The Garden of Eden vs The New Jerusalem

I am always interested in how our own personal experiences and journeys through life and faith, impact our theologies and doctrines.  When I did my undergrad in Theology, this was an inherent part of the learning that I gained.  It seems to me that this was one of the most significant things that I learnt over that time, and I remain suspicious of those who speak of 'arguments from experience' with disdain or smuggery, as if they have won the argument (whichever argument they are fighting) by simply raising the fact that someone's life and interactions with God's cosmos has had an impact on what they think about that cosmos.

Such important doctrines as our theories of atonement are rooted in the ground of the time from which they came, and the people who lived particular lives, in a particular time. The Exemplar theory, a witness of great love from the Abelard who was castrated for his, Penal Substitution theory from Calvin the lawyer, Satisfaction theory from Anselm's understanding of the feudal system. Simplistic of course, but nevertheless, it is not a coincidence that these theories are rooted in lives lived, and the impact of those lived lives on the way Scripture is read and interpreted.

It strikes me that some of our conversations on sexuality and the proper place for acts/expressions of sexual love might benefit from some honest self-examination of our own lives lived.

In scripture and theology there are often concepts which find themselves in seeming tension with each other - justice/mercy, election/freewill, heaven/earth, body/spirit etc etc.  As human beings are wont to do, we find it difficult to find a way to hold these things together, to live in the both/and, rather than the either/or.  I sometimes wonder if we are incorrect in trying to keep these concepts in tension, rather than finding ways to integrate them in our minds and lives.  That justice is found within the mercy of God for example.

One of these is the 'concepts in tension' is the pairing of The Garden of Eden and The New Jerusalem.  The perfect paradise which we left through disobedience versus the city of God to come.

I have often wondered whether, where you rest at the moment, with regards your position on sexuality, will be reflected in where your heart finds itself with regards to The Garden of Eden or the New Jerusalem.  We know, in theory, that we have left Eden and our trajectory is towards the New Jerusalem, but, particularly in Western theology, we found a way for The New Jerusalem to be the Garden of Eden.  Are we going forwards, or going backwards?

In the West, we have tended to understand the story of salvation as something like this:

The world was made perfect, humans transgressed, Jesus came to redeem, perfection recovered.

Another story, that found through the Eastern Christian tradition, particularly found in Irenaeus, reminds us that the world was not made 'perfect', but that it was made 'good':

Good (waiting for perfection in Christ), humans transgressed, Jesus, restoration of goodness, perfection.

Are we going forwards in order to recover an old way of being, or going forward to discover a new thing?

I have lived for a number of years with an eschatology which looks more like the second of these stories.  And so it is not hard to understand that when it comes to ways of being human community, ways of family, I find myself left cold by arguments that equate themselves, for all their posh language, to the old 'God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve' line of thought.

I do not desire to go back to Eden, but on to the New Jerusalem.  And in the New Jerusalem, there are possibilities, there are stories of family and love and intimacy, which are yet to be told.  I do not know yet what these possibilities are, but I know that they do not necessarily have to conform to the Old Creation.

Depending on where your own proclivities are weighted - do you desire Eden or Jerusalem?  The Garden or the City? The Old Life or the Unknown Life? - I suspect will have an effect on how easy or hard you might find it to engage in genuine conversation about sexuality.  Conversation which may lead to as yet unknown forms of human living, rather than re-establishing the known.

It is interesting for me to question myself, in light of this reflection - what about my life lived has meant that the New Jerusalem is where my own heart is drawn? I suspect a childhood begun in a council flat in Aberdeen, with parents who were steeped in a work ethic, has had an influence I can't measure.  It was never that where we were was awful, I never felt a desire to escape.  However, I did grow up knowing that life was a bit of an adventure, that you could forge a path that was unknown to you or your kin before you.  I learnt that money and housing and clothes and cars were passing nothings, and that love and work and justice would remain.  I learnt that the things of value come with you into the unknown.  I also learnt that moving forward was good. That staying where you were was to turn down the possibilities of flourishing that were open before you.  To take the opportunities offered to you, walk through the door. Be brave.  I have moved house 13 times in my life.  New places, new people, new ways, cultures, thoughts.  All these interest me, intrigue me, cause me to think, to explore, to live life beyond the life I have thus far lived. And I have also learnt that respectability is not the same as goodness.  I also prefer cities to gardens.

The honest truth is that any comments or theologies, or interpretation I may come to offer, on any subject, will always have been formed by these learnings.

My life lived.

Doing it in Public

I was so excited to write for Threads, which has the Christian New Media Award for Best Christian Blog.

You can read my first contribution commenting on the #viralvicar and Christianity in the public square, here: http://www.threadsuk.com/doing-it-in-public/

England's Women

I wrote last month on a small part of the whole host of biblical background which undergirds the necessity of women bishops.  We are now another month on and I wondered about writing again on women bishops, surely we are all getting bored with people banging on and on about it.

And that's the trouble.  We are now just over three months on from the vote on 20th November that saw over a decade (and more, depending on where you begin your count) of work, reports, meetings, discussions and legislative consideration go down the drain.  It was crushing for those who had been part of those talks for a very long time, who had felt that the Measure that sank was the best that had come out of all the possible permutations that were available.  I have seen men and women with heavy hearts over the last few months.  Really.  This is not a joke. It can be soul-destroying. I have wondered myself, how these people will continue their work on this having received this door being slammed in their faces, a door that has been slammed before and which will, in all reality, be slammed again, a number of times, before women bishops become a reality.

The sheer drudge and monotony of keeping going is the reality of the life of the activist.

The sheen of fame, fortune and glamour that surrounded the issue last November has dulled.  The outrage has distilled. There are those who got a smack in the face and who wanted to sit up and do something, but three months on, stuff takes over, there are other things to do.  And that is right...there are other things to do.

But not for me.

And maybe not for you.

If that is so, then keep reading, for this post is for you.

Your heart is stirred, you feel that you have been caught up in a story so much bigger than yourself and you do not care that you may be a small part of that story, swallowed up in the bigger tale that will be told when, some day, in the future, a woman will don her mitre in this land as a sign and a symbol that the Kingdom of God is recovering its Image.

That a mitre on the head of a woman in the Church of England will be a mark of the restoration of all things, where women and men begin again to stand alongside each other as equal partners in God's mission.  That this future sight will mean that we no longer collude in the belief, worldwide, that women are a radically different type of human being to men, so much so that she can be privatised, beaten, sold, starved, deprived of education and medicine in order that the true human, men, can survive.

We live with the knowledge that this will be our shame throughout future generations, that we colluded for so long, too long, in the disfiguring of the Image of God: that women have been tortured and killed and men have been dehumanised in the process.

