2022.07.03 IN-dependence? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blogpost

We, in this country and on this Earth, are living in the midst of the death throes of patriarchy. As I stutter to understand things, a question pops up, like in the game Jeopardy. Let’s call this category: Values. 

The highest personal value in the United States.

What is Independence?  

Ding. Correct. That’s $$$$ more for you, dear Contestant. 

More Word Play 

“Throes” does not mean death itself, but rather the painful struggle, the convulsion that accompanies great change. 

“Patriarchy” does not simply mean the rule of all things male. It means a system of social organization based exclusively on the dominance of White straight maleness, often Protestant—garnished with the temptingly alluring word: INDEPENDENCE. 

“Independence” does not simply mean freedom. IN-dependence means without dependence. Consider: other words, such as IN-ept (without aptitude), or IN-animate (without animation), or IN-adequate (without adequacy), or IN-domitable (without defeat) or unbeatable, or even IN-formation (without full formation)—just a list of facts without a fully formed idea, plan, or conclusion. 

All my eccentric word-play explorations make me wonder even more about the American idolatry of IN-dependence. We even set apart a whole day, July 4th, to honor our IN-dependence. It came about historically after a bloody war, the loss of many human lives, and the establishment of our own government, based in IN-dividual (without divisions) freedom for our nation. We fought to be free of British rule, and we prize our freedom(s) without letting them evolve and ripen. Too much? 

Have we overvalued our IN-dependence?

*  *  *  * 

When I read about the move to end checks and balances in our government I feel alarmed about the return of originalism, a political fundamentalism that IN-hibits (hinders) national evolution and advocates autocratic methods and purposes—so alarmed that I have actually prayed for what Christians call The Second Coming. We need divine INter-vention (coming between). NOW. It could also open enough hearts and minds to, well, revive the ancient ethic of the good old Golden Rule: What you hate do not do to another OR Love one another as you would have them love you. 

We need INTER-dependence (sharing mutual dependence) not more IN-dependence. No one is ever without dependence, despite all of her or his dramatic adolescent delusions. 

Who is not dependent? 

Personal Spiritual Stories

When I was a child I struggled consistently to be INdependent of my mother’s over-attentiveness, not the same as nurture. She was well-meaning I know, but I needed to know my own embodied self, INdependent from her. I needed to breathe. I achieved my INdependence. I also lost much in the process, including the capacity to mother myself and give enough maternal nurture to my own children. What did I gain? I gained a strong sense of myself, strong enough to make many choices like divorce, professional success, and happiness. What did I lose?  A marriage and full IN-timacy (without timidity) with my children. 

What helped me reclaim my dependent self?  

1) The consistent and INternalized (not externalized) loving listening presence of God whom I encountered in prayer—the chatter of a small child to the God she’d seen in a picture book. 

2) The affectionate good presence of a therapist, herself suffering from excesses of INdependent sadness and anger. 

3) The abiding INtimacy and good humor of a man who taught me to love and cherish my body as if it were his. 

4) The cautious yet authentic devotion of my four biological children whose feelings and fears I have learned to listen to without condition or parental-ism.  

5) The very recent acquaintance I’ve made with a young (26) man named Jared, who, because of a tragic accident, is paralyzed by a spinal cord injury that has left him dependent on others. Talking with Jared, I admit, has felt at times emotionally paralyzing to me. He has taught me again how to be healthfully dependent, ironically through his very fine, educated mind, fully IN-tact (without tactile sensation). Jared works as a design engineer at a healthcare facility for people with spinal cord injuries such as his own. He texted to me:  “I’d say that my greatest joy is seeing my ideas become reality. Having something to build, designing it, and eventually holding it in my hands.” 

I remain dependent on all these love-factors—IN-definitely (without definition), but not quite IN-finitely (without finitude)—yet. 

Happy Dependence Day. 

 

2019.11.03 How Can A House Divided Stand?

Saints and sinners live side by side everywhere—in every home, town, city, nation, country, church—and in every soul. When you know and embrace this wisdom your house will not be divided.

What happens, though, when ignorance and evil conspire to become institutionalized?

Recently, on the nightly news commentary show, Greater Boston, we heard an interview with French artist and filmmaker François Ozon. He talked about his creative process in making a movie about the abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. The film is based on true stories and real people and is entitled, “By the Grace of God.”

