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Elspeth and Gordon Strachan 1985.
Labarum Publications Ltd, The Abbey, Dunbar, East
Lothian, EH42 1J P, Scotland.
Republished on our website with permission of the
authors
Contents
3. Yahweh and the Queen of
Heaven
i. In the shadow of the Goddess
ii. The patriarchal
spirit and hints of transcendence
4. The marriage of heaven and
earth
i. Yin and yang
ii. A question of numbers
iii.
The alchemical transformation
iv. Animus and anima
v. The
Judeo-Christian tradition
i. Made not in God’s image
ii. Woman: the
soul’s death
iii. The European witchcraft craze
iv. The schizoid
heresy
i. I’m OK-You’re OK
ii. The enduring
shadow of the Goddess
iii. Christian consequences
iv. The archaic fear
of nature
i. The return of the Goddess
ii.- Finding the
balance
Preface
This book began its life among the carrots and quiches of
the Netherbow wholefood restaurant in Edinburgh. As we chopped up the organic
parsnips for vegetable stew, cleared the tables and washed the dishes, it
occurred to us that we were involved in a more traditionally feminine sphere of
life. What we were doing was ‘woman’s work’; the vegetables we
were chopping had been gathered from the lap of ‘mother’ earth; they
had grown in ‘virgin’ soil and owed their health and beauty to the
beneficence of ‘mother’ nature, with her warm sunshine and
life-giving rains. The feminine imagery was very striking.
We enjoyed this work, knowing it to be healing, creative,
economically sound and of crucial importance in terms of health and wholeness,
but the church authorities who owned the Netherbow Arts Centre were
unimpressed. What we were doing seemed far too menial to them to be worthy of
serious attention. As an ordained minister and a history graduate we should
have been using our brains to preach and teach, not our hands to serve and
cook! But for us the excitement of the kitchen and of the Netherbow Arts Centre
as a whole was that it brought together head and heart, mind and hand, soul and
body, art and craft, and represented a more feminine approach in what we saw as
an overmasculine church and society.
We came to the Netherbow in 1974, at a time when groups
such as Christian Aid and Oxfam were pleading for more practical compassion to
be shown those millions of people in our world who are towards starving. They
urged us not just to give more money, but to recognise that all life on this
planet is one, that we are inextricably connected with each other. How we live
affects others, they said, and so we in the west must learn to live more simply
that others might simply live. In response to this challenge we decided to put
basic needs before luxuries and to make the kitchen and cottage garden, rather
than the theatre and galleries, the heart of the Netherbow. Although we
appreciated the arts as an essential part of life’s harmony and
creativeness, as well as a powerfully prophetic medium, it seemed to us that
before any harmony could be real the first priority was to recognise and meet
people’s basic needs. This changed our whole perception of life and our
attitude to lifestyle. It was for this reason that we could be found working
away in the restaurant, serving simple, vegetarian food and helping to dig our
tiny cottage garden to produce herbs, flowers and vegetables to grace our
tables. It became increasingly clear to us that what was needed was a new
understanding of the feminine and a release of the feminine qualities in
ourselves, our church and in society.
Another dimension to our desire to free the feminine was
our interest in ecology. We began to see that if all life is one, then we have
a responsibility not just towards our poorer neighbours, but towards all of
creation. Conservationists were telling us that ‘mother’ earth on
whom we depend for our very survival is exhausted and polluted by our
industrial expansion and greed. She is in a state of rape, they said, and
unless something is done to respect her needs and renew her fertility, we will
be in serious danger ourselves. We discovered in the bible that God’s
answer to the land’s need for rest and renewal was for every seventh year
to be fallow. This sabbatical year was an intrinsic part of the rhythms of
creation and a biblical conservation strategy for all of nature, including
humanity. Although the church refused to grant the Netherbow itself a
sabbatical, after six years there, we decided to leave and take one ourselves.
In an attempt to recover a sense of the rhythms of life and our unity with,
rather than. domination of nature, we went into the country to read and write,
and try our hand at gardening.
This book is one of the fruits of that sabbatical year.
Together we discussed, read and wrote about many of the issues covered here.
Elspeth felt particularly drawn to explore the meaning of the
masculine/feminine balance and the connection between women and nature,
feminism and ecology. Gordon was fired by the desire to study the Romantic
Movement and the bible’s attitude to nature. This book is the fusion of
our ideas. It was researched and written by Elspeth and edited by Gordon. The
whole process has been one of growth, discovery and sharing and we feel very
privileged to have been given the opportunity to think, study and work together
in the way we have.
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