Thealogical Lady: A Blog

Hand to Hand, Mother to Daughter: Part 1 (Guest Post)

10/7/2017

Keeley Bruner

Keeley Bruner is the mother of two daughters and a devoted, progressive member of the Disciples of Christ Church. In this three-part series, she writes of the challenge of handing on her faith in ways that mirror the best of her own religious upbringing while reflecting the ways in which her faith has matured and widened in adulthood.

Growing up in my home, faith was always a part of my life. It was woven into the fabric of our family through weekly worship services and prayer meetings, blessings before meals, bedtime stories and prayers, and frequent conversations with family members. As I got older, my involvement in church activities increased, and my own understanding of my faith and what was framed as my personal relationship with Jesus Christ grew. I remained cozy in evangelical Christianity throughout my college years, continuing to attend church, engage in daily personal Bible study and prayer, and serve through my college’s Campus Crusade for Christ ministry.

Whenever someone begins a spiritual autobiography this way, the implication is often that something then happened, that some shift occurred to change the trajectory of the expected path. And while these things did happen, I can’t trace it to a single event or even period of time. Maybe it was meeting my husband the summer before my senior year in college, a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man whose own faith had undergone significant dissembling and reassembling in the months before we met. Maybe it was traveling to Uzbekistan on a cultural exchange with my college ministry buddies and experiencing the love and hospitality of people of different, or no faith, there. Maybe it was moving to Cambridge, MA after getting married right out of college, where we experienced a definite cultural shift from our suburban Bible-Belt environment. Maybe it was hanging out with Jesuits, Franciscans, Benedictines, and other Catholics at my husband’s graduate school there, or experiencing the social activism of our Baptist church home in Cambridge. Maybe it was moving to Princeton, NJ and finding our spiritual home at a United Church of Christ congregation in the middle of that small, idyllic town, and witnessing the fire of older saints’ faith which had been forged through decades of practicing progressive Christianity. Maybe it was Obama, and the way he engaged people of all faiths to see the possibility and necessity of using government to care for the least of these. Maybe it was the work of Jim Wallis, of reading issue after issue of Sojourners and seeing the ways that Christians are jumping in and doing the real work of caring for the poor without keeping cost, without needing numbers and conversions to bolster their faith. Maybe it was experiencing pregnancy and giving birth, and realizing the magic of growing a person inside my body and nourishing a baby with my own milk, with my own life, twice. Maybe it was moving to Tempe, AZ and being pulled as if with a magnet to our faith community here, the most ragtag, loving, beautiful bunch of misfits I ever saw, with our hearts open wide to whatever, and whomever, may come through our doors.

It’s possible that the shift had something to do with the guilt of never doing enough in my previous Christian tradition, of always falling short but never fully being able to count on God to still love me or the grace of Jesus to fill the gap between who I was and who I should be. It’s possible it had to do with the bean-counting I found here and there, of how many testimonies shared and how many souls converted when the work of Christ encompassed so much more in my mind. It’s possible it had to do with the boiling down of the broad, deep, wide, incomprehensibly beautiful work of the Spirit into 4 sentences, each illustrated by pertinent cartoons. And most recently, it’s possible the final shift slipped into place with the realization that 82% of my former cohorts used their rights, and privilege, to catapult the coarse, vulgar, greedy celebrity we know as the leader of our land into power.

The fact is that it’s done, that the trajectory has been different than it might have been. While I have faith in God, love for Christ, and a kinship with the Spirit that are true, deep, and meaningful to me on a daily basis, how these are manifested departs significantly from what I might have expected based on my early life. But as I expressed above, I like to think of that conversion as a moving towards something, rather than away from something. I think of it as embracing a much larger God than I had imagined, with a much more expansive love than I had been told and a closer knowledge and presence with us than I had ever envisioned.

While my faith surely remains simply a part of my identity, another reason it matters at this point in my life is my children. Having come from where I did (mark my husband’s beginning at roughly the same place on the spectrum) and having traveled to where I am now (repeat), how do I foster a life of faith in my family in a thoughtful, genuine way? The church we attend has a small and hardy children’s ministry but, as my own mother decided, I don’t want to depend on that alone to impart the beauty of Christian faith to my daughters. I may not want them to grow up in the cradle of Evangelicalism the way I did, but there are many facets of my upbringing I certainly wish to convey to them. So, what is a Progressive Christian to do?

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Presiding like a woman

8/22/2015

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This is how we do it:

In kitchens, standing over steaming saucepans, following recipes
passed down by our grandmothers,
At the table, gathering the day’s news from children, guests,
lighting candles, feeding tidbits to the cats.
In operating theatres, administering with precision the deadly wounds that will heal,
In parliamentary communities and city councils,
trying to find another way of doing business.
wielding power that enables and includes,
In concert halls, at the rostrum, bringing all that unruly creativity
into one living, breathing music.
In classrooms, warming to our subject, encouraging the slow and
quick-witted learners, drawing out incipient wisdom.
In gardens, clearing weeds, making space for things to grow,
planning colours in their right times and seasons.
In bedrooms and at waterpools, learning over the women about to give
birth.
holding their sweating hands, looking into their eyes, saying
‘Yes! Now! Push!’
In our own voices – elegant, educated: rough, untamed; stuttering or eloquent;
in all the languages that God gives.
Or sometimes without voice, silently, through gestures;
the nod of the head, lifting of an arm, sway of our bodies,
the way we move around a space.
Sometimes with permission, mostly without.
Recognized for the priests that we are, mostly not.
Never alone; always in the company of sisters,
brothers, children, animals who call our gifts into being
and offer their own for the making of something
that includes everyone and yet is beyond us all.

Seated, standing, lying propped up in beds or couches,
from wheelchairs and walking frames.
proud of our bodies, bent with the burdens we’ve carried all these years
or youthful, resilient, reaching after what’s yet to come.

In shanty towns, under rickety roofs made out of tarpaulin.
and high rise council flats in the centre of sprawling cities.
In remote rural monasteries and out of the way retreat centres;
in hospitals, prisons and shopping centres.
factories, office blocks and parliamentary corridors;
in women’s refuges and hostels for the homeless.
old people’s homes and kids nurseries,
on death row and in the birthing wards:
every place where human lives jostle, mingle, struggle, despair, survive.
In the desert cave and the hermit’s hidden cleft,
where land and sky and the company of saints are the congregation.

This is how we do it:
not really thinking how we do it but doing it;
not naming it for what it is but sometimes, in flashes,
recognizing the nature of what it is we do:

the calling, the gathering, the creating of community,
the naming, the celebrating and lamenting of a people’s sorrows and joys.
the taking of what human hands have made.
offering it with thanksgiving and blessing.
the breaking, the fracturing of so many hopes and expectations.
to discover something unlooked for, new, beyond the brokenness:
the sharing of what has been given by others:
the discovering that, even out of little, hungers are fed,
hurts healed, wounds not taken away but transfigured –
the bearing, the manifesting of the body of God,
the carrying in our bodies of the marks of the risen One;
seeing the light reflected in each others’ eyes.
seeing Her beauty mirrored in each one’s softened face.

-Nicola Slee

I finished the first draft of my first novel yesterday. Upon finishing, I read and savored the above poem on an acquaintance's Facebook page.

As I look for my next project (and there are so many from which to choose!), I reflect on the difficulty of presiding. I have a whole liturgical library of resources to draw from, but none of those resources is Thean. I don't have a Thean prayer book, a Thean lectionary, a Thean Psalter, a Thean Bible, or a Thean hymnal. I long to have resources I can use that I don't have to create on a weekly basis, and in which I'm not constantly crossing out masculine pronouns and names and writing in feminine ones.

Presiding in this new liturgical tradition is my calling, but Thea never implied that it would be easy. The project that stirs my heart most now is the creation of permanent resources for the Thean tradition.

I could do this the easy way and simply revise existing Christian and Jewish texts for my own purposes. I probably will do that with the New Testament--I'm still drawn to the Christian narrative. But to have a prayer book that covers the whole liturgical year, I will have to reimagine the liturgical year in my own words. It won't be easy. But again, Thea never implied that it would be.

I want to do this the right way. I want to be able to make Thean resources available to others--and that's not something I can do if I'm piggybacking off someone else's work. So I will, prayer by prayer, create new resources for Theanism. And, perhaps within the space of a few months, or a year, or a decade, I will have Thean books I can turn to when I preside over my house church liturgies.

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Drama

4/30/2015

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Occasionally my four-year-old and I will do dramatic improvisations of biblical characters. For example, the other day, she said, "You be Jesus," so I played Jesus, first carrying the cross, then laying down on the cross, then being nailed to the cross (by her), then dying. Then my almost two-year-old tapped on my arm to raise me from the dead: I was resurrected.

It wasn't long before my four-year-old wanted to switch roles. She was to play Jesus and I was to play Mary Magdalene, she said. Suddenly we were outside the tomb, the rock was rolled away, and Jesus was calling my name, asking me why I was there. Then we switched roles again so she could play Mary Magdalene and wear a sparkling scarf on her head.

Bit by bit, my daughter, who loves both reading and performing, is learning the stories of the Bible. She's also learning, through our house church liturgies, that God's name is Thea, and that "she" is an appropriate pronoun for the divine. What will my biblically literate, feminist daughter make of her faith as she grows up? Where will the path she's on now lead her later in life? I watch her and see potential for wonderful things. No matter how she chooses to journey in the future, I suspect her adult faith life will be rich indeed.

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Hand to Hand, Mother to Daughter: Part 1 (Guest Post)

Keeley Bruner

Presiding like a woman

Drama

Rev. M. Kate Allen

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