Arrest as Self-Initiation: Activism as Spirituality

An Ontological Epistemology of Participation: Arrest as Embodied Pedagogy of Self-Initiation: Bringing together Feminist Spirituality and the Occupy Movement

Elizabeth Swearingen, Ed. D.

California State University, Fresno

Women’s Studies

eswearingen@csufresno.edu

Abstract

This paper will explore strategies of ritualization, ontology as epistemologies of participation, and embodied pedagogies of resistance between the Occupy Movement and feminist spirituality. Using my own experience situated within the context of feminist spirituality as social activism, I will reflect on my experience with the Goddess through a private rite of initiation/surrender followed by a public arrest aligned with the 11.11.11 full moon and Goddess ritual.  Discussion will include how ethico-political pedagogies of striving for a better world were created at the intersection of public activism/private ritual through the grassroots imagination of the Occupy Movement.

Introduction

I was arrested on the night of November 11, 2011 with four other Occupy protestors exercising our First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. I was in a kneeling position with my arms extended in the gesture of surrendering as approximately thirty police dressed in riot gear and three attack dogs approached us from behind. All four of us were silent. I was hand cuffed and spent my first night in jail. That is the public story, but the personal story goes much deeper. My ritualized arrest provided a ground or vehicle for the embodiment of my feminist epistemologies of resistance because it connected and aligned my body, mind, and spirit within the Occupy Movement with my sacred activism.

The experiences leading to my decision to be arrested as an act of witnessing and surrender were situated at the intersection of my personal history and existential desires within feminist pedagogies of resistance. Within the Occupy Movement I felt as if I was having a spiritual experience because I was occupying my body and spaces in ways I had never done before. To ritualize my arrest was an act of naming – a signification process for the spaces of Occupy culture that surrounded me. Using my arrest as an act of personal initiation was about re-image-ing a vision yearning to be born within me as an act of creative actualization. So what did this mean for me? My initiation was not only about a personal journey towards wholeness, but about surrendering my own ego to something bigger.

Dreaming the Vision

I had the following dream two weeks before my arrest:

I was with others I did not know very well in an encampment on a high mountain. There was a ledge with deep water below and I was afraid. My daughter beckoned me to jump saying, “I know it’s deep and scary, but you will hit bottom and come back up.” I wanted to stay in the warmth and security of my sleeping bag; nevertheless I began to shed my protection, my coats, and my clothing until I was completely naked. As I approached the edge and looked down, the ground below grew closer and the water began to recede until I realized I could simply walk off the ledge and wade through the water safely. After wading for a while, I was clothed in gossamer sheaths of indigo and received as a heroine.

Although this was an extremely romanticized and metaphoric representation of the growing longing that I felt inside, I could not dismiss this dream in relation to what the Occupy Movement meant to me. The promptings did not go away after the dream. My personal journey seemed clear to me - I wanted to enter the doorway of my own soul. I saw the act of surrendering that which I valued the most - my freedom - as both feminist activism and a personal spiritual quest.

The Mormon culture I had grown up in privileged transcendence over immanence. Mormonism was a deeply patriarchal religion that externalized my salvation in a structure of grace and strict obedience to laws and commandments received from an anthropomorphic Father in Heaven. Mother in Heaven was acknowledged only briefly, but I was never allowed to worship or pray to Her. She, as the Mormon Goddess, became essentially an unknowable heresy to me. This was extremely subordinating to me because it denied my body and experiences as a woman.  It seemed to me an endless task of ‘shutting down’ my body wisdom. My childhood faith became a controlling dogma that reinforced my body as instrumental outcomes in the service of patriarchy. This was a body-prison for me. My feminist awakening happened over an extended period of time as resistance to and exile from my Mormon faith and community; however, my spiritual roots framed my past and to some extent my current activism. I recorded my feelings in a journal about ten years ago as my lamentation to my Mother in Heaven:

I am a wounded angel.

I don’t want this to be a war.

I see that Patriarchy cannot reveal you Mother,

For Patriarchy is your prison guard.