We work so that the time of our shame will be finite.  The calling is high, but it is a long, arduous and sometimes downright boring road.  It is a road filled with meetings and writing, reading and talking, synods and lectures.  Occasionally we will be part of historic moments, such as 20th November 2012, we may even find ourselves being interviewed or staging a protest...occasionally.  Mostly however it's plod, but it is plod with that image in your mind, ever before you: the mitre, as if tongues of flame, descending on a woman's head, in the CofE, this romantic heartland of Anglicanism, and the explosion as our shame is ended.

But mostly it is emailing and stuffing envelopes and intentionally behaving as if women should and must be bishops.  Boring perhaps, but if this is your calling, I can tell you now that you will not escape it, it has caught you up.

How do we keep going in this sometimes arid land?  When people think we are a little mad and we wonder it ourselves every so often?  I think of Wilberforce - yes I own our struggle in the same vein as that great activist, hubris perhaps, but I don't think that Wilberforce ever thought of himself as anything less or more than I have described above.  We are caught up in a part of the Christian story that is both ancient and new - the foundation story of our faith is that of the liberation from slavery, liberation to freedom.  We own the Exodus story, as groups and peoples have before us.  It is beyond and before Wilberforce's cause, and it will transcend ours, because it is God's.  We share the DNA of Wilberforce because it is about liberation and re-humanising ourselves in the truth of the equality of every human being before God.  Wilberforce worked for decades because of this truth that he held in his imagination.  But he was firstly a politician, and he was firstly a politician because he believed he could make things better.  It is a small suggestion perhaps.  Initially it wasn't to do with God, he was embarrassed by his fervent evangelical relations.  But soon the belief in his own ability to make things better, to know better how a country might be run, became infused with the desire to change the world, fuelled by exactly that embarrassing fervent evangelicalism.  Well thank God for embarrassing passions!

Wilberforce was fed by God's own imagination, if we rely on our own then we are doomed.  Our imaginations do not carry us far enough, they are not big enough, fast enough, broad enough and they do not let us be embarrassed enough.  God's imagination is playful, but it is also bright and hard as diamonds, it exposes the flaw and breaks the heart.  Once you have been infected by God, there is no going back, you cannot simply choose to imagine something different.  God's reality is burned into your mind's eye with a ferocity that can never be 'fixed'.  And are we not glad!

If this is you, then you will be drinking this up as if I have given you a long awaited glass of water.  Or perhaps a top up along an already well trodden path for you.  I think I may have lost some of you along the way, don't worry, we'll see each other again soon.

For those who are still with me - let's keep going, keep walking together, one day the tongues of fire will descend and we will laugh and embarrass our grand-children, who will not understand the story into which they are born.  We will send them off into a new story, ancient and new of course, where they will find their own God-given cause and perhaps recover our story in order to live theirs.

And if their story continues to be women bishops?  So be it.  One day there will be tongues of fire that descend on the beating heart of England's women.

An Ordinary Radical Event

As we head into the New Year, it is very easy to forget the controversy and explosive events of last year with regards to the Synod debacle over women bishops - and some other controversies have, of course, overtaken our thinking in recent days, which I will look to write on soon.

But I encourage you to read the following, which is an extended version of my article published today in the Church Times.  It unpacks some of what I believe to be at the heart of the matter.
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Women Bishops: An Ordinary Radical Event

I believe that the case for women and men working alongside each other in the Episcopate is an issue of justice and equality that is found firmly in the Biblical narrative.  My primary case for ‘women Bishops’ would be what I understand to be the overall story of gender found in the Bible and from which we understand something of the very nature of God.

Bruno Pasqualini

As in all good stories, we must start at the very beginning.  Our case begins in Genesis 1.26, where we first find Humankind (traditionally rendered ‘Man’ – the capital ‘M’ denoting the inclusive representation of men and women within a ‘type’).  This type of Humankind is then differentiated, male and female, and both are said to be made in the image of God.  In Genesis 2 we find this interplay becomes further explored as the first human (hb. adam or Dustling) is made from the ground (hb. adamah or Dust) .   We then learn that ‘it is not good for adam to be alone’ and so the adam is made to sleep and from the adam two different beings emerge, the Man (hb. iysh) and the Woman (hb. ishshah).  It is clear from the narrative that the adam who fell asleep, is not the quite the same as the iysh who wakes up!  In other words there was no Man without Woman and no Woman without Man.  We define each other.   In one fell swoop a number of ‘arguments’ suggesting a divinely established hierarchy between the Man and the Woman are demolished.  Adam was not ‘made first’, Eve was not made from an offcut.

Man and Woman, uniquely and equally made in the image of God.

So far, so good.  And then it all goes wrong.  In Genesis 3, the relationships disintegrate.  Not just between God and humankind, but between humankind and the Creation, and between the two humans.  Man and Woman find themselves in an unequal relationship of domination and oppression.  This is a direct result of the brokenness that they find themselves in because they chose to step out of the patterns of relationship which would cause them to flourish – the story traditionally called ‘The Fall’.  To be explicit, the inequality found in the relationship between men and women is as a result of Sin rather than divine order.  The Man and the Woman find themselves in patterns of relationship that are destructive.  From here – and very quickly – we move from the happy equal partnership of male and female found in Genesis 1 and 2, to a situation where women are interchangeable when it comes to sex, marriage and motherhood.  Indeed in a few short years we find Solomon not with one wife, but with 700!  And that is not to mention the concubines:  a far cry from the initial intention.

The Biblical narrative however, does not leave us without clues as to what God’s intention is regarding this situation.  As with all things broken, by intention or failure, God’s desire is for redemption and restoration.  We find many stories throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament which indicate that God is working to restore the relationship between men and women to the equality of shared humanity found in Genesis 1 and 2.  The first obvious example is with Abram and Sarai.  Abram does not understand that Sarai is as much part of the promise of blessing given in Genesis 12, he has absorbed the mindset that she is simply an interchangeable object.  What is more, she is not going to be very useful for his job of ‘being the Father of many nations’ because she is ‘barren’.  And so when he goes to Egypt, he sells her to Pharoah to save his skin and get rid of his ‘barren’ wife.  But this is not the way that God sees it.  Sarai is to be the Mother of many nations, the promise is for her too, directly and equally alongside Abram, in the story of God.  God thus rescues Sarai from Egypt.

