Emerging Women

There are a number of good offerings from Emerging Women around the blogworld this week and I just want to highlight a few of them here in our Weekly Round-up. I’m excited to see what the next month holds as it appears that many of us will be blogging about advent.

As always, if you would like to nominate a post (yours or someone elses) for this round-up just email the link to emergingwomen (at) gmail (dot) com. Enjoy these posts and support these bloggers with your comments!

Jan wonders if a church’s activism can hinder its ability to make disciples.

Liza describes how the youth in her church experienced worship through art.

Amy questions the Christian response to the possibility that crucifixes are being made in sweatshops.

Miz Melly posts her sermon thoughts on sabbath.

Catherine has some beautiful thoughts on understanding advent.

Lainie reflects on how the church is not a safe space.

and I have a few thoughts on sacred space.

I’ve seen alot of posts recently about identity: what it means (or doesn’t mean to be female, feminine etc,) whether or not we should change and/or hide parts of “who we are” in certain situations, and generally what it means to be an authentic woman/person of God.

What lies at our core and is essential to who we are as authentic human beings, and what aspects of our habits, presentations and personalities are flexible, adaptable and able to be altered and improved to better enable our essential authentic selves to shine forth ultimately?

From the Bishop of Oxford’s sermon yesterday morning during chapel at work:

“For me, the mark of an authentic faith is that the person isn’t about whether they’re really religious or not, it’s whether or not they are fully alive .“

YES YES YES.

He continues:

“I’ve known people whose faith has diminished them, made them smaller. It has prevented them from fully engaging in life.”

He has articulated one of my most deeply held beliefs. As a Catholic in my church, my faith is measured by whether I receive communion on the tongue or on the hand; whether I go to a mass where the priest’s back is to me; how well I can worship at a priest’s feet; how precisely I follow the rules.

But looking around me, all I see is death. People dead to the world, to joy, to God.

As per a favourite poet:

“And an old priest said, “Speak to us of Religion.”

And he said:

Have I spoken this day of aught else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,

And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?

Who can spread his hours before him, saying, “This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?”

All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.

He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.

The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.

And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

The freest song comes not through bars and wires.

And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.

Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,

The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.

For in reverie you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.

And take with you all men:

For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.

And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.

You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.”

–”On religion”, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

So you’ll pardon me if I judge your faith not by your ability to parrot or follow the rules, but by how you live your life: how you treat others; whether you will risk fully engaging in a mortal life that brings love and pain, happiness and sorrow in equal measure; whether you will risk everything for love, mortal or divine; whether your faith opens you up to others or makes you shut them out, creating a world of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I have seen ‘faith’ diminish too many people – they have become small-minded, narrow; desperate for the approval of their superiors; joined the ‘more perfect’ religious life to run away from their issues and to lead an easy (read: avoiding responsibility) life; they amputate parts of their personality until they fit a soulless mould and there’s nothing left of the person God created.

Shortly after that, Bishop John made a point that wasn’t explicitly related, but I think ties in beautifully to his comments above.

“When I’m afraid, I lock the door. But when I lock myself in, am I locking Christ out?”

That’s the real question, isn’t it? “Perfect love drives out fear” – and makes you unlock that door – and yourself.

The truth shall set you free.

Okay another advice column post here. This was from the Ask Marilyn page from Sunday’s Parade Magazine –

Why is it so much more likely that parents will give a son his father’s first name than give a daughter her mother’s first name?
—Kary Anne Tamblyn, Ellicott City, Md.

Daughters are not reared as independent individuals with lifelong surnames, so giving a girl only her mother’s first name is mostly pointless. It’s the combination of a first name and a surname that creates an identity.

Boys and girls both start life with their father’s last name. But girls usually drop their surname when they get married, changing to the name of their father-in-law. I believe both men and women should keep their premarital surnames throughout life. When they get married and have children, sons would take their father’s surname, and daughters would take their mother’s surname. The benefit to girls and women would be enormous while costing boys and men nothing—except the fun of claiming ownership of the opposite sex!

I found the perspective interesting and just thought I’d throw it out here for discussion.

