Taussig, Hal and Cole, Susan Cady
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| - | Oh, here we go, and, | 0:00 |
| so if you could just say your names please. | 0:07 | |
| - | Susan Cole. | 0:11 |
| - | Hal Taussig. | 0:13 |
| - | Thank you, and I kind of know the answer to this, | 0:14 |
| but I'll ask anyway, are you lay or clergy? | 0:17 | |
| - | Clergy, United Methodist. | 0:20 |
| Retired. | 0:21 | |
| - | Retired, yes. | 0:23 |
| When and where were you born? | 0:26 | |
| - | Denver Colorado, May 18th 1947. | 0:28 |
| - | East Cleveland Ohio, September seventh 1945. | 0:34 |
| - | Oh okay, thank you. | 0:39 |
| And where did you go to school, graduate school, | 0:41 | |
| divinity school? | 0:43 | |
| - | See I went to Ohio Westland. | 0:45 |
| And then I went to Union Theological Center. | 0:48 | |
| - | I went to Antioch College, Methodist Theological School | 0:54 |
| in Ohio for the M Div, | 0:59 | |
| and then the Union Institute for Aging. | 1:03 | |
| - | Okay, okay. | 1:08 |
| And is Union Institute affiliated with Union Theo-- | 1:10 | |
| Susan And Al | No. | 1:12 |
| - | I never was a (mumbles). | 1:15 |
| But, no, that's a school that is in Cincinnati Ohio, | 1:22 | |
| and I went through the program when there were no | 1:28 | |
| interdisciplinary PhDs, and they were, | 1:32 | |
| and so they're not a theological institution | 1:39 | |
| but they did do theology, because we were looking at, | 1:42 | |
| because some of us theologically interested in poems, | 1:47 | |
| were interested in interdisciplinary material. | 1:50 | |
| - | So what was your-- | 1:56 |
| - | So I'm basically a New Testament scholar. | 1:58 |
| And, I did my dissertation for instance was | 2:02 | |
| a three hour dramaturgy of the Revelation to John. | 2:06 | |
| So it was interdisciplinary, had to do with the media | 2:12 | |
| and New Testament. | 2:16 | |
| - | Oh, fascinating, wow. | 2:17 |
| Why don't I start with you, Susan, | 2:21 | |
| how did you first become interested in feminist theology | 2:22 | |
| in general, and then we can talk about Sophia in particular. | 2:25 | |
| We'll start with feminist theology in general, I guess. | 2:28 | |
| - | I think that was the impetus to go to seminary, actually. | 2:30 |
| It was a feminist impetus to go to seminary. | 2:33 | |
| And when I, and that came out of my experience in church. | 2:35 | |
| Yeah boy, that's a really interesting question, | 2:47 | |
| I'm not sure if I could even pinpoint it exactly. | 2:50 | |
| But, here's what I can remember going back, | 2:54 | |
| that's stretching things back, that's going (laughing). | 2:57 | |
| - | But do the long version of this, | 3:01 |
| this is really wonderful stuff. | 3:02 | |
| - | Yes! | 3:03 |
| I wanna hear. | 3:04 | |
| - | Well... | 3:06 |
| I was a Methodist all my life, Methodist. | 3:08 | |
| And when I came to Philadelphia I had a directive | 3:13 | |
| by a religion professor at Ohio Westland | 3:18 | |
| to the United Methodist Church here in Germantown, | 3:22 | |
| which is pretty close, which is a pretty progressive church. | 3:25 | |
| And so I got hooked up there, and, | 3:29 | |
| in the course of that, became involved with | 3:32 | |
| one of the pastors in a small community, | 3:38 | |
| we met weekly, we were pretty intensely doing a program | 3:42 | |
| and things at the church and elsewhere, | 3:47 | |
| and I found that I was really being dissed a lot. | 3:49 | |
| A lot. | 3:54 | |
| - | Could you say a little bit more about what that was, | 3:56 |
| what that looked like? | 3:58 | |
| - | Well, the guys, these were couples, | 3:59 |
| so there were several couples, | 4:04 | |
| and the man in the couples were | 4:06 | |
| constantly paid attention to. | 4:09 | |
| (mumbles) | 4:12 | |
| Like kind of typical stuff. | 4:14 | |
| And also during that period, so that was kind of | 4:16 | |
| grumble, grumble, kind of going on on one side, | 4:22 | |
| and then the other was, I was, | 4:26 | |
| the church got a woman about my age, | 4:30 | |
| maybe a year or two younger, but very close to my age, | 4:35 | |
| as an associate, and so for the very first time | 4:37 | |
| I saw a woman preaching. | 4:41 | |
| And so very quickly, within six months, | 4:43 | |
| it became clear that I had a call to ministry, | 4:45 | |
| that I hadn't been able to articulate, | 4:48 | |
| I was incredibly involved obviously, had always been. | 4:50 | |
| But it was at that point, like, oh, | 4:53 | |
| and I knew that, I guess part of the grumble grumble, | 4:55 | |
| and then seeing something that was real | 4:59 | |
| and female in the pulpit, it was a feminist era, | 5:03 | |
| do you know? | 5:08 | |
| - | This was in the early 70's? | 5:09 |
| Be early 70's. | 5:14 | |
| - | Early 70's. | 5:16 |
| And so, there was a lot of feminist stuff going on. | 5:17 | |
| And so when I looked for seminaries, | 5:20 | |
| I specifically looked for one that I thought | 5:22 | |
| would support that impulse in me. | 5:25 | |
| And I remember, one of the things that happened, | 5:28 | |
| right before I left for Union, | 5:32 | |
| was the ordination, the regular ordination | 5:34 | |
| of the 11 women. | 5:40 | |
| And I had two of those women priests | 5:42 | |
| were teachers of mine at Union, | 5:46 | |
| which was really fun. | 5:48 | |
| It just kind of continued that-- | 5:49 | |
| - | So this is the Episcopal women-- | 5:50 |
| - | Yes. | 5:51 |
| Oh yeah, it was certainly possible for me to be | 5:53 | |
| ordained in the Methodist church, | 5:56 | |
| but to have that, such exciting gathering right here | 5:59 | |
| in Philly, sort of go from that to Union, | 6:02 | |
| and just kind of continue the work | 6:06 | |
| and the, just checking things out and finding, | 6:09 | |
| I got involved with the Bible there. | 6:14 | |
| That was my major, my major focus was with the Bible, | 6:16 | |
| and trying to find women in it. | 6:23 | |
| Trying to find women in it, | 6:25 | |
| trying to find feminine anything in it. | 6:27 | |
| - | Is that when you first started finding Sophia? | 6:32 |
| - | No, did not find that at Union at all. | 6:35 |
| I did my thesis there on feminine imagery | 6:39 | |
| in the crossing of the sea, in Exodus. | 6:45 | |
| - | Miriam. | 6:51 |
| Or no, no-- | 6:52 | |
| - | Not just Miriam. | 6:53 |
| More than just Miriam. | 6:54 | |
| The sea itself. | 6:55 | |
| - | Say a little bit more about that, that's intriguing. | 6:57 |
| - | Well, I mean, the sea became womb, | 7:00 |
| womb to 'em the whole, and baptism, | 7:03 | |
| and the time that into baptism. | 7:06 | |
| Yeah. | 7:09 | |
| And looking at some of the other... | 7:11 | |
| Stories that were, that were, | 7:18 | |
| I don't know whether they preceded the Hebrew story | 7:25 | |
| or whether they, I can't remember anymore, | 7:28 | |
| that information, but, it was all of these | 7:30 | |
| God and Goddess stories that had similar kinds of, | 7:35 | |
| similar movements. | 7:39 | |
| So it was more the movement, it was like a, | 7:40 | |
| feminine movement through the female. | 7:45 | |
| - | So was it at Union you were first introduced formally | 7:49 |
| to feminist theology? | 7:52 | |
| - | Yeah, that's when I was formally introduced | 7:54 |
| to feminist theology, it was there. | 7:57 | |
| - | And how did you discover Sophia? | 8:00 |
| - | That was later. | 8:03 |
| I was, | 8:05 | |
| can't remember if I was still in school, | 8:09 | |
| I think it was after school. | 8:12 | |
| It was after school, I worked at | 8:14 | |
| a Calvinite Methodist Church in West Philadelphia, | 8:19 | |
| and Hal was there, and there was a bunch | 8:22 | |
| of really angry disgruntled women there (laughs), | 8:27 | |
| and another woman, a clergywoman in Caldig and I, | 8:32 | |
| Sandy Forrester-Dufrain, met with this group | 8:35 | |
| of mostly young women, mostly at Penn, | 8:38 | |
| but some were older, called a feminist study group. | 8:41 | |
| And they were really pushing for some shifts | 8:46 | |
| in the liturgy and God language and all of that. | 8:49 | |
| And Hal was trying, Hal's on the staff, | 8:54 | |
| and he was trying to, I don't know what you were | 8:57 | |
| trying to do, whatever you were trying to do, | 9:00 | |
| you were at least trying to make some kinds of coming round, | 9:02 | |
| and he introduced a study of Sophia in Proverbs. | 9:06 | |
| So it wasn't really until I got, | 9:12 | |
| I never heard word one about it at Union, | 9:14 | |
| not word one, no. | 9:17 | |
| It was really in these Bible studies at Calvary, | 9:19 | |
| and I thought, oh boy, she's just not good enough. | 9:25 | |
| That was my reaction. | 9:29 | |
| - | What do you mean, she's not good enough? | 9:31 |
| - | She was just too peripheral, too-- | 9:32 |
| - | Oh. | 9:35 |
| - | It wasn't a big enough character to carry | 9:37 |
| what needed to be carried. | 9:39 | |
| - | So what changed? | 9:41 |
| - | When I had a vision. | 9:44 |
| So it was really a personal experience | 9:46 | |
| that shifted that for me. | 9:47 | |
| - | I've read a little bit about the vision, | 9:50 |
| could you say a little bit more about that? | 9:52 | |
| - | It's actually in one of my sermons. | 9:56 |
| I pretty much put a lot of it in there. | 9:57 | |
| - | Yes, that's where I read about it, yes. | 10:01 |
| - | It's been years, so let me see if I can remember, | 10:04 |
| this was, it was a very significant date however. | 10:06 | |
| It was Epiphany. | 10:09 | |
| - | Perfect. | 10:15 |
| - | Yeah. | 10:16 |
| And, I was actually preparing, | 10:20 | |
| I had been preparing a sermon that I was gonna | 10:21 | |
| be offering at a women's group, here in Philly. | 10:24 | |
| We had a feminist, we had a feminist organization | 10:31 | |
| that put on monthly worship services | 10:37 | |
| that were specifically feminist in everything. | 10:41 | |
| And I have thought, well, I'll do a Sophia sermon. | 10:45 | |
| It wasn't that I wasn't interested in Sophia, | 10:52 | |
| she just seemed too small. | 10:54 | |
| And so I was working on it, that evening, | 10:58 | |
| that was an evening. | 11:01 | |
| And I was playing some music. | 11:04 | |
| And... | 11:09 | |
| There she was. | 11:11 | |
| I mean really, it was just there she was. | 11:12 | |
| (laughs) | 11:15 | |
| There she was. | 11:17 | |
| And she, she was a dark-haired woman, laughing, | 11:19 | |
| with sparkly, really sparkly eyes, | 11:28 | |
| and she was, | 11:31 | |
| standing at a doorway, but the door was one of those | 11:33 | |
| half-doors, you know, have an upper half | 11:37 | |
| and a lower half, and she was standing, | 11:40 | |
| if I could see the top part of her, | 11:42 | |
| then she was laughing and she was calling to me. | 11:44 | |
| And I can't remember, there was something, | 11:49 | |
| there was another part of this, | 11:53 | |
| and this was the part that I'm kind of losing, | 11:55 | |
| what my state was at that moment. | 11:57 | |
| But, | 11:58 | |
| I know that I was in some bit of, despair would be | 12:02 | |
| too strong a word, but I know I was kind of in a slump, | 12:07 | |
| and she calls out, and she says, | 12:12 | |
| "Come on, I've known you forever, | 12:16 | |
| "I've known you since before you were born." | 12:18 | |
| When I say that, that makes me teary. | 12:20 | |
| And... | 12:23 | |
| "And you've always been faithful." | 12:30 | |
| There was something about my always having been faithful | 12:32 | |
| that was really important, and that's the part | 12:34 | |
| that I can't remember anymore, | 12:36 | |
| what the struggle was that I was concerned | 12:37 | |
| about my faithfulness. | 12:39 | |
| I honestly don't remember that anymore. | 12:41 | |
| I might have to go back to my journal | 12:42 | |
| and see if I can recall that, but I don't right now. | 12:44 | |
| But, "You've always been faithful, and come on, | 12:48 | |
| "we've got lots to do, let's..." | 12:51 | |
| So that was it, it was just pretty short, | 12:54 | |
| but it was really powerful, | 12:58 | |
| and I was just in tears, I was just like whoa, | 12:59 | |
| so overwhelmed with that. | 13:02 | |
| And I remember that the next day we were meeting | 13:09 | |
| for Bible study. | 13:11 | |
| We had this little group of clergy and lay folks, | 13:13 | |
| who did the weekly Bible study. | 13:16 | |
| And they were coming in the next day and say, | 13:18 | |
| well, why are we even talking about call, | 13:20 | |
| like it came up in the Bible study. | 13:23 | |
| Something about call, and I said, | 13:25 | |
| well I just had one (laughs). | 13:27 | |
| I just had one. | 13:29 | |
| So I was able to just talk about it, right there, | 13:30 | |
| right after-- | 13:34 | |
| - | And how did people respond, do you remember? | 13:35 |
| - | A little... (laughs) | 13:36 |
| Well I remember having that reaction too. | 13:42 | |
| I remember it was being teary and overwhelmed, | 13:44 | |
| but also thinking, this is a little weird. | 13:48 | |
| Am I losing it? | 13:52 | |
| So I had all those thoughts. | 13:54 | |
| And I can't recall again, maybe I've written it | 13:57 | |
| in my journal somewhere, I hope so. | 14:00 | |
| But I later did a meditation, | 14:03 | |
| within a week or two afterwards, | 14:09 | |
| I did some meditating. | 14:10 | |
| And in that, in the meditation, | 14:13 | |
| was able to meet her again. | 14:18 | |
| And the setting, in my meditation, | 14:21 | |
| was I was in a big, oh I know what the situation was, | 14:23 | |
| I was really worried about | 14:27 | |
