Thealogical Lady: A Blog

Priest

10/2/2015

When I was a girl, the rule was that a female couldn't be a priest. I embraced that rule right up through my freshman year of college, when I defended the male-only priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church as "sacred tradition."

In the fifteen years since then, I've met dozens of female clergy, Christian and Jewish, who have helped me reimagine who can be a pastor. A year and a half ago, a discernment committee helped me affirm what I had come to suspect: that I, a woman, had a vocation to priestly ministry.

This year, I've embraced that vocation, becoming a house-church priest.

And the other day, I received clergy apparel in the mail.

Can a woman wear a clerical collar?

I'm wearing one. The garb is the outer sign of an inner truth: I am minister, pastor, priest.

It's just clothing. But now my outside matches my inside. I'm humbled by what I see in the mirror, and I yearn to embrace all that that means for me.

Sacred Rebels

9/15/2015

A good friend of mine, a fellow writer, introduced me to the Sacred Rebels Oracle, which is a deck of cards akin to a Tarot deck. It includes forty-four cards and a 180-page guidebook with descriptions of each card, and it's designed specifically for creative types (and even more particularly for women).

I looked through the deck for the first time today, and the cards swept me away not only with their images, but their themes. The tenth card, called "Releasing Allegiances," particularly stood out to me as I contemplated my next creative project, which is to write a gospel according to Kate.

I thought immediately of Luke 14:26 as I looked at this card: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters...such a person cannot be my disciple." When I think of my own allegiances, I think of my long-time devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, and then to the Episcopal Church, and especially the Benedictine Canons (a Benedictine, Episcopalian religious order for men and women in which I was a novice for nine months). It was to my great surprise that I had to let go of my allegiances to my former Christian communities in order to turn my focus entirely to Thea.

As I break down the doors of the early medieval canon of Christian scripture by writing my own gospel, this oracle card resonates with me profoundly. By writing a gospel of my own, I am turning inward, where the light of Thea burns brightly.

I'm excited to write this gospel, to reimagine religious narratives as a Thean narrative, and to use this gospel in my house church liturgy when it is finished. My daughters will grow up hearing and learning from a truly feminist gospel, and in that, I know that my work and call as a house church priest will not be for nothing.

Dirty Word

6/12/2015

I've always known that "power" is a dirty word. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power is not something that nice people seek. If you want to be holy, you seek humility, not power. I learned this from my Roman Catholic upbringing, and that lesson followed me in my theological training.

But these days, power gives me pause. As a woman, I've often lacked a sense of my own power, and consequently I've been drawn to the power of others. My own power, residing deep within me, has come across as a source of danger and sin, so I've ignored it, even denied it. I've let others take the lead; I've followed, allowing my power to trail behind, unattended.

But imagine with me for a moment that power isn't a dirty word. Imagine a woman like me letting go of her attachment to the power of others and taking up her own power instead. Does my power render me dangerous? Does my power strip me of holiness?

Maybe my power exerts itself whether I acknowledge it or not. So what happens if I look deep within myself and intentionally draw my power out?

The trouble is, if I harness my own power, I place myself at the center of my actions, rather than at the margins. If I follow someone else, I can always redirect attention to her or him if something goes wrong. I can't blame others for how I use my own power, however; I alone am responsible for it. Acknowledging one's own power, using one's power, means accepting the consequences of one's power. If power corrupts, why would I ever want to accept my power and its consequences?

I can pretend it's not there, hope it does nothing, and take no responsibility for it if it does. Alternatively, I can claim it, learn to use it as I see fit, and take responsibility for it when I do wrong--and right.

I get the sense that the good and holy way to approach power isn't what I've always thought. Maybe my power is a source of goodness, rather than evil. Maybe it is a good and holy thing to take up the power that Goddess places deep within me; maybe the sin is in squelching it.

Do I dare take up my own power?

Spirit Whispers: Sister Thea

6/19/2014

Sister Thea Bowman was a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, and she changed the face of the African-American Roman Catholic Church.

Sister Thea was a woman who led with joy, story, music, and a sharp intellect. She was a woman who had the power to speak prophetically against injustice in ways that would soften the hearts of even old white bishops--again and again. Her power was the power to tell a story, to preach without a fourth wall, to engage others at the level of senses and emotion and experience.

She died from cancer a couple of weeks before I turned eight years old. It was another twenty years before I knew who she was.

When I make my solemn profession as a Benedictine Canon next spring, I plan to take Sister Thea's name as my religious name. I see in Sister Thea a bright, strong, gentle, humble, magnetic leader who could tear down any Jericho walls with the dulcimer sounds of her story-telling-and-transforming voice.

Do I have the courage to be more than I am? Do I have the humility to let go of my own weighty importance so I can fly with the wild, light Spirit in whom I put my trust and hopes?

