What Would It Take to Move the Map?

By Dr. Lawrence Wills

Maps, whether real or mental, omit as much as they show.

In our universities and seminaries, the early history of Christians and Jews in the West is studied in exacting detail, but it is often a one-sided process: the movement of Christians and Jews—and Muslims—to the East is largely ignored.

There is increasing evidence of a rich history of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who moved eastward all the way to China, at a time much earlier than was previously believed. There is, in fact, an entire “lost history” of these groups in the East, not because the evidence is not available or accessible, but simply because our universities and seminaries choose to ignore it.

The “What Would It Take to Move the Map?” conference is organized to address the simple yet fundamental question: What would it take to move the map to include a more inclusive history by introducing eastern narratives into this early history?

It is partly a matter of reintroducing some of the new findings about these groups in ancient Armenia, Syria, India, Inner Asia, East Asia—which some of the experts at this conference will do. But this conference will also encourage participants to reflect on the challenges and benefits of integrating an eastern history into the bigger picture. For instance, how can this realignment of the map and expansion of historical themes teach us about movements of religious groups in other areas, say, in Africa or South America—or the United States?

Modern global issues demand that we think anew about the interconnections and take measures to integrate the history of the East and West. It is natural for people in the West to have been more interested in “their” history, but from the beginning there have been non-Europeans present whose history was simply ignored. Is European and American history “their” history? What happens when more and more people in the West are from Africa, the Middle East, or South or East Asia? What happens when more of the West’s relations are with the East? The broadening of the historical map goes hand-in-hand with the broadening of the modern map, which is becoming increasingly complex. This conference will provide a forum for essential conversations on integrating new historical knowledge with our common maps, laying the foundation for a more thorough and complicated understanding of modern global concerns.

Dr. Lawrence Wills is the Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School and author of Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World.


“What Would It Take to Move the Map? Abrahamic Religions on the Silk Road” is a one-day conference that will take place at Episcopal Divinity School on Saturday, March 3^rd from 9am to 6pm. The conference will explore the overlooked histories of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East, India, and East Asia. This conference is part of EDS’s interfaith initiative funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York. For more information visit www.eds.edu. 

Occupy Boston

Kwok Pui Lan

Brendan Curran, a senior M.Div Student at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), has participated in Occupy Boston since it started in late September. He is living in the tents in Dewey Square by South Station in downtown Boston, while continues to take classes and do his course assignments. Occupy Boston was inspired by Occupy Wall Street in New York.

EDS held a teach-in session on Occupy Boston on October 17, 2011, facilitated by President Katherine Hancock Ragsdale and Professor Ed Rodman, two veterans of social movements. The session followed a community Eucharist in which the Rev. Mwape Chilombo, a student from Zambia, delivered a powerful sermon on the need to take a new direction. She linked Occupy Wall Street with the struggles of Zambian people against government corruption and oppression.

About seven faculty, staff, and students have visited Occupy Boston, and participated in or witnessed the various demonstrations and marches. Sarah Monroe, who is doing field education at Ecclesia Ministries, a ministry for homeless people, said that homeless people feel welcome and supported by Occupy Boston.

Susan B. Taylor brought her family to visit Occupy Boston, together with members of The Crossing, an emergent church community in Boston. Her daughter was asked to share her experience upon her return with three different classes of her school in Western Massachusetts.

Other eye-witnesses were impressed by the toleration of diverse opinions in the general assembly, the decision-making body, and the diversity of people gathered, including students, homeless people, members of the labor unions, older people, and veterans of the civil rights movement.

Brendan Curran taught the hand gestures used in the general assembly to ask a question, to vote, to make a point, and to show disagreement. He was impressed by the collective and collaborative effort against capitalism at Dewey Square. “We do not want to become a political party or to be co-opted by a political party,” he said. The movement has been described as the “the return of the silent majority” by Time magazine. “It is exciting to see it go global,” Curran said. Occupy Wall Street has inspired protests and demonstrations in many cities worldwide on October 15, 2011.

The teach-in session provided an opportunity for President Ragsdale to share her rich experiences in organizing for social change. She said changes happened in 4 steps, which are not linear:
· Personal and spiritual transformation
· Educating others
· Lobbying and providing alternative proposals
· Civil disobedience
She said individuals and institutions can be involved in the different steps of the process and at different stages.

Some of the attendees said the Occupy movement does not have clear demands and a concrete platform and it is hard to explain to others. Professor Rodman recommended two books co-authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire and Multitude. In Multitude, the authors have envisaged a mass democratic global movement, mobilized by the Internet and social networking, to rise up to resist Empire. The multitude is marked by diversity rather than similarities. The challenge for the multitude in this new era is “for the social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.”

