Swanson, Sue / Re-Imagining Collection / Duke Digital Repository

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And we are now recording.

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So first of all, some background,

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if you could say your name.

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My name is Sue Swanson.

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And are you lay or clergy?

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I'm lay.

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And what is your denominational affiliation, if any?

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Episcopalian.

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Okay.

And when and where were you born, Sue?

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I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1949.

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Okay, and where did you go to school,

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graduate or divinity school?

0:26

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I went to school at the University of Minnesota

0:27

to be an elementary teacher and then I went to Metro State

0:30

University to do a executive communications degree

0:33

and united theological seminary for my master of divinity.

0:39

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What an interesting background.

0:44

And how and when did you first become aware

0:46

of feminist theology?

0:49

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I was working with the United Methodist Women Organization

0:51

and they did not do anything with feminist theology

0:55

and Mary Gates became involved with the Re-Imagining

1:02

Conference and told me that I had to go.

1:04

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Is that right, so she invited you to it.

1:08

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Yes, yes, she told me I had to go.

1:10

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Yes.

1:12

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It was mandatory.

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Knowing Mary, I can imagine that.

1:14

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So that was, Re-Imagining was your introduction

1:16

to feminist theology.

1:18

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Yes.

1:19

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Wow.

And this was the 1993 conference that you went to.

1:20

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Yes, yes.

1:22

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Okay, well that is exciting, I wanna hear more about that.

1:24

Can we talk about your relationship

1:27

to the Re-Imagining community?

1:28

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I think I'm gonna go chronologically.

1:33

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Good, good.

1:35

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So I attended the 1993 conference but I didn't

1:36

do anything, I just was an attendee,

1:39

and then in 1994, I was a member of the ritual committee

1:42

and we planned the ritual for that year

1:46

and in 1995, I was working with small group formation

1:48

for our small group, one of the only two that has survived

1:54

up to this point, but we had many many different

1:58

small groups that were formed in 1995.

2:01

And then in 1996 and through 2003, I was a conference

2:04

planner, I was on the Coordinating Council,

2:09

I was Membership Chair, I was Chair of Quarterly Worship,

2:14

I also presented different faith labs

2:20

as well as writing for the quarterly publication,

2:23

and writing music for the conferences

2:29

as well as all three of the books that were published.

2:32

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You were involved in all three of the books.

2:37

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Right, right.

2:38

I had a song in the first book that was sung

2:40

at one of the conferences, I think 1996,

2:43

and a song in the songbook that Madeleine Sue Martin edited

2:46

and that song was written with Nancy Berna King

2:51

and then of course I was the editor

2:55

of the ritual book, Bless Sophia, in 2003.

2:58

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Wonderful, that's an amazing amount of participation,

3:02

that is really, and I wanna hear about a lot

3:06

of these different ones, so we'll need to

3:09

explore that a little bit more.

3:10

In fact, why don't we talk some about small groups

3:12

because I think that was really important.

3:14

Do you recall about what motivated people to wanna have

3:19

the small groups, what went through that process,

3:22

how successful it was?

3:25

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Mhmm, well what we were doing, we were thinking about

3:26

the fact that really the theology that we were doing

3:29

required a lot of participation with members,

3:35

a lot of discussion, a lot of reading,

3:38

so we thought that the best way to have the maximum

3:40

participation would be to break people into small

3:43

geographical groups so we tried to take people

3:46

that lived pretty in close proximity and so

3:49

we took a survey at the 1994 conference

3:56

of who would be interested in being in a small group,

4:01

put it all together by geographical area

4:04

and then several of us just started calling people

4:06

and seeing if they were interested in getting involved.

4:09

And so we formed quite a few groups,

4:13

I have how many, I have the list, so if you wanna see that.

4:15

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I would like to, yes.

4:18

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But I would say, I wanna say that we formed

4:20

about 25 or 30 groups.

4:23

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And this is across the country?

4:25

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Mostly in the Twin Cities because there wasn't really

4:27

much of a geographical concentration anywhere else.

4:29

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It is interesting when I look at the quarterly newsletter

4:37

to see that small groups did form

4:39

around the country eventually.

4:40

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They did, they did form from some theological groups

4:42

that were already going.

4:47

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Okay.

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Out of Voices of Sophia and some denominational groups

4:50

and some other groups that were feminist oriented

4:53

that kind of were loosely affiliated with Re-Imagining.

4:57

So I'd have to look at the list and see.

5:01

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Yeah, good.

5:03

That is wonderful.

5:05

In terms of the faith labs, what did you teach

5:06

for faith labs and what was that experience like?

5:09

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I taught beadwork, beadwork is a spiritual discipline

5:12

so I taught some classes on actually making prayer beads.

5:15

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But how did you get interested in that, Sue?

5:21

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Oh, in prayer beads?

