holy hellions

This is the fifth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

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Jason,

Below is a list of what I googled in order to respond to your post from last week:

-”Coakley often gets her hackles up in response to intellectual uniformity and shrillness.” I now know that hackles are the hairs along the back of an animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed, like my cat Meekie used to do when I tried to put a baby bonnet over her mosquito-bitten ears.
- “I’ll just tell them to put on their big girl panties and then I’ll show them my Glock.” Frankly, I’m glad I’m naive enough not to automatically know a Glock is a handgun. We Midwestern gals are more comfortable with corn husks and corn hole.

I suspect all good (and angry) Christian feminists will need to know what hackles and Glocks are at some point in the journey with the church, and so for my brief linguistic education, I am grateful to you.

Your birthing image of Christ was such a powerful conclusion to last week’s post on what it might look like to de-center gender. Would you advocate for such language in liturgy? Mixing gendered metaphors has always been a favorite feminist move of mine. Like praying to God the Father and her only begotten Son. Again, I’m not sure Coakley would find this strategy all that effective at producing true change in the relationships between men and women at the congregational level, but I do think it does something to jar the soul and pop the lid on its imagination.

This week’s chapter found us back in familiar territory with Coakley again challenging the sweeping anti-hero of feminists – the Enlightenment’s ‘Man of Reason’ – and asking us to consider the presumed antinomies (another googler for me; meaning the incompatabilities) such a denigrating view has with the autonomous self many modern feminists aspire to.

In my experience this is one of the critical issues of a specifically Christian feminism that we’ve discussed in the last few weeks: vulnerability and dependence are part of our salvivic narrative, and as such, need to be part of our liberation narrative. The Man (or modern Woman) of Reason, upheld by the Enlightenment’s key figures such as Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant, should not be our holy grail of equality, however tempting it may be to emulate the characteristics already rewarded by society.

However, Coakley notes the arguably ill-advised move of some radical feminists to deepen women’s connection to nature and capitalize on our differentiated strength. Funny, isn’t it, that the radical feminist position is perhaps most in line with the evangelical Christian position of complimentarianism? Makes me all the more suspect of authors like Wayne Grudem and John Piper knowing their views may have been influenced by lines from Rousseau such as this, “A perfect man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind that in face.”

Coakley concludes that the feminist dream must be the ‘abolition of the sex class system” tout court (googled: meaning ‘and nothing else’), not simply a swapping of masculine and feminine ideals nor a complete blurring of sex all together.

To her I say, Amen. And nothing else.

Peace,
Erin

This is the fourth post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.

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Howdy again, Erin,

Glad we have this regular discipline of reading Coakley and writing to one another. I love your comment from last time about some theologians being drawn to speak of the Spirit in particularly feminine terms: “like the Spirit is supposed to be our Wonder Woman to your Batman and Spiderman.” Coakley herself has critiqued this common move. It often draws its origin from Syriac patristic sources, but doesn’t stop to note that the Syriac Orthodox Church is not especially noted for its feminist sympathies.

I’m pretty sure Coakley is where I first heard Mary Daly’s quip about this move: “You’re included in the Holy Spirit. He’s female.”

Coakley often gets her hackles up in response to intellectual uniformity and shrillness. So in the chapter we have just read she objects to theology’s near universal condemnation of Descartes, his cogito, and its purported “peeling back” of all things that matter: the body, community, the other, and all things but the lonely self contained in a physical shell. I love this move from her—first salvaging a more sympathetic reading of Descartes before dispatching him more carefully for failing to be as fully Trinitarian in his understanding of the soul as his predecessor Augustine was.

Then she makes a pivot and describes Gregory Palamas’ triadic understanding of the human person with its greatly more elevated vision of the body and commends Palamite thinking as a potential source for reconfiguring the self after Descartes. Now that’s a lot.

Ultimately this chapter didn’t satisfy me as much as her work usually does. I know these figures better than the average Joe, and I wanted a much slower account of who said what when and why before we ran to conclusions. This feels like a book, not a chapter, and even if I agreed or disagreed I’m not much sure what would be at stake. And where’d the feminist material go here?