Professor Christopher Duraisingh provided a theological perspective. He said Occupy Boston reminds the Church of its prophetic witness. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says prophetic witness involves the articulation of alternative consciousness to demolish and debunk dominant consciousness and providing the impetus for building a different community. Professor Duraisingh asked whether the Church has responsibilities to be involved in and support movements like Occupy Boston. Since the movement is against corporate greed, he challenged the Church to rethink its identification with corporate America.

The teach-in session was closed with Professor Rodman reminiscing about his student days in the 1960s during the height of the civil rights movement. He said Southern white students were ostracized after their classmate Jonathan Daniels was killed working for the civil rights movement in Alabama. It was the black students who reached out to them. He used this example to remind us there is going to be divided opinions on emotionally charged issues and asked us to listen to and care for each other.

*Kwok Pui Lan is William F. Cole Professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women’s Theology.

Tears for Peter Gomes

By William Bronson

I cried when I heard the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, died last February. I am not normally emotional. I can hardly remember crying over anyone’s passing. But my tardy awareness of his leaving us, over three months late, struck me hard.

How can I explain it? I felt less embarrassed to be a human being knowing that I shared that species designation with him. I had been reading again, off and on, his Scandalous Gospel of Jesus recently, as though an angel had told me he was gone.

As I prepared an envelope and enclosed my book, How to Get to Heaven with a note about how I enjoyed his books and ministry and hoped he found my little tome pleasant, inclusive, and reasonable. I couldn’t resist a PS that said James Carroll thought it was great.

Then, looking up his address I got the news, perused the Wikipedia article summarizing his life and the brutal stroke, brain aneurism, and heart attack that took him a year before he planned to retire and a month or so before his Easter sermons.

I remember his graciousness when I met him a couple times at his Wednesday teas at his home just north of Harvard Yard, when I was at Episcopal Divinity School (EDS). I remember his wonderful sermons at Memorial Church and his wisdom when he shared the stage at Trinity Church’s remarkable 2006 conference on eschatology with Carroll, Jürgen Moltmann, and Barbara Rossing in New York.

But I remember most the wonderful, conversational way he wrote. His eloquence transferred to the written page seamlessly. It may be more accurate to say that he spoke the way he wrote. And imbedded in all he said or wrote was a deep wisdom, patience, and perspective.

And he lacked no courage. When he came out years ago it was in solidarity with embattled gay and lesbian students who were challenged on Biblical and cultural grounds through a periodical by fellow Harvard students. As a Republican American Baptist pastor who participated in both Reagan and Bush senior’s inaugurations, it came as a surprise to many that he would not only defend but identify by his own sexual orientation with the gay community.

When they invited him to speak with other administration and faculty members about the raging controversy, the organizers of the rally had no idea that they would receive not only a personal “confession” but a careful dismissal of the Biblical arguments against homosexuality. One may read of the whole episode in the chapter “The Bible and Homosexuality” in his wonderful bestselling The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Heart and Mind. This quote from those pages is worth repeating:

“I also knew that no one wanted me to be ‘religious.’ Religion, in fact, was part of the problem here and not part of the solution, or so it was thought by my secular friends. I knew all that, and yet I also knew that the only ground on which I could stand in this particular instance was religious ground, and so rather than a pious elegiac on civility, or an exercise in political outrage, I determined that I would make my best effort to represent my understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith as it applied to the heart of the present discontents. As the university’s pastor and preacher, as a Christian, and as a homosexual, I decided to reclaim by proclaiming a vision of the gospel that was inclusive rather than exclusive, and to do so as a Christian who was more than the sum of the parts of which I was made…I also wanted to win minds and hearts, or at least to awaken them, to a view of the Christian faith which in dispute valued charity and humility over mean-spiritedness and arrogance.”

It is remarkable, one might say destined or karmic, that someone with such a high view of Scripture was found in the center of this controversy in this place. What I love about Pastor Gomes speaking and writing is that he never second guesses the Bible. He takes it as he finds it and draws from it the lessons that it gives. While valuing Scripture, he is too intelligent to be drawn into the doctrinaire interpretations that have created such rancor in recent times.

As an older student (sixty-nine on graduation) at EDS, coming out of the evangelical community, having done my Masters in Theological Studies thirty years earlier at Gordon-Conwell, I had some anxiety about fitting into the community here. But when I discovered how much common ground I felt reading Gomes and Cox and others, I took courage. Listening to Bishop Steven Charleston preach and later receiving his warm endorsement of my book confirmed my decision to come here.

In solidarity with the blessed pastor Gomes, I would like to end with my very succinct plea from my very succinct book:

“On the issue of sexual orientation, I think it would be helpful if we would not be so obsessed with sexuality considered in the light of human anatomy. The psychological aspects of femininity and masculinity are far more important identities. And it is clear that everyone is a mixture of these two elements including the Godhead. How people are equipped physiologically need not always match their stronger psychological identity. Most of us would be androgynous physiologically if that were possible. We should not stand in judgment of the creation (which any biologist will tell us has huge variations in that regard), the Creator, or each other on this issue.”

