holy hellions

I just spent $175 on a dress and had a spiritual experience.

It feels dirty to admit my splurge so publicly. Money habits are more taboo than sex practices amongst many of the Christians I know. “What position do you prefer?” sounds absurdly more decent these days than “How much do you stash in retirement every month?” Money is the new sex, the new outlet for our desires, the new measure of our desirability.

I’ve always been a bit embarrassed to admit my own obsession with money amongst groups in which debt is so devilish and consumerism is so casual. It feels wrong to listen to friends overwhelmed by leases and credit card payments and then to admit my own vice quietly: “I am a sadistic saver.”

Okay. Sadistic may be a stretch for the sake of snarky sounding alliteration. But it’s true that I proudly announce our net cash gain to my husband at the end of every budget month like I’ve just slashed five pounds off the number on the scale. I have to restrain myself from checking the stock market every day, the new interest rates for mortgages, and the maximum contribution limits on Roth IRA’s. It’s no surprise my fourth grade teacher wrote in my yearbook :

2 Efficient
2 Be
4 Gotten

Somehow I don’t think efficiency is the mark of a good Christian. Somehow I don’t think Christ was entirely concerned with saving time in the home of Mary and Martha or saving money during the anointing at his last supper. Somehow I think Christ was about something called a full life, had something more to do with the word abundance than scarcity.

I hit rock bottom recently when I received a check in the mail from my mom with the sweetest note congratulating me on my hard work in completing a work project. She told me to treat myself to a new pair of shoes. I cried over her generosity. And then with cheek still wet, I promptly flipped the check over, signed my name, and wrote in big capital letters “FOR DEPOSIT ONLY.”

I didn’t need new shoes, after all. Receiving her sentiment was enough. It wasn’t until days my professor suggested that the circulation of money could be a spiritual practice that I began feeling like a boob (a man boob).

That thought sparked all sorts of correctives to my perpetual penny-pinching. And so I formulated the idea to splurge as a spiritual practice. I realize this sounds downright heretical, namely because I was planning to splurge on myself and not the poor. But it was just going to be for three months (since I had so rudely squandered away the first) and it could only be at clothing boutiques in my local community of Durham, NC. In doing so, I would be living out spiritual convictions long pushed aside as earnest but inefficient.

1. I would be patronizing small business owners instead of supporting big online conglomerates. I would force myself to say hello, learn names, quell my introvertism for a hot minute.

2. I would choose to focus on clothing boutiques because those are the businesses in my community that I love to browse and yet never buy due to the costs. It would also allow me to inquire directly about where clothes and accessories are sourced.

3. I would allot a % of my freelance income for the endeavor to signify a tithe, a matter of trust that circulating my money in this way, albeit not the most efficient way, would offer not just me by my community a blessing of abundance.

4. I would be supporting, in some measure, gender parity as the boutiques in my community are primarily owned by women.

5. I would be forced to leave my house, find some time for leisure, and in the midst encounter my neighbors who roam the streets in search of money downtown.

I knew it was a good idea when I kept putting it off, kept asking God, “You can’t seriously condone this” and mining my mind for ways to do part but not all of the task (what if just walking around downtown is enough?).

And yet tonight, as I ventured into stores, made small talk with the clerks, let them ask me time and again if I needed anything more, took their suggestions to try this and that and with that belt and with this sweater, I felt God’s abundance. I relaxed my shoulders. I took my time, feeling every piece of clothing. I learned about my community, even how the consignment store down the street donates the clothes that don’t sell to Dress for Success.

I finally settled on a $175 eco-friendly dress from a local green boutique, Vert & Vogue. It was all I bought in the end and I’ve decided that store will be the only one I frequent for the rest of my practice. There is something spiritual about splurging on sustainability, something about beautifully made clothes that didn’t make you feel like you needed a whole closet of crappy ones.

On my way to the car, swinging my canvas bag with a big smile on my face, I ran into a disheveled, red-eyed man on the street. “Do you have any money for food?” he asked. I stuck my hand in my bag and unquestioningly pulled out my biggest dollar bill – a fiver. I just handed it to him, forgetting to ask his name, but suspending my expectation of how it should be spent.

As I had spent freely, I was strangely able to give freely.

Such is the paradox of the splurge. Such is the paradox of the cross.

Psalm 19 9-10
The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and the dripping of the honeycomb.

My husband, the youth pastor, cringes when folks laud his students as “the future of the church.” They are the church. Right here and now. Need proof? Below is a sermon on Luke 8:40-57 from my high school friend, Alice, who has got the itch to preach, to speak, to teach. School’s in session.

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I am a mosquito magnet. And I love the outdoors.  It seems like every time I go outside, even to check the temperature, I get bitten. I also have a terrible habit of absentmindedly picking at scabs. If you know mosquito bite scabs, you know that when you pick them they bleed and bleed and bleed.

I was at a fancy dinner once, when the mosquito bite I picked gave way to blood that ran all the way down my leg. When I looked over at the hostess, she was staring with a slightly appalled and mostly disgusted look on her face. She said rather bluntly “You should go get that cleaned up”.

This is kind of like what the hemorrhaging women in Luke 8:40-57 experiences every day. Except, she has a severe physical problem. Except, the bleeding has been going on for twelve years. Except, the awkward situations and disgust of others is in the rules of her society. It’s scriptural.

Leviticus lays out rules for what is clean and unclean for the Jews. Blood is unclean. Anything unclean is to be put out of society. “You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.” (Lev. 15:31)

Not only is something unclean unworthy, it defiles God.

The woman in Luke has been told for twelve years that she is unclean. That she is unworthy. That she defiles God’s dwelling place. She cannot touch anyone. She cannot be around her loved ones. She cannot participate in society. She has been ostracized by her community, her family, and seemingly by God.

And yet, we see this woman in a crowd of people, touching a strange man because she believes she can be healed.

Contra dancing is a type of English Country dance that is popular in Chapel Hill, NC where I live. A few years ago my parents began contra dancing. After they went a few times, I decided to tag along. Contra dancing attracts a multitude of different people. In the same room are brilliant socially-handicapped nerds, athletic teenagers, along with country club grandmas, elderly hippie men, and me, a suburban teenager who had never seen all these people together in one room.

The first time I came, the old hippie men in skirts attracted my eye. Not kilts mind you, skirts. My entire life I had seen and been told that men wear pants, never skirts. Immediately I felt better than them. I knew the rules, and they didn’t.

This is kind of like Jarius the synagogue leader in Luke 8. Except, he is rich. Except, he has a high place in society. Except, him being too good is in the rules of his society. It’s scriptural.

Leviticus also outlines rules for priests. What priest can and cannot do. It calls priests to be set apart for the service of the Lord.

Jarius has been told his whole life he is better than others.

And yet, we see Jarius prostrating himself in front of a strange man.

How did Jarius and the woman get there?

They defied a social norm within themselves, first.

Both Jarius and the woman stepped outside a rule they had been told their whole life. They looked at all they had been told about life and themselves, they looked at all they believed, and then believed there was something better. That this was not all there was.

Both Jarius and the woman believed in a feeling, a push, an idea, that happened inside themselves. They didn’t write themselves off because what they saw inside was in stark contrast to the world around them.

How often do we hope for something in the Kingdom of God, and yet don’t truly believe it and live it out within ourselves and our communities here and now?

What social norms have we conformed to in our own hearts, in our own communities that don’t have a place in the Kingdom of God?

Who have we written off?

These questions often don’t have answers that are black and white. That are right from wrong. That are clean from unclean. And yet, it is our invitation and duty to live fully in this tension. To ask the hard questions, to discern the hard answers, and to act on what may be a little off center.

And even when we act and are standing in a world of “What was I thinking?!?” God says to us “daughter, son, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

And maybe you’ll get healed. Maybe others will be healed. Maybe this world will be healed. The woman did. Jarius’s daughter did. And once I let go, I found out I loved contra dancing and the men in skirts.

I pray that through our questions, actions, and discernment God’s Kingdom will come to dwell here on earth. I pray the lines we have drawn will give way to a world, a love, and a hope bigger than we could ever imagine, the way God dreams and gives us the ability to dream, too.

Postmodernism. Poststructuralism. Postcolonialism.

Try mentioning a “post-ism” at church on Sunday and be met with blank, disdainful stares… like the kind your dog gives you when she doesn’t know what you mean by the word kennel and why you’d ever try to force the concept on her.

Post-isms are meant to suggest the departure from one (laughably backward) era to another (arguably more enlightened) one. And while theory has shifted over the past thirty years from claiming big ‘T’ truths to spreading a million tiny truths – contextual, fluid, multi-vocal musings – our culture has remained ostensibly rooted to its binaries. And in the church, there is perhaps no more sacred binary than that of man and woman. Never mind the complication of intersexuals, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs.

Last week, I attended the annual Religion Newswriters’ Conference here in Durham. When pressed to explain my current thesis on gender as a performance and humor as a way to subvert its fixed categories, I realized how unmarketable such an idea would be in the church, let alone the media where simple ideas and big platforms are the queen bees. I found myself trailing off into a high-pitched whisper and reverting to the use of “blah, blah, blah” (complete with chomping hand gestures) at the end of my sentences.

I’d been mulling over the utility of my theory since meeting the previous week with one of my professors at Duke Divinity School. She stared at me plainly as I waxed on about why Christians and feminists were so serious and what must that mean for the doubly-doomed Christian feminist. I wondered about the theological significance of humor and how it might be a tool for us dullards in preaching gender transformation in the church. I might have referenced Tina Fey.

When she finally entered into my muddled monologue, she pulled my thoughts back to the ground as if they were balloons carelessly (if not romantically) let afloat in the polluted sky. The church and the Divinity School are decades away from these theoretical developments, she insisted. A woman professor is still applauded for her womanly authority.  A female student seeks out only female mentors. A class that broaches homosexuality is still on the cutting-edge.

We’re still stuck in the 70′s/80′s mindset where a man is a man and a woman is a woman and golly-gee-Bobby aren’t we progressive if we insist on valuing both equally. Except we all know that equitable valuation is rarely practiced. There are only one two woman professors among eighteen listed under Duke’s faculty of Theological Studies. At my church, there are commendably two woman associate pastors on staff but never has one been the senior pastor. On a national scale, progress toward pay equality is actually slowing. According to a new fact sheet from The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “During the last decade the wage gap narrowed by less than one percentage point. In the previous decade…it closed by almost four, and in the decade prior to that…by over ten percentage points.”

I’m convinced that the reason why we’re still stuck is because for roughly twenty years now, the discourse that feminism’s work is done has been effectively spread and swallowed. Wasn’t the point to increase women’s access to opportunities? Shouldn’t we be happy to be leaders in the academy, church, and politics at all? What more could we demanding broads possibly want?

Well, pardon me for being unladylike but I want more -and not just for womankind but humankind. I want the freedom promised me in the Gospel. I want the transformation coming to me in the new creation. I want to live as “neither male and female” but an entirely fragmented, wholly neurotic, impossible complex, person who along with the other geeks and freaks of the Christian body is one in Christ.

Surely, that’s not too much to ask (eyelashes batting) of a new millennium. Surely, that’s not too much to ask (knees bending) of an everlasting God.

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

—

Bless you, Erin.

This conversation has been a joy. I’m delighted to hear of your response to Coakley’s chapter on Judith Butler and Gregory of Nyssa. I remember too that’s the chapter that moved me from interest in Coakley’s work to loving it. There was something about the sheer chutzpah of pairing a secularist lesbian gender theorist with a Cappadocian father. Neither would like it very much this side of our eschatological ironing out in Jesus’ judgment. But on the other side of such judgment it’s the sort of company we’re going to have to learn to keep.

Even as I name that trait I love in her work, I worry about it. Does it do a sort of violence to the people we read to pair them over their objections this way? Doesn’t it feel like we seek extra credit for joining the ideas of the unlikeliest of companions, as if there are bonus points for cleverness?

I love your point about your complimentarian friends suggesting Galatians 3:28 as an eschatological text for future purposes only. I love it because I can’t remember ever hearing it. It reminded me that the vision of eschatology I imbibed at Duke was hyper realized. That is, in baptism, where that text was born, distinctions between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek are relativized. I don’t want to say demolished—we go on being male and female, Jew and Greek, etc and have to learn to be church across such lines of difference. But by the power of the Spirit now we can be the people who are Jesus’ life-giving body.

If feeling cheeky I’d want to ask your friends whether they think slavery still permissible, if Galatians 3:28 is only about a far-off eschaton. Or maybe more precise: certainly Galatians 3:28 is an eschatological claim. And the eschaton began at Golgatha; we can live in its power because of Pentecost.

I love your confident claim that there is more hope for gender transformation in the gospel than in the works of secular theory you have read. I am a preacher! I expect it to be so. But then again, ‘the world’ often lives out the gospel better than the church does, even if it has no idea (and would adamantly deny) its doing so.

So keep reading Butler and others (not that you need my encouragement to do so). Let’s hope Coakley and others keep demonstrating to us barely suppressed eschatological longings in those who wouldn’t so describe their desires themselves. And let’s all hope Jesus brings the kingdom despite our best efforts and intentions, not just through them. If we’re only dependent on the latter we’re all lost.

I’m grateful for the church as a place where male and female can be one by virtue of baptism, not least when they are teacher and student.

Gratefully,
Jason

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

—

Jason,

What brought me to attend Duke and what brought me to read Coakley were in part you and in part the desire for middle ground in the famously fraught lines of faith and feminism.

It is Coakley’s last section of her piecemeal collection of essays in Powers and Submissions that reminds me of the sympathetic synthesis needed between feminist theorists and orthodox theologians. Here she seeks to reconcile the theory of the notoriously thorny Judith Butler and the 4th century ascetic Gregory of Nyssa.

Anyone who’s ever read Butler either loves or hates her for her desconstructive theory of gender that claims there is no biological essence to sex and desire but rather gendered identity – if at all stable – is fashioned by the repetition of performative acts. In effect, we are what we do. There is no other way for society to “read” our gender than by what we inscribe on and enact through our body.

I confess that I love Butler. I love when theory itself is a performance of idealistic word acts that constitute their authority by a sort of scholarly repetition. Butler is an unmissable tool for any feminist theologian seeking to bridge gaps in understanding between a postmodern theory of gender construction and an enduring theory of human transformation. I curled into this last chapter of Coakley as I would a crisp new issue of the gossip rag Us Weekly, just brimming with curiosity about the smack talking that might ensue.

Coakley argues that Butler, albeit an ethnic Jew and performative lesbian, is concealing an eschatological longing in her obsessive focus on the body as the sole focus for (somewhat hopeless) societal change. As a feminist, I was already a bit taken a back at this somewhat paternalistic (“I know she’s saying no but she really means yes”) scholarly approach.

However, what Coakley concludes is monumental for the work I’m seeking to do on transforming gender in the church. She argues that Butler’s insistence on performative acts has parallels in Gregory’s practices of transformation. Both “create the future by enacting its possibilities.”

Amongst my complimentarian friends, I often hear Galatians 3:28 dismissed as an echatological vision, one that will be enacted when God’s kindgom comes to earth again but one that is not meant to be embodied now. Surely, for the sake of order we must have male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile! Not so.

We create the future by enacting its possibilities.

Both feminists and theologians are trying to enact the possibilities of  transforming the oppressions and inequalities of this life. Feminists often use the language of utopia to signify the potentially unrealistic and other-worldly ideal of gender liberation. But for Christians, we have the very realistic and this-wordly guarantee that such a utopia will occur when heaven comes to earth again in the form of Jesus Christ. And though we are waiting, waiting for the fulfillment of all God’s promises, we are charged to enact – whether through performance or practice – heaven on earth here and now.

What propels me in my vocation as a Christian feminist is nothing more and nothing less than the following summation: There is more feminist hope in the Gospel for gender transformation than there is any secular feminist  theory of change I’ve ever read.

Thank you for helping me to affirm as much.

Gratefully,
Erin

This is the eighth 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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Erin,

I love the scale of the questions you raise. One of my favorite things about graduate school classes was the chance to raise a big question and then watch a major intellect work on it. I remember asking Geoffrey Wainwright about a contention of John Zizioulas’s: that if only Augustine had learned a little Greek he might have read the eastern fathers and not come to so gloomy a view of the human person as he did with his doctrine of original sin. Surely God watches over the church enough that one person’s failure to learn a language wouldn’t cause a church of billions of people over thousands of years to be permanently impaired—right? Half an hour later Wainwright hadn’t answered my question (how could he?), but it was certainly fun to watch him work.

When I was at your stage, colleagues and I pushed around Nicholas Lash with a similar question to yours. Lash was visiting for a semester from Cambridge, where he was the first Catholic chair holder since his predecessor lost his head in the Reformation (does clear the mind a bit). Lash describes “Father” and “Son” as metaphors in his Believing Three Ways in One God (a book title that already runs to the modalistic). Lash, as a Barthian, felt that we don’t know what “Father” means when applied to God, but we’re bound to use the description by scripture and tradition. Those of us reared on Wainwright pushed back, suggesting the terms are more like proper names, and so more unsubstitutable than “metaphor” would suggest.

The point, Erin, is that really smart people don’t know the answer to your question.

In the patristic era it became clear that “Father” and “Son” were not unproblematic. But the people who came to be seen as orthodox responded that the titles have a pride of place in scriptural usage across the New Testament, and that they appropriately name the one key thing: the Father and the Son are the same “thing,” just as creaturely parents and children are the same species. If the Son is not as divine as the Father is, he can’t save us. Yet they were at pains to eliminate the false meanings: there is no sexual generation involved, no mother involved, and no change implied within the Godhead. Origen came up with the crazy suggestion that the language of generation—parenthood—must refer to an eternal begetting. Who’s ever heard of an eternal generation? No one, then or now. Crazy as it was, the language was the best description we could come up with: the Father begets the Son eternally. Try to find an alternative that makes biblical and philosophical sense. You won’t.

Which brings us to feminist alternatives. I myself don’t care for gender neutral pronouns for God. God is not an “it,” but is “personal,” the living God—our “personalities” are a dim reflection of the One who is life itself. And, sure enough, I find most church members react to female substitutes with a horror that suggests they assume that God must be male (all the “he’s” you mention in Isaiah not the least reason why). Yet the church fathers insist God is not male, not a creature, has no sexual parts, is no more “he” than “she.”

So . . . where’s that leave us? Back where we were, trembling before the liturgy, nervous to show (not just tell) that God’s not a boy. Of course what we should really fear is unfaithfulness in the presence of the fiery One who meets us in Mary’s belly with judgment and grace. So as we lead those whom Coakley describes as “being progressively reborn in the likeness of the Son,” how do we name her? Maybe, when we put the question that way, the answer is clear.

Gratefully,
Jason

This is the seventh 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,

I appreciate your candor about the courage it takes to know when and how to mix gendered metaphors in worship. I pick this theme up again partly because I found Coakley’s chapter on the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity overwhelming and partly because I found my commitments to feminist language questioned when preaching a sermon for the very first time in church this past Sunday.

I wasn’t going to change the language of the text itself. I read from Isaiah 56:1-8, one of the Scripture readings in the Catholic liturgy, and preached on the need to play all parts in the Christian narrative. To play all parts isn’t to erase all identifying markers of gender such as the persistent “he’s” and “him’s” peppered throughout our text. But the calling to find ourselves in union with God alone,  a creator who is neither male or female as you pointed out last week, is to ultimately acknowledge the transience or fluidity of our gendered identities and the parts we play in them.

Rush was leading the worship music in what I jokingly called a good ol’ husband and wife variety hour. I had to tread carefully in my critiques. I left the masculine pronouns but was a bit more picky about the title of ‘Father’. Would you call Father and Son titles? names? metaphors? I sense their orthodox use throughout history has you committed to their continuing utility for our post-modern era. Coakley even points out Gregory of Nyssa’s belief that these words were authoritatively given in revelation.

But there are other titles, names, metaphors like Master and Servant that we’ve used more sparingly in recent years and and in certain communities for the connotations they have with slavery. I wonder if Father and Son haven’t lost some of their radically intimate natures and become tainted by their sexist connotations. Do we keep the words and insist on different meanings or do we keep the intentions and insist on different words? Even Gregory acknowledges “father” and “mother” have the same meaning. Was God then simply giving people a revelation – one that included masculine titles – because God, like us preachers, was worried about what they could stomach? In the end, I only changed a paltry Father to Maker in one song, and Father Almighty to God Almighty in the creed we spoke.

Of course, my sermon itself provided the greatest space for creative use of language. And as much as I wanted to sprinkle the blessings of “she” for God’s personhood, I neutered it, every last gendered marker available. As a guest preacher, I measured the effectiveness my words would have on an audience I barely knew and one with whom I’d have little ongoing opportunity for conversation.

Does neutering or mentioning no gender for God really go towards Coakley’s vision of the abolition of the “sex class system”? Or does it simply fall into the trap Coakley lays out in her seventh chapter that the neutral person often stands as a substitute for the normative male? But if she reads Gregory correctly, that human transformation is “unthinkable without profound, even alarming, shifts in our gender perceptions,” then who are we to not usher people along in these shifts by any – radical – means possible?

Thinking, thinking, thinking,
Erin