I am standing on a bridge over a deep cavern

It’s sustained by a narrow path and ropes.

It moves and sways as I walk across.

My stomach feels the fear of falling.

Breaking apart

Will this bridge hold me?

This narrow, precious, swaying…awakening bridge that I stand on.

I look at the cool water rushing over the rocks below,

The vegetation building bridges in the sky above.

I wonder about bridge building.

Nature builds bridges with such ease and beauty.

Yet humans must build their own bridges

Strangely precarious

Subject to flaws

Arbitrarily constructed.

Is my bridge my feminist awakening?

Will it sustain me?

Where is the safest crossing?

Whose construction crew can I call on?

It’s scary and fraught with danger.

Yet I gather courage to face my fears.

Not from the abstract concepts of religious dogma,

But from the ground, the trees, and the sky.

The wholeness of nature reaching out filling my space,

Pushing for life and communal existence  everywhere.

I can stand on this narrow bridge

I can look at the waters below

I can let my screams be absorbed by the trees

And be carried away by the waters

My awakening soul is like a healing river

Carrying away my anger, my loss, and my fear.

Strategies of Ritualization as Intentional Bridgework

Malhotra and Perez (2005) argued that because intentional bridgework is fluid, temporal, and spiritual, it promises to be present with the pain and suffering of others without losing self to it. Giri (2006) asserted that the spirit of embodied pedagogy - inclusive of practice, ontology, and epistemology - involves the rethinking of society, self, and subjectivity between academics, public movements, and activists.  Appadurai (2000) argued that bringing in critical voices that speak for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized calls for an ontological epistemology of participation requiring some kind of ‘witnessing self’ where our whole self, not just cognitive mind, is involved in critical action between self as other, and society as cosmos. Appadurai’s epistemology asserted that academic institutions and the knowledge they produce have become increasingly isolated from the public sphere, especially the poor and their advocates. Appadurai argued that new forms of knowledge transfer, strategies, visions, and horizons would come from public collective discontent or “globalization from below (p. 3).” Appadurai asserted that research, as knowledge production requires the practice of social imagination, and concluded that social disjunctures have the potential as emancipatory forces because they “manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local (p.6).”  Berry’s (2006) study of feminist ritual builds on Turner’s work with ritual and liminality. Berry argued that ritualization can be a deliberate and intentional strategy of resistance and liberation through symbolic action or metaphor that subverts or transgresses dominant power relations. Christ (1980) described ritual as naming the body anew through the integration of spiritual and social reality as praxis because it rejects the dualism and separation between immanence and transcendence, emotion and reason, bondage and freedom, and arises out of the impulse toward wholeness. Christ declared, “Women’s spiritual quest provides new visions of individual and shared power that can inspire a transformation of culture and society…to challenge that power comes from control and domination of nature and other people (p. 131).” Gross (1996) asserted that feminist spirituality must empower women’s bodies within ritual.  Gross argued the Goddess embodies and dissolves the polarity of dualisms, thus life becomes death, surrender becomes liberation, and arrest becomes freedom.

Using my arrest within the Occupy Movement as a personal ritual of initiation was a powerful experience that involved self/other, body/mind, public/private, and spiritual/political experience. Using my body for social resistance was also a profoundly immanent and dangerous act, not a transcendent journey; it was situated in the reality of my own lived experience, not in ceremonial safe places. My evolving thealogy required I experiment with new ritual forms since Mormon theistic ritual was no longer available to me. As a feminist, I was acutely aware of how problematic the cultural appropriation of indigenous forms of spirituality was in the self-service of my own spirituality. It was important to me to be self-reflexive in how I constructed my feminist spirituality at the intersection of political praxis. The Occupy Movement was an emerging community of creative resistance I had joined. It allowed me the spaces and opportunity to construct rituals of witnessing even though as a community, other Occupiers were not aware of my own spiritual ritualization. It is in my experience of the Goddess that my arrest became ultimately renewing, and a source of strength, courage, and support in my continuing feminist activism.

