2012.07.04 Tender Icon of Hope

Worship in London on Sunday before we left for home was beautiful, although full as always with He's and he's and Hims...and lots of Fathers. 

The parish, All Saints Margaret St. does not let women priests celebrate. Clergy are working on it slowly but surely. Building rehab came first of course. And it is elegant.

I tell you, despite great music uplift and Eucharist and a good sermon,  I felt excluded from both humanity and divinity by the all-male language for things holy/godly.

And there was the gospel read from Mark, chapter 5,  in which Jesus heals the daughter of Jairus, president of the local synagogue,  and calls the girl "daughter" .......AND the hemorrhaging woman whom he also restores to health and the human community. TWO females included into community, religious and social.  So what is wrong with this picture in so many of our churches?  

I do think it will take a healing miracle of Jesus to bust up two of the two most recalcitrant idols in most liturgical churches: pews and language.  Social justice thrives outside the walls, but what about justice in the worship language?  OK, my soapbox again. 

I was myself healed from my ire as my attention was captivated watching a young family with 2 small daughters, maybe 4 and 2.  And a baby doll.  The 4year old cared for her baby and never complained. The 2 year old slept and only peeped when Mom tried to apply a brush to her knotted hair. She deftly avoided the brush by swiveling her head fast.  

The 4 year old in time asked her dad to lift her up so she could see. Her attention was riveted on the lovely statue in front of her of the BVM (not the latest car but, for those who might not know, the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

The statue represents Mary as Queen of Heaven all crowned and majestic, her right arm supporting Jesus, of toddler age. He holds an orb as if it were his ball to play with and his right foot and right hand swing out and point outward towards the observer. Go!  

The little girl began to swing her foot in and out, (imitatio dei,) a feat that looks easy in statuary but didn't quite work for Daddy's grasp.  Down she came but later Daddy took her up to see the votive candles in front of the Mary and Jesus statue and with great patience and care showed her how to light a small candle carefully, then place her coin in the slot.  She nodded vigorously and pointed up to Mary.  She knew something. God knows what:)

Flesh and blood icons are the best.

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Happy and blessed American Independence Day. We are lucky. Despite my critiques I am patriotic.  America, home of the mostly free and the occasionally brave, my home.  We struggle still with the vision of equity and democracy

And pray for peace and inter-dependence for Israelis and Palestinians......... and for all those who have courage to serve their country and still ask dream of a war-free peace.    

Mary and Me

I chose for my ordination day the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, officially Mary’s day, but this year, 1988, my day too. I had chosen my day hoping it would fit the bishop’s calendar which takes precedence over all other calendars on earth, or so it seems. I was lucky.

Mary was a woman like me, a mother of children like me. One of her children was Jesus who, according to biblical accounts of his growing up, was more difficult to raise than any and all of my four, the same four who through no fault other than their tender existence, had been the chief reason for my rejections in the ordination process. To sexism, misogyny, gynephobia and other labels, add mother-ism, the irrational fear that your own or someone else’s mother, if given enough liberty, might just take over the world.

The Church exalted Mary, raised her Motherhood to near-divine status, surrounded her with stars and crowns and haloes and called her blessed. Blessed by divine touch she was, however in time the patriarchy of religious tradition and biblical interpretation neutered her and turned her into a virgin, for which there is no clear prophetic substantiation and whose politics of control wasn’t even subtle. They stole her sexuality, her femininity, her courage and stamina, and her alliance with God’s politics. It’s no accident that the biblical mandate for justice, the Magnificat we hear read and sung at Christmas time, is placed on the lips of the woman Mary whom God chose to be a prophet— as well as quite a mother. However, the more heavenly Mary became, the more her influence spread and the more difficult it was for earthly girls, women and certainly mothers to find a place for their humanity in church and culture.

Thought not immune from this disorder, I had grown up Protestant, untaught, so when I went to a Mass with my college roommate and spotted a woman up front—a statue and bad art, yes, but unmistakably female, I had strained to get a better look. Virginity didn’t matter as much to me as it had in high school and motherhood was a distant goal, so I’d fallen in love with Mary and with the liberating idea her prominent presence represented. I could be up front too.

I quickly identified with Mary because God had asked her to do a hard thing—be an unwed pregnant young girl risking shame and even death for the sake of God’s big new project. It happens all the time in the bible, written as if God said and presto it happened. But I knew better. I knew how to read between the lines. I knew these ancient men and women were real, their stories my story, their experience archetypal, their bodies as vulnerable as mine. I knew because I knew how God could be; I knew because I never forgot my own childhood spiritual experience.

Angel Gabriel or no Angel Gabriel, I had trusted my own annunciation and call to priesthood, which fortunately did not make me pregnant.