Cody Miller

Remaining in Genesis, we begin to see the effect of this distorted relationship on women themselves.  Sarai and Abram leave Egypt with some slaves.  One of those slaves, we can assume, is Hagar, who receives very rough treatment from Sarai.  Sarai has learned that women can be bought and sold, and in her treatment of Hagar – the gentile, woman, slave – shows that she has begun to collude in the story she has inherited.  For Sarai, Hagar has a role to conform to and if she will not, she will have to go!  But here again we see God’s intention.  As Hagar disappears off into the desert, she meets God.  In fact she is the first person in the Biblical narrative to experience the theophany of ‘The Angel of the Lord’.  She is the first person to ‘see’ the Lord, and she is the first person to ‘name’ God in Scripture.  She is given her own promise of blessing, to be a Mother of a Great Nation.  And who is she?  She is a Gentile, Woman, Slave.  This story is the opposite bookend to Galatians 3.28: a mark of God’s intention to have full equality throughout all humankind.

And there are many other stories throughout Scripture which indicate God’s desire for full inclusion and equality between men and women: From the Old Testament; Deborah, Ruth, Esther: From the New Testament; Mary, Phoebe, Priscilla, Lydia, who were all shown to have specific qualities of leadership, whether as the archetype of a disciple, as in the case of Mary, as those in church leadership as in Phoebe and Priscilla, or business, as in Lydia.  But my particular favourite women from the New Testament are those who remain unnamed in the text where they are found: the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery and the woman who poured oil on Jesus’ feet.  These women represent the restoration of women to their full humanity, quite literally, by God.  Jesus takes their shame, whatever it is deemed to be, and restores them and returns them to their community.  Their namelessness indicates the relative invisibility of women in Scripture, and thus the place of women at that time, and yet their stories are stories that Jesus makes sure are heard.  He does this by subverting the assumptions, not only of the time, but our assumptions too.  If we briefly unpack one of these ‘nameless women’ stories - that of the woman caught in adultery - we can see this double subversion.  These women have many labels attached to them, and not just those that we expect to see.  And Jesus undoes them.  The woman caught in adultery has many labels that were given to her in the story – whore, slut, adulteress – we are well used to, but there are others too.  Labels that have built up through many years of reading these stories through the lenses that we have been given to read them – not always ‘women friendly’ lenses.

Firstly, and fairly easily for those brought up on these stories, we sense the misogyny of only the female half of the adulterous couple being brought before the accusers, furthermore the hypocrisy of  the accusers to believe that they can stand in judgement over this woman, when their own sin condemns them.  But at this first level, the woman still has her labels – she is still a whore in the eyes of those reading at this level only.  She may be a forgiven whore, but that is still a defining label for her.  However there is another level at which we might read this story and see the true liberation and restoration which Jesus’ brings to this woman.  Women and sex has always been an issue for those reading and interpreting the stories of women in Scripture – it is an issue for all these nameless women.   When women and sex come together in Scripture it often exposes the ugly truth of how women are viewed and valued.  It is easy for us to read this story and see the redeemed whore, but better for us to look at this story and see a fully human woman.  This is in fact what Jesus does for this woman.  Of course he does expose the misogyny and hypocrisy of the situation; those are indeed part of the restoration.  He sees that this woman is being used as a pawn in their game to test him.  She is not really a person to them.  But she is a person to Jesus and he refuses to let her be peripheral, as the accusers want.  She becomes the point of the story.  He reminds the accusers that they are, in the depths of their humanity, the same as her (‘Let those who have no sin…’).  And it is not simply a ‘sin thing’ it is a ‘human thing’, they are all human beings experiencing the same human condition.  Finally, right at the end of the story he says to the woman ‘go and sin no more’.  And rather than seeing these words as a confirming her status as a redeemed whore, we should understand them better in the light of Jesus desire to restore her humanity.  The reality is that her power to choose her sexual relationships was significantly diminished as a woman living in 1^st Century Palestine.  In telling her to ‘go and sin no more’, he is liberating her to make different choices in a world where her choices feel limited.  Jesus has exposed the misogyny and hypocrisy of the men involved in her shame; he has revealed that they are all deeply humanly the same; and he empowers her to be liberated to make her choices, to be fully human as a woman.

David Hayward

 But actually it is how we interpret Genesis that forms how we understand these further stories and the rest of Scripture when it comes to men and women.  If the nature of both male and female can be found equally in God, as indicated in Genesis 1, then God’s nature provides us with the model for relationship between men and women.  There is no hierarchy in God and there is no hierarchy indicated in Genesis between the man and the woman.  Jesus constantly attempts to restore this non-hierarchical relationship between the sexes in his encounters with women.

I believe that working for the inclusion of women in the Episcopate is the continuing story of God, found in Scripture, working to restore men and women to their right relationship.

But let us take a moment of pause.  Those who disagree with my position on this would have a very different interpretation, not just of Genesis, but of a number of other key texts in Scripture.  I am not going to deal with all the key texts in the New Testament which seem to prohibit women teaching or becoming leaders/priests in church setting in depth, those will be dealt with by another contributor, however I do wish to say a little about them and also about how we approach Scripture.

It is not enough to say that all Scripture unequivocally affirms women in Church leadership, we all know that there are tricky texts, we hear them often.  However the most quoted texts, 1Tim2 and 1Cor14 have all been gone over with a fine tooth comb when it comes to how we interpret them in when it comes to women in leadership, in this I am not saying anything new.  The text in 1Cor14v34, which states that women are not permitted to speak in church is clear to those who endorse a ‘plain meaning’ approach to Scripture because it simply ‘says what it says’.  How can women lead in churches when these words exist in Scripture?  However, even within the same letter of Paul (1Cor11v5), it seems clear that women do, in fact, speak in church – to pray and prophesy.  If we take the 1Cor14 verse at ‘plain meaning’ then we do so in contradiction to the whole narrative of Scripture and even to the rest of Paul’s teaching within the same letter.  It does us well to remember that we are listening to one half of a conversation, when we read the letters in Scripture, sometimes we do not have the knowledge to understand exactly what the other half of the conversation was.  To interpret this one verse in such a way that it seems to undermine the story of God’s restoration of the relationship between male and female, does violence to God’s Word written.  1Cor14v34 can indeed seem so dissonant to its immediate and wider context that it led Gordon Fee, that eminent evangelical NT scholar to suggest that Gordon Fee says: "Although these two verses are found in all known manuscripts, either here or at the end of the chapter, the two text-critical criteria of transcriptional and intrinsic probability combine to cast considerable doubt on their authenticity." (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, ed. Gordon D. Fee, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987, 699.).  This of course seems an extreme approach, particularly to sister evangelicals, and I would prefer to suggest that there is a conversation occurring in the context to which we are, perhaps, unaware and which would be the interpretative key to this ‘odd’ verse.  Nevertheless, we need to take seriously the scholarship which honours the text and yet finds this particular verse untenable if we are to take the whole Bible seriously.  Similarly with the contentious 1Tim2v12, one of the most difficult to interpret in Scripture, and which, Tom Wright suggests, should in fact be interpreted in the opposite way to that in which it has traditionally been understood.  Rather than saying that women should not teach, Wright says, Paul is writing to endorse women teaching.  Verse 12 rather than saying that women should not have authority over a man, is rather saying ‘I don’t mean to imply that I’m now setting up women as the new authority over men, in the same way as previously men held authority over women’ (Paul for Everyone: Pastoral Letters: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, Great Britain: Westminster Knox Press, 2003, 25).  As Wright goes on to say, the signs are there that Ephesus, the context into which Paul is writing to Timothy, is rife with the cult of Artemis and the worship of the goddess Diana.  In this situation Paul is keen to say that women are not now ‘in charge’ in the way that men had been assumed to be prior to Christ’s reversal of that assumed order.  However, the dynamite in 1Tim is that Paul is saying that women must be allowed to be educated, learners and teachers under submission to God, just as men have been and should continue to be.