We will miss him. He will be on my short list of those I would like to commune with in heaven, but I’m sure it will be a long line I will stand in.

*William Bronson, DMin ’08, was an airline pilot for many years and author of How to Get to Heaven.

Playing with Doubt

By Elizabeth Kaeton

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Lest you be too impressed, that’s really about all I remember from my high school Conversational French Class. That, and this: “Voilá, la tour Eiffel!”

The more I think about this last semester and reflect on my time here as Proctor Scholar at EDS, the more I know the wisdom of this saying. Things have changed at EDS. A lot. And, much has stayed the same.

This school – this seminary – this place of theological education for seminarians and students of theology and future leaders of the Church – is still a place of and for theological inquiry. It’s a place where questions are understood and honored as the gateway to faith. It’s a place where theological inquiry is not only supported, it is a passionate enterprise which is endorsed and cherished and blessed by faculty, staff, field education and CPE supervisors, and fellow students.

Indeed, as I was considering the Gospel lesson we are using for this day of Doubting Thomas (John 20:19-31), it occurs to me that it would not be an overstatement to name St. Thomas as the unofficial Patron Saint of EDS.

We here at EDS are encouraged to stick our fingers into the messiness of the Body of Christ. To not take anything for granted. To question and look, touch and probe for ourselves so that, in seeing and touching, we may believe – and, lead others to believe. We are all, in some way, carefully educated and trained to be the Doubting Thomases among the faithful disciples in the church, so that the church may, herself, become more faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I doubt that no other disciple – well, none other than, perhaps, Judas – gets as much grief as does Thomas. “Doubting Thomas,” he is called. No other disciple gets a distinctive descriptive before his name. Not “Impatient, Immediate Mark” or “Inclusive Luke.”

I further doubt that many would agree with me that he would be better called “Risking Thomas.” Or, “Courageous Thomas.” Or, even, “Faithful Thomas.” Well, except, perhaps, for the faithful community of theological inquiry here at EDS.

I’m wondering just how many sermons you’ve heard – or, in fact preached – over the years about how doubt is a part of the faith journey. You’ve heard it said – and, perhaps do not doubt it yourself – that faith is risk, and risk wouldn’t be risk without doubt. You no doubt believe that faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. Trust, perhaps, but not faith.

Faith is that daring commitment that climbs out on life’s limbs and leaps. As someone once said, faith is what leads you to have no doubt that, when you do leap off that limb, one of two things will happen: either you will land safely, or you will be given wings to fly.

And, I think that’s the point of faith – to believe enough to play with your doubts. What if John is playing with our doubts in this gospel story? What if he is tormenting us with the obvious truth by setting up Thomas – with whom, some scholars believe, he had such serious rivalry as to write this story so as to shame him – to be the one who is the bearer of our doubts and questions about the Resurrection?

You know, sometimes, I think we take our faith too seriously – so seriously that we think we have to have it right – correct, perfect, “orthodox”, God help us – or else we’ll get an “F” on our earthly report card and not gain entrance into heaven.

Today’s reading says, after all, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Blessed are they who play with their doubts. Laugh at their doubts. Torment those who love with their doubts that they may push through their doubts and find Jesus in the midst of their doubts and fears that have frozen them into not living out the gospel more fully.

It has ever been thus. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The more we enter fearlessly into our doubts, the more Christ is revealed in our lives, and the better we are able to live more fully into the full stature of Christ.

It’s been going on for years like that here at EDS.

And because I have played – and will continue to play – with my doubts these past 25 years, I know this much to be true: Christ is alive!

And, after a semester here, I have absolutely no doubt that it was never more true than here at most this amazing place called the Episcopal Divinity School.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! And, let the whole church say, “Amen.”


*The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Kaeton, MDiv ’86, is the spring 2011 Procter Scholar at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

** Adapted from a sermon preached on Thursday, May 5, 2011, at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Haunted by Relationality

Carter Heyward

By Carter Heyward 2011 (c)

            First, let me say how glad I am to be back at EDS.  This school will live in my heart forever!  I’ve enjoyed following recent appointments -- Susie and Patrick’s reputations go before them. As these appointments were being made, I got calls  from Emory and Union and other places telling me how lucky EDS would be to land them both!  Then of course there’s Katherine Ragsdale , whose bold appointment  as President and Dean has moved the school forward in remarkable ways.  Indeed, the revolution is never won – and it is sometimes amazing to see what comes next, once we ourselves move on.  May God continue to bless this seminary through these new leaders and each and every one of you here tonight.

