Hames, Susan
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| Interviewer | Susan, thank you so much for agreeing to be | 0:01 |
| interviewed and if you can just first say your name | 0:03 | |
| and actually spell it as well. | 0:06 | |
| Susan Hames | Okay, my name is Susan Hames, | 0:08 |
| S-u-s-a-n Capital-H-a-m-e-s, | 0:10 | |
| I'm a Sister at Saint Joseph. | 0:15 | |
| Interviewer | Thank you. | 0:17 |
| Susan Hames | And happy to be a part of this project. | 0:18 |
| Interviewer | Thrilled to be interviewing, | 0:20 |
| that's wonderful. | 0:22 | |
| So when and where were you born? | 0:24 | |
| Susan Hames | December 1, 1944 in Oakland, California | 0:28 |
| during the war. | 0:31 | |
| - | Really? | 0:33 |
| - | My father was in the Coast Guard | 0:33 |
| in Oakland-Alameda and my mother | 0:36 | |
| went out to be with him or to be close to him | 0:38 | |
| and was pregnant with me six months at the time. | 0:42 | |
| And then I was born in December | 0:47 | |
| and the war was over the following June. | 0:49 | |
| So we flew back over the summer. | 0:52 | |
| Interviewer | Where was back? | 0:58 |
| Susan Hames | Oh, back to Minneapolis in | 1:00 |
| Saint Paul where, actually, Minneapolis, | 1:01 | |
| both my folks were from Minneapolis | 1:04 | |
| and had decided to marry the day of Pearl Harbor. | 1:07 | |
| Interviewer | Oh my goodness. | 1:13 |
| Susan Hames | My mother wasn't Catholic at the time | 1:15 |
| but was in the process, when they married | 1:17 | |
| that April, was studying to be Catholic | 1:19 | |
| but very much later I learned how difficult it was | 1:24 | |
| for her that they were married in the sacristy | 1:27 | |
| because she wasn't baptized yet. | 1:29 | |
| Interviewer | Oh really? | 1:32 |
| Susan Hames | That was hurtful to her for, I think, | 1:33 |
| a long time. | 1:38 | |
| Interviewer | Yes. | 1:39 |
| Susan Hames | But I didn't know that. | 1:41 |
| People didn't talk about those things in those days. | 1:42 | |
| Interviewer | Yeah. | 1:44 |
| Susan Hames | I found out much later. | 1:45 |
| And we celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary | 1:47 | |
| in great style, it was as if they were married | 1:49 | |
| all over again, and all of us were the | 1:51 | |
| great witnesses so that was lovely. | 1:53 | |
| Interviewer | How nice! | 1:56 |
| Susan Hames | My interest in ritual comes out | 1:59 |
| of my family very organically. | 2:01 | |
| Interviewer | Say some more about that. | 2:05 |
| Susan Hames | Well, family dinners were not to | 2:06 |
| be missed and both of my folks loved entertaining. | 2:09 | |
| When I got to be working in campus ministry | 2:14 | |
| as the director, and much involved in the liturgy, | 2:19 | |
| and in hosting celebrations, I had the experience | 2:22 | |
| of experiencing my folks. | 2:27 | |
| I had a very visceral connection with my dad | 2:29 | |
| who was always the grand, loved to put together | 2:35 | |
| a party, putting it together, | 2:40 | |
| let's put something together. | 2:43 | |
| It was the supper, it was the dinner, it was the party | 2:47 | |
| or some kind of gathering | 2:50 | |
| and mother loved to do that, but it was the cooking | 2:52 | |
| and all the preparing and all of that, | 2:59 | |
| and then she loved the part where we cleaned up. | 3:01 | |
| Interviewer | (laughs) | 3:05 |
| Susan Hames | We got to do the dishes | 3:06 |
| and she was relieved. | 3:07 | |
| But, anyway, and we always sang, singing was | 3:10 | |
| a big thing in the family, music. | 3:14 | |
| My mother sang in the choir, her church choir, | 3:17 | |
| and she always sang in octave, her voice was very low, | 3:20 | |
| but my younger sister and I were very, | 3:24 | |
| and Phyl made church music for years | 3:26 | |
| and I assisted, she and a good friend of mine and I | 3:29 | |
| were backups to her. | 3:35 | |
| She had a voice kind of like Judy Collins | 3:36 | |
| in her heyday, and she played at the 4:30 Mass | 3:38 | |
| at Saint Olive for years and we were together, | 3:45 | |
| she and I, we were part of a contemporary group | 3:48 | |
| at basilica, at the 10:30 Mass. | 3:51 | |
| [Interviewer] Really? | 3:54 | |
| Susan Hames | It would have been in the '70s, | 3:56 |
| when I was, I think I was teaching at Holy Angels | 3:58 | |
| at the time, but that kind of became our parish. | 4:02 | |
| In fact, I made my final vows there, | 4:06 | |
| in '74, so Kathy and I backed Phyl up | 4:09 | |
| and Phyl was in our community for a while, | 4:17 | |
| my younger sister, and she had her BA | 4:19 | |
| in Theology from Saint Catherine's | 4:25 | |
| and she entered and stayed through the novitiate | 4:26 | |
| and kind of clarified her own sexuality | 4:32 | |
| in the process of that | 4:35 | |
| and when she came out as a lesbian | 4:36 | |
| she really didn't see herself continuing | 4:38 | |
| teaching and so we continued to back her up | 4:44 | |
| at coffee houses around the Twin Cities. | 4:50 | |
| [Interviewer] Is that right? | 4:53 | |
| Susan Hames | Yeah, we had a lot of fun | 4:54 |
| at women's coffee houses. | 4:55 | |
| We were down at Plymouth Congregational | 4:57 | |
| and, I forget, that's the place I remember the most. | 4:59 | |
| There were a number of other places, | 5:02 | |
| but it was fun. | 5:04 | |
| Interviewer | You said her name was Phyl? | 5:05 |
| Susan Hames | Yeah, my mother's name was Phyllis, | 5:06 |
| so we had Phyllis Eleanor and Phyllis Anne | 5:09 | |
| and, um... | 5:12 | |
| Interviewer | That was your mother and sister? | 5:13 |
| Susan Hames | Hm-mm, Phyllis Anne was also, | 5:15 |
| once she got into high school she became Phyl. | 5:17 | |
| P-H-Y-L. | 5:22 | |
| Interviewer | Got it. | 5:23 |
| - | Which is a little different from other Phils, | 5:24 |
| but anyway, so, so my background is ritual, | 5:26 | |
| that's all kind of organic and in the community, | 5:30 | |
| I was just talking about this because I preached it | 5:36 | |
| at Carondelet Village on Saturday and Sunday, | 5:38 | |
| the Feast of Corpus Christi, which is my favorite feast | 5:41 | |
| so I got to tell them about that | 5:44 | |
| and why it's become my favorite feast, | 5:45 | |
| but anyway, I was remembering, part of it was remembering | 5:47 | |
| when I joined the community we spent the whole week | 5:54 | |
| getting ready for the Sunday liturgy. | 5:57 | |
| You know, we were learning the Latin chants. | 5:59 | |
| Our Sisters were trained at Solesmes, by the monks | 6:03 | |
| at Solesmes, so we learned the Gregorian chant | 6:05 | |
| and we practiced it so intensely | 6:08 | |
| that many of us got to know the chants | 6:14 | |
| and the readings, you meditated on the readings | 6:15 | |
| and we sang the chant so it stayed with me | 6:18 | |
| but I think for a lot of us we knew the chants by heart. | 6:26 | |
| [Interviewer] Yeah. | 6:30 | |
| Susan Hames | It got inside of us, | 6:31 |
| so the early training, it wasn't training, | 6:32 | |
| but the early formation in the liturgy was | 6:37 | |
| very profound for me. | 6:41 | |
| Really has stayed with me. | 6:50 | |
| I read the whole Bible in our novitiate years | 6:53 | |
| and I remember, we were taught to meditate, | 6:57 | |
| as a community we meditated for an hour a day, | 7:05 | |
| half an hour in the morning and half an hour | 7:09 | |
| in the evening, and it wasn't all serious. | 7:10 | |
| Some of it was trying to stay awake. | 7:16 | |
| [Interviewer] (laughs) | 7:19 | |
| [Susan Hames] Who had the banana peels and was | 7:20 | |
| peeling stuff. | 7:23 | |
| [Interviewer] (laughs) | 7:24 | |
| [Susan Hames] But aside from all the pranks | 7:25 | |
| and the play that it involved, there was a certain | 7:27 | |
| serious quality and something about learning | 7:31 | |
| to take time, to make time in my life | 7:36 | |
| for that kind of quiet, that I've held on to | 7:39 | |
| and has stayed with me. | 7:42 | |
| And I still value, so I learned a lot from | 7:46 | |
| the schedule even though it was quite rigid | 7:54 | |
| and uniform in ways that I could never support now. | 7:56 | |
| (laughs) | 8:00 | |
| And it was uneven, I mean, some people hate it. | 8:03 | |
| Not everyone would tell you that it took. | 8:08 | |
| [Interviewer] Yes! (laughs) | 8:12 | |
| Susan Hames | Or ways it took, | 8:14 |
| it was different for all of us, | 8:16 | |
| but it was on the whole a much more positive | 8:18 | |
| experience for me. | 8:21 | |
| And unintentionally, you know, we didn't have | 8:25 | |