posted by tribalicious

Having said all this, I would want to say that these interpretations are nothing new. Any basic foray into theological study or investigation of a commentary will give us the tools to understand the meaning of these verses.  And there are different ways to interpret these texts.  We have to admit to there being an element of choice in the conclusions that we come to about their true meaning.  The reality for me is that the overall narrative of the Biblical story leaves us with no other trajectory than to establish women and men alongside each other leading the Church.  It is not a case of dismissing those other texts, but of understanding them within the whole story.  I do not dismiss 1Tim2, but I do read it in the context of the whole narrative of Scripture.  In doing this I understand Wright’s translation of 1Tim2v12 to be more consistent with that narrative. Indeed I believe this approach to be a more deeply biblical approach than the so-called ‘plain meaning’ approach.  Undeniably ‘plain meaning’ is itself influenced by context and formation so as to be disingenuous to be called ‘plain meaning’ at all.  There is no such thing.

Indeed, I delight in the God who comes to dwell with humanity and who has worked with humanity in the particularity of their historical context.  But this means that it is not neat and tidy.  The ‘right’ options are not always open to God.  When I read the book of Joshua, for example, I find myself uncertain, confused and disturbed by the divinely ordered genocide I find there.  I would argue that is exactly the right way to read it.  It is confusing and deeply disturbing!  I do not think it sanctions those actions, instead I choose to understand it within the context of God working within humanity as it is.  Sometimes this means that there are practices which were culturally appropriate at a particular point in human history, which are simply not appropriate or even morally right, at this point in human history.  We would not advocate the Joshua approach to geographical relocation now and we rightly question whether it was the right thing then!  We do not consider women as chattel to be bought and sold, we happily take out mortgages, borrow money at interest, wear hats and polyester/cotton mix clothes and live in a world where slavery is understood to be ‘a bad thing’.  All of these biblical practices we have understood within their particular cultural and historical context and have reversed the practice seen in the pages of Scripture.  When we read Scripture we must read it with those lenses, rejoicing that God enters human history and that that includes whatever ‘mess’ is there.  But we must also open our eyes to scan the whole story: a story which affirms the place of women and men together, equally, for the glory of God.

Barbara Perrin Chu
Deborah is God's answer to Israel's cries

The relationship between men and women has been distorted from almost the beginning of human history.  The Biblical writers saw this as the reality in which we are living and have sought to address it at the different points of history in which they are writing.  We see this story from Genesis, through the Pentateuch and the Torah to the New Testament in which Jesus continues to restore this relationship to the intended equality and Paul writes gender equality dynamite both to Ephesus and Galatia (Gal3v28).  The choices that we make in what to believe about the role and place of women in the human endeavour will themselves be formed by our own context and formation.  We need to own this if we are to get anywhere in recognising where we are now in the discussions regarding women in the Episcopate.  The weight of Scripture points towards a new reality in which men and women work together in equality, this begins in Genesis and continues throughout the Biblical narrative.  However, as with other ethical questions throughout history, our cultural context impinges on our ability to break with the status quo and imagine a new way of being.  In a world where the vast majority of women experience explicit oppression daily and others bear the implicit inequality so commonplace that we forget to expose it, it is unsurprising that there are those who work for this to remain our paradigm.  It is truly world-shattering to make a change.  But there are clues as to how to do this, both within Scripture and in our own history.  God answers Israel’s cries for help with Deborah, Jesus exposes hypocrisy and misogyny by liberating a woman about to be stoned and Wilberforce spent his life repeating the same arguments over and over again until the world changed.

As Christmas and Epiphany begin to fade from our memories and our world gets busy again with day to day life, we can forget the radical nature of our own faith.  The nature of the world was changed by the ordinary event of birth.  We are now in the pregnant pause before women Bishops are given life, but when they appear, it will be world changing, but will also seem a very ordinary radical event.

Is 'Community Engagement' just a Christian Fashion Statement?

'But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.'

So says the prophet Jeremiah to the people of Israel.  Finding themselves in Babylon, persecuted and mocked, unsure whether God has deserted them, they are given this perplexing message.

Babylon was the antithesis of what God's people thought they should be.  Shouldn't they separate themselves from it, become a ghetto within the City, show their difference and their distinctiveness in their apart-ness?  What a radical suggestion from Jeremiah this was to Israel in exile: and it seems that it is still a rather radical suggestion to our Christian communities today.  Causing disagreement amongst Christians about what community engagement means and also within the secular authorities regarding what these fractious Christians should be allowed to do.

A FASHION STATEMENT

Community is rather a buzz word for Christians in contemporary UK.  Some are becoming a little disenchanted with the mention of it.  Seeing it as jumping on the bandwagon, the fashionable thing to do.  We can forgive those who have got rather fed up with the calls for engagement in community and see it as nothing more than Christians pretending to be unqualified social workers and perhaps causing more damage than they are preventing.  I know that, as a priest, I have training, but that part of that training is to know when my expertise ends and I need to signpost people to the places and organisations who can really help.  Others see community engagement as a betrayal of the call to proclaim the gospel - thinking something akin to 'why waste time on community engagement projects that may or may not see conversion?'

