A few pics from my reading tonight

Beautifully decorated cherry pies

Gorgeous flowers with love from my parents

Clint and I before the reading

Introductory comments

Friends reading liturgy to frame my work (in background)

Reading a childhood story

Reading a story from Oxford

Through no fault of my lovely, last-minute photographer, the pics are a little dark.  Alas, the pictures never do justice to these things.  But everything went beautifully.  I read 30 pages of my writing in a little over an hour.  There were so many friends who came, who helped out, and who ate cherry pie afterward. Pie served from tables spread with red checked tablecloths.  It made me truly happy.

Mr. Eliot, I would like to introduce you to K'naan.

(Today was a tough day. I've been very undisciplined and I was sinking into a funk of existential despair and malaise. But then I remembered that tonight there was an open mic at Regent. I hadn't written a poem in a very long time, so I figured it was time to claw my way out of the malaise. I've been wanting to write a hip hop inspired rhyming poem for a while since we've been listening to a lot of very good rap recently. So, here it is with love for you all.)


Reading and writing,
Reading and writing,
much like fighting
thunder and lightning
I always lose.
Yet my throat is tightening
as I shake to my shoes,
in a holy act of words:
I choose.


I thought that rhyme was dead
all possibility exhausted
by the men in my Norton’s Anthology.
My professor in college, she
taught me it was about innovation
while I saw gradual stagnation--
language became a still pool
overwrought and uncool.
Then I heard slam and I learned
to fondle the words and their turns
to apply pressure and let them express
the strange power of their native noblesse;
cacophony of origins diverse,
epiphany of courage new in verse.
Perhaps what we have lost
is not the words but their cost:
we must bare our souls
to them without a higher goal
than just to listen and let them flow
But who am I to say I know
anything about words?

Reading and writing
reading and writing
like humans flying
straining and trying,
with waxen wings,
I tremble, crying
in the wind each word sings,
we think we know so many things.

So I’ve set aside poetry to listen
long blinded by the glisten
of fresh black on a blank page.
The silence sends me into a haze
where the words pummel me with force
plebian and coarse,
words that have not been civilized
like I have, black eyed
from the way the world is.
Words that hum and fizz
can only be heard and never seen,
to see is to make them everlasting,
and they are only breath in air
or they would cease to be there
at all. Unless I think of them as waves
pulsing the dusty motes, hardly slaves
to brother light who only theoretically
plays the particle, holding mystery
in the glint of sunset from a snowy peak
in wind-whipped ocean, grey and bleak.
Seen and not word.

Reading and writing,
reading and writing,
fighting and flying,
tightening and crying,
Who am I to say that when I choose
I lose?

The deep, inarticulate reasons...

I was reading for a class that I started today called "The Moral Fit: A Fresh Look at the Relationship of the Sexes" -- the reading was Stanley Hauerwas, "Sex in Church: How Adventurous Christians are Doing It" -- when all of the sudden one of the deep, inarticulate reasons that I came to Regent washed over me again. I want to read my Bible again without being angry. That's why I'm here. Every act of interpretation in the presence of the Holy Spirit is an act of rebellion to reclaim the promises of each verse, rebellion against the Enemy who battles against the Church of God, trapping our minds in lies about their meaning. Well-thought-out, rational, reasonable lies.

O God, deliver our minds from all the lies that our culture tells us about what it means to be human persons. Deliver all the teachings of Your Church from our captivity to culture and its systems. Raise up men and women of wisdom to combat heresies, to speak Your Truth in an age that does not want to hear Truth, to speak it loudly and with heart-rending love in the very temples of Empire. Give them the gift of interpretation of dreams, give them the gift of advising the kings of the earth, give them discernment to re-tell the stories that give meaning to our lives so that we can see You more clearly. Give them the courage to walk through fire and pray in the midst of lions. May their blood unjustly spilt be the seed of new growth. Give us rest from the oppression of the Evil One. Give us faith to press more into You every day.

"Be present, merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night: that we, who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, may rest on your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN."
(Evening Collect, Australian BCP)

Where are all the women?

As we've been studying the interrelationship between Christian thought and culture this year at Regent, the most pressing question on my mind is: where are all the women? We started with the ancient Roman world, then moved on to study the Church Fathers, the changes the Christendom brought to the European West, and the effects of the Reformation. It's not that there haven't been any women, it's just that women's thoughts and observations aren't typically included in what academics like to summarize as "Systematic Theology."

Part of the cold, hard truth for me to confront as a feminist as I reflect back on this material is that in the ancient world a woman's daily life did not usually include an intellectual education, and even if it did, very few women wrote. But if we are historically honest, it was Christianity that began to break down the cultural barriers of the ancient world like gender roles. Many strong women have risen up in the history of Christianity: from Mary and Martha, to Lydia and Priscilla, from the desert mothers and early martyrs, to the women like St. Macrina who worked and taught alongside the Church Fathers, from the mystics of the Middle Ages like Julian of Norwich and St. Cathrine of Sienna, to the women of the early evangelical and pietist movements. Women are everywhere present in the history of Christianity.

But what about its thought? Systematic theology is too often thought of as a line of Western European men who refer to the (mostly) Western European men who came before them. I don't mean to diminish the work they have done, so many of them committed their whole lives to puzzling about what it means to be a Christian. But maybe it's not about tracing an absolute line of Christian doctrines through history, maybe it's about a few people in every generation puzzling it out again, using whatever resources they have (I heard a statistic this week that the average medieval scholastic had only 400 books to work from in his entire library, and didn't even read all of them in his lifetime. No wonder I feel overwhelmed in the library!).

The delightful thing for our generation is that we have a lot of resources that nobody had before. A girl sitting in a library in Vancouver, British Columbia can read books written 1700 years ago in Alexandria and Cappadocia. Conveniently translated into her language, even conveniently selected to reference the particular topic she is interested in, say, women in Ancient Greece and Rome, or women in Late Antiquity. She can begin to gather the women's texts that do exist and make sense out of them.

But all of this can be very distracting. If there are so many books, how do we tell which ones to prioritize, which ones are the "most important?" Are they merely the ones that most influenced Christians through the ages? What about the ones that have only recently been "rediscovered" or dug out of forgotten corners of very old libraries? Why were those considered unimportant for so many years and now considered of great importance? Should we reinterpret the tradition of "Christian Thought" to take a woman like Julian of Norwich seriously, or was she merely a woman trying to figure out her weird near-death experience? Did she herself ever expect for her text to be included and studied alongside men of the church like Aquinas or was she writing for a completely different devotional purpose? What is the ideal for theology--one of Augustine's sermons to new church members or a City of God? The Institutes of Christian Religion were a labor of love for Calvin, but have they also led some astray in their hunger to systematize "the answers?"

There are no easy answers to these questions. But to take a stab at the opening question: women were here in the Church all along, contributing to its life however culture would let them, and often seeking, in small ways, to make life better for their daughters. Because if it hadn't been for all those faithful women, I don't think we would have ever imagined a cultural moment where a girl like me could puzzle about these things as she plods toward a second master's degree.

A quiet evening

The apartment is quiet right now. Clint went out for a walk and I'm about to start my Hebrew assignment on pual, hiphil and hithpael verb stems. We had a lovely dinner tonight, slow cooker beef stew (mmm...) with biscuits and salad. The table is cleared now and my red and pink and orange and yellow birthday roses back in their place on it. I'm sipping some cold jasmine tea with milk as I work.

I've had a bit of a slow start to the semester and somehow managed to get pretty far behind in my reading. Maybe it's the subject matter. One of our New Testament texts is NT Wright's The New Testament and the People of God and the first 100 pages or so where Wright explains his methodology have reminded me a lot of Cedarville and the biblical education I absorbed there. Unfortunately, although I really did appreciate my Cedarville education overall, I was frustrated in some of the Bible classes. Something seemed to be missing. I'm really glad that Regent is filling in some of those gaps but it has been a bit hard for me to process. I had no idea how dissatisfied I was with the premillenial dispensationalist framework, or how my frustration had stalled my spiritual life.

We've also been studying the Reformation in my Christian Thought and Culture class and its hard for me not to project onto it all my baggage and see it as the beginning of all divisive, individualist denominationalism. But I'm humbled too, because it's not so easy to see the way forward for the church today sometimes either. We too are limited by our historical moment, our cultural and political ideological environment.

I come to these questions as a lay person, but one who cares deeply about how we do church. And I've felt hurt by the church before, which makes me a little skittish about a lot of things. And yet God works with us still right where we're at--me in the labyrinth of my emotions and memories, the church in her wanderings.

Time to get to that Hebrew. ;)

Setting the alarm for 7

Well, tomorrow the alarm will go off at 7am and I will actually have to stumble out of bed, get myself all psyched up and head off to Hebrew class again. Oh the hardships of being a seminary student. I really do think it's inhumane to offer Introductory Hebrew at 8am. I can barely read forwards at that early hour, let alone backwards.

All my folders are ready and packed away into my backpack. I've read ahead enough to last me until Wednesday's New Testament class. I've practiced the Hebrew alphabet through once or twice again, with only a slight case of letter dyslexia. ("Which way do you write ayin, honey?" I ask as I trace imaginary Hebrew letters in the air with my finger, none of which are even remotely discernable to my poor husband.)

Of course, there are still a lot of books in the "Christmas Reading" pile especially any books that required thinking theologically or otherwise. Really, the Divine Comedy was a bit overambitious at this point... I read quite a few young adult novels, a Christmas novel, a few more pages of Cien Años de Soledad (still chipping away at it), skimmed a few books on women and Christianity that I picked up at the Regent bookstore for criminally low prices, and started more books than I finished, of course. But it was a really good and relaxing break. I don't think that I've been on a break in years where, outside of a week with family, my only responsibility was to pass the time however I saw fit. Or maybe it was a more personal victory, maybe I just haven't let myself be on break without carrying around a weight of "I ought to"s in a long, long time.

I got a strong dose of the sadness of the holiday season this year, the broken, raw reality of family life, indeed any life with other people who are not you. But also a lot of real beauty. I passed my preliminary Canadian Citizenship exam (that is, I played hockey outdoors). I ate a ton of wonderful food. I got to read a ton, just for the sake of reading. I even wrote a little bit (though unfortunately not on this blog).

The best part is, deep down, I feel ready for that alarm to go off in the morning, even if it will be a shock to my system and I'll be tired for a few days as I readjust. Deep down I'm ready for round 2.

My life in a Bibliography

It has been a really busy week. One of those coming-to-the-end-of-term weeks that I had kinda forgotten about. It has been a strange transition for Clint and I to come out of "real world" work and into the mental work required of grad school.

Let me recommend a few books, since that's my area of expertise right now.

First, let me recommend to you that you should remember to read a good children's picture book every once in a while. My personal favorite is a book called Miss Suzy about a squirrel. I've been surprised to remember how much children's lit deals with the real kind of pain we experience daily.

On that note, take some time to read a Young Adult fiction book that you haven't read since you were a child. I read Little House in the Big Woods and found it richly rewarding. Can I also recommend two books that I didn't read as a child but enjoyed dedicating an afternoon to now? They are Holes by Louis Sachar and The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin.

If you are a feminist who struggles how to deal with "patriarchy" in the Biblical texts without denying inherency I have two books to recommend: Discovering Eve by Carol Meyers and Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion by Margaret Y. MacDonald. They were very helpful to me recently in defining what my own biblical feminism is without devolving into polemical arguments about "women in ministry" or "women and authority." (My paper this week was on women in the early Church context, esp. regarding "reproductive rights")

Oh, and if you ever wondered if there were any women recorded in the first, hmm 1300 years of Christian thought, one great book to check out is The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan.

Hmm... what else. I'm beginning to sound like a librarian for women and children.

Can I give a hearty recommendation to read Julian of Norwich's long text Revelation of Divine Love if you haven't before? I know, I know, I'm biased, but I was looking at it again recently. SO rich.

Needless to say, after such a heady life, Clint was beginning to get hungry (since our agreement is that I cook dinner for him) and our apartment was a big mess. So this weekend brought to life a domestic urge. We are relatively tidy now and ready to face another week of reading.

Blessings in the many and diverse undertakings you might face this week!