Thealogical Lady: A Blog

Eastertide: Day 10

4/29/2014

I am struck by this image of St. Catherine of Siena, whose feast Christians celebrate today. She is enormous. She is standing, looking eye to eye with the beholder from slightly above the beholder. She is bold and magnificent and holy all at once.

Women just aren't portrayed this way often in the Christian tradition.

St. Catherine is considered a doctor of the church. On prayer.forwardmovement.org, she is described this way, "One tends to think of medieval women as silent and passive dwellers in homes and convents. This was far from the case with Catherine of Siena. She exercised great influence in matters of church and state, and hers was one of the keenest minds of her day."

St. Catherine was a Dominican, and Dominicans have a special charism to preach. She took her charism so seriously that she dared to confront Pope Gregory XI--and she left having persuaded him to see things from her view.

I see in this extraordinary woman a model of bold, faithful, wise, and total devotion to God and God's work. She did not cower away behind medieval expectations of what her role was to be in the world. She stood taller and brighter than all her counterparts, female and male alike, not with self-preoccupation but with a keen vision of the vital part she had to play in the bringing about of God's reign--and God's holy work was done through her. She had the humility to say yes to being extraordinary.

In what ways am I called to say yes to being extraordinary? In what ways do I allow my fear to inhibit me from playing my part in bringing about God's reign?

Eastertide: Day 9

4/28/2014

The season of Lent (Sundays excluded) is forty days long, but Easter is fifty days long. Committing to a change of heart is a long process, but allowing oneself to bask in the joy of new life takes even longer.

Lent is the season in which I feel most at home. I get my radical need for metanoia, for turning from my sin. I'm not as comfortable allowing myself to soak in joy. It can feel like cheating, especially when I'm not feeling particularly joyous.

In what ways am I called to allow joy to be planted in me, right in the midst of my brokenness? In what ways does the flourishing of joy in me bring about the very metanoia I'm convinced I need?

Easter Saturday

4/26/2014

Photo by M. Kate Allen

Today my family is hosting a gathering of people we love, so yesterday I got to work.

When my hubby walked in the house after returning from work, he thanked me for my efforts and attempted to apologize for my having to do all the house-cleaning. I said, "No, I like it! It appeals to my sense of order!"

He proceeded to say I was sick and gave me a kiss as I grinned.

The thing is, when my house is clean, it is spacious. We don't own very much stuff (spring cleaning + preparation for potential move somewhere at some point + pregnancy took care of that this time last year), so when the clutter is organized and the dust is wiped away, what's left is ample room. This is a space that can be breathed in by a harried mom or run in by an exuberant toddler or crashed in by a learning-to-walk baby. I gaze around the room and am grateful for the simplicity I behold.

How does my heart reflect my hearth? What within me could use the loving touch of Eastertide refreshing? How may I live into the simplicity within me that I cherish so much outside of me?

Easter Friday

4/25/2014

Photo by M. Kate Allen

Sometimes a friendship abides only in the knowledge of what was--and sometimes that gossamer thread of what was is the only connection two people need to meet again as if not a thing had changed between them.

I had a deep, soulful conversation with one of my my longest-time friends last night (on Facebook chat, of all things). This friend is someone I've scarcely talked to over the last fifteen years, but when our fingers began flying across the keyboard, it was as though all those years of growing in wildly different directions had changed nothing.

I realized something surprising as I listened to my friend reminisce: part of me--one of the best, worth-keeping-around, worth-fighting-for parts of me--has been part of me for all these fifteen years, and probably more.

Sometimes my inclination is to tell myself that the best parts of myself have only emerged recently (i.e. since I've fully and intentionally embraced who I'm called by God to be), but that story isn't true. I've just had trouble naming or owning some of them before now.

In what ways do I allow the resurrected aspects of myself overshadow or swallow up the life-giving aspects of the life I lived before? In what ways do my life now match (or perhaps pale in comparison to) my past? What might I learn about my old-time self from the words of the people I love if I listened to them talk about me, and what about my old life do I still need to invite forward as I live my Easter life?