Ozon spoke about his well-curated decision to make a movie, rather than a documentary or even a docudrama, about the pedophilia crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in France. He got actors to play the parts of the priest, those who exercised ecclesiastical authority, the adult men who'd suffered abuse as children, and their families in Lyon, France.

THE STORY

All the victims had remembered in silence. One man began to search for the others. They found each other, shared their shame and their stories, and were able together to effect some change in a centuries-old rigidified, hierarchical, religious institution. How did they accomplish this?—through the power of truth, collective action, mutual support, media, and the secular legal system.

All of the men had been part of a scout troupe led by one parish priest who was sexually attracted to children. The narrowing of the focus plus the dramatization of the issue made it flesh, made it real, and therefore palpably credible—much more so than a docudrama would have. 

Although this film is in French and has subtitles, the dialogue isn’t complex, and the subtitles are not bothersome.

MEANINGS

Besides a sinking heart, I felt a rising rage AND an expansive hope after I saw it. There is much more to this trauma than meets the eye. 
    -This is NOT as simple as an indictment of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. It is about centuries of patriarchal power abuses and coverups, involving complicit men and women at all levels—saints and sinners all.
    -It is about the politics of money. 
    -It is about confusing the Church with God, commonly called idolatry. 
    -It is frighteningly connected to what is going on in our nation and the world right now.
    -It is about ancient wisdom: words of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke way back in the first century CE: A house divided against itself cannot stand. (Mk. 3:25, Mt. 12:25, Lk. 11:17) You don’t need a personified figure called Satan to know this truth. 
    -It is about the ultimate value of breaking the silence and the shame that engulf addiction and related compulsions, diseases that keep full healing out of reach for too many. 
    -It is about tragic, treacherous exploitation of the best of religious values: forgiveness and divine compassion, and the Mystery of the Holy within and among us. 
    -It is about a terrifying exploitation of the Gospel: Jesus himself loved and touched little children, did he not?
    -It is NOT about priests who are evil, but about priests, such as the one in this film, who repeatedly ask for help for their mental illness and get refused. It is about priests, such as the one in this film who, when confronted, confess over and over. THEY TELL THE TRUTH.  (This is not about all priests of course, but I had one such priest as a client some years back. He had been stripped of everything, including his pension. I saw him for free and felt about as powerless as he did, except to proffer forgiveness divine. I did not know how to psychoanalyze his disease or help him, but I knew moralizing wasn’t helpful at all. He knew that too.) We need more research.
    -It is NOT about pedophilia, because that means love of children NOT sexual love with children. A better word might be pedo-predation.
    -It is about calling Holy that which is Evil.
    -It is about the inability to see saint and sinner at once.
   

OUTCOMES   

The amazing work of this small group in Lyon realized one big legal change: the statute of limitations for seeking reparation or accountability for such predation has been extended in France from 15 years to 30 years. That is restorative justice and hopeful. When we work together, give up our unholy divisions and collaborate for the good of all, we can change our system. Their work continues, and despite complexities, there’s hope for the pope.
   
Without question, this film dramatizes one of the most painful death throes of patriarchy. If you have ever tended to someone who is dying you know what death throes look like—jerky, often lasting for days and weeks, painful to watch. The only thing to do is to be patient, present, take lots of breaks, have people who will listen to you, and pray without ceasing. You are hurting more than the one in the throes. If you are faithful you will trust the outcome and the divine hope within it.

TITLE

See the film to catch the fullness of the power this phrase evokes: By the Grace of God.

BIBLE  Remember the story of Zaccheus, the money manager/tax collector/business man who intuited something sacred going on with  this Jesus and his teaching? The crowds pressed, so Zaccheus went up into a tree to see Jesus as he passed by. Jesus spotted him, glanced up. Their gaze locked. Ever wonder what Jesus saw in Zaccheus's eye, and what Zaccheus saw in Jesus's eye?

WISDOM 

Remember always to ask: the grace of God according to whom?
A divided house cannot stand, but it can be rebuilt.

2019.04.07 A Flat Out Failed Wrinkle

Recently we watched the movie “A Wrinkle in Time.” I was looking forward to it. I had loved Madeleine L’Engle’s book by that name and was sure the movie would live up to her vision. After all, Ty Burr, cantankerous Boston Globe movie critic, even gave it a few nods, and Oprah Winfrey was in it. How could it lose?

