God has always—as far back as my memory can reach—always been my most fascinating companion. I am a little girl standing on the pew next her mother, singing words I do not know, feeling the way the congregational responses meet the pastor's sung verses; waves on a shore. My heart is nearly dancing with anticipation, as we move toward the climax of sound. Years later a similar, intensely joyful longing would be found in waiting for that perfect wave as I body-surfed while on break from clerking in the oceanfront gift shop.
I mention the sea because I never had that Sunday School image of God as an elderly white-bearded man. Rather my images came from the pictures of Jesus’ baptism, the rays of light radiating out of heaven; and from the shoreline, the endless deep of sea—the great mother’s womb whose essence is so much like our own water-filled bodies. Light, depth, life power - these were all aspects of the One with whom I conversed and wrestled, wept and laughed deep belly-laughs, as I accepted the jokes on me and my severe gravity.
When I was perhaps 6 years old, I discovered denominations. We were Lutherans; there were Roman Catholics and Baptists too, and so one day after hearing in Sunday School that Jesus was Jewish, I told my mother that I wanted to be Jewish, because I wanted to be as close to Jesus as possible. She told me rather gently that Jews did not feel the same way about Jesus as we did, and that if I wanted to be close to him, I could do so even as a Lutheran.
It is about this same time that I began to read in earnest, and I took the smaller black Bible out of the bookshelf and started at the beginning. The first paragraph or so was enough to keep me deep in contemplation, night after night. “How could God exist in Nothing?”
I must have worked on this for weeks. Finally with a child’s pragmatic wisdom, I decided that IF one could exist in Nothing, and create Something out of it, then One was, of course, God. The act gave meaning to the name.
As the second of four small girls, there was still a loneliness, an emptiness within me that allowed this divine-human relationship to grow. I endured the drought years of Sunday School, when other kids had bailed out; a child’s fidelity to the reality of the friendship with this One who was Other, invisible and yet true.
I am the fifteen-year-old, standing in Connie Sjostrom’s office, (the pastor assigned to work with the youth of our church.) Tormented by the fundamentalist’s insistence on the conversion moment, I am safe in this Lutheran world, with the man who has discovered Jesus ‘late’ in his life and so I ask, ‘How will I know that I believe? How will I know that I have given myself to this Jesus who loved us enough to risk crucifixion?’ The light is golden, as it reflects back from the wood paneling, and he looks at me with calm intensity, “you’ll know because you are his already, there’s no going back."
But even then I never thought of the ministry. My long ago infatuation with Lil Anderson’s sister, the missionary to Hong Kong, was a vague memory. I tried Christian coffeehouses; the joyfulness suited me, but not the theology. I argued against being baptized again, as I had affirmed my infant baptism with integrity and purpose. I wept myself to sleep because they, the fundamentalists, told me my Jewish friends were damned unless of course they converted.
In university, though an English major, I took countless religion courses. I transferred from the University of Florida to Bard College largely on the recommendation of a friend who said I would really like his religion professor. (The beauty of the campus compelled me as well.) It was not perhaps love at first sight, but the Lutheran child and the Episcopalian priest became the deepest of friends. For the first time in my life, I had found someone who not only believed in the reality of the Presence, but who understood the poetical power and truth of Scripture in a way much like mine. We were conspirators even as we argued duty vs. grace. I mentioned this to someone at his funeral and they looked surprised and said, “oh he must have played the devil’s advocate.” He had an aura of sternness that was tempered by his unconditional love. We traded ideas about Lazarus as the Beloved Disciple, we read C.S. Lewis and the Johannine writings. He gave me a poem by George Herbert when I was numb with grief at the death of child friend and unable to work on my senior project, Toward El’Azar. And when I broke down in tears, reading the Akeda, the Binding of Isaac, at the Great Vigil on Easter Eve, he consoled me and told me it was the most appropriate reading of the text that he had ever heard.
After a sojourn in the south of England, I found myself in seminary, but even then I'd continued my studies out of my fascination with God, not with the purpose of entering the ministry. I had thought of chaplaincy, but circumstances (a dead car) led me away from an internship in the hospice, and I found myself working with victims of domestic violence. Seminary is a terrible and profound place, if only one allows it to work its transformations. Between courses and fieldwork, I experienced the justification for feminist theology and felt drawn to explore other forms of liberation theology. I became an activist, participating in actions which I came to understand as “prayer on location”. In seminary, I began healing ancient wounds; I took the infinitesimal first steps on the long and painful journey of accepting myself as I am.
In 1986, I took a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School, this a miracle in itself if one considered finances and the profound shyness/insecurity that was part of my childhood legacy.
Divinity schools offer you a smörgåsbord of ideas about God, introduce you to the different ways in which people encounter God. I would feel my own relationship with God shift from time to time. There would be empty times, and I’d think, “we are having a lover’s quarrel. I hate this not speaking, while being keenly aware of the other.” I would ache until the balance was restored once again. How can I explain that while this God carried no physical image for me, the energy was like that of lover?