Now, I'm the kind of Christian who sees 'the gospel' as something more than can be said with words (after all, so did God - the Word had to become 'Flesh') and the proclamation of which is measured by more than conversion notches on the bedpost, but I can also understand the frustration of being forced not to articulate our community engagement through the context of our faith.  It is by that faith that we are compelled to be involved with our communities, so we must be able to articulate our presence through the paradigm of faith.  It can be tricky to work with those who want us to put Christ on the down low, or seem concerned that we are about to get weird on them at the drop of a hat - 'weird' being somewhere between mentioning God and taking on the persona of a hellfire preacher in the marketplace.  Because I wear a collar, I perhaps get a little more leverage in this area than others - people expect me to mention God, within reason.

And I agree with them, mostly because I see God's presence in more than my mentioning God explicitly and if, in fact, my mentioning God explicitly prevents them from seeing God's goodness, then I am more than happy to find another way.  And it is worth saying here that when I speak explicitly of God in my own community, people seem mostly pleased with the idea that God might possibly still be interested in them and their place in the world.

But the reality is that my engagement with the community is more than 'finding a way to talk about God'.  It is even more than following a command of God to do so.  It is because I believe that these are the places where God is.  Scripture tells us that we are to 'Love mercy, act justly' and that in doing so we will 'walk humbly with the Lord our God' (Micah 6.8).  So it makes sense to me that if I go to the places where mercy and justice are needed, I will find God.  This leads me then to the places where I live that are in dire need of mercy and justice.  For in doing so I seek after God.

Of course there is a sweet paradox in our doing this.  Are we seeking our own welfare, or the City's?  For it really only is in seeking the other's welfare that we will find ourselves close to God.  We can't fool God.  Do we seek the welfare of the city for its own sake, or because its a means to our own well-being?  I suspect that we are a work in progress.  We can indeed use community engagement for our benefit, because it makes us look good, it's fashionable and it makes us feel a little bit righteous.  But that's the work before us.  To seek God, we must seek the welfare of the other.

Community engagement is truly where we will find our welfare.

Are Women Really Human?

Almost a week has passed since I was sitting, nervous, jittery and hopeful on the edge of my seat, in the public gallery in Church House, Westminster.  Waiting for the voting figures to be called, first the bishops, then the clergy, and finally the laity.

Since that moment it has been all at once interesting - in a way that a disinterested observer might watch a newly discovered tribe order themselves by strange alien customs, and painful - so that the grief cycle of disbelief, anger, sadness is completed a number of times every day.

The most surprising emotion that I experienced this week was the sense of shame that rested upon me on the Wednesday morning.  I felt that I simply did not exist at the same level of priestliness as my male colleagues. I have heard a lot about 'second-class' citizens in this debate - whether it is in defence of making sure that women bishops are equally bishops, or, distastefully in my opinion, the cries of 'second-class' status that those who are 'anti' claim.  However, I had not expected to feel like a second-class priest.  After all, isn't this about bishops?  Not priests.

So, why this is not just about 'Woman Bishops'?

Some of the conversation that I have heard over the last week has been a bit puzzled why women priests are quite so upset - not just angry because of the injustice, the unbiblical decision, the disgraceful way the process was mitigated against - but upset, gut-punchingly, heartachingly, tear-jerkingly, upset!

Is it puzzling though? Is it?  Or is it that what is, now blindingly obviously, a structurally male organisation, is simply incapable of dealing with this kind of pain?  So it is then easy to be puzzled, and it is easy to think that this is an overreaction to simply not being allowed to progress up the career ladder - after all the majority of us will not be headed in that direction anyway.

Why be quite so upset, when it is not going to make a difference to your life anyway?

You can almost see the cogs turning.

Firstly, I want to say something about the 'career ladder' language that has surrounded some of the responses to the images and stories of women's pain linked with this issue.  The idea that women enter the priesthood in order to progress up a career ladder is not only offensive in the extreme, but ridiculous too.  Do those who suggest such twaddle really think that if women were choosing their day job on the basis of progression, there might not be something rather better that we could do?!  I simply think that there is deep ineptitude in understanding the connections that women priests (and of course other men and women in the church) are making regarding this vote, that this is the only thing that some people can think is 'wrong with us'.

Well, what is 'wrong with us' is that we feel 'rubbed out', as if we are a strange anomaly in the fabric of the priesthood, an anomaly that can simply be unpicked at any moment.  For those of us who were at Synod, listening to the speeches, we were under no illusion that the discussion was really a time-shift back to 1992.  Arguing again the case against women being priests. And the case against women being priests is, in itself, really about the particular humanity of women - is the particular humanity of women sufficient to represent authoritatively the humanity of Christ?  If the answer to this is 'no', then the reality is that a woman's humanity is fundamentally different to a man's humanity and when there is a difference like that, then it follows that one type of humanity *must* be the most authentic representation of humanity that there is.  In this case the male is the most human human and women are....well not.

So yes, we are upset.

For those of us who are priests, we recognise that our orders have been called into question yet again.  Called into question because of a voice which speaks of us as the 'not-quite authentically human' human and expects us to be okay with that.  And when that voice speaks with the authority of the institution (regardless of the fact we know that most within the institution did not want this...), it causes a disintegration between the inner and outer person of the woman priest.

Ecclesiologically, I am supposed to rest on my orders - given me by an institution which officially says I'm not the truest representation of Jesus' humanity.

Spiritually, I am supposed to 'hang the Synod' and rest on my calling from and identity in God - a calling and identity which seems unrecognised fully by the church to which I am called.

Emotionally, I am supposed to show resilience - so as not to disturb the church with my tears, and if I do cry it will be because I am a woman and show me lacking in strength.

Do not underestimate the strength and resilience it took for many women priests to get up on Wednesday morning and do their job, without this dissonance causing a fatal crack in their psyche.

So yes, we are upset.

But we will not stay so upset forever.  Do not, however, mistake this for it 'going away'.  This conversation will not go away and women priests will not go away.  We find in our pain the very reason to stay - it is ironic that the very thing that hurts us will be the thing that gives us the strength to remain in the CofE.  Our humanity is inextricably identified with Jesus' humanity in this.  We came to our own and have been rejected. We were told 'how dare you' and asked 'by which authority'?  We were denied again and again.

Our humanity is Jesus' humanity and it is by *this* authority that we dare to stand where we stand and say what we say, behind the altar and in the pulpit.

The Morning After

This is still on the agenda

Clearly this is a strange moment in time - the Yes2WomenBishops campaign team are deeply disappointed that the Measure before Synod did not pass yesterday.  But there will be women bishops in the CofE.  Of this I am convinced.

below is my article published in theinformationdaily

___________________

Yesterday the General Synod of the Church of England voted against the legislation that would have made women bishops a reality.  The machinations were many and the complexity of why this happened has left most of the Church of England, let alone the nation we serve, at a loss to understand.