To say I was disappointed is to put it mildly. I was furious. The movie was flat out terrible. Even if you knew nothing about L’Engle’s book or had no expectation, the movie failed to portray in an integrated way the forces of mystery, science, religion, spirituality, and the drama of three children in search of their missing father, an astrophysicist, whom they believed was lost in space.

On their journey the children meet three guides who represent Goodness, possibly the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, and named accordingly: Mrs Whatsit Mrs Who and Mrs Which. The actors who play these three guides in the movie are token black, token middle east, and token vaporous-mystical. Despite spotlighting big name stars and making God imagery expansive, the film’s dialogue is flat and the plot contrived. Possibly trying to be too “p.c.”, it fails to convey the spiritual depths of the classic good vs. evil drama. The film even downplayed the climactic scene in which heroine Meg Murry, token black, tries desperately to save her younger brother from the forces of evil they call IT. This rescue scene was one Madeleine L’Engle often chose to read publicly, in dialogue with her husband, a professional actor.  L'Engle (1918-2007) wise story-teller imagining tesseracts.

I admit my expectations for this film might have been too grand and complicated by my affection for L’Engle, but this interpretation missed her vision: her desire to communicate the wonders of quantum science through a dramatic quest story with obvious theological imagery.

Theology and science shaped Madeleine L’Engle’s spirituality. I first met her in 1980 when I was in seminary and fretting about having been turned down in the ordination process toward priesthood. I felt ashamed and inadequate. Madeleine, my spiritual director, did not argue with my feelings but rather told me that the institutional church was not exactly innocent in its devaluing of the ministry of women. She also persuaded me not to give up my quest and issued me a new commandment: “Now, my dear, when you get ordained, and you will, do NOT turn into a little man!” It made me laugh and gave me courage to resist being shaped by patriarchal forces—the IT in my life.

I felt like Meg Murry. She was driven to save her brother and find her beloved father. She dared to travel through time and space in the fifth dimension because of a tesseract, a word meaning four-dimensional cube, from tessara + actis "ray", adopted by L'Engle to mean a wrinkle in time through which one could travel into outer space.  As far as I was concerned the Episcopal Church might well have been a tesseract, a realm scary and mysterious with potential to destroy all my hopes and dreams. Besides her brain, her heart, and her love for her father, Meg uses her skills in math and science, her spiritual guides, and her wisdom to outwit IT, a force that insists that everyone is exactly the same. Meg knows that alike and equal are not the same. She persists. I have no mathematical skills, but I knew that women and men were alike but not the same. and definitely not equal—yet. And I did persist, nearly succumbing to the powers of IT and pretzeling myself into shapes I thought would please, rather than being myself. To come to my true self, I sinned and prayed, probably in equal measure, and enjoyed prodigal dollops of divine grace.

L’Engle also persisted. She submitted Wrinkle for publication twenty-some times over several years until finally the first publisher she’d submitted it to accepted it for publication in 1962.
Rejection hurts but it won’t kill you. Its plangency (don’t you love that word?) might even have provided me courage enough not to become a little man, as L’Engle had commanded.

P.S. My husband with whom I saw the movie found it boring. “So you have a copy of the book?”  he asked. I did. He read it and got every wrinkle of it—small but meaningful redemption.

2018.02.18 Anger

I’m so enraged, so angry, so downright outraged. I think there must be fear underneath this anger, but by God I simply can’t find it in my heart right now. And I am furious that I am so powerless.

Oh yes, I’ve wallowed in detachment-with-love and all that wisdom, but right now I’m attached in anger to the terrible FACT of the regular slaughter of young children in schools. Statistics are helpful but boring. You can easily find them.

How many children have to die because our nation, our government is too damn paralyzed to legislate gun control?  What prohibits gun control? Piggishness I’d say. I believe that the well-being of the whole is the responsibility of us all. I also believe that children have an edge— little children face down on beaches just trying to get to safety, teens hugging and wailing because their classmates are dead and they are alive, one more time a parent having to explain that this won’t happen here and your school is secure and protected, and no, I don’t know why this happens or why this unstable person could or would buy such a weapon. One young child asked: How come anyone can have big guns? Only soldiers or police have those. The answer: I don’t know. And a kiss. 

Please don’t speak spiritual/religious platitudes like Fear not. I’m done with that. Yes, I know it’s all over the Bible, but I simply can not swallow or follow that wisdom right now. Mea culpa, maybe. But just now it packs no wallop.  

What is the gun mania in this country?

