again so that Zeus could ask him whether woman enjoyed charvering more than man. (He said, 'yes, nine-tenths of the pleasure went to the woman.')
The androgyne is an ideal. S/he combines assertiveness, self-discipline with passion, nurturing and passivity. Having all the charvering, from both sides now, and the mental experiences and growing that go with that.
The androgyne is liberated for the communal good. S/he frees energy for the new life, the sort of energy that was previously wasted on frustration, depression and categorising everything as 'top' or 'bottom'. The androgyne floats above social conventions, and that includes all the dress codes for our clubs and open-air cha-cha-charvering.
The androgyne is also the new category, a New Other, defined neither as the oppressor/oppressed, dominator/dominated, giver/receiver, pusher/puller.
So look to your androgyne Veil. Fly that flag.
In "Discovering Queer Archetypes" by Bert Provost, a.k.a. Corona, gay neopagans are encouraged to surrender heterocentric images of the Goddess and the God in favor of more gay-sensitive icons. Provost's is a carnivalesque vision, reminiscent of contemporary punk writing:
In Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans, who founded the fairy circle in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, writes, "We look forward to regaining our ancient historical roles as medicine people, healers, prophets, shamans, and sorcerers.
Similarly, Harry Hay, a cofounder of the Radical Faeries (which constitutes a related but distinct tradition) proclaims,
We have been a SEPARATE PEOPLE . . . drifting together in a parallel existence, not always conscious of each other . . . yet recognizing one another by eyelock when we did meet . . . here and there as outcasts . . .
Spirit people in service to the Great Mother, healers and nurturers, VISIONARIES .. REBELS
Blossom of Bone, 269
Prejudice is the sum of negative attitudes from the 'ingroup' (here Heterosoc) against the 'outgroup' (us). Stereotypes are exaggerated beliefs to justify prejudice against the outgroup.
We nuns invite prejudice and discrimination, we wear its fabric on our bodies, glorified against itself. So we must ask 'Why?' about prejudice.
Prejudice has a function, it meets needs and goals for the ingroup (Heterosoc). It helps keep their minds small, it is a form of brain economy. It reduces the incoming load of information.
Heterosoc needs predictability and so prejudice helps to reduce the diversity of Homo-World for them. But we nuns display difference by manifesting.
Prejudice is also a vehicle to defend the Heterosoc ego. They see us as competitors for limited resources (typical capitalist stance) and so run us down. They build up their own self-esteem by pointing us downward. They feel better about themselves and less threatened.
Think what devastation a smiling nun does to Heterosoc.
Prejudice helps Heterosoc to imagine itself as a community, whereas it is not. By marshalling its members (falsely) together, they do not easily get the chance to question prejudice.
The key to breaking down Prejudice is to make the three Interventions.
Our manifesting means making the bigots' unconscious force itself into their conscious. Their automatic hatred is forced to become self-aware.
We alert the bigots about the target of their discrimination.
We force this into the mental, thinking part of their brain which can then get to work.
They have to justify their bigotry in the aware sector of themselves. That hurts them.
Manifesting means forcing the bigots into thinking us of individuals, whereas we look, as nuns, as if we belong to a group. That is only at first glance.
The Gathered Faithful are forced to look minutely at us. They cannot look away, even if out of the corner of their eyes.
The legal definition of prejudice in the USA includes the 'intention to harm'. We force the bigots into the open, into the public situation where their wrong-doing is shown to be due to malice, that it is false and consciously in disregard of the truth.
The traditional scapegoat theory has it that prejudice and hatred are the result of frustration which could not be discharged at its source. And so it was directed at a minority group which could not retaliate.
But this scapegoat theory is not adequate.
Why must WE account for motives in those who hate us?
This redirects the cause back to US.
WE would become the victims again. WE have to find the reasons.
More recent research seems to show that prejudice is the result of the ingroup being in a generalised mood.
This negative mood affects their social judgements.
Radical Fairie Circle, Berkeley, USA 1979