I’ve really struggled with Christmas over the past few years, and last year was the last straw. I remember looking at the mountains of presents – some which I can regrettably say have just sat on a shelf most of the past year untouched. I wondered where Jesus was in all of this. We always focus on the Nativity at Christmas and use an advent candle etc; but something has always been missing.

This year we decided to do things differently. We have brought gifts from Fair Trade and World Vision for family members. We have started a Jesse Tree today with the children, which focuses on God’s prophecies and promises of the Messiah. I am posting these devotions on my blog if you want to follow. I don’t think I will feel we have made a big enough change by the end of Christmas, but it’s a good start which I feel positive about and know that we will find more of Jesus in.

Do you struggle to find Jesus in Christmas? How do you celebrate? How as Christians can we avoid the consumerism within Christmas without our children feel like they are missing out? Finally, I’ve been thinking about the origin of Christmas lately. How was it celebrated prior to Saint Nicholas being given the Santa Claus tag by Coca Cola and so forth? Any insight you have into this would be good. I’ll look it up on the net when I have time one day

In recent years numerous organizations have worked to call attention to the abuses of the international sex trade. Of particular interest issex tourism, in which individuals from wealthy countries travel to third world nations with the explicit intention of patronizing prostitutes while there. In some cases, there are special travel companies and resorts that specifically cater to sex tourists.

While much has been made of the fact that many men (and sometimes male/female couples) take advantage of sex tourism, this article shows that when it comes to the exploitation of vulnerable cultures and people, women are more than capable of holding their own. While I’ve been crowing for years that church and society need to regard women as sexual (not just emotional) beings with needs and desires of their own, this article demonstrates the failures of laissez-faire sexual ethics along with the fallenness of our sexuality. The willingness to use the other for our gratification is not something that is limited, or excluded, by gender.

On page 110, Volf states based the human tendency to commit injustice, we have two unacceptable options:

“We can simpy disregard justice (as Nietzche did) and abandon the world to the interplay of forces, thus plunging the unprotected weak into suffering; or we can insist on the relentless pursuit of justice and end up with a “rectified” world-in-ruins, a world completely torn apart by the unsparing hands of retributive justice.”

The third option (drum roll for this big shocker, please) is forgiveness. Volf writes,

“In the memory of the Passion we honor victims even while extending grace to perpetrators. shouldering the wrongdoing done to sufferers, God identifies it truthfully and condemns it justly.”

Although Volf argues for an ultimate healing where offenses no longer comes to mind because love has entirely suffused and reconciled the human community with one another in and with God, he is careful to point out that “one should never demand of the those who have suffered wrong that they “forget” and move on….Any forgetting other than that which grows out of a healed relationship between the wrongdoer and the wronged in a transformed social environment should be mistrusted.”

Clearly this works for catastrophic and clear cut wrongs, but what about the smaller offenses where perceptions plays a huge role not only in memory but in interpretation?

I’ve thought of this idea recently and wondered, since God *could* forgive without the cross, because God is God, if part of the atonement is to both honor the victim by validating the inexcusability of the wrongdoing, while offering grace to the one who does wrong. And in situations where memories differ and it’s a game of he said, she said, then if God in Jesus died for ALL sin, God covers whoever *deserved* (from our human standpoint) punishment, and we all are called to show grace to ourselves and one another, even when we disagree about who was wrong, who was more wrong etc.

1. Is there a sense in which, in God you can either be right or your can be happy (because God in Christ has made all things right)?

2. What criteria do you use to decide what truths/memories are worth fighting for and what can be let go and healed by a general appropriation of the Passion with its grace and its humbling effect on all people?

On page 171 Volf analyzes Kierkegaard’s depiction of three women abandoned by their lovers, who act as forgiving as a good Christian possibly could, yet remain largely unhealed and despairing. The women are un-liberated by their forgiving actions because “the bond between the lover and the beloved is ‘an alliance of self-love that shuts God out.’ As a result of this selfish idolatry, the self of each woman is left unprotected and subject to the mercy of her fickle lover.”

3. In what situations have you deluded yourself into thinking you were selflessly loving another but in actuality you were putting a human love ahead of keeping your ultimate identity in God, to your own detriment?