5:23

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Yes, yes.

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I was traveling for business about eight to 10 times

5:27

a month and I was in hotel rooms all over the country

5:30

and airplanes constantly and got very tired

5:34

of movie theaters and shopping malls,

5:37

so I needed something small that I could carry with me

5:41

and beadwork worked really well, so I started in just

5:44

regular, secular kinds of beadwork and wrote

5:47

for Beadwork Magazine and Bead and Button Magazine

5:50

and then I started learning about prayer beads

5:52

and that's where I was really interested

5:56

because I had already been doing some studying

5:58

on spiritual practices, so beading as a spiritual practice

6:00

became something that I started teaching in 1997.

6:04

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1997?

6:09

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Mhmm.

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And were you teaching in churches?

6:10

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In churches and stores and conferences

6:12

and different kinds of schools, yeah.

6:16

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So a variety of different settings, very neat.

6:19

We can get back to some of this but when we talk about

6:23

maybe, let's talk about the backlash for a minute.

6:26

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Yeah.

6:30

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Were you aware of the backlash?

6:31

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Yes definitely, I was aware of the backlash.

6:32

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And did it affect you directly?

6:35

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Yes because my pastor was head of the National Promise

6:37

Keepers and very anti-feminist and very discouraging to me

6:40

because I didn't have any theological credentials.

6:47

So I did not have a voice, period, I didn't have a voice

6:51

that was credible, any of it, up until I went to UTS.

6:55

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So you had conversations with the pastor.

7:01

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Many conversations about feminist theology,

7:04

there was actually two pastors,

7:07

one was maybe a little bit more compassionate about it.

7:11

My son and I did the Boy Scouts God and Country badge

7:18

using all different kinds of images for god from the bible

7:23

and he was our advisor for that and it was a good project.

7:28

He wasn't very interested in it

7:33

but he was willing to listen.

7:35

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Yes, yes, good, okay.

How did you react to the backlash,

7:40

what was your response to it?

7:42

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Well I was invited to quite a few of the meetings

7:44

after the conference about the backlash and at that time,

7:47

I was heavily involved in United Methodist Women

7:51

which had sponsored some of the programs

7:54

so they had gotten into some of the problems

7:56

with a denomination putting their weight behind

8:00

feminist theology and so basically, I was interested in it

8:03

because I was very engaged with the whole ideas

8:08

of feminist theology and I started doing a lot of reading.

8:14

I probably was the only person around any of the tables

8:17

when they said that, during the first conference,

8:21

of let us speak the names we have never spoken for god

8:25

that didn't have one word, one name to speak,

8:29

besides God the Father, I hadn't heard any of it.

8:32

So it was quite an education.

8:36

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I wanna hear more about this, Sue, this is fascinating,

8:39

so this was your introduction to feminist theology.

8:42

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Absolutely.

8:44

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Tell me about

what that was like to be at the 1993 conference.

8:46

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I had been involved in an awful lot of open space

8:52

conferences, like it was, so the idea that it wasn't very

8:55

organized and that there was no one person speaking

8:58

and keeping us on time or in line was not a problem for me.

9:01

I had done a lot of firsts in my church,

9:06

I was the first administrative chair that was female,

9:09

I was the first usher that was female,

9:11

they had me wear my navy blue suit that day.

9:13

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Really?

9:15

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Yes,

and they asked if the offering plates were too heavy

9:16

to lift up above my head for blessing.

9:18

So I had been involved in some of these feminist

9:21

sort of things and of course a lot of feminist activities

9:25

in business but it never basically came up in church.

9:28

There was nothing, no inclusive language, nothing.

9:32

I at that time wasn't involved in the Catholic Church at all

9:37

so didn't even have the images of Mary,

9:40

so I basically had no images of feminine deity at all.

9:43

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And I'm curious, did you feel the lack of that

9:49

until you went to Re-Imagining, did that?

9:52

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Well I don't know that I thought that was an option.

9:55

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Yeah, right.

9:59

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'Cause you don't really think about it.

10:00

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Sure.

10:02

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And questioning wasn't really an option

10:03

and we were kept very very busy with the structure

10:05

of the United Methodist Church, I mean United Methodist

10:07

Women has 1000 committees and the church itself

10:10

has a huge structure so we were very busy just upholding

10:13

the normal structure and yeah, that's what I was doing.

10:17

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So it obviously was an important experience for you

10:21

because you were even involved in planning the very next

10:24

conference, so in what way was that so important to you?

10:26

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I just saw this huge lack of woman

10:35

in anything having to do with church

10:39

and putting that together with my business background

10:41

and lack of women that were allowed to sell data

10:44

and women that weren't allowed to do different things,

10:47

it just kind of all clicked, it made sense there.