Years ago, maybe 20, while on this faculty, I was at a concert over in Sanders Theater, listening to the great American folk singer Pete Seeger.  He was teaching us a song called “Somos El Barco (We are the Boat)” – the tune I forget, the words I’ll never forget – “We are the boat, we are the sea, I sail in you, you sail in me.” – a lovely companion piece to EDS’s current motto, borrowed from Mohamed El-Sawy, “We either live together or we die together”  -- indeed, and that’s because   “I sail in you and you sail in me.” As we, the audience, finally got the tune and the words and were singing our hearts out,  Pete Seeger laughed into the mic and said:  “You see, it’s a lot like life.  Once you’ve learned it, it’s over.”  As the years move along, I find myself thinking a lot about it.

What am I thinking these days?  This question opens into so many directions at once  – from thinking about what kind of hay to feed an ailing horse, to which horse to match up with a 4 year old autistic boy, to how to raise more money for Free Rein our therapeutic riding center,  to how to understand the various Medicare forms that seem to arrive almost daily and in duplicate.  What am I thinking?  About what to say in an ordination prayer for a friend;  about how to play the fiddle in a way that doesn’t drive my friends away;  about how to be both intimate friend and care-provider for people that mean the world to me; about how to be involved actively, as a senior citizen -- it’s hard to take in! -- on matters that mean as  much to me as ever in these challenging times in which racial, sexual, gender, and economic injustice continue to gnaw at our social fabric, and in which xenophobia of many kinds,  especially today against Muslims and Mexicans, is on the rise.

  Bev Harrison, Sue Sasser, myself, and our other companions in the mountains of North Carolina (including EDS alums Nancy Richards, Jennifer Rouse, Peg Hall, Norene Carter, Ann Franklin, Elly Andujar),  are thinking a lot about Bev’s declaration that “aging is not for the faint hearted”;  We think  about what Bev aptly names  “capitalist spirituality” is doing to us all. As we do each spring, Sue and I are thinking  a lot right now about the stables and our horses and how to care for them in  ways sustainable environmentally  and economically.  She and I recently read and discussed  Atul Gawande’s interesting book, The Checklist Manifesto,  which offers a good bit of wisdom about the value of teamwork, preparation, and focusing in getting a job  done.

So then, what am I thinking about God and the world? What on earth does it mean to speak of “God” in this world at this time?

How others “read” us can help us understand ourselves.    I do not know the Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis personally, but he evidently has read a good bit of my theological work.  In his book Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time (Fortress, 1997), he suggests that my work, like Jewish social philosopher Martin Buber’s, is “haunted by relationality” (149) – and this is the theme of my presentation tonight:  “haunted by relationality.”  Marc Ellis is not presenting Buber, myself, and others whose work he assesses, as parallel or equivalents. Rather he looks at Buber’s  work and mine and others’  as representing  those  Jewish  and Christian theologians  who have troubled some of  our contemporaries by presenting theologies that are, in Ellis’ words, seen as being “naïve and utopic” because they rely too heavily upon “relationality.” –

But aren’t  all Jewish and Christian theologies relational? You might well ask.  Yes and no.  All Christian and Jewish theologies do indeed presuppose a relationship between the Creator and the creation, and also among creatures, including human beings, who constitute the creation and the history in which God acts, or does not. But by no means are all theologies – Christian, Jewish, or other – relational at the depths to which Martin Buber calls us.

The relational theology I have attempted to articulate and build on over the years is rooted in the social philosophy of Buber.  Like Buber, I assume that whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is just, whatever is God can be known only “in relation” to “the other.”  That is, in relation to whoever or whatever is outside my, or our, most immediate frames of reference. 

For example, I can only know what it means, to me, to be Christian in relation to those who are not Christian, or who are not the same kind of Christian I believe myself to be.  If I take this relational claim seriously it means that I cannot be a faithful Christian without acknowledging the good and the harm being done both to Christians, and by Christians, in this nation and elsewhere – and how the good and the harm are shaping me, and how I am shaping these healing and destructive dynamics. No-thing, no doctrine, no spirit, no salvation can be truly known (either cognitively or experientially) apart from its relational matrix – that is, apart from how it affects and is affected by others.

Thus, a truly relational Christianity  will not claim to know, much less be, the only way to god.  A genuinely relational Christ  will not claim to be the only child of a Father God who himself does not claim to be the only image of that which, from a relational perspective, is always and forever reframing itself, reshaping itself, reforming itself in relation to that which it has not yet encountered, known, or incarnated in quite the same way before.  If God is love, then to god, or to love, is to eternally be opening into spaces and places of the universe, and the human heart, that are yet to be, or yet to be fully touched.

Many Christian theologies hint at such a theology.  I think immediately of Whitehead and Process Theology, of Pannenberg’s God of the future, of Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s utopic realm of  One who is not present yet, but always coming.  I think of other feminist and womanist theologians –  Sallie McFague,  Delores Williams, Kelly Brown Douglas, Rita Nikashima Brock, and of course Kwok Pui-lan, each of these women working theologically on the basis of god’s unfolding  in multiple and varied ways,  through diverse bodies, relationships, and cultures.  I think also of liberation, postcolonial, and queer theologies and of the work being done not only by the elders of these theological movements, like our own Christopher Duraisingh, but also by the brilliant “youngers” like Patrick Cheng and Suzanna Snyder, who are coming along now to grace us with their theological leadership.

  And yet very few Christian creeds, or doctrines, make allowance for, much less encourage, the faithful to learn to bend and sway upon this radically relational, ever shifting, ground of our being, as the basis of Christian faith and the foundation of pastoral care.

Let’s see what Marc Ellis says about Buber, because it is timely. “Buber is often seen as naïve and out of touch with reality, a mystical utopic thinker uninvolved with the world.” (152) [for most of his life, he was a university professor].  Ellis continues, “Buber, until he was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1938 and then immediately after the Holocaust, spoke of the need for and the possibility of German-Jewish reconciliation. This was true as well in the realm of Jewish-Christian relations before and after the Holocaust…. (151-2)”   Furthermore, Ellis writes, “Buber wrote and organized against the division of Palestine and the coming state of Israel both within Palestine and internationally.” (152)  “Because Buber saw the Jewish return to Palestine as a fulfillment of a spiritual destiny rather than an attempt to normalize the Jewish situation through state power, the return was a spiritual elevation of the Jewish psyche and soul rather than an empowered state ….” (152)

Ellis recounts that, after the founding of the state of Israel,  “Buber spoke forcefully to [Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion] about [the issue of Arab repatriation] as ‘a great moral act’ that [would arise from] ‘the Jewish ethical tradition.’ Buber addressed this question in light of Jewish history by asking Ben-Gurion, ‘Were we not refugees in the diaspora?’” (152-3)   “For Buber,” according to Ellis, “Jews and Arabs should realize a union comparable to that of Switzerland, with two partners recognizing the full national autonomy of the other while pursuing cooperative projects and educational opportunities.”  Ellis concludes that “It is difficult to argue that Buber was divorced from history.  Rather, he entered history from a particular perspective and offered a path that was largely rejected, at least by the more powerful elements of social and political life.” (153)

As I read Marc Ellis’ reading of Buber, my work,  and that of others, I’m left with a sense that Ellis thinks  all of us  are certainly utopic  and perhaps a bit naïve, all who base our theologies, philosophies, psychologies, or other world views on mutual relation as a basic value and goal for groups and individuals and even different species in relation to one another.  But Ellis contends that this utopic character is not a bad quality but rather is inherent to all work in which relationality is taken seriously. 

I think, for example, of the work of feminist psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller in the late 1970s.  Subsequently, Miller was joined by several younger feminist psychologists who, together with her, founded the Stone Center at Wellesley College and developed a relational psychology that challenged the more traditional psychological  assumptions that the healthy individual essentially stands alone or apart from others in the core of his/her psyche.   I think especially of one of the Stone Center founders, psychologist Janet Surrey’s linking of  relational psychology to relational spirituality and of Surrey’s  partnering with her spouse Steve Bergman to write Bill W. and Dr. Bob, a powerful theatrical presentation of the relational foundation of  Alcoholics Anonymous. 

Powerful stuff, the struggle to be mutual, to generate with others a  dynamic, out of which something sacred emerges, something that transcends each one’s identity and, in God, re-creates and spiritually enlarges  each one in the struggle for mutuality --   each of us re-newed, reformed, even transformed with, and through, the others.  “We are the boat.  We are the sea.  I sail in you.  You sail in me.”  Like it or not, we are indeed haunted by a radical relationality . From moment to moment, we may or may not have much role in choosing our relational challenges and opportunities.

So perhaps we are a bit naïve in imagining that such relationality , something that we preach, teach, sing, struggle for politically and socially, can possibly be realized in this world.  If not naïve, we are at least utopic, but as Rosemary Radford Ruether’s insists, “utopia” is not unreal or simply imaginary -- but rather is  that which is “no-where yet.”  Like the kin-dom, or realm, of God, it is no where yet, but always coming – to the extent that the Martin Bubers of this world continue to set before us the possibilities of “making God exist” (Jean Casanas).  

This was Jesus’ work, of course – to make God exist, to struggle for right relation with sisters and brothers, to image a God in whose relational image we truly are created for the purpose of struggling with one another to make God exist, again, here and now.  I believe that the Christ, or christic, Spirit haunts us with radical “relationality.” If our hearts and minds are open, we intuit this, even when we don’t actually understand it, for all around us in the world relational activists, artists, teachers, spiritual and political leaders are on the move, haunting us like “friendly ghosts.”  We often don’t see them or recognize them if we do, but they are all around.

We are haunted, for example, by the life and ongoing work of Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004,  a Kenyan woman and environmentalist who initiated a movement to save the trees, and therefore the land, in Kenya. Like every other prophet,  Wangari Maathai  had to take on the principalities and powers and, in leading the Green Belt Movement, she had to be able and willing to suffer for her belief in the people and the land and the trees and the Spirit that enlivens them all.  In her memoir, Unbowed (Anchor, 2006),  Wangari  Maathai images society – whether Kenyan or American – as necessarily sitting on a three-legged stool.  One leg is a government that respects humans rights.  One leg is a culture of struggle for peace.  One leg is an economy moving toward sustainability of people and natural resources.  Think about this.  If there is any truth to Wangari Maathai’s vision of what makes a society not only good but possible in the long run, what does this bode for the United States of America? We all know the answer to this question and it is not a happy one.

So where, then, does this leave us, if not filled with unhappiness?

For reasons largely unknown still to my brain, I keep returning to Saint Augustine of all people – me a feminist and LGBTQueer liberation theologian.  I keep returning to Augustine not for his help on matters of body, sex, gender, women or, for that matter, social justice of any kind. I’ve come, years ago, to accept that we, every one of us, is constructed socially by the world around us – and that Augustine was no different.  Within the limits of his flawed abilities and partial insights, he had a lot to say, much of it worth our bother.  One of the most intriguing theological insights that Augustine shared very early in his work (Confessions) was about Time.  Here’s what he said:  “In eternity, our expectations, our attention, and our memory are one. (Book XI)”  He is saying here that, in God [eternity],  our future [expectations], our present [attention], and past [memory] coincide.   In a poignant passage recounting his last moments with his mother Monica before her death, Augustine wrote, “While we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant, we reached out and touched it.” (Book IX)  

Now many who have  been present  with loved ones of any species at the time of death have had this experience: to reach out and touch God.  Many who have been present at the moment of birth also know this experience.  And I believe also that anyone who lives in the present – in which expectations, attention, and memory coincide – know what it is to reach out and touch the Eternal Wisdom, the Sophia of God.

If we live fully in the present – that is, as fully as possible, and as often as possible, and make a habit of it through prayer and meditation, through the friends we keep and the communities we build– we are grounding ourselves  in God in such a way that Wisdom becomes an old friend and the struggle for mutual relation, increasingly, a way of life.  This is because a life lived fully in the present is a life in which memory of the past, and expectations and hopes for the future, find their place in the serenity/the holy attentiveness of the present.  In this spiritual crucible, we are able to see ourselves in God, and God in us, and we are able to know where we belong in relation to others – partners and friends, sisters and brothers, bound together by the mutuality that always moves us close to the heart of the Sacred.  Able with Augustine and Monica, to reach out and touch the Eternal Wisdom.

But how do we know that the Wisdom we touch, the God to whom we pray, the Jesus who goes with us, is not simply a construct of our own limited vision? 

I am offering in this presentation only one criterion: We must be always open to that which we do not yet know.  This criterion, I believe, is the peg, that secures each of the legs of Wangari Matthai’s stool:  human rights, economic and environmental sustainability, culture of peace. None is possible without the ongoing openness of the community to those who/that which we have not known before. And by the way, this criterion also offers new images of spiritual depth and vitality to each of the 3 legs of the Anglican stool of authority:  Bible, tradition, reason. Thus,  whether Kenyan peasants or Episcopal seminarians, if we are to touch the eternal Wisdom, we must be open to the possibility of discovering  more truth, or other truths, of learning what we have not known before -- about God, Jesus, church, Bible, other religions, other cultures, other peoples and species, which means ever-learning new truths about ourselves.

            Indeed, we must take care, for as Marc Ellis contends, “The God who limits the possibility of more truth is the same God who legitimates atrocity.” (166)  Atrocities like the Holocaust and what is happening in Israel/Palestine today, and in Libya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Uganda, everywhere else  people and other creatures are suffering under the yoke of human greed, violence, and madness.  Here in the United States, China, India, and Japan (until the terrible recent disaster)  and elsewhere in those countries rich with money, weapons, and some global clout, atrocities may be better disguised and less publicly dramatic but they run rampant nonetheless.  Atrocity abounds wherever people and other creatures are unable to find and share nutritious food, clean water, adequate health care, adequate public education, safe places to live and love  and work without fear of state sponsored laws and customs that legitimize oppression, violence, or torture.  Atrocity runs insidiously  in the veins of any and every culture and religion that does not celebrate diversities of tribe, race, religion, culture, gender, sexuality, age, species, and politic.

As for what this has to do with God,  Ellis writes, “Within the eruption of barbarism, in the midst of atrocity, the God [that Buber, and the others of us] point to does not yet exist.” (149).   The God of mutual relation does not yet exist. The Eternal Wisdom that moves the struggle for right relation is not here yet.  The God upon whose foundation the  Episcopal Divinity School has tried faithfully to build itself from one generation to another is no where yet, a utopic Spirit, and yet She is on her way, coming with power. 

Precisely because this relational utopic Spirit is so hard for communities like the Church to fathom and for individuals to trust, countless intelligent, caring people  have simply had it with religion and “God talk.” Surely we can see why.  There are a lot of hateful, frightened and frightening, folks running around talking about Jesus and running for President.  A number of years ago(when I was living here in Cambridge), it was  a bit more frightening to identify myself in public gatherings as “Christian” than it was as “lesbian.” Of course  the opposite is true where I live now – in the mountains of North Carolina, but down there, especially, those of us who are  Christian feminist liberation theologians have to frequently clarify that  being “Christian” does not mean that we don’t want to work with Jews, or Muslims, or pagans, or atheists;  or for that matter  with Christians who don’t agree with us. Being Christian also does not mean we think that either we ourselves or others are damned sinners because we’re gay or angry, or because we’re universalists, or because we don’t believe the Bible is The One and Only Word of God.  No,  it’s not hard to see why lots of intelligent, deeply loving people have had it with religion and believe it does more harm than good. 

Religion of any kind or tradition invariably does more harm than good unless it is sparked by a relational Spirit that can never be exhausted, and never fully known, because there will always be more truth, more justice, more compassion, more God to be discovered with, and in relation to, those  whom we do not yet see, or recognize.

Perhaps we can only be haunted by such a God; see only through a glass dimly.  There is always more of a relational God to be known, and much of what is  yet to be known can come  only from sources, people, traditions, cultures, and religions we have not known before. The most faithful spiritual journey will often be toward unknown places,  to meet people or creatures or circumstances that may have frightened  or offended us, or somehow turned us off, or turned us away, because we have not known them, and they have not known us.

In the midst of the terror happening on every continent and in the seas and air, how we use the word “God” matters.  We need to use this word, “God,” only very carefully, and prayerfully, those of us who use it.  Even before the Holocaust, Buber had said that the word “God” is the “most heavy laden of all human words… soiled [and] mutilated.” He continued, “Just for this reason I may not abandon it,” (reported in his later book, Eclipse of God, Harper, 1952,  7-8). After the Holocaust, Buber proposed that God was “in eclipse.”“Perhaps one can swim with a new stream whose source is still hidden,”  he mused.  Buber also wrote,   “the I-Thou relation has gone into the catacombs.” and he asked, “Who can say with how much greater power it will step forth?... Something is taking place in the depths that as yet needs no name…” (Eclipse of God, 129) 

Surely no one paying attention  would suggest that we have progressed much, if at all, spiritually, morally, or politically since the Holocaust.  Again, this is not a happy or hopeful thought.  But it is something I think about at times, actually rather often, when I’m mucking out the horses’ stalls or walking the dogs or horses through the woods in the morning.  I think about the state of our nation and of the world; and I think about God.

I think about German political and feminist liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle’s  insistence  that God cannot be all powerful  and all loving – unless we redefine power as love and love as power. Only insofar as we do so can we possibly affirm that  God is omnipotent, all powerful.  And what that means is that God’s power is God’s love and that whenever we love one another, a power is present that will not die.  God’s power, God’s love, will always return, for the power and love of God is irrepressible, immortal, forever haunting the present moment.

Until the day she died, while leading a retreat on “God and Poetry” with her husband Fulbert Steffensky,  Dorothee Soelle was adamant that we humans, if we wish to be faithful to the God whom Jesus loved, must do whatever we can to generate this love that is power, to struggle for right, mutual relation;  to make God exist  in the smallest and largest places of our lives, those parts of who we are that are most private and those that are most public.  Like Martin Buber,  Dorothee Soelle was haunted by relationality – and in her life and work,her theology and her politics, Dorothee Soelle haunted the world around her with relationality. 

For many decades, a close friend and mentor of Angela Bauer,  Dorothee Soelle was also  one of my teachers, mentors,  colleagues, and friends.  After she died,  I found out that she had told Bishop Bob DeWitt, the man who ordained my sisters and me in Philadelphia in 1974, that she considered him to be my “spiritual dad” and herself “my spiritual mom.”  I was quite taken with this image!  Partly because,  why not? what a team!  but even more because it was so true, in many ways, for many years.  These two mentors haunted my life and work with relationality! And they are still at it! 

Bob DeWitt and Dorothee Soelle  belong to my “heavenly council,” a small group of people and other creatures who have gone on before, and whose wisdom I routinely seek.   Our beloved EDS colleague and pioneering sister priest, Sue Hiatt, often in her time called “bishop to the women” (before there were any official women bishops) is part of this heavenly council, as is Sister Angela of Stroud, Australian artist, nun, priest, and mystic, who spent some time with us at EDS.  While they were alive here on earth, both of these women were among my best friends and spiritual mentors, and they still are.   Through their  spiritual companionship, I am learning  better how to live in the Eternal Now, daring to speak of “God” only when it seems to me it will do more good than hard – that is, always in such a way as to make space for “the other.”

My spiritual dad Bob DeWitt faithfully practiced this relational theology.  Here’s a little of what I said about him in the homily I preached at his memorial service  in this chapel in May 2004.  I’m reflecting here on a visit with Bishop DeWitt shortly before he died, in his retirement community in Saratoga Springs (passages taken from Keep Your Courage: A Radical Christian Feminist Speaks, Episcopal Church Publishing, 2011):

Bob told Sue [Sasser] and me a story in response to my asking him whether he had ever had any particular religious or spiritual – mystical – experience.  He said that, when he was a boy, maybe about 16, or maybe even as young as 12, he and his family were vacationing in Canada, and he was in a little boat out on a lake.  All of a sudden he sensed something.  He didn’t hear any words or see any vision.  Rather, he just knew that he was surrounded by – ‘for lack of words,’ he said – ‘a presence.’  He said that, if it had used words, which it didn’t it would have said something like, ‘I see you.  I know you’re there.  I’m glad you’re there.’ ‘Even now,’ Bob said, ‘It’s as clear to me as if it were yesterday.’…

In June, 1973, about a week before I was to be ordained a deacon in New York City, I panicked.  I can’t be ordained, I said to myself, because I can’t, in good faith, take that damn ‘Oath of Conformity,’ which goes something like this: ‘I believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation, and I promise to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church.’ My own good bishop, Paul Moore, was unavailable to talk with me about this, because his wife Jenny was dying of cancer at the time.  So I phoned Bishop DeWitt of Pennsylvania, whom I had met and begun to know through the movement for the ordination of women.  I told him over the phone what my problem was. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘Let’s meet tomorrow in Penn Station (New York City) and have coffee.’

What I recall is my own hyped-up anxiety about the situation being met by Bishop DeWitt’s laughter – not at me, of course, but at the situation.  What he said to me was hugely important to me then and has been ever since: first, he said, to affirm the Bible as the Word of God doesn’t mean that it’s the only Word of God; second, to say that it contains all things necessary to salvation doesn’t mean that everything it contains is necessary to salvation; and third, to promise to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church means only that, as with any vow, you’ll do your best, ask God to help you, and use your common sense.

As important as these words were to me, there was something even more important about that meeting with Bishop DeWitt: I think I was a bit like he himself had been in that boat so many years before.  In this meeting in New York’s Penn Station, I sensed myself surrounded by God, a Spirit much larger than us both and much larger than the Episcopal Church, and much larger than the Anglican Communion, and much larger than Christianity.  Bishop DeWitt’s ministry to me on this occasion was to laugh!  In this Spirit, he helped me see that basic to the ministry I was being ordained into was a deep, soulful recognition that, in the larger scheme of things in God’s world, the Oath of Conformity in the Episcopal Church does not rank very high!  On the subway, headed back up to the seminary from Penn Station, I remember thinking, ‘He’s talking about keeping things in perspective!’

Haunted by relationality – the boy in the boat, being seen, and sensing a benign and comforting  Presence; the bishop in Penn Station, meeting the other – a strung out young woman – where she was, needing not to be judged or lectured to, but rather needing to laugh at the situation!

I close tonight with a poem by Linda McCarriston, a poet with origins in Lynn, MA, and currently Professor of Creative Writing at University of Alaska in Anchorage.  I share it with you because it so powerfully images my experience not only of horseback riding but, moreover, of the relational Spirit that haunts us. 

“Riding Out at Evening”   by Linda McCarriston (used with permission by the poet, 4/11)

At dusk, everything blurs and softens

From here out over the long valley,

the fields and hills pull up

the first light sheets of evening,

as, over the next hour,

heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads, predictable deer

browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s

herd of heifers, the kitchen lights

starting in many windows.  On horseback

I take it in, neither visitor

nor intruder, but kin passing, closer

and closer to night, its cold streams

rising in the sugarbrush and hollow.

Half aloud, I say to the horse,

or myself, or whoever: let fire not come

to this house, nor that barn,

nor lightning strike the cattle.

Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights

of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless

or foolish to ride out in the falling light

alone, wishing, or praying,

for particular good to particular beings

on one small road in a huge world?

The horse bears me along, like grace,

making me better than what I am,

and what I think or say or see

is whole in these moments, is neither

small nor broken.  For up, out

the inscrutable earth, have come my body

and the separate body of the mare:

flawed and aching and wronged.  Who then

is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,

might course over the entire valley,

over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace

of flight, who presses against her breast,

in grief and tenderness,

the whole weeping body of the world?             

*  Carter Heyward, St.  John’s Memorial Chapel, Episcopal Divinity School, April 14, 2011. Poem by kind agreement of Linda McCarriston author of Eva-Mary.  No part of this poem or blog may be reproduced without permission from the authors carterheyward(at)aol.com and linda.mcarriston(at)gmail.com