Easter: Day 43

6/1/2014

For the last couple of days, I've written about my Benedictine Canon vows. Today I'll explore the vow of obedience.

Obedience was always the vow I resisted most when I was discerning the possibility of life as a Roman Catholic nun. The idea that I would ultimately have to submit to an authority outside of myself worried me. To use an example that actually came up in my discernment, if my heart's desire was to be a liturgist and my community/superior told me I had to do something other than prepare liturgy, what would I do? How would I be happy?

Obedience, as I understood it, was a stance of submission to the will (and whims) of the other. When I read about Joseph and his many brothers, and the trials Joseph endured while he waited for God to come around, I'm reminded of this stance of submission and I cringe. The psalmist's question, "How long?", is one that could be answered with "Forever." If one found oneself in the wrong community, a life of obedience could be one of misery.

What I discovered as I was discerning the possibility of becoming a nun was that I was being obedient to God--I was listening hard, and I was hearing God's voice through my worries. To be obedient to God is to pay attention to one's life. What is it in my life that brings deep, quenching joy? What brings me nerve-wracking restlessness? Paying attention to my life in all its particulars is a vital way in which I listen to God's call for my life.

In my novitiate as a Benedictine Canon, I dig through the hardened soil in my heart so I can make room for what God wishes to plant in me. In order to turn that hardened soil, I have to embody a stance not of blind submission, but profound openness--openness to be seen by myself, God, and others in all my facets, just as I am. Masks keep me from perceiving what God wishes for my life and keep the seeds already planted in me from budding; they keep my unique, God-given brilliance from shining in God's marvelous light.

To be obedient, in my case, is to notice what life as a Benedictine Canon life is like for me. If I were worried or doubtful or unhappy, obedience would mean paying attention to that worry, doubt, and unhappiness and being willing to seek their source. Being obedient as a Benedictine Canon means being willing to share my joys and fears with my Benedictine siblings, especially my superior. To take counsel with another is an act of utter trust, and it is a way of allowing God to speak through others what I may not yet be able to hear from God through myself.

What will I hear as I continue to listen to God in the presence of sacred others? What will spring forth from my heart as I loosen the soil that has been made tough and hard?

Eastertide: Day 12

5/1/2014

Twenty-four years ago, I participated in my first May Day May-crowning. I had just received my first communion a month a few weeks prior, and I got to march up in a procession of other girls in puffy white dresses and waist-length veils so that a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary could be crowned with flowers.

Back then I didn't know anything about Beltane or other pre-Christian May Day celebrations. What I knew was that I got to wear my awesome dress and veil again, this time at Central Catholic, home of that particular BVM statue and the same place where my mother went to high school.

I remember another May Day in which I attended a May-crowning at a cloistered convent of nuns in my hometown, the same community in which Mother Angelica was formed. They had Eucharist to go with it, but as an elderly woman was warbling "Ave Maria" in the choir loft, I was sneaking Smarties into my mouth. My mom caught me and we didn't go up to receive communion. No fast, no feast!

May, mainly in Roman Catholic circles, is celebrated as the month of Mary. I'm no longer Roman Catholic, but I belong to an Episcopalian religious community named after St. Mary of the Annunciation, so honoring her is something I do a lot.

I could crown my community's chapel statue of Mary with flowers today, but if I did, I would want to crown my Benedictine siblings with flowers as well (female and male alike!). Mary shows the Christian world what it means to dare to say yes to bearing God into the world. Mary was pregnant with God's presence well after she gave birth to Jesus. She showed Christians how to hear God's call and allow ourselves, in our unique contexts, to bear God's presence in our very bodies. We bear God into the world in our brokenness as well as our wholeness, in our failings as well as our achievements. Every bit of us, every inch of us, every act of us, every memory of us has the potential to bear God's loving, merciful presence.

Whose God-bearing presence will I honor this May Day?

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: Divorce

3/31/2014

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.

Living Lent: Shards

3/26/2014

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?

Life. Love. Liturgy.: The Book

2/27/2014

What sort of God do you get when the images you have don't look a thing like the person you see in the mirror? What do you get when they do?

What does sacred encounter look like when a person no longer practices religiosity or believes in God?

When religion's beliefs or dogmas are inadequate or unjust, what might keep a prophetic person or community rooted in religiosity?

