Reteat One: Rediscovering Grace

This was a sort of mini-retreat--about 5 hours long, really. I flew out to Tucson for a graduation but got there early enough to have the morning and afternoon to myself. I don't have a whole lot to say about the time itself (though it was wonderfully nurturing--even 5 hours of totally free alone time now feels like a huge gift!). But I began reading this book, which is wonderful and may salvage my connection to Christianity, and I would like to share a couple of pieces of writing that came out of that time for me. The first is a little prayer I wrote based on the celtic prayers and spirituality in Newell's book (link above) which see the natural world as a sacred text, able to speak of the goodness of God. My husband (C.) and my daughter (SparkleEyes) and I now say this prayer every night as a part of our bedtime ritual. The second is a revison of a paper I had to write for my feminist theology class about whether or not I see feminist theology as necessary (if you really want the full more academic version w/footnotes and all, feel free to ask for a copy, but I figured most of you would want to be spared!). I worked on both pieces on the plane on the way home.

Bedtime Prayer

We bless you, Sister Sun,
for the warmth and light of your rays
that have illuminated our day,
for reminding us of the light and warmth of Mother God
who fills the world with life.

We bless you, Brother Moon,
for filling our night with your gentle light,
for reminding us
of Father God
who fills the world
with gentle, healing light.

We worship you, God,
Three in One,
Our Creator,
Our Redeemer,
Our Sustainer
for bright day,
for dark night,
for death,
for life,
for sleeping,
for waking,
for food for our bodies,
love for our hearts,
and hope for our souls.

Amen.



Grace Undone and Redone: Naming, Renaming, and the Powerful Potential of Feminist Theology

Grace—this particular story begins with my middle name. My story begins with Grace. There it stands—that word—at the center of my name. There it stands—that concept—at the middle of my identity.

Naming, it’s a powerful act, naming. When we name we shape identities even as they emerge from the womb. Naming, giving a yet unformed self definition, boundaries, a way to be and be known in the world. And what a powerful act to re-name, especially to rename oneself, or, as Hagar did, even to rename God. Language—in it we live and move and have our beings. Language—the words spoken to us, of us, about us—weaves us into a way of being and weaves its way through our being, framing us, creating the boundaries around how we can perceive and act on our worlds.

I was named by my father. I was named by a five-point Calvinist. His world and self, marked as they were by violence and mental illness, seemed too shattered, too far beyond repair, too full of awful, unspeakable evil for him to believe easily in a God of love who loved him simply because he was, in fact, loveable. Once he said to me, “When I get to heaven I think God will probably look at me and say, ‘Alright. I guess I’ll let you in. You’ve sure screwed up, though.’” Unable to conceptualize of a self good and loveable enough to be greeted with joy and delight, my dad at least found a way to stop the terrifying visions that filled his teenage years—visions of being swallowed by a pit of fire, visions of being forever tormented in the eternal flames of hell.

Irresistible Grace—God chose me. I am too damnable, broken, vile, to choose God, to move even one iota toward God, toward salvation, toward heaven. God chose me and I was unable to refuse.

Born of an angry alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother who suffered post-partum psychosis and probably other illnesses as well, it is no wonder my father’s teenage years were filled with anxiety attacks fueled by those visions of hell. No wonder Grace—this Calvinist understanding of grace—wooed him, changed him, finally let him believe that perhaps hell was not his fate. Though he could not believe that he was worth saving, at least this faith taught him that he was saved anyway because God had chosen to save him. And this faith—this Calvinist faith that affirmed his sense of his utter depravity—well, this faith changed him enough that years later he could throw his arms wide, smile, and with a joyful shout grasp me in a hug and say to a friend nearby, “This is my daughter. Isn’t that wonderful?!?” He had at last found a way to sometimes be for me what God was not yet for him. In my dad’s new visions—his visions of salvation—God might not greet him at heaven’s door with outstretched arms and a shout of joy, but his faith had healed him enough to sometimes believe in goodness, to sometimes believe in my goodness, my lovability, if not his own. He could at least greet me with joy even if he could not imagine the same greeting for himself. But these moments of affirming my goodness, my lovability, well, they were not the only moments.

Grace—God chooses me though I am through and through marked by a curse, utterly depraved, carrying the searing hot lava of hell in my veins.

I think he meant the name—the word right at the center of my name—to speak of love, of freedom, of liberation. I don’t think he realized it would also first whisper and then shout to me about the self-hatred he still carried, the masochism, that prompted him to marry a mentally ill woman who would abuse him, would abuse their children, even as she wished to love, to rejoice. I don’t think he realized it would speak to me of his belief that awful suffering is inevitable (and thus not worth fighting) because the world is an awful, depraved place. I don’t think he realized it would speak to me of his cowardly inaction in the face of my suffering, that it would tell me that I deserved to be hurt, to be destroyed, to be sacrificed. I am certain he didn’t realize that someday it would lead to my own suicidal depression. I don’t think he realized this name—this way of being and seeing the world—would torment rather than free me.

Grace—it is not a liberating concept. Not this kind of grace.

Visions of hell tormented me when I was a teenager too, but believing myself to be one of the “elect,” I feared for my classmates rather than myself. If God chooses us because we’re too fallen to even move toward God, if God predestines to hell as well as to heaven, then what would become of these twenty non-Christian teenagers filling the desks beside me? As I stared around the room, picturing those young bodies being licked, seared by the flaming tongues of hell, I lost my faith in five-point Calvinism—in this God who plucks people up, flinging some heavenward and some down through the gaping mouth of flames below. My brother, though, feared God had plucked him up simply to fling him downward. He hated afternoons and sunk into silence when confronted with the fiery flames of day. He collected stray and broken black umbrellas and decorated his room with them, creating flocks of delightful, disheveled creatures that reminded me of something from Wonderland. Years later through sobs he told me, “That’s how I felt—broken, discarded, ugly, cast aside because no one wanted me.”

Grace—watch out! You might be on the other list, on God’s naughty, vile sinner list. If you’re not, you sure as hell deserve to be, you lucky, undeserving bastard.

Because theology and the faith I embraced so early played such a crucial part in my becoming, I cannot now conceive of myself or my journey apart from theology. My work to heal from this past has necessarily been theological. It is no exaggeration to say that feminist theology saved my life as it gave me a new language and, thus, helped me to rename myself and my God. It helped me to read, write, speak my way out of a theology that said my self, my world were utterly depraved and that as a woman I was especially depraved and linked with evil. It helped me journey out of the theology that told me that if I, a woman, preached, I would unleash demons on my congregation. Feminist theology helped me to speak, read, and write my way into a new, more life-giving, way of being. I experienced (and sometimes still experience) the alienation and the grief and agony inherent in the work of deconstruction, what Mary Daly speaks of as “a radical encounter with nothingness” (211) that “emerges when one turns one’s back upon the pseudo-reality offered by patriarchy” (216) a pseudo-reality that has, nonetheless, through language, through religion, constituted our beings down to the very depths. But I have also begun to experience that simultaneous discovery of my “own depth of being” (216) and that “surge of ontological hope” (211) that came as I realized that my own “exclusion from identity within patriarchy has a totality about it which, when faced, calls forth an ontological self-affirmation” (216). As I discovered that my own story, my own experience, my own existence was denied (and, when acknowledged, hated and demonized by the tradition I had loved)—I also discovered the sometimes terrifying space suddenly open within me. I discover a space once filled with misogynistic, self-hating religion into which I could now become.

Grace—feminist theology has opened me up to new ways of understanding it and, thus, myself. Through feminist theology I have begun to—with God(dess) and with others—speak a new self into being.

No longer do I see grace “as opposed to nature, but as cooperating with it, restoring it or releasing its essential goodness. […] What has been lost is not the light that is within all life, for as St. John says, the darkness has not overcome it. Rather, what has been lost […] is ‘the true beholding of the light from the inner eyes.’ Grace is given to heal that inner sight, to open our eyes to the goodness that is deep within us, for God is within us” (Newell 36-37).

I gave birth to my daughter 2 ½ years ago, just as I was learning the pain and the joy of discovering new names for myself and for God.

I named my daughter ___ Grace. A few weeks after she was born I wrote this:

Grace—it is a theological concept that has troubled me, that has been defined for me as “unmerited favor.” But I am understanding grace a bit differently these days. I hold my daughter and stroke her soft downy hair and her silky skin and I want to weep with the beauty and joy of it. Sometimes I do weep, just overwhelmed that so much beauty can exist. Of course there’s nothing I could ever do to deserve to hold another life, another being so totally inside and with me, but it’s not that I don’t deserve her; it’s just that the gift of another self is too great, too precious, to carry a price, to be bought. Now grace doesn’t feel so much like a “get out of hell” pass issued to a lucky undeserving few; instead, grace feels like a moment of stunning beauty that comes simply because that is its nature. It drops on me and is mine to receive—this shimmering, stunning moment is mine to bask in. Grace is the feel of my daughter’s skin, of her hair, the smell of her clean milkiness, the sound of her soft sighs, her desperate grunts and gurgles as she looks for my breast, her very being in all of its goodness, in all of its miraculousness—her infinite otherness given to me. It is a gift I can only return with myself, a “debt” I can never repay except by receiving her and then giving myself—this equally precious, infinite gift—to her .

Grace—a world, a life, a self, love, beauty, community—given to us to see, to discover, to make, to remake, to rejoice in.

At the heart of my daughter’s name is the same word, the same theological concept as mine, but I hope it is now a new name with liberating potential. And I hope that if I, like my dad did to me, unintentionally harm ___ Grace with my imperfect grasping at God and at freedom, love, and joy, I hope that feminist theology will be there to help her deconstruct and reconstruct. I hope it will be there to help her claim her power to rename and remake herself and her world. I hope it will be there to help her discover the abundant goodness and joy that is at her core because it is at the heart of the Goddess and at the heart of all of creation made in Her image, made out of the overflow of her abundant, creative, fertile, life-giving, life-affirming love.


Works Cited


Daly, Mary. “Why Speak About God?”. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. Revised edition. Eds. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow. Harper, SanFrancisco, 1992.

Newell, J. Phillip. Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality. Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ, 1997.