Private Ritual of Initiation and Surrender

My arrest was layered with ontological and symbolic signification. First there was significance in the date 11.11.11. The integer ‘1’ defines the difference between existence as ‘1’ and non-existence and nothingness as ‘0’. 1 is potential, beginning, and it is contained within all other integers. November 11, 2011 was also Veteran’s Day, derived from Armistice Day on November 11, 1919, hailed as the end of World War II, the war that was supposed to end all wars. It was the night of the full moon, and coincidentally my daughter’s birthday. I saw this day as a day of shape shifting energies, a bridge, an intention, and invocation of the Goddess. These multiple layers of signification were like transparent watercolors on a palette. Each interacted with the other creating new hues and shades of experience for me. My hope was that my sight would become in-sight, connecting ideas and images in a vision trying to be born out of the Occupy Movement. In this way the ritualization of my arrest layered epistemologies of participation into a personal pedagogy of resistance. Fear was often my companion. In my Mormon past, it had tried to tell me what not to do. My initiation was about surrendering to my own fears and daring to be transgressive. Through arrest, I was facing my own symbolic ego death, piercing a veil into my own spirituality and feminist praxis.

I prepared myself at home with a purification bath and private ritual of surrendering. After casting a sacred circle, I consecrated my body and imagined my arms and legs becoming part of the earth. I invoked the Goddess and rehearsed my surrendering to arrest. After this ritual I felt calm and assured. My expectation was that I would feel great comfort and sustenance throughout the night. My daughters participated in their own circle ceremonies under the full moon. The action of embodying the outer social world through a ritual gesture had already taken place in my heart. I was ready to risk my spaces of safety and leap into an unknown. I knew I would be arrested because there had been five previous nights of arrests for any Occupiers standing within the local courthouse park after midnight.

I knew I was getting ready to pass through a labyrinth – a surrendering in order to re-weave my own web of life in relation to the wider social world and myself. Labyrinths present a series of experiences, tests, and symbols. However, I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. Shortly after midnight, I heard the police loudspeaker call for everyone to disperse from the courthouse park. There was some discussion among the Occupiers as to who wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights. Most of the Occupiers dispersed to the city side of the sidewalk because there were no ordinances prohibiting the occupation of a public city sidewalk. However; the county courthouse was located adjacent to the city sidewalk and had a no-camping ordinance. In fact the county board of supervisors had passed an ordinance that no more than nine people could be together without a permit at any time, and no political signs were allowed under a no-handbill ordinance. The courthouse park was at this time, and had been in the past, full of homeless people considered vagrant, but these people were largely ignored by the police who had become accustomed to their chronic presence. Five Occupiers including myself stepped forward and decided to kneel in front of a memorial called Freedom Gazebo. We were aware that approximately thirty county police officers with three attack dogs were in formation marching towards our backs. The officers were in full riot gear. At the moment of my arrest as I was kneeling in silence with my arms extended above me, I felt the tight sting of twist tie cuffs around my wrists which were pulled behind my back. The floodlights the police had turned on in front of me blinded my eyes. The full moon, which brilliantly lit the night, now disappeared behind thick, dark clouds. What ensued over the next eight hours was an experience in personal humiliation. I felt as if I had become the ‘0’.

One of my arresting officers exclaimed, “Tonight is 11.11.11 and that will never happen again.”

I responded ‘Yes, I know, it is also my daughter’s birthday and this is my gift to her.”

The officer replied in a mocking manner “You should have gotten her an X-box instead; she would have liked that better.”

I was trying to be ‘a good guest’ in a labyrinth of jailing I did not know. Processing my arrest removed more layers of my personal space and I found myself in a ten by ten foot cement holding cell with four other women. Concrete was the only sleeping surface. One toilet in the corner of the room was broken and was continually flushing. One woman was sleeping on the concrete floor and had made a pillow with the only roll of toilet paper available. There was a steel bench on one side of the room with boxy phones above. This made it impossible to sit comfortably on the bench. One wall was completely covered with bail bond advertisements. Three of the women who were already in the cell were ‘working the phones’ in an attempt to secure bail or a family member to intercede. I recognized that I knew nothing of this survival skill, but there was a bizarre capitalism to it all. One of the women was pregnant and late term. She was nauseated and asked an officer for some bread. Her petitions were dismissed as she sat watching the officers on the other side of our cell window enjoy their dinner with a cup of Starbucks coffee. She said to me, “They don’t care, they don’t care. I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

                  Another woman replied, “What did you expect? This is jail.”

