Emerging Women

I came across some writing about ecopsychology which I would like to share:

“An individual’s harmon with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.” (James Hillman, quoted in Parenting with Spirit by Jane Bartlett).

I was invibing this idea and imagining that the same is true of our spiritual selves, and not only our psychological selves. We are created from God, from the stuff the earth. What connects us to the earth connects us to our ‘own deep self,’ and also to the One from Whom all created essence flows and vibrates its creational songs, crying out the Joy! of Being. What’s connecting you to you to the earth, to your ‘own deep self’ and to the One, like you and I, who entered the created order through a natural mother and cried, “I am here!”?

Andrew Jones (tallskinnykiwi) has a post up about Female Christian Bloggers. It’s a great resource of a number of female voices out there reflecting on faith, theology, and life. So go check it out!

In the recent US Presidential election, we experienced both the closest the glass ceiling has ever come to being shattered as well as evidence that sexism is alive and well in our country today. I was intrigued by Jim Wallis’s recent post at God’s Politics where he implored the nation to not use sexist criteria for judging Sarah Palin post-election. He wrote -

Basing post-election analysis on Gov. Palin’s wardrobe, insults to her family, and whether or not she answered the door in a towel is sexist.

If Obama had lost this campaign, no journalist would be commenting on the color of Joe Biden’s ties or the Scranton native’s trips to Brooks Brothers. On this blog we have already started a discussion around the many opportunities our country has for reconciliation. This can occur not just around race but also gender and the many other things that divide us.

Go ahead. Disagree with her politics and her policies. There are a lot of people who are going to get into some healthy fights about the future of the Republican Party. But like her or not, to reduce Sarah Palin to her wardrobe is wrong and is a great way to start this post-election season off on the wrong foot.

Almost as if on cue, the comments to his post do exactly what he was warning against delving into such controversial topics as whether or not mothers should work outside the home. What has your experience been this election cycle with sexism? Do you think the glass ceiling will ever be shattered?

I finished reading Richard Paul Evans’ newest release, Grace, last week. I held off on writing a review because I wanted to ruminate on the novel awhile, let it roll around in my head and “marinate” heart and soul. I also wanted to take my time because you can’t rush a review of Grace. It’s not that kind of book. Here’s why:

When I read the Author’s Note regarding the 1874 child abuse case of Mary Ellen Wilson, I almost put Grace back on the library shelf. I can’t get near that topic without one of two reactions: dissolving into a soggy heap of tears, or wanting to personally thrash the stuffing out of the perpetrators.

As the mother of four boys and the Children’s Ministries Director for our church, child abuse enrages me beyond words. It also rips my heart out. Frankly, I wasn’t up for either emotion the day Grace came into the library (It took awhile. I was #23 in the “On Hold” queue). Tempted to put it back, I refrained from doing so for just one reason: I own every title Evans has ever written. So, on the strength of Evans’ prior work, I decided to trust him with this new book. I stuffed Grace into my bag en route to the YMCA with my youngest. Poolside while Josiah splashed down the water slide, I gingerly withdrew Grace and started reading.

Grace opens with a recap of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl and some grandfatherly reflections from protagonist Eric Welch on Christmas Day 2006 (p.5). Told in the first person, the story unfolds in flashback fashion during Eric’s teen years and moves from October 1962 to early January 1963.

Eric’s father, a construction worker, is unable to work due to Guillain Barre Syndrome. The family of four, which includes Eric’s ten year-old brother and best friend, Joel, is forced to move from southern California to a rundown, low-rent part of Utah. (I have a good friend with GBS. This is the only time I’ve seen this debilitating disease appear in a novel.) We struggle with Eric through the first four chapters as he endures the slings and arrows of being “the new kid” in middle school and all the attendant traumas and woes that unhappy scenario typically includes. In Eric’s case it’s exacerbated by being poor and from out-of-state to boot.

We meet fifteen year-old Grace in Chapter Five. She’s foraging for food in a dumpster behind “McBurger Queen,” Eric’s part-time (scum bag) employer. On page 34 we find out that Grace is a runaway: “I’m not going home.” But she has no where to go. Besides, there’s something about Grace (and grace) that’s …unexplained. Mysterious. Something that causes us as well as Eric to pause…

Unwilling to leave Grace roaming the streets alone on a cold October night, Eric brings her to the “clubhouse” he and Joel built behind the family’s sprawling, dilapidated home. The next 240 pages detail the tender uncertainties of First Love, selflessness and sacrifice, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, the Cuban Missile Crisis, family and emotional struggles, and Eric’s rage at the people who “coulda, shoulda, woulda” protected young Grace from her predacious stepfather – but didn’t. The willful ignorance of neighbors, school officials and law enforcement receive a withering indictment that’s all the more effective for its understated subtlety: “I sat alone staring at the back of a pew while people who didn’t really know anything about Grace talked about her as if they suddenly cared.” (p. 292). Evans gently but unequivocally shows how any willful blindness or ignorance makes us all complicit when it comes to crimes against children:

“You killed her. You and Dad and Joel and her pathetic, worthless mother and those stupid, idiotic policemen who just couldn’t wait to be heroes. … You all killed Grace…’ (p. 295)

If the story stopped here, it would have been poignant, but Evans doesn’t let it go. Not quite. He doesn’t leave us outraged, wrung-out, hopeless and helpless. Instead, he subtly intertwines themes of God’s grace, redemption and restoration throughout this carefully crafted story of a teen runaway (see the bottom of page 296). This reaches its zenith in an Epilogue that is both hopeful and heart-wrenching. It is in these final, gripping pages that we see how tragedy transforms a painfully shy, self-conscious fourteen year-old boy “with acne and a bad hair cut” into a tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners prosecutor whose life is forever and irrevocably changed by those late autumn and winter months of 1962 and a girl named Grace:

“I have spent my life hunting down and prosecuting people like Grace’s stepfather. I carry Grace’s locket into every trial. I’ve earned a reputation as a fierce courtroom combatant who takes every case personally. What Grace saw in the candle was true of me as well. I am feared. … Today I continue my crusade. I have testified about child abuse before state lawmakers more times than I can remember. I’ve lived to see child advocacy become a public concern. I am grateful that the world finally has the courage to open its eyes. My wife asks me when we can retire, but I tell her I’ll die in the saddle. With my last breath I’ll continue to fight for these children. I cannot save them all, but I can save some of them, and that’s worth doing. There are other Graces out there.” (p. 305, 306).

I was relieved that Evans avoids any graphic details regarding Grace’s family history, relationships or the experiences that led to her running away from home. Consummate storyteller that he is, Evans drops subtle clues and hints throughout the story and allows us to fill in the blanks without assaulting us with additional traumatic narrative.

In terms of format and style, Grace features Evans’ usual short chapters and his trademark “diary entries” that preface each chapter. The style is vintage Evans, luminous and evocative, introducing us to three-dimensional characters whom we come to know, love, and miss as plot, climax, and conclusion unfold with great sensitivity and sagacity. The book closes with A Letter from Richard Paul Evans detailing practical help readers can provide via The Christmas Box Initiative and Operation Kids. Web sites and a toll-free phone number are included.

All in all, Grace is a fast – but not a light – read. I read the book cover-to-cover in an afternoon. I wanted to stand up at cheer by the final page and plan on a “return visit” – just as soon as I restock my Kleenex stash.

Grace

By Richard Paul Evans

Simon & Schuster, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5003-7

A Novel

From BBC News “Stoning Victim Begged for Mercy”- full article here

A young woman recently stoned to death in Somalia first pleaded for her life, a witness has told the BBC.

“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me,” she said, according to the man who wanted to remain anonymous. A few minutes later, more than 50 men threw stones.

Human rights group Amnesty International says the victim was a 13-year-old girl who had been raped.

Initial reports had said she was a 23-year-old woman who had confessed to adultery before a Sharia court.

The witness says she was forced into a hole, buried up to her neck then pelted with stones until she died in front of more than 1,000 people.

Cameras were banned from the public stoning, but print and radio journalists who were allowed to attend estimated that the woman, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was 23 years old.

However, Amnesty said it had learned she was 13, and that her father had said she was raped by three men.

People were saying this was not good for Sharia law, this was not good for human rights, this was not good for anything
Witness

When the family tried to report the rape, the girl was accused of adultery and detained, Amnesty said.

Convicting a girl of 13 for adultery would be illegal under Islamic law.

I want to weep.

…but you can no longer be part of my life.”

What has made you (or would make you) set this sort of boundary in your life?

I have never actually said it to someone who has lost access to any information about my life, but I have had to make this call a few times in my life. Once it was due to serious safety issues. It’s never a decision I’ve made lightly. In at least one case I wonder if I made the right decision, even though at the time I had good reasons for choosing to dis-engage from a particular individual.

In the church I was raised in, we were taught to forgive seventy times seven. But they never really taught us how to forgive someone without allowing them to continue to have the opportunity to do those things that require so much forgiveness in the first place. I’m thinking of people who do heavy emotional or spiritual or physical damage repeatedly without showing any inclination that they’re trying to change, not the everyday sort of forgiveness that one gives a healthy friendship or relationship.

(No, this post isn’t inspired by anything that’s happened in my life recently. )