Thealogical Lady: A Blog

In the wake of Orlando

6/17/2016

As a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, I have taken the words of my LGBTQ+ friends to heart over the last week and quieted myself so that they and their community could be heard in the wake of the devastation at Pulse in Orlando, Florida.

As a minister, however, I also have a responsibility not to keep silent forever, because my silence might imply my endorsement or approval of the actions of the man who shot and killed/wounded over a hundred members of the Latinx LGBTQ community.

Let me be clear: it is not the will or desire of God (whom I call Thea) that LGBTQ people should be targets of violence. It is not Thea's will that LGBTQ people should in any way change or hide or be ashamed of their sexual identity. Individuals and communities that intentionally marginalize/persecute the LGBTQ community for their sexuality are absolutely wrong to do so, full-stop. These persecutors are the ones who need to change, not the ones they persecute.

I mourn for the precious lives lost and those that were forever changed in this mass shooting. I also mourn for the shooter, whose life was lost fighting the wrong fight. I pray for peace, solace, and love to envelop the LGBTQ community so they might heal and be strengthened to be who they are with enormous pride, and I pray for compassion, a desire for mutual understanding, and forgiveness among all of us, because we could all use much more of that. As for me, I have spent this week letting my LGBTQ friends know that I love them and I'm thinking of them, and I've also spent this week lovingly communicating with those who would promote marginalization of another group, those who follow Islam, in order to show that fundamentalist extremism does not equate or speak for religion as a whole. I've spent this week lifting up those in politics who can make a difference in keeping guns out of the wrong hands. I've done what I could, and I will continue to do what I can to ensure that a tragedy like this is forever a thing of the past. I pray that you and all of us will do the same--not just pray, but take tangible steps to prevent this kind of tragedy from ever taking place again.

I came across this psalm in my prayer today, and it seems to fit:

Psalm 79

O Thea, those who do evil have come among us;
   they have made Creation a pile of rubble.

They have shed blood like water throughout all of Creation,
   and there was no one to bury their victims.

Help them and us, O Thea! Change their hearts and ours;
   let your compassion be swift to meet us all and spread among us.

Help us, O Thea;
   deliver us and teach us your forgiveness,
   that we may taste and see the sweetness of your mercy.

O Thea, let the sorrowful sighing of those in chains come before you,
   and by your great might give hope to those who are condemned to die.

We will give you thanks forever
   and show forth your praise from age to age.

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Spirit Whispers: When It Comes to Healing (Guest Post)

8/7/2014

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Elizabeth A. Hawksworth is a published poet and historical fiction writer as well as a prominent blogger on topics of feminism, body positivity, fatphobia, writing, nannying, social justice, and spirituality. She is bold in writing about issues of ultimate concern when remaining silent and unnoticed would be, in the moment, easier. Here is part of her story.

A few hours north of Sarnia, Ontario, there is a quiet place nestled in a forest. Built with rustic logs, smelling like pine pitch, and surrounded by acres of misty trees, this small building stands, institutional and peaceful; utilitarian and somehow unique. In its natural surroundings, staring at a painting of the Baby Jesus, I found God.

Prayer, for me, has been a way to get through everyday life. I pray for health. I pray to be a better person. I pray for my family, my friends. I pray for things I want, things I don’t deserve, things I’m desperate about, things I can’t deal with. It’s not a fancy prayer. It’s often a mantra, repeated over and over, sometimes under my breath, sometimes out loud, sometimes mouthed in public places, and sometimes earnestly in the dark. And I pray every night, without fail, before I can close my eyes and sleep. I have to touch base. I have to let Him know. I need You. Please help me.

In that church retreat, hidden in the woods, I learned how to pray for more than just myself. I unlocked the talent I had all along – the talent of being able to use my words to change the world for the better. And I never felt closer to God, or more powerful with Him through me than I did then – creating creeds, weaving poetry, sharing with everyone my own personal faith, placing my feet on the path to social justice. If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I didn’t think I would ever be able to part from my relationship with God.

How things change.

I was badly wounded by the Church when I was a teenager. Shy, uncertain, and angry, I was struggling with my own sexuality and my sense of being. Holding hands with God, or so I thought, I faced the people who, also holding hands with God, told me that I didn’t belong. That I would burn in hell. That I was a sinner, a deliberate sinner, one who was so full of pride and bravado and hubris and lies, that I would never be welcome unless I changed who I was at the core. I had grown up solid in my belief that God makes us in His perfect image, and never makes mistakes. Now, I wasn’t sure if I was wrong, or if they were, but my hurt overwhelmed my faith.