10:49

And I didn't really have any access to any of those authors

10:53

because I wasn't in academia and there wasn't,

10:56

and the Methodist Church certainly wasn't allowing us

10:59

to see any of that, so there was just nothing.

11:02

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Did you say after the conference you started

11:05

reading the authors on your own?

11:07

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Definitely, definitely, yeah.

11:08

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And that was obviously a good experience for you.

11:11

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Very good experience, yeah.

11:12

Although somewhat confusing, 'cause some of the speakers

11:15

were pretty well over my head at that time.

11:21

It was pretty heavy going to study it on your own, but.

11:25

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How did you react to the claims afterwards

11:29

that people who attended were heretics and pagans?

11:33

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That's changed over the years.

11:41

I think we were.

11:42

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Oh, interesting.

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Yeah, I really do.

11:44

We started the conference as Christian women

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and we had a very serious conversation in the coordinating

11:52

council about remaining Christian

11:55

and there was a lot of push for us not to remain Christian.

11:58

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From where?

12:05

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From people who had attended the gathering

12:06

and it was a real heated discussion within the coordinating

12:08

council of whether or not we wanted to be a Christian

12:12

organization or open things up like the women

12:15

in spirituality conference that they do at Mankato,

12:18

which is just completely open.

12:21

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Right.

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I think if we had, that it's a very small step

12:25

to people's thinking from new age to pagan to heretics

12:28

because it's very, even today,

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I think it's even more dangerous.

12:35

Some of our stands today are completely unacceptable.

12:37

The Episcopal Church has been censored for three years

12:43

for their stand on homosexuality,

12:45

so today it's no real better to me.

12:47

I don't see any difference in the language from 1993

12:49

to today, it's not there, the militaristic, patriarchal

12:53

language is still in churches, you might hear a couple

12:58

mentions of a female saint or a female theologian

13:02

but not very often and there's absolutely no compromise

13:06

in using all-male language for god in the Episcopal Church.

13:09

None.

13:14

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Yeah, yeah.

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And even if you say, if you use a female image once

13:16

but you're using a male image 99 times,

13:21

what are the children and how are we raising people?

13:25

We're just raising a God the Father mentality still.

13:29

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Now, you just raise an important point,

13:32

that the Episcopal Church has really been censured,

13:33

I guess you could say, for its stance on homosexuality.

13:36

Now, it's interesting that, do you have any thoughts

13:39

on why the Episcopal Church has moved forward on that issue

13:43

but not on the issue of feminism?

13:48

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I think that they would say that they're ahead

13:52

on the issue of feminism because they've had a nation

13:54

of women for a long time and that they are fully accepting

13:56

of women in all the leadership positions.

14:01

However, the language doesn't reflect it

14:04

in any possible way, I can't see it.

14:07

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Right, yep.

14:10

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I wish I could put

a positive spin on it, but I don't see it.

14:13

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Right, I wanna get back to a couple important things

14:17

you said earlier, first of all, the part about

14:20

the coordinating council discussing whether to remain

14:22

Christian or not, so they decided to remain

14:25

a Christian organization, do you recall why that decision

14:27

was made, what were the reasons for that?

14:31

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I think it's directly because of the backlash,

14:33

that they wanted to stay in the fight and stay members

14:36

of their churches and have voices within their churches.

14:40

We all really felt like we had work to do and that would

14:45

have some sort, it would come to some sort of fruition.

14:49

And talked about planting seeds that we would never

14:54

really see blossom into flowers

14:56

but we were gonna plant the seeds anyway.

14:59

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Given what you just said, do you feel like the seeds

15:01

have not come to flower yet?

15:04

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No, they have not, no.

In a few places, I see Wisdom Ways and we had a program

15:11

about Hildegard of Bingen a few weeks ago

15:16

with 120 people there and people came up to me afterwards

15:18

and said it was refreshing to see the feminine face of god

15:22

again tonight, so there's people that are still very

15:27

very hungry for it and there are small pockets of places

15:31

that are still doing that in a Christian setting.

15:35

Of course, when you go to Minnesota State,

15:39

the Women in Spirituality, it's all feminine, feminist

15:42

images of god and it's very refreshing and it's wonderful

15:49

but then you are opening yourself up to witches and elves

15:51

and fairies and extra-terrestrials

15:56

and there's no bounds on what they do.

15:58

And by the way, this is their last year,

16:01

this is their final year.

16:04

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Oh, is it, okay.

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So there isn't any fence around it, it's everything.

16:05

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Why did you say, it was an interesting comment,

16:10

that in fact, you decided we were heretics and pagans,

16:12

why do you say that, how are you defining those terms

16:15

or why is that?

16:18

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A questioner,

a questioner of the faith, and I think we were questioning.

16:20

Well, no doubt about the fact that we were seriously

16:23

questioning and the way I look at it is that we were doing

16:26

constructive theological work, a systematic theology base

16:31

with the feminine face of god intertwined in that work

16:36

and it was constructive and it worked.

16:41

And in the past, a lot of the academic theological work

16:45

that had been done was deconstructionism, very dramatic,

16:49

sometimes very negative speech of taking apart

16:54

and dismantling the organization.

16:59

What we did was different, we put it together

17:02

and we actually did the ritual, we actually had an inclusive

17:04

community and it was like one brief shining moment

17:08

like Camelot that it worked and I think that's what really

17:12

scared people, is that it worked and it worked beautifully.

17:15

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So why was that heresy and paganism?

17:19

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Because we were questioning the basic beliefs

17:22

and the basic structure of the church.

17:24

Especially for different denominations

17:27

it affected in different ways, we had the call to action

17:29

in the Catholic Church where women couldn't preach

17:32

or couldn't be ordained and then we had some denominations

17:34

where women were marginally accepted but the language

17:38

and the ritual was never accepted and never there.

17:42

I've never seen it and I've been in

17:45

a lot of different churches, lot of different denominations.

17:46

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How do you account for the backlash and then maybe

17:51

why you don't think there's been more progress in the church

17:55

because I know those are two questions

17:58

but they're kinda related.

17:59

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Well a lot of the backlash had to do with money,

18:01

of people who had spent money to support the conference

18:03

so it kinda hit people in the pocketbook

18:05

and that's always some place that people will look

18:07

and also in employment of people that had a voice

18:10

in the church that were, that didn't affect me.

18:14

So I think it just kinda hit 'em where they could feel

18:19

that difference, that they'd actually sponsored something.

18:24

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Right, yeah, it was really actually tied

18:28

to the mainline churches.

18:30

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And I think that the reason we haven't made progress

18:32

is it's just been quelched everywhere,

18:35

you just can't do that, you aren't welcome to do that,

18:38

you would not be welcome to change the language

18:45

of a psalm to a feminine language or to a first-person

18:48

language, you wouldn't be welcome to do it in church,

18:52

you'd just be happily told that that's not

18:55

something that we do here, or you can do it

18:57

in your small groups or you can do it other places

19:00

but not in the worship gathering on Sunday morning.

19:02

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Any thoughts on why that's still the case?

19:07

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Yeah, the church is very defensive and the mainline

19:11

churches are in a defensive position of shrinking and aging

19:14

and when you start shrinking and aging

19:19

and thinking of the pie as shrinking and shrinking,

19:22

you're not gonna be in a position for expansive language

19:25

or expanding what you're thinking.

19:28

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Thank you, this is really good.

19:32

How would you define Re-Imagining?

19:35

We've already been talking some about it

19:38

but maybe explicitly.

19:39

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I would define it as a community of women

19:41

who are engaged in theological thinking and also

19:45

in a new way of being the church together.

19:48

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Yeah, mhmm, mhmm.

19:52

As you were involved in the community,

19:57

you were not involved in it being formed,

20:02

or were you involved in the actual community

20:04

being formed after the '93 conference?

20:05

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Yeah, oh yeah.

20:09

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You were, you were, okay.

Okay, oh, I'm glad I asked that.

20:11

So could you say more about how and why

20:14

the Re-Imagining Community was formed?

20:16

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We just wanted more, I wanted more,

20:19

we just needed to get together again,

20:21

we needed to talk to each other and support each other

20:24

so I think it's just 'cause there was just such a huge

20:28

hunger for that kind of organization.

20:30

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So some people have argued that it only happened

20:36

because of the backlash, do you think if the backlash

20:38

hadn't happened that that hunger would have been there

20:41

and it still would have been formed?

20:43

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The hunger would have been there but I don't know

20:45

if we would have been able to do it ourselves.

20:47

We always go between centralization and decentralization

20:49

and that was a moment in centralization.

20:55

I don't think if we would have just gone off on our own

20:57

we would have been able to pull anything off alone.

21:00

I certainly wouldn't have been able to do anything

21:03

on my own with United Methodist Women.

21:05

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So we needed the community.

21:09

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Yeah.

21:10

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As you look back, and you were involved in many

21:12

different ways, how would you say that feminist theology

21:14

affects the structure and functioning of the community?

21:19

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Of the Re-Imagining community?

21:25

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The Re-Imagining Community, yeah.

21:26

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Oh, well first of all, I think we really tried

21:27

to be a round table so when we got together,

21:29

we always had a beautiful of ritual or poetry

21:31

when we started and then we started with check-ins

21:35

rather than starting with business and a business agenda

21:38

so we got to know each other on a personal basis

21:41

rather than just a business basis and we took the time

21:43

to do that, so I think just the way that the meetings

21:46

were run, I think people trying to communicate

21:51

as much as possible on an equal footing without titles

21:58

and without authority, we had a lot of people with academic

22:02

credentials and a lot of religious and I think people

22:07

just tried to listen to all the voices,

22:14

and that was important, so it was a different kind

22:16

of community, very inclusive community.

22:18

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As you're talking, I'm thinking, you had a business

22:22

background which not many people had,

22:23

so that must have been, how would you,

22:26

coming from a business background,

22:29

how would you reflect on the way the community

22:31

and the meetings were structured?

22:32

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Well it wasn't hierarchical, we didn't have an org chart,

22:35

we tried to have a coordinating council

22:38

instead of a more administrative name with a president,

22:42

we had coordinators, we had co-coordinators usually,

22:46

and we had different interest groups rather than,

22:51

we didn't really use the business terminology,

22:54

although we did agendas and we did minutes, thank goodness,

22:58

but we didn't adhere to a, what do I want to say,

23:02

an unchangeable structure that we started

23:12

and just filled slots in an org chart, we didn't ever really

23:14

do that, so I think that was important.

23:17

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What challenges were faced by the community during its

23:22

10 years of existence, and you were involved in various ways

23:24

during that time and how were they addressed?

23:27

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Well I just wanna say the biggest one was inclusivity

23:30

and diversity because when we started the group,

23:32

it was mostly older white women,

23:35

I was actually on the younger side of people.

23:37

Most of the people that were planning it were my age now

23:40

or 25 years older than me, so when it gets started

23:43

by an older group of white women, it's difficult to then

23:49

later on change your personality and invite in diversity.

23:53

You can invite in a speaker or two which we always did,

23:57

but according to a lot of people now,

24:01

that's just another form of tokenism, really.

24:05

So we were interested, it wasn't that we weren't wanting

24:08

to hear those voices but we just didn't really

24:12

know how to do it, and when we did it,

24:15

we didn't do it in the very best way possible.

24:16

We made a lot of white privilege kinds of mistakes,

24:20

inadvertently, and sometimes it was kind of sad.

24:23

It just reminds me of when we had Linda Hollies,

24:31

did you go to that meeting?

24:35

Linda Hollies is a black womanist and she came in

24:37

and she was talking about art in the black community

24:40

in the South and made a comment about quilts

24:45

and I was thinking, "Oh, how beautiful,"

24:49

the story quilts were and I just commented to her

24:52

that I loved the colors that they used in the quilts

24:56

and she came down from the podium and started screaming

25:00

two inches away from my face saying, "We could only use

25:02

"the pieces of materials that came from the slave masters

25:05

"and came from your mothers, your foremothers," she said,

25:11

"We never got to choose anything, we never got anything new"

25:15

and screamed at me, and then we had to have Alika Galloway

25:18

come in and actually do another quarterly worship

25:21

to try and do some healing after what happened

25:25

so we didn't always make the best decisions,

25:29

I think they were fairly innocent,

25:32

but we didn't always do it right.

25:34

-

Yeah, that was at a quarterly worship that that happened?

25:37

-

Mhmm, two quarterly worships, then.

25:40

-

You know, I wonder if you could, you have such experience

25:42

of the quarterly worships, of the conferences,

25:46

of so many things, could you just reflect on what some

25:48

of your memories of striking moments in those experiences?

25:52

That was a very striking one.

25:57

-

That was striking to me,

yeah, I think there were, I think,

25:59

although it's Jeannie Williams' story to tell

26:07

about Letty Russell because Letty Russell obviously

26:09

was one of the female academics that was leading,

26:14

she wrote, what was it, the Feminist Theology Dictionary,

26:20

I think was Shannon Clarkson and very very famous woman

26:27

and she came into our round circle planning

26:31

for the gathering and of course we checked in

26:35

and we did all of our things, she thought she was going to

26:38

be running the meeting and afterwards,

26:40

after several, several meetings, the pre-meeting

26:44

and then when she came in for the conference,

26:47

when Jeannie went to take her to the airport,

26:49

she said she had learned a lot about power from us.

26:52

-

Really?

26:55

-

Yes,

which surprised me because she was expecting to come in

26:56

as the powerful woman and tell us what to do

27:00

and it didn't happen.

27:03

Probably it happened in everything else

27:04

that she had ever done, and so we were a little different

27:06

and she could kinda feel that difference.

27:10

-

That is an important story.

27:12

Are there other things that come to mind?

27:14

-

There are just so many, there's just so many.

27:17

I think we had some real poignant moments

27:23

during the quarterly worship, we did one midsummer worship

27:27

out at a labyrinth and I don't know if you were there

27:32

in Eaton Prairie and it was just a beautiful evening

27:35

and we actually served milk and honey

27:38

at the center of the labyrinth and it was very beautiful

27:40

evening surrounded by a huge group of people that had a big

27:44

bonfire and sang Re-Imagining songs afterwards.

27:49

-

Really?

27:53

-

Yeah, it was really beautiful.

27:54

And some of the different kinds of rituals that we did.

27:55

I think it was always very poignant to me

27:59

when Sister Martha would bring her bread that she had made

28:02

and we would share bread or share communion together

28:06

and we did some things that were really thoughtful,

28:11

really good.

28:17

-

Yeah.

And this is related, but a little different.

28:20

What aspects of Re-Imagining

28:22

were most significant to you and why?

28:24

-

Well I enjoyed reading the books that we did

28:31

in our small group, I think that that helped me a lot,

28:33

not knowing a lot about feminist theology,

28:35

it helped to discuss it with the small group

28:40

and to choose books that we would be interested in

28:42

and that we would have some handle on,

28:46

so that made a big difference,

28:48

that was sort of my reading guide for many years.

28:51

And I would have to say when we were disbanding

28:57

the community, too, how we kind of thoughtfully

29:01

went about that, taking the community apart and yeah.

29:05

Just a lot.

29:13

-

Yeah, yeah.

How did your involvement in Re-Imagining change

29:17

your perspective on feminist theology and toward the church.

29:19

-

Well of course.

29:23

(laughs)

29:24

Basically, I guess once your eyes are opened

29:27

you can't shut 'em again, so it caused a real critical phase

29:28

for me in the church because I wasn't being fed

29:33

in the church and I was being fed in other groups.

29:35

Re-Imagining and Women's Spirituality Conference

29:39

and Wisdom Ways and all of those women's groups were where

29:42

I was really feeling that I was being fed spiritually.

29:46

In church it got to be kind of a fight, unfortunately.

29:50

It just got to be a huge amount of structure

29:54

and a lot of people saying that what we were doing

29:57

wasn't mainstream and didn't really count

30:01

when I felt like in my heart that's all that counted

30:05

so basically, I have, when I was in seminary,

30:08

I switched from Methodist to Episcopal

30:13

because I just felt that the Methodist Church

30:16

had absolutely no interest in the kind of spirituality

30:18

that I was interested in, I just wasn't being fed there

30:21

in the least and just felt like I was fighting it

30:25

and that my voice wasn't ever

30:30

really going to be heard there.

30:32

-

Have you found a home in the Episcopal Church?

30:34

-

I wish I could say I had.

30:36

(laughs)

30:37

Not really, not really.

30:40

I missed, I spent a couple years without church

30:42

and I missed having a community and I missed the rituals

30:45

and the holidays and that sort of thing.

30:49

It's very difficult to go into a strange community

30:52

and share communion, you really can't, it just doesn't work

30:56

and so I thought having a small community might work

31:00

and it still is, to a certain extent, working

31:05

but I'm not finding that there's any interest

31:09

in any of the retreats or workshops that I do at all, none.

31:12

-

Couple of questions, 'cause you've said

31:20

a lot of important things.

31:21

One is, before I forget, what led to you going to

31:22

United Theological Seminary?

31:26

-

Oh, well just the fact that I had absolutely no

31:28

credentials, educational credentials,

31:31

and I felt like if I was ever gonna have a voice at all

31:34

or to be able to go into different religious communities

31:37

and different women's groups studying theology,

31:42

that I really had to have a systematic education

31:47

and that's what it gave me.

31:50

-

Do you, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth,

31:53

do you feel like Re-Imagining

31:55

was an important part of that decision?

31:56

-

It was because that was the kind of work that I was doing.

32:00

I was probably, near about the time that I left

32:03

the business world, I was doing about half spiritual

32:09

kinds of work and half business work.

32:12

Because of the fact that I traveled so much,

32:15

I had a lot of free time, so I was state coordinator

32:16

for United Methodist Women, I was Vice President

32:20

of the district for eight years in a row,

32:23

I was doing just a lot of different kinds of work

32:26

and by that time, the feminist voice had definitely entered

32:28

what we were doing and it was very welcome

32:32

in the small groups of women, just not on Sunday morning.

32:36

-

Small groups of women in the United Methodist Church?

32:42

-

United Methodist Church, it was just fine

32:44

and not necessarily probably using the word Sophia

32:45

but the basic tenets behind what we were doing were okay.

32:51

So I just felt like I needed a better education.

32:56

-

And I wanna get back to another comment you were making

33:01

about, so how now at this moment,

33:03

how are you finding your spiritual life fed?

33:07

-

Through my yoga class, on Saturday mornings,

33:11

we have a very spiritual person who always,

33:14

she leads it like a retreat, a two-hour retreat,

33:17

leading us through some of the great spiritual thinkers

33:23

and leading us in embodied spirituality

33:26

including meditation, so body, mind, and spirit.

33:29

I always felt like that was one of the things

33:34

that we were missing the most in the mainline Christian

33:36

church, was the body wasn't there,

33:39

and I think if we're gonna have an integrated spiritual

33:41

life that we have to have body, mind, and spirit,

33:45

all three together, and that's where kind of the appeal

33:48

of yoga and some of these spiritual classes have come in.

33:53

And I still really don't find the body present

33:59

in the mainline churches, it's just really not there

34:02

besides maybe a few gestures of walking up to communion

34:07

and that sort of thing, so I need all three

34:11

and I need them together, I also do a lot with art

34:15

and with, what do I wanna say?

34:20

Finding your spirit through the creative acts.

34:30

-

And you lead workshops and retreats on these topics?

34:33

-

Absolutely.

34:35

-

Could you say a little bit, you do many interesting,

34:36

could you say some about what you do?

34:38

-

Well, yes.

34:40

It's called Prayer Craft because Nancy Berna King

34:44

came up with that word, she said what you do is using art

34:47

as a gateway to healing and wholeness and meditation

34:50

is like combining prayer craft and at that time,

34:53

taking two words and making them into one word was trendy

34:57

so that's what I've kept it called up to this day.

35:01

Just a few years after Re-Imagining, I became really

35:05

heavily involved with the labyrinth community

35:09

and I still am very involved with different groups

35:12

having to do with prayer walking and using different kinds

35:16

of physical activities to incorporate spiritual meditation

35:22

so anyway, I do, I teach beadwork, collage, soul collage

35:30

or story cards, knitting and crocheting,

35:35

mainly for groups that are doing prayer shawls

35:38

and different kinds of charity knitting,

35:40

and just using art as a gateway to prayer and one person

35:44

put it as prayer for people who can't sit still.

35:49

So since meditation, Buddhist meditation,

35:52

was sort of designed by men in monasteries

35:54

and we're not men in monasteries, a lot of women resonate

35:57

with drawing or painting or beadwork

36:01

or that sort of meditative activity and that helps them,

36:05

helps them to pray and to meditate.

36:08

-

Mhmm, wonderful.

36:13

What do you think are the specific contributions

36:19

Re-Imagining made to Christian theology and/or liturgy.

36:21

-

Ah, wow.

36:25

(laughs)

36:28

I don't think, I don't see any.

36:31

I don't see any, and I gathered the book of ritual,

36:34

of all of our rituals, and they're very very meaningful

36:39

to me but I don't see any that I could probably do.

36:43

I couldn't even do them at UTS Chapel,

36:46

except we did a few things, not much, not much,

36:50

music, sometimes, will ameliorate the message

36:55

so you can move in, if you're not changing the words

36:58

of existing hymns and you're using new music,

37:02

sometimes that helps people with some new metaphors, but.

37:04

-

Well you were very involved in both ritual and music

37:08

and I wonder if you could say some about

37:11

what was distinctive about, you said it was meaningful,

37:14

why was it meaningful?

37:18

-

Well, I think it was the metaphors,

37:20

using different metaphors for god,

37:21

not necessarily female metaphors, just using either unisex

37:23

types of things like basket-maker god or god ecclesia,

37:30

god calling in the church, god with us.

37:33

I like the term expansive language.

37:37

It's just that we're thinking of god from all different

37:40

perspectives and realizing that our little slice

37:43

of what we see is nothing compared to what god is

37:45

so I think ritual and music are a way just to open us up

37:49

to seeing in a different way, and anything that we can do

37:55

that's expanded, to me, is helpful.

37:59

I think when we try to contract to one little image of god

38:03

that we end up in a dualistic fight with other religions

38:07

in the world, that there's just many many ways

38:10

up to that top of the mountain and we have to be able

38:13

to at least appreciate what other people are seeing.

38:16

The smaller our slice gets, the more competitive

38:20

and defensive we get.

38:24

-

Yeah, very good.

To move toward the future, and you've already talked

38:29

some about that, but what do you think is the greatest

38:32

legacy of the Re-Imagining community?

38:34

-

I think we do have a legacy, I think we have a legacy

38:38

of opening up the discussion at a time,

38:42

at that millennial time.

38:45

Unfortunately, the third wave women have struggles

38:49

with the church, but I think it's something that people

38:56

can go back and look at what we've done and hear

39:00

those voices and there's a validity to those voices

39:02

and what we did, it does stand the test of time.

39:07

When I go back and read it, I'm happy with what we did.

39:11

Sometimes I'm shocked, yeah, and very happy,

39:14

so I think that that's a legacy.

39:18

And we still have small pockets of people

39:21

that are looking at our rituals and looking at what we did.

39:25

So I think there's a future.

39:30

-

Yeah, yeah.

What do you think Re-Imagining means today?

39:36

-

Well first of all, the word's all over the place now

39:43

so we don't really own in any way that word,

39:45

everything is getting re-imagined.

39:47

I think today, I'd hate to see it lost,

39:50

but it's not mentioned very much, it's just a very little

39:54

bit, kind of a blip on the radar screen

39:58

of what was happening around the millennial.

40:01

And so that's about as far as our organization.

40:04

I think unless you were directly involved with it

40:09

you probably wouldn't know anything about it.

40:11

-

What would it mean to re-imagine today?

40:15

What needs to be re-imagined, do you think?

40:19

-

I think the same things as we were doing.

40:21

If you look at the ritual book and you look at the first

40:23

chapters of inclusivity and different women's ways

40:25

of worship and the different ways that we did administration

40:29

and ritual, it's not being done, so yeah,

40:33

I think we still have work to do.

40:37

I don't think it really, there's not much that's there

40:40

that doesn't still have to be done.

40:48

It's getting watered down by different kinds

40:50

of gender studies and it's getting watered down

40:53

by different other kinds of social issues

40:56

that are so pressing right now, so now feminist theology

40:58

is just kind of one thing, especially at UTS.

41:02

They're doing a lot of other really fine work

41:06

but it's just not getting lifted up like it was

41:09

at that little wave that we had.

41:12

-

How does it make you feel to think about that?

41:16

Are you discouraged?

41:19

-

Well I'm not discouraged 'cause I get a chance

41:21

to teach this three or four times a month

41:22

so I'm just out there doing it, so that's what,

41:25

I'm happiest when I'm teaching, and that definitely

41:29

was a direct effect of Re-Imagining and the way

41:33

that we did business, that way that we actually conducted

41:39

a retreat or a workshop, same way as I do it now

41:42

and people love it, so that helps me.

41:47

-

Yeah.

41:50

What would you include in the current Re-Imagining website?

41:54

Who would benefit from it and why

41:57

and how would they find out about it?

41:58

-

Well, yeah, I'm gonna take the last one,

42:01

that's always been our hardest thing, is publicity,

42:04

of how you get the word of who you are out there

42:07

and it's easier now with social media

42:10

so I would say not only do we need a website,

42:13

we need to get into social media and we absolutely have

42:15

to have a Facebook or a place to comment.

42:18

Websites are more like a brochure that somebody's

42:21

gonna open if they know that it exists,

42:23

they're not gonna go to a website or go,

42:26

they're just not gonna go searching for a website

42:33

and find Re-Imagining, what they're gonna find

42:35

is a lot of the conservative backlash on Re-Imagining,

42:38

so it's not an easy thing to find and unfortunately,

42:42

the only way that you can get about that

42:47

is to get enough hits on a good website.

42:49

So that's hard, and one of the ways to do it

42:52

is through other social media, every single time

42:57

there's a meeting, it should be on Instagram

43:00

and it should be tweeted and it should be on Facebook.

43:02

Just so that, and then it does get out there

43:05

to a lot of different people, that's the only way.

43:08

It's hard.

43:12

We always struggled with how to get people included,

43:13

always, and it's not any easier.

43:16

-

And this has been wonderful,

43:22

your insights are really helpful.

43:24

What have we not discussed that you feel like

43:26

you wish you had been able to say or include?

43:29

-

Besides the people that spoke at gatherings,

43:38

there were some people that were really important

43:41

in the community and I think somehow we should figure out

43:42

how we could gather their biographies.

43:45

Some people like Madeleine Sumarden and Nancy Berna King

43:48

and Sally Hill, even, 'cause she wasn't really a speaker

43:53

and I don't know if we've ever tried to gather

43:58

the biographies of these organizers or the beginnings

44:02

so the interviews are kinda the beginning

44:05

but that might be part of a website too,

44:08

how people build the organization

44:11

that weren't more behind the scenes.

44:13

-

Yeah, very good.

44:16

-

And as far as what should be included in the website,

44:22

because Google goes pretty deep in websites,

44:28

if we start putting speakers' names and what they said,

44:31

it's going to show up, so if you google Mary Bednaraski,

44:34

our website is gonna show up as a hit there,

44:39

so just getting as many names and as much stuff on there

44:42

as we can is going to start boosting the awareness too.

44:45

-

Good point.

44:53

Thank you so much, this was great.

44:54

-

I hope it's helpful.

44:58

Well I'll make us lunch, how does that sound?

45:04

-

Wonderful.

45:07

-

Actually, it's all made.

-

Boy, Sue, that was great.

45:10

-

But what have you heard from other people?

45:12

What are they saying?

45:14

Some people are really positive and saying,

45:16

"Oh yeah, you totally changed the Presbyterian church"?

45:18

-

No, no, everybody's been saying what you have about how,

45:21

yeah, that it's not really entered into the church.

45:26

I think everybody, I mean, you said, the good thing is,

45:29

Annie asked me this.

45:35

Swanson, Sue

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Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture