Emerging Women

By Irim

“Woohoo!” I thought, as the 4B stopped next to me in the High Street. “Hi ho, Hi ho, off to Littlemore we go!” It had been a full day – talk to the Research Induction School; Dean’s Forum; the usual first week frustrations with a new intake. Now off to a 7pm case study.

It was just after 6 when I got on the bus (I like early, especially in rush hour) and was rooting through my pockets for gum (which, of course, I’d left on my desk) when my hand came upon an odd texture.

Beads.

I have a ROSARY in my pocket? Since when?

She is eternal:

Curious to see which one it was, I surreptitiously pulled it out – and found myself smiling. It was the one brought back for me from Israel by my beloved teaching colleague, Helen Raucher, and her husband, Steve, shortly after I’d converted. Blue crystal beads, silver chain, ‘Terra Santa’ where Our Lady’s image usually is. Yes, I’m a wooden bead girl, but a rosary given with love – especially from Jewish friends acknowledging and wishing me joy in my conversion to Catholicism – trumps that a thousandfold. It’s my favourite, and was a particularly appropriate one to find as Erev Rosh Hashanah was about to begin.

I gazed at it with trepidation. Anyone who reads this blog knows of my deep love for Our Lady, the dream I associate with her, the fact that I said the ‘Hail Mary’ long before I was Catholic…

long before nations’ lines were drawn – when no flags flew, when no armies stood, [her haven] was born

…but I have a shameful secret. I DREAD saying the rosary. I would rather dental floss an army of cats without body armour than have to say the rosary, especially in congregation after the 10am mass (sorry, guys!).

But I feel torn. Our Lady is what holds me in the Church, and this is really THE form of prayer that focuses on her, and I can’t abide it. I know I’m not alone; that doesn’t make me feel less guilty. “Ok,” I thought, “Let’s give it a go. Best way over guilt is to stop avoiding it. You can do it for an intention, right? Just…start.”

I tried the Apostles’ Creed, but got as far as…”We.” Hey, at least I got that far.

I looked at my phone as soon as I got off. 18.30. Not due in till 19.00. Maybe try it walking through the church graveyard at St Mary’s and St Nicholas’? Had time to spare, what did I have to lose?

I wiggled through the gate and turned left, starting the Apostles’ Creed, as I tried to remember WHICH mysteries…Tuesday…sorrowful. Crap, it’s been so long, what ARE they?

Our Father, which art in heaven…

I passed the grave of the lad who died at 19 yrs and 6 months in France in September 1918, and though I continued reciting the rosary, my heart broke with sorrow for one lost so young, so near the end of a war.

And you ask me why I love her – through wars, death and despair. She is the constant; we who don’t care

And as the beads slipped through my hands…

Hail Mary, full of grace

…I finally got it. Fr Richard told me ages ago, when I told him I couldn’t do the rosary at home or in bed, that the rosary was a prayer of motion. I kind of got it at Walsingham and on Newman night walks.

In the graveyard, I *got* it. It’s what any Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim would have told me. The rhythm of repetitive prayer allows your mind to let go and drop deeper into prayer – even if that prayer is the fact that the plumber needs to come and fix the sink. Even if it’s about a 19 year old boy I never knew. It’s all prayer.

Glory be to the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit…

As I wandered amongst the graves, beads rough against my fingers, slipping from decade to decade, I thought about love, life, loss, being forgotten and remembered, what I’d left behind and where I was going, the constant, deepening struggle between the institutional Church and my unfolding faith.

You wonder will I leave her – but how? I cross over borders, but I’m still there now.

As the sun lowered in the sky, I could feel the internal stillness deepen, and a sense of peace came over me.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy…aw, crap, how does the rest of it go? Fuck it. Salve regina, mater misericordiae…

Then I turned the last corner, and the gate came into sight again…and I had the answer. Well, I’d always had it; I’d just been letting too much get in the way, too many well-meaning people decide what KIND of Catholic *I* had to be: you’ll be a good Catholic when you receive on the tongue; if you fall in line here; if you stop thinking about this, it’ll be so much easier, dear, won’t it? And if you stop looking too hard and too deeply and seeing what’s really going on, it’ll all be fine. Will it, fuck.

I can’t say the rosary just like anyone else: others prefer kneeling, saying it together, in bed, in the car, wherever. But that’s not for me. The rosary works for me when I’m walking in a graveyard: maybe it’ll work when I’m walking on the railway line at Walsingham or somewhere else. I don’t know. What I DO know is that tonight, I made the rosary mine. Now, it is always mine.

I need to do the same with my faith: stop looking around; stop listening to even the most well-meaning when they try to change me; stop trying to fit in a mould that doesn’t work for me. The other thing I need to stop doing is getting infuriated/drawn into politics, ideological arguments, hard as that is for me, since I love a good argument. But this isn’t genuine argument; it’s polarisation. And I can only imagine Our Lady’s sorrowing eyes as she looks down on it.

How can I leave her? Where would I start? Let [the Church's] petty [factions] tear themselves apart…

Not too long ago, a friend said that I was ‘a mix’ when it came to my faith. He’s *right*. My faith is what it is – it’s ME. Complicated, light, dark, sharp, tender, angry, loving, sad – all of it. Take it or leave it. I suspect – or rather, I hope – I know which one Our Lady will choose.

…[Mother Church's] only borders lie around [her] heart.

Happy birthday.

Irim lives in England and is re-training to be a psychotherapist – after having been a teacher and a librarian. She was born a Muslim, taught at an Orthodox Jewish School and became Catholic. This post first appeared on her blog The night and half-light of dreams.

By Wendy McCaig

The air was surprisingly cool and crisp this morning as I set out from our property in rural central Virginia for what was supposed to be a 10 mile ride through the country. It is a ride I have done many times before and I was starting to get a bit bored with it. I decided to press on past my normal turn around point expecting to go just a little further.

I had not gone very far when two very fast, very fierce dogs began to chase me. I paddled as fast as I could up the hill and managed to escape unharmed. However, as I turned and looked behind me, my pursuers were poised in the middle of the road daring me to return. I did not have the courage to undergo another attack so I kept riding with no idea how I would get back to our cabin.

I soon found a road I recognized. I assumed it would get me back to familiar territory which it did. However, I was coming from a different direction, took a wrong turn and ended up going an additional 5 miles before I finally found my way back to our property. In total, I biked 17 miles which is quite a long ride for an old woman like me.

While I really wish the snarling dogs would have been napping when I rode past, without my fear of being eaten for lunch, I never would have found this new path. What I saw on these new roads was well worth the risk it took to get me there. I ended up on a ridge overlooking rolling green fields, came upon a creek as I passed through the Buckingham Appomattox Forest, and discovered I am biking distance to Holiday Lake State Park. Most importantly, I learned I can bike 17 miles and live. This one unexpected venture will yield months of new biking expeditions. I also grew tremendously as a biker from the experience. I learned to take a map with me, a cell phone, and will be investing in pepper spray as a nice surprise for the next pack of dogs to challenge me.

This weekend, when I was not biking through the country, I was reading Mike Breen and Steve Cockram’s book Building a Discipling Culture. I discovered why I seem so prone to adventures like the one noted above. According to the assessment tool in the appendix of the book, I am an “Apostle.” I never thought of myself that way before. However, as I read the description, a few things started to make sense to me. Breen makes the argument that every believer is given one of the five roles found in Ephesians 4:7, 11-13.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it…It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Breen describes the Apostles as follows, “It is from the Greek apostolos meaning “one who is sent out.” Apostles are visionary and pioneering, always pushing into new territory. They like to establish new churches and ministries. They come up with new and innovative means to do kingdom work.”

Breen then goes on to describe the pioneering nature of the Apostle and how this spirit of adventure and the resulting changes can be unsettling to those whom he describes as “settlers.” Breen explains “Settlers look to put down roots, while pioneers are hacking through dense jungle growth in search of new territory.”

Breen warns that “The tension between Settlers and Pioneers must be understood and managed to keep from being swallowed by division. Pioneers naturally want to move into new ways and ideas of advancing the kingdom. They are willing to take risks and join the Lord in new endeavors, often long before the settler even knows the Lord is moving in that direction. Off goes the pioneer, with excitement that cannot be contained, but that disturbs the settler who is working to preserve what has been handed down by previous generations. “It worked for them, so it will work for us,” is the settler’s life motto.”

What I realized is that I have entered a whole new territory culturally, economically, and racially during a time of tremendous cultural shifts and have left some behind. They simply cannot see the critical need for new methodology to adapt to this new environment. In short, I have failed to bring people along into this new territory with a new paradigm for doing ministry.

There is no doubt in my mind that God is doing something very exciting across this country and I want Embrace to be a part of this movement of God. Some will want us to follow tried and true paths from the past. Some will see the snarling dogs blocking the road and will want to turn around and stick with the ground we have already gained. I recognize the truth of Breen’s words “Without Settlers we would never keep the frontier that was won by the pioneers. Settlers must come to build and occupy, to maintain and to increase through steady, deliberate efforts.” However, I am a pioneer. I can’t help but take Embrace down unchartered roads that may take us in the wrong direction at times. We may have to travel out of our way, face attack, and feel lost and confused some times. But, I trust that in the long run, we will find the path designed for us. It will not be exactly like anyone else’s path and it will be hard work clearing and claiming this new frontier.

Breen not only helped me see myself, my gifts, and my calling more clearly. He also helped me understand why I often feel misunderstood and why it is so hard for me to explain the things I am seeing to those whose focus is on past experiences. I have learned that if a pioneering ministry is turned over before a new paradigm is firmly in place, it will return to what is tried and true. Breen helped me understand why my unconventional ways seem so dangerous and unnecessary to some and I pray I am more sensitive to these issues in the future and do a better job of stabilizing a ministry before I move on.

Wendy McCaig is the founder and Executive Director of Embrace Richmond (www.embracerichmond.org), an urban ministry in the inner city of Richmond, Va. Her first book From the Sanctuary to the Streets: How the Dreams of One City’s Homeless Sparked a Faith Revolution that Transformed a Community was released earlier this summer. Wendy blogs at www.wendymccaig.com about social justice and Christian practice. (this post first appeared at her blog here)

By Ellen Stevens

He woke with a certain sense of confidence; an assurance that everything was going to be okay. Toby is normally extremely positive and upbeat, but this was beyond the norm. When I asked what happened, he told me.

He had a dream last night: a God dream. One of those where God speaks to you with insight and encouragement. In the dream, God spoke peace and light into our situation giving Toby the confidence that all would be well. It was an amazing gift and well-timed. The coolest part? God was a hippo!

Awhile back, my friend Wendy had a God dream. I don’t know what he said to her, but it was obviously impacting. And in her dream, God was Donald Sutherland.

Now, I fully believe that God speaks to people today, and I know he often uses dreams to connect with us. I’ve heard person after person tell me stories about God coming to them and speaking in their night. In these moments, God speaks to us in a way that resonates within us, that communicates in a manner that we can hear. But, as talking animals and movie stars? Seriously? How awesome is that?!

I seemed to get ripped off.

Every night, I dream about rescuing people from burning buildings, stopping hijackers on planes and tearing kids out of the grips of traffickers. I wake up exhausted, with sore muscles, having battled all night long. I’m certain there is a reason I have these action-packed, thriller dreams, and I’ve often thought I could certainly draw on my midnight experiences to write an award-winning screenplay. But they do wear on me.

Every once in awhile, I’d like a God dream; a nice, calm inspiring one. And I’m completely okay with white-haired movie stars and talking animal God-characters.

One night, maybe he will show up in my adventures. I’ll be trapped, trying to figure out which wire to cut on a ticking bomb and hear a voice speak to me. Ellen. Ellen. I’ll turn and see a beautiful butterfly land on the red wire. Follow me. I will lead you into all understanding and peace. Then, I’ll cut the red wire. The digital readout will stop. Silence.

Then maybe I’ll finally, truly sleep.

Until the next dream.

This post originally appeared at Ellen’s blog ellenstevens.com.

By Adele Sakler

Joan Ball’s journey from Atheism to a Christian faith in her first book, Flirting with Faith (Howard Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.) resonated with me because I have gone through those similar experiences in my past. It’s just that I am finding myself no longer able to relate much anymore. Today I claim to be an Agnostic Christian who does not believe in many doctrines and interpretations of the Bible that run the gamut in evangelical circles. I am standing on the precipice of A/theism because I am falling out of belief of my human constructs of G-D. Yet, I really enjoyed Joan’s journey, and I will share some of my favorite moments from the book.

It is an honest and authentic journey that never bordered on preaching. She always owns her experiences and never tries to say that is how everyone else should believe and/or do things. Her experience of having her own life and being in control of her own destiny made the leap to belief in G-D all the more compelling.

The revealing things about her misery resonated with me as well. “I had yet to read the clear indications that I was at the root of my own misery.” (p. 63) This gut-level honesty is one of the things I love about Joan! Her child-like faith became a motif throughout her journey. It all started from the beginning of her conversion: “Within weeks of my conversion, my journal was peppered with erratic talk of surrender and repentance and desperate pleas to be changed from the inside out” (p. 81) This continued in decisions from leaving her job and selling the home her and her husband had built together.

Joan is a very creative and expressive person. An example of her open and poetic heart is when she said this: “I felt like a human zipper coming undone as God opened me up and showed me the best and the worst of myself through the lens of day-to-day life.” (p. 122) She is also realistic in her approach to faith in Jesus: “Jesus is no genie in a lamp. All the happy thinking in the world will not keep life from being life” (p. 165)

There was a terrible church experience that rattled Joan and her family. How they waded through it all and came out on the other side inspired me. Joan says, “I can never be completely sure, but I think that God allowed my comfortable church existence to be shaken up so that I could learn what it means to forgive radically and to love beyond reason, even when dealing with people I would have preferred to hate.” (p. 179)

Joan is now a teacher at a university and through her friend, John, learned what teaching is really all about. I loved this as I can see it reaching over to faith as well. John told her, ‘It is not about knowing everything and dispensing wisdom from on high. It is about reaching each student individually, heart to heart. It is about connecting with them as human beings in a way that meets their needs, not your convenience.’ (p. 188) Now, if more people like Joan could enact this in their daily lives when living out their faith we’d be in a much better place spiritually!

Now, I admit I am a walking contradiction, and scoffed at a lot of what Joan writes because I have been there, done that with so many similar kinds of stories. I just do not experience G-D in those kinds of ways anymore, let alone sensing the Holy Spirit at work. Maybe I am jaded or maybe it’s a season. For this I do not know, but I find myself slipping from faith to atheism, the reverse order of Joan’s journey. I feel like there is no plan for my life and feel like a waste of space at times. Chronic illness ravages my body. Not sure where I will end up on this odyssey but I want to thank Joan for sharing hers.

Adele Sakler currently resides in Sacramento, California with her partner, and their cute Tibetan Spaniel named Mushu. She suffers from, and is in treatment for Chronic Lyme Disease, a few other Tick-Borne diseases and Heavy Metal Toxicity. She considers herself at this point in her journey a Christian agnostic because she just can’t seem to sign on the dotted line and ascribe to all the doctrines and long-held man-made traditions of Christendom. She loves G-D and is a failing Christ-follower. She blogs at www.existentialpunk.com (where this post first appeared) and is the creator and site administrator for www.queermergent.com.

By Cindy Wallace

Last night I cooked. As day deepened into darkness, I stood wrapped in an apron my mother made, grinding almonds, rolling out dough, chopping potatoes and onions, washing lettuce, slicing strawberries, blending whipped cream and cream cheese and sugar. I cooked until I was cranky, and then I kept cooking (Josh learned to keep his distance). I was preparing for the feast, but this preparation struck me as strange: how does one live into the joy of Easter in the mid-time mourning space of Holy Saturday?

In the church calendar, Good Friday may be the darkest day, but the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is for me a day of profound mystery. It bespeaks the waiting I often feel within myself, the tentative question: what next? I am preparing, I am mourning, I am hoping. For Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the other women who found his tomb empty early Sunday morning, Saturday would have been a Sabbath day. Would they have lit candles or lamps? What wailing would their mourning have entailed? They certainly weren’t preparing to celebrate; they weren’t peeling vegetables and drizzling honey. They weren’t wrapping their hair on strips of cloth to make spring Sunday curls.

But my experience of Easter happens now, with Bibles tucked on my numerous bookshelves telling me very little about Saturday but that by Sunday morning those women knew, as perplexed and afraid and astonished as they may have been, that there is such a thing as life out of death. That there was such a thing as a temple rebuilt in three days, One come to suffer with, to give his life a ransom for many, to vanquish death and evil in the most flip-flopped, unexpected way. Like a bulb planted in the earth–you look at it, and you think, how could this shrivelled brown ball ever make something beautiful? (How could this submissive, shameful death ever make something beautiful?) And then: life!

Life!

So I prepared my feast. I assembled friends to share the feast–as one of them called it, a “resurrection family.” I followed the recipes my mom and aunts taught me by many years of example. And after a night of deep sleep, I awoke to Life. (Let’s also be less romanticized and more honest: this morning I drank copious quantities of coffee and ate pastry and haphazardly hacked a nine-pound ham with a meat cleaver so that at least part of it would fit into a slow cooker.) Leaving the ham, Josh and I strolled two blocks to gather with the most beautiful collection of Christians I’ve ever witnessed. And we celebrated. After the darkness of Friday and Saturday, all I could see this morning was Light. All I could hear was Joy. All I could feel was Hope.

And then we ate. We ate in the sort of way where laughter ripples along the table, where forkfuls of avocado-lime pie pause in midair as people discover surprise connections, shared hopes. I took photos of us all and sent them to the family back home, where a similar feast had taken place, with a similar menu, also made ready by hands on that mysterious Saturday of waiting and preparation.

Tomorrow morning I will awaken to a day like most days, which at least for me are much more like Holy Saturday–the bridge between pain and beauty, death and life, looking back and looking ahead–than either Good Friday or Easter Sunday. I have hope and I have questions. I have sorrow and I have joy. I live in neither fast nor feast, but moderation, small happinesses. But my red-stained fingers, dyed brighter than the eggs I will now make into egg-salad, will remind me: we have fasted, and we have feasted. We have layered our laughter and tasted of life’s delight in special food and special friends. We live not just in the shadow of death but in the light of a Risen Son.

Cindy Wallace is a graduate student, a recovering fundamentalist, and a church-planting plotter with her red-goateed seminarian husband. This post originally appeared at her blog http://lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com/.

By Erin Crisp

One of the first signs of spring in my hometown corner of the world was a trip to my grandfather’s sugar shack, usually with my cousins. It was a crude little dirt-floored structure nestled at the edge of a stand of sugar maples. At one end of the shack, a huge metal vat the size of a bathtub filled half of the shack. Underneath the vat, and of a similar size, was a wood burning stove with a curvy little stovepipe that rose from behind the vat and escaped through a hole in the slanted aluminum roof. Bright winter sunlight broke through a thousand tiny cracks in the walls, and on every available stud inside, nails held ladles, spoons, nets and filters. Two folding chairs and a small homemade table were the only other furnishings. It wasn’t especially colorful or comfortable inside the shack, but I remember it with a smile. Maybe it was the smell. For 2-3 weeks every spring, a sweet, woodsy aroma of smoke, syrup, moisture and the earthy outdoors combined with the barn-like smell of my grandfather’s coveralls. I can almost taste the hope of spring as I type.

The syrup making ritual involved checking sap buckets daily, collecting it in 50 gallon size containers that would then be dumped into the vat in the sugar shack- 43 gallons of sap yields just 1 gallon of sticky, sweet syrup, so this was truly a labor of love. Mixing, testing, stirring, feeding the fire that raged below the vat, skimming the syrup with a net to remove impurities that were distilled to the surface, day and night, batch after batch, waiting for the exact moment of perfection- too long and it would burn, too short and the flavor was weak.

For my part, I was involved as a tourist, but for my grandfather and uncles, it was laborious. The end product? Clear glass quart jars of syrupy, caramel-colored goodness would file into my grandmother’s mudroom weeks later.

Today, during this same season of the year, I am involved in an entirely different ritual of purification.

With my prayer, “Cleanse my heart Lord. Purify me from impurities.”
I imagine, “Turn up the heat in the old wood stove. Load on the firewood Lord.”

With the common practice of giving up something for Lent, I imagine the excesses of my life being distilled at a rumbling boil, escaping through the curvy stovepipe of my spirit into the vastness above.

With the difficult work of self-reflection and prayer, I imagine the physical labor of my family members, toting heavy buckets of sap, standing or sitting around a steaming vat day and night, chopping and feeding logs to a ferocious fire for days on end.

And the end result of both processes? A beautiful sweetness that can only be produced through a process- a process of bringing what I have to the sugar shack, stoking the fires of reflection hot, releasing that which is impure (allowing another to skim off the really nasty stuff), and looking forward to the hope of a sweeter, closer relationship with my Maker.

As I allow Him, God is happy to illuminate the clouds of my watery self being released toward Him. He accepts it, releases me from the burden of carrying it, and I anticipate the closeness of knowing Him in all of His flavorful goodness as the days of Lent progress.

This post originally appeared at Erin’s blog Five Crisps: One Mama’s Musings on Her Three Boys and Life.

By Jessica Coblentz

In an excerpt from her recently published diaries, Dorothy Day recalled a friend who, exactly 9 months before Christmas day, celebrated the Annunciation by getting on his knees, leaning over, and kissing the ground. This is the day that God entered Mary’s womb, he would exclaim. He delighted in the fact that Christ Christened the earth with divine incarnation on that day. With that day, the earth became sacred in the most tangible, significant event of Christian history.

I so often think of Christmas day as the annual celebration of the Incarnation. However, this man’s celebration of the Annunciation challenges me to think of the Incarnation of God in the world as something that occurred not in a single day like Christmas, but rather, through an unfolding process–quite literally, though the season of Mary’s pregnancy.

And, really, the Incarnation did not reach its pinnacle with the birth of Christ in a manger. The Incarnation continued throughout Jesus’ childhood, adult life, crucifixion, and resurrection. And I think the Incarnation, the unfolding of the divine in temporal life, it continues today. It is my regular witness of it in ordinary life that compels me to believe this paradoxical religious claim with such devotion.

What if I lived each day like it was Christmas–the celebration of divine Incarnation in this broken, messed up world? I don’t mean to pose this question in some sort of sappy Coca-cola Christmas commercial kind of way. I mean it. What if I lived with the type of reverence for the goodness in this world that would compel me to kneel down and kiss the dirt? What if I took the time to recognize the continuous unfolding of the Incarnation like that?

Come to think of it, what if I simply lived Christmas day–one day a year–like that? Perhaps that’s a start to a new way of living out the whole year.

Jessica Coblentz is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. Follow her writing on the Web at www.jessicacoblentz.com.