I went back at 18, denying who I was. I joined a church of beauty and majesty, of tradition as old as time, and restrictions worse than any other church I’d ever been to. Was it punishment for the supposed sin of who I thought I was? To this day, I can’t answer that. All I know is that everywhere I turned, I found leaders, church members, even the Bible itself, it seemed, telling me that the person I am would never be good enough for God.

So I left. And I tried to forget.

I’m a rational person, most of the time. I also hold grudges, long after I should. And the hurt faded into twinges and then roared back to life in explosive, fiery anger. I wanted to hurt the Church the way it had hurt me. I wanted to hurt God. I wanted to burn in hell the way they said, just so that I could be myself without pretense, so I could live in sin without consequence and guilt.

And inside, I cried out for the God I knew in that quiet forest retreat. I begged Him to help me. I pushed Him away with both hands while simultaneously crying for Him in the night. And to His credit, He hasn’t let me go, though most days, I continue to angrily push and push and push, as hard as I can. He has forgiven me and continues to forgive me, despite all of my anger and moral failings, despite my hurt and my pride. He has quietly proven over and over that He thinks I am good enough for Him.

Knowing this, I suspect that one day, I will heal completely from my scars and from my open, bleeding wounds, the way that even the biggest wounds do heal. The scars will always hurt a little, but they won’t always be open and raw, ready to bleed again at another article about Christians saying “God hates fags”, or someone telling me that you can’t be Christian and gay.

But here’s the thing about healing. When you forgive someone, you don’t do it for them – not really. They benefit from it. They may think that you are doing them a favour. And maybe, part of healing is to acknowledge that you acted wrongly, too, even if at the time, you don’t think you did. Maybe part of it is to be like God, and not push away your fellow human, even if that fellow human has done cutting, horrible things to your psyche and to your sense of self.

The thing about healing is that forgiveness is mostly for you. It’s to reach out with your own humanity and be the bigger person. It doesn’t mean you forget, and it doesn’t mean that you have to draw that person back into your heart. What it does mean is that where the rushing, raging rivers have broken the bridge of faith, forgiveness helps to place new planks, to tie the knots back into the ropes. Where the bridge has rotted in places, forgiveness places brand new materials to make your bridge stronger than ever before. Where the bridge is shaky, forgiveness helps to steady it so that when you walk across it and try to meet God on the other side, it’s not so hard and scary to cross it.

Because when it comes to healing, it might take awhile. It might take a long time to rebuild your bridge. And I’m not saying that someone isn’t going to come along and say cutting things that will throw it into disrepair. I’ve rebuilt my bridge many times now . . . and I’ve begged God to help me find the strength to do it again.

Your bridge isn’t just to God. Your bridge is to your fellow humans, as well. The ones that put up walls to keep others out – your bridge goes to their door and invites them to come and meet you in the middle. The ones that tell you you’re not welcome – your bridge goes to them and tells them that they are welcome to come and belong with you. And the ones that meet you with hatred – your bridge shows them that the easier path is love.

Because maybe the place you’re all trying to reach is that little church retreat in the woods, with the whispering leaves and the distant rush of the many creeks. Maybe the path you all want to walk is the shady wide dirt path with the dappled sunlight through the trees, that wide and welcoming path that has benches to rest on and clear pools to drink from. Maybe the paths we choose are inevitably the harder ones because the stony paths teach you what smooth footing feels like, and we have to learn, in order to grow.

Maybe the pain and the blood are something we all experience, even when we’re the ones wielding the swords that hurt. And maybe when it comes to healing, you find it in the silence and the dark, the pleas and the desperation, the fact that when you couldn’t walk anymore, He carried you – and carries you still.

Maybe when it comes to healing, it becomes the easier path to take – broken bridge, and all.

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Living Lent: Divorce

3/31/2014

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Now that the second half of Lent has arrived, I've tacked on a new morning practice of before-the-kids-wake-up running. As I was running this morning, tumbles of thoughts bounced through my consciousness, and one of the things that stuck and lingered afterward had to do with divorce and religious identity.