It’s not just about National Rifle Association money, or is it? It’s not just so we can protect big gun manufacturing companies, or is it? It’s not just because we have a president, our national leader, who expresses tearlessly impotent sympathy, or is it?  It’s not just because all those Republicans worry about wallets, or all those Democrats simper along about progressive ideals and have no strong politics right now, or is it? It’s not just because America thinks it’s so great and is just discovering that it has deceived itself and followed its own privileged swollen ego, or is it?  It’s not just because so many voices from pulpits and bimahs lack courage to encourage the fires of anger, the only adequate fuel for transformative change, or is it? It’s not just because of patriarchy, or is it? 

If this list imposed a forced choice on me I’d vote for the centuries-old demonic idea that has been perpetuated in every culture: “The powerful and the privileged have the right to bend the lives, bodies and wills of the powerless to serve their own needs and desires and wants.” (Quote taken from a sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday 2/14/18 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street by the Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of New York)

The poor and the powerless are expendable. This same idea means that the powerful and privileged own even the freedom of others!   

I’m a religious person. Should I not feel compassion? Should I not be consumed with love for all these shooting victims and even the deranged shooters? Should I not be praying feverishly for God to intervene? I don’t believe in such a God. I believe God gave us, created and equipped us all, with hearts, minds and wills to mend the broken world. 

I believe God right now does weep with those who weep. I think God by now has consumed that old bush that caught Moses’s eye because it burned without being consumed, and moved on. Who will lead us out of this inferno of gun violence, flashes of gunfire exploding in children’s faces? Who? Will it be the wrath of God within us?

The only sacrifice I need is your gratitude. So speaks God in Psalm 50.

America instead sacrifices children on the altar of GUN-worship. This gun-empowered nation apparently does want children sacrificed, is that it?  In guns we trust?  The idolatry of salvation by guns, is that it? Hope in guns?  America IS a gun. 

All I can do is write and preach and sign every petition I can, call every politician I can, vote in every poll and every election. I’m too old and breath-limited to march and rally, but I can gnash my own teeth to no good end. And I can offer gratitude, very selfishly, because my own grandchildren are not dead in these recurring American shooting sprees in schools—yet.

I am a fervent believer in Hope. Right now I find hope in my anger.

As to thoughts and prayers? Yes!— that enough outrage will overcome American lassitude and selfish sloth to help Godde heal our souls, blast us for Christ’s sake out of torpor and turpitude into (insert any good C-word: communion, community, cooperation, collaboration, common good.) 

Be angry and sin not. Do not let the sun go down on our anger. (Ephesians 4: 26.)  I will be angry. I will not sin by buying a gun, just in case. But by Godde I want to. I want to. As to the sun: it’s already down.

Today we heard Mark’s story of how the heavens were “torn” apart to reveal Jesus as Beloved Son. Then Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted to reject that identity and its heft.  Torn and driven are strong verbs, angry verbs.

The greatest temptation for me right now would be to dress the sacrifice of my anger in more acceptably prissy theological language, like “righteous indignation." To hell with that!
                                             *  *  * *
Yet as priest I consecrate the holy meal, inviting communicants to give thanks to God who brings us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” (BCP, p. 368)
                                            Is that it?

2017.12.03 Advent of Sexual Harassment?—Always in Season

In the midst of this avalanche of allegations about sexual harassment, I asked my beloved priest spouse: Have you ever sexually harassed anyone?

Answer: Besides you?

What I keep on recalling, not as excuse but as cultural history, is that sexual harassment has been acceptable behavior for centuries. It was almost expected, and both men and women learned to live with it, their roles and rules clear: men pinch and comment; women demure, blush and dodge.  Feelings about it weren’t important.

So had I ever been sexually harassed in my work place, which was in the church? That includes volunteer work.

Once a priest commented on the movement of my body as I turned the drum of one of those old mimeograph machines. He liked to watch it, my butt not the machine. God forbid, I was flattered. I also felt uncomfortable. That was mostly because I worried that my behind was too fat or too flat, or whatever other idiotic body judgment I imposed on my body. Really? Yes.

What I experienced a lot was something I’d call attitudinal harassment. A bishop once towered over me and queried: “And WHO will take care of the children?” It wasn’t exactly harassment but it was shriveling and left little room for my perspective, let alone my answer. His assumption was that I couldn’t leave home. Mine was that my children would benefit from less not more parenting as they grew.  

