“Basically there can be no categories such as ‘religious’ and ’secular’ art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore ‘religious.’”

“If we fall into Satan’s trap of assuming that other people are not Christians because they do not belong to our own particular brand of Christianity, no wonder we become incapable of understanding the works of art produced by so-called non-Christians, whether they be atheists, Jews, Buddhists, or anything else outside a frame of reference we have made into a closed rather than an open door.”

“If I understand the Gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who have already seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

II Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

(Kidd is also on her way to Boston)

“The feminine wound is created as we internalize all these experience — the voices we hear at church, school, home, work, and within the culture at large suggesting (in ways both bold and subtle) that women and feminine experience are ‘less than.’

If you receive often enough the message that women are inferior and secondary, you will soon believe you are inferior and secondary. As a matter of fact, many experts tell us that ‘all women in our society arrive at adulthood with significant feelings on inadequacy.”

“Yet the truth is, as long as one woman is dehumanized, none of us can be fully human.”

“As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves–a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.”

“Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.”

“The word mother comes from the Latin word mater, which means matter. Mother and matter are both the stuff out of which everything is composed.”

“Both women and earth have been abused, raped, and disregarded.”

“When you can’t go forward and you can’t go backward and you can’t stay where you are without killing off what is deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation. And so it was that I went that autumn afternoon to run my errands, walked into the drugstore, and found my daughter on her knees.

As I listened to the man say, ‘That’s how I like to see a woman-on her knees,’ something broke within me. I felt there was nothing more of that old life worth holding onto. I saw that this was not only just about me. It was about my daughter. It was about all the daughters everywhere.”

II Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Before I send She Who Is off packing to a friend in Boston, I thought I might share some of her thoughts with you:

“Feminist theology results when women’s faith seeks understanding in the matrix of historical struggle for life in the face of oppressive and alienating forces.”

“Drawing energy and light from this social experience, feminist theology engages in a least three interrelated tasks: it critically analyzes inherited oppressions, searches for alternative wisdom and suppressed history, and risks new interpretations of the tradition in conversation with women’s lives.”

“Goal. The goal toward which this theological effort passionately journeys is transformation into new community. Feminist liberation theology hopes so to change unjust structures and distorted symbol systems that a new community in church and society becomes possible, a liberating community of all women and men characterized by mutuality with each other and harmony with the earth.”

“…the goal is the flourishing of all beings in their uniqueness and interrelation — both sexes, all races and social groups, all creatures in the universe. This calls for a new model of relationship, neither a hierarchal one that requires an over-under struture, nor a univocal one that reduces all to a given norm. The model is rather inclusive, celebratory of difference, circular, feminist — we reach for the words.”

“The goal of feminist theology, in other words, is not to make women equal partners in an oppressive system. It is to transform the system.”

II Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is

I am not comfortable with hell. I am not comfortable with people who believe that others are going to hell. I am not comfortable with a God who will send people to hell. I am not comfortable condemning people to hell.

The three year old I live with woke up in the middle of the night and eventually told mom that there was a fire in her room (she had just learned that day about what to do when there is a fire, and contrary to what her father and I have being doing when the smoke alarm goes off, it is not actually stand and wave your arm like she told her mother). Interestingly enough, she woke up with a fever and said that there was a man with a pointed nose and fire coming out of his mouth. Weird. Maybe a dream. Maybe signs of a spiritual realm. I do not know nor do I claim to know.

I once said that maybe heaven and hell are not so much physical places of torment or bliss for an “afterlife” but rather they are related to story. Heaven being having a voice in the grandeur story and scheme and hell being… Dying alone, unnamed, and seemingly without worth in Africa.

I wonder of if Jesus’ prayer for “heaven on earth” was in part due to the seeming presence of “hell on earth.” My mind cannot comprehend life-shattering earthquakes in China or governments cutting off humanitarian aid in Zimbabwe or what it would have been like to be naked in a concentration camp. Although I can write about darkness and have and probably will write more… The reality of physical torture is beyond me (though I could tell you of other personal sufferings: tears, heartache, etc.).

I do not like violence or find it particularly holy or just. Perhaps this is why I squirm when imagining hell as well. Why would our loving, great, merciful God allow such a thing? Who in their right mind would choose heaven over hell? Who in their right mind would choose to struggle with same sex attraction? Who in their right mind would choose to go through the painful torture of abortion? Who in their right mind would choose to have a failing marriage? Who in their right mind would choose… And the list goes on. I cannot look at this world without seeing through broken glasses.

Why (the hell?) would Christ “descend to the dead” if not to abolish death?

What happened in that stanza of the creed?

If it is about “whosoever believes in me” who is in? Do I say who believes and who doesn’t? Do I know who believes and who doesn’t? What does it mean to “believe in Jesus” anyhow? Is my Muslim friend who views him as a prophet “in”? Did the Jews, who experienced “hell on earth”, but did not believe in Jesus, have a sentence to hell?

Purgatory

I am in the waiting place

Somewhere between the worst of me

And the hopeful glory

All the wrongs that I have wronged

Burn my flesh in anguish

Surely, there must be some good in me

But the checkerboard floor bears my reflection better than I

There is a couch and a couple of leather chairs

Which entice one to sit and relax the time away

Lest for the tacks that remind one that this is a place of pain

Below the room, beneath the tile

Demons with nine-inch nails

Claw against the roof of their glass ceiling

Their silently screaming faces

Remind me of the Munch painting on the wall

If only Edvard could hear the nails, maybe then he would come rescue me

Oh, why am I here

I thought I was good enough

I thought that you loved me

Enough to open your heart and share a part of yourself with me

The phone in the corner is as useless as I feel

Its rotary style reminds me of the times I used to call my father

To pick me up from grade school

I ease my way onto the chair next to a modern side table

I dial the operator

Who says that your number has been disconnected

Or that you are unavailable

Or that I could leave you a message

Hopelessly, I wrap the phone cord around my wrist

Its extra curls do not suffocate me or cut off my circulation

Unfortunately

I am stuck here, to live, but not to die

I am in the waiting place, the atoning place, the middle ground

For I am neither fit for heaven

Nor fit for hell

Theology. We used to break this word down in Christian Beliefs class; simply put, one could call it the “study of God.” Calling it that now just sounds too meh, too blah, too bland. It sounds like some task that we must do in order to better relate or understand the Creator. I wrote in a paper a year ago that for me, theology felt like taking a towel to my feet covered in wet sand. Ouch.

Outside of the protective bubble of a Christian university campus, I find that attempting theology still hurts. What used to hurt in the terms of late nights typing papers and aggreivating discussions that went no where now hurts in a different way.

I’ve spent years thinking that you could understand it all on an intellectual level – and not only that, but that for whatever reason, intellect was superior to devotion. I find myself consistently weeping while listening to Christian music on the radio. I spent years avoiding Christian music (intellectually, I had my reasons). I spent years thinking that I could not read my bible (because, of course, you have cannot have good hermeneutics without good exegesis!). I spent years thinking, thinking, thinking…

And, I awoke, just recently to the realization that I had gone somewhere dark and lonely. I am deeply wounded – as Caputo suggests – from the choices and the mistakes and the struggles that this journey has taken me. I realize every day as I drive down these foreign roads with a mere ten minutes of KLOVE – which often bring a batch of resounding daily tears – that I am desperately in love with a man who may never love me and a Creator who deeply loves me.

“They” say that when we ask the questions about suffering and God that it will deepen our understanding of who God is… It is so easy to say this and much harder to feel the pain and the loss and the loneliness and attempt to reconcile a relationship with God in the meanwhile.

Nonetheless, I want to try. I want to know God – intellectually and spiritually. The circle comes back to these new theological beginnings: when once the word “study” meant agony, now it merely means, “Come and see” and perhaps paradoxically, “Be still and know that I am God.”