I'm pleased to present Life. Love. Liturgy., my newly released collection of short stories and poetry, available online for purchase. In it I explore the processes of crashing against, opening up, dismissing, and broadening prescriptions of God and religion.

~~~

This book spent twenty months in gestation after being crowdfunded by many generous donors on Kickstarter. Over those nearly two years, I unexpectedly ventured away from the Roman Catholic Church and eventually found myself in the Episcopal Church (as a member of a Benedictine Canon community), with many stops in between. The order in which the pieces are presented is the order in which they were written, in order to honor the ways in which my own journey shaped this collection.

Each piece in this book is written in honor of someone. The first piece, Emmaus, is written in honor of my friend, Rev. Cody Unterseher, who died unexpectedly in April 2012. His theological courage, his pastoral compassion, and his untimely death compelled me to shake off my fears and take up my vocation as a writer about matters of ultimate concern. I owe a debt of gratitude to many people, but especially to Cody.

If you are interested in interviewing me about Life. Love. Liturgy. for your blog or other communication outlet, please contact me.

Greetings and Farewells

2/15/2014

This is my last day as a Roman Catholic.

Tomorrow I will be received into the Episcopal Church by Bishop Kirk Smith of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, thus continuing my baptismal journey, continuing my journey as a novice of the Community of St. Mary of the Annunciation Benedictine Canons, and beginning my journey in a new-to-me Christian tradition.

I am continually surprised at the deep connections I find between my adult faith and the faith of my childhood. I am about to enter the Episcopal Church, a church that liturgically isn't very different from the Roman Catholic tradition. My devotion to a relational, triune God was established before I knew it on Trinity Sunday, the day of my baptism. And my formation in the Community of St. Mary of the Annunciation Benedictine Canons, whose devotion is to God's preeminent open-hearted listener, the Theotokos, began not during my years of graduate study at St. John's School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota, but at my baptismal church, St. Mary of the Annunciation Church in Greenville, Ohio.

My Prior suggests that synchronicities such as these are worth attending to. I have always been a fan of synchronicity--I have just never experienced so much of it in one place as I have in the Sonoran Desert these last five months. All the threads of my life of faith--the threads of liturgical practice, structured prayer, understanding of God as relational/transcendent/imminent, singing, feminism, openness, commitment to the seeking of truth in all places and people, and humility in the presence of God's wondrous deeds--all of these and more are woven into the pattern of my faith life at St. Augustine's and as a Benedictine Canon Novice of St. Mary of the Annunciation. And the pattern they weave takes my breath away.

I say farewell to the Roman Catholic Church in kindness and love, and I greet the Episcopal Church with fondness and hope. I trust that my almost thirty-two years as a Roman Catholic Christian have not been in vain, but instead have created a strong foundation on which I can build a stronger faith.

An Open Letter to Pope Francis from a Roman Catholic

1/17/2014

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.)

Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal

12/28/2013

Edited by W.A. Sessions

One of Flannery O'Connor's journals, started when she was just twenty-one years old, was just published last month by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

It's a journal of O'Connor's ardent prayers to God. She prays that God will give her the grace to love God zealously and think of God at all times, rather than getting swept up and distracted by the glamour of the quotidian life and only giving pause for God during times of reading (people like Léon Bloy) and writing.

I find in O'Connor's journal echoes of my own evolving pleas to God. I remember writing my own longing-filled prayers to God, prayers that God would help me become my best and most talented, giving self (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, as I learned to say from the Jesuits).

Looking back on the earliest years of my adult life, I see how open everything was--the whole world was at my fingertips, and all I had to do was pursue my interests with my whole heart and I would do well.

It was both exciting and hard on me when I realized, at the age of 19, that I was being called by God to ordained ministry. I remember telling my pastor this, letting him know that I thought I would pursue that call in the Episcopal Church. He, whose opinion I esteemed above virtually all others, warned me that to enter a different church was to take on a whole different set of church problems. I realized then that I wanted to stay in my own church and help transform it into what it was supposed to be: a beacon of Christ's radical message of hospitality and love.

I did a year of volunteer work with the Missionary Cenacle Volunteers with that in my heart. I didn't want to become the sort of theologian who was completely detached from the world of real people encountering God in the midst of genuine (i.e. non-academic) difficulties. Then, after earning my Master's degree, I did what any bright, theologically inclined woman in the Roman Catholic church might do--I went on for doctoral work, assuming that that would lead me to a position in which I could be positively and transformatively influential among both lay people and clergy within the Roman Catholic Church.

I went almost all the way there, and then God threw a kink in my plans. Her name is Anastasia, and she just turned three in October.

Then came another kink. Her name is Miriam, and she's a little over half a year old.

Then came another, in the form of my husband's new job, which sent us to the desert where neither of us ever thought we would move.

And if my devotion to the Roman Catholic Church hadn't been so strong for so long, I might never have become disenchanted enough with its backward regression to leave it. If I hadn't been so ready to leave it, I might never have discovered St. Augustine's of Tempe, which has become as much my spiritual home as any church ever has been.

I still shake my head at what I've gotten myself into over the last fifteen years. In contrast to my college years, I find myself prepared to let God let me where she will, while continuing to exercise my strengths and nourish into health my weaknesses. I am finally in a place in my life where I am safe, and Sisyphean struggling is no longer my game--bravery and radical acceptance of self and the Holy Other constitute the new game.

Let's play, God.