{"id":2206,"date":"2014-01-17T11:54:54","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T16:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/?page_id=2206"},"modified":"2014-01-17T11:54:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T16:54:54","slug":"creating-the-word-themes-for-a-spirituality-of-preaching","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/events\/women-in-the-world-conference\/past_women-in-the-world\/women-in-the-world\/creating-the-word-themes-for-a-spirituality-of-preaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating the Word: Themes for a Spirituality of Preaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria Harris<\/h2>\n

March 17, 1988<\/h3>\n

INTRODUCTION:<\/h3>\n

She called yesterday, the Shaw Center, with a few little details, and the first thing she asked for was a box.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve mentioned that to a couple of friends today, and they didn\u2019t understand what that was all about.\u00a0 But, as another person who when I stand on that side so I don\u2019t show at all, I was real clear that the box was so that we could really be together, and not hung up with this stand here.\u00a0 It\u2019s a pleasure to introduce Maria Harris.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard about her when she was at Andover for years, Andover Newton.\u00a0 And what I kept hearing was not just words, but a sense of something very special from women who talked about being in her classes.\u00a0 And so when we had the chance to invite her here with us today, I was thrilled because at last I was going to get my chance to share some time with Maria Harris too.\u00a0 I must confess that also in getting ready for this event, I recognize again the power of women.\u00a0 If any of you happen to have noticed the advertisement in Christianity and Prices, <\/i>you might see that the Anna Howard Shaw Center has managed to do something that even the Pope has managed to do yet.\u00a0 We ordained Maria Harris (laughter and applause.)\u00a0 Of course for those of us who know that ministry doesn\u2019t have too much to do with those special ordination processes, we already knew that we were going to be ministered to by Maria\u2019s presence.\u00a0 Maria is a visiting professor of Religious Education at Fordham in the fall of each year, and she\u2019s at New York University throughout the year.\u00a0 Her most recent book, which I believe is still upstairs, is Teaching and Religious Imagination.\u00a0 <\/i>I know that book is there.\u00a0 She\u2019s also written, Women and Teaching.\u00a0 <\/i>We are delighted to have Maria.\u00a0 She\u2019s going to have some conversation, then we will divide in small groups, and she will answer questions.\u00a0 It\u2019s a pleasure to have you.<\/p>\n

SERMON<\/h2>\n

Maria Harris<\/h2>\n

\"Maria<\/a><\/h2>\n

This is what Margaret and I are like when we don\u2019t stand on anything (laughter.)\u00a0 This is what \u00a0we\u2019re like when we have a box.\u00a0 So thank you for the box.\u00a0 Thank you for the ordination.\u00a0 Thank \u00a0you for your presence.\u00a0 Thank you for the invitation to be here.<\/p>\n

\u00a0A Feel for the Group<\/h3>\n

How many people, it would be very helpful to me to get a sense of the group, are ordained- really ordained, not fake ordained- how many ordained\u2026?\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 Studying preparatory to ordination if somebody will take you?\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 Denominational Execs?\u00a0 We got anybody like that? Good.\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 Two. Who am I leaving out?\u00a0 The priesthood, the common priesthood of all believers, those who are not ordained?\u00a0 I do this now, sometimes yes, sometimes no.\u00a0 How many people are working in local church settings? That\u2019s very few then who are not.\u00a0 What else then is represented besides local church settings?\u00a0 Just call it out.\u00a0 Hospital ministry, pastoral counseling, chaplaincy, university chaplaincy.\u00a0 Who are the university chaplains?\u00a0 I know one, two, three.\u00a0 I consider myself a loafer.\u00a0 I work half a year, and then I plant the garden or cook, sit still the second half of the year.<\/p>\n

But today, I\u2019m not loafing.\u00a0 What I would hope to do today is this: I\u2019m going to speak for about an hour.\u00a0 And I\u2019m going to try to address the topic: Creating the Word.\u00a0 Subtitle, Themes for a Spirituality of Preaching.\u00a0 After that, after about 50 minutes or an hour, I will ask you to take some time for a conversation with one another, particularly around responses, comments, interpretations, applications that you are making, I\u2019m going to assume that as I\u2019m speaking, you will be responding, making applications and interpretations.\u00a0 And then we\u2019ll spend the last half hour or so talking back and forth, both this way as well as this way with one another.\u00a0 So sit back, and let me try to address to you in the first part of our time together:<\/p>\n

Creating the Word: Themes for a Spirituality of Preaching<\/h2>\n

I spent most of yesterday at a shelter for women in Brooklyn, New York.\u00a0 I was tremendously impressed by the work of the women who are running the center, the women who are from all walks of life: a couple of nuns, a couple of ex-offenders. Tremendously impressed and inspired by those women, and as always, shocked and disturbed by the suffering of the women who are staying at the shelter, and by what they have endured.\u00a0 And last night, talking with my husband, I said, \u201cI find myself, in preparing for tomorrow, and reflecting on what I\u2019m going to be doing tomorrow, making comparisons between the work of using words and really important work they are doing at the shelter.\u201d\u00a0 And that was private until about an hour and a half ago, and I thought, \u2018I would suspect that that experience I had yesterday, and then getting ready to speak today, is one that most of you have also met.\u2019\u00a0 Where we are most of us, people who work if not exclusively with words, people whose major tool or major form of interaction is speaking.\u00a0 And I think it important the way I settled it temporarily for myself, was in recalling Judy Collins\u2019 great song, which in turn refers to that great strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, \u2018hearts starve as well as bodies.\u00a0 Bread, which we need to give to one another, real bread, and roses.\u2019\u00a0 All of which is to say, I hope this will be food for your spirits and for your hearts.\u00a0 Creating the Word: Themes for a Spirituality of Preaching.<\/p>\n

The two key words: word and creating.<\/h3>\n

Martin Buber says that there are three ways to be present in a situation.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0You walk into a situation, and the first way to be present is you bring a list, or you bring a notebook, and you write down whatever happens, you look for it, and you go home with a pack of notes.\u00a0 Buber calls that the way of observation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

2. The second way, you trust your mind and your heart to pick up whatever is going on in the situation.\u00a0 You don\u2019t write anything down.\u00a0 You trust that you\u2019ll be able to take in whatever you need to take in.\u00a0 And that second way is the way of Onlooker<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

3. But the third way is entirely different from those two.\u00a0 Because when you\u2019re the observer or an onlooker, you\u2019re the agent, you and I are in charge.\u00a0 We go in, and we take in whatever we feel is important to take in from the situation.\u00a0 The third way, we walk into a setting and we find that something addresses us<\/strong>.\u00a0 Something says something to us.\u00a0 And we have to do with it.\u00a0 We may have to sell all our goods and give it to the poor, we may know that there\u2019s a decision down the pike, the pike in 5 years.\u00a0 But whatever, in this third kind of situation or setting, a word demanding an answer happens to us.\u00a0 A word demanding an answer inflicts destiny on us.<\/p>\n

And in speaking this afternoon about creating the word, the kind of word I want to draw our attention to is that word which demands an answer. The kind of word which inflicts destiny.\u00a0 At the very top level, here, the words that come out of our mouths when we teach or preach, when we are speaking or taking the role of speaker.\u00a0 Underneath that level, what really helps to create the spoken word, the words we are. Ourselves, and other selves as words demanding an answer.\u00a0 Underneath ourselves as words, there\u2019s even a third meaning of word, and that is world, universe, all of created beings, which we are continuing to create or deny the creation of.\u00a0 And that world in which we create, that\u2019s the undergirding for the words we are, which is the undergirding for the words we speak.\u00a0 And then, at the very deepest level but also permeating all the other words, the one who, as in the story of Lilith, keeps saying, \u2018I am who I am, but I must become who I must become.\u2019\u00a0 The word who, I would take the last position is also in some way ours to create.\u00a0 Its word and all those meanings I speak to this afternoon.<\/p>\n

The other word in the title is creating.\u00a0 I would recall to you (that\u2019s good, because this is my good side.\u00a0 The photographer\u2019s down here \u2013laughter.) I\u2019d recall to you that in the Hebrew Bible especially there are two images of creating.\u00a0 The first image of creating is of the potter or the carpenter, but of making something particularly with the work of our hands, making something, shaping it, and having it exist out there in front of us. Creating as making, which shows up, if you think about these phrases for a while, this first image of creating, in such phrases as \u2018making a living,\u2019 is that what we do to living? Or \u2018making meaning,\u2019 as if it\u2019s our making that creates meaning.\u00a0 Or, a very interesting phrase, \u2018making love.\u2019\u00a0 So there\u2019s that first image of creating of something outside us.<\/strong>\u00a0 However, suffusing the poetry of the Hebrew Bible is a second image of creating where the Creator, divine and human, is a brooding, hovering, involved presence never separate from that which is being created.<\/strong>\u00a0 Creating in this second imagery of creating you find in Julian of Norwich, Blessed Julian of Norwich who talks about the Spirit enclosed in her and herself enclosed in the Spirit.\u00a0 And the closest analogy to this second image of creating is of course, as you\u2019re aware, birth.\u00a0 It\u2019s the second image of creating I want to explore with you this afternoon, that brooding, hovering, always involved in what is being created, never being able to separate from.\u00a0 I\u2019d also say- would you believe this is all by way of introduction?- I\u2019d also say with reference to creating that there are a few laws which always accompany creating, a few rules.<\/p>\n

