by Mary Ann Lundy
1997 Voices of Sophia
General Assembly Breakfast
Syracuse, New York
Introduction by Susan Halcomb Craig
Introduction:
The stole I wear is one Voices commissioned and had made; you wrote about it in the Spring '97 Illuminations. It's by Betty Graham of Santa Fe. "When one weeps - all taste salt."
Dear Friends, in Voice's formative days, I was a silent member. I went to the St. Louis meeting with a figurative bag over my head because I was national staff - so it's wonderful to be out of the closet and to be here today with bells on to introduce Mary Ann.
Mary Ann: You are the one who pushed over the top, after years of grousing that Presbyterians were resisting feminist/womanist theologies and theologians, US! After years of knowing we needed to go outside the institutional church to find our voices and our strength - and your ecumenical sisters acted; you created Re-Imagining, and nothing will ever be the same. Because of you and Re-Imagining, Voices was born. Mother, Sister, Wise Woman, Muse, you became an example for us of all that is faithful/is woman/is alive - and we thank you.
You are central in the paradigm shift we KNOW is happening: we're midstream, still in change, water up to our waists, encountering you as you encounter us. It's exciting! And we thank you.
Mary Ann came to us from the World Y, Central American advocacy, the Sanctuary Movement - remember the letters we wrote when you were under house arrest? From COWAC, then the Women's Unit: But there was Shape and Form, and then you were Associate Director of the General Assembly Council re-shaping us further. "The Gals were out of the Corral," Ginny Davidson said. "Oh Goddess!" I said. Did you know how many ugly letters we'd get? And it was the price of change, More Light for us all, more struggling for you, till you found your stride in the World Council of Churches.
You found LIFE after denominational employment. You found LOVE after denominational employment. AND you asked us to reimagine who we are as women and men of faith coming out as feminists and Christians and Presbyterians all at once.
And we thank you.
We're here, Mary Ann, and we're glad you're hanging in there. Like you we trust the vision of the smile on future's face! And we yearn for a future that is free. We say today:
Common ground, if it be on the backs of some of us, is not enough.
I invite you all to take off your shoes and stand, as able, with me on the holy ground we claim. STAND UP and welcome our sister Mary Ann back among us: She who was, and is ever becoming. Blessed be!
~ Susan Halcomb Craig, Los Angeles, CA
Three Hundred Years Later: For Mary Ann
These are dangerous days for imagining,
days when burning bushes
are turned into pyres
and seers
are taken as scapegoats.
Three hundred years ago
they killed the heretics
in presses of stone
and at fiery stakes.
Three hundred years
after the fires went out
in this land,
the witch-hungry presses are still around,
now spewing glossy and slick
and just as mistaken.
And in this land
three years later
there is still much at stake,
more than jobs
more than positions
more than orthodoxy.
Three hundred years ago
those women knew what this is about:
about power
about naming
about claiming holy things
as their own.
I tell you this: three hundred years later
white women are crying out
that there is better news
for these days,
I have seen it
breaking bread at the table
embracing the brokenhearted
touching with oil the wounded and weary
laughing and dancing and singing and free.
It is beautiful, I tell you,
and it is strong
and it is rising.
Prayer for All Things Rising
For all things rising
out of the hiddenness of shadows
out of the weight of despair
out of the brokenness of pain
out of the constriction of compliance
out of the rigidity of stereotypes
out of the prison of prejudice;
for all things rising
into life, into hope
into healing, into power
into freedom, into justice;
we pray, O God, for all things rising. Amen.
~ from the book Sacred Journeys, A Women's Book of Daily Prayer,
Jan L. Richardson. Nashville, Upper Room Books, 1995.
Hanging In there...
It is good to be here. I wasn't at all sure when the leaders of Voices of Sophia asked me to come that I wanted ever to come to another General Assembly. The Wichita Assembly, my last, had been hard for me and the scars are still there - memories well up and I am amazed at how vivid they yet are. Why go to another General Assembly, I asked myself.
And then I received a message with the proposed theme for this breakfast - "Hanging In There..." and my doubt increased, for how could I, out of the country for two years, know what you who have been here all the time have been facing within this denomination? When you are the ones who have had to stay and face the cacophony of strident, even belligerent, voices, how could I come here and tell you about sticking it out? But I decided that I would come and be with you and learn from you and that listening and crying and singing together would be an act in itself of hanging in together.
So here we are...with my preaching on a theme to the converted. You are the ones who have been hanging in there, who come to G.A. year after year - whether you like it or not because there's work to be done. But while I am preaching to the hangers-in, I also know that you feel more and more like outsiders looking in. One of you said to me yesterday, "I'm here to find the community, for I feel so out of it, so pushed to the margins."
As Howard Rice puts it in his column in the Witherspoon Network News, "As we engage in post-mortems on the vote on amendment B and also on COCU, it is a time in which many of us feel marginalized in our own church; we feel that our denomination has taken a turn to the right that has left us behind. We wonder whatever happened to the church we love, to its progressive stance, its willingness to be fully ecumenical, its commitment to be inclusive? How do we fit in? Have our concerns become irrelevant to the direction of the church?"
Do we hang in or get out? Choose to stay and maybe be exiled? If we choose to stay, why? Why stay, feeling marginalized, even exiled?
I have told many of you the story of my interview with Bill Bright, a young reporter for the Washington Post, after the Wichita Assembly. Bill ended the very long interview with a question that stunned: "What are you going to do - stay in the Presbyterian Church? Or will you leave and join another?" For only a second I hesitated. "I am going to stay in this church. It is my church. It brought me up, it nurtured me. It brought me to this time. Of course, I'll stay." And then I stopped. "But this isn't the only church or even the one that is doing it's best. I could belong to another church. Of course." Suddenly I realized that I had a choice. I didn't have to stay. Who needs it! I thought for a moment. Knowing that I could choose to stay has made all the difference.
Why stay? Well, we stay because this is our community - our family. We need each other and we need to know that no one of us is alone. We need to be greeted and hugged and welcomed and then we need to give each other permission to be angry. We need to cry together, tears of frustration and sadness, tears that will move us out of our lethargy and our paralysis. Most of all, we need to support each other.
We need to remember that it is in marginalized communities of pain shared that surprisingly enough, hope is born, joy emerges. We learn that the experience of our own pain must make us more compassionate about the pain of others. That understanding the pain that others have survived helps us to know what can be borne.
Perhaps one of the things that we have to teach each other is that the pain some of us most fear can be borne, has been, by many others who have come through it and out of it, have come to know reality in deeper ways. In these communities of outsiders we learn not to be so afraid. We gain strength from each other to stand against the forces that divide, that seek to win in order to gain power. We gain courage even to stand alone. And we learn from each other that there are different ways to be courageous, just as we learn that we are afraid of different things.
Perhaps it is an ironic twist that we can learn things, experience different gifts than we expected from each other, when we are in a community of outsiders. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a real gift to be a part of an outsider community. Not to be marginalized alone, but to be a community of the outside looking in. For we not only see the issues of justice differently, we feel more acutely, but we do indeed learn to tell our stories and to listen and hear each other differently.
For some of us the most vital, most vibrant and vital experience of real oikoinia, of a strong experience of community of faith, was in the Sanctuary Movement with Central American refugees, who told their stories of fear and freedom far from home. Who expressed their living faith in a living God far from security. Their inability to be safe anywhere and yet their trust of us, total strangers, part of the enemy, in fact, with their lives because we believed in that same God of liberation was life-giving for us. In a sense because they believed us to be people of faith, we became in fact people of faith. That trust became a kind of thread that bound us together, that moved us all to risky, decisive action, to taking risks that none of us would have believed possible. And we experienced the indescribable joy that emerges from the excitement of being alive in the midst of terrible threat.
I think we, too, hang in, we stay with the church, because we know that being loyal to our tradition, to be a Presbyterian, the always-reforming, never-there-yet tradition not only gives us permission, but even pushes us to push the boundaries of our past. To be loyal to our tradition means to take it seriously enough, to have the confidence that its symbols are able to be re-imagined - that our affirmations, our confessions are relevant to the present questions.
In the words of one of the speakers, Mary Farrell Bedarnowski, at the Re-Imagining Conference: "We come together as a people of faith who know that a tradition that cannot re-imagine itself cannot survive and who know that a tradition that does not listen to many voices will not be whole..." will not be just, will not merit our allegiance. One criterion for staying or leaving...
If the only absolute is God then we have the responsibility, you and I, to use all our energy to reform this institution and to do it knowing that we are right to do so. That's my understanding of belonging to a confessional body.
And we have a further responsibility in making the decision to leave or to hang in as we tell our stories of our Presbyterian past to look at who is in and who is out, who is included and who is not, to figure out all the ways that outsiders have been created by the system - by race, by economic class, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation - all the ways the church, our church, has used to call people "different" and "sinful" and to silence them. And then we have to speak the truth, break the silence.
Who is missing from the family? We have to ask the questions about why and discover within ourselves the energy to keep on, to persist in writing an inclusive history for our day.
And we have to ask whether the boundaries of our Presbyterian tradition can be pushed to limitless inclusion. What does it mean to really include others? And if the boundaries can't be pushed then I believe we have ceased to be both church and Presbyterian.
To leave or to stay? We've asked the questions about the past, about our present, what about the future? Where is the vision? Is the Presbyterian Church so obsessed with keeping its have and have nots divided clearly that it can no longer articulate a vision? What kind of community do we wish to be? Can we look beyond ourselves to encompassing an ecumenical vision, a vision for the whole oikoumene - a vision for all of creation? A vision of community that expands rather than constricts? A community that cares more about justice-love than about right thinking? A community that reflects the teachings of Jesus and reflects his life in our midst? What vision do we hold?
One vision that has been helpful to me for holding up is that of our friend and colleague and sister Presbyterian Letty Russell. It is of the roundtable - a table, a church, with no preferred seating, no in's and out's, no first or last, no head or foot, but seating for all, for full participation and nourishment for all, equal expectations, and mutual responsibility and support. Wouldn't it be beautiful???
I want to close with a poem that was sent to me during the aftermath of Re-Imagining and that I cherish. It is by a Methodist sister - Jan Richardson and it talks about silencing and speaking - it is for all of us.
~ Mary Ann Lundy, Geneva, Switzerland
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