As my alarm rang at 3.30am yesterday morning and I made my way in the dark to the night bus that took me to Trafalgar Square, I was excited and hopeful about the day ahead.  A short hop to Church House, Westminster and I was joined by a small number of others, all of us eager to be part of this historic moment in the Church of England.  We were reminded of the story of Easter, the bit before Jesus is raised from the dead, all were in deep despair and our Scripture tells us ‘Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb …’.  Mary then goes on to find the tomb empty and Jesus resurrected, that joyous resurrection life, which is abundant and full and open to all.  Mary, a woman, whose testimony was suspect because of her gender, was witness to the greatest moment in human history, according to the Christian faith.

It felt like we were gathering, in the dark, in a place of waiting.  We were hoping for a glimpse of that resurrection life in the day that lay before us.

I am not a member of General Synod and so had to queue for a space in the public gallery, where we had to remain silent and simply listen to the debate happening on the floor below us.  It was important to remember that what was being voted on was not the principle of woman as bishops, this has already been agreed in the Church of England, but rather the legislation that was to make that a reality.  Unfortunately a number of the speakers to the debate appeared to still be arguing the case against women being bishops rather than speaking to the legislation.

The concern for those against this measure was that it did not provide sufficiently for those against having a woman bishop.  However, in the debate, again and again, our bishops spoke to reassure people that the measure ensured that bishops would be duty bound to provide an acceptable bishop when one was requested by a parish not in favour of women bishops.  It is unclear how much further a measure might go.

As the result of the vote was given by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, there was an audible gasp that reverberated around the room.  The faces of many there told the story.  The vast majority of Synod wanted this to happen.  In fact almost 75% of Synod voted in favour of this legislation.  The vote needed to pass by 2/3 majority in all three Houses of Synod: Bishops, Clergy and Laity.  Both the House of Bishops and the House of Clergy voted in favour, however the House of Laity, which is unrepresentative of the vast majority of laity in our Church, voted against.

The story from this moment hangs in the balance, it is as yet untold.  However those of us who gathered at 5.30am that morning find ourselves sorrowful and yet ever hopeful, we believe that there will still be an Eastern morning, a ‘resurrection’, a time when women and men will work alongside each other for the good of the communities they serve.

In terms of the synodical process now, there will be further repercussions.  There will most likely be a demand to reform the House of Laity, so that it does its job in representing the majority of the laity and there will be discussions as to the exact time that we will now have to wait until this will be able to be discussed at Synod again.  Most say that it will be at least 5 years until that happens, although there may be ways in which the constitution will allow for earlier.  The measure that was set before Synod yesterday was the work of over ten years of conversation and discussion with those who could not accept a woman bishop, it is unlikely that the same process will be repeated.

For myself and the many women priests in the Church of England, we have and will continue to work alongside people and parishes who cannot accept our ministry.  We will continue to serve our own parishes who accept us joyfully.  The reality of our day to day ministries seems a far cry from Synod.  We live with life and death, cry when we bury young people and older people, and smile when we baptise happy gurgling babies and twinkly eyed 80 year olds, we eat lunch in the local café and chat with people at the bus stop, we listen to those at the end of their tether and we laugh with those for whom life is good.  God has called us and we will serve the communities before us with joy and privilege, as we have always done.

And perhaps the full life of the resurrection is closer than we think.

To General Synod

Published today in CEN online

twitter: @yes2womenbishop

facebook: Yes2WomenBishops

Next week, just over twenty years after the vote for the ordination of women to the priesthood, General Synod will vote on the legislation which will pave the way for women to enter the episcopate.

It is an auspicious moment and anyone reading the blogosphere will know that people on all sides of the debate will be thinking of voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’.  Whilst I understand in particular why those who are pro women bishops, would struggle with the amendments that were made to the legislation that was overwhelmingly passed by the Dioceses, I became involved in the Yes2WomenBishops campaign because I do believe that this current legislation is sufficient for all people to flourish within the Church of England.

I, in common with many on General Synod, am an Idealist.  And when you are an Idealist it is very easy to spend life disillusioned and despondent that the world is not ‘as it should be’.  Idealists find it very hard to abandon their Ideal in order to work with what they see as a ‘means to an end’ mentality.  Idealists are naturally very suspicious of ‘means to end’ mentality.  I have friends who tell me that they are Pragmatists, they want to see something happen and are willing to do what they see as ‘working together with others’, in order to make it happen.  Pragmatists become frustrated with what they see as ‘my way or the high way’ rigidity.  Both of these are of course exaggerated, however I suspect that when it comes to the legislation on women bishops the biggest dispute is Idealist vs Pragmatist.

There are idealists on both sides of the argument.   For those who are pro women bishops, there are those who cannot in conscience vote for anything other than a single measure legislation where there are no qualifications to women’s episcopacy.  On the other side there are those who cannot ever, no matter what the legislation, vote for anything that would mean women bishops become a reality.

And there are pragmatists on both sides of the argument, who see that the Church of England has ‘spoken’ - we want women bishops – and given that, will wrestle with compromise to produce what they consider the ‘best possible plan’ depending on their position.  For pragmatists who are pro women bishops, they have to decide how much they can compromise on what they see as the full humanity of women in order to see the reality of women bishops come to pass.  For those who are anti women bishops, they have to decide what the legislation will have to say in order for them to feel they will be provided for (and would rather be involved in the conversation because they consider it is going to happen anyway, so they might as well have a voice).

The reality of the situation that is before synod this November, is that Idealists, such as myself, will have to discover where their inner Pragmatist ‘kicks in’, if at all, and Pragmatists will have to decide if their caveats have been met.  This will be most costly for those Idealists who are pro women bishops, where they find that both a Pragmatic ‘yes’ or an Idealistic ‘no’ vote to the legislation will not bring them joy.  They may get women bishops (but at what cost) or they may not get women bishops (the Ideal that is the ‘way the world should be’ as they see it)

As I said, I am an Idealist.  However, I have found that this current legislation wakens my inner Pragmatist.  It must be understood that the legislation is very much a compromise for those who want to see women and men working together equally in the church.  However, the Appleby Amendment provides the pathway for provision for those unable to accept women bishops, in such a way that hopefully the orders and consecration of women will not be undermined.  The consequences of legislation will, of course, only truly be known in the actuality, but I believe that this has the best potential for satisfying all our needs.

Sadly some of the information being given by those who do not wish to see women bishops, suggests that the ‘respect’ offered within the legislation is not robust enough to ensure provision is given.

Not only is this a deeply disturbing indictment on the way women are viewed – as seemingly entirely unable to behave with integrity – but is simply wrong.  The ‘respect’ that is required is a term that holds gravitas legally.  To use this word in the measure is not simply to offer a nodding acquaintance with the reality that a parish is requiring other provision, but to respect the letter of request that is proffered and respond in an appropriate manner.

Unfortunately I think that some will simply not be satisfied with anything other than a church where there are no women bishops.

I deeply hope that those who wish to see women and men working alongside each other as bishops, can vote yes for this legislation.  There is provision, there will be space for women to flourish as bishops for the good of the church….find your inner Pragmatist and vote yes!

virgin mothers and barren women

So some of us have navigated Mother's Day again this year. again, a bit like Remembrance Sunday, this is one of those services that feels a bit tricky, to say the least.

often we talk about how those women who have experienced infertility might feel, those who have wanted to be mothers, but are not, but I think that the difficulty goes a bit deeper than that.

The Biblical images that are being invoked are the 'thesis and antithesis' of womanhood - the virgin mother or the barren woman. These images have followed us through history and are embedded in our culture in a way that is quite oppressive. Firstly, women are expected to want children, and if they don't then they are somehow 'odd' or 'unwomanly'. In our culture a woman without a child is as incomplete as a woman without a husband (note the first questions people wish to ask you: are you married? do you have children? I recently experienced the almost physical pain of someone who was desparate to ask this question, but knew that it was inappropriate - and I refused to help them out by offering them the information.... at first before I felt sorry for them....).

For those of us who do want children, some of us will experience infertility and heaped on top of the pain of not having a child, is the shame aspect of not being able to have a child, when our culture tells us that, as a woman, that is really what you are *for*.

But what about those of us who are mothers? Surely Mother's Day is for us, and that is okay - to celebrate those who care for and nourish us? Yes, we should be sensitive to these issues, but surely it's okay to thank those who have been our mothers? Well the answer to this is 'yes, but....'

Enter, the Virgin Mother.

By all means, be grateful for your mother - and lest you think I have mother issues, I sent my own lovely things to thank her for her mothering - but I think that too often at this time of year, we enter a state of ideals. Firstly, the ideal is that women have children, secondly, that if they have children, they at least do them courtesy of being a Perfect Mother:

- Be a mother firstly and foremost
- Do not let us think about you having had to have sex to procreate
- Diminish your own needs to the point of having none
- As this book says, Perfect Mothers, become Invisible Women

Mother's Day presents women with hobson's choice, a choice in which wherever we turn, our definition is dependent on our relationship to our children, whether they are actual or absent. Often it has a very human focus, our understanding of Motherhood coming from what we have been able to generate ourselves as human community, often built up in a very male dominated environment, where women are the answer to the needs of husbands and sons.

But there is a different way of looking at Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday. And that is to look to God for our image of Mother. I wrote about this before but I think that it needs saying again. There are many images of God as Mother in Scripture. For us to entirely focus our celebration of motherhood on the human aspect is to miss the point of Christian discipleship. In church, of all places, we should be looking to God for our understanding of humanity and human role. To look to God, instead of at each other, or our own needs, for our image of Mother releases us in all manner of ways.

Firstly the images of God as Mother in Scripture are not always, in fact in most cases they are not, gentle kindly images. We have, as I spoke of before, the God as Mother Bear image, ferocious and fierce, a love that you do not want to get in the way of - beware the Mother Bear robbed of her cubs (Hosea 13.8). Or we have the God as Mother Eagle, leaving her children to fend for themselves as she goes for food, teaching them to fly on their own, giving them strong wings to make their own flight through whichever storms they encounter (Deuteronomy 32.11-12). Or, more obscurely perhaps, we have God as Mother Pelican, and image that has been surrounded by the myth of the Pelican - in legend the mother pelican, seeing its young dying through lack of sustenance, will break its own breastbone and pierce its own heart, and its lifeblood will revive the young. Not surprisingly this traditional image of God as Mother is linked with the sacrifice of Christ, who saves the whole cosmos (Psalm 102.6).

In these images it is not the insipid invisibility of motherhood that we are sometimes offered, certainly there is sacrifice, but it is the sacrifice which makes us all whole. It makes us the solid people we are made to be, rather than calls us to transparent ideals which are built on dominance and oppression.

And one of the most important things about transforming Mother's Day into a gaze at God, is that it includes everyone. All people are made in God's image and are called to be like God. So if God is Mother, then we are all called to be like that. The image becomes something which is for everyone, Women, Men and Children.

We are all Mothers, because God is Mother.

theradicaldisciple: fear should not stifle debate on sexuality

learning the art of watching and being entirely pointless

so here i am. ordained. there is a whole ministry stretched out in front of me and i don't have a clue what it is going to look like. this is good.

God is the God of suprises. i could never have imagined any of this for myself. in fact if i could have i probably would have run away....at least initially. as it is, this is the only thing that i can imagine myself doing. and yet the exact details are veiled.

at college the primary metaphor that was given to me about being ordained, was to be a manager. manage the services, manage the people, manage the parish. yeuch, no thanks. but there was also this lingering idea (i think it comes from the mission shaped church report) that as ministers of the gospel, we should be watching. watching for what God is doing....and then joining in with that. this is one of those phrases which is, to be honest, bandied around without anyone having the slightest clue what it actually means. i mean, what does it 'look' like...to watch for God?

simeon watched for God. was his ministry any less meaningful because he had to wait til the end of his life for the thing that he was watching for? or did the faithful daily completing of his work, day in, day out, give him the eyes that he needed to see when God did the thing he was waiting for?

i want to be the kind of ordained person who is patient and who can see what is going on, when what is 'going on' isn't necessarily on the surface, laid bare, clear. i'm not sure that i'm naturally a patient person, not when i can see what needs doing, but sometimes what needs doing is to wait and watch.

these are the things that are not taught in college. perhaps they can't be, perhaps there are things that cannot be taught. there's a lot of panic going on at the moment about fees and money and how the theological colleges will continue in this particular educational climate. personally i think that theological education is all very well, i definitely think that people presenting themselves for ordination should put themselves through a theology degree, but......

who will teach us the art of watching for God?

those of us ordained this petertide (that's this summer for those who don't speak in anachronistic language....) are now to go out into the world that needs God, in order to be those who speak 'God', who see God in the dark corners of our communities and point God out to those communities and have those communities point out God to us. but how are we to do that? where do we begin? how do we know what is God and what is our own minds, conjuring up the safest or most comfortable delusion about the God of our own imaginings?

the art of watching for God is not new. it did not arrive with the mission shaped church report. the art of watching for God is ancient.

it is called prayer.

in the climate of financial turmoil that the colleges are going through, whilst many are looking to diversify, building projects multiply and the next couple of decades are looked to be managed, will there be those who are part of the training of priests, who will teach us how to watch for God? teach us how to pray?

this is the moment! will they grasp it? i often said at college, that i really could have done with 2 years of prayer. being taught by those who pray. learning the art of listening. i know that it sounds naive. i used to joke about it. but i don't think i was joking. if i was teaching people to be ministers of God's people, ministers of the Gospel, i'd ask them to come having done their academic training, and then i would teach them to pray. for 2 years. at least.

so many young guys come to theological college having been in a career where they were quite successful and they are taught by people like them....and they are handed comfort blankets - ways to manage the congregation, the parish, the building project, the community partners. these are ways of saying that this is a 'job' that you just have to figure out how to do... and it's ok, because the tools are the same as the 'job' you just came out of.

i yearned for people to say, more often....at all?....that this is the most ridiculous job in the world and we don't know what we are doing...or rather we know what we are trying to do, but have no idea how to do it!

it is so easy, as an ordained person, to get frightened by the need to be doing, to be seen to be doing, and to be able to produce a product in order to be recognised as successful. whether your product is an ever expanding congregation, a new programme, a course or a very full diary. the pressure is on to have something in your hand to show what the point of you is.

so, at the start (which is really the middle), here i am....committed to learning the art of watching for God, stepping into the stream of the ancients who have gone before me, and perhaps being part of the story that will be told after me.

and so being willing to be unseen, willing to have nothing to show for my presence, and happily finding myself utterly and completely.....pointless.

facebook church poem

what does it mean to be church?

gosh, i really do not know
what this is all about
i shall ask some clever people
and see if they can work it out

the church is full of all the things
you hope to leave behind
emptiness and guilt...
a broken family you'll find

the church is given lots of things
we hope that it will do
acceptance, joy and hope, we pray
and a bit of sharing too

the church is given lots of words
we hope that it will be
the body, human, saved, alive
a REAL community

this worshipping community
this messy, broken home
this inconsistent family
may not do all these things
perhaps we do need messiness
(not red bull) to give us wings

we have bishops who can tell us
to be a united family
and from whom we hope to witness
kenotic vulnerability

so it seems we think there's hope for
this dysfunctional unity
that one day we will come alive

and act like we're redeemed

with thanks to david c, tiffer, dan, abi, phil g, sarah, terry, mark b, adrian, tash, alli, derek, simon r, nat, lesley h, greg, vicky, mike, christian, jo, beardy phil, eleanor, barrie, peterson, al and sue - for providing me with words via facebook

perhaps i'm mad

sometimes it can be difficult being involved in the conversations that i come across being involved in fulcrum. especially at the moment with all the discussions on whether women can be bishops or not. the problem being that really all these discussions revolve around the same 'headship' issues that simply proves that the conversations that were done around women's ordination to the priesthood did not do the job they professed to do. if people can accept women as priests only because they have a man above them as bishops, then we still have a problem with how women as priests are viewed, and therefore treated, by their male counterparts. this is more deeply rooted in anthropology than issues of church order.

anyway, point being, that sometimes all that stuff washes over me more easily at some times than at others.

but in this last week it has all been a little bit tough really. i'm not sure why. but it has made me ask whether i'm not just a little bit mad to be giving myself, not just to God, but to an institution that remains decidedly ambivalent about whether i'm a valid part of the structure or not. why would any sane human being do that to themselves? i'm sure psychologists would have a field day. some would suggest i have a deep seated self-loathing that leads me to give myself to something that tells me every day that i don't quite match up to the norm/ideal.

whenever anyone makes the argument that women are just demanding their 'rights' when it comes to leadership in the CofE, i just laugh - i mean, seriously, who would want it if they didn't think it was a response of obedience to God?

but one of the other things that i've been struggling with, which has been a bit unexpected, is being a little bit lonely. i have some good friends here, i do, so i'm not sure lonely is the right word. it's just that the way that the structures work here is such that Q and i slightly slip through the cracks. let me explain. i am the ordinand, Q is the spouse. but Q is not a 'wife' and i am not a 'husband'. so when it comes to socialising together my friends, who are generally blokes, don't tend to ask me to play, and the spouses don't tend to ask Q out. but neither does Q get invited out by the male ordinands or i by the female spouses. can't win really.

in addition when it comes to the 'couples' thing, it tends to be the women who hold the social diary and so when they think 'who shall we invite for dinner', they tend to gravitate towards their friends, who tend to be the women they meet at the spouses group (not Q). and my male friends tend not to invite us for meals together because it's just not where their head is at. ergo, Q and i have not been invited to anyone's house for a meal since arriving at college over a year ago. no, i lie, we have been invited for one meal. one. in a year. it was a female ordinand.

this is not anyone being mean, it's not that these are people who don't think i should be here, it's not any big 'political' statement...lol....it's just that the structures that are in place, official, or unofficial, do not support women with young families training - and this is one way that plays out in the 'social space' of theological training.

it takes a lot of energy to be here, as i've said before, sometimes i'd like it not to be me that does the running. so when you encourage women to go for ordination, remember to ask yourself the question - are you willing to be her friend? - because unless you are, it may be that you are asking too much....

september

so term starts on sunday and here i am at the end of the summer.

so am i ready for term?

only time will tell i guess. i've got some survival strategies for the next year, which include a rather large dose of things that do not include going to college. in fact one of those things meant that this evening i was sewing elastic on my ballet shoes, which is something that i had to do for tali when she was 3, and was ever so slightly weird on my size 7 shoes :D

anyway, that's my plan, do things that mean i keep one foot in real life, with real people, doing real things, preferably things that bring me to life and make me laugh and smile.

i'm in the throes of trying to find a curacy and something VERY exciting has come up, but not sure it is going to work out yet, but it's quite exciting that this is a process that i can really see is open to the holy spirit being involved, even though it's institutional and sometimes it can feel very fixed. it can feel like it's just a factory, that you're pushed through theological college and then shoved into a curacy. there's an interesting amount of fear that circulates during the process, which is mixed in with a pseudo-spiritual thing which can result in us not really being allowed to ask for a particular thing or ask for the desires of our heart. people are told that they can't be too fussy, that if they are too particular in what they want they'll be 'left on the shelf' effectively. but then there is the other side, the curates who i know whose curacies have been the worst years of their lives.

my own journey through that process has been interesting, and i don't want to talk too much about it here, but it actually was part of my own liberation from feeling an obligation to being part of the renewal of the evangelical tradition. for reasons that shall remain unblogged, i have felt that God has given me permission to ask for what i want. so i did.

daddy, i want......