I struggled without much success to find a way to connect with the other women I shared a jail cell with. Sleepless hours passed as I tried to take up as little space as possible crouched under the wall phones sitting on the steel bench. I did not feel heroic. I felt completely and totally shamed. I felt as if I was nothing. The other women struggled to understand why I was there and what did the Occupy T-shirt mean that I was wearing.

One woman asked, “Why would you voluntarily be arrested?”

I tried to explain the Occupy Movement, but one woman expressed that “it was all silliness and I was a stupid woman.”

Another woman said “Yeah don’t we have a Black president?”

I tried to engage in some political discussion, but there seemed to be no common ground in which I could connect in conversation with the other women.  At one point in the evening I suggested, “why don’t we talk about sex” which brought out some laughs and stories about the ‘old men’ in their lives; however, most of my night was spent in silence. Just before I was released, one of the older women looked at me and said, “I get it, you are fighting for poor women like me! Well give it to me sista and hallelujah”. Then she said something that broke my heart, “Do you think I am a bad…a bad woman?”

                  I realized how I had romanticized and idealized my own activism. My safe barriers of privilege had all collapsed. When I was released from jail the next morning it was raining. I was cold and the harshness of the night stuck to my skin like tar. All I wanted to do was bathe, as if I could wash away the body invasion I had experienced and reclaim some innocence. I threw away the clothing I had worn. I did not take flight on my indigo gossamer wings, but I had gone through the door to my own soul and was forever changed in the liminal space between past illusions of freedom and the brutality of imprisonment. My night in jail was spent in spaces, a few feet…borders like invisible bars that keep our society so de-facto segregated and separated by identity locations. I knew I had been the stranger, a sojourner in another reality. I knew my incarceration would be temporary. I didn’t need to learn street skills for my own survival. I was privileged by an unjust system that over-determined the very life choices, visions and opportunities of the women I shared a cell with for one night. I actually felt ashamed. Who was I to intrude in their world? My choice to be arrested now seemed like grand gesturing, so invasive, and presumptuous to the lived reality of the women I spent the night with.

The next day I was invited to a local church to talk about my experiences and the Occupy Movement. I received a heroine’s welcome, yet my experience of jail had shattered any romanticization and self-indulgent desire to be a heroine. I was uncomfortable with the self-aggrandizement and asked four other people from the Occupy Movement to speak with me. We had shared arrest together and felt the sweet rush of connection between us. I, as a white women’s studies professor was with a Native American veteran, a Black Civil Rights activist, and a Chicano college student studying to be a teacher. We were standing in solidarity with the emerging Occupy Movement. Something profound had changed within me. I had paid attention to the soul of place, within the jail as a privileged white woman, and let myself witness and walk through a liminal gate into a sacred space where I encountered myself. I realized in a few short hours that if my spirituality as feminist praxis was not aimed at the soul of the world, I would simply dwell in a false, de-facto segregated, and romanticized worldview of my own design. My ritualized arrest shape shifted my own epistemology of participation as an act of witnessing. Oddly enough I had done work within the prisons as a volunteer, but always knew I was not part of the ‘other.’  With my arrest I became the other. I gained not just empathy, but some alchemic change had occurred within every cell of my body.  I knew I would never be the same, and would never again enjoy the illusion of distance from those incarcerated.