Then several years later, I first heard “Womb of Compassion” as a name for God and felt that I had come home. I had chosen “divine imagination” as part of an exercise for a women’s spirituality class, but it was too obscure, too personal, for how would you see the love, the writer’s life-giving energy that I see within those words?
All too often we reduce God to metaphors and, even forgetting that the metaphors exist, embrace the finite attributes they represent. These images can become idols. For those of us who embrace a theology of the personal, relational God it becomes important to speak to at least as much as we speak about God. With these words I am reminded of being a mother; of the tendency to tell stories about our children even as they stand next to us. It is important to acknowledge their presence, “yes, we are speaking about you right now” because it means that we see them as persons and not as objects.
Certainly there are differences of approach that suit different world views. For some it is appropriate that there be a nameless energy from which we derive our being and to which we return. And yet, as a relational being, I have found life in the conviction that there is mutual relationship between my Creator/Redeemer/Advocate and me. Over time I have learned to walk the lines of understanding, the way one walks on parallel lines in the linoleum. The notion of parallel universes gives insight into parallel world-views. Hopefully, I can speak enough of your language to explore a point of meeting. But on the other hand I spend much of my time being with that One I call God, and interpreting Scripture, so that I am not always sure if I can articulate, in a systematic way, my beliefs about this One who for me is midway between the “Father, Almighty” of the creeds and the nameless essence of all Life. This One who is, for me, Other and yet within me.
I will come back to this notion of Who it is that compels me to live as one set apart. But first I will tell you of that journey toward ordination. I came out of seminary the first time, degree in hand, exhausted by all the spiritual/emotional work that I had done. I had stopped going to church, somehow no longer officially Lutheran or Episcopalian.
After leaving my weekend job at the women’s shelter I led a quiet life caring for children, attending a writer’s workshop, learning to play the mandolin. I started attending what we called “Battell,” officially called “The Church of Christ in Yale University.” Here I was encouraged to take an active part in its liturgical and social/spiritual life.
I'd just come through one surgery when I met my husband through an engineering friend. I was facing a second operation, when, as part of a Lenten series, I encountered the question, “why do you not serve me?” I grew angry (it is always good to investigate those places where the energy is high) and said, “but I have given you all that I do. My life of caring for, is service to you.” Still so very Lutheran at the core, I was insistent on “the vocation of all believers.” But conversation with Kate Latimer, our associate chaplain, had me “trying on” the idea of ordination. And so I applied to return to YDS in order to seek ordination. Somehow the experience of surgery was important—perhaps because I lacked both insurance and money and there was the dawning understanding that it would be okay with God if I were to earn a living doing what I loved to do, namely creating, and holding the space for liturgy; supporting people on their spiritual journeys.
Curiously enough, I was not accepted in the first instance of re-applying to Yale. Someone on the committee had not appreciated my activism, I think—or perhaps she simply thought me fool—my application was rejected. So when I said to Margaret Farley, my beloved ethics professor and (informal) spiritual adviser, “Oh, I guess I was wrong about that” she responded “a human ‘no’ does not necessarily mean that God is saying ‘no.’ If you believe that God is calling you, I will write a letter and you will get in.” She wrote the letter, I was accepted, and embarked on the journey toward ordination. Courses at YDS, courses at Andover Newton Theological School were my river Jabbok. Unlike Jacob, however, I did not have to wrestle God alone. I am grateful for those who wrestled along side me as we scrutinized this thing called ordination.
I received my Master of Divinity degree in 1991. We moved to Montreal and after the birth of my second child, after a struggle with differences in polity, I was ordained by the New Haven Association of United Church of Christ to serve in the Montreal Presbytery of the United Church of Canada, and was appointed to serve Westmount Park Church.
It was amusing that after all my reluctance to accept the call to ordained ministry I should have to fight in order to obtain it.
Very simply, ordination means “set apart.” I had been distressed by the “us” and “them” mentality that seemed to be translated into qualitatives that did not exist for me. Even now I have to laugh when people react to my vestments when minutes before they have been having fun with me. I have to laugh or else I would cry, for we all share the potential for that aura of “holiness.”
In my ordination paper, I had presented the ordained clergy-person as a resource person; the training and personal commitment justified this idea of the designed pitcher (or should I say “pray-er” since lots of people have an aversion to praying out loud in front of others) but all too often I have found that people want the minister to be the priest, the intercessor, the one who holds the space for faith and believing.
My way of accepting ordination came through my understanding it as a kind of wedding; it was a public avowal of love and commitment. It was saying, “I love you, God, so much that I will give myself to you in front of the world, to be your prophet, your priest, your lover. “
And as I write these words I can do nothing but weep.
It is much like a human marriage. One has such hopes of faithfulness and trust. And yet one is distracted by work, one can grow irritable within the safety of love.
There has been a great loneliness and some disappointment in discovering that the “set apart” is simply a stronger sense of being the outsider with God. We throw parties and people are too busy to come. I see the exquisite beauty of an everlasting love rejected, and my heart aches.
“Maker” is an old English word for poet. God is truly the divine Poet. Speaking worlds into existence; surrounding us with images. In my homilies, you will see how I understand these images and the ways that they would direct, even at times, seduce us toward embracing God and life. There are warnings about destructive patterns and practices, which we have too long interpreted as threats of destruction.
Nuance is incredibly important. So much depends upon the lens one uses to investigate the text. I often think about the way the eye lights upon a certain angle, intersecting the page in a new way, and how this opens one to new meanings.
I have rambled on about my self, about my evolution as a person on a journey of faith, so that you will understand something of the fluidity of the words in my homilies.
If I sound certain, it is the conviction of the inspired moment, certainly I do not claim infallible insights, I only share with you the delight of seeing something new and fresh, in the hopes that it would inspire you to look anew at the texts themselves. I want us to challenge our presuppositions and assumptions; I want us to be open to Spirit.
The collection arises from requests that I gather my homilies into one place for further consideration. I am not gifted as an orator; rather, critical comments have centred on my sincerity, and on the relevance of my words to people’s lives. Let me say this, the process of receiving the words of a sermon has long mystified and delighted me. I sit down at my computer after having read and lived with the passages. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what I am to say, then the first sentence comes, followed by the rest.
While a single mother and full-time minister, I did not always have the time necessary to create “finished” pieces of writing. When I preach, I present them in their rough forms because I know that we are all in process, we all drift in and out of listening. Just as I bring myself to the text, so the listeners hear with filters that are shaped by their feelings and thoughts and experiences. It is always educational to hear what someone else has heard you say.
I am aware that my homilies, my reflections and musings upon Scriptural passages are shaped when the assigned readings of the lectionary intersect my life experiences. My theological and exegetical training influences the presentation of these reflections. I can not just "make up" what I want to say; the training insists that I abide by certain rules. There are guidelines for working with the text as a literary or an historical or theological document. I am to take the meaning "out" of what is there, hence the technical word for what I do: "exegetical.” One is responsible for guarding against reading meanings into the text, meanings that suit one’s own agenda.
In order to be honest, I need to declare my theological bias, this means that I acknowledge my understanding of Who/what God is and the effect this understanding will have upon my reading of the text. The way that one interprets Scripture is called one's hermeneutic. There is a feminist "hermeneutic of suspicion" that states that much of the Bible has been used to harm marginalized people. And many would say then that these passages reflect the patriarchal agenda more than they reflect God's intention for humanity.
My hermeneutic is based on my belief that despite obvious potentially harmful passages, despite the patriarchal agenda, the Holy Spirit can and does work through Scripture to speak to us of life and God's great love for Creation (which includes us.) If you are a writer, or if you create anything, you understand the pure delight that arises in the creative act. I see this in God, and I believe that the example of the natural world in its movement toward healing itself reveals something to us of God’s nature as well. The movement of the Cosmos, the divine energy of God is expended to move through chaos and death into new and abundant life - a process that awakens joy.
Certainly you could accuse me of “creating God” in my image. And yet it has been a mutual evolution of understanding who we (God and I) are in relationship with one another.
As I said in the beginning, the relationship was born out of fascination of the One experienced in worship, in nature, in nightly musings. There have been influences by those whose own encounters have touched me in different ways because of their authenticity. In finding myself called to the ministry there are impositions of that role that affect changes in me, on my gypsy soul.
Let me explain my understanding of the differences between pastoral, prophetic, and priestly, for these are key elements of the minister’s identity. As pastor I am to guide, protect and comfort, much as the shepherd to whom this word owes its meaning. As priest I intercede, though it is not an absolute necessary to my way of thinking, for all of us are granted the freedom to approach God; nevertheless, I am willing, and have committed myself to stepping into those awful places where we are reminded of our smallness and our fragility. I do so in order to “return” and bear witness to the reassurances that as small as we are in this vast creation, we are cherished by our Creator.
As prophet, I live with the awareness that God is educating me about God’s love; teaching me about being ‘embodied spirit’ through daily participation in living. Often it is neither pleasant nor comfortable to be prophetic. Sometimes it can be dramatic and exhilarating as when one engages in civil disobedience. Other times it is quite simple; the difficulties of a given week suddenly relate to the essential meaning of a Scriptural passage, and you have lived it so that you might speak authentically of the struggle or of the insight. The prophetic experience is the 'living out' of an awareness of God’s real and active presence. It is by God’s grace and my willingness to submit to this prophetic life that I find the authority to preach.
My poet’s soul sees God as Maker, as Cosmic poet. I am called to hold up one small mirror to show one tiny facet of the One who Is, who bears such names as the Beginning and the Ending. It is simply my hope that my glimpses of the Divine speak to another, so we need not feel alone. May our explorations of the texts help us unlearn all the messages that have damaged our spirits; let the hardships of the journey break open our hearts so that we are transformed, and may our hearts find healing as we finally, truly, hear the Divine Voice, “you are my beloved, this day I have begotten you.”