| much else to talk about so we talked about | 8:28 | |
| what we were reading, the scripture we were reading | 8:30 | |
| or the spiritual reading that we were doing, | 8:33 | |
| so I learned, even though the structure didn't help us | 8:37 | |
| to learn to talk about those things, to articulate | 8:40 | |
| what things meant to us. | 8:43 | |
| We were learning it kind of under the radar, | 8:44 | |
| walking around the yard. | 8:48 | |
| You just had to be careful you didn't walk | 8:50 | |
| with the same person, which of course | 8:51 | |
| some of us did. | 8:54 | |
| [Interviewer] (laughs) | 8:55 | |
| Susan Hames | Anyway, that's all kind of... | 8:57 |
| Interviewer | Well, that's fascinating, | 8:59 |
| both your background and the whole... | 9:01 | |
| Susan Hames | It's all connected. | 9:03 |
| Interviewer | It is. | 9:04 |
| Susan Hames | Yes, we say. | 9:05 |
| Interviewer | Yes, it is. | 9:06 |
| Susan Hames | Discovered so much more deeply. | 9:07 |
| Interviewer | Yes, yeah, I love it, | 9:11 |
| I love that your love of ritual was rooted | 9:12 | |
| in celebration, it sounds like, at home, | 9:14 | |
| party, celebration, joy, which is wonderful. | 9:16 | |
| And I know we discussed this earlier | 9:20 | |
| but can you talk about where you went to school, | 9:22 | |
| graduate school? | 9:23 | |
| You have an interesting background. | 9:24 | |
| [Susan Hames] Yes, I, well, I completed a degree | 9:25 | |
| in Spanish and Secondary Education at St. Kate's. | 9:29 | |
| I got into Spanish, Jean Rooney, one of our Sisters, | 9:33 | |
| taught us all in Spanish because I entered | 9:36 | |
| in '62 which were the years Vatican II | 9:39 | |
| was just beginning, John XXIII is telling | 9:43 | |
| religious orders, 10 percent of your order | 9:48 | |
| should be going to the South American countries | 9:50 | |
| and we were preparing to do that. | 9:52 | |
| Our order got right into that so we were all | 9:54 | |
| studying Spanish for which I was grateful. | 9:57 | |
| I had four years of Latin in high school | 9:59 | |
| and you didn't talk it, it helped me, I'm sure, | 10:01 | |
| understand language but it made much more sense | 10:04 | |
| to me, and Jean Rooney, studying Spanish with her | 10:08 | |
| was like having a course in liberation theology. | 10:13 | |
| She was very, she eventually taught English | 10:15 | |
| and Literature over at the Minneapolis campus | 10:19 | |
| of St. Kate's but she was way ahead of her time | 10:22 | |
| in terms of how she understood Spanish | 10:26 | |
| and she taught conversational Spanish, | 10:28 | |
| she had a great facility, great accent, and she was, | 10:31 | |
| and helped me discover that I had some facility | 10:35 | |
| for language because it was easy for me | 10:38 | |
| and I think I got put into Spanish | 10:42 | |
| because we needed Spanish teachers and | 10:46 | |
| in high school I remember putting it down | 10:47 | |
| because I loved the language and I loved the class, | 10:53 | |
| but I also didn't want somebody assigning me | 10:55 | |
| to become an elementary teacher. | 10:59 | |
| I was scared to death of that. | 11:01 | |
| Interviewer | (laughs) | 11:02 |
| Susan Hames | We were in the transition days | 11:03 |
| from your mission or your ministry being assigned. | 11:05 | |
| So, anyway, I majored in Spanish and Secondary Education | 11:11 | |
| and I used it summers to work with migrants | 11:15 | |
| in the western part of the state, | 11:20 | |
| Hector and Bird Island and Mahnomen, | 11:21 | |
| but never lived anywhere where I was | 11:26 | |
| among Spanish people and using the language daily | 11:28 | |
| which would have helped me a lot. | 11:31 | |
| And I taught elementary and intermediate Spanish | 11:36 | |
| for about three years, four years in high school | 11:38 | |
| but I always really wanted to teach Religion | 11:42 | |
| and the deal was that we all had enough credits | 11:45 | |
| so we could all teach Religion and everybody did, | 11:49 | |
| but some of us really wanted to do it professionally, | 11:52 | |
| kind of, so I did, gradually I taught all Religion. | 11:56 | |
| I started at St. James' for a year at that high school | 12:05 | |
| and then that high school closed, nothing related | 12:08 | |
| to my being there. | 12:10 | |
| Interviewer | (laughs) | 12:11 |
| - | And then I taught at St. Margaret's. | 12:12 |
| A couple of people that I really admired | 12:16 | |
| came and asked if I would come over to Holy Angels | 12:19 | |
| and I was thrilled. | 12:22 | |
| I saw myself as learning how to teach at that point | 12:25 | |
| and I thought, these are people who could really help me. | 12:28 | |
| So that was a very happy thing. | 12:32 | |
| I was there for five or six years and began | 12:33 | |
| to work in membership with the community. | 12:36 | |
| That was fine, I moved out of there gradually, | 12:38 | |
| but we team-taught, it was a wonderful way | 12:41 | |
| to learn teaching. | 12:44 | |
| Team-taught religion. | 12:47 | |
| Interviewer | Sorry to interrupt, I was wondering | 12:50 |
| if I could close the window? | 12:51 | |
| Susan Hames | Yes, absolutely. | 12:52 |
| Interviewer | I don't want that to interrupt the... | 12:54 |
| Susan Hames | I thought Tuesday was the day, | 12:55 |
| but I think we had so much rain, I hope that's not, | 12:56 | |
| that doesn't interfere. | 13:01 | |
| So I gradually taught more religion | 13:03 | |
| and then by '71 the community asked if I would like | 13:11 | |
| to go on for a Master's and I wanted to go, | 13:19 | |
| I had extensive, I finished my study at St. Kate's | 13:23 | |
| the year that they opened up a Master's for women | 13:30 | |
| in Theology and I had more than enough credits | 13:34 | |
| but not the right ones | 13:38 | |
| and I couldn't get all the right ones | 13:39 | |
| so I couldn't get a Master's. | 13:41 | |
| I'm sure I had a minor, but anyway... | 13:44 | |
| Interviewer | This is the Master's at St. Kate's? | 13:49 |
| Susan Hames | Yes. | 13:51 |
| I had a Master's, no, not a Master's, | 13:53 | |
| a major in Theology, you couldn't get a degree | 13:58 | |
| in Theology at St. Kate's until that time, really. | 14:03 | |
| Interviewer | So you did get to a Master's? | 14:11 |
| Susan Hames | So, anyway, I didn't get a major | 14:14 |
| in Theology because I didn't have the right credits, | 14:16 | |
| but I had more than enough credits to have | 14:19 | |
| earned a major, it's just there are certain ones | 14:21 | |
| that they required for the major, | 14:25 | |
| so, anyway, I went on, where I did go | 14:28 | |
| was six summers at Webster in St. Louis, | 14:36 | |
| which had an experimental Religious Studies program | 14:42 | |
| where it was a Master of Arts in teaching | 14:45 | |
| with a specialization in Religious Studies | 14:48 | |
| and it introduced me to world religions | 14:50 | |
| and to a lot of issues, liberation theology, | 14:53 | |
| social justice, it was really a combination, | 14:56 | |
| the emphasis was on opening up education | 15:01 | |
| and I would say it was helping me to begin to teach | 15:03 | |
| adult education and a lot of communication | 15:08 | |
| skill building process in education. | 15:13 | |
| Philip [Hiberian 15:21] and Elizabeth McAlister | 15:19 | |
| came, they would have people like that, | 15:22 | |
| came as specialists. | 15:25 | |
| We studied pedagogy and we addressed, as a significant, | 15:29 | |
| Thomas [Ellington 15:40] came for a summer, | 15:38 | |
| talked about authority in the church, | 15:40 | |
| very, really, again it opened up my thinking | 15:43 | |
| and it was, the theology had been, we'd been taught | 15:49 | |
| by Dominicans, we had to study Thomas Aquinas, | 15:54 | |
| we had philosophy of nature and metaphysics | 15:58 | |
| and, you know, I was looking for something | 16:02 | |
| that was more opening like that and it was | 16:05 | |
| a very good fit, so both process and content wise. | 16:08 | |
| So that was '71 to, really '71 to '74, it | 16:13 | |
| wasn't six summers, but anyway, so and I was teaching | 16:18 | |
| at Holy Angels and I moved into membership. | 16:23 | |
| And then we were reimagining the formation program | 16:26 | |
| for entering, where out of all this uniformity | 16:33 | |
| and we were creating a program where we had | 16:36 | |
| 30 or 40 women coming for weekends, three or four | 16:39 | |
| times a year, and what we did was we planned | 16:45 | |
| the weekends, introducing them to the community | 16:48 | |
| but also introducing them to spirituality | 16:52 | |
| and to religion and so the ritual was all very | 16:55 | |
| creative, I would say. | 17:02 | |
| The kind of thing that we would naturally do in RE-Imagining | 17:05 | |
| and bring to RE-Imagining. | 17:09 | |
| It was what we were learning to do in the community, | 17:12 | |
| what we were trying to do with students in school. | 17:15 | |
| You know on Ash Wednesdays we created a ritual | 17:19 | |
| where the students in homeroom could give | 17:22 | |
| each other ashes and then at the end of the day | 17:24 | |
| we came together for the liturgy of the Eucharist. | 17:27 | |
| The word was in their homerooms and in their | 17:30 | |
| homeroom groups and trying to bring it close to them | 17:33 | |
| and help them get into it and discover | 17:38 | |
| it as their own, discover themselves and be able | 17:40 | |
| to claim it. | 17:46 | |
| So it was, it was always kind of, we had a couple | 17:48 | |
| of young assistants, Tim Hower and [Tommy Ryan 17:57], | 17:54 | |
| working with us and teaching with us | 17:58 | |
| and the principal was Bob Cassidy | 18:00 | |
| and it was already hard to get permission | 18:03 | |
| from him to do this or that for the liturgy. | 18:07 | |
| If it meant putting the spotlights on him | 18:11 | |
| during the consecration, he was good for that. | 18:13 | |
| He taught Drama, he understood drama. | 18:15 | |
| His understanding of ritual was a little different | 18:19 | |
| from the rest of ours and that was always kind of, | 18:21 | |
| but it was where we were at the time. | 18:27 | |
| So I moved into working full-time at formation, | 18:31 | |
| for the community it was the assistant novice director | 18:38 | |
| and social director for some years | 18:41 | |
| and that involved placing the young women | 18:42 | |
| in local communities, working with them in | 18:46 | |
| local communities, and a lot of that and ritual | 18:48 | |
| and community and working in community ritual | 18:52 | |
| continued to be a big part of my work, | 18:55 | |
| so I always from very early on | 18:58 | |
| I got into this working in reimagining the liturgy, | 19:01 | |
| particularly with younger women and particularly | 19:06 | |
| with women. | 19:11 | |
| Interviewer | And eventually you went to GTU? | 19:14 |
| Susan Hames | Yes, I went to St. Kates first | 19:16 |
| as director of campus ministry and the priest who | 19:19 | |
| had developed a very strong program in liturgy | 19:22 | |
| and went on to get his PhD in liturgy | 19:25 | |
| and teach liturgy at Notre Dame, | 19:28 | |
| began a very strong and wonderful program | 19:30 | |
| and the priest that we got to take his place | 19:34 | |
| when he left didn't see himself working in liturgy | 19:37 | |
| so I picked up the liturgy area | 19:41 | |
| and was happy to have the priest do some other things | 19:43 | |
| as long as they would support what we were doing. | 19:46 | |
| And that was fine at the beginning and then | 19:50 | |
| during the, I would say that the 10 years I was there, | 19:55 | |
| from '78 to '87, it got harder, | 19:59 | |
| progressively harder, harder to find priests | 20:04 | |
| who would work in that situation, | 20:06 | |
| work well in that situation. | 20:12 | |
| They were older, less identified with young women's | 20:13 | |
| experience, and less interested in really, | 20:17 | |
| they were closer to retirement age | 20:22 | |
| and more into retiring and working on their own terms | 20:24 | |
| than necessarily the college, what we in | 20:26 | |
| the college needed them to do. | 20:30 | |
| So after about 10 years of that, | 20:32 | |
| the students, I learned a lot from students, | 20:37 | |
| and I learned a lot with students | 20:41 | |
| and had a wonderful time with them actually | 20:43 | |
| and a wonderful time working in liturgy with them, | 20:45 | |
| but I was becoming feminist in those years | 20:48 | |
| and St. Kate's was struggling. | 20:51 | |
| It was the years when St. Thomas went co-ed | 20:54 | |
| and we heard all kinds of, restructuring every year. | 20:57 | |
| When I came in as the director, I loved doing | 21:01 | |
| the budgeting to make possible what we wanted to do | 21:03 | |
| and it got harder and harder to cut the budget | 21:07 | |
| every year, so after about 10 years I was | 21:09 | |
| ready for a change and it would be refreshing | 21:13 | |
| to study, and during that time I'd also gone off | 21:18 | |
| and gotten a Master's in liturgy summers | 21:20 | |
| studying at St. John's, six weeks in the summer. | 21:23 | |
| My job at St. Kate's was a 10 month job | 21:28 | |
| so I was free in the summers and I thought | 21:30 | |
| studying liturgy would give me more background | 21:33 | |
| for what I was doing with the students | 21:35 | |
| because we really did a ministry formation program | 21:37 | |
| trying to help them understand, to get underneath | 21:40 | |
| what was happening in the liturgy | 21:44 | |
| and relate it, I would say, it was about | 21:47 | |
| trying to help them develop a liturgical spirituality. | 21:49 | |
| And so, I loved studying at St. John's. | 21:54 | |
| I mean, our sisters had always studied with the monks, | 22:02 | |
| getting ready and were into the liturgical | 22:06 | |
| when they offered that so we studied, | 22:08 | |
| so I got a very thorough and wonderful education. | 22:13 | |
| Gayle Ramshaw was on my committee, | 22:17 | |
| really good committee, but Gayle was a breath of fresh air | 22:25 | |
| because she brought at least a Lutheran perspective. | 22:30 | |
| I mean, she also appreciated the tradition, | 22:32 | |
| but she had some different takes on things, | 22:38 | |
| and she was becoming more feminist in her thinking | 22:41 | |
| and that was clear and nice for me. | 22:43 | |
| And they were very supportive about me going on | 22:47 | |
| to study, I didn't talk about that immediately. | 22:49 | |
| Well, I finished in '86 and really I went away, | 22:57 | |
| I made the case to go away in '87, | 22:59 | |
| that was part of the energy for going | 23:02 | |
| was being encouraged by them and of course | 23:06 | |
| by then I'm getting closer to 50. | 23:09 | |
| When I went away to study, I really didn't go | 23:13 | |
| to get a PhD, to become a college professor. | 23:18 | |
| I never saw myself doing that, but I did | 23:20 | |
| want to study women and ritual | 23:22 | |
| and I did want to do interdisciplinary study | 23:24 | |
| and I didn't even know exactly what that would lead to | 23:28 | |
| but I got to GTU and I put myself into the | 23:32 | |
| Christian spirituality area which was a | 23:36 | |
| very different place to put yourself | 23:38 | |
| if you're in liturgy like John Ball didn't | 23:40 | |
| understand that and Sandra didn't really | 23:43 | |
| understand it too well, she understands... | 23:45 | |
| Interviewer | This is Sandra Schneider? | 23:48 |
| Susan Hames | Yes, she understands symbols | 23:49 |
| when it comes to words and words as symbols, | 23:51 | |
| but, you know, feathers and stuff, she's just, | 23:53 | |
| she was very demeaning about what women were doing | 23:55 | |
| with ritual and playing seriously | 23:58 | |
| with other traditions respectfully, | 24:01 | |
| but really she did not... | 24:05 | |
| Interviewer | Yes (laughs). | 24:09 |
| Susan Hames | I think she gets it now. | 24:10 |
| But it was a struggle and other students knew, | 24:12 | |
| could see what a struggle it was. | 24:19 | |
| They could see how different we were | 24:21 | |
| and yet there's so much about Sandra that I loved. | 24:23 | |
| I mean, I knew her work and I read everything | 24:28 | |
| and we worked well together, really, | 24:30 | |
| within our limits. | 24:34 | |
| Interviewer | (laughs) | 24:36 |
| Susan Hames | I was intimidated by her, | 24:38 |
| her ability to present, I could not present like that. | 24:41 | |
| But, anyway, I did well and it was all, | 24:49 | |
| my dream, I had a dissertation topic but I | 24:57 | |
| came back to reimagine it, I came back in '93, | 25:00 | |
| but I came back because my mother had Alzheimer's. | 25:05 | |
| Not because, I came back to do the study, | 25:09 | |
| I finally got permission to study what one community | 25:12 | |
| was doing. | 25:19 | |
| All this time part of what's energizing me | 25:20 | |
| to go and do this study was what I can see happening | 25:24 | |
| which is reclaiming our own tradition | 25:26 | |
| on our own terms. | 25:30 | |
| And it's not a matter of, we were doing exactly | 25:33 | |
| what RE-Imagining is about foundationally | 25:36 | |
| and we were doing it from within | 25:40 | |
| and we were struggling with our own superiors | 25:43 | |
| to do it and it was a way of, we created | 25:47 | |
| in 1982 and 1988 and 1992 we had three | 25:54 | |
| province assemblies in which we invited | 26:01 | |
| all the Sisters to come back and live at | 26:04 | |
| St. Catherine's in the summer. | 26:06 | |
| And we did processes to help us know each other, | 26:08 | |
| which we had never done before, | 26:11 | |
| tell our stories, the stories of our religious life | 26:14 | |
| because we've lived together in these big convents | 26:18 | |
| but never developed the skills for talking to each other, | 26:25 | |
| for sharing our stories as we say now. | 26:30 | |
| And so we were trying to fill that in, | 26:35 | |
| create a space where we could and at the same time | 26:42 | |
| where we'd have morning and evening prayer | 26:44 | |
| and we could hear each other preach | 26:46 | |
| and we could do ritual the way, in a creative way, | 26:48 | |
| so that those who were slower to get into that | 26:52 | |
| or to appreciate a freer and more creative kind of ritual, | 26:55 | |
| to help us all along together | 27:00 | |
| and to fight it out where we needed, | 27:05 | |
| I mean, really, at one point we were so far | 27:08 | |
| from each other in our experiences of Eucharist | 27:12 | |
| we had to create a way to talk about | 27:15 | |
| how, why we couldn't go to Mass anymore | 27:17 | |
| or why, well, that's it. | 27:20 | |
| Why we can't have Mass for community celebrations, | 27:28 | |
| why we need to have something that's more flexible | 27:31 | |
| and inclusive for all of us. | 27:33 | |
| It was very threatening. | 27:38 | |
| And we had to have companions for the conversation. | 27:43 | |
| [Interviewer] What do you mean by companions? | 27:46 | |
| [Susan Hames] Well, we created a way where people, | 27:47 | |
| four or five people, talked kind of in a fishbowl setting | 27:51 | |
| but they had a companion with them so people | 27:56 | |
| raised questions to them and they were just, | 27:58 | |
| because the questions could be really unkind | 28:01 | |
| and not respectful because people | 28:06 | |
| were just so, I think some sisters who were | 28:10 | |
| at that time so convinced of the traditional | 28:18 | |
| and of not moving ahead of the priests. | 28:24 | |
| In 1982, 75 percent of us said that women | 28:26 | |
| should be ordained. | 28:29 | |
| I had that in my research, from an evaluation tool | 28:31 | |
| that was done at the end of... | 28:36 | |
| That's a phenomenal number and we were in this province | 28:38 | |
| we were 800 or so sisters at that time, | 28:44 | |
| but we couldn't capitalize on that, | 28:49 | |
| we couldn't move forward. | 28:50 | |
| The leadership wasn't there, some of us were there, | 28:52 | |
| and we were the ones who were trying | 28:56 | |
| to create the assemblies and make it happen, | 29:00 | |
| but we never were | 29:01 | |
| in the leadership. | 29:03 | |
| Then the leadership would get what the assembly said, | 29:07 | |
| this is what we want to do for the future | 29:10 | |
| and then they didn't know what to do with it, | 29:12 | |
| so we would have in those three assemblies, | 29:13 | |
| it got better as the assemblies went on. | 29:18 | |
| We'd get better about using things | 29:20 | |
| and about moving together and that's the result | 29:22 | |
| of doing them. | 29:25 | |
| It really helped us as a community. | 29:28 | |
| Interviewer | Doing the rituals? | 29:30 |
| Susan Hames | Yes, to negotiate the change | 29:31 |
| and to have these assemblies where we really got | 29:33 | |
| to know each other in different ways. | 29:36 | |
| We lived together in a certain way. | 29:37 | |
| [Interviewer] How would you describe the change? | 29:40 | |
| What changed? | 29:41 | |
| Susan Hames | We got better about living | 29:44 |
| with ambiguity and with respecting the diversity | 29:46 | |
| among us. | 29:50 | |
| We got to know the diversity as diversity | 29:51 | |
| and not disbelief. | 29:53 | |
| We learned how to live with the differences | 29:58 | |
| among us and to not to feel like we had | 30:01 | |
| to convince each other that | 30:06 | |
| there's only one way to be or | 30:09 | |
| there's only one way to think or | 30:11 | |
| there's only one way to pray | 30:12 | |
| or there's only, whatever. | 30:13 | |
| Interviewer | That's tricky when you're doing ritual. | 30:15 |
| Susan Hames | It is, it is, and so, | 30:17 |
| but we weren't throwing out scripture and we | 30:22 | |
| weren't throwing out our tradition, so we | 30:27 | |
| could sing traditional songs but we could sing them | 30:33 | |
| with a more inclusive mind, which we could | 30:35 | |
| see a woman standing at the altar table | 30:39 | |
| with a priest and hold up the gifts. | 30:41 | |
| And eventually we got to where we sang | 30:46 | |
| the eucharistic prayer together, where we sang | 30:48 | |
| one of the table prayers, the eucharistic prayer, | 30:50 | |
| you know, these celebrations. | 30:53 | |
| We had women going off to study feminist, | 30:55 | |
| Joan was going off to study feminist scripture | 30:57 | |
| at Harvard and coming back. | 31:00 | |
| Interviewer | Is this Joan Timmerman? | 31:02 |
| Susan Hames | No, it's Joan Mitchell. | 31:04 |
| Interviewer | Joan Mitchell, got it, okay, yeah. | 31:05 |
| Susan Hames | So she came back at one of those gatherings, | 31:07 |
| talked about what she learned about women in scripture. | 31:11 | |
| And the whole ritual was more focused on | 31:21 | |
| women at the table and women sharing their stories. | 31:24 | |
| It just was profound, I have the video tape. | 31:28 | |
| What I proposed to do in my dissertation was to | 31:37 | |
| study us and make a case for our negotiating, | 31:41 | |
| really reimagining Catholic ritual in a way | 31:50 | |
| that includes all our relations. | 31:52 | |
| And I broke down in the process of it, | 32:04 | |
| I couldn't figure out how to include everything | 32:07 | |
| that I thought needed to be included, which you can't do. | 32:12 | |
| And I really wanted, I was so taken with our story, | 32:16 | |
| who we were becoming that that was who I wanted | 32:23 | |
| to be faithful to, it became unimportant to write | 32:27 | |
| for who you have to write for, who you have to write | 32:30 | |
| a dissertation for, so I just lost energy. | 32:34 | |
| And then my mother was, that's when mother was having | 32:35 | |
| Alzheimer's and when I came back from studying | 32:37 | |
| all of us, Kathy, my good friend, her mother died | 32:44 | |
| and then Kay's mother died and I'm thinking | 32:47 | |
| this is a different time in my life. | 32:51 | |
| I had to pay attention to those things. | 32:56 | |
| I did not want to be absent from what was happening | 33:00 | |
| with mother, so I just made a decision | 33:04 | |
| to let go of the dissertation | 33:08 | |
| because I really wasn't... | 33:10 | |
| You know, St. Kay's, Joanne was leaving | 33:15 | |
| and they were, why don't you apply for this job? | 33:18 | |
| But there was nothing, there was no assurance, | 33:21 | |
| I had to have the dissertation in hand. | 33:26 | |
| Interviewer | For what job, for a faculty position? | 33:30 |
| Susan Hames | Yeah, faculty position. | 33:31 |
| So I knew I had to have it, so what they were saying | 33:33 | |
| was that and I didn't have it | 33:36 | |
| and I wasn't going to have it at the end of a year, | 33:38 | |
| so I just didn't apply, I just thought this is silly | 33:40 | |
| and if I do that all of my energy will go | 33:44 | |
| into that teaching and I'll never do the dissertation. | 33:47 | |
| And meanwhile, you know, RE-Imagining has begun, | 33:54 | |
| it's already begun. | 34:01 | |
| Sometime in there in '93 I reconnected. | 34:03 | |
| Before RE-Imagining, I reconnected with Sue. | 34:06 | |
| Interviewer | Sue Seid-Martin? | 34:09 |
| - | Seid-Martin, yeah. | 34:10 |
| By that time, I think she, I don't know if she was | 34:11 | |
| still teaching at the seminary or what. | 34:15 | |
| Mostly I remember meeting with her at her home | 34:21 | |
| and just having this, really it was, we shared | 34:23 | |
| our stories where I'd been since I last talked with her | 34:29 | |
| and where she had been, and she was just, oh, | 34:32 | |
| you have to be involved in this | 34:36 | |
| because it's what we've been doing together, kind of. | 34:39 | |
| And I had been on the board, the founding board | 34:51 | |
| of Wisdom Ways so Mary Kay and I had been close, | 34:53 | |
| mutual admirers and appreciators for years. | 34:55 | |
| Interviewer | Mary Kay Metzinger? | 35:00 |
| Susan Hames | Yes, and she was very involved | 35:01 |
| in this and Donna Kassbaum. | 35:03 | |
| Interviewer | Yes. | 35:05 |
| Susan Hames | Eventually we worked together | 35:07 |
| at St. Kate's. | 35:10 | |
| So Sue got me into RE-Imagining and then | 35:18 | |
| meeting Sally Hill and Nancy Bernanke. | 35:24 | |
| Nancy and I, we did the same thing. | 35:30 | |
| We redid the hymns, we're forever | 35:34 | |
| reimagining the texts of hymns in ways | 35:39 | |
| that were more inclusive and were | 35:43 | |
| a theology that would be more inclusive for people, | 35:46 | |
| that we could all sing. | 35:48 | |
| So we could continue singing those beloved melodies | 35:51 | |
| but with new words. | 35:54 | |
| It's interesting because it's how the old words | 35:58 | |
| stay with you, you know, Holy God, we praise your name | 36:01 | |
| or Jesus Christ Has Risen. | 36:04 | |
| I have rewritten Jesus Christ Has Risen so many times. | 36:05 | |
| But the old words are so in us, | 36:09 | |
| that's what we know by heart. | 36:12 | |
| You can't, for our 2001 celebration I rewrote | 36:15 | |
| the words to Shall We Gather At The River | 36:20 | |
| and our Sisters have come to love those words | 36:22 | |
| so we keep using that, but still it's hard | 36:24 | |
| to sing because the words change | 36:27 | |
| and that's part of the beauty of it | 36:31 | |
| and doing it ritually in a celebration like that, | 36:37 | |
| we could tell the whole story of our coming | 36:42 | |
| and we could tell the story of our history | 36:44 | |
| and we could be the river. | 36:46 | |
| But people have to have paper, they have to have | 36:49 | |
| the text in front of them to sing it, so... | 36:53 | |
| Interviewer | So what was your role in planning? | 36:56 |
| Was it working on the music? | 36:57 | |
| What exactly did you have plan? | 36:59 | |
| In the '93 RE-imagining? | 37:02 | |
| Susan Hames | In '93 it was just being a part | 37:04 |
| of a musical group. | 37:06 | |
| I didn't really, I don't think I helped plan anything. | 37:08 | |
| Sue told me about things that were happening | 37:14 | |
| and we had informal conversations about stuff | 37:16 | |
| but I wasn't involved in the planning at all. | 37:19 | |
| Interviewer | So what did you do for the music? | 37:23 |
| What was your role? | 37:25 | |
| Susan Hames | I was a member of the choir, the singers. | 37:26 |
| I was an alto and I will never forget the opening | 37:30 | |
| of the event. | 37:36 | |
| That opening, drumming, the gathering | 37:38 | |
| was just electric | 37:44 | |
| and it was, I think it was In Christ There Is No East. | 37:48 | |
| It was a very traditional, I'd say Lutheran hymn, | 37:51 | |
| very, very, very strong, just gorgeous | 37:56 | |
| and woven together, so it seemed to me | 38:02 | |
| there were about three opening chants. | 38:06 | |
| It was a huge and wonderful opening. | 38:11 | |
| It set before us what the feast might possibly be. | 38:16 | |
| And it was wonderful to be there | 38:20 | |
| because I kept discovering, I was freshly back | 38:27 | |
| from GTU and had been studying | 38:31 | |
| so I hadn't been doing any public ministry | 38:35 | |
| or something so I was relatively unconnected | 38:39 | |
| to people and as I went around the room | 38:42 | |
| I kept discovering people from every place | 38:44 | |
| in my past and meeting people I hadn't seen | 38:47 | |
| for ages, people that I worked on things with | 38:50 | |
| or I'd been very involved with archdiocesan work, | 38:54 | |
| pastoral planning, and head of the Sisters' Council. | 38:58 | |
| Lots of women religious were there | 39:04 | |
| and from different communities | 39:06 | |
| and different communities supported it in various ways | 39:09 | |
| and so it was just a feast of relations for me, | 39:12 | |
| a feast of reconnections, | 39:18 | |
| and then a feast of new connections in the sense | 39:19 | |
| of meeting all of these scholars from other traditions. | 39:22 | |
| It was a more scholarly conference than the | 39:33 | |
| assemblies that we had done. | 39:36 | |
| It was like the assemblies, so it was familiar | 39:37 | |
| from that point of view, but it was larger, | 39:41 | |
| 2,000, where we were gathering 500, you know. | 39:44 | |
| And it was serious talks, serious reimagining, | 39:53 | |
| talking about the rootedness of the tradition | 39:59 | |
| and all of that fit with my GTU study | 40:02 | |
| and the fact that I had to go to the edges | 40:07 | |
| of the GTU classes to get that kind of stuff | 40:11 | |
| and here it was, the feast was front and center. | 40:15 | |
| And the idea of it is that this needs to be | 40:19 | |
| front and center everywhere | 40:22 | |
| and I knew that from being at GTU, | 40:24 | |
| I knew that this has to permeate, | 40:26 | |
| not be one chapter in the book or | 40:29 | |
| one month of the curriculum, | 40:38 | |
| one unit of the curriculum, however you say that, | 40:39 | |
| or one book of feminist perspective. | 40:44 | |
| We need courses big time to reimagine the whole thing. | 40:50 | |
| So it was just such a feast on so many levels | 40:55 | |
| for me, and really I knew I was on the edges | 41:01 | |
| of what was happening with Sue about the milk | 41:05 | |
| and honey ritual. | 41:12 | |
| On the one hand, my experience of the ritual | 41:15 | |
| was just so, I would say (laughs), | 41:20 | |
| I would use the word orgasmic as much as any. | 41:27 | |
| Interviewer | (laughs) | 41:30 |
| Susan Hames | As much as I could experience | 41:31 |
| anything orgasmically. | 41:34 | |
| I think that it was visceral, | 41:38 | |
| the beauty of it and the longing for it, | 41:41 | |
| it was in everyone in that room. | 41:46 | |
| It was unbelievable | 41:49 | |
| (emotionally) and to experience it, overflowing abundance | 41:50 | |
| of our experience as women, | 41:56 | |
| it was so powerful. | 41:59 | |
| Interviewer | You're tearing up even talking about it. | 42:02 |
| Susan Hames | Oh yeah. | 42:04 |
| And to share it, the experience of that, | 42:05 | |
| the power of it, was very much a shared, | 42:12 | |
| we cried together, we wept together, | 42:17 | |
| and we sang together and danced together. | 42:21 | |
| It was very empowering and that it was a source | 42:24 | |
| of such controversy was just shocking. | 42:32 | |
| It was just unbelievable that... | 42:40 | |
| But, of course, if you weren't there | 42:45 | |
| and if you couldn't conceive of such a thing | 42:50 | |
| (laughs) yourself, then I suppose | 42:55 | |
| I could understand it. | 42:59 | |
| But in another way it was just so, so much | 43:01 | |
| an expression of what the problem is, | 43:05 | |
| where there needs to be communication, | 43:12 | |
| free communication flowing like milk and honey | 43:17 | |
| and there isn't. | 43:19 | |
| Interviewer | Where does the free communication | 43:21 |
| need to be happening? | 43:23 | |
| Susan Hames | Well I think between | 43:24 |
| men and women scholars and for sure between | 43:26 | |
| clergy and ordained Catholics | 43:35 | |
| and lay and ordained Catholics | 43:38 | |
| and lay and ordained Lutherans | 43:47 | |
| and every other denomination. | 43:49 | |
| In the other denominations they can ordain women, | 43:51 | |
| but it doesn't necessarily make for | 43:53 | |
| deeper communion and deeper communion | 43:58 | |
| is what it's all about. | 44:01 | |
| And deeper communion means that the boundaries | 44:03 | |
| are more porous and that we can think | 44:06 | |
| freely and differently and appreciatively | 44:15 | |
| together with each other and be influenced | 44:21 | |
| by each other. | 44:24 | |
| Because my thinking is feminist and I may | 44:26 | |
| speak from that perspective doesn't mean | 44:31 | |
| that I'm discarding a tradition | 44:33 | |
| or that I don't love this tradition | 44:35 | |
| and I don't value or honor it and claim it. | 44:37 | |
| In fact, I never claimed it more deeply | 44:42 | |
| or fully, the problem is that we're always | 44:45 | |
| only claiming it partially | 44:50 | |
| and we need each other and we need all of us | 44:53 | |
| and more to claim it fully. | 44:55 | |
| Interviewer | I'm intrigued. | 44:57 |
| How did feminism help you to claim the tradition | 44:58 | |
| more fully? | 44:59 | |
| Susan Hames | Well, it made the women visible. | 45:03 |
| You know, so I'm reading these texts and I'm not | 45:06 | |
| picking up, I have become absolutely, profoundly | 45:09 | |
| influenced by the woman who anointed Jesus | 45:16 | |
| and whose memory... | 45:22 | |
| The words of Jesus that are there affirming her | 45:30 | |
| and we never hear them, we never hear them. | 45:33 | |
| The readings that we read liturgically are so partial | 45:40 | |
| and so biased and even with a better preaching tradition, | 45:43 | |
| than we had for years when I was growing up, | 45:50 | |
| it still is so male dominated. | 45:53 | |
| And then all the work that has been done | 46:00 | |
| by feminist scholars on our language and imagery | 46:07 | |
| for God, I'm thinking of Elizabeth primarily | 46:12 | |
| and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza | 46:15 | |
| and now so many others, they're legion, | 46:18 | |
| we are legion. | 46:21 | |
| We are so slow to welcome that. | 46:23 | |
| The clergy who still have the preaching authority | 46:27 | |
| and have taken it back from little advances | 46:31 | |
| that we've made, they don't continue studying, | 46:35 | |
| they don't continue learning | 46:42 | |
| and we all need to be continuing learning. | 46:43 | |
| If there's anything I learned from being feminist, | 46:48 | |
| there's always more! | 46:51 | |
| Once you start including, there's much more | 46:55 | |
| to include, so feminist isn't an end, | 46:57 | |
| feminist perspectives are one among many | 47:02 | |
| that are deeply enriching because of how limited | 47:07 | |
| our view of our own tradition has been | 47:11 | |
| and how much there is there to discover | 47:15 | |
| that we haven't. | 47:18 | |
| I mean, all the connections about who Wisdom is | 47:19 | |
| and who embodies wisdom and how did this | 47:25 | |
| woman figure, this Wisdom figure, how could she ever | 47:31 | |
| even appear in Proverbs? | 47:34 | |
| How could that become part of the Hebrew canon? | 47:36 | |
| Really, who is she? | 47:39 | |
| When I read Claudia Camp, part of my little studies | 47:42 | |
| out at GTU, her thing from studying Proverbs, | 47:47 | |
| that was her specialty, was that Israel socially | 47:54 | |
| and politically were so destroyed in the centuries | 48:03 | |
| immediately prior to the Common Era | 48:09 | |
| that it was the women through whom they survived. | 48:14 | |
| The women became so integral and gave such leadership | 48:20 | |
| in the people surviving that it became possible | 48:28 | |
| for the men to conceive that woman could be | 48:31 | |
| a female figure. | 48:37 | |
| Interviewer | Wisdom could be a female figure. | 48:41 |
| Susan Hames | I'm sorry, Wisdom could be. | 48:42 |
| So that's behind in the Book of Proverbs, | 48:45 | |
| this female figure in chapter eight, | 48:51 | |
| she's at play with the creator in the creation | 48:56 | |
| and the beloved companion of the human ones, | 49:01 | |
| of humanity. | 49:05 | |
| Interviewer | This is great. | 49:09 |
| Earlier you were starting to talk about the backlash | 49:10 | |
| and I'm wondering did it affect you | 49:12 | |
| directly at all, the backlash against RE-Imagining? | 49:14 | |
| Susan Hames | No, no, because I was unconnected. | 49:17 |
| But I was feeling it because in the community | 49:23 | |
| there was still controversy about, | 49:29 | |
| well, using feminine or feminist images | 49:38 | |
| of God, for instance, or language about God. | 49:41 | |
| We were still negotiating our way | 49:44 | |
| to doing that freely, which we can | 49:47 | |
| do more freely now, more or less freely. | 49:51 | |
| But still... | 49:54 | |
| Interviewer | Did RE-Imagining influence that discussion | 49:57 |
| in the community at all? | 49:59 | |
| Susan Hames | It did very much for some of us. | 50:03 |
| I would say indirectly, and there were other sources | 50:06 | |
| for RE-Imagining, like Roseanne, did you hear, | 50:12 | |
| was teaching a spiritual guidance workshop | 50:15 | |
| that was just beyond, I mean, she's into | 50:17 | |
| the whole universe and understanding what | 50:20 | |
| the universe is telling us long before. | 50:26 | |
| We were reading Brian Swim and Thomas Berry. | 50:32 | |
| I had begun reading Thomas Berry out in Berkeley | 50:35 | |
| and so she and I discovered we were on the same pages | 50:40 | |
| and she was always surprised because she would think | 50:43 | |
| of me as being much more, because here I am | 50:46 | |
| working in Catholic ritual and I'm always | 50:48 | |
| doing more traditional ministry than she would be. | 50:54 | |
| She would be much more at the edges, | 50:56 | |
| but we had a wonderful, at the end discovered | 50:58 | |
| this wonderful mutual admiration for each other | 51:02 | |
| and I think learning from each other | 51:05 | |
| that was quite wonderful and lovely. | 51:08 | |
| Interviewer | So how do you account | 51:13 |
| for the backlash against RE-Imagining? | 51:14 | |
| Why do you think that happened? | 51:17 | |
| Susan Hames | Well, we should talk about | 51:26 |
| what the backlash is first of all, | 51:31 | |
| because I'm not even sure I know | 51:33 | |
| when you say, what I'm talking about is | 51:34 | |
| and I don't even remember this so very well. | 51:37 | |
| My understanding was that Sue's position | 51:49 | |
| at the seminary was somehow threatened immediately. | 51:52 | |
| That was a source of huge pain for her, | 52:05 | |
| but in a way it was by that time | 52:08 | |
| she was so beyond it that it didn't matter | 52:14 | |
| and I was kind of amazed. | 52:17 | |
| That was a part of the whole, part of rediscovery | 52:23 | |
| and from my point of view, I didn't experience any | 52:30 | |
| backlash directly. | 52:38 | |
| I think what I'd say in retrospect is | 52:41 | |
| the backlash would be, you know, I can imagine | 52:44 | |
| priests in the dioceses reading the papers, | 52:49 | |
| reading about RE-Imagining in the papers | 52:52 | |
| and just concluding things that that's... | 52:54 | |
| Interviewer | But people in the community here | 52:59 |
| who were involved never experienced anything? | 53:00 | |
| Susan Hames | Well, not that I know of, | 53:03 |
| and I think that our leadership | 53:07 | |
| has been, well, since 1991 we've had team leadership, | 53:17 | |
| and while individuals may have questioned things | 53:25 | |
| and we've had a team or two that I would say | 53:29 | |
| was less than feminist | 53:32 | |
| in their thinking, for the most part, | 53:33 | |
| they're understanding, they would not be | 53:38 | |
| making judgments about that just off the top. | 53:40 | |
| Their approach would be to talk to people involved | 53:43 | |
| and gain understanding. | 53:46 | |
| And this conversation about the Eucharist, | 53:49 | |
| that probably happened sometime along in the early '90s, | 53:55 | |
| might have happened around that time, I don't know, | 54:02 | |
| I can't, I think it would have been before 2001, | 54:05 | |
| but that was a very, the '90s were a very | 54:10 | |
| turbulent in a very good kind of way for us at the time. | 54:18 | |
| We were working through a lot of things together | 54:22 | |
| and this assembly, assemblies '82, '88, '92, | 54:25 | |
| that 10-year period, gave us a way of negotiating | 54:29 | |
| what was very difficult for us theologically | 54:33 | |
| and communally. | 54:37 | |
| I mean, the fact that in '91 we worked our way | 54:39 | |
| into team leadership from having a superior. | 54:44 | |
| Well, we called her a province director, | 54:47 | |
| so we were into a corporate model by that time, | 54:50 | |
| but we moved from a corporate model into | 54:53 | |
| a real team model. | 54:55 | |
| Three would share authority equally | 54:58 | |
| and we had to learn, they had to learn | 55:01 | |
| by doing it. | 55:02 | |
| We worked our way into saying that's what we wanted | 55:05 | |
| and we were done with superiors. | 55:09 | |
| In local communities we had coordinators | 55:14 | |
| and that wasn't very, but we were also, | 55:17 | |
| the large living groups were becoming smaller | 55:20 | |
| and smaller and smaller as people were moving | 55:25 | |
| out of them and learning new ways of being | 55:28 | |
| connected with each other. | 55:31 | |
| So that's a lot of ferment, ferment more than turbulent | 55:32 | |
| would be my descriptor of those years. | 55:40 | |
| There was a lot, we were teaming with energy | 55:42 | |
| and life and we were losing, we were continuing | 55:46 | |
| to lose lots of members and not retain new members | 55:49 | |
| and there was grief and a lot of angst | 55:55 | |
| and a lot of pressure on people in formation | 56:00 | |
| about that because we say formation is the work | 56:02 | |
| of the whole community but we expect these numbers | 56:05 | |
| and we were into that corporate model. | 56:07 | |
| Numbers, it's about numbers. | 56:12 | |
| And so underneath the radar, we're teaming | 56:15 | |
| with working on all that together. | 56:23 | |
| Interviewer | Well, this is fascinating, | 56:26 |
| because when I ask about the backlash, | 56:27 | |
| there was well-organized backlash by organizations | 56:28 | |
| within the United Methodist and Presbyterian Churches | 56:31 | |
| and Mary Anne Lundy lost her job. | 56:33 | |
| Susan Hames | Yes. | 56:35 |
| Interviewer | So it's interesting how different | 56:36 |
| the experience was here and how it tied in | 56:39 | |
| with what you were already doing, which | 56:41 | |
| is really interesting. | 56:43 | |
| Susan Hames | And among Catholics, in the association | 56:52 |
| of pastoral ministers, RE-Imagining would have been | 56:58 | |
| celebrated because a lot of those people | 57:01 | |
| were at RE-Imagining. | 57:03 | |
| Pastoral ministers, women pastoral ministers were | 57:06 | |
| a part of it and they would be interpreting it | 57:08 | |
| to their counterpart, to their male counterparts. | 57:11 | |
| They're different in terms of the clergy | 57:15 | |
| and there are clergy, there's a circle of clergy, | 57:21 | |
| the ones who are helping in our liturgy now, | 57:27 | |
| our guys who have thought for years that | 57:31 | |
| women should be ordained, | 57:33 | |
| that's the reason they haven't become bishops | 57:35 | |
| because they've very much on the side | 57:38 | |
| of including women in different ways | 57:41 | |
| and they think we should be celebrating | 57:45 | |
| our own liturgies. | 57:47 | |
| So they would be all for RE-Imagining. | 57:53 | |
| They've been learning with us about, in parishes, | 57:58 | |
| how to make liturgies more inclusive | 58:01 | |
| and they're becoming rarer now | 58:06 | |
| and that's a huge, that's something we should be | 58:11 | |
| grieving in this local church more publicly, truly. | 58:15 | |
| Interviewer | The loss of those kind of priests? | 58:21 |
| Susan Hames | Yeah, I think some of the Vatican II, | 58:23 |
| the most faithful, we've never | 58:26 | |
| altogether thought what it cost them | 58:32 | |
| to be as faithful to Vatican II as they have been. | 58:35 | |
| That will be really something. | 58:38 | |
| I hope that [Hamden 58:42] has some smarts about that. | 58:41 | |
| They've gotta know about the priests. | 58:47 | |
| Anyway. | 58:50 | |
| Interviewer | So I'm wondering in the end, | 58:51 |
| how would you define RE-Imagining? | 58:53 | |
| Susan Hames | How would I define RE-Imagining? | 58:57 |
| Interviewer | Yeah, what was RE-Imagining? | 58:58 |
| Susan Hames | Well, I think of it as a community | 59:01 |
| that emerged in the process of hosting these | 59:11 | |
| ritual events that were lifechanging | 59:13 | |
| for the participants and that we're | 59:17 | |
| lifechanging... | 59:24 | |
| Oh, okay, how much time do you have? | 59:31 | |
| Are we doing what you hoped? | 59:32 | |
| Interviewer | Yeah, this is great! | 59:35 |
| This is good, sure. | 59:36 | |
| Do you need to go at a certain point? | 59:38 | |
| Do we need to...? | 59:40 | |
| Susan Hames | Let me just make a phone call. | 59:43 |
| Interviewer | Sure, let me just stop this now, great. | 59:44 |
| - | Defining Re-imagining | 0:04 |
| - | Okay, yeah, we're going again, great. | 0:06 |
| Yes, defining Re-imagining. | 0:08 | |
| - | So, | 0:10 |
| So I would stick by what I said initially | 0:21 | |
| about it, that it was, | 0:24 | |
| I think about it, first, of all, as a community. | 0:26 | |
| - | Mm | 0:27 |
| - | That's broadened, from that original community | 0:30 |
| that planned that original event, | 0:33 | |
| to include many more women and men | 0:34 | |
| who want to re-imagine | 0:37 | |
| our Christian church traditions | 0:44 | |
| in a more inclusive, can I say Catholic? | 0:46 | |
| - | Yeah. | 0:51 |
| - | More catholic, inclusive, | 0:52 |
| and communal and collegial way. | 0:57 | |
| And I continue to be involved in the ritual events, | 1:02 | |
| the large, larger gatherings. | 1:07 | |
| I didn't get involved in the faith labs | 1:09 | |
| because I felt that as a part of, | 1:13 | |
| as a member of this community, | 1:13 | |
| and the other circles of my relationships. | 1:18 | |
| In 1995, I began working at St. Catherine's again | 1:24 | |
| as a co-director of campus ministries | 1:26 | |
| as a team member with them, Cathy Stephens. | 1:29 | |
| And I got back into working in the archdiocese. | 1:31 | |
| Into all the catholic circles. | 1:35 | |
| And I, | 1:40 | |
| I was still doing the work of re-imagining. | 1:54 | |
| But in that more limited context, again. | 2:02 | |
| - | How were you doing the work? | 2:05 |
| - | But trying to do it, trying to do it | 2:06 |
| in ways that would be open to that. | 2:09 | |
| Like if there were, and as there were calls | 2:11 | |
| to work across denominations. | 2:17 | |
| - | Uh-huh | 2:21 |
| - | I was open to that. | 2:24 |
| And I was away when Sally Hill died, | 2:25 | |
| and that is just, I mean, ah. | 2:27 | |
| What a loss. | 2:31 | |
| - | Yes. | 2:32 |
| - | For all of us. | 2:34 |
| - | Yeah | 2:35 |
| - | And I have always been more attentive | 2:40 |
| to what's happening at UTS, | 2:44 | |
| - | Um-hm | 2:46 |
| - | Because of getting connected with them | 2:47 |
| in re-imagining in and around that time. | 2:50 | |
| And I'm never not doing the work of re-imagining ritual | 2:59 | |
| in our own tradition, because I am continuing to work in | 3:02 | |
| ritual now for the province. | 3:07 | |
| - | Um-hm | 3:09 |
| - | And I'm connected in the St. Catherine faith community | 3:10 |
| and Lori and I | 3:15 | |
| talk, and plan, and argue about how, | 3:22 | |
| how can it be more, how can we, | 3:26 | |
| how can language be more inclusive? | 3:29 | |
| - | Um-hm | 3:31 |
| - | How can we, and we have a new president at St. Catherine's | 3:32 |
| now and I hope that it's a new moment. | 3:36 | |
| - | mm | 3:38 |
| - | Much as I love Andrea, | 3:40 |
| and appreciate, really deeply, broadly and deeply, | 3:44 | |
| everything that she has done for St. Catherine. | 3:50 | |
| And I also experience ways | 3:52 | |
| in which she never got us as CSJ's. | 3:55 | |
| - | Um-hm | 3:59 |
| - | And she always was more protective about, | 4:01 |
| I think she could have been more feminist in her thinking, | 4:07 | |
| in her leading, | 4:10 | |
| and what that would mean, and less/ and more | 4:18 | |
| I think she's very, on GLBTQ things, very restrained | 4:29 | |
| - | Um hm | 4:36 |
| - | And I , and has repressed that movement at St. Catherine's | 4:37 |
| in ways that have been very hurtful to people. | 4:42 | |
| So I look for, I hope that we will be very forward | 4:47 | |
| in our conversations with Becky | 4:53 | |
| about how we can move together as far as | 4:55 | |
| - | And Becky is the new president? | 4:58 |
| - | Becky is the new president, ReBecca Roloff. | 4:59 |
| - | Yes, yes, yes | 5:01 |
| - | So I mean I think its, | 5:04 |
| Andrea did wonderful wonderful work for St. Catherine's, | 5:06 | |
| in so many ways, and she a wonderful a gifted liturgist. | 5:09 | |
| - | Yes. | 5:14 |
| - | In some ways, I always wanted her to be more collegial. | 5:19 |
| - | Um-hm | 5:23 |
| - | And I got to experience that first-hand | 5:25 |
| as the Director of campus ministry | 5:27 | |
| and as being in a department that | 5:29 | |
| and it will be interesting to see somebody follow her | 5:35 | |
| who doesn't have her particular expertise | 5:38 | |
| in liturgical and ritual leadership. | 5:42 | |
| - | mm | 5:44 |
| - | To be president. | 5:45 |
| I think Becky has big shoes in that sense to follow | 5:47 | |
| and I hope that she'll be confident | 5:51 | |
| and that she'll take advantage of all the good people | 5:54 | |
| around her who can help fill in some of the things | 5:58 | |
| that she may feel lacking in herself | 6:02 | |
| because she doesn't have the same kind | 6:05 | |
| of Catholic, liturgical, musical background | 6:08 | |
| that Andrea had and brought to the position. | 6:12 | |
| - | Uh-huh | 6:15 |
| Susan, as we, as you look back at re-imagining | 6:16 | |
| what would you say is most significant to you, and why? | 6:18 | |
| - | Actually, | 6:25 |
| For me, the experience in that first event | 6:31 | |
| it was just jolting, wonderfully jolting, | 6:36 | |
| about how, how broad and deep the experience | 6:38 | |
| of the world's women is, in our traditions. | 6:49 | |
| And so I've always, since then, my reading is, | 6:56 | |
| theologically, is much broader, I do | 7:00 | |
| The world's women theologians, | 7:07 | |
| I have done much more reading and much more attentive | 7:10 | |
| and in tune with scholars across traditions. | 7:13 | |
| - | mm | 7:17 |
| - | And the fact that Elizabeth's new book is | 7:19 |
| Global Women's Voices in Christology. | 7:21 | |
| And they won't all be Catholic. | 7:26 | |
| - | Yes. | 7:28 |
| - | That's very significant, I think, for us continuing | 7:29 |
| - | Is this Elizabeth Johnson? | 7:34 |
| - | Yes. | 7:35 |
| And Joan Mitchell has for years wanted | 7:37 | |
| to bring Ebony Guevarra here. | 7:39 | |
| I hope we still do that. | 7:41 | |
| I don't know how old she is at this point. | 7:47 | |
| Because she's a | 7:51 | |
| we've become familiar with her work, and who | 7:58 | |
| I mean, I feel like if I met her I would know her. | 8:03 | |
| - | Um-hm | 8:06 |
| - | So, so | 8:09 |
| Expanding my sense of connection, my svelte connection | 8:19 | |
| with women around the world in this work, | 8:23 | |
| and as well as my knowing of the people. | 8:26 | |
| I've never lost track of Kwok Pui | 8:31 | |
| - | Kwok Pui Lan? | 8:34 |
| - | Yes. | 8:35 |
| - | Chun Hyun Kyung | 8:36 |
| - | Yes. | 8:36 |
| - | Using her work, becoming more familiar | 8:37 |
| with more of her work. | 8:40 | |
| Those are, Letty Russell, Dolores Williams, | 8:42 | |
| all of those people, are, have become real to me | 8:47 | |
| in a way that, in ways that | 8:51 | |
| Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, I mean | 8:55 | |
| - | Yes, | 8:57 |
| - | Mercy Ambu Oduyoye | 8:58 |
| Their names are like music to me. | 9:02 | |
| And their contributions to theology, and to, | 9:04 | |
| and you know, I would long, I long, not would, | 9:10 | |
| I do long for their work to be celebrated in our tradition. | 9:13 | |
| - | Yes, | 9:19 |
| - | The way, the way we can celebrate it. | 9:21 |
| The way we celebrate founders and visionaries | 9:25 | |
| and saints among us. | 9:30 | |
| They are, they are that to us, I think. | 9:31 | |
| - | Which brings me to the question of how, you know, | 9:36 |
| the goals of re-imagining were to bring inclusive language | 9:39 | |
| more, and feminist theology to the churches, | 9:42 | |
| and where do you think we are in that, today? | 9:45 | |
| - | Not as far as I had hoped | 9:53 |
| - | Yes | 9:55 |
| - | and dream of being. | 9:57 |
| And I can't, sadly, | 10:04 | |
| I can't speak for more than my own tradition, | 10:07 | |
| Catholic tradition, because I'm still that, | 10:10 | |
| that's what I'm most familiar with. | 10:13 | |
| And unfortunately, in some ways, | 10:16 | |
| that's who I've more remained in closest dialogue | 10:18 | |
| or relationship with. | 10:24 | |
| But, | 10:25 | |
| - | How would you describe the situation | 10:28 |
| at the Catholic tradition, now? | 10:29 | |
| - | Well, happily struggling, | 10:35 |
| at least we're alive and struggling. | 10:37 | |
| - | Um hm | 10:39 |
| - | I am | 10:41 |
| I don't find, as a leader of women religious, | 10:53 | |
| I didn't, I don't find us as vocal and forward-looking | 10:57 | |
| and as appreciative of ourselves, | 11:04 | |
| as I wish we were outspoken. | 11:07 | |
| I think there's a place for us, especially having | 11:09 | |
| survived and thrived through the apostolic visitation | 11:13 | |
| and the CDF, I think it's time | 11:16 | |
| for our voices to be heard more | 11:18 | |
| across the spectrum in public. | 11:21 | |
| And I think it would be helpful to be more outspoken within, | 11:24 | |
| because there is a leadership vacuum | 11:32 | |
| in the Catholic church. | 11:37 | |
| Our bishops are paralyzed, I think. | 11:39 | |
| I think there are a growing number | 11:45 | |
| of Francis appointees who I hope are caucusing. | 11:48 | |
| - | Um-hm | 11:55 |
| - | And I would use that word, because I think that | 11:58 |
| our bishops act out of that political reality more | 12:01 | |
| and are that influenced by , | 12:06 | |
| and I, I think that might not be a bad thing. | 12:08 | |
| I think the Holy Spirit can work in all kinds of ways. | 12:13 | |
| And I think for the good of the church, | 12:16 | |
| for the good of this church, and for us to not lose | 12:18 | |
| what we have done, what we have gained the Catholic | 12:22 | |
| institutions and ministry, broad ministry. | 12:28 | |
| And for us to heal from the sex abuse | 12:33 | |
| trauma. | 12:43 | |
| - | Um hm | 12:45 |
| - | I think it's a very opportune time for growing, | 12:47 |
| - | Um hm | 12:51 |
| - | And it's a, we're, Francis is a huge gift, | 12:54 |
| and his leadership is a huge gift. | 12:57 | |
| So I hope that we could work more together. | 13:00 | |
| And I hope that, I hope that leaders, | 13:04 | |
| I mean the UISG having the advantage of having Francis | 13:11 | |
| with them for an extended period of time, | 13:14 | |
| for two years in a row, would empower them | 13:16 | |
| to have even bolder conversations than they recently did | 13:18 | |
| about asking about women beacons, | 13:22 | |
| and some other things which | 13:24 | |
| - | What organization is that again, I'm sorry. | 13:27 |
| - | This is the International Union of Superiors General. | 13:28 |
| They meet, with, three times, every three years in Rome. | 13:31 | |
| - | Um hm | 13:34 |
| - | Two or three years. | 13:35 |
| - | Um-hm | 13:36 |
| - | Rode didn't even deign to meet with them. | 13:38 |
| - | mm | 13:41 |
| - | And Braz de Aviz has met with them, | 13:43 |
| but now Francis has met them, two times running | 13:46 | |
| For extended conversation, 75 minutes. | 13:49 | |
| That's a lot of Francis's time. | 13:52 | |
| - | Yes. | 13:54 |
| - | And they asked for bold questions of him, | 13:56 |
| about inclusion, in various ways, | 14:01 | |
| and that's hopeful. | 14:04 | |
| - | Yes. | 14:06 |
| - | I think we're finding our voice. | 14:07 |
| - | Um-hm | 14:10 |
| - | I think we the leaders, we need to find our voice | 14:11 |
| and we need to trust it. | 14:15 | |
| - | Um-hm | 14:16 |
| - | And I so wish that Hillary | 14:17 |
| would break through some things. | 14:20 | |
| I think that Bernie has helped move her to the left, | 14:25 | |
| and I think that she could, | 14:27 | |
| I hope daily and pray daily that she'll move further, | 14:30 | |
| in terms of not | 14:33 | |
| holding corporations and the military to account. | 14:41 | |
| - | Um-hm | 14:44 |
| - | I don't want to get into the politics of it all, | 14:46 |
| but I just think there are lots, | 14:48 | |
| I mean I, I hope this is her time. | 14:50 | |
| - | Um hm | 14:54 |
| - | And, and I hope that she could be, that she will be | 14:56 |
| helped by all the voices, the voices of women around her | 15:03 | |
| not only those who already have positions of authority, | 15:08 | |
| but who have the experience of women deeply at heart | 15:12 | |
| - | Um-hm | 15:17 |
| - | And have that wisdom to bring her | 15:19 |
| and to push her into further, I don't know | 15:24 | |
| - | Yeah, yeah | 15:27 |
| - | Anyway, I think it's a hopeful, it's a very hopeful time | 15:28 |
| that we're opening to larger realities that we need to. | 15:38 | |
| - | mm | 15:43 |
| - | And I hope that, that our, | 15:44 |
| I hope that our voices can be stronger. | 15:50 | |
| - | Um-hm | 15:52 |
| I think that's a very good and hopeful place to end. | 15:53 | |
| Is there anything you want to add that we haven't discussed? | 15:56 | |
| - | Probably, but I think I'm grateful for the opportunity. | 15:58 |
| I remain grateful for the opportunity. | 16:06 | |
| I'm glad for the conversation. | 16:07 | |
| - | Me too. | 16:10 |
| - | And I look forward to where we'll go from here. | 16:11 |
| - | Absolutely. | 16:13 |
| - | So | 16:15 |
| - | Thank you, thank you, Susan. | 16:15 |