A Vermont Feminist Minister on Religion and Others

By Katharine Hikel

Photos By Margaret Michniewicz

Roddy Cleary Roddy O’Neil Cleary, minister at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Burlington, has performed dozens of civil unions in Vermont. She is a feminist theologian who teaches women’s spirituality courses at the University of Vermont; she is a married woman, the mother of two sons; she is a former nun who lived and worked in a teaching order at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. “I was institutionalized for fifteen years,” she writes in one sermon, explaining why she never learned to cook. “I spent more time in the confessional than I did in the kitchen. It would have been healthier the other way around.”

Cleary describes her years at Marymount, during the 1950s and ‘60s, as a total immersion in education. “We went to school weekends; we went to school summers; we were always in school,” she says. “I never lived in a convent. I lived on a campus.”

Those were the “question authority” years, the time of the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John XXIII convened for the purpose of moving the Catholic Church from medieval to modern times. “Theology was constantly evolving, being updated, becoming more rooted in Scripture, and it was wonderful,” Cleary says. “I was taught by Dan Berrigan,” the Jesuit priest who, with his brother Philip, was a leading anti-war activist. “It was a rich, rich time; I frequently tell my two sons, ‘If it weren’t for Pope John the Twenty-Third, you wouldn’t be here!’

“It was the time of the peace movement; it was the time of civil rights; it was a tremendous ‘aggiournamento,’ or renewal, as they called it then, in theology,” she says.

“There was an amazing sense of liberation in the Church — and now it’s all been pulled back.” She describes that progressive spirit as “pretty much of the past.”

Cleary grew up in a Catholic household, the youngest of seven children who gathered around their mother’s bed every night to say the Rosary, joke around, and pray for everyone in the neighborhood. “I always said that I had to be ‘rehabilitated,’ because as much reverence as I had for my mother, she had suffered the ravages of sexism: women weren’t interesting, they were second best.

“She had four daughters, and I never got the message from her that I was any less than my brothers. But it was always her view that women talked about uninteresting things. She wanted to talk about politics.”

At every Rosary session, Cleary’s mother would pray for a ‘vocation’ — for one of her children to hear the calling to religious life. Cleary was the one. “I got into this community of educators, and we’d sit down at the table, and we talked about everything, from physics to philosophy to heology to mathematics. It was very stimulating. And it was a great community of women,” she says.

Keeping feminist thought alive in an era when the women’s movement seems dormant to many, Cleary currently teaches a course called “Women and Spirituality: A Challenge to Institutional Religion,” in the women’s studies department at the University of Vermont. “I was struck by something Audre Lorde said: ‘In a very real sense, women have not experienced their own experience.’ When I first read that line, I thought, ‘Oh, come on! This is the final blow! Give me a break!’

“Then I went back and looked at the word ‘experience.’ What is experience, after all? John Dewey said that experience is the interaction of an organism with the environment.

“And I’m thinking, all these structures within the environment are all male! The institutions are all founded by men: religion, law, medicine, education.” Cleary goes on to explain that women are not living in an environment of their own design; and the traditional methods for succeeding in this environment — adversarial rather than cooperative — are not necessarily their methods. So women’s lives in this semi-alien environment are not really the way they might live.

Sexuality is another area that has been shaped by alpha-male-dominated culture. “Sexuality is all about love and connection,” she says. “A more encompassing term is the erotic. Audre Lorde says that the erotic has been patriarchally confined to the bedroom. It’s been plasticized; it’s become pornography.

“What’s needed is to reclaim the erotic from the pornographic,” Cleary says. “The erotic permeates all of life, to the extent that we really and truly claim it and acknowledge it. Sexuality, in its essence, is a gift from God. Good sex has three criteria: one is that it’s pleasurable. The second is that it’s just — in other words, radically equal, because a full erotic experience requires absolute equality. The third one is that it enhances the life of the community.

“In a full erotic experience, you become connected and expansive, and sensitive to others’ pain. That’s why, in our lovemaking, love is not separate from justice.”

At the time of the civil union vote, she wrote that the heart of the gay rights issue was “a deeper understanding of the mystery of human sexuality, a fuller revelation of what it means to be in relationship, whether that intimate relationship be heterosexual or homosexual.”

For those who are “uncomfortable” with homosexual relationships, she quotes Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who says “comfort has nothing to do with the issue and that often as not, change is discomforting.” A little social unease is insignificant in the face of “the discomfort of gays and lesbians who for years have been excluded, isolated, silenced, abused and even killed,” Coffin writes.

Cleary also refers to Dorothee Soelle, a feminist religious scholar, who said that remaining in the closet is destructive to the true meaning of human sexuality, which is inclusive.

“We should not exclude our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from their rights,” Cleary wrote at the time of the civil union vote. She has since performed civil unions for parishioners and non-parishioners from around the state. “Hopefully we can learn from history how denying people their rights pollutes the moral environment.

“In Vermont, we care about the environment.”

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