| whether I could stay in the church. | 14:28 | |
| It just felt so big, all of a sudden | 14:30 | |
| she became very big. | 14:33 | |
| Really big! | 14:34 | |
| Really big. | 14:35 | |
| And I felt really connected, like right here, | 14:37 | |
| really connected. | 14:39 | |
| So she was in me, she was all over, big. | 14:40 | |
| And I wasn't sure I could stay in the church, | 14:43 | |
| as a clergyperson, with that kind of, | 14:45 | |
| what was happening in me. | 14:49 | |
| And so that was what the impetus for this prayer | 14:51 | |
| meditation was, and so I found myself, | 14:53 | |
| in the meditation, being in a big, big big gothic church. | 14:56 | |
| And she stood in the doorway at the far end. | 15:07 | |
| And there was outside, usually gothic churches | 15:11 | |
| don't have doors at that end, but this one did. | 15:15 | |
| And it was a doorway, and outside was outside. | 15:20 | |
| And she was calling me out, and I though, oh shit. | 15:24 | |
| I'm gonna have to leave the church. | 15:27 | |
| And outside, and, outside there was this great big | 15:29 | |
| humongous airy dome, over the church, | 15:33 | |
| and over everything. | 15:37 | |
| Over everything! | 15:39 | |
| Nature, people, it was wonderful, it was so, | 15:41 | |
| I mean even now, that's my church, was that. | 15:44 | |
| But the church was in it, | 15:49 | |
| so I didn't have to leave the church | 15:52 | |
| to be part of something larger. | 15:53 | |
| - | So in both cases she was at a doorway. | 15:56 |
| - | She was. | 15:59 |
| - | And why do you think, do you have any thoughts about that? | 16:01 |
| - | I've thought about that. | 16:04 |
| I mean, it's thresholds, right? | 16:05 | |
| - | And how about laughing? | 16:09 |
| - | Yeah, laughing was really wonderful. | 16:11 |
| Laughing was really wonderful, it was. | 16:13 | |
| - | And I'm gonna, one other quick question. | 16:18 |
| I think I understand but just to be sure, | 16:21 | |
| why did you feel as if initially, | 16:23 | |
| your connection to Sophia meant that | 16:25 | |
| you would leave the church? | 16:26 | |
| - | Well because she said, come on, we've got work to do. | 16:29 |
| - | I see. | 16:32 |
| So you saw it as calling out. | 16:33 | |
| - | Yeah. | 16:34 |
| - | Okay, yeah. | 16:35 |
| That's wonderful, thank you. | 16:38 | |
| Hal? | 16:40 | |
| How about your, first became aware of feminist theology? | 16:41 | |
| - | And can I ask Susan another, give her a reminder? | 16:45 |
| - | Absolutely, this is great about being together, yes. | 16:50 |
| - | So, I like the way you talk about your childhood | 16:54 |
| and adolescence, and what you had then | 17:03 | |
| later in high school and college, | 17:06 | |
| how you started noticing the implicit call, there. | 17:10 | |
| - | Oh, my call to the ministry, that stuff? | 17:17 |
| In my childhood. | 17:22 | |
| - | Well, whenever... | 17:24 |
| - | No, I think it was more a high school. | 17:27 |
| Yeah, I was really really always, | 17:30 | |
| a church kid, you know, I was really active. | 17:33 | |
| Active in the youth group, head of the worship community | 17:35 | |
| in high school youth group. | 17:38 | |
| So I got to write the prayers and lead the (laughs). | 17:40 | |
| I remember doing that, it was really fun, | 17:46 | |
| I liked doing that. | 17:47 | |
| And, all the guys that I was dating, | 17:48 | |
| up until I met that guy that I married, | 17:55 | |
| were going into either the ministry, or, | 17:59 | |
| one of them, after we were dating for a year, | 18:01 | |
| decided to go into the Roman Catholic priesthood. | 18:03 | |
| And so for a while I got interested in Catholicism, | 18:06 | |
| and I thought really seriously about it, | 18:09 | |
| it was during Vatican two, it was really exciting, | 18:11 | |
| and I thought seriously about converting | 18:15 | |
| and becoming a nun. | 18:17 | |
| Yeah, yeah, so there was all of these, | 18:19 | |
| clearly trying to, yeah. | 18:21 | |
| - | Did you think about being | 18:23 |
| a Methodist pastor at that point? | 18:25 | |
| - | No, never. | 18:27 |
| A minister's wife, maybe. | 18:29 | |
| Yeah, but it just never, no. | 18:31 | |
| Not until, not until the woman at my church. | 18:35 | |
| - | And obviously no one encouraged you in that. | 18:41 |
| - | No. | 18:44 |
| No, there was not on the radar screen. | 18:46 | |
| - | And say a little bit about, | 18:50 |
| how many visions you'd had before this one. | 18:52 | |
| - | None. | 18:57 |
| - | Really? | 18:58 |
| - | Nor any after. | 19:00 |
| - | And say, how would you describe yourself, | 19:05 |
| outside of that vision, | 19:08 | |
| in terms of your, being drawn to visionary stuff? | 19:12 | |
| - | Well I mean, I was spiritual director now, | 19:22 |
| so it's really important to me | 19:23 | |
| to be able to affirm and pay attention to | 19:25 | |
| and take seriously everything that a person experiences. | 19:30 | |
| - | So when you had the vision, | 19:34 |
| one of the things you kept saying was, | 19:35 | |
| I don't have visions. | 19:38 | |
| (laughing) | 19:39 | |
| - | Yes. | 19:44 |
| - | This is just outside. | 19:45 |
| - | Yes! | 19:47 |
| Fascinating! | 19:51 | |
| It really came out of the blue and-- | 19:52 | |
| - | It really came out of the blue. | 19:54 |
| - | Knocked your socks off. | 19:56 |
| (laughing) | 19:57 | |
| - | Or it came out of really interesting difficulties | 19:58 |
| and pains and possibilities, so it seems to me | 20:02 | |
| like you were at, and you learned how to take in | 20:06 | |
| some of the ways of addressing the pain and | 20:10 | |
| the possibilities. | 20:16 | |
| - | You know, I'm wondering, | 20:17 |
| I'm sorry I didn't prepare better-- | 20:21 | |
| - | No, this is wonderful! | 20:24 |
| This is great. | 20:26 | |
| - | I think maybe the struggle I was having | 20:27 |
| was staying in the ministry. | 20:29 | |
| I think that's what it was, | 20:31 | |
| I think I had been-- | 20:32 | |
| - | No, you said that explicitly. | 20:34 |
| - | Okay, I think so, okay. | 20:36 |
| Now it's starting to come back. | 20:38 | |
| Okay. | 20:40 | |
| I had been in the ministry for a while | 20:43 | |
| and I was at this wonderful church, | 20:44 | |
| that really had, they had feminists in the congregation, | 20:46 | |
| they were like, you know, I had pretty good colleagues. | 20:49 | |
| Perhaps a good colleague, they weren't all great, | 20:53 | |
| but it was a mix of colleagues. | 20:56 | |
| But really, I had a clergywoman, | 20:59 | |
| we had some funny staff. | 21:04 | |
| It was a bunch of us on the staff, | 21:05 | |
| on this little mission church. | 21:09 | |
| So I think there's a clergywoman that got on the staff, | 21:11 | |
| and was openly working on the whole issue. | 21:14 | |
| And this one guy who wasn't so much, | 21:18 | |
| but he talked the dog, didn't walk it very well. | 21:20 | |
| But even so, I found myself really in a situation | 21:25 | |
| where I just wasn't sure I could do it anymore. | 21:29 | |
| It was too constraining. | 21:32 | |
| And that's right, there was an incident that happened | 21:35 | |
| at worship, and it happened at Eucharist, | 21:38 | |
| it happened at the community service. | 21:40 | |
| And, if I was leading worship, | 21:44 | |
| I believe I was leading the communion that day, | 21:46 | |
| and the words just left me, I couldn't... | 21:51 | |
| I thought, oh my God, I am doing this, | 21:54 | |
| we're all getting together around a man, | 21:58 | |
| this doesn't feel good. | 22:02 | |
| And I remember stumbling, I stumbled over | 22:04 | |
| the liturgy some, and all the way through | 22:06 | |
| that service I was talking to myself, saying, | 22:11 | |
| this is larger than just a man. | 22:15 | |
| This is a man who became God, | 22:16 | |
| this is the community, we're all part of the body of Christ, | 22:20 | |
| we're all part of the body. | 22:24 | |
| I was talking to myself, in my head, | 22:25 | |
| the entire time I led that worship service, | 22:28 | |
| and I thought, and afterwards, I thought, oh my God, | 22:30 | |
| what's happening to me? | 22:33 | |
| I might not be able to do this any longer. | 22:35 | |
| Yeah. | 22:37 | |
| - | So that's why those words, "You've always been faithful," | 22:38 |
| were what you needed-- | 22:41 | |
| - | I knew that was important, but I couldn't (mumbles)-- | 22:42 |
| - | This is good! | 22:45 |
| And thank you, keep it up, this is helpful. | 22:46 | |
| Yeah. | 22:48 | |
| - | That's it, that was it, yeah. | 22:49 |
| And it's also why, having the church inside | 22:51 | |
| this larger airy dome was also important, | 22:54 | |
| I didn't have to leave, cos I was really struggling with it. | 23:00 | |
| I do remember getting together with some | 23:02 | |
| of my clergywomen friends, | 23:04 | |
| and I don't know if I shared that particular moment | 23:05 | |
| with them, but I remember, being in the middle of struggle. | 23:09 | |
| In talking with them, sharing with them. | 23:14 | |
| - | So is it safe to say your initial reaction | 23:19 |
| was you thought your experience of Sophia | 23:20 | |
| would lead you outside the church, | 23:22 | |
| but it's what enabled you to stay in the church? | 23:23 | |
| - | Absolutely, yeah. | 23:26 |
| She's what enabled me to stay. | 23:29 | |
| I have said that many times. | 23:31 | |
| That she's what enabled me to stay. | 23:34 | |
| - | And you wanna say now, a little bit more | 23:39 |
| about that longer journey with her, | 23:41 | |
| and your journey as a woman in ministry with her? | 23:46 | |
| - | It got messed up pretty quickly. | 23:55 |
| But, the initial, aside from obviously, | 24:01 | |
| this whole discernment with the lever, | 24:06 | |
| that got decided pretty quickly, | 24:07 | |
| but the other thing that really happened was that, | 24:09 | |
| was having this connection with her. | 24:13 | |
| Just, it affirmed my body, as a woman. | 24:17 | |
| Totally. | 24:23 | |
| - | Could you say more about that? | 24:24 |
| - | It really transformed the way I felt in my body, | 24:26 |
| from the very moment of that vision. | 24:30 | |
| I really felt, there's some lovely passages in scripture | 24:32 | |
| about being God is love, and we're in God, | 24:37 | |
| but it was always, | 24:41 | |
| and I loved them, I remember there was a priest, | 24:43 | |
| a Catholic priest during the Vatican two time | 24:46 | |
| who had this wonderful psalm, eucharistic liturgy, | 24:48 | |
| and there was this lovely song | 24:52 | |
| that he had written to go with this Johannine passage. | 24:54 | |
| And I would sing that a lot. | 24:59 | |
| But then it really fit. | 25:04 | |
| - | Do you remember what the words were, | 25:06 |
| that meant-- | 25:08 | |
| - | God is love, God is love, and... | 25:09 |
| And we who abide in God abide in love, | 25:20 | |
| or abide in love abide in God, that's it. | 25:24 | |
| God is love and we who abide in love abide in God. | 25:26 | |
| And there was, and God in us. | 25:33 | |
| I loved that! | 25:37 | |
| I still do. | 25:38 | |
| But it just, when Sophia arrived, | 25:40 | |
| it was clear that she was in me and I was in her, | 25:45 | |
| and there was no tension at all. | 25:49 | |
| That tension, that whatever little bits of tension | 25:53 | |
| that were around that, disappeared. | 25:56 | |
| - | And to make sure I understand, | 25:58 |
| is it because she was female? | 25:59 | |
| - | Yeah, absolutely. | 26:00 |
| It was her femaleness. | 26:01 | |
| - | So it affirmed your female body. | 26:04 |
| Yeah. | 26:05 | |
| Well to pick up on your question, | 26:09 | |
| how did that evolve for you? | 26:14 | |
| - | Well how it evolved was, | 26:17 |
| I started spreading the good news! | 26:24 | |
| So I talked to, we had, back in those days | 26:27 | |
| there weren't that many of us clergywomen | 26:31 | |
| in the Methodist church, and we got together, | 26:34 | |
| I don't know how often, monthly maybe. | 26:37 | |
| And so fairly soon thereafter, | 26:39 | |
| within the next couple of months, | 26:41 | |
| I remember sharing this with them. | 26:43 | |
| And I wrote letters to people who I thought | 26:46 | |
| might be interested, sharing it with them, | 26:49 | |
| what my, | 26:52 | |
| the woman who was my New Testament tutor at Union, | 26:56 | |
| Sharon Ringey. | 27:01 | |
| I remember sharing it with her. | 27:04 | |
| And a woman who was a part of the larger Calvary committee | 27:06 | |
| who's a Roman Catholic nun, I sent a letter to her. | 27:11 | |
| And just, a few, I can't remember, | 27:17 | |
| those are the two that I remember specifically, | 27:18 | |
| but there were people I thought, | 27:20 | |
| I want to let them know. | 27:21 | |
| I really thought I was sharing the good news. | 27:24 | |
| - | How did people respond, do you recall? | 27:26 |
| - | I remember that the nun wrote back to me and said, | 27:30 |
| "well yeah, sure, that's God." | 27:33 | |
| Looks like she was pretty matter of fact! | 27:35 | |
| (laughing) | 27:37 | |
| It's exciting! | 27:41 | |
| Now I understand that perfectly. | 27:44 | |
| (laughing) | 27:45 | |
| I don't know if I heard anything from Sharon, | 27:50 | |
| maybe, I don't know if I heard anything from, | 27:53 | |
| I can't remember if I did. | 27:54 | |
| - | How about the other clergywomen, do you remember? | 27:57 |
| - | Yeah, most of them were really excited, | 27:59 |
| and a couple of them said, | 28:02 | |
| this is gonna get you, get us in trouble. | 28:04 | |
