Everything is changing. 2011 seems to be the year that the waves crash, and the current carries much away, and leaves new pebbles behind. Pebbles of insight, beauty and wisdom. Sometimes at night I get scared. So much is shifting in me and around me that I wonder what to hold on to. Then I realize, the point is not to
hold on. The point is to let go. Trust the current of the Spirit and allow myself to be carried.
The church was the container of my faith for my entire life; the United Methodist Church, to be exact. I'm sure I felt the vibrations of the church organ and its rhythms from the womb as my mother sat in church. I have three brothers, who were all pretty much out of the house by the time I reached 5th grade. First I was the only girl, then I was just.. the only. My parents are very traditional; even more so in the fact that my mother grew up in the South with five brothers, and my father grew up in India. They came together with very definite and complementary views of the role of women.
I questioned a lot of things, but never to the point of shaking things up too much. My brothers didn't have anything to do with Church because of their own various experiences as pastor's kids, so I was the Church Girl. I was the Mature Teenager. I learned early that that role gained me some affirmation from a lot of adults around me. I loved the church. I loved the candlelight, communion, the kneeling, the beautiful rituals, and mostly the music. Singing in the church choir was a powerful experience for me that nurtured my faith and passion for God.
I never questioned why all the role models and heroes in the Bible were men. I never questioned how I was made in the image of God and yet God was male and I was female and so....?? I was simultaneously immersed in my father's psychology, as he liked to share his knowledge with anyone who would listen and at the dinner table I was a captive audience. So I learned that our fates were determined by the age of 3, that most of our problems were caused by our mother who was the primary nurturer in our lives. I learned that sexuality was a problem for everybody, and that children had sexual feelings toward their parents that they usually denied of course. I didn't question. I also learned that women have penis envy. Ha! I must say I did question that one! I knew that wasn't true for me at all!! They can have that one! But with that teaching, I learned that I was "missing" something. In church I was taught that Eve was created by God using one of Adam's spare parts, so a woman was made from man (no one told me there was another creation story in which both were created in the image of God at the same time). I also learned that the sins of the world for which Jesus had to undergo a tortuous and cruel death were caused by a woman who stepped out of line. Who didn't obey. Who took initiative.
In church, I confessed my sins, of which I wasn't clear on. But I acknowledged that I was a sinner in need of salvation; in need of Jesus undergoing a bloody, violent death to appease God. I drank my juice and never questioned.
But as I've grown older, as I've undergone treatment for depression, struggled all my life with self-esteem issues, paid countless therapists to "fix" me, and also faced rejection in the church just for being a woman.... I started to think something was terribly wrong. It wasn't until I left the Church that I was brave enough to really question things I took for granted. First of all, my depression improved considerably when I left the church. There was a clue. The huge shift in thinking and feeling, however, came to fruition when I attended a Woman's Retreat in Kansas City last July. Karen Drucker and Lori Sandstrom, whom I'd never previously heard of, led the retreat. At the retreat we were led in many exercises to change the stories that we carried in us. Stories that tell us, "you are stupid," "you aren't worthy," "it's all your fault," "you're too sensitive, you're too emotional, you're too..too...too...", "You are a temptress," "you're a bitch," "you need a man to be whole..." I remember one moment when Karen had us think about what we say to ourselves as women, and I thought,
I don't even think of myself as a woman.
That was weird.
But I realized that I'd spent so much time trying to be taken seriously all my life, to get my father's attention or any other man that needing impressing in order for me to move forward, that I tried to do things a man's way. I was a woman in ministry, but the whole church and way of doing things is decided and shaped by men. It kept me in my head, and the heart wasn't really involved, because that makes things too unclear. I denied my sensitivity, my passion, my creativity, my intuition, my
heart. Oh, I let it out occasionally, of course, but overall, I kept it all stuffed inside. I wore a robe designed for men, read liturgy written by men, read creeds voted on by men (1700+ years ago, I might add), and sang 200- year old hymns. I took vows for ordination and agreed to a contract written by a man in the 1700s.
I didn't really think of myself as a woman. On Christmas Eve I did add my perspective as a woman who knew what pregnancy and birth were all about, and tried to imagine what that would have been like in a cave faraway from my mother, in a town of strangers and a clueless husband whose marriage to me had been arranged. In fact, it was only at Christmas when I felt like a woman had any prominence in the Gospels at all. Or Holy Week. During Tenebrae I embraced the grief-stricken Marys and embodied them in drama. Twice a year, I got to connect to women in the Gospels. Pregnancy and death. What about the other women? What did they do? The women of the Old Testament? What did Sarah believe about this God who ordered Abraham to slaughter her long-awaited miracle child?? What about a culture where it was ok to have several wives and concubines? And what did they believe? Who did they worship?
I was among a community of women that weekend in KC who asked those questions, who also wrestled with depression and self-hatred, all while worshipping a God who demanded his son to die a cruel death like a lamb in slaughter
because I was that bad.
I am a woman. I feel deeply. I love profoundly. I weep, I get angry, I am gentle, I am strong. I have experienced profound connections with God since I was a child. I have a body that has created life! Like the seasons of the year, my body goes through possibility of new life, death, and new life again. I am creative. Words come to me. I sense when a friend needs a hug, a note, a reminder that she is beautiful. I have a profound, passionate love with my husband of 20 years, where we have grown as individuals and a couple during that time. We have been hurt, we have been angry, we have been astonished at one another's goodness and appreciated each other even more over the years. We are friends and we are lovers. Nothing has been more profound for me than the experience of being pregnant-- feeling that life grow inside of me, and to see my child's face for the first time. I will never, ever forget that. When I look at the beautiful young woman she's become, I can still appreciate the awesome mystery that she came together-- arms, legs, feet, toes, head and fingers-- inside of my body. That she got her first nourishment from my body. That connects us in a way that men simply can't understand.
I am not better than a man. Nor is a man better than me. I believe we were created in God's image at the same time, like the first creation story says. That we were always meant to be equal, different parts of the whole of humanity. That we were created to work together, side by side, in harmony. In peace. Appreciating the unique gifts and beauty of the Other than is also a part of me. If God is male, than we are incomplete. We are single-parented children. And women are Other, wrong, missing parts. But God is more than male. God is male and female and All and More. We are all created in God's image, and so our image must be in God. Jesus taught so many things about living in harmony, in peace, in justice. But in the Church we only focus on his death and resurrection, and mostly ignore his radical teachings and who he was/is. The Christ... who told us that we were do even greater things than he did.
God has not stopped speaking. God speaks every day, in nature, in books, in movies, in people, in the arts, everywhere and in any thing that humans are paying attention to, God can speak. God speaks through women. And men. And I am a woman with unique gifts. With feelings, emotions, passions, insights, so much! to share. There is a lot of Good News for God to share, and I don't believe God would limit that Good News to one story, one creed
, one book. Not when God has so much to say and to share!
I am Woman. I am beautiful and unique. I am growing all the time. I will never stop learning, not even when I cross over into eternity, into timelessness and Perfect Love. In the meantime, I have gifts to share, light to shine, stories to tell. Ones that only I can tell. So do you. Will you tell me?
