Random Thoughts and Strange Encounters

** Today as I was standing in line at Starbucks, there was a mailman speaking to an older couple I have known through Starbucks (they come every day). They had struck up a conversation and discovered that they'd both lived in Rhode Island; the mailman in Newport, the couple in Providence. Nancy pointed me out and said, "She's from Woonsocket!"  Mailman said, "You're from Woonsocket? Do you know Bert _________?" 

 

I said, “Yes, I do know him. He’s my brother.”

 

I am NOT KIDDING. Turns out the mailman just moved from Newport and is one of my brother’s best friends. He called him from his cell phone immediately. When Mailman handed the phone over to me, my brother said, “He’s crazy.”  Mailman took the phone back and then said to me, “Know what your brother just told me? He told me not to even try to touch you.”

 

That’s the thing with protective older brothers…they always treat you like you’re twelve years old.

 

** The other day as I was teaching Post-Holocaust theology, I was lecturing on theologian Emil Fackenheim’s response to the Holocaust. I mentioned that Fackenheim has proposed a 715th commandment, “Thou shalt not give in to despair of God or humanity, lest Hitler have a final victory.”  I realized later that I had incorrectly numbered the commandments of the Torah. There are 613 Commandments therefore Fackenheim has proposed a 614th commandment. And then, I knew what I had done. I had confused the number of the Commandments in the Torah with the number of home runs Hank Aaron had to hit to beat Babe Ruth’s record…

 

** There is a proposed amendment on the South Carolina ballot this Election Day to ban civil unions for same-sex couples. One of the proponents of the amendment was interviewed on the local news the other night and this essentially, was her argument:

That marriage was instituted to recognize the commitment of heterosexual couples to the procreation of children. Marriage is beneficial for the propagation of the species. Marriage was intended to provide a social and religious arena for the survival of the species. Marriage as a sacred union was created by God and is intended for a man and a woman. 

        *First of all, the human species is not an endangered one and seems hardly to be threatened by extinction in the very near future (unless, of course we all blow each other up).

        * Secondly, how would any of that STOP if same sex couples were allowed to marry?

        * Thirdly, the argument from sanctity is one for the churches, not the state. Congress and state legislators have no business discussing and deciding what is sacred and what is not. The framers of the Constitution saw to that. The issue is not sanctity, but Constitutional rights. Are gay and lesbian couples denied the same rights that are extended to heterosexual couples under the law? Clearly, the answer is yes.

 

** Voting Democratic in South Carolina is comparable to a 300 pound woman ordering a Diet Coke with her two Big Macs. It makes us feel better about ourselves, but doesn’t really make all that much difference.

 

** Sixteen years ago today I was working as a part-time teller in a bank as I worked on my Bachelor’s degree. At 9:30, just after the Brinks truck had pulled away after delivering the week’s money order, an armed robber in full rubber Halloween mask entered the bank and demanded the Brinks delivery. I was at the teller station closest to the door and so consequently,closest to the bandit. It was difficult to hear him with the rubber mask and while on my knees with my hands up in the air, but finally I clearly heard him say, “You’d better get it fast or I’m going to start shooting f***in’ tellers,” at which point he looked me straight in the eye. I shouted to the head teller, “Pat, he wants the Brinks bag. Get the Brinks bag.” She was frozen in place but at the direction was ableto move into the vault and retrieve the $250,000 contained in the bags. He got what he wanted and left. Some of the people who worked in that bank could not return to branch service and had to be placed in jobs in the Operation’s Center. I wanted to go to work the next day, but the bank insisted I take the next day off and not return until after the weekend. I was determined that some bully with a gun was not going to decide how I would live my life. I also learned through this experience that I am cool-headed in crisis situations and that I am not afraid to die. (Even though I don’t want to, I am not afraid to).

 

 

"Now everything's a little upside down...

as a matter of fact, the wheels have stopped. what's good is bad, what's bad is good, you'll find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom."   (Dylan)

A few weeks ago when the killings occurred at the Amish school in PA, one of the elders was interviewed as saying that they celebrate a person's day of death more than their birthday, because when a person dies they go to heaven; the little girls were in heaven now and with God, and so they were better off. I remember thinking then how so many religions invert what is instinctively and traditionally “the good” of the experience of being human.

 

Life is good, but in religion, death is good. It is the myth of death to life, which can have some pretty serious repercussions. Baptism is made more important than physical birth because it represents an eternal life. The life of this world is denigrated to secondary importance. What really matters is the afterlife, immortality. The consequences of such a view render physical life to be rejected as inconsequential and I daresay, joyless. Suffering is trivialized because there is a greater plan for it in some eschatological scale of justice. In every world religion there are teachings that stem from dualism, the separation of the physical and spiritual life into two opposing realities. The body is perceived as an obstacle to the divine and must be renounced, ignored, suppressed.

 

Sex is experienced as good but is rendered an evil. And even within the societal constructs of marriage, for centuries sex was regarded as necessary not because it provided human connectedness and relationality and yes, pleasure, but because it was the only way to conceive babies.

 

Self-love and self-esteem become vanity; a sense of pleasure at our accomplishments becomes pride; enjoying the fruits of the earth becomes gluttony, rest and re-creation become sloth, etc. etc. How good are YOU at simply doing nothing, because it is good for you to do nothing sometimes?

 

The Seven Deadly Sins should only represent “sin” if one engages in excessive indulgence in the good. They should not lead us to a rejection of the good completely. And perhaps this was the original intention, but this is not what they have become. We are made to feel guilty for enjoying sex, for feeling proud of an accomplishment, for eating a piece of chocolate cake.

 

What if there IS no afterlife and heaven and hell represent constructions of a collective psyche that is merely a mythical confrontation with the fear of death? What if the Garden really was intended to be delightful and we have squandered joy? What if we have it backwards and upside down? What if the physical world is not an obstacle to the divine but is in reality its vehicle?

 

I, for one, will not reject this life. It may be all I have.

 

Now, where did I put that cake?

 

 

thou shalt not erect graven images

Feminism has been embattled in my classroom lately. Last week, one of my classes had to read a chapter from Judith Plaskow's book Standing Again at Sinai, a "classic" in Jewish feminist critique and another from Anne Baring's book The Myth of the Goddess, which is not a theological work but rather an attempt to trace the history of goddess worship in human religious history. Class ended on a note that can only be described as a shouting match. This hasn’t happened in my classroom in a long time. Some of the boys got all bent out of shape with the idea of a feminine divine image. I remarked that hostility to the suggestion that God be imaged in feminine ways may not in fact be a theological issue but a cultural, sociological (and I might add, misogynist) one, i.e., that this hostility doesn't say so much about how people think about God as how they think about women. It is unthinkable to some that the divine be imaged in ways that reflect the feminine. Why? Because in our society the feminine is not worthy. It is not a theological issue because they understand that the God of the Bible is eternal. They understand that in order to have a sex, something must have a body. And they understand that a thing that is infinite cannot have a body. Therefore, God does not have a sex. They do not become disturbed when I suggest that the Bible contains a plethora of images for God that are not male; e.g., “God is like a Mother Bear,” “God is like a Mother eagle,” “God is like a mountain…the ocean…a rock.” The Wisdom of God is Sophia (feminine), the Spirit of God that dwells among humanity is Shekinah (feminine). It is only when one suggests that God is like a Mother, or when one refers to God as “She” that the hostility emerges. I told them that there is a feminist theologian and Catholic nun (Sr. Elizabeth Johnson) who has written in her book She Who Is  that to insist upon only one image for God; to insist that God can only be imaged exclusively in male terms, is paramount to idolatry; it is comparable to creating a "graven image," an idol. That's when a few of the boys lost it. Towards the end of class one of them asked, “What is it that you (meaning, you feminists) want?” I began by saying that the feminist critique of religion and feminist theology were important to me because I am convinced that, “our theology shapes our humanity.” I am convinced that the ways in which we image God directly affect and influence our images of each other. What God becomes, becomes God. To quote Mary Daly, “God is man writ large, man is God writ small.” And as long as only men get to reflect the divine; as long as men are the symbolic representation of God; as long as men are the only human beings who are considered worthy enough to mediate between the divine and the human, then the feminine and women will be rendered inferior. Regarding his question as it related to the issue of women's lives I responded this way, “I would like it if a woman were not sexually assaulted every few minutes in this country. I would like it if a woman were not beaten every few seconds in this country. I would like it if the trafficking in women’s and girls’ bodies was not the third largest illegal trade in the world. If globally, women could be educated, could own property, inherit, sign contracts, witness in courts of law, vote, etc, etc. “ 

 

I received an email later from a young woman in the class who said that on the way out of class someone said to her that if she didn't "think of God as a man," she was going to hell. Just one more reason for going to hell. I am starting to count how many things I violate that condemn me. 

 

Post Script to Spaghetti Summons

I can almost hear some of you now. "Is the Church ordaining women?" The answer to that question is no. The Church stubbornly maintains that it does not have the authority to do so (see my previous blog entitled "Infallible Teaching"). The Catholic women priests mentioned in "Spaghetti Summons" have been ordained by renegade bishops in secret ceremonies which have usually taken place on water (I suspect so that no Diocese can claim authority over them), e.g., the St. Lawrence Waterway, the Danube River. The ordinations were witnessed and notarized; the records I suspect, are kept in secret. The official position of the Church is that the women, by taking part in the conferring of Holy Orders, public celebrations of the Mass and consecrations of the Eucharist have ex-communicated themselves from the Church. This is always the case in ex-communications; the Church always maintains that people ex-communicate themselves by acting against Church teaching. Now isn't that ironic? The women have separated themselves from the communion of the Church by celebrating Communion!

Spaghetti Summons

Ten years ago, and before I moved to South Carolina, I taught in the theology department of an all-girls’ Catholic high school in Rhode Island.

 

And I was summoned to the Bishop’s Office.

 

One night, as I was stirring spaghetti at my kitchen stove, I received a phone call from a reporter for The Providence Journal. She was doing a story on the lack of vocations in the Diocese. At the time, there were only four men in seminary, but quite a few more than four older priests who were scheduled for retirement. One of the angles in her story, was to point out that there were women who had the “charism,” who were trained (the MDiv degree is the “ordination degree”), and who were ready and waiting in the wings to have their hands consecrated in Holy Orders. She had been given my name and phone number by Annie (about whom I wrote in a previous blog entry). So she interviewed me over the phone as I cooked my spaghetti. Her interview questions were of a personal nature, not a theological one. She didn’t ask me to argue for the ordination of women. She didn’t ask me to critique the Church’s practice of barring women from Holy Orders. She did ask me if I had ever thought about ordination. I answered by saying, “As a child I always wanted to be a priest and yes, I have considered ordination elsewhere.”

 

The morning that this Providence Journal edition hit the news stands, I was teaching my class when the school’s principal appeared at the window of my classroom’s back door. I caught her eye and she made that motion with a crooked finger that means, “Come here.” I pointed to my chest and mouthed, “Me?” She said, “Yes. You.” I excused myself from my class and joined her in the corridor. She told me that she had received a phone call from the Chancery and evidently all morning since the story broke, the phone was ringing off the hook at the Bishop’s Office. Diocesan priests and other concerned Catholics had been calling all morning to ask, “What kind of people do we have teaching in our theology departments in our schools?” Unknown to me, the reporter had mentioned in the article that I taught in Bay-View’s theology department. Great. My school’s administration now had to engage in what can only be called damage control.

 

You see, the problem was that even though I had steered clear of outwardly criticizing the Church, simply by saying that, “I had considered ordination elsewhere,” I had implied that the Church’s teaching on the non-ordination of women might not be “truth.” And so I was summoned to the Bishop’s Office to apologize for, and explain my heresy.

 

I didn’t actually have to appear before the Bishop. My interview was conducted with the Vicar for Education (who is now a Bishop). Before I even walked into his office, I had determined what I was prepared to say and what I was not prepared to say. I would NOT apologize for expressing what had been the truth of my life. As I sat before him, I could see the misogyny in his eyes. He hated me. And he hated me simply because I was a woman who dared to challenge. He sat there with his $600 black suit and his gold cuff links and craftily attempted to get an apology out of me. When he would not relent I finally said, “I regret that what I said in the Providence Journal interview was interpreted in such a way as to reflect badly on Bay View Academy, its faculty, or its administration.” In other words, I was sorry that what I had said was received with Catholic paranoia and fear. He realized at some point that this was all he was going to get from me and I was “dismissed.” The incident still appearson my permanent Diocesan record.

 

Actually it is a good thing that the Diocese of Providence does not keep a “Most Wanted Feminists” list, because just a few years before I had been a member of a radical group of Rhode Island Catholic feminists who staged numerous protests right in front of the Cathedral in Providence. If they kept such a list, I would have been in the Top Ten Most Wanted and never would have been hired at the school in the first place!

 

There was a young woman who was a student at Bay-View whose name is Erin. I was her teacher for several courses throughout her high school years. The first class was a tenth grade ethics course. And even then I taught feminist theory; the tenth grade version. Erin was my most vocal objector. She fought me every step of the way. One day in her frustration and I suspect, in the midst of her tenth-grade epistemological leap, she cried in class. She was wrestling and struggling with a Catholic upbringing that she loved but she was intelligent enough to understand the feminist critique. In many ways, she was the first to teach me the power of this message and of the gentleness with which I must deliver it.

 

A few years ago I received an email from Erin informing me that she had been named to the National Organization for Women’s first Young Women’s Task Force. She was one of only 20 young women chosen nationally. At the time she was teaching (ironically enough), in a Catholic elementary school in Rhode Island. One day I called the school’s secretary and found out when Erin would be in the faculty lounge. I called the faculty lounge phone to congratulate her. She was very surprised. We spent a few moments remembering those days at Bay-View.  

 

Last week, I received another missive from her which included photos of her attendance at a Mass celebrated by one of the 60 or so women in the world who have been ordained Catholic priests. She told me that now she was living in Washington, DC and working full-time on the staff of NOW.

 

I don’t take credit for Erin and the direction of her life. I never would presume to do so. But I like to think that as she sat in my classroom, front seat, third row from the left, that I helped to plant a seed that would contribute in some small way to the young woman she is today, and the work that she does. I am so proud of you Erin… Goddess-speed.