I find myself grateful for my husband, who has no personal stake in my religious identity except inasmuch as it gives my life meaning and joy. If he had been religious like me when I met him, I'm not sure there would have been enough spaciousness in my own religious identity, once wedded with his, for me to move out of my former religious tradition and into my current one. I'm not even sure I would have been able to voice my concerns about my former tradition as boldly as I have in these last few years. My husband's non-religiosity opened my eyes in a profound way, inviting me--gently--to examine what it was that I found compelling about life as a religious person. As I heard him ask me again and again why I stayed in my tradition when I spent more and more time bitterly murmuring about it, I had to ask myself the same.

Leaving the Roman Catholic Church was a bit like getting a divorce, and you just don't get a divorce when you're Roman Catholic--not unless you want to be ostracized by a whole lot of people. If you've loved it once, you're expected to love it always, no matter what it might cost you. Further, in an abusive marriage (the kind where one partner's life and calling is deemed to be to less important or not important in comparison with that of the more powerful partner), if the one being abused has no promise of support from those she loves when she leaves that marriage, how can she draw from within herself the courage and strength to leave it anyway?

I am fortunate, in a way. Because my marriage with my husband is so healthy and loving and strong, it was able to illuminate the increasingly toxic character of my relationship with my former religious tradition. Because my husband had no personal stake in my religious identity, I was able to give myself permission to transform it.

Divorce is a rending of identity, and it is, from every story I hear, profoundly painful. And yet, in cases of abuse, there may be redemption in it. I am grateful not to have daily cause for murmuring anymore. I'm grateful to be in a tradition that, though imperfect, fuels rather than diminishes my hope, diminishes rather than fuels my anger, and honors rather than silences my voice. And I am grateful for my hubby, whose greatest expectation for my life is that I daily pursue my deepest joy. I find myself steeped in blessing, having let go of that which diminished my life and embraced that which resurrects it.

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Living Lent: Shards

3/26/2014

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After I wrote yesterday about Mary as the Reed of God, a dear person in my life sent me a reflection she had written about mothering and Advent. I thought I might have written an Advent reflection while I was pregnant (or just after I was pregnant), so I scoured my mommy blog and this blog to find one. Alas, I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find something else.

The day before yesterday I posted my Sunday homily, the one I was invited to give at both of the 3rd Sunday of Lent liturgies at my parish. I shared with several people afterward that giving that homily meant breaking through the glass ceiling of my former Roman Catholic identity.

Isn't it odd, then, that I should come across an old blog post, over a year old, about breaking through that very same glass ceiling?

I invite you to read that post and ponder it with me. Some questions you might use to frame your pondering could include: What is the hermeneutical slant I bring to my religious framework? In what ways does my privilege shape my reading of my sacred texts? In what ways does my marginalization shape my reading of those texts?

The lesson I take from my old blog post is difficult: the glass ceiling is not something I have broken once and for all. As long as any woman is made to seem lesser when compared with a man, I will need to keep breaking through it, whether I'm the woman in the comparison or not. This, I realize, is part of my prophetic call.

How do I come to recognize the prophetic role I am called to play in the world? How do I develop that prophetic ability once I have recognized my responsibility?

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Living Lent: Demons

3/18/2014

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For weeks, I've let it get under my skin.

Several weeks ago I was invited to give a homily (i.e. a sermon/reflection) for Lent III, which is next Sunday. As of yesterday I hadn't yet been able to write one word of it.

Think of it as a bad case of writer's block, except it only applied in this one case. I've written a dozen blog posts since Ash Wednesday alone, so it's not as though I didn't have a command of words elsewhere. The lessons for Lent III are richly evocative, so that wasn't it, either.

When I'm about to do a new thing, especially a thing that's bound to make a tremendous impression on people, anything short of excellence and complete satisfaction on my part will send me fleeing in the other direction. And even though I've written and given a number of homilies in the past, I've never stood up as "The Preacher" for Sunday liturgy. It's a new thing, and it scares me.

The other day I talked about how I spend one or two hours writing per day--and that's on the ample side. Yesterday I gave this homily no fewer than five hours of feverish attention. Why?

A lot hangs on this, in my mind. It's a classic case of first-impression-making. If I do well, the parish as a whole gains not only a thoughtful homily, but a set of implicit expectations about who I might be and what I might do at the service of the parish in the future. If I don't do well, the parish will wish they had heard the vicar instead, and--more importantly--the leadership might see my future and vocational path in a different light.

Giving this homily is about so much more than giving a homily. It's a moment in which I'll have an opportunity to prove wrong every single person who ever told/taught me that women in general--and I in particular--weren't meant (or designed!) to be pastoral leaders (and Jesus said so, forever and ever, and let the church say "Amen").