You asked last week how I would practice and model a de-centered genderism. I don’t really know. I was impressed by meeting an intern from Duke who retired from a law enforcement career. After she regaled with stories of target practice I mentioned that being a first woman pastor in a congregation won’t likely intimidate her. “Nope,” she said. “I’ll just tell them to put on their big girl panties and then I’ll show them my Glock.” Nice. She can drown any would-be critic in testosterone. In one way I admire it. In another . . .

I’m glad Coakley can out muscle any male philosopher of religion. But I like her work better when it’s closer to the rough ground of the church in flesh and blood now, of her own experience, of matters of the soul (however understood) that church leaders like me might actually face.

What does it mean for gender to look on Christ as our mother, from whose side we, the church, are born in blood and water, who longs to gather us under her (his?) wings, who did not fulfill his era’s expectations of a rabbi that he have children but gave birth to a church now millennia old and billions strong? No idea. But I’m glad to have friends like Coakley and you to stew on it.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the third post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee.
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Jason,

Three weeks into our public reading project and me thinks I’ve gotten the juciest chapters to date. First, the necessity of vulnerability in Christian feminism. Now, the perils of “creaturely dependance”  for women in the church.

To start, you were right to subtly correct my essentialist and, dare I say, lazy sexist assumption in your post last week that Christian submission is soft and receptive, like a passively veiled and demurely bejeweled bride of Christ.

Coakley begins her discussion of our dependence where theologians rightly should: with a discussion of the Trinity, and the dependence of Christ to the Father God and even the Mother Mary in his vulnerable human life and death.

I remember being stunned in my class on the rabbinical tradition of Midrash last semester when our professor, Rabbi Steve Sager, suggested to us that God is always learning. Like the infant Christ who dangles precariously on Mary’s knee in Georgios Klotzas icon, even God required attention, care,  and discipline. If our Christ was ( or is?) dependent, then surely all of us should count sharing in that need as a blessed inheritance.

Thus Coakley concludes it is not the wholly mind-blowing doctrine of dependence itself – however divergent Eastern and Western conceptions of it are – but the practical implications of these theologies upon the bodies of women that is so perilous to the church. The message is: “All creatures are dependent, but some are more dependent than others.”

This is a bold-faced lie, and one Coakley pegs on the Enlightenment’s cultural ideal of the stoic man, reluctant to admit his dependency on anything more than his own free will and ambition. She even goes so far as to wonder who in the Godhead men more readily identify with – “the yielding, depotentiated Son, or more truly with the impassive and all-powerful Father?”

I gather from your attraction of late to Bride of Christ imagery that you do not find yourself in this either/or bind. But from my own experience, many Christians are eager to tout the feminine-like nature of the Holy Spirit as a condolence for women’s lack of linguistic heritage with the Father and Son.  It’s like the Holy Spirit is supposed to be our Wonder Woman to your Batman and Spiderman. We all know which ones make the big blockbusters.

As you begin to pastor your new church, I wonder how you will model that de-centered genderism you mentioned last week. Coakley is skeptical that it can come from moving beyond these male and female images of stoicism and vulnerability to one of adrogynous political-correctness. While she rightly points out the need to examine the actual relationships between men and women, leadership and laity, doctrine and practice in any church, I think she ultimately is too dismissive of the power of language and imagery in the Body of Christ.

But then again I am a theologian now. And we are nothing if not dependent on the Word.

Until next week,
Erin

This is the second post in a ten-week series on reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions with my friend and mentor, Pastor Jason Byassee. See my launching post from last week here.

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Erin,

It’s an honor to be invited into this conversation, and I don’t mind being swooned over in the least, especially as we read together a theologian I’ve swooned over myself not a little. Sarah was kind enough to blurb my small church book, to engage me in dialogue about her work for an academic article I wrote, and to eat Thai with me in Cambridge once.

The essay from chapter two reminds me why I love Coakley’s work. Here she is engaging in conversation with a man I’ve never heard of (hey, I’m a Methodist, we were probably reading church growth technique or something), one Dom John Chapman OSB, arguing with his early 20^th century reading of St. John of the Cross as she and both men wrestle together with prayer, feelings, darkness and agony, and implicitly, with gender.

This is how theology works—it’s a conversation among saints through time and space about the God fleshed in Christ, constantly poured out anew in the scriptures and the liturgy. The fact that I’ve not heard of the Dom is also oddly comforting. We’ll never run out of theology to read, just as we’ll never run out of God to contemplate.

But maybe that’s not such great news. Dom Chapman corresponded with countless professional praying people – monks and nuns—and found the bulk of them quite unsatisfied with their experience of prayer. Work at this long enough and the harder slog it’ll be, they thought. His advice was comforting: “Pray as you can, and not as you can’t.” And that saying’s correlate: “The more you pray, the better it gets.”

This advice strikes me as fundamentally right, in line with other bodily activities that make us human (exercise, sex), but which can also destroy us if done wrong.

Then Coakley shows that Dom was nearsighted in ruling out bodily affect, in ignoring sexuality altogether, and in aligning sentiment and spiritual experience with two ultimate horrors: women and Protestants.

Sorry Erin, you fail on both scores . . .

You asked last week where I feel vulnerability as a man. I guess the answer right now is as a pastor—as I’ve been back in the parish only two weeks. My entire family’s livelihood, the whole of my career, is, in some sense, in the dock for my church to judge. If they like me I do well; if not I don’t. That’s overly simple, of course. We have mechanisms in place for pastors to be prophetic, bureaucracies and bishops to stand between us and the mob if the congregation revolts.

Nevertheless I’m struck by how vulnerable it feels to have 1400 judges each week and to feel the need to please all of them or my kids may not eat. Isn’t hysteria supposed to be (quite literally) a female attribute?

You appreciate the way Coakley moves past the dismissal of all gender essentialism and wants to keep some of them, in modified form. I’m struck by how I want to keep most of them decentered. What I expressed above isn’t male or female, it’s just small-minded, fearful. It waits to be entered into by the vulnerable, power-giving God and exploded. I am compelled by the image of the church as Christ’s bride (I’ve found myself using it in public prayer and teaching twice already in two weeks), but I’m not sure that means soft or receptive or submissive.

All of this Dom Chapman would pillory—affect, women, sex, Protestants.

All the good stuff, in other words.

Gratefully,
Jason

Be still my Christian feminist heart.

Amidst the indulgent romance novel One Day and stacks of In Style magazine, I’ve added the most ambitious tome to-date to my summer reading list: Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender by Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley. Only a contemplative Christian feminist whose love for the word paradox is rivaled only by my own (and perhaps, Quaker philosopher Parker J. Palmer) could make my brain twitch with such affection.

But the swooning continues. My friend and mentor Jason Byassee formerly of Duke Divinity and currently of Boone United Methodist Church has joined me in my ambition (fresh into a new gig as senior pastor). For the next two months, we’ll be reading Coakley together – section by section – and sharing our candid conversation on this blog every Wednesday.

Truth be told; both Coakley and Byassee are beyond my intellectual chops. But they’re both invested – to my benefit – in distilling the sometimes murky water of Christian feminism for the church, not just the towers.

Without further gushing…

—-

Jason,

We have a tough task ahead of us to keep our mutual musings on topics like power, submission, and gender to a brief blog post. In the prologue and first chapter alone, I made a total of twenty-three check marks for further reflection.

I want to home in on the idea of vulnerability this week, as it was central to Coakley’s first chapter on the self-emptying quality of Christ that has been absent from much of Christian feminist prescriptions. As a woman, and one who vacillates between embracing the (naive, yet compelling) idea of global sisterhood and eschewing its generalist assumptions of gender, I am admittedly still a bit honored when I’m able to prove my ability to “hang with the guys” – including you.

Power is at stake and submission is for pansies. Herein is the mistaken assumption (laden with gender anxieties) that Coakley combats with her insistence that vulnerability and empowerment can co-exist. This central contribution of Christ should be a central contribution of Christian feminists if only we could  loose our own ambition for the secular movement’s promises of agency, accolade, and accomplishment.

My husband Rush, as you can attest, is an admirably sensitive man. So why do I still relish telling anyone who will listen (this blog audience now included) that he cried three times during the sappy epic The Notebook while I merely got a round of goosebumps when the score kicked it up a notch? Masculine stoicism still has its grip on our aspirations.

I wonder:

• how do you embrace vulnerability as a man? 
• where do you resist its strength? 
• and are you compelled by imagery of being Christ’s bride, willing to be soft and receptive and  submissive?

Coakley made a subtle distinction between a Christ who “choos[es] never to have certain (false and worldly) forms of power” and one who “reveal[es] ‘divine power’ to be intrinsically ‘humble’ rather than grasping.” While she favored the former, I found myself being more convinced by the latter, that power is a relationship dynamic that rightly exercised is in service and joy and humility to the other.  However, I can’t help but be a bit cynical that the one in service of another – the Christ-like self-emptying ‘man’ of Ephesians 5:25 – still ultimately has more honor and privilege, although a number of complimentarian champions would try to argue otherwise.

What I love about Coakley is that she questions the gender generalizations that would see vulnerability as a feminine weakness rather than a human strength. I’m curious to see as we continue reading if she’ll concede any “core attributes” of sex based on biblical interpretation.

For now, I’m taking her advice – and looking forward to your discussion next week of contemplation – and praying “not for negation of self” but “for the self’s transformation and expansion into God.”

And next time we’re watching a Kodak commercial, I’ll try not to smugly ask Rush, “Are you actually crying?”

In gratitude,
Erin

Seattle grabs your gut, stuffs it with cupcakes, and puts you on a bike to “work it out.” It’s thrilling.

But that’s not what brought me to the Emerald City. It was my brother first. It was Parker Palmer second. And it is my work with his organization, the Center for Courage & Renewal on Bainbridge Island, that has me “pink-cheeked and plucky” as I wrote in my latest article for Duke Divinity’s Call & Response blog. You can read it here.

The rub of it is that all the cheery idealism of millennials like myself can be an asset to those institutions ready to run off the fuel of our feverish energy. This is integral to not only ailing churches but stagnant feminist organizations.

As we used to say in the publishing world, “Fail quickly.” And then move on, preferably on a fixie with mustache handlebars and lavender cupcake crumbs flying off your mouth.

No sooner had my husband and I driven away from the brick-red stucco apartment of Oakland, CA when I began insisting the West Coast wouldn’t get over me without a fight. The 1oo+ degree weather that met us with a suffocatingly sweaty handshake in North Carolina made my surrender all the easier.

Here I am now, a year later, living in Seattle for the summer where the sun shines more than its locals let on and the sporadic rain affords a scenic backdrop to my introspection.

Was I an insane idealist to think two and a half months away from my home, my friends, my dog, and my husband was healthy? Was I seemingly selfish to think following my vocational path to the Center for Courage & Renewal was going to be good for both me and for my marriage? And was I just plain deranged to think after five years of living with only one other person that I could sleep on the floor of my brother’s house shared by him and three other roommates?

I’ve surprised myself:

(1) I can cook. More than bacon and eggs. I can cook for myself. Everyday. Sometimes that includes toasted pita and peanut butter. But sometimes that means whipping up a batch of lamb and gorgonzola meatballs with a yogurt mint dipping sauce. I am not domestically handicapped.

(2) I am strong, physically.  I wish I could find some time to sit on my ass in front of the computer but, alas, people in the Pacific Northwest seem to really love exercising. All the time. Just when you think you’re done for the day, some chipper hipster suggests a quick bike to the sculpture garden. And you pedal hard to keep up, to keep cool.

(3) I am indebted to Hulu. Television is a delight rather under-appreciated in Seattle. You’d prefer homemaking candles? I’d prefer homemaking with the fictional Modern Family. No, I do not want to play Dungeons and Dragons. I am a dork of the mainstream media variety.

(4) I am a great roommate. I am tidy, I am agreeable, and I bring home cake pops from Starbucks when everyone gives me a puzzled look at their description. I splurge on Swiffer wet jets, swipe the hair out of the shower drain, and politely hold my pee when one of my four roommates is using the bathroom.

(5) I am really attracted to my husband. Seattle men are among the prettiest I have seen with their polished man boots and gentlemanly vests. But no one has that misplaced dimple under their left eye, no one wears flannel and high tops in such an unpretentious way, and no one would whisper through tears, “I’m proud of you” when their wife high-tails it out of town like my husband. Seattle makes me want to date him. Hard.

Truth to be told, I got the impression that most friends thought I was more than a little too independent, too fiercely feminist for following my call to Seattle. Friends asked if I was unhappy in North Carolina. Others told me that they liked their husbands too much. I insisted my husband liked me too much not to let me go.

And here I am. Two weeks strong. Two weeks more in love.

Feminism does not support women. Feminism supports humanity.  And humanity, rather obviously, includes men.

“Should I Love Feminism?” asked the clever advertisement for a panel on the utility of feminist theology at Duke Divinity School.  A Facebook event page soon became littered with RSVP’s in the hundreds, the interest no doubt expounded by an all-star line-up of scholars.

It was an intentional strategy on the part of the sponsoring Women’s Center to invite only men to speak on this topic. Without the perspective of these powerhouses, the panel could have easily been dismissed as the worn-out, worn-thin, haggardly arguments of disenfranchised women. Such is the mythical reputation garnered by second wave feminists.   The event would have been relegated to the trash heap of “women’s issues,” a sub-field of academia becoming less popular with every click of the remote to watch the Bachelor or Real Housewives .  The media has declared feminism dead more than once in the last three decades.

Opening remarks framed the debate, if such a tempered discussion could be called as much, and offered praise for the male supporters of the women’s center. Applause is rightly given to those who make genuine moves toward reconciling gender disparity. Applause, however, is not incentive enough for leaders to charge brazenly into the future of feminist reformation. Something more intrinsic than one’s affection for mothers, wives, and daughters must be named. Without a clear stake in one’s sense of self or one’s sense of the divine, leaders who are merely “in support” of women and “their issues” risk becoming the paternalistic figures of benevolence feminists have long critiqued.

Someone has told these men of a different generation than I that the goal of feminism is women’s equality. At the debate’s outset, Associate Professor of Historical Theology Warren Smith defined the contested movement of feminism, first organized at the end of the 19^th century and heightened during the civil rights era of the 1960’s and 70’s. While he wisely asserted feminist’s multi-vocal platform, Smith articulated its most basic concern as recognizing the full humanity of women.  This is indeed true. This is not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that the feminism is about recognizing the humanity of all gendered persons, women among them. The cultural context of the last twenty years has shifted western feminism’s focus to a more nuanced, complex, and diverse approach to gender transformation. As with the “post-ing” of modernism, the post-feminist corpus has complicated the perceived solidarity of its predecessor. While this makes it harder to organize for social change, it does expand the subject for whom feminism is concerned to the overwhelming breadth of men, women, and those who eschew binary categorizations.

To me, it felt as if the panel discussion could have taken place twenty years ago. My illusion of academia being on the cutting edge of discourse has slowly evaporated from sight as I finish out my first year in graduate school. Instead, I sat through a ninety-minute discussion on the arguably uncontestable idea that women should be honored in the classroom, in the workplace, and in the home.

I wish there had been a larger critique of the way that men’s bodies have been regulated in the rhetoric of masculinity, how their socialization has inhibited their expression of vulnerability, how their full humanity has been distorted by the power regimes of which they are expected to be a part.  I wanted to stand up, point my finger, and say, “You. This affects you, too.” Especially in much of the western world where women have gained the basic rights of citizenship, it is critical for leaders to recognize that in many ways it is now men who are failing to live up to their full humanity. Look at our soldiers, our prisoners, our politicians. What is the cost of their masculinity?

A Christian feminist approach ultimately reflects the heart of Jesus. It is undoubtedly a heart that gives special attention or “support” to society’s marginalized; undoubtedly, these are often women. But these are not only women. Feminism then is not an additive to the Christian narrative as was implied by Smith. Christianity is inherently feminist in so much as it unequivocally affirms the humanity of both men and women in the image of God.

As Christian leaders, our stake in feminism must be named as nothing less than the Cross, nothing less than abundant life.

I posted the following story about women in the news where I blog every Tuesday at The Thoughtful Christian. For years I’ve wished that violence weren’t such a big sub category of “women’s issues”; I’ve lamented that one of the few areas young women are asked to comment on in Christian media is sexual abuse; I’ve wanted to move past the issue of violence and on to a vision of liberation. But I can’t. And I won’t.

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I used to get paid to follow the news.

I was a book publicist whose job it was to pitch authors as expert commentators on the cutting-edge trends and up-to-the-minute stories of the day. I ate cereal with the cotton candy fluff of Good Morning America, hitched a ride into work with the hearty granola of Morning Edition, procrastinated through lunch with the beefy Daily Beast, and unwound at home with the decadent dessert of Glamour.

The only kink in my routine was that I hated the news. I hated its fear, its negativity, its polarization, its triteness. I hated the violence it directed my gaze towards.

February’s  news stories were wrought with violence, and an overwhelming portion of it was against the bodies of women. It is ironic, as fellow blogger Greg Garrett points out, that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition arrived to such a climate.

On February 15th, a landmark class-action lawsuit was filed by 17 women accusing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld of creating a culture where violence against women in the military was tolerated. The report on the Daily Beast identifies statistics that female recruits are now far more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed in combat.

On February 16th, I heard the news of reporter Lara Logan’s sustained sexual assault while covering the riots in Egypt. As women took to the streets to participate in a swelling protest of their oppression, another woman, Logan, was whipped, stripped, beaten, and pinched, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

And then, on February 18th, word came from Politco of 240 congressmen and women voting to strip Planned Parenthood of their federal funding. The fine print is that this funding is already restricted to non-abortive services. Therefore, what these congress people are really preventing is basic healthcare for women in the form of pelvic exams, breast exams, safe-sex cosunseling, basic infertility counseling, and access to birth control from one of the country’s largest providers. Planned Parenthood is not without fault, but some of its comprehensive measures could most certainly be viewed as pro-women-and-children’s-lives.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed or desensitized to the violence. I know I just want to stick my head in a box of Thin Mints and ignore the raging war against women’s bodies that is being fought across the world. It’s dangerous to essentialize women’s experiences, but by nature of our biology, many of us share in a collective fear of abuse. Let us not forget either that men’s bodies are violated, too, when used for such abusive purposes.

The Bible, like the news, is no haven from violence. Men and women participate in the destruction of human life and creation throughout the text. But unlike the news, God is an anchor of hope.

—

If we are to be real critics of how stories about women are framed in the media, we must heed the thoughts of theologian Walter Brueggeman, author of The Prophetic Imagination, and learn that grieving the violence is as transformative as visioning for equality.

A few weeks ago I wrote a snappy article for Faith and Leadership, an e-magazine from Duke Divinity, on how a pirate store could save the church. I don’t always understand my obsession with “the church” when it comes to writing, speaking, and critiquing. I’ve insisted my whole life that I don’t really belong in one, nor do I ever intend to work for one. But for some reason, I have very strong opinions on how the church should behave. You can read them here.

An abbreviated version of what I wrote is essentially this: I think the church should behave like a pirate store, that is, Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia project.

Why? Because my generation (and perhaps others) want to be a part of something that has a sense of whimsy. There are other healthy reasons why the San Francisco-based non-profit is so appealing, but I name the fact that it sells pirate paraphernalia out of its front store as one of its strongest lures.

After the article published, I received an email from a local divinity school graduate who had begun looking into the possibility of starting an 826 writing center here in Durham with another friend. Was I interested in joining the conversation?

Hell, yes. It’s an easy sell when you’re able to contemplate creative ways to partner with your community. We could get kids interested in maps! Or give them Dictaphones to become citizen journalists! At the very least, we could spazz out to Justin Beiber beats together.

But here’s what makes me sad about all of this. Getting me involved in church these days feels much more cumbersome. Serious. Daunting. Dreadful.

Why am I – and potentially others in my generation – trying to find church-like communities outside of the church these days? I’m wrestling, like Jacob and the angel of God in Genesis, and begging God to give me the blessing of true church. Even if it means I am walking to the chapel with a limp.