Its Saturday and the sermon is finished!

I have been writing a sermon on the Feminine Mystique this week. I have had my share of meetings and pastoral consultations, and my phone calls and the oh so urgent email. But a lot of the week has been engaged in sermon writing.

It is like that every week I write a sermon, but this week is a little different. I lot of energy went into writing the sermon. Usually I have energy to spare.

I read the book back in 1963. I have changed and the world has changed since then, so reading the book was an exploration of those changes. I could only touch on them in the sermon, but I have meditated on changes all week. There was no "women's movement' in 1963, this book is credited with igniting what was to be an explosion. I remember the explosion, it was a few years later. The women's caucuses, the demands. I was working in the peace movement. I was supporting the Black Empowerment Movement. Yes the demands were just, but we have to stop the napalm from falling, can't this wait. Yes, I remember the demands.

And I remember the invitations to go to all male groups to talk about our feelings about feminism. I was for the demands, now I have to talk about my feelings? Why? Yea NOW. Now let me free Angela Davis. Isn't that more pressing? Her trial is coming up. So this week some old conflicted feelings were revisited.

But what took most of the energy was confronting Freud once again. She argues against Freud's understanding of women. I had forgotten that that was an issue. Struggling with Freud was important back then, but does anyone take drive / repression seriously as a dynamic anymore? But that was the orthodoxy then, to think psychology was to think of ego and id, and most of my congregants were educated before the Freud was critiqued out of favor. And it was the feminists beginning with Friedan who led the charge against that idea system.

How to develop that in a sermon? Ah ha! Good old Margaret Fuller to the rescue, talk of androgyny! She was way ahead on the idea that the nature of human beings both men and women was to express themselves creatively. On the other hand, Freud assumes an essentialist distinction between men and women. Contrasting those ideas made my journey in "human nature" less a chore, but for a while I was stuck. It wasn't a history of the flaming chalice sermon.

I think this sermon that I just finished is simple enough to keep everyone with me, and challenging enough to keep me wanting to preach again.

Its that time of the year. Twelve more to go!