That's a lot of disvaluing to overcome in ten minutes. For the record, neither the vicar nor anyone else has said to me that my vocation is at stake in this homily--they have been generous in trusting that I will do well (I wouldn't have been asked otherwise). I trust that they trust me. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that my vocation and the integrity and valuing of women on the whole are wrapped up in this small opportunity I have to stand up before a hundred people and speak with authority.

Patriarchy and Hegemony are powerful demons in the Christian tradition, and every battle waged against them matters. My homily is ready. May I speak this Sunday with the authority of the one I call Lord, that they may be powerfully silenced in my presence.

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An Open Letter to Pope Francis from a Roman Catholic

1/17/2014

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M. Kate Allen

To Pope Francis:

In my almost thirty-two years as a Roman Catholic, I have never been prouder of any pope. Granted, I've only encountered three in my lifetime, but I am also a student of Christian history. You stand out among your predecessors.

You have rocked the entire world with your embodied proclamations of the good news. You kiss the wounds of the sick. You share tables with those who have neither tables of their own nor food to put on them. You warn your clergy again and again against the glamour of clericalism. Your love is abundant, like Christ's was and is, and I have seen it have a multiplying effect, even (perhaps especially) among non-Roman Catholics.

I am tremendously grateful to God for your faithful, living witness to the teachings of Jesus. Your heart is wide open, and I feel quite certain that if I happened to walk into your midst, you would smile and greet me with the warmth of an old friend, and I would greet you likewise.

I need to confess something to you. On February 16, 2014, God willing, I will leave my cloak of Roman Catholic identity behind in order to be received as a member of the Episcopal Church.

Despite having spent my entire life as a devoted (albeit flawed) Roman Catholic, I cannot remain Roman Catholic any longer. Because despite the gospel of Jesus you now proclaim miraculously through your very body, and despite the many ways in which I encounter Christ's presence through your holy example, I'm afraid there is at least one way in which you, like most if not all of your predecessors, have failed to hear the voice of God and heed it: in the calling of thousands upon thousands of women around the world to ordained ministry.

I was able to name my own God-given call to ordained ministry thirteen years ago. I was still a teenager then. I am close with several Roman Catholic women who share the same call. Yet you, like your papal predecessors, have dismissed even the possibility that women might be called to ordained ministry.

I don't understand this hardness of heart. Not from you.

What I do understand is how hard it can be to hear God's earnest whispers when so much of one's culture screams against it. My favorite psalm is Psalm 51, because it is a perpetual invitation to be changed, transformed, turned around:

Create in me a clean heart, o God.
...
Then will I teach transgressors Thy ways
and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.

I suspect this psalm is as dear to you as it is to me. Please, then, let God's whispers reach your ear through my meager words: God calls some women to serve as ordained ministers. That the Roman Catholic hierarchy refuses to acknowledge this (or even to discuss it) is gravely sinful. It is presumptuous to deny God's calling to those whom God has chosen.

Please, for God's sake, don't allow whatever is lacking in me cause you to be deaf to what God is speaking to you through me in this moment. If anyone with the authority to effect gospel change in the Roman Catholic Church can hear this prophetic word, I believe you can.

Please, open your heart and listen for the sake of my daughters, who will grow up in the midst of your legacy even if they never set foot in a Roman Catholic church.

Please, listen. Listen because you know better than almost anyone that God speaks prophetically through those who are marginalized, women included.

Please, I beg you from the bottom of my heart, listen--allow yourself to be importuned by me, just like the judge was importuned by the widow, or like Jesus was importuned by the woman begging for scraps. You and I both know what happened in those latter two instances. If Jesus' mind could be changed, surely yours can.

I believe that the world-wide turning of hearts to God, if you listened in this one way and acted accordingly, would be a miracle of biblical proportion.

With blessings and love in the One who creates, redeems, and sanctifies all the world,

M. Kate Allen

This letter originally appeared at parentwin.com, where I am a regular contributor on topics of religion. The letter went viral among my Facebook friends and received more discussion and shares there than anything else I've every written, anywhere. A friend of mine encouraged me to mail it to Pope Francis. I did. If he responds, I will share his response here. (Unless he asks me not to.)

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In the wake of Orlando

Spirit Whispers: When It Comes to Healing (Guest Post)

Living Lent: Divorce

Living Lent: Shards

Living Lent: Demons

An Open Letter to Pope Francis from a Roman Catholic

Rev. M. Kate Allen

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