Easter Thursday

4/24/2014

Photo by M. Kate Allen

Yesterday I engaged in radical transparency as I told a story of my life that's been hidden for many years.

Sharing this story of brokenness had the unexpected effect of rendering me more, not less, whole.

This has me wondering whether the gospel writers couldn't make due with the original ending of the gospel of Mark because it wasn't enough for the scandal of Jesus' rising from the dead to go untold. Perhaps the resurrection event became redemptive as it was whispered with others.

A grain of wheat alone is small, lonesome, and dry--but if she dares to expose herself to the enveloping, all-penetrating company of rich, moist, nourishing soil, she gives herself over to the possibility of growing up to new life, and eventually fulfilling her life's call to feed others from her new life.

What still remains hidden, isolated, and untold within me? What lonesome seed from my life needs to be plucked from its isolation and planted within the soft soil of my heart so it may rise up?

Easter Tuesday

4/22/2014

During evening prayer yesterday, I read the lection from the gospel according to Mark of the three women going to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

I wonder what the three women experienced as they walked toward the tomb of the one they so deeply loved. Heartache? Shock? Disbelief? Unrelenting grief? Were they stoic, determined to make the best of it, to do the tasks prescribed and move on?

And when they discovered that the tomb was empty, and that this young man in white was sitting next to the tomb, telling them their beloved had been raised from death, I wonder what they feared most. Would they be blamed? What could this mean? If he wasn't in the tomb, then where was he?

This morning, a friend of mine from theology school quoted Henri Nouwen, one of the gentlest voices of Christian spirituality from the twentieth century: "The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will never get lost."

In moments when my faith is strained to its limits, how strong is my belief that what belongs to God will never get lost?

Easter Monday

4/21/2014

I don't know how Cyril, the late-4th century bishop of Jerusalem, did it. After all the liturgical hoopla he went through in each Holy Week and Easter, he spent each Easter Week guiding neophytes of faith through mystagogy, the breaking open of the mysteries they had just experienced.

I'm no bishop. I'm not guiding anyone through the meaning of their confirmation/baptism/communion. All I did for Holy Week and Easter was sing, and I'm totally zonked.

Perhaps Bishop Cyril was able to move energetically from Easter action into Easter mystagogy because he was an artist, the kind of artist who's so passionate that he'll forsake all else for the beauty and importance of his work (work, in his case, which was done for God's sake).

Perhaps Cyril believed, like I do, that liturgy (and the belief to which it gives rise) matters. Maybe, since he was the head of the church--in the city where Jesus died and rose--he felt that his responsibility was just a little bit weightier than that of others whom God had ordained to serve. And maybe his desire to bring about illumination of hearts was his manna in a wilderness of leadership.

As I went through Holy Wednesday's shadows, Holy Thursday's footwashing, Good Friday's darkness, Holy Saturday's silence, and then the Vigil that beckoned forth the new light of Easter, I was struck over and over by how different Holy Week and Easter felt at St. Augustine's than it had for me elsewhere. I don't perceive the difference in terms of "better" or "worse." I perceive the difference in the degree of leadership I was granted, and in the way my leadership helped shape the prayer of others. In small ways--as a musician--I spent this Holy Week and Easter living into Bishop Cyril's holy presence as a liturgical leader. I find myself in awe (and maybe the more appropriate word here is "fear") of my God-given ability to make a difference to others, for better or worse.

As I continue to be called forth to lead, how will I maintain my zeal like Bishop Cyril did? How will I engage in self-care without losing sight of the care of others?

Easter

4/20/2014

This is the day the Lord has made!
Let us rejoice and be glad!

Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs
bestowing life!

Christ is risen indeed!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Furthermore,

My toddler Easters when she wakes up crying and seeks my early-morning arms.
My infant daughter Easters when she utters "Ma-Ma" as her greeting for the first time.
I Easter when I behold my sleeping beloved and smile.

The world Easters every time it loves without fetter.

Easter!

Alleluia!

Living Lent: Holy Saturday

4/19/2014

Jesus--crucified.
The whole world fills the new tomb.
In stillness hope stirs.

Living Lent: Maundy Thursday Mystagogy

4/18/2014

"Maundy" comes from "Mandatum," which refers to Jesus' mandate to his friends to wash the feet of others just as he washed theirs at the last supper before his death. The act of washing a dinner-guest's feet was normally reserved for a slave, and it meant coming into contact with whatever a first-century Jewish person in Jerusalem might have stepped in or on--dirt, feces, bugs, waste-water, nettles, anything. The host of a dinner wouldn't make his own hands impure by touching the unclean feet of his guests.

And yet.

Nowadays, folks who are planning to have their feet washed during the ritual enactment of Jesus' foot-washing take pity on those who wash feet. They wash their own feet in advance, maybe even manicure them, making sure every last trace of "ewww" is gone.

I might have done this, too, but in the midst of preparing to sing many new-to-me hymns for liturgy, I forgot.

At my parish, anyone can have her feet washed. As the foot-washing ritual got underway, it looked as though everyone was choosing to do this. So despite my dirty feet, I went forward.

Exposing my feet, allowing the clean hands of another to wash them, was humiliating. And in my humiliation, a new gateway for grace manifested.

What a gift to receive the blessing of the holy other who beheld my uncleanness and loved me anyway.

Isn't this receiving and giving the entirety of the Christian call?

Living Lent: Tenebrae

4/17/2014

Long psalms draw me into shadow.

A clatter rattles me.
Death!

But a lone flame alights,
scattering harbored dark
and my dry face is watered with hope.

Living Lent: Disappointment

4/16/2014

Easter draws near, and I find myself disappointed. I'm excited for the resurrection day, but I don't feel prepared for it. Like all Pelagian Christians, I have this sense that I should have done more (or at least done better) this Lent.

Pelagius was deemed a heretic, though. He implied that the human person had all the resources at her disposal (okay, his disposal--I doubt he would have been concerned with women) to achieve salvation.

And Christianity doesn't work like that. I don't save myself. Salvation--healing--relies on the outpouring of the sacred other. I can't do it or accomplish it on my own.

I'm the sort of person who would rather do it myself. When I'm in charge, things happen more efficiently (and more to my liking).

But my faith calls me (over and over and over, sometimes to my great annoyance) out of my egoism. Like right now.

What do these last days of Lent have to offer me that I cannot offer myself?

Living Lent: Reading

4/15/2014

I've spent much of this Lent steeping my heart in words: words from my prayer books, words from scripture, words from novels, and words from those I love.

I recently read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a medieval story that follows the rhythm of the monastic daily office. Now I'm reading D.L. Smith's The Miracles of Santa Fico, a story that my friend, Denise, promises will illuminate Holy Week. Soon I will reread Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the most influential books of my life (whose contents are summed up in the title).

In what ways do the stories I read and hear shape the story of my life? As I approach the liminal liturgy of Triduum that serves as the gateway between Lent and Easter, what stories should I embrace as truth-bearers, and what stories should I relinquish as deceivers?

Living Lent: Going Home

4/14/2014

Last Tuesday my baby daughter and I traveled to Ohio to visit family and friends. Many wonderful, loving, fruitful meetings took place, and my daughter and I hardly stopped moving except to sleep. My heart is full with marvelous memories of the trip.

I have much from the trip to reflect on over the coming days, but one insight stands out for me: the home of my childhood, whose land and people I love, is no longer my home. My home is in the desert, a place that I would never have imagined myself living in even a year ago.

What other surprises await my life as I open myself to the possibility of the unexpected?

Living Lent: Grieving death

4/7/2014

I have grieved the deaths of many people I love. Grieving death, when love for the one who has died is great, hurts. The hurt can be so searing that the griever seeks to shut out her grief: she buries it, hiding it so she doesn't have to face it.

What isn't obvious to the griever is that hiding grief isn't the same as letting it go. Hiding allows the grief to blossom deep within me. It becomes a weed, claiming good soil for itself and choking to death the good that has been cultivated within me.

In my personal effort to grieve a death I've never grieved, I have had to dig deep within myself to grasp at my grief's roots. That grasping has taken the form of many words--as I give voice to the grief, its shape becomes distinct from the now-hardened soil in which it dwells, and I can grasp it with gradually increasing ease.

In what ways will I have to embrace my grief before it releases its hidden grip on me?

Living Lent: Grief - 5th Sunday of Lent

4/6/2014

Stony heart walls break
Spilling rush of long-dammed grief
Soft love whispers, balm.

Living Lent: Powers of Mercy

4/5/2014

As my Benedictine Canon community prepares to engage in a formal discernment process about its future ministries this afternoon, my mind is on spiritual and corporal works of mercy.

"Works" is a loaded word that most folks of Protestant inclinations dislike. "Works" sounds like that dangerous idea of trying to make ourselves look better to God so we can get more grace (which is the notion so unhelpfully espoused in practice, if not in teaching, by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages). Martin Luther was no fan of this. He, an Augustinian monk, was excommunicated for speaking out prophetically against the notion that we could manipulate God to get God to gives us more grace (mainly in the form of indulgences sold by the church).

There is a long-standing patristic tradition of two kinds of works of mercy: spiritual works of mercy and corporal works of mercy, both of which are worth listing here.

Spiritual Works of Mercy

To instruct the ignorant;
To counsel the doubtful;
To admonish sinners;
To bear wrongs patiently;
To forgive offences willingly;
To comfort the afflicted;
To pray for the living and the dead.

Corporal Works of Mercy

To feed the hungry;
To give drink to the thirsty;
To clothe the naked;
To harbor the harborless;
To visit the sick;
To ransom the captive;
To bury the dead.

Rather than referring to these fourteen acts as works of mercy, I would prefer to refer to them as powers of mercy. Christians are empowered by baptism to do all these as acts of discipleship to Christ. Our purpose, our mission, is to go out to the world to use our power to act in these ways, because this is this sort of power that Christ bestowed (and bestows) on his followers. The power we are given is radically counter-cultural, noted only rarely by wider society (and then only in people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta) because these powers are embraced in such a lukewarm way by so many Christians (myself included).

Imagine with me a Christianity in which Christians devoted themselves not to the preservation of their own religious status quo, but rather to embracing and exhibiting the powers of mercy bestowed on them in baptism. Imagine Christian communities taking the lead of Martin Luther in upsetting their own lukewarm faith, emptying themselves of their own chaff that they might make way for the grains of wheat that God seeks to plant in them. What if we Christians allowed ourselves to become living bread, the risen, powerful Body of Christ in and for the world?

Living Lent: Aurora Chapel

4/4/2014

I wrote recently about discovering long-buried grief while sharing sacred conversation with my spiritual director.

It is amazing to me what can dwell in darkness for years without being uncovered, and then emerge--just a little--through the act of trusting another.

Aurora, Homer described, is the rosy-fingered dawn whose light precedes the blazing dayfire of Apollo. She is the first bearer of light, strong and gentle at once. Her light is enough to disperse the darkness, but her light is not so bright that it blinds.

I would like to offer sacred space in which trust may dwell and rosy-fingered light may emerge. I invite you to make prayer requests in the Aurora Chapel for whatever dwells hidden in the depths of your heart. Early each morning, I will gather up the requests that have been made in the past day and offer intentions for them during the course of my Benedictine Canon community's prayer. All requests will be held in confidence.

What abides so deeply in your heart that you scarcely notice it?

Living Lent: Heart in Blossom

4/3/2014

Howdy. I'm Kate. And within the Enneagram personality indicator, I'm a three.

As a three-type, I'm the sort of person who, my whole life, has been motivated by varying degrees of desire to succeed, to be praised, and to be valued by others.

The healthiest three is the sort of person who is able to let go of her attachment to praise and valuing from others and to draw motivation for her actions from her heart's deepest desire. The healthiest three is one who is motivated not by the joys accessible outside herself, but by the joys accessible within herself.

Yesterday, April 2, 2014--on an otherwise ordinary, unremarkable day--my heart blossomed, and I beheld my life's calling without fear or doubt. My motivations having to do with pleasing others were supplanted by the desire to serve my God in the place of my own deepest joy.

I'm Kate. I'm a three. And as of yesterday, I am free from the bondage of outside affirmation. I am directed from within myself. I am free to be who I am called to be in the eternal now, no holding back.

What will my life look like from this day forward? What will I be compelled to do and say and be for the sake of God and neighbor that I would have hesitated to do and say and be before?

Living Lent: Accepting New Light

4/2/2014

Suppose someone shines a light in your face. Do you turn from it, or do you let it illumine you for the other to see? What if the light is so bright it hurts your eyes? What if there is no light anywhere around you except that which is shining on you?

My toddler does this. She'll find our emergency LED flashlights tucked away, pull them out, turn them on, and shine them in our eyes till her daddy and I remind her not to do it, since doing that can give people ow-ies.

During spiritual direction yesterday, my spiritual director held up a lone flame to illumine part of my past that was buried deep within me--old, strong grief with old, strong power. She invited me to consider seeking therapy to work through it. My inability to withhold tears as I considered my grief confirmed that she was right.

Lent is a time for digging through one's deepest darkness--not to find new ways to bury it, but to hold it up to light and embrace it with the fierce grip of love.

Will I be able to bear the tears that come as I face this old darkness? Will I trust others to gather me up when I release both my tears and my strength to stand?

Living Lent: No Longer for Ourselves

4/1/2014

As a student of liturgy, it's fair to say that I have spent a good deal of my life preoccupied with how liturgy is prayed. I studied liturgy with the same Benedictine community that sent Dom Virgil Michel to Europe to study liturgy during the revolutionary liturgical time preceding the Second Vatican Council. For fifteen years--almost half my life--the way Christians (and others) worship together and how that in turn shapes their lives has been the source of much reflection for me.

When my pastor at the Community of St. Peter (then Historic St. Peter Church) was gathering feedback for his D.Min. dissertation about how worship was formative for our congregation, he asked the choir to gather for a special meeting. We choir members had had the broadest and most consistent exposure to the various liturgies celebrated in our community, including funerals and weddings, which generally were rather exclusive affairs. Our breadth of liturgical experiences made us especially important for his dissertation, so we talked with him. I remember speaking up at one point to offer that liturgy--however it may be done--teaches Christians agency and accountability. Where we are liturgical agents, we become accountable for the way we bring about God's Reign in the world. Where we are not liturgical agents, we are not accountable for the way we bring about (or fail to bring about) the Reign of God in the world.

It seems to me that for Christian communities who are fearful of becoming obsolete in their ritual practices, the answer starts, but never ends, with liturgy. In what way do congregations pray? If what we do at church is what we learn to do in the world, what exactly is it that we're learning? And if what we learn at church is that practicing the Reign of God is someone else's job, then aren't we doing church wrong?

The church doesn't exist for its own sake. Christians are called to live no longer for themselves, but for the sake of the world, that God's radical peace might find a place to dwell in every corner. Any Christian community that exists to serve itself may as well shutter its doors. We are formed in Christian community primarily so that we--all the baptized, not merely clergy--may be sent into the world to do what Jesus charged his disciples to do: to feed the multitudes with that for which they are most desperately hungry.

For what do our neighbors starve and thirst? And what will my Christian sisters and brothers and I--as people empowered by baptism and formed around the tables of holy word, living bread, and saving wine--offer them?