One law is you never create alone.\u00a0<\/em> Let me just throw that into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

A second law I got from J.D. Salinger, where Seymour, the 9-year-old Seymour, who is arguably the greatest marble player in all of Brooklyn is giving instructions to his little brother, his little 6-year-old brother Zooey about how to play marbles.\u00a0 And it\u2019s a great law of creativity.\u00a0 Seymour looks at Zooey and watches what he\u2019s doing, and finally he says to the boy, \u2018Could you try not aiming so much?\u2019\u00a0 Creating: key rule, don\u2019t aim.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

And the third rule I\u2019ll offer up to you is as we create, we engage in steps in a process.<\/em>\u00a0 The notion of steps is all over contemporary literature, particularly psychological literature. But the steps we get in much contemporary literature, the notion that we have in contemporary literature is the steps on a ladder, or steps on a staircase.\u00a0 Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler-steps.\u00a0 The notion I want to offer to you today is another set of steps, but this time, steps as in a dance.\u00a0 Rosemary Reuther reminds us that \u2018when you take steps, movement is never up, the movement always is toward the center.\u2019\u00a0 And when you think of yourself as involved in steps in a dance when you are creating the word, then that understanding of steps is one where you can move forward, backward, sometimes be partnered with 10 or 20 partners, sometimes be solitary, where at whatever step you find yourself, you are where you are supposed to be.\u00a0 And where the steps in the activity of creating, as in that second image, lead naturally to the next step, and where the cycle is, it isn\u2019t only this way, it is sometimes this way and this way, as we are when we are free and liberated to dance and when we stop aiming.\u00a0 But the most important aspect in the steps of creating the word is that each of them is drawn from the lives and experiences of women.\u00a0 Each of them is part of the geography of women\u2019s spirit.\u00a0 Together they can serve as the basis for women serving the word, and the world, and eventually I would argue transform all preaching.<\/p>\n

There are five steps.<\/h3>\n

SILENCE<\/h3>\n

The first of them is silence.\u00a0 The activity of creating begins with the step of silence. \u00a0[Can you hear me?\u00a0 I know there\u2019s some problem with the sound, it\u2019s reverberating. Anybody want to change their seat?\u00a0 I\u2019ll go near.\u00a0 Is that any better? Well, let\u2019s see\u2026Feel free to change your place.\u00a0 Do whatever you have to, or start talking to the person next to you (laughter.) That\u2019s allowed too.]<\/p>\n

Anyway, first step, silence.\u00a0 It would be difficult to find a more pervasive theme in contemporary study of women, especially women studying women than silence.\u00a0 Some examples.\u00a0 Tillie Olsen, Silences<\/i>.\u00a0 Adrienne Rich, Of Lies, Secrets, and Silences.\u00a0 <\/i>Rita Gross and Nancy Faulk, writing about the religious lives of women in Africa and Asia, Unspoken Worlds.\u00a0 <\/i>Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice.\u00a0 <\/i>Jane Rolland Martin, perhaps the most powerful work on contemporary education and women, Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation. <\/i>\u00a0Most recent book, earlier this year on women\u2019s poetry, Stealing the Language.\u00a0 <\/i>And of course, the great council of Marge Piercy, her work is Unlearning to Not Speak. <\/i><\/p>\n

But perhaps the most striking example of this exploration of silence and of voice, which pervades the literature and conversation women have with one another is in the 1986 study, Women\u2019s Ways of Knowing<\/i>.\u00a0 How many people are familiar with that?\u00a0 Check it out in the bookstore.\u00a0 In that research into the educational lives of over 100 women, the four authors, the four women who co-wrote the book relate an insight similar to this starting point of silence, and then they go on to comment, and I\u2019m quoting them, \u201cWhen we interviewed the women, what we had not anticipated was that voice was more than an academic shorthand for a person\u2019s point of view.\u00a0 Well after we were into our interviews with women, we became aware that voice is a metaphor that can be applied to many aspects of women\u2019s experience.\u00a0 In describing their lives, women commonly talked about voice and silence.\u201d\u00a0 And then they start listing the ways women talked about their lives.\u00a0 What they had are, \u201cspeaking up, speaking out, being silent, not being heard, really listening, feeling deaf and dumb, having no words, an endless variety of comments,\u201d and these are women who had not read the research.\u00a0 In trying to speak about their lives, just think about the implications for preaching, women go back to or go down into the imagery and the metaphor of silence.\u00a0 And in Women\u2019s Ways of Knowing, <\/i>the authors say, \u201cwhen we asked \u2018what are the metaphors she\u2019s using to depict her experience of growing and changing,\u2019 the metaphor reverