Emerging Women

By Tom and Kim Wilkens

Today, Sunday the 29th of November, we begin another liturgical year. I once met a don (professor) at Oxford University who scheduled his life according to the church’s calendar: its seasons, its saints’ days, and its liturgical hours. He refused to use or even to acknowledge the more arithmetic 12-month, numbered-day, 24-hour-subdivided Julian calendar that most of us follow. Making an appointment with him was difficult, to say the least.

We don’t need to go to the extreme of that Oxford don, but perhaps we might pay a bit more attention to our distinctive, somewhat countercultural church calendar. There could be some pleasantly surprising gifts awaiting us, such as the peace and perspective offered by the Advent Season – the season of the advent or coming of God. It is a season that places our lives in a cosmic context or, greater still, a framework as large as God herself. We won’t find that in our holiday shopping at WalMart, Macy’s, or even Neiman Marcus. It can’t be bought; it can’t be built. It comes only as a love-motivated and grace-saturated blessing.

Let us pray:
Come among us Mothering God, Mothering Christ, Mothering Spirit. As you gave birth to us as the Alpha, the fertile source and beginning of all, so also embrace us at last as the Omega, the welcoming goal and end of all. Come among us Birthing God, Feeding Christ, Nurturing Spirit.
Amen.

Kim’s response:
My dad wrote this Advent Devotional for the congregation that he and my mother belong to – a mainline denominational church. The thing that struck me was the reference to “God herself”. I have such a gut reaction to that. First, it’s a reaction of – “ahhh, finally”. But then I wonder how much trouble he’ll get in for referring to the mothering nature of God. Finally I wonder why my solution to this quandary has been to keep my God language gender neutral. That definitely feels like a cop out as well, especially in light of the Advent season, a season of expectant waiting and preparation, a season that any mother can relate to as she reflects on the birth of her own child. I am so grateful that my dad has given me the gift of remembering God herself and the wonderful ways in which she has birthed, fed and nurtured me.

Tom Wilkens served for three years as a pastor in Wisconsin and for thirty-one years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin. He and his daughter, Kim, have recently co-authored the book, Un-American Activities: Countercultural Themes in Christianity (http://unamericanactivities.blogspot.com).

A very Happy Thanksgiving to all of our US readers! I pray this holiday weekend finds you well. Amidst the baking and the family time, I invite you to share here about your family traditions and what you are thankful for. It is always encouraging to hear the stories from our community.

And believe it or not, this Sunday marks the start of the season of Advent in the Western church. Here at Emerging Women we want to focus our posts during this time on the idea of incarnation. What are the practical implications of incarnation in our lives. What does God becoming flesh mean for your faith? How can we celebrate and be present in incarnation each and every day? How does incarnation turn our world upside down? I invite you to share your thoughts in the form of a reflection, or a poem, or a photograph (or whatever medium you desire). We have already received a few beautiful submissions, but would really like to hear from as many members of this community as possible this season. These posts can be whatever length you want them to be, we just want to hear your thoughts. So please send them along to emergingwomen@gmail.com.

Enjoy the holiday, and I look forward to hearing your reflections.

- Julie Clawson

By Tisha Brown

One of my favorite scripture passages is the story of Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1:9-11. I particularly love the words that come from the voice in heaven as Jesus emerges from the Jordan “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” When I read this scripture I imagine God’s voice speaking these words to me at the moment of my baptism; “You are my daughter, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Recently, these words have begun to take on new meaning for me as I realize that not only do I claim them for myself as a disciple of Jesus Christ who needs to be reminded from time to time of her beloved-ness but I claim them also as a pastor. I claim them for all of the people in the congregation I serve and most especially for every infant, child or adult I have the privilege of baptizing.

The new meaning of these words has come about through conversations I’ve been having with two teenage boys in my congregation who are considering baptism. I have become aware through these conversations that not only am I their pastor because I work at their church but I am their pastor because they accept me and see me in that role. They have granted me authority in their lives. They listen to what I say, they watch what I do, and they respect me because I’ve been there for them in their lives for the past 6 years for better and for worse.

Claiming the authority and the power that comes with the title of pastor has been a struggle for me since my ordination. I believe that all people, by virtue of their baptism, are called by God to serve and follow Jesus Christ and that no one person’s calling is necessarily more important or authoritative. I have also been intimidated by the level of responsibility that comes along with the role that a pastor plays in the lives of congregations and in the lives of the people who make up those congregations. Clergy are responsible to carry their power and authority ethically, humbly and with integrity in every aspect of their lives. I take this responsibility very seriously and it scares me.

But what I have come to realize through talking with two teenage boys in my congregation is that the power and authority of my role as pastor of this congregation isn’t mine alone. It is a gift from God and a call that I have humbly heard and accepted. In this call I am never alone for the Holy Spirit is always there reminding me of who I am and whose I am.

In addition, this community has grown to trust me and to see me as their pastor and they call this power and this authority out in me. I am their pastor not only because they pay me to fulfill that role but because we have been together through the many ups and downs of life. We have grieved the deaths of significant people in the community, walked together through divorces, job losses and the death of a teenage boy and we have struggled to forgive and move on. We have sung and prayed and worshiped, shared secrets and longings, confessed shortcomings and accepted grace, baptized babies and adults, celebrated weddings and laughed a lot. We have become intimately connected to one another in Christ. Together through the gift of trust that has developed between us, by the grace of God and with much fear and trembling we have accepted this relationship of pastor and congregation. They affirm the power and authority of the role, I willingly agree to be their pastor and God blesses and keeps us all.

I am so grateful to these two young men for teaching me these things. They couldn’t possibly know that their awkwardly mumbled responses to my questions, their non-committal head nods and the way they seem so interested in whatever is on the tops of their shoes was revealing something that I needed to see. I am a beloved child of God in whom God is well pleased and I am their Pastor. And God willing, I will stand on holy and sacred ground in the midst of the community and say to them “I baptize you in the name of God who created you, Christ who redeemed you and the Holy Spirit who sustains you. May the Holy Spirit be upon you, child of God, disciple of Christ, member of the church.

Rev. Tisha Brown is the pastor of Community of Hope, UCC in Madison, WI. Community of Hope and Advent Lutheran, ELCA form the Madison Christian Community, a unique, 40-year partnership of two congregations sharing a building and engaging in mutual ministry. Tisha is new to the world of the emerging church and is happy to say it is saving her faith. In her free time she loves to run, dance and sing. She blogs at Thoughts and Reflections

When I was a child I remember an impression rise up in my mind that there were invisible strings attached to people. I was careful to not get mine tangled up behind me. For example, if I walked around a table in a clockwise direction, I was careful to walk back around it in a counter-clockwise direction. I literally retraced my steps. I’m aware this sounds like a manic O.C.D. episode, especially for a child, but it was brief lived; probably ran the time span of about a week.

That image has been long vanished from my mind until recently contemplating on the truth that each individual has a myriad of defining moments that are largely taken for granted. The smallest visions that we see around us all have a string that winds back for miles in time; twisted around and through the most unexpected influences. A woman holding a child is rarely anything noticeable. Backtrack down her time-line from that moment and see the knot that is the attempts that were miscarried, the tangle of relationship issues that had to be considered to start a family, all the way back to the twisted mess of anorexia that had depleted her developing body to the point that threatened her ability to ever conceive at all. Awareness of the presence of struggle allows for a deeper appreciation of even the most simple things; (in this story) snuggles between mother and child.

Examples of shallow assumptions that cheat us of special moments could be listed ad nauseum. The point would be the same: each life has a ball of twine stringing behind it. Every moment we experience and witness has a complicated history that is usually forgotten or ignored. We speed through visions around us on auto-pilot. Individual struggles are not considered and we assume that things just work out somehow; rarely recognizing that the most seemingly unrelated kink in the line affects and determines the direction of the line. In doing so, we miss the special moments when those tangled strings become clear and straight and, for a moment, we can soar.

This post originally appeared at the blog Diary of a Doubting Believer.

By Rebecca Cynamon-Murphy

Hi folks. Although I’m not a regular participant on the Emerging Women blog, I facilitate our local emergent cohort here in Chicago and am part of the leadership team at my emergent church, Wicker Park Grace. My name is Rebecca and, recently, I became involved in a new project that is trying to create an online community of people who are engaging Judaism in non-traditional ways. We are trying to move beyond the discussion of whether or not intermarriage will destroy the Jewish people by working from the premise that it will not, that it is here to stay and that some of us need to take leadership roles for how to constructively help Judaism adapt to this new dynamic. The website can be found at www.fiftypercenters.com. It’s a lot like the work we’re doing for emergent Christianity and that you’re doing for feminism. All we can do is tell our stories as we keep trying to live out this ideal. We believe that will help shape the future.

This project is engaging my passion right now because two and a half months ago, I married a practicing Jewish man. I struggled so much with feelings of rejection from the Jewish community: a community that still speaks with a fairly unified voice that families like mine are not welcome. To give you some idea of the scope of this refusal, I have only heard of three rabbis in the entire city of Chicago who will even perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. The feeling of being somewhat helpless but also full of righteous indignation was so similar to how I felt when churches I had tried to be a part of told me that they didn’t want me unless I wanted to fit into the limited identity they had laid out for.

I worked through these feelings on my personal blog and with friends and with my therapist but what we’ve all learned from our participation in the emergent movement is that finding a community that has similar experiences has all sorts of redemptive power. Thus Fifty Percenters was born. As my family expands and as the world changes, we want to be at the forefront of that change, contributing and creating the necessary dialogue to ensure that people have unfettered access to God in the language that their souls speak. If you are at all interested in this project or know of anyone who would be, please visit us or direct your friends to us. The more voices that we have responding to posts and the more eyes we have reading the stories that are being told, the more likely it will be that lives will be changed.

“Please God, help me.”

It’s a desperate plea from an unlikely source, Hollywood screenwriter and “bad boy” legend Joe Eszterhas. Widely known as “America’s king of sex and violence” and a “Machiavellian opportunist,” Esterhas’ monikers include: “the cocaine cowboy. The weed eater. The tequila king.” He’s the “Hollywood animal” who wrote Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Jade, Showgirls, Flashdance, and screenplay for sixteen films that made more than a billion dollars at the box office.

With a professional resumes that reads like a rap sheet of raunch, Eszterhas suddenly finds himself recovering from larynx surgery and facing down throat cancer. He cries out to the God he shunned, mocked, and reviled all his life and begs for mercy. Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith is the startling, gritty, astonishing story of how God heard a “bad boy’s” prayer and rescued Eszterhas from himself. He writes, “God saved me… from me.” (p. 8).

“I was praying,” begins Eszterhas in this riveting first-person narrative. “Asking. Begging. For help. Begging God to help me. And I thought to myself: Me? Asking God? Begging God? Praying? I hadn’t even thought about God since I was a boy, yet I was listening to myself begging him for help over and over again as I moan in pain.”

Crossbearer is the story of one man’s simple, childlike faith, and the ever-faithful Father who heard his plea and changed Eszterhas’ life. Apparently repudiating his role in writing the kinds of movies and books that made him famous, Eszterhas’ new passion is telling “the world about You – about how You changed my life and saved me – even if telling the world destroys my Hollywood career.” (p. 21) He writes, “… for the first time in my life, I gave up all control. I put my life in God’s hands. God was in control – my life was up to His will, not mine… I thanked God for freeing me, for loving me so much that He was willing to take over my life.” This is the backdrop upon which this no-punches-pulled book is painted.

Crossbearer is divided into two parts: Faith and Hope. Both are prefaced with Scripture from Romans. There are no chapters or chapter headings. Topics and soliloquies are set off by paragraph breaks, skillfully woven into a seamless garment of masterful wordsmithing. This technique maintains Crossbearer’s whooshing momentum, deftly weaving events, personalities, perceptions, observations and prayers from one page to the next into an inimitable, compelling work.

Tightly written with a crisp, gotta-know-what-happens-next, page turner appeal, the style is terse, almost brutal in its “take-no-prisoners, no-nonsense” tone. No gilded lilies or satin and lace here. No ornamental or ostentatious language. Plain-spoken and direct, Eszterhas “tells it like it is” – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Portions may be categorized as “earthy” or “R-rated” (caveat emptor) and may not be appropriate for gentle readers. Some may find certain pages offensive. But for those who’ve been believers for years or may be lulled or dulled into a safe, semi-somnambulant faith, Crossbearer is a dash of cold water in the face. It reminds the reader of what it means to become a new creation in Christ, and chronicles the unfathomable riches of grace in terms that are sometimes startling, unconventional, maybe even eccentric – all “in living Technicolor.”

Eszterhas’ narrative runs the gamut from religious to socio-political. He comments on Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ, “gender prejudice” in the Catholic church, clergy celibacy and sex scandals, abortion, gay marriage, “church neighbors,” his anti-smoking campaign (“Join Joe”), “baseball religion,” his early years as a Hungarian refugee, cancer, anti-Semitism, forgiveness, miracles, and God’s love. That’s just for starters. Eszterhas’ new-found faith causes many Hollywood insiders to consider him nuts. “I am not born again…” he insists (p. 47), “I have a new relationship with God.”

The guffawing, jaw-dropping Hollywood response doesn’t bother – or slow down – Eszterhas in the least. A self-described “captive Catholic,” Eszterhas says of a Catholic festival he participates in, “I’d often been stoned on booze in my life and on more substances than I cared to remember, but I’d never been this high before. Stone sober. High on God.” (p. 213). Another example:

“I wasn’t raising hell anymore. I was raising a cross instead of raising hell. … It was like I had always had a hole in my heart that was finally filled. There was a joy in my heart that had never been there, a joy that contained an inner peace I had never known but had self-destructively always been seeking.” (p. 218)

Intermingled with the rough edges and occasional raw language is a surprising tenderness and vulnerability. This is evident as Eszterhas describes his devotion to his wife, Naomi, and their four sons, his daughter Susie, and his grand children. We see it again in his relationship with his priest at Holy Angels Roman Catholic Church, Father Dan, Deacon “Cheeze-us” Fred, his compassion toward a struggling screenplay writer, Vince, other cancer patients, and many others. A regular parishioner at Holy Angels in Ohio, Eszterhas wears Rolling Stones T-shirts and Harley Davidson jeans to Mass. He carries the cross from vestibule to altar each Sunday. His childlike faith is boundless, joyful, astonishing, and somehow… refreshing.

From Hollywood animal to crossbearer. Talk about “amazing grace.”

Written by Kristine

By AJ Gregory

I’m practicing the discipline of silence. Spending time in the quiet. Just me and the mysteries of the spiritual. Why is silence so hard? Easy. It’s like giving my mind free reign to wage a maniac compulsive thinking spree. This is why it’s hard for me to ‘be still and precisely why I need to meditate more.

When I’m silencing the pounding blood in my being to a soft lull, I start to panic. I feel lazy. Like I’m not saving the world or meeting a deadline or putting another load of laundry in or following up on emails. But once I get passed that, everything is okay. Silence invites me into her loving arms and begs me to stay awhile. “It’s your daily does of goodness,” she says with a wink in her eye and a tray of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. And when I listen to her and follow her voice, I know she’s right.

I laid on the floor today. Closed my eyes. Rested my head in the lap of a world without tasks, deadlines, networking events, fears, doubts, questions, tears, loneliness, and the steady tick of a clock. I was quiet for a while and as solitude took her beautiful course, the thought came to me, “Where are you going?”

Normally I would have an answer for that because my daily routine is pretty planned out so I know what I’m doing at hourly intervals…i.e. today I know in 30 minutes I have to run out to Target and buy ice cube trays and apple cider vinegar…then I have to return my library books…then go home and work on a chapter for a client …you get my drift.
A few years ago I would have told you exactly where I was going with my life. ‘Matter of fact, I recently read a journal entry in 2002 where I wrote something like “I will kill myself if I don’t become a NY Times bestselling author by the time I’m thirty.” I also remember having lunch for the first time with my now one-of-my-best-friends when she candidly blurted out, “I have a feeling you’ll be married at twenty-seven” and I almost choked that country bumpkin with my Jersey claws because I was twenty-two at the time and thought FOR SURE living in the Bible Belt would guarantee me a marriage license at MAXIMUM twenty-five.

Needless to say, life happens. Today, at the tender age of thirty-three, I can say I’m not sure where I’m going. It’s not an ambiguous answer because of my lack of enthusiasm for the future, or because I have no long-term goals, or because I’m apathetic or hopeless. It’s just because, for the first time in my life, I don’t know. And that excites me! I catch glimpses of what’s possible every now and again…a seductive taste to keep me from pigeon-holing myself and to, like Henri Nouwen, said “create a space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.”

This is where silence has brought me. To a humility about tomorrow—that it might never come and if it does, I still won’t know for sure what it will bring. To a peace (sometimes overwhelming, sometimes barely beating, but nonetheless always there) that as long as I am doing my best to keep healthy (in all ways), continue in my seeking out of faith (with revelation and without a clue), and love others as I want to be loved…whatever joys, surprises, beauty, divine intervention, and purposed events that are mine to enjoy will unravel, unfold, and open up at the right time.

Where am I going? Definitely somewhere.

AJ is a 30something single Jersey girl living in the Garden State who has published 2 books (Messy Faith, 2008 and Silent Savior, 2009) under Baker/Revell and ghostwrites for some pretty neat people (She’s co-authored ten books ranging in topics from marriage to the mob to international military). Her unconventionality has gotten her in trouble sometimes, but she’s a firm believer that God gives different pathways to people for a reason. She loves to write about faith and life and how messy and beautiful the coupling of both can be. She blogs at Roars & Rambles.