My role in the church was limited to set up, clean up, ogle the altar, and in time, administer the chalice at the communion rail (a much trickier maneuver than passing out the bread/wafer), read from scripture on a Sunday, and serve on the vestry. I shoved my way along toward more and more leadership roles, ending up as Dean of our regional deanery, until finally the Church voted in 1976 that women could be ordained priests. Full acceptance of women in leadership is a work-in-progress.

Context is important—always. Some of this ongoing mess we’re in is a matter of interpretation, according to different times and different circumstances…and just plain evolution. My dad, for example, was a “mad man” in the 1950s. He had an affair with his secretary. Maybe more, though he was penitent and confessed his dalliance to my mother. What startled me most was that she told us daughters about it. Was that hostile? To whom?

In high school in a Connecticut shore town famous for gentlemen’s agreements (antisemitism in real estate, Christian/white elitism), I observed that lots of flirting went on amidst the cocktail party set. My mother wasn’t innocent. I learned from her that flirting was power—dangerous power. But my mother flirted with style. Is flirting sexual harassment of a sort?  What about flirting in the work place?

But these were the rules back then in the 1950s: men got handsy not just at parties but in work places. Women were supposed to overlook it or find clever ways to avoid office rape. It was a predator/prey culture, the assumption being that boys and men couldn’t help it—all that testosterone you know. Women had to work around it. These have been the rules over centuries, and they remained the rules.

Until 2017?  Well, we’ll see.

The point I want to make is that I still loved my dad and saw other good things in him. He never sexually harassed me with comments or looks. I felt proud when he retired early because advertising was becoming unethical, he thought ie. false advertising.

Plenty of great artists (Picasso for one, Woody Allen for another) have treated women in abusive exploitive ways. Does that discredit their art, their gifts?  How do we separate and sift all this while at the same time reshaping our collective mores/morality for the common good? Gawd, look at most all our presidents! Not to mention many saints and bishops!! Does their behavior toward women discredit their skills and accomplishment?

I’m a big-picture, person, for better or worse, so I see that it is increasingly incumbent on ALL of us to work together to end the abuses across the board born within a deeply entrenched, centuries-old patriarchal system of social organization. What was overlooked by everyone, men and women alike, really is now impossible to overlook. Or is it? American politics, religion, economics, morality across the boards, has been corrupted/contaminated by a silent consensus to ignore or deny unconscionable behaviors. Most painful to me is the fact that all this has as its underpinning the strong belief that women are not people, I mean not really people! 

To speak theologically, which I can’t resist: Sin is a condition that develops when anyone or ones become disconnected from the goodness in themselves, God, and their neighbors. And there you have it. Sin is always in our reach, which is why the system murdered Jesus for not recanting his politics and his image of God rich in compassion for the poor, the sick, the needful, the preyed upon, the underbelly of society—and women. Sin is endemic and inevitable, which is why all of us need to try to be Christ-like, to understand what that means, and to remember that every week in Eucharist we are re-Christified.

Will it be different now, or is it really going to be different now with all the latest revelations and fierce confessions?  I hope so. I pray so. You know my death throes of patriarchy theory. Godde knows!

2016.12.04 What About LIttle Girls?

Children take their political and religious cues from their parents, at least in the beginning. Whatever we do as adults affects our children. It forms them for good or ill. And there is hope whenever children remember. A couple of tender stories to remember.

In a class of four and five year olds

Cathy and her friend Susie had a conversation in school about the election of Donald Trump to serve as our next president. Another friend, Mimi, joined the conversation. Mimi informed her friends that Donald Trump thinks it’s okay to touch “women’s private parts". Cathy said her feelings would be hurt if that happened to her or her friends and is glad she lives in Massachusetts, since he will live in Washington,which is far away. The teacher handled it well, reassuringly, and also reported it to the parents of these girls.

In a parish church, Episcopal, in northeast Massachusetts

The parish rector, a woman, told me this story: A new family, parents with their young daughter, attended church the Sunday after the election. The rector went over to greet the newcomers, thinking they looked a little red-necked. She welcomed them then asked them how they found the parish. To the rector’s astonishment, the woman burst into tears, through which she said: “I looked online to find an Episcopal church that had a woman minister and found you. I wanted my daughter to have a female role model.” The rector was ashamed of her own assumptions, astounded at the woman’s candor, and honored to be a role model for the little girl.

In the woods in Chappaqua, New York

Here is a widely circulated image on Facebook by Margot Gurster. The text quoted below the photo is from an article in The Guardian by Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker.

“The  snap on Facebook was taken on the hiking trails surrounding Chappaqua by Margot Gerster, a grieving Hillary supporter who was out walking with her little girls. Suddenly, she wrote, there was the sound of rustling. Then, appearing like a mirage in the clearing, was Hillary herself with Bill and their dogs, doing ‘exactly the same thing’ as Gerster. The former president obliged Gerster by taking the photograph after she and Hillary had exchanged “a few sweet pleasantries” and hugged.

Nothing I have seen in the last 15 months of the campaign has resonated with me as much as the image that Gerster posted. It shows Hillary wearing what looks like no make-up, her hair uncoiffed, dressed in a baggy black parka, brown leggings and boots, and holding the dog leash twisted in her hand as her poodle mix snuffles among the carpet of leaves at her feet.”

No glamor, no glitz, no campaign—simple beauty.

Little girls will notice and remember. Little boys will notice too, yet what they notice will be different in a patriarchal culture.

Thank you, Hillary Clinton, for giving little girls a memory that will shape their consciences forever. Some will take it into political service, but wherever they take it, it will shape our future as a nation.

Thank you for risking so much to give us females yourself as a role model by which to remember that we too have voices and gifts for leadership as we desire. It has seemed to me that many white women of my generation have been so beaten down by patriarchy that they simply can not envision a woman—someone like themselves— in the White House.

My husband Dick and I have what we would call the honor of being the only grandparents, save one, of our shared twelve grandchildren, including step grandparents, ex-spouses, and in-law grandparents, to have voted for Hillary Clinton. In this we joined the majority of American voters. Still, some days I feel as if Dick and I went out on a limb and fell off our own generation.

Nevertheless, this latest new generation will remember. What it will mean to them precisely, we don’t know. But this election will mean something very significant, something way beyond who won the high office, to the future of patriarchy in our nation. Despite the pain of backlash and particular governmental policies that threaten to demolish progress our nation has made towards social wholeness and the constitutional equality we proclaim, I believe, when I look at the bigger picture, that, in this election, patriarchy has suffered a blow from which its -ism-dependent system of social organization will never recover.

This gives me hope, indefensible perhaps, but hope. For this I thank God. 

2013.06.16 Stuck With God? OK, But Not Godde's Pronouns

We may have thrown the baby out with the bath water. In this case the “baby” is God. The bath water I suppose is all the dirty sins—against God and humanity— of the many patriarchal religions.

Out, out damn sins, but save the "baby."  I’m stuck with God. I just can’t find a way around God. I’ve tried to use other names and  alternative spelling like Godde. I’ve experimented with various alternatives like Upholder, Source of Life, Creator, Shepherd, Holy One, Light, even Love— but these are all descriptives, not names.

I need a name! God is a name, not a gender.

There is something unrelinquishable about a name!—if you’re going to be calling on someone or addressing them as if they count. And God knows we call on God enough!—just in case if nothing else. Naming is an important tradition in families, in the Bible, and in religions. G-d names people.

The other issue for me is plain courtesy.  I was first introduced to divinity as God. I wouldn’t normally change the name I first knew anyone by, would I? Not. 

My one time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested I find a name for God that was a term of endearment, something like I'd use with my spouse—when I found him endearing. But hon just didn’t do it. 

I am a woman who fought passionately to get ordained a priest. As a woman, feminist, and priest I lobby for my conviction: God is not a boy's name.

Lots of Latino boys are named Jesus, Jewish boys named Moses, Muslim boys, Mohammed, but really! . . . Do you know anyone named God?  Can you imagine it?  “Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet the man I love and plan to marry. His name is God.”  It’s more traumatic than, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

When I was a child I thought of God as an old bearded man in the sky full of winks and wonders. and love for every ounce of creation. Then I was violated by an old man with a long white beard like God’s and after that I was pretty sure God was no man, even though the Church, all the prayers, the Bible, and everyone I knew called God He, Him, His, Himself.

I notice that traditional gendered language about God traps God in manhood and holy manhood at that—patriarchal images and theologies of omnipotence.  Language that deifies transcendent manhood is a constant thorn in the side of the freedom of God to be God. It’s God-abuse! 

It's also not good for us humans. We waste time and energy on gender-bound argumentation, all the while knowing that Divinity is not tied to a gender. It’s exhausting and personally it makes me furious and want to gnash my teeth. I do not feel loved and included in God who is only He. I'm a She. Divinity consistently clothed in such garb is NOT good for women, period.

So can keep God's name and get rid of the darn pronouns? It's possible.

At a retreat homily for seminarians I thought would be, well, liberal,  I suggested that, although Jesus the earthly man of Nazareth, was a man, Christ taken up into the godhead was a messianic title that no longer required masculinization. And further, the Incarnation was not restricted to Jesus’ flesh but was for all flesh, over half of it female.  N.B. The male seminarians freaked out; the women seminarians were moved and excited—but secretly.  One calling me a "trailblazer."

Why couldn’t we say in our liturgy, “By Christ and with Christ and in Christ” instead of him when we elevate the elements?   We have easily changed “It is right to give him thanks and praise” to  “It is right to give God (or our) thanks and praise.”  It’s not hard and it’s about Love.

Christians say God is unconditional love. Then why do we set conditions on that love by giving it a gender?

For Godde’s sake, literally, and before we know it some boy will be named God.  Poor kid.



 

2013.05.22 Endangered Values/Endangered Patriarchal Religion

I remember thinking when we—my first husband and three children—lived in Alabama (imagine!) and Jimmy Carter was running for Governor of Georgia in 1969 that he had something different going for him. I didn’t know what it was but I trusted my intuition over my shamelessly northern distrust of those who drawled and said “bless your heart” too much.

We’d moved to Annniston, a “northern”city about midway between Birmingham and Atlanta for a job offer too good to refuse. The job had promise, but the company boss was an all-day alcoholic who drank Pepsi Cola laced with bourbon, which more than once landed him in Birmingham Hospital with unstoppable hiccups. Guess who got a call in the middle of the night to go rescue him? 

Our house was elegant red brick and had a spacious front entryway of large square black and white tiles— fit for Scarlett O’Hara, not for three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, who ran in the red clay soil and tracked it into the house.  I slaved to keep the floor clean with my newly purchased electric floor cleaner. Still, the black tiles bled onto the white ones besmirching them with black flecks. What a ghastly metaphor for racism. I was as angry at the tiles as I was at the segregated uptown Episcopal church I could not, by any twist of conscience,  make my spiritual home

Alabama was a foreign land and I was a bored housewife who missed New England and had not much else to do but clean the freakin floor!—also drink scotch, nurse my depressed rage, write sloppy laments, read crap, correct the kids’ blossoming southern accents,  get pregnant with a fourth child— and watch TV.  

On TV, however,  I became acquainted with Jimmy Carter.  Later, back north, I voted for him for President.  He was a one-term president, some have labeled “weak.” He was hardly the traditional American macho president-of-choice. But neither is Barack Obama, yet both of these men won Pulitzers for peace efforts, Carter’s, uniquely, awarded 20 years after he left the presidency.

I still think Jimmy Carter represents something our American culture needs very much, perhaps a return to our basic values and faith in a power greater than ourselves.  We are a country that needs more than ever to be "under God" not above or without God. “Under” to me means overseen, not as a spy or a tyrant but as Love that is intimately, providentially co-creative. Dare we return to Genesis and the all-inclusive image of deity?

Recently  I read about Jimmy Carter’s “high profile defection” (NY Times’ assessment) from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which he’d been a member for 60 years. Carter could not support the Convention’s selective biblical literalism used to justify the subjugation of women and prohibit them from serving as pastors. At last I knew why I’d thought Jimmy Carter had something different going for him. 

Carter published a book in 2005 called Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.  In it he wrote: “The truth is that male religious leaders have had—and still have—an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.”

He rightly connects patriarchal theology and abuses of power with abuses of women throughout the world—with God as their justification.  Carter knows that such gender discrimination is a “clear violation” of the core teachings of all major religions.

Please note: Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention. He did NOT defect from Christianity, nor the Church, nor the Gospel of Jesus Christ—nor, I add, from his integrity as a human being and a son of the living God.

I don’t regret our southern sojourn in Alabama. There I got gifts: a dear fourth child, second son, born almost immediately after we came “home”; the memory of my friend, a lovely black woman who took care of the neighbors’ children while I took care of mine—we were domestics together; the surety that I would never have a black and white tiled foyer; and pride in an American politician who did have something different  going for him.