| - | Really, right away. | 28:07 |
| - | Right away. | 28:08 |
| They knew that. | 28:09 | |
| And that was like, I was still too much in euphoria | 28:12 | |
| to even notice that my (mumbles). | 28:14 | |
| And I thought I can preach about it! | 28:21 | |
| I preached about it at Calvary almost immediately! | 28:23 | |
| Within a week or two. | 28:25 | |
| - | And then you continued to preach about the Sophia texts. | 28:30 |
| - | Yeah, and then I organized a group. | 28:34 |
| It was made up of a lot of the feminist study group, | 28:36 | |
| but other people, it was women. | 28:39 | |
| And we met, I don't know, every week, | 28:41 | |
| every two weeks, and we looked at the texts, | 28:45 | |
| and we did all manner of spiritual exercises with the texts, | 28:47 | |
| the Sophia texts. | 28:52 | |
| And I started finding more of them, | 28:54 | |
| because it wasn't just Proverbs, there were other things | 28:55 | |
| I found, actually one of them had almost | 28:59 | |
| exact words that she said to me, | 29:01 | |
| and I about fell over. | 29:03 | |
| - | Really? | 29:05 |
| - | Yeah. | 29:06 |
| - | Do you remember where that's from, by any chance? | 29:07 |
| - | Oh, let me see (mumbles). | 29:11 |
| (laughing) | 29:12 | |
| The thing about being before I was born, | 29:19 | |
| and wisdom is with the faithful, in their mother's wombs. | 29:21 | |
| - | Okay. | 29:26 |
| - | I thought, oh well. | 29:28 |
| - | Yes, yes. | 29:31 |
| - | That's impressive! | 29:31 |
| - | So, the sermons and some of the study materials in here | 29:34 |
| are from that. | 29:35 | |
| And what kind of reaction did you get from people | 29:40 | |
| in the church? | 29:42 | |
| - | Well, our church was a really funky, | 29:44 |
| lovely little church, but it was a real mix of people. | 29:46 | |
| There were these feminists, and then there were | 29:49 | |
| working class African-American folks from the neighborhood, | 29:53 | |
| and there were other students, Penn students mostly, | 29:56 | |
| and there were people from an organization called | 30:01 | |
| Movement for a New Society. | 30:06 | |
| They lived communally, and they were really out there | 30:08 | |
| activist types, social activist types, | 30:12 | |
| so there were those folks. | 30:14 | |
| And then there were folks who lived in group homes | 30:15 | |
| because they were mentally ill. | 30:18 | |
| So it was a mix, a real mix of people. | 30:22 | |
| And so, some people were really interested and excited, | 30:25 | |
| some people were kind of scratching their heads, | 30:28 | |
| and the African-American folks kind of thought | 30:30 | |
| I'd probably gone off the deep end. | 30:32 | |
| They were polite, they were polite. | 30:34 | |
| - | Now, were the feminists mostly the Penn students? | 30:37 |
| What was the demographics? | 30:40 | |
| - | Great majority were the Penn students, but not all. | 30:42 |
| There were, there's an older woman in the congregation, | 30:47 | |
| who was very very active, and in looking back, | 30:53 | |
| looking back, do you know, | 30:57 | |
| I think she was a closeted lesbian. | 30:59 | |
| It gave her a place to be that she'd never been before. | 31:03 | |
| - | If I'm hearing you right though, | 31:09 |
| you said, some African-Americans members of the community, | 31:10 | |
| they might have thought you were a little, | 31:14 | |
| gone off the deep end, was there any strong resistance? | 31:16 | |
| - | No, there was no strong resistance. | 31:18 |
| And the other, every time that I preached, | 31:24 | |
| after that first one, the first one was kind of, | 31:26 | |
| (high pitched wail), that first one, | 31:28 | |
| I always couched it in, | 31:31 | |
| I always kind of went through, | 31:33 | |
| Sophia is basically the Greek word for wisdom, | 31:35 | |
| and wisdom's in the Old Testament, | 31:38 | |
| and Jesus is called Wisdom in the new, | 31:42 | |
| I would just produce mini little things, | 31:44 | |
| almost every time I preached. | 31:47 | |
| I would couch it in some kind of little teaching. | 31:49 | |
| So they, they were at least, | 31:51 | |
| folks just came along, mostly. | 31:55 | |
| But, there was one, I can't remember, | 31:59 | |
| I remember Hal, you and I, finally decided, | 32:03 | |
| we have stretched this congregation too far | 32:06 | |
| in terms of what they could handle anymore. | 32:10 | |
| We were just finding out more things, | 32:14 | |
| and it was just getting a little bit too much to do | 32:16 | |
| in sermon form. | 32:19 | |
| And I think that's when we formed that group. | 32:22 | |
| - | How did you know that was the case? | 32:26 |
| That you'd stretched them too far? | 32:29 | |
| - | Do you remember? | 32:33 |
| - | I don't. | 32:34 |
| - | Do you remember the conversation? | 32:35 |
| - | I think it was just that the, | 32:37 |
| even the politeness would fray a little bit, | 32:41 | |
| and you could see the lack of attention, and so forth. | 32:46 | |
| - | Do you think it was that they thought | 32:52 |
| you weren't orthodox anymore, | 32:54 | |
| or it was just, they didn't resonate with it? | 32:57 | |
| Or do you have any sense of what was going on? | 32:59 | |
| - | I honestly don't. | 33:02 |
| I remember one woman, this was an African-American woman | 33:03 | |
| and she, she was a lesbian. | 33:07 | |
| Anyway, we had a little food co-op at the church, | 33:10 | |
| it was really more of a buying club. | 33:15 | |
| And I'd picked her up and we were doing some stuff | 33:17 | |
| around that, and I said something about, | 33:20 | |
| being kind of out of it, and she says, | 33:22 | |
| well yeah, well I can tell that from your sermons. | 33:25 | |
| And I can't remember what exactly I said, | 33:28 | |
| something about, there's a clue there. | 33:29 | |
| - | Do you have an idea about why it was | 33:35 |
| African-Americans who acted that way? | 33:37 | |
| - | Trying to think if there were other people | 33:53 |
| besides African-Americans, because I just remember | 33:54 | |
| that she most certainly was. | 33:56 | |
| Jesus is just so important. | 33:59 | |
| Jesus is so important in the African-American-- | 34:00 | |
| - | Absolutely, yeah. | 34:04 |
| - | And another way to think of saying similar things is, | 34:07 |
| is that, so the marginal character of one's place | 34:10 | |
| in the world as African-Americans, | 34:17 | |
| means that signals that you can give, | 34:22 | |
| that you actually are in the same world, are important. | 34:25 | |
| So this did not seem like worth the risk. | 34:30 | |
| - | Yes. | 34:34 |
| - | There were some African-American women | 34:36 |
| who were part of this feminist study group. | 34:38 | |
| They were lesbians, so their feminist identity | 34:41 | |
| was very important to them. | 34:46 | |
| And they were fully engaged. | 34:48 | |
| - | One of the things I noticed in the book, | 34:52 |
| which is making a lot of sense to me, | 34:54 | |
| is how pastorally concerned that you were, | 34:56 | |
| that you said, you're constantly saying, | 34:59 | |
| if your audience is this, I don't know if audience | 35:02 | |
| is the right word, but-- | 35:04 | |
| - | You came out of that, it came out our own experience | 35:06 |
| that it was really important to be pastoral. | 35:12 | |
| I mean, pastoral first, as far as I'm concerned. | 35:15 | |
| And there was actually, when I went to my next church, | 35:18 | |
| and one of the congregants there read the book | 35:20 | |
| and said, so we'll see, she just set it up, | 35:24 | |
| it's all part of a plot. | 35:26 | |
| I thought, no (laughs). | 35:30 | |
| - | And that was the person who made it public. | 35:34 |
| - | Right, and started all the hoo-haa. | 35:37 |
| - | This is so wonderful, there's a lot here, I tell ya! | 35:46 |
| I do wanna continue getting back to the evolution, | 35:51 | |
| where things went, but could I go to you now, | 35:54 | |
| and talk about your, first became aware of that | 35:56 | |
| as theology, and then Sophia in particular? | 35:59 | |
| - | Yeah, I... | 36:03 |
| I think that there was, so my undergraduate at, | 36:06 | |
| what work was doing at a very left wing institution, | 36:12 | |
| Antioch College, and so I had a, | 36:18 | |
| I wouldn't say that I had any prompts there explicitly, | 36:22 | |
| but sort of, interest in the ways that, | 36:28 | |
| I mean, there was mainly issues, | 36:35 | |
| I mean that's the late 60's, that was mainly poverty | 36:39 | |
| and race that our society's, | 36:44 | |
| but I'm sure that there was feminist dimensions | 36:48 | |
| of that college. | 36:52 | |
| But I don't remember myself as being particularly | 36:56 | |
| sensitive or interested in that. | 36:59 | |
| But it seems to me that just being there, | 37:02 | |
| sort of modeled the ways of women and men being together, | 37:06 | |
| that were new to me. | 37:12 | |
| So I suspect that was all subliminal. | 37:14 | |
| - | Did you choose Antioch because it was progressive? | 37:21 |
| - | I can't remember. | 37:25 |
| - | Flip of the coin, wasn't it? | 37:27 |
| - | I mean yeah, I was considering it at the same time | 37:29 |
| as I was considering going to Wheaton. | 37:32 | |
| (laughing) | 37:34 | |
| I was still, in many ways, | 37:39 | |
| somewhat of an evangelical Christian, | 37:44 | |
| and I never, that was never a problem | 37:49 | |
| or never broke in me, it was simply just kind of a | 37:54 | |
| gentle goodbye over decades, I think. | 37:59 | |
| - | Were you brought up United Methodist? | 38:04 |
| - | No. | 38:06 |
| - | No, okay, okay. | 38:07 |
| Yeah. | 38:08 | |
| - | In fact, I was just recruited by the Methodists | 38:10 |
| after I left college. | 38:12 | |
| Because I did, and I won't go into this, but, | 38:14 | |
| in my year abroad I ended up accidentally | 38:20 | |
| changing my program and going to seminary for a year | 38:25 | |
| in France, and, that happened to be the time in which | 38:29 | |
| French theologians were at Vatican two, | 38:37 | |
| writing the documents. | 38:41 | |
| So I ended up having a year of study | 38:43 | |
| with those Jesuits mainly. | 38:46 | |
| So there was a little bit of, | 38:51 | |
| so that's, somewhat implicit. | 38:54 | |
| So I would say that really, I didn't find myself | 38:59 | |
| very sensitive at all to feminist thought, | 39:03 | |
| until I pastored in this church. | 39:10 | |
| And there, I think I was relatively insensitive, | 39:14 | |
| to the needs of the women that I was a pastor. | 39:21 | |
| And, I mean that was a steep, and wonderfully generous | 39:26 | |
| pastor, was almost my first, not quite my first pastor, | 39:35 | |
| I was one year someplace else. | 39:40 | |
| But, so for African-Americans and feminists to, | 39:44 | |
| sort of claim me as one of their pastors was, | 39:51 | |
| was generally, I mean it taught me a lot. | 39:57 | |
| But I would say, it would be a stretch | 40:02 | |
| to call me a feminist at the beginning part. | 40:05 | |
| But learning to, learning to be, | 40:10 | |
| a pastor to these women meant taking them seriously. | 40:17 | |
| So I think that, generally, thinking it most with, | 40:23 | |
| the African-American dimension of the congregation | 40:32 | |
| and the feminists, is trying to be a good pastor, | 40:36 | |
| and tending, I mean, the feminist study group | 40:42 | |
| was happily less patient with me | 40:46 | |
| than the African-Americans were. | 40:49 | |
| So that generally helped me learn how to be a pastor, | 40:53 | |
| and then I think secondarily begin to have | 40:58 | |
| that included in both my own spiritual journey | 41:04 | |
| and my own theological journey. | 41:09 | |
| Because I already had a PhD at that point. | 41:13 | |
| But nothing in my PhD in New Testament, | 41:18 | |
| made me particularly interested, | 41:21 | |
| so I knew about Sophia, | 41:23 | |
| not because I thought she was relevant, | 41:25 | |
| but I just had to read her cos that was | 41:29 | |
| what my advisor had done work in, | 41:32 | |
| not relevant to feminism at all. | 41:38 | |
| - | Who was your advisor? | 41:41 |
| - | Bertan Matt, and so he was, | 41:42 |
| he was really interested in Sophia, | 41:46 | |
| but had really no interest in feminism. | 41:48 | |
| So it was just a slightly awake, defensive, | 41:51 | |
| gesture that I told the feminist study group, | 42:01 | |
| well why don't you try her? | 42:05 | |
| And so-- | 42:08 | |
| - | I remember feeling that way. | 42:11 |
| I remember feeling that. | 42:12 | |
| - | No no, I think that's exactly the way it-- | 42:14 |
| - | Feeling what way, sorry? | 42:16 |
| - | Like it was, well, here's something. | 42:17 |
| - | Okay, okay, yes. | 42:20 |
| Because what were they saying to you, | 42:21 | |
| what were they asking that prompted you to-- | 42:24 | |
| - | Well I mean people were just asking, | 42:27 |
| the feminists were just asking to, | 42:30 | |
| make us recognize them as full members | 42:34 | |
| of the body of God, and of the congregation. | 42:39 | |
| And so, there was all kinds of really lovely, | 42:47 | |
| in retrospect, difficult in the moment, pressure. | 42:53 | |
| That ended up, it taught me a lot. | 42:59 | |
| - | You know, I remember that there was actually, | 43:02 |
| this group was there before I got there. | 43:05 | |
| - | I wondered, okay. | 43:07 |
| - | And before I got there. | 43:09 |
| - | And before you got there, I was wondering, yes. | 43:10 |
| - | And I was asked to preach my very first sermon | 43:12 |
| at that church. | 43:14 | |
| It was my home church, that I started out, | 43:17 | |
| and so my home church, I was a seminarian, | 43:19 | |
| and I was told that the week before, | 43:23 | |
| the feminist study group had charge | 43:25 | |
| of the sermon part of the service, | 43:29 | |
| and they'd done a panel. | 43:31 | |
| And they had done it on Mary Daly. | 43:33 | |
| - | Really, really?! | 43:35 |
| Wow. | 43:38 | |
| - | Yes, they'd done Mary Daly and just blasted away. | 43:39 |
| And so, I was warned-- | 43:42 | |
| - | I wasn't there yet. | 43:45 |
| - | Oh, okay, okay. | 43:46 |
| Yeah, yeah. | 43:47 | |
| - | So that was just my coming in, | 43:49 |
| it was like students-- | 43:51 | |
| - | And you say warned. | 43:53 |
| - | Well, that people are gonna be upset. | 43:55 |
| - | Somewhat upset about-- | 43:58 |
| - | I don't remember if the details, | 43:59 |
| but yes, they had to have been very upsetting, | 44:01 | |
| had to have been. | 44:03 | |
| Can you imagine? | 44:04 | |
| I can't even imagine, I can't! | 44:05 | |
| Mary Daly, so, well anyway, that's what they did. | 44:07 | |
| - | Wow. | 44:11 |
| - | That's something about just being folks, | 44:12 |
| you don't have to think pastorally, | 44:14 | |
| you can just go ahead and blast away | 44:16 | |
| whatever's bothering ya. | 44:17 | |
| And they did. | 44:19 | |
| So no, I preached a sermon that was basically | 44:22 | |
| a sermon that was on my heart at the moment. | 44:25 | |
| It was, yeah, didn't have anything to do with anything | 44:28 | |
| except, yeah, it wasn't all that stuff at all. | 44:30 | |
| - | So I'm sorry that I'm going in kind of slow motion | 44:36 |
| about your question about feminism. | 44:39 | |
| I mean, I was, really educated by this congregation, | 44:41 | |
| and then started reading and paying attention. | 44:49 | |
| And then, these things happened to Susan. | 44:53 | |
| As my congregant. | 44:58 | |
| - | No, I was, I wasn't a congregant. | 45:00 |
| - | Right, by that time you were a (mumbles). | 45:03 |
| And so, by that time I had understood a bunch | 45:11 | |
| of what this meant to her. | 45:17 | |
| And what that was doing in such powerful | 45:19 | |
| and integrative fashion to who she was | 45:22 | |
| and to her own call. | 45:25 | |
| And so, therefore, me being able to, | 45:29 | |
| help folks who were learning about Sophia, | 45:36 | |
| that was easy and I got to also see | 45:41 | |
| how that affected them in a positive way. | 45:45 | |
| And so, and then I took a two year leave, | 45:49 | |
| of the pastorate because my wife, at that time, | 45:57 | |
| was Swiss, and we wanted our children | 46:05 | |
| to know her country, | 46:08 | |
| so we moved to Switzerland for two years. | 46:11 | |
| And I asked for a two year leave. | 46:14 | |
| And at that point I was just saying, | 46:16 | |
| I was, | 46:19 | |
| house husband, and a father at home. | 46:22 | |
| And I was doing a lot of work in my field, | 46:28 | |
| just cos I had enough time. | 46:32 | |
| But I also decided that for my own, | 46:35 | |
| spiritual life that I would simply pray | 46:40 | |
| all of the Sophia texts. | 46:43 | |
| And so I spent really two years, | 46:46 | |
| basically living within the Sophia texts, | 46:48 | |
| and came out of that time, deeply, | 46:55 | |
| deepened as a person. | 47:00 | |
| And then of course, by that time, | 47:02 | |
| society was having us all think about | 47:06 | |
| who we were as men and women, together. | 47:09 | |
| And so, it began to be clear to me that, | 47:12 | |
| my spiritual growth in that regard belonged, | 47:18 | |
| and so that became really the heart | 47:24 | |
| of my own spiritual life, was my relationship | 47:26 | |
| to the Sophia texts. | 47:31 | |
| And so that also taught, because I knew | 47:33 | |
| how to teach texts, and how to pray texts. | 47:35 | |
| That also became my own spiritual journey in that regard. | 47:39 | |
| Became a, another resource in ministry and, theology, | 47:43 | |
| to help other people pray the Sophia texts. | 47:56 | |
| Became just a skill, out of my own, | 48:04 | |
| my own two year monastic relationship to her. | 48:09 | |
| - | May I ask, how did the Sophia texts, | 48:14 |
| praying them, affect you spiritually? | 48:17 | |
| - | All kinds of ways. | 48:23 |
| I mean it's a really big corpus. | 48:24 | |
| So there's just lots of stuff. | 48:27 | |
| So I would say, the way Scripture generally | 48:29 | |
| invades one's psyche and spirit, | 48:34 | |
| through metaphor and the like. | 48:39 | |
| But through me, and therefore who I am as a man. | 48:42 | |
| Who I am as a pastor, as a father, | 48:49 | |
| all those things, this was helpful material. | 48:57 | |
| And then, | 49:03 | |
| it also simply, | 49:07 | |
| and more or less replaced, any sense of loyalty | 49:11 | |
| I might have had. | 49:16 | |
| I mean, by and large I wasn't very interested | 49:19 | |
| in whether things were orthodox or not, | 49:22 | |
| but because I had a really deep relationship spiritually | 49:25 | |
| with texts, and my own belonging to God, | 49:30 | |
| I think more to God than to Jesus, | 49:36 | |
| but just spending those two years with those texts | 49:40 | |
| gave me a functional, deep, deeply emotional belonging | 49:44 | |
| to part of larger Christian belonging, | 49:53 | |
| that really replaced any, | 49:59 | |
| authority that might have existed orthodoxly. | 50:03 | |
| So it made me into a different kind of person | 50:10 | |
| and it made me belong to God at deeper levels. | 50:14 | |
| And here I think I would say, | 50:20 | |
| I think just what we would now talk about, | 50:23 | |
| the character of gender in our own self-understanding | 50:26 | |
| and belonging, came to the fore because, | 50:32 | |
| I was inside of a larger, | 50:38 | |
| set of texts that had really, genderful, imagery. | 50:43 | |
| And kind of, affective, emotional connection. | 50:54 | |
| And so I was just, and by that time I was, | 50:59 | |
| I'd been praying for quite a while, | 51:05 | |
| kind of Catholically with a lot of meditation | 51:09 | |
| and the like and stuff, just to live in that world, | 51:12 | |
| gave me nurture of, and challenge, | 51:17 | |
| but mostly nurture. | 51:22 | |
| So I would write poems as, | 51:25 | |
| as a part of my prayers, so I would meditate on a text, | 51:30 | |
| and then I would write poetry about it, | 51:36 | |
| not for anybody else, but just, for my claiming of it. | 51:39 | |
| Is that close to you-- | 51:44 | |
| - | Yeah, that's very helpful, that's very helpful. | 51:45 |
| I'm not remembering the exact wording, | 51:49 | |
| but you said something about, | 51:51 | |
| did you say something about the larger Christian belonging? | 51:53 | |
| What did you mean by that? | 51:56 | |
| There seems to be that sense of expansiveness | 51:58 | |
| that you were talking about too, | 52:00 | |
| and I wondered what you meant. | 52:01 | |
| - | So I, | 52:03 |
| I think that's, you seem more profound | 52:08 | |
| at the end of the day. | 52:10 | |
| For me, what I meant about that stage is, | 52:13 | |
| so I had a kind of a ragged set of connections | 52:17 | |
| to Christianity. | 52:21 | |
| I was somewhat still evangelical, | 52:22 | |
| in a kind of, | 52:27 | |
| feeling-filled dimension, but by that time | 52:35 | |
| I was a Methodist clergyperson, | 52:40 | |
| and so the character of Methodist belonging | 52:43 | |
| had imposed itself on me, | 52:47 | |
| and seemed relatively open-ended. | 52:50 | |
| And not primarily doctrinal, | 52:54 | |
| but a lot of straight-up kind of Protestantism | 52:57 | |
| in mainline Protestantism, that I had, | 53:03 | |
| that I was pastoring people who were | 53:07 | |
| in that larger belonging. | 53:11 | |
| And then I'd been the mentee of a Roman Catholic cardinal. | 53:13 | |
| So, so, it was a kind of a haphazard set | 53:23 | |
| of belongings and had not a particular wholeness to it. | 53:29 | |
| So that's what I mean is, | 53:33 | |
| the larger Christian mass, that I was attached to. | 53:36 | |
| - | And Sophia helped to integrate that? | 53:41 |
| - | Or replaced it. | 53:43 |
| - | Or replaced it. | 53:44 |
| Could you say more about that? | 53:45 | |
| - | I think, I mean the coherence of those texts, as prayer, | 53:47 |
| gave me a spiritual center, | 53:54 | |
| rather than a diffuse set of connections to Christian-ness. | 53:58 | |
| - | Yeah, that is helpful, yeah. | 54:11 |
| So how did the book evolve, out of all this? | 54:13 | |
| - | Actually, I think that two years of prayer, | 54:17 |
| was, for me, one of the things I brought back, | 54:22 | |
| so it started really after Wheaton became-- | 54:28 | |
| - | I don't, you know, was it after? | 54:32 |
| We had this group going. | 54:36 | |
| We had this group that was not the church anymore. | 54:37 | |
| We gathered folks from the church, | 54:40 | |
| we gathered some who were interested | 54:42 | |
| and we gathered some other clergyfolks | 54:44 | |
| and some friends into a group that-- | 54:46 | |
| - | Meeting every Sunday night. | 54:50 |
| - | We met on Sunday evenings and we did-- | 54:51 |
| - | Was this when you were still at Calvary? | 54:54 |
| - | Yeah. | 54:55 |
| - | And after. | 54:56 |
| We continued after too, for a couple of years. | 54:58 | |
| - | Between five and 20 people. | 55:03 |
| - | And they came from a variety of places, | 55:09 |
| it wasn't just, a few Calvary folks. | 55:11 | |
| Because by that time we'd done some workshops | 55:14 | |
| around and about, and in the larger Methodist arena, | 55:16 | |
| so we had some Methodists from other churches, | 55:21 | |
| were part of it, and clergy, and friends. | 55:24 | |
| - | We went to Grailville, shortly thereafter. | 55:27 |
| That we can for them. | 55:30 | |
| - | And that's where the other-- | 55:33 |
| - | That's where we met-- | 55:35 |
| - | Marian Ronan. | 55:36 |
| - | No, we didn't meet Mary in there. | 55:37 |
| - | No, we didn't-- | 55:38 |
| - | Maybe Mary and Goddess there, or something like that. | 55:39 |
| - | Mary and Goddess there. | 55:43 |
| We'd done some kind of workshop there somewhere, | 55:45 | |
| and don't remember where anymore, | 55:48 | |
| but even invited Marian to come and respond to our stuff. | 55:50 | |
| And Marian said-- | 55:53 | |
| - | This is a book. | 55:56 |
| - | This is a book. | 55:57 |
| - | Okay, okay, I see. | 55:59 |
| - | And she hardly knew anything about Sophia at that time, | 56:01 |
| but started work. | 56:04 | |
| - | And she'd already done a book, | 56:06 |
| on liturgy and feminist literature, | 56:09 | |
| and we needed to do some. | 56:12 | |
| - | If I could switch to some of the questions | 56:15 |
| about Re-Imagining. | 56:16 | |
| Well, this is important background. | 56:20 | |
| This is definitely related. | 56:21 | |
| So you didn't really have any connection, | 56:23 | |
| and Re-Imagining, could you say a little bit more | 56:25 | |
| about what yours was, a little bit of what Hal is, alright? | 56:27 | |
| - | Yeah, and I don't think I can remember my contact. | 56:30 |
| But someone called or wrote me, and said, | 56:33 | |
| we know your work about Sophia, | 56:41 | |
| and we need somebody to write a description of her | 56:46 | |
| for the program. | 56:51 | |
| And, | 56:53 | |
| and so I wrote that, sent it to the person, | 56:56 | |
| whoever they were, whoever she was, | 57:00 | |
| and I never even, I never saw the program. | 57:03 | |
| So, all I know is that I wrote a couple of pages I think, | 57:07 | |
| for, introducing who Sophia was, | 57:13 | |
| that was represented as going in the program. | 57:18 | |
| Person thanked me, but, I don't even know | 57:23 | |
| whether it was in any program, | 57:26 | |
| and what was the program on. | 57:29 | |
| What program was, a liturgy program, | 57:30 | |
| or maybe the program was a larger program book, | 57:33 | |
| for the conference. | 57:37 | |
| That's, and so I wrote about Sophia, because, | 57:40 | |
| and I do remember, a little bit about, | 57:44 | |
| it must have been a phone conversation, | 57:48 | |
| because it was clear to me, this person did not know jack, | 57:49 | |
| about Sophia. | 57:55 | |
| - | Ah, really. | 57:56 |
| - | And I thought, you better have somebody say something. | 57:57 |
| And so, I said, and then she said, | 58:03 | |
| by the time that conversation was halfway over, | 58:09 | |
| she said, what is your itinerary? | 58:13 | |
| - | So she didn't initially call you to write something? | 58:17 |
| - | No, she, it was about Sophia. | 58:21 |
| I'm not sure whether she, | 58:24 | |
| I think it was a kind of inexact request, | 58:28 | |
| when it started. | 58:33 | |
| - | Like maybe she just wanted to know a little bit | 58:36 |
| about Sophia. | 58:38 | |
| - | And it was that character of that conversation, | 58:41 |
| that, as I sent it off to her, | 58:45 | |
| I thought, I don't know if this is gonna go anywhere. | 58:48 | |
| - | Yeah? | 58:52 |
| Well, what do you, | 58:53 | |
| I assume you heard some about the 1993 conference. | 58:54 | |
| Do you know-- | 58:56 | |
| - | Almost immediately after. | 58:57 |
| - | What was your reaction to what you heard? | 58:59 |
| - | It was reported in the Methodist Reporter. | 59:06 |
| It was a national newspaper, reported very badly, | 59:09 | |
| very negatively, was Susan Morrison's picture in it, | 59:15 | |
| was like anything they could do to just slam us, they did. | 59:18 | |
| So it was a real nasty period in that newspaper's life. | 59:23 | |
| And, I had known about the conference, | 59:29 | |
| and I knew I couldn't go, cos it was November! | 59:33 | |
| Like the biggest time of the year, | 59:36 | |
| both programmatically and financial, | 59:37 | |
| I mean there's all kinds of ways, | 59:40 | |
| there's no way I can go on out there. | 59:42 | |
| And I remember thinking, oh, it's really too bad, | 59:43 | |
| I would really love to be there, but can't. | 59:45 | |
| And then, I think the next thing I heard was, | 59:48 | |
| seeing this picture, I think. | 59:51 | |
| And then people's response, because people of course | 59:53 | |
| got the newspaper. | 59:55 | |
| So, I said, you know, I wasn't there, | 59:56 | |
| I don't know much. | 59:59 | |
| - | And she was your bishop at that point. | 1:00:02 |
| - | Yeah, she'd already been through stuff with us. | 1:00:04 |
| - | And I saw it in the secular media. | 1:00:07 |
| And, I remember, that, | 1:00:12 | |
| 11:30 PM news show-- | 1:00:17 | |
| - | Nightline? | 1:00:20 |
| - | Nightline, yeah, I remember seeing that. | 1:00:21 |
| And, I remember thinking, | 1:00:26 | |
| oh, well finally some more people | 1:00:30 | |
| will get to know about Sophia. | 1:00:32 | |
| I mean, I remember being excited about the fact, | 1:00:37 | |
| I mean we, by that time, knew, | 1:00:42 | |
| how Sophia upset people. | 1:00:44 | |
| And so I remember being, happy that she was | 1:00:49 | |
| on the national scene. | 1:00:54 | |
| And we knew how she was powerful for people. | 1:00:57 | |
| - | I think, again, it's hard to remember exactly, | 1:01:03 |
| but I think the first I heard, | 1:01:07 | |
| which is already negative, already attacking, | 1:01:10 | |
| and I thought, oh boy, | 1:01:16 | |
| Susan's in (drowned out by sniff) on the bishops. | 1:01:19 | |
| Got her hands full now, again. | 1:01:22 | |
| But more personally for her. | 1:01:24 | |
| And I remember thinking, and I'm not in it this time. | 1:01:25 | |
| So I had this very selfish thought. | 1:01:29 | |
| Oh, it's not me this time. | 1:01:31 | |
| - | Oh, but that is. | 1:01:33 |
| But that is very interesting too, because, | 1:01:35 | |
| by that time, at least one of the books was out. | 1:01:37 | |
| - | At least? | 1:01:41 |
| Oh heavens. | 1:01:42 | |
| - | Probably both. | 1:01:43 |
| - | Not that one, but the first edition was out | 1:01:44 |
| when I was still in Roxborough, in the 1990's. | 1:01:48 | |
| - | I think it was 1986, maybe? | 1:01:51 |
| - | Something like that, yeah. | 1:01:56 |
| 1890's. | 1:01:57 | |
| - | And the conference itself was-- | 1:01:59 |
| - | 1993. | 1:02:01 |
| - | So, that was actually right in the middle | 1:02:02 |
| of what I think of as the four or five year long heresy. | 1:02:08 | |
| - | It was actually at the waning, | 1:02:12 |
| and it was the-- | 1:02:13 | |
| (everyone talking at once) | 1:02:14 | |
| It was the waning end of it though at that point. | 1:02:17 | |
| We'd already gone through all kind of crap, | 1:02:19 | |
| we'd already been through the charges, at that point. | 1:02:21 | |
| - | But, the next, see, there was a period of | 1:02:23 |
| I think five years in which, | 1:02:26 | |
| our annual conference meeting, | 1:02:29 | |
| which is a regional meeting of Methodist, | 1:02:31 | |
| that every Methodist regional group has this | 1:02:35 | |
| as a meeting in the late spring. | 1:02:39 | |
| And every year, we would be, | 1:02:43 | |
| targeted in the motions, of our regional meeting, | 1:02:48 | |
| about, can we come out-- | 1:02:52 | |
| - | Call this heresy. | 1:02:56 |
| - | In other words, they were just the regional body | 1:02:59 |
| of maybe 1000 people, who met for three days, | 1:03:01 | |
| and we were in the middle of it, cos we had to be there. | 1:03:06 | |
| So there were about a five year period in which, | 1:03:09 | |
| we, going to our annual conference, was knowing, | 1:03:12 | |
| that this was gonna be another round | 1:03:16 | |
| of a kind of a war against us. | 1:03:20 | |
| And that, after, | 1:03:23 | |
| and every year, the motions against us did not pass, | 1:03:30 | |
| but the year that, Re-Imagining happened, it did pass. | 1:03:35 | |
| - | Did it? | 1:03:39 |
| Oh... | 1:03:40 | |
| - | Ain't that funny, I blocked that out. | 1:03:41 |
| - | The motion was, to forbid any pastor | 1:03:44 |
| from preaching Sophia in the worship. | 1:03:49 | |
| - | And that did pass. | 1:03:54 |
| - | That did pass. | 1:03:55 |
| - | Wow. | 1:03:56 |
| - | But it was after, what Re-Imagining did, | 1:03:58 |
| which was really wonderful, it made it national | 1:04:02 | |
| instead of this little, annual (mumble) was fighting. | 1:04:04 | |
| So that did pass, but then, | 1:04:07 | |
| what Re-Imagining did, which was a wonderful, | 1:04:08 | |
| wonderful, wonderful thing, | 1:04:11 | |
| was that it got the bishops in the Methodist church | 1:04:12 | |
| to take it on. | 1:04:16 | |
| Because up til now they just kinda, | 1:04:18 | |
| didn't want it, poor Susan had been dragged through it. | 1:04:20 | |
| But other than she, the bishops as a whole | 1:04:23 | |
| hadn't had to take it on, and they did, | 1:04:27 | |
| and they wrote a-- | 1:04:29 | |
| - | What did you think of the report? | 1:04:31 |
| - | I thought it was pretty good. | 1:04:32 |
| It wasn't perfect, it wasn't perfect by any means, | 1:04:33 | |
| but boy, it was like, okay, | 1:04:36 | |
| this is a legitimate Christian thought. | 1:04:38 | |
| This is not outside of Christianity, | 1:04:42 | |
| which was the basic thing it said. | 1:04:46 | |
| - | I felt like it was, | 1:04:48 |
| better than any official response we'd had | 1:04:51 | |
| to that so far. | 1:04:54 | |
| - | Is that right, yeah. | 1:04:56 |
| - | I mean I think the one thing that I didn't | 1:04:58 |
| diddle with them about is, | 1:04:59 | |
| they said, well, Sophia or wisdom or whatever they called, | 1:05:02 | |
| I can't remember how they talked about her, it, | 1:05:06 | |
| was, this is not a Goddess. | 1:05:09 | |
| And they, very explicit. | 1:05:11 | |
| And you know, I never used Goddess language either, | 1:05:15 | |
| because I was too good of a pastor. | 1:05:19 | |
| But, I remember thinking, oh, come on, guys. | 1:05:21 | |
| It was mostly guys, it wasn't all guys, obviously. | 1:05:25 | |
| Susan was there, and there were other women. | 1:05:27 | |
| But I think that was the only place left on myself, | 1:05:30 | |
| saying, come on, you could have done a little bit better, | 1:05:33 | |
| but mostly it was good. | 1:05:35 | |
| This is Christian. | 1:05:37 | |
| - | They spent a year studying it. | 1:05:39 |
| - | And it was clearly a response to Re-Imagining. | 1:05:41 |
| I don't think it would have happened as long | 1:05:44 | |
| as it was just this little tempest in a teapot with us. | 1:05:46 | |
| - | So, on the one hand you had that resolution | 1:05:50 |
| passed against you, but then there was, | 1:05:52 | |
| would you say overall that the effect was positive | 1:05:54 | |
| from Re-Imagining? | 1:05:56 | |
| - | No. | 1:05:58 |
| I think, I think, our experience, | 1:06:00 | |
| topped off with Re-Imagining, basically quashed any chance | 1:06:03 | |
| of Sophia being a part of liturgy, | 1:06:08 | |
| in the church for a long, long time. | 1:06:12 | |
| - | Yeah, I would say, yeah. | 1:06:16 |
| I felt like the combination of our, | 1:06:18 | |
| of the process against us, | 1:06:22 | |
| and all of the, and I mean, | 1:06:25 | |
| the Good News folks, that was a national, really, | 1:06:29 | |
| campaign against it. | 1:06:35 | |
| And then, Re-Imagining, it felt like, okay, | 1:06:39 | |
| now we are sort of officially blocked | 1:06:44 | |
| from a creative relationship with the mainstream church. | 1:06:50 | |
| I mean not because of us or because of them, | 1:06:57 | |
| but the result was that, I mean, | 1:07:00 | |
| so what did they call it, the IRD? | 1:07:04 | |
| Both Women | IRD, yep. | 1:07:06 |
| - | So they got in and they sort of won that battle. | 1:07:10 |
| - | Yeah, I'm a lot more cursing, | 1:07:16 |
| you know really well just what happened | 1:07:18 | |
| to the United Methodist women, | 1:07:20 | |
| and so for our denomination, | 1:07:21 | |
| they really got slammed, and they fought back beautifully. | 1:07:23 | |
| - | Say some more about how they fought back, | 1:07:29 |
| what you remember about that | 1:07:31 | |
| or what you thought of that? | 1:07:32 | |
| - | Well, I mean, it's all kind of, | 1:07:34 |
| my overall impression now, years later, | 1:07:37 | |
| they fought back really well. | 1:07:39 | |
| They were strong, they were united, as an organization-- | 1:07:42 | |
| - | Which I bet the United Methodists women. | 1:07:47 |
| - | Yeah, and they, they published some stuff, | 1:07:49 |
| and I think they even put out a video, | 1:07:53 | |
| it's my vague recollection, that they did that. | 1:07:56 | |
| But they really came back fighting. | 1:07:59 | |
| They, they were, as an organization, | 1:08:02 | |
| it's partly the United Methodist Church, and yeah. | 1:08:07 | |
| - | Did you ever hear about the Re-Imagining community | 1:08:11 |
| being formed, or was it-- | 1:08:13 | |
| - | I remember hearing about it. | 1:08:15 |
| But it was only hearing about it, it was pretty vague. | 1:08:16 | |
| - | But I think, I think we were interested | 1:08:20 |
| in a relationship, but, | 1:08:23 | |
| that was just kind of an idle thought. | 1:08:27 | |
| - | Yeah, sure, sure. | 1:08:30 |
| How do you, because you experienced the backlash | 1:08:32 | |
| about Sophia, even before Re-Imagining did. | 1:08:36 | |
| And there was also the communion service that drew-- | 1:08:39 | |
| - | That was part of it. | 1:08:44 |
| - | Yeah, so how do you, looking at this now, | 1:08:46 |
| account for what was going on, why this backlash? | 1:08:50 | |
| - | Women. | 1:08:58 |
| Women's power. | 1:08:59 | |
| We talk about it. | 1:09:03 | |
| - | So this, addition, of (mumbles) that a little bit frankly, | 1:09:04 |
| I think that piece, the authorship of Marian, | 1:09:13 | |
| is strong there. | 1:09:18 | |
| So I think we all three have different takes on that. | 1:09:20 | |
| But one of the things we say in that is that, | 1:09:25 | |
| well, as I said, maybe you said it first. | 1:09:27 | |
| So, in our region, first of all there was, | 1:09:32 | |
| we got, for the first time, a bishop who was a woman. | 1:09:40 | |
| Then Susan was, | 1:09:46 | |
| appointed as co-pastor at the, basically | 1:09:52 | |
| the cathedral church downtown of Methodism in Philadelphia. | 1:09:58 | |
| - | And what is that called again? | 1:10:02 |
| - | Arch Street. | 1:10:03 |
| - | Arch Street, okay-- | 1:10:04 |
| - | It's right by City Hall, it's like, very central. | 1:10:05 |
| - | And in both of those cases, | 1:10:08 |
| our regional body was, | 1:10:12 | |
| was having the, men, the men of all kinds, | 1:10:17 | |
| both lay and clergy felt, | 1:10:25 | |
| I mean, so that was terribly offensive to them, | 1:10:29 | |
| that both, now they have a basically, | 1:10:34 | |
| the main church that was representing the congress | 1:10:40 | |
| in many ways, and the bishop, were both women. | 1:10:46 | |
| And, | 1:10:51 | |
| and then, then, they voted on Sophia. | 1:10:53 | |
| - | I think that's where I'd like to jump in. | 1:10:57 |
| Because the book had been published. | 1:11:00 | |
| Not the little lavender cover-- | 1:11:04 | |
| - | The Future of Feminist Spirituality. | 1:11:06 |
| - | That had been published years before that. | 1:11:08 |
| When I arrived at my little congregation in Roxborough, | 1:11:10 | |
| white working class congregation, right, | 1:11:13 | |
| that book was already published, | 1:11:16 | |
| that was already out there. | 1:11:17 | |
| - | And they were happy to have your author. | 1:11:19 |
| - | And it was part of my introduction. | 1:11:21 |
| I mean, in the introductions, I was the author of this book. | 1:11:22 | |
| And I can remember meeting with this young man | 1:11:25 | |
| who was the lay leader, he'd written a book, | 1:11:27 | |
| a little history of that church, that congregation, | 1:11:29 | |
| something like that, and we actually talked | 1:11:32 | |
| a little bit about the fact, you know, | 1:11:34 | |
| so that was at the very, that was before | 1:11:36 | |
| I even got to that church in 1890, I don't do that, | 1:11:39 | |
| I think I must be older than I thought. | 1:11:42 | |
| 1987, would that have been? | 1:11:44 | |
| I don't know, I think 1987, yes, | 1:11:47 | |
| because, our former colleague wrote a, | 1:11:50 | |
| a book review of this book! | 1:11:56 | |
| So for the first one, Sophia, the Future of | 1:12:00 | |
| Feminist Spirituality, the whole thing, | 1:12:02 | |
| wrote a review of it for the United Methodist Reporter | 1:12:04 | |
| for our edition of the United Methodist Reporter, | 1:12:08 | |
| our local newspaper. | 1:12:11 | |
| Because we would get the first page, I think | 1:12:13 | |
| of the United Methodist Report, was our own region. | 1:12:16 | |
| And he wrote a book review of it! | 1:12:18 | |
| We had a book signing party. | 1:12:22 | |
| We invited the bishop and the cabinet | 1:12:25 | |
| and lots of our Methodist colleagues to come to that. | 1:12:27 | |
| It was well-received, people, it was fine, | 1:12:31 | |
| no problem, and, that was in 1987. | 1:12:33 | |
| I was a pastor in this little diddly-doodly church | 1:12:38 | |
| that nobody cared about! | 1:12:40 | |
| Fast forward. | 1:12:42 | |
| Then Susan Morrison was elected bishop in 1988. | 1:12:44 | |
| I was there, I actually helped getting her, | 1:12:51 | |
| I mean I was one of the people there, | 1:12:53 | |
| which was really exciting. | 1:12:55 | |
| I was selected, yes. | 1:12:56 | |
| - | She was an elected delegate, | 1:12:57 |
| which means, one of the leaders of the congress. | 1:13:01 | |
| - | Right, so I was there. | 1:13:03 |
| As a matter of fact I had at that point | 1:13:06 | |
| gotten into this elite organization, | 1:13:07 | |
| the very first woman elected into this organization | 1:13:09 | |
| because I'd written a book! | 1:13:12 | |
| - | And which organization are you talking about? | 1:13:15 |
| - | This stupid little organization | 1:13:17 |
| that now Hal's part of that he thinks is wonderful. | 1:13:18 | |
| (laughing) | 1:13:20 | |
| There's a whole story there, I can tell ya. | 1:13:24 | |
| We've got a lot later, I dropped out after a long time. | 1:13:27 | |
| But, anyway, I don't know if that's so much very important, | 1:13:30 | |
| except to say that at that point I think | 1:13:33 | |
| that they helped get me elected to the judicial-- | 1:13:36 | |
| - | These are all the inside leading male pastors. | 1:13:39 |
| - | Yeah, they were all the big shots. | 1:13:44 |
| - | And they chose her to be in their secret organization. | 1:13:46 |
| - | I got calls from different people saying, | 1:13:49 |
| you gotta say yes because you're the first woman, | 1:13:51 | |
| we've had fights about it, blah blah blah, | 1:13:54 | |
| and I gotta do it. | 1:13:56 | |
| So, okay, so I get in that. | 1:13:57 | |
| And then I'm elected to the jurisdictional conference, | 1:13:59 | |
| I'm sure because they all said, well, | 1:14:04 | |
| gotta get her in, gotta have one woman. | 1:14:06 | |
| All this good Methodist, make sure we've got | 1:14:09 | |
| one of everybody. | 1:14:11 | |
| You know, (laughs). | 1:14:12 | |
| To this day that's still a pattern. | 1:14:14 | |
| So I was, and so she was elected, this was 1988, okay. | 1:14:19 | |
| And then a year or so later, | 1:14:23 | |
| I started having trouble with this lay leader | 1:14:25 | |
| in my congregation. | 1:14:27 | |
| He actually reads the book. | 1:14:28 | |
| - | And, one of the prompts of his is that | 1:14:31 |
| we were on the front page of the Enquirer. | 1:14:34 | |
| - | Oh right, that's right. | 1:14:38 |
| There was that! | 1:14:40 | |
| - | And you were on the front page because-- | 1:14:43 |
| - | Because it's a Sunday, a Sunday in choir-- | 1:14:44 |
| - | A Sophia group. | 1:14:46 |
| - | I see, I see. | 1:14:48 |
| - | The religion reporter of the, | 1:14:49 |
| or one of these reporters of the choir | 1:14:53 | |
| called to ask about, he was doing a piece on, | 1:14:56 | |
| Wicca, or small, women's groups. | 1:15:00 | |
| But part was Wicca, part of it was Wicca. | 1:15:04 | |
| - | Yeah, it was basically, women's religious groups. | 1:15:07 |
| - | Yeah, and so anyway, I was talking about | 1:15:12 |
| how important it was to women to be together, | 1:15:16 | |
| and the kind of the, try to explain a little bit, | 1:15:18 | |
| some of the rhythms of a group like that, | 1:15:22 | |
| and the church, liturgy would look, | 1:15:24 | |
| and finally I said, why don't you just come? | 1:15:27 | |
| You could see. | 1:15:30 | |
| And he came, he brought a little reporter, | 1:15:32 | |
| I mean, like a photographer, | 1:15:34 | |
| and we ended up, we landed, | 1:15:36 | |
| this was in February, I remember now, | 1:15:38 | |
| it's all coming back. | 1:15:40 | |
| We landed on the front page of the Sunday Enquirer. | 1:15:41 | |
| - | And that's what-- | 1:15:48 |
| - | That's when the shit hit the fan. | 1:15:49 |
| - | Yes, because he wasn't experiencing this | 1:15:52 |
| in the church, it was yeah. | 1:15:53 | |
| And then there was a Good News article about this? | 1:15:57 | |
| - | Well he then, wrote, he wrote a piece, | 1:16:00 |
| for the United Methodist Reporter | 1:16:05 | |
| that was an ad hominem attack, | 1:16:08 | |
| accusing me of heresy. | 1:16:11 | |
| - | And then a lot of people started attacking us, | 1:16:13 |
| including Good News. | 1:16:15 | |
| - | But that finally, even that didn't go very far | 1:16:16 |
| until I was appointed to Arch Street. | 1:16:21 | |
| And then the clergy, the white male clergy | 1:16:24 | |
| got on board. | 1:16:28 | |
| But up until that point they'd been kinda, | 1:16:29 | |
| but when that happened, there was change. | 1:16:31 | |
| That's when they started having, | 1:16:34 | |
| that's when the Jesus Christ is Lord taskforce | 1:16:36 | |
| came on board, that's when they began having, | 1:16:39 | |
| Sunday evening, it was kind of like witch hunts, | 1:16:42 | |
| they would give, they had this big-- | 1:16:45 | |
| - | Rallies. | 1:16:47 |
| - | They had big big rallies, anti-Sophia rallies. | 1:16:48 |
| - | Who would have them, and where? | 1:16:51 |
| - | Jesus Christ is Lord taskforce. | 1:16:53 |
| - | But it was the more conservative, | 1:16:58 |
| the conservative white men clergy that really powered it. | 1:17:02 | |
| - | Now, just want to clear the chronology, | 1:17:09 |
| how about this book? | 1:17:12 | |
| Did this book come under, had that caused controversy | 1:17:13 | |
| when it came out, or it was-- | 1:17:17 | |
| - | That one? | 1:17:19 |
| - | The Wisdom Speaks book. | 1:17:20 |
| - | Well the Wisdom Speaks came out | 1:17:21 |
| in the middle of it, actually. | 1:17:23 | |
| Wisdom Speaks came out when I was still | 1:17:24 | |
| in my little church in Roxborough, | 1:17:26 | |
| I remember holding it up. | 1:17:28 | |
| I just got it and I said, | 1:17:30 | |
| I wasn't gonna, I actually weathered the storm | 1:17:32 | |
| at that church pretty well. | 1:17:36 | |
| - | Because that, lay leader, did most damage after you left. | 1:17:43 |
| - | Well, he was doing what he could do | 1:17:50 |
| while I was there, but, | 1:17:52 | |
| I could talk to people, and I could show them the Bible, | 1:17:54 | |
| I was a good pastor! | 1:17:57 | |
| I was able to do some teaching and-- | 1:17:59 | |
| - | This was at the Roxborough church. | 1:18:02 |
| Okay, yeah, yeah. | 1:18:03 | |
| - | We were able to weather it, | 1:18:05 |
| and so, when it came out, I held it up | 1:18:06 | |
| and said, look at the book! | 1:18:07 | |
| No, I don't think, I don't remember, | 1:18:11 | |
| but maybe it did. | 1:18:14 | |
| I mean it was at that point that there were liturgies. | 1:18:15 | |
| It wasn't just theology, which that book was. | 1:18:20 | |
| - | That's what I'm wondering, | 1:18:24 |
| do you think it, makes a difference that as long | 1:18:25 | |
| as it's an academic book it's okay, | 1:18:29 | |
| and then when it starts to be in liturgy and ritual | 1:18:31 | |
| that's when people get upset? | 1:18:34 | |
| - | That's what they said. | 1:18:36 |
| I mean they literally said to us, | 1:18:37 | |
| oh, this is an academic book, and that's okay, but-- | 1:18:39 | |
| - | But you can't be messing with the people-- | 1:18:42 |
| - | You can't mess with the church. | 1:18:45 |
| - | You can't mess with people! | 1:18:47 |
| As long as you just think about 'em on yourselves. | 1:18:48 | |
| - | Literally, I mean some of the most, | 1:18:50 |
| vicious attacks would always say, | 1:18:55 | |
| you can think it. | 1:18:58 | |
| But you can't do it. | 1:19:01 | |
| Don't tell us about sermons and worships and (trails off). | 1:19:03 | |
| - | This is a little foggy, I don't remember | 1:19:07 |
| when I went to Drew. | 1:19:10 | |
| - | Was it 1990? | 1:19:13 |
| - | Arch Street, | |
| or whether I was still-- | 1:19:16 | |
| - | Was that 1991, does that sound right? | 1:19:18 |
| - | I think it's in here... | 1:19:22 |
| - | I just read it and I don't, | 1:19:23 |
| but I'm not positive-- | 1:19:24 | |
| - | I lived in Arch Street then, | 1:19:26 |
| so that would've been after I had moved. | 1:19:27 | |
| - | So, so you were invited as a guest preacher | 1:19:30 |
| to do the communion service? | 1:19:35 | |
| - | Yeah, they had the Nell Morton lectures. | 1:19:36 |
| I did a lecture there. | 1:19:39 | |
| - | I see. | 1:19:41 |
| - | What I did, was I did the lecture, | 1:19:42 |
| the Nell Morton lecture, and I did, | 1:19:45 | |
| a Sophia lecture I think, one evening, | 1:19:50 | |
| and then the next day was chapel service, | 1:19:53 | |
| and Heather, invited me to preach at that service, | 1:19:59 | |
| and I preached a Sophia sermon, | 1:20:04 | |
| because she wanted me to. | 1:20:08 | |
| And she then put the liturgy together, | 1:20:10 | |
| so a Sophia liturgy that she put together, | 1:20:12 | |
| that was hers. | 1:20:14 | |
| - | In the middle of the grievance process in March 1993, | 1:20:17 |
| Susan presented the Nell Morton lecture. | 1:20:19 | |
| - | Oh it was '93, okay, I was wrong. | 1:20:23 |
| Good for you! | 1:20:25 | |
| - | And the annual lecture at Drew Theological School. | 1:20:27 |
| - | Okay, thank you. | 1:20:30 |
| - | Yeah, and it's a shame, it's really a shame | 1:20:35 |
| what happened, then did, it was so nasty. | 1:20:37 | |
| - | Tom Soden. | 1:20:40 |
| Did you have any idea that that was gonna happen? | 1:20:41 | |
| - | He was so perverted, it was so perverted, | 1:20:44 |
| now that's the one where things got totally perverted. | 1:20:46 | |
| He did not listen to that sermon at all. | 1:20:49 | |
| Took it, it was not what I said even. | 1:20:54 | |
| But, I didn't know him, and I guess he-- | 1:20:57 | |
| - | We had-- | 1:21:00 |
| - | He was in the back of the chapel, they told him-- | 1:21:02 |
| - | He have one, I think when you went, | 1:21:04 |
| we knew about him. | 1:21:08 | |
| - | Anyway, but I remember that the other women | 1:21:12 |
| on the faculty were really pleased with what I'd done | 1:21:15 | |
| because I had done such a nice, a nice pastoral way! | 1:21:18 | |
| And they were like, Korean students who were | 1:21:23 | |
| really excited, I remember the response | 1:21:27 | |
| from the students! | 1:21:29 | |
| They were really excited. | 1:21:31 | |
| Because I pulled it together! | 1:21:33 | |
| And it wasn't just out there somewhere, | 1:21:36 | |
| it was really pulled together. | 1:21:38 | |
| And he just blasted. | 1:21:42 | |
| - | So was your first clue when it came out, | 1:21:43 |
| the article came out in Christianity Today, | 1:21:45 | |
| that's the first time that you knew? | 1:21:47 | |
| Yeah. | 1:21:49 | |
| And then what did that lead to for you? | 1:21:50 | |
| - | I was already in the middle of stuff. | 1:21:54 |
| It didn't change anything. | 1:21:56 | |
| I remember going to this, the phi beta meeting, | 1:21:57 | |
| I had a phi beta, this group of-- | 1:22:00 | |
| - | Phi beta kappa? | 1:22:03 |
| No no no. | 1:22:04 | |
| Phi beta. | 1:22:05 | |
| - | This was pretentious-- | 1:22:06 |
| - | Just pretentious, anyway. | 1:22:08 |
| But, I remember going to that meeting which happened, | 1:22:11 | |
| a day or two after that article came out, | 1:22:13 | |
| and just grumbling to people about it. | 1:22:16 | |
| It's totally untrue! | 1:22:18 | |
| But that's when Susan Morrison got in trouble, | 1:22:22 | |
| and I remember being asked to go defend, | 1:22:24 | |
| Sophia theology in the neighboring annual conference. | 1:22:30 | |
| She is bishop, was bishop over two annual conferences. | 1:22:34 | |
| And she said she couldn't do it, | 1:22:38 | |
| she simply couldn't do it, | 1:22:40 | |
| there were people there were still vicious, | 1:22:41 | |
| so I did it for her. | 1:22:43 | |
| - | This is for, four months before the conference-- | 1:22:46 |
| - | Yes, yes. | 1:22:49 |
| - | Was that close? | 1:22:52 |
| It felt like, by the time that came, it was like, | 1:22:53 | |
| the forest was on fire (laughing). | 1:22:57 | |
| I guess because, we must have, | 1:23:00 | |
| the charges must have been dropped by that point, | 1:23:02 | |
| and Susan was taking them on. | 1:23:04 | |
| - | So it sounds like she was supportive of you? | 1:23:07 |
| - | She was, she was, yeah. | 1:23:09 |
| - | And you were supportive of her too. | 1:23:11 |
| - | Yeah. | 1:23:13 |
| - | She was getting attacked as well. | 1:23:14 |
| - | Well, and then she was brought up on charges. | 1:23:17 |
| - | When she dropped the charges against us, | 1:23:23 |
| then she was brought up on charges. | 1:23:25 | |
| - | And that process lasted about three times | 1:23:27 |
| as long as ours. | 1:23:29 | |
| - | Really. | 1:23:31 |
| - | And frankly, she let us know that she needed | 1:23:33 |
| to take some distance from us. | 1:23:37 | |
| She was, at three crucial points, | 1:23:41 | |
| she knew where she stood. | 1:23:44 | |
| But she told us, she had to protect herself somewhat. | 1:23:46 | |
| We were glad for that. | 1:23:53 | |
| - | Sure, yes. | 1:23:55 |
| And who decides, who decides the charges | 1:23:59 | |
| that were brought against her? | 1:24:03 | |
| - | Well this is all, this is against her. | 1:24:04 |
| The charges against her were because, | 1:24:07 | |
| were for not fulfilling her obligation as the teacher. | 1:24:10 | |
| Teaching, allowing folks teaching. | 1:24:13 | |
| Now that was the charge, and there's a larger body | 1:24:18 | |
| in the jurisdiction, I was gonna go judicial, | 1:24:23 | |
| and jurisdictional mixed up. | 1:24:30 | |
| We have-- | 1:24:32 | |
| - | It's basically the entire northeast. | 1:24:34 |
| - | It's the northeast part of the United States, | 1:24:36 |
| including West Virginia, so Western Virginia | 1:24:39 | |
| kind of little hanging on there, to the northeast. | 1:24:43 | |
| And they had a body that, | 1:24:49 | |
| decided charges that came, I guess, | 1:24:54 | |
| I don't know, Hal is it just bishops or what? | 1:24:57 | |
| But anyway, the body there that reviewed the case. | 1:25:00 | |
| And this was the... | 1:25:07 | |
| - | I wanna, be respectful of time here too, | 1:25:10 |
| I don't wanna take too long, | 1:25:13 | |
| but yeah, I wondered if we could just move quickly | 1:25:15 | |
| to the future, where do you, | 1:25:17 | |
| the evolution of Sophia? | 1:25:19 | |
| One question I had is, do you think-- | 1:25:21 | |
| - | I'm gonna go to the bathroom-- | 1:25:23 |
| - | Sure, of course! | 1:25:24 |
| Should I stop it now? | 1:25:26 |
| - | Okay, looks like we are on, excellent. | 0:01 |
| - | Well, thank you again. | 0:04 |
| - | I wondered if you could, in this book, | 0:07 |
| you did a wonderful job of talking about strategies | 0:10 | |
| for bringing Sophia theology | 0:13 | |
| and feminist theology to churches, | 0:15 | |
| and I'm just wondering if you think that | 0:17 | |
| this would work today, would it be different, | 0:19 | |
| would it be easier or harder, or would you change anything? | 0:23 | |
| - | Boy, just because of everything that happened-- | 0:27 |
| - | Right. | 0:31 |
| - | It shut things down, just so, so... | 0:34 |
| Categorically. | 0:42 | |
| Whatever's there is pre everything that happened. | 0:45 | |
| - | Right. | 0:48 |
| - | So now it just seems like, oh yeah sure | 0:51 |
| that would have been nice. | 0:54 | |
| - | Yes. | 0:56 |
| There's a sense of what could have been? | 0:57 | |
| - | What could have been. | 0:59 |
| I remember actually talking to a parishioner of mine | 1:00 | |
| at Art Street who went on to go to Drew. | 1:02 | |
| And at some point I said, you know it's a shame. | 1:07 | |
| It was after re-imagining and all the controversy, | 1:11 | |
| and just all of the ways that women | 1:14 | |
| in those organizations had been shut down so harshly. | 1:17 | |
| So it was really a shame, | 1:21 | |
| because this really would have been such | 1:23 | |
| a wonderful thing to bring to the churches. | 1:24 | |
| And it doesn't seem as though it's going to be possible now. | 1:28 | |
| She said, "Yeah, I don't think so." | 1:31 | |
| And she was a student. | 1:33 | |
| I mean, she was a student. | 1:34 | |
| She wasn't a pastor who was kind of in the thick of things. | 1:36 | |
| She was a student looking at it. | 1:39 | |
| I know that I had it would be nice, | 1:42 | |
| this is again, way back, | 1:44 | |
| I thought it'd be really nice to write a book for lay women. | 1:46 | |
| Just a little chapters with little exercises | 1:51 | |
| and little scriptures, and it would, | 1:54 | |
| it was just too hot, it was just too hot. | 2:00 | |
| It was like a, it just sent, you were either for or against, | 2:02 | |
| there was no, there's no place for, oh wow, | 2:06 | |
| or just the kind of lovely discovery of what might, | 2:11 | |
| of what's there that might be helpful. | 2:15 | |
| So it just felt like that just all got shut down | 2:20 | |
| in the churches. | 2:24 | |
| The place that I know that it still continues is | 2:25 | |
| with the Roman Catholic sisters. | 2:31 | |
| They've been able to keep, | 2:35 | |
| to really let it thrive in nice ways. | 2:37 | |
| That's been very sweet. | 2:41 | |
| - | Do you see any, oh go ahead Hal. | 2:45 |
| - | I was just gonna, Susan, would you say a little bit about | 2:47 |
| your own personal relationship to Sophia in those regards? | 2:51 | |
| I mean, sort of, where she is for you? | 2:57 | |
| - | Oh, okay, that's a different question. | 3:02 |
| Well, that's not future so much as-- | 3:05 | |
| - | Well, I mean, if framing that future-ly | 3:08 |
| would be interesting to me. | 3:11 | |
| - | Well, I don't think, I mean, I... | 3:13 |
| I don't know future, right. | 3:16 | |
| I can tell you where it's come from, | 3:18 | |
| or where it's been, or where it is now. | 3:21 | |
| When I did the spiritual exercises, | 3:26 | |
| which is a part of my... | 3:28 | |
| Part of my formation as a spiritual director | 3:31 | |
| was to do spiritual exercises. | 3:35 | |
| And that's very, very Christological. | 3:36 | |
| Very Christological. | 3:39 | |
| And I did it with Sohpia (laughing). | 3:40 | |
| - | Oh, you did, okay. | 3:43 |
| - | Which was really quite lovely and wonderful, really. | 3:46 |
| And I think my own spiritual life has evolved-- | 3:49 | |
| (all laughing) | 3:56 | |
| - | We're disentangling tea bags here, | 3:57 |
| I am listening, yes (laughing). | 3:59 | |
| - | I think I'm much less personal in my own prayer life and | 4:03 |
| personal isn't where, that sits more, | 4:11 | |
| it's much less personal, much more open to a large, | 4:15 | |
| I don't think so right now, a larger world. | 4:20 | |
| - | Does that mean Sophia still plays a role, or not? | 4:24 |
| - | Sophia is, I mean again, because Sophia was a personal, | 4:26 |
| a personal, you know, the personal. | 4:30 | |
| The personal has pretty much dropped out | 4:32 | |
| of my spiritual life. | 4:34 | |
| And the places where I can connect with Sophia, | 4:36 | |
| I think part of the place that I connect the most, | 4:39 | |
| I know it's the place I connect the most, | 4:42 | |
| is the passage in Sirach, | 4:45 | |
| where the sage is describing wisdom in Torah | 4:50 | |
| and equating them. | 4:59 | |
| And describing, in using the metaphor of river, | 5:01 | |
| the various rivers, the sea, | 5:06 | |
| and there's this wonderful passage | 5:08 | |
| that talks about an eye... | 5:10 | |
| I am a tributary from the river, from the sea, | 5:15 | |
| I'm a tributary from the river, and I water my flowerbeds. | 5:23 | |
| And when I water my flowerbeds, | 5:28 | |
| and this is totally not accurate, | 5:29 | |
| - | (laughing) Don't worry about it. | 5:31 |
| - | I'm not, I didn't grow up in | 5:33 |
| a culture that memorized verses. | 5:35 | |
| And from then, becomes a tributary, | 5:39 | |
| becomes a river, becomes the sea. | 5:41 | |
| And that, I think if I was gonna talk about | 5:43 | |
| my spiritual life, that would be it. | 5:45 | |
| That would be it. | 5:47 | |
| It's, you know, when I'm doing my personal work | 5:48 | |
| it's watering my flowerbeds, | 5:51 | |
| and then that merges, that connects to the large sea. | 5:53 | |
| And I think that's probably the Sophia passage | 5:57 | |
| that most relates right now, for me. | 6:02 | |
| - | So the images now would be more | 6:07 |
| images of water or natural-- | 6:09 | |
| I mean, is that how you're imaging God, | 6:11 | |
| or is that imaging your personal, spiritual life, or? | 6:13 | |
| - | Yes, both (laughs). | 6:17 |
| - | Yes, both, makes sense yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | 6:20 | |
| - | Yeah, and I think being outside in nature is | 6:22 |
| one of my best spiritual practices | 6:25 | |
| and that's all very, it's all very wisdom-y, Sophia-y to me. | 6:28 | |
| - | Yes, yeah, yeah. | 6:33 |
| - | Yeah. | 6:36 |
| - | Do you see, do you still teach about Sophia? | 6:39 |
| Did I read somewhere about you connected | 6:43 | |
| to queer theology or? | 6:44 | |
| - | Well, let me wander around in that a bit. | 6:48 |
| So, first of all, church-wise, | 6:52 | |
| church-wise my, simply, my pastoral appointment | 6:55 | |
| was quite different than Susan's. | 7:01 | |
| So Susan became the cathedral preacher. | 7:03 | |
| And that's a lot of different kind of people. | 7:07 | |
| And with the kind of good pastor she is, | 7:11 | |
| she was sensitive to, at least I felt like you knew | 7:15 | |
| that you preached to who you got. | 7:19 | |
| And my last 24 years here in Chestnut Hill, | 7:23 | |
| so I came to a completely, | 7:30 | |
| basically, a disappeared church. | 7:34 | |
| There were six people all over 75 when I arrived. | 7:36 | |
| And I got, but indication in a situation demographically | 7:42 | |
| that there were new people moving in. | 7:51 | |
| So I got really, did a restart, and was there for 24 years. | 7:53 | |
| And built up with colleagues | 7:59 | |
| a real innovative and strong congregation. | 8:03 | |
| And some of the first people who came | 8:11 | |
| were very interested in thinking | 8:16 | |
| about themselves spiritually as women. | 8:20 | |
| Now they were really a lot younger than we. | 8:25 | |
| In other words, this wasn't what I would call | 8:32 | |
| kind of first-wave feminism, | 8:34 | |
| or even second-wave feminism, | 8:37 | |
| these were people in their 20s and 30s, 20 years ago. | 8:39 | |
| And so, they were... | 8:43 | |
| There were some interests in Sophia and we, | 8:50 | |
| so Sophia became, I guess, in our worship life, | 8:54 | |
| a minor deity. | 8:58 | |
| In other words, there were probably | 9:03 | |
| four or five times a year in which | 9:06 | |
| we either preached about or had liturgies about her, | 9:09 | |
| used some of those, and it's been | 9:13 | |
| mostly new ones that I wrote. | 9:17 | |
| And so I would say it wasn't the experience of | 9:20 | |
| people catching fire with her, | 9:27 | |
| but she became something that people cited, | 9:30 | |
| listened to, from time to time. | 9:37 | |
| So there wasn't kind of clash that froze things | 9:42 | |
| in so many other, because we were coming out of nothing. | 9:48 | |
| And we were mostly non-church people. | 9:53 | |
| So we attracted the younger, non-church folks, | 9:56 | |
| or the spiritual seekers, | 10:00 | |
| or the people who had been chased out | 10:02 | |
| and gotten lonely and came back, things like that. | 10:04 | |
| I would say my, I ended combined | 10:09 | |
| almost that entire time I was at Union. | 10:13 | |
| And there, I would, by and large, | 10:17 | |
| none of my students, or very few of my students, | 10:22 | |
| would have known about Sophia, | 10:25 | |
| but when they learned about her, | 10:28 | |
| and I mean, so you can't, | 10:31 | |
| I maintain you can't do New Testament studies | 10:32 | |
| without knowing Sophia pretty thoroughly. | 10:36 | |
| And so, they have to know her. | 10:39 | |
| And so there were, I've quite a few sparks | 10:42 | |
| that were flying for people both spiritually | 10:46 | |
| and intellectually around Sophia. | 10:51 | |
| Again, not as a primary, but as a secondary way of | 10:55 | |
| engaging God and knowing who you are. | 11:01 | |
| So that would be, so I would say, | 11:08 | |
| I have a, kind of a steady beat of interest | 11:11 | |
| in her and engagement with her | 11:19 | |
| in my two ministry and theological settings. | 11:22 | |
| The other thing to say, | 11:30 | |
| no a couple of the other things, | 11:32 | |
| the other thing that's happened to me in my last 25 years is | 11:34 | |
| I've been very engaged with all | 11:37 | |
| these newly discovered texts from early Christianity, | 11:40 | |
| which turned out to be full of Sophia. | 11:45 | |
| And when were working with that, I would say, | 11:50 | |
| that'll make sure that people think it's heresy. | 11:55 | |
| - | (laughing) Right. | 11:58 |
| - | And I, myself, thought that it was. | 12:00 |
| But now I would say I have gotten to know | 12:05 | |
| those texts a lot better and found out | 12:09 | |
| that it was all of the early kind of heresy-baiting things | 12:11 | |
| about those new discoveries in general, was just a crock. | 12:17 | |
| And so, I've found... | 12:23 | |
| Both in the local church, | 12:29 | |
| not only here when I was pastoring, | 12:32 | |
| but as I lecture across the country, | 12:34 | |
| there's enormous interest in those texts | 12:38 | |
| for spiritual nurture and inspiration. | 12:42 | |
| And when they bump into Sophia in a number of those, | 12:46 | |
| they're engaged by her. | 12:51 | |
| And the theology of those texts is much more | 12:55 | |
| thorough going relative to Sophia. | 13:03 | |
| So I would say that a bunch of students and people, | 13:07 | |
| that I, since I'm no longer in the local church, | 13:13 | |
| but people in churches where I speak, | 13:15 | |
| are quite interested in her. | 13:19 | |
| And especially because she, | 13:23 | |
| she's just, she's even deeper than the big corpus | 13:28 | |
| of the texts in the Bible that there is. | 13:33 | |
| There's just a lot more use of | 13:35 | |
| who she is in terms of patterns of pain and sorrow. | 13:38 | |
| There's a lot of thinking about her | 13:46 | |
| as a primary or secondary god-figure in these texts. | 13:51 | |
| And so, I mean... | 13:58 | |
| The thing that's right in the middle of, | 14:03 | |
| or I'm in the middle of now, is | 14:06 | |
| that a bunch of my either recent grads at Union or students | 14:08 | |
| are very interested in these texts | 14:18 | |
| mainly for spiritual nurture | 14:22 | |
| and therefore quite interested in Sophia. | 14:26 | |
| And so they find them, so they're at least as interested | 14:31 | |
| as I, in Sophia for the themselves, spiritually, | 14:37 | |
| and although I would say, for me, | 14:43 | |
| Sophia, in my own spiritual life, | 14:50 | |
| Sophia is still a part of it. | 14:52 | |
| Not quite as much as two years | 14:55 | |
| of meditating on her everyday, | 14:58 | |
| but meaningful to me. | 15:02 | |
| Yeah, so... | 15:07 | |
| - | What is it about Sophia that's feeding these people, | 15:09 |
| what is appealing to them spiritually? | 15:13 | |
| - | Partly because she's new | 15:15 |
| and they're tired of old. | 15:17 | |
| Partly because in some of them she has new stories. | 15:22 | |
| So, for instance, I will try to just keep | 15:31 | |
| this to three minutes. | 15:33 | |
| The dissertation that just was done under my supervision | 15:36 | |
| is about the creation of the world by Sophia herself, | 15:42 | |
| in which she does it imperfectly, | 15:52 | |
| and screws things up as well as | 15:56 | |
| brings humans into the world, | 15:59 | |
| and then she redeems herself divinely | 16:03 | |
| to be the primary bringer of salvation | 16:07 | |
| and or Jesus to the world. | 16:12 | |
| So here you have a divine figure | 16:15 | |
| who has a complicated story | 16:22 | |
| that doesn't repeat the canonical Eve as the bad woman, | 16:25 | |
| but is a problematic and salvific figure at the same time. | 16:32 | |
| People are like that mixed-up-ness, actually. | 16:38 | |
| And then secondly I would say that | 16:43 | |
| just her largeness of female presence in these texts. | 16:47 | |
| So she's kind of the go-to person in a lot of stories. | 16:52 | |
| So I don't know where that's going exactly, | 16:59 | |
| but I find myself in another realm | 17:02 | |
| of helping me, helping folks be presence to her | 17:05 | |
| in these newer texts. | 17:13 | |
| And, of course, I teach that this is just | 17:16 | |
| a large family corpus both inside and outside the canon. | 17:19 | |
| Then let me talk a little bit about queerness. | 17:26 | |
| I guess I would want to just put that in a larger frame. | 17:31 | |
| So, because... | 17:34 | |
| Because gender is such a, I've learned, | 17:42 | |
| is such a carrier of self-understanding | 17:46 | |
| and that happened to us and all of our people | 17:50 | |
| as we introduced Sophia. | 17:54 | |
| So who she was became who we were. | 17:57 | |
| And so that simply made me really want to be | 18:02 | |
| very interested in, I guess, theory, feminist theory, | 18:13 | |
| which turned into gender theory, | 18:19 | |
| as far as I'm concerned, for me, | 18:22 | |
| the smartest people and the most insightful people | 18:24 | |
| that were feminist theorists became gender theorists, | 18:30 | |
| in other words, it was not a stable world | 18:34 | |
| of the feminine and the masculine, | 18:39 | |
| but a complex way of knowing ourselves | 18:42 | |
| in terms of who God is and who we are | 18:47 | |
| that shifts all the time. | 18:50 | |
| And so I have found, in my life and work, | 18:54 | |
| that third-wave feminism, and or gender theory, | 19:00 | |
| which is more or less the same thing, I think, | 19:06 | |
| is enormously generous and life-giving | 19:10 | |
| in terms of thinking about who God is and who we are. | 19:19 | |
| And profoundly queer. | 19:23 | |
| In other words, gender theory and queerness, | 19:26 | |
| it's not an accident that we've had to find new | 19:30 | |
| languages to think about the sexuality, gender, | 19:34 | |
| and identity as gifts about God and from God, | 19:44 | |
| and addressing, and nurturing us as to who we are. | 19:53 | |
| So for me, I think, so for instance, | 20:00 | |
| this whole thing about Sophia and Jesus now, | 20:09 | |
| are they one and the same or different. | 20:14 | |
| I just like the question better than any of the answers. | 20:17 | |
| And I like spiritually thinking about Jesus and Sophia, | 20:21 | |
| sometimes being the same and sometimes not being the same. | 20:30 | |
| Sometimes too really powerful divine presences | 20:35 | |
| and sometimes being the same and sometimes edgy connected, | 20:39 | |
| and edgidly connected. | 20:45 | |
| Yeah, so I think that's where I am about her future. | 20:51 | |
| I think she's got, she got | 20:55 | |
| a pretty interesting life ahead of her in our world. | 20:58 | |
| And got quite a bit of life for us. | 21:07 | |
| So like 2/3 of what I just said is just theologizing. | 21:13 | |
| But it for me has been really connected strongly | 21:20 | |
| to people's spiritual thirsts. | 21:23 | |
| And so you know the people that I live with under 40, | 21:27 | |
| they just won't, they need spirituality so much | 21:33 | |
| and they need really important, good thinking theologically. | 21:38 | |
| So I don't find them wanting to just talk theology, | 21:43 | |
| but they want to ask who she is, what she does, | 21:49 | |
| and it feels like the combinations | 21:52 | |
| of the new texts and the new theorizing | 21:55 | |
| helped actually be productive spiritually. | 21:59 | |
| - | I did want to get back to a comment that you made | 22:06 |
| and you referred to, at least a while ago, | 22:09 | |
| about Sophia as goddess, | 22:12 | |
| and you talked about Sophia as deity, | 22:13 | |
| am I right about that? | 22:15 | |
| Yeah, you said... | 22:17 | |
| - | Yeah, yeah, I remember that. | 22:18 |
| - | You were saying that | |
| you didn't, really. | 22:21 | |
| - | No, well, I said several things there. | 22:22 |
| - | Yeah, but I'm just wondering, | 22:26 |
| one of the charges that people made is, | 22:27 | |
| this isn't Christian because she's a goddess, | 22:30 | |
| and this is pagan. | 22:33 | |
| So I'm just wondering how you would respond to that? | 22:34 | |
| - | To that? To that proof? | 22:38 |
| - | Yeah. Yeah, yeah. | |
| - | Well in as much as, yeah well, | 22:42 |
| she's a way of imaging God as female and... | 22:45 | |
| People have often called female god-figures goddess. | 22:51 | |
| It's not a particular, this is not a term | 22:56 | |
| that really resonates much with me | 22:58 | |
| just because I've been raised so Christian, | 23:00 | |
| so Methodist, you know, it doesn't really work with, | 23:03 | |
| certainly, when I think about intellectually it's like, | 23:06 | |
| what's the deal? | 23:08 | |
| There's no deal here. | 23:09 | |
| So God equals he? | 23:11 | |
| (laughs) | 23:13 | |
| That's the whole problem with G-O-D anyway. | 23:14 | |
| - | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 23:17 |
| - | Yeah, but she's divine is that. | 23:19 |
| This is definitely what she is, boy. | 23:22 | |
| Big time. | 23:25 | |
| - | And I think I was the one that got | 23:26 |
| our book into some goddess language. | 23:32 | |
| I know that the only goddess reference in the book, I wrote. | 23:37 | |
| And I was learning actively from first-wave feminist people | 23:42 | |
| about that language. | 23:47 | |
| And it felt to me like what they were saying made sense. | 23:49 | |
| I think that that project also failed. | 23:52 | |
| In other words, I think goddess language | 23:58 | |
| hasn't really grabbed the hearts of tons of women. | 24:01 | |
| There are still, that's a marginal term. | 24:06 | |
| And so I think I've, that was a, | 24:11 | |
| that was something I would take back | 24:16 | |
| in terms of how to be with Sophia, to call her a goddess. | 24:18 | |
| Turned out to be what I thought would be helpful | 24:23 | |
| to a bunch of people, but wasn't particularly. | 24:26 | |
| And so I resonate with what Susan has as | 24:29 | |
| a much more kind of flexible language world. | 24:35 | |
| But, and I'm... | 24:40 | |
| Since, so, since in... | 24:44 | |
| Right now in our country, what's happening is | 24:47 | |
| the bottom's falling out of Christianity. | 24:51 | |
| And there are whole bunch of people | 24:53 | |
| who have some loyalty to some parts of it and are leaving. | 24:55 | |
| And are spiritually thirsty. | 25:00 | |
| It's, I mean, I don't feel protective of | 25:04 | |
| what's really Christian and really not. | 25:11 | |
| I feel much more engaged by, | 25:13 | |
| so what's going on and big picture | 25:15 | |
| for all of us, theologically and spiritually, | 25:19 | |
| and it probably not goddess stuff, | 25:23 | |
| but it is profoundly sensitive in terms of gender | 25:28 | |
| and sexuality and what it means to be men and women, | 25:33 | |
| and places in between. | 25:38 | |
| And I think that she has lots to offer | 25:41 | |
| as a part of a choice of a pantheon. | 25:45 | |
| - | Yeah, if I could just switch from | 25:49 |
| those kind of categories all together, | 25:51 | |
| and use some other stuff. | 25:53 | |
| Well, I wanted to piggy back a little bit | 25:55 | |
| on the pantheon goddess, the deity stuff. | 25:58 | |
| But then I want to get into something else. | 26:01 | |
| I said I've been doing spiritual direction | 26:04 | |
| for a really long time. | 26:06 | |
| And one of the big draws for me, always, | 26:08 | |
| has been the fact that I really got beat up spiritually, | 26:11 | |
| and I really wanted to provide a safe place for people. | 26:16 | |
| And that's what my spiritual director did for me. | 26:19 | |
| I wanna provide a place where people could really themselves | 26:23 | |
| and own what their spirits have experienced, | 26:27 | |
| what the spirit is doing in | 26:32 | |
| and through them and bringing them. | 26:35 | |
| And for them to have a place where | 26:40 | |
| they can really just pay attention to it and honor it. | 26:41 | |
| And that so much has to do with my own experience of Sophia. | 26:45 | |
| Not only in my own experience, | 26:52 | |
| but then all of the stuff that kind of flew up around it. | 26:54 | |
| And there have been people along the way | 26:59 | |
| who have come specifically because of my book. | 27:01 | |
| I have gotten people-- | 27:06 | |
| - | Really? | |
| - | Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. | 27:07 |
| And then I've gotten other people who've come | 27:10 | |
| who have just found out, somehow or other, | 27:12 | |
| Sophia's become a major part of their journey. | 27:15 | |
| I have a woman who just, was it just, it was just last fall, | 27:18 | |
| it seems like years ago now, | 27:22 | |
| a Mennonite woman who had her, | 27:25 | |
| it wasn't a rebaptism, but like a Sophia baptism. | 27:28 | |
| And she invited some of her friends and family to come | 27:31 | |
| and we did a Sophia baptism. | 27:34 | |
| It's lovely. | 27:37 | |
| It was wonderful. | 27:38 | |
| And so there have been moments like that. | 27:40 | |
| And just last week (laughs), just literally, | 27:41 | |
| just last week, a rabbi, a woman rabbi, | 27:44 | |
| we were exploring a dream that she'd had, | 27:50 | |
| and she called it her wisdom tree. | 27:52 | |
| It was so, we just really spent a lot of time with that | 27:59 | |
| and this is a person who hardly ever can stay | 28:02 | |
| with anything more than two minutes | 28:08 | |
| and she's really seeing this is a central | 28:10 | |
| and guiding image for her that has a lot of power | 28:14 | |
| for her in terms of discernment | 28:19 | |
| and she's actually even emailed me about it since | 28:22 | |
| and done some collage work and art work with it. | 28:24 | |
| So there's people like that in my life | 28:28 | |
| that come, that for whom Sophia, | 28:31 | |
| always that Sophia can be experienced | 28:36 | |
| as meaningful and growthful. | 28:39 | |
| So that's just a piggy back on your stuff. | 28:42 | |
| But the other thing I would want to say is that | 28:46 | |
| there's something about Sophia, wisdom, | 28:49 | |
| the wisdom world, I hate to say wisdom theology, | 28:57 | |
| that just feels too boxy, | 28:59 | |
| but the wisdom world that really allows for us to, | 29:03 | |
| well I guess maybe I'm, I spoke for myself earlier | 29:10 | |
| about the whole thing about the sea | 29:13 | |
| and water in the flowerbeds and all | 29:15 | |
| that whole big connection, | 29:17 | |
| that's the wisdom world connection. | 29:19 | |
| And it has said so much about the natural world | 29:22 | |
| says so much about the environment, | 29:26 | |
| it says so much about our time in our world right now, | 29:28 | |
| which is so, facing such a crisis, | 29:31 | |
| we're in crisis, not just facing it. | 29:34 | |
| We are in it. | 29:36 | |
| And think that the wisdom world has a lot to bring to that | 29:37 | |
| in terms of sustenance, as we take it on | 29:43 | |
| and honor what's been given us | 29:48 | |
| and live into it in ways that are hopefully healing | 29:51 | |
| as opposed to destructive. | 29:59 | |
| I think there just a lot there for us. | 30:02 | |
| And I, maybe a lot of us the, a natural imagery, | 30:07 | |
| I don't know, but I don't think it's just | 30:11 | |
| the natural imagery part of it is that the fluidity, | 30:13 | |
| there's a lot of fluidity. | 30:18 | |
| She comes into holy souls, | 30:20 | |
| she's mist and she's tree and she's sea. | 30:24 | |
| Do you know there's a lot of fluidity as a whatever, | 30:32 | |
| as a presence, that allows for presence | 30:39 | |
| to be honored in this world and universe of ours. | 30:42 | |
| Yeah, well. | 30:50 | |
| - | Beautifully said. | 30:52 |
| And this has been wonderful. | 30:53 | |
| Is there anything else that you would want to say | 30:54 | |
| that you haven't had a chance to say? | 30:57 | |
| - | It's nice to think back about the whole conversation. | 31:02 |
| Let me see. | 31:06 | |
| It's not often that we get to sit down and say, | 31:08 | |
| okay, so what did you think about those last 15-- | 31:11 | |
| (laughing obscures speaker) | 31:15 | |
| - | We've been stirring the memories, haven't we? | 31:20 |
| - | (laughing obscures speaker) It's really lovely. | 31:21 |
| I think I've said all I need to. | 31:34 | |
| - | Thank you, thank you both very much. | 31:39 |
Item Info
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