Ontology as Epistemologies of Participation

Gross (1996) explored feminist activism as integrated spirituality situated within the body as an act of reclaiming the praxis of community. Gross asserted the ritualization of sacred activism became political praxis or passages that bridge toward social change because these liminal passages construct profound links between individual and collective consciousness. Gross argued that ritual changes the consciousness of the performer as the body gives itself to discursive involvement. My body was the point where my spiritual and political intents intersected. I experienced what Christ (1980) described as hearing the cries within and from others in communal acts of resistance. Soelle (2001) described prison as a false economic order that ensures the violence we name ‘security.’ Soelle argued there was no distinction between a mystical internal and a political external, because no experience of the Divine can be so private as to remain the property of the initiated. For Soelle, willingly going where you become nothing is making manifest the fear of contradicting affluence; saying No! to the external world while at the same time presenting your nakedness as the moment you answer Yes! To humanity. Soelle concluded: “Small actions, simple education, and mere symbolic acts are in the wider sense resistance against the violence of the economic system that governs and systematically renders the majority of the human family destitute (276).”

Christ (1980) described her spiritual transformation as a feminist quest of ‘diving deep’ and ‘surfacing’. Christ argued that the experience of nothingness for women often preceded a feminist awakening which was profoundly immanent and not transcendent. According to Soelle (2001), classical mysticism writes of transcending the body, whereas Christ argued feminist mystical experience was about a new naming of self through experiencing the powers of being fully in our bodies. Christ argued that it was essential for women to move through the self-negation and self-hatred of a deeply misogynist society to new possibilities of selfhood and empowerment. Christ explained how the intense experiences of women’s subordination and marginalization into their own nothingness could actually open women to an acute awakening to the larger forces of domination and death encoded in the very fabric of patriarchal constructions of reality.

Conclusion

Predatory capitalism, with its gods of commerce, allowed for the dispassionate militarism of my arrest with machine like precision. The police in riot gear were not there to secure Occupiers constitutional rights, but were part of the emerging monster of Homeland Security to police our bodies in resistance to the globalized economic order that brutally consumes space, time, and creation. My body and the bodies of other women become an important site of resistance precisely because they have been historically subordinated into instrumental outcomes in the service of empire. The predatory capitalism of militarized masculinity depends upon the subordination and marginalization of the feminine body, as well as the annihilation of the feminine principle. Ontology as epistemologies of participation in feminist spirituality offers the hope of personal and communal involvement. Nature as body continually witnesses how life creates itself from death. My descent into the death of imprisonment offered a birth passage with all kinds of possibilities for my own transformation that rippled outward into communal spaces situated within the context of the Occupy Movement. I was not surrendering to the police but resisting the relationality and domestication of a militarized and brutal force in service of empire. The Occupy Movement witnesses immanence by positioning bodies as the source of resistance to the violence, possession, and power of a genocidal global economy.  The Occupy Movement uses bodies as discursive text in creative acts of re- image-ing community outside of empire. My own journal entry after my arrest put this into being for me:

I love here, now

Today in this moment

I hurt because others hurt

I fear because others fear

Love stings and greets me every day

Love asks how will I change?

For me this means a radical love of humanity, standing up as I kneel, being what I do, and immersing myself in the whole of humanity without dividedness. Immanence becomes the action that opens self-body to ontology as epistemologies of participation. For me authenticity meant taking my body-power back by giving it away in an act of witnessing on behalf of the powerless. Putting my privilege on the altar, as an intimacy of body became a communion within the Occupy community as well as with the women I shared a night with in jail.

References Citied

Appadurai, A. (2000). Grassroots Globalization and Research Imagination, Public Culture 12(1): 1-19

Berry, J. (2006) Whose Threshold? Women’s Strategies of Ritualization. Feminist Theology. 14(3): 273-288

Christ, Carol P. (1980). Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (2^nd Ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press

Giri, A. K. (2006). Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods and the Calling of an Ontological Epistemology of Participation. Dialectical Anthropology, 30: 227-271

Gross, Rita (1996). Feminism and Religion: An Introduction. Boston, MA: Beacon Press

Malhotra, S & Perez, K (2005) Belonging, Bridges, and Bodies. NWSA Journal, 17(2): 47-68

Soelle, Dorothy (2001) The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press