The Role of the Brothers
by Sister Kate, Vernal Equinox, Wind Moon March 2017
The mission of the Sisterhood Ministry is to grow more enclaves, more community living spaces, shared spaces for prayer, ecology, and survival through healthy co-dependence and a communal life-style that shares some of the resources, reducing the cost of living for the resident members.
This planet’s first attempt at a feminist revolution, the women of the planet’s first attempt at taking back their powers, gained some equities in law. We gained the right to vote. We got laws put on the books that made it unfair to discriminate against women, but – of course – that discrimination has continued. Just like the laws that changed in California 20 years ago should have made it such that the intelligent plant was no longer discriminated against and laws on the books that make it illegal to discriminate based on skin color – Jim Crow laws, red-lining practices. Things got marginally better, but the discrimination continued and, continues.
Our belief in empowering women is by giving them control of land, bank accounts, property, buildings, and businesses. We believe we can do that without taking anything away from the men, and we believe we can do it without disempowering the men; we believe that the very act of empowering women is a manner of honoring the men. When you lift up the women in a society, all of society benefits.
Men have had control of 98% of the riches on the planet for two thousand years. It didn’t necessarily mean that they were mean to their women. But many wars have raged, many war machines are being fed our tax dollars in place of feeding and sheltering our homeless. We don’t think women would run things this way.
Men should not be fearful of women taking control of the wealth of the planet. They should be happy. They should be relieved. We can’t do worse, really, than what is happening now.
But brothers gathered here and listening, you should know that it is the wealth, the capital, the control of resources that we take very seriously. What this means in practicality is that if a Sister wants to buy her own farm, and the business is able to help her do that, that property? That farm? It must be in her name. Perhaps not all in her name, but women have to learn that control of resources is not dirty man’s work. It’s our sacred calling. And the time is upon us.
So even though we got some laws made that inspired equality, we haven’t made a lot of progress. Those laws that were passed in the last hundred years are now being dismantled. The statistics on college rapes and molested girls and the amount of sex trafficking – are still outrageous.
What went wrong?
It might be because there was so much pent up anger towards men, back in the 1960’s, like 2,000 years of frustration, that our first attempts at equal rights, at retrieving our honor, were angry. Women lashed out. Men were mocked and made to feel small. Women were singing songs about hearing themselves roar. Really, do we want to roar? Is that who we want to be?
I think we failed because we tried to be them, instead of embracing in ourselves, in our divine feminine, all those things that make us stand apart from men.
My favorite old myth is the one where it is said that when God first created man, man and woman were conjoined, like a 4-legged, 4-armed, 2-headed creature. But that creature was so powerful, it was too powerful for the earth plane, so God split us in half and thereby condemned us to forever after roam the earth seeking our other half. In this way, we were condemned to feel incomplete without each other. I like this story because it says, ‘we need each other’, ‘we complete each other’, ‘we come from each other’.
The time is upon us, now, to do better. To be better. There isn’t a Sister among us that would sign up to be part of this order if it excluded men. No one would be here if we didn’t have a specifically defined and honorable role for the men to play in our lives.
Our Beguine ancestors had their Beghards and we have our Brothers. The primary mission of the Brothers is to protect the Sisters. To protect the women and the children.
Here is a clip from an article titled “Real Men Are Warriors Who Protect” by Dennis Rainey:
“One of my favorite quotes, attributed to British politician Edmund Burke, is “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” When evil arrives . . ., the easiest thing for him to do is nothing.”
As the men in our tribe, you are the warriors who have been charged with the duty of pushing back against the evil that seeks to prey on your tribe. If you don’t step up, who will?
“When you think of protecting your family, perhaps the first things that come to mind are keeping your house locked or holding on to your child’s hand on a crowded sidewalk or investigating a strange sound downstairs in the middle of the night, or teaching your children about what to do if the house is on fire. But as I’ve looked at my responsibilities as protector at home, I’ve realized that they go further.” (Edmund Burke)
We are not inventing any of this. It is all ancient wisdom being revived, as the fog clears, and we see the truth.
When I think of the Brotherhood, I see warriors. Warriors hell bent on protecting their women. I see men who go to town meetings, for the Sisters, men who go out and do the public interfacing for the Sisters, men who take care of the women, their plants, their home. I see warriors who keep their ears to the ground, listening for the hooves of the horses of the enemies. Surveying the land all the time for trouble that could impact the women. Meeting the trouble on their own terms, in their own way, always with the interest of the women first and foremost.
Concludes Mr. Rainey: “A trained warrior also has battlefield vision that anticipates the future. He scans the horizon and assesses dangers that are coming so that he can prepare for them. And he realizes he is never off duty.”
I hope one day that we go so far in our Sisterhood, as to declare that no strange outsider man can speak to a Sister, a woman of the tribe, without first being introduced to her through the Brothers. This is ancient wisdom.
This is respecting the role the men play. This system requires trust.
We are a work in progress, this Sisterhood of ours. But in honor of this Vernal Equinox, this Springtide night, we honor all our Brothers We honor them for protecting us, we honor them for doing the hard and difficult jobs they do for us. And we honor them for honoring us, by being part of this very feminist operation. It takes very strong men, in this cultural environment, to stand up with the women. It takes special courage to be one of the first. To trust that the women are not on some man-bashing mission and to trust us to love and respect and care for you, as well.
