Expanding the Sisterhood
Book of the New Beguines
There is an old saying by the Catholic nuns that ‘Many are called; few are chosen’. We find this to be true.
The enclave of our Sisterhood/Brotherhood is not original. It is not new. Beguine revivalism is happening in many places on planet earth right now, in many forms. And with or without knowledge of the Beguines, women and men are walking the walk everywhere, and people have been waiting for a movement like the Sisterhood’s to come along.
The Sisterhood connects the women and men and that makes us a force to be reckoned with – we are connecting a thousand points of light in a thousand places in a thousand lands . . . and this movement is right and good and timely. We offer our people renewed hope that it is possible to live a more charming and gracious interaction with our all-nurturing, all providing Mother Earth.
We don’t believe in suffering as a path to spirituality, as many other religions do. We don’t believe that suffering necessarily brings you any closer to God. We don’t believe that healing should necessarily hurt. But there is one place we suffer – and that is in our activism. Being an activist is like being in the army or being a parent to a newborn.
One’s personal comforts are set aside, while subjected to service. In our case, the suffering comes from listening to city council(s) and police chiefs and even citizens spew lies (either out of ignorance or some other agenda that trivializes people’s pain).
Spike Lee said ‘politics is the war of winning inches and activism is the war of winning miles’. We are scholarly women and choose activism over politics.
For highly spiritual women, highly intuitive women, it is difficult to be in a room with liars.
It is a tear in our golden web when we have to sit in a room and listen to lies come through a microphone. It hurts our feet when we protest. We sometimes don’t get to eat, and our stomachs are often growling, and we can’t find a place to even get a drink of water; we were often denied access to bathrooms.
Even though we are not proponents of pain, nor are we interested in poverty vows, we also know that all things worth having are worth making some sacrifices for. We sacrifice our time, we sacrifice our feet and our comforts all in the name of activism — to change the minds and hearts of a very uncompassionate governing body, or to just shine light so that others will bring the pressure for reform.
The planet is crying out for a new age order of Sisters and Brothers to grow and provide some leadership and direction. We need to grow big enough that we become a political force of our own. It is the only way we will gain justice for the people of the plant – and the planet.
If you’ve ever wondered how we got to the point where fascism is fashionable again, wonder no more. Christian churches, Catholic churches, as a matter of policy, have steadily fed the most right-wing politician in their town, city, state, province, country for thirty years, until bingo, we have the far right at the helm. It is time to create an order that counters that. It is time to create wealth and jobs and a movement that does the very same thing in the opposite direction – the most left, the most socialist, the most progressive.
That’s how we will gain balance again.
We take six vows: Service, Obedience, Living Simply, Activism, Chastity, Ecology
We celebrate every full moon with a fire circle. When the weather is bad, we light up a large room with candles and have the service and celebration inside. (Ancient wisdom. Don’t make your tribe sick.)
And on most New Moons the Sisters gather, either by laptop connections, telephone conference, or in person, to talk, to plan. New moons are for the women.
We strive for excellence.
We believe the women and the children.
We trust the women to make decisions about their own bodies, their own lives, and we trust them to make decisions for the citizenry, as well. We work diligently to propel good women toward offices inside the government that we know will result in reform.
We are a women empowerment organization. Every single decision we make about our order has to pass these tests: Is this empowering? Or does it dis-empower women? Would our ancient mothers approve? Or disapprove? Our guiding question is, “What would our ancient mothers do?”
“What would our ancient mothers do, if they had the internet and the post office and could reach the whole world with their plant-based medicines?” We are like our Beguine mothers and are called to work with the people. We have been called to help the people. As the first organized army of nurses in the castles of Europe in the middle ages, the Beguines rescued poor women and gave them housing security, food security, and honorable, spiritual jobs. The Bougienages and the Beguines were around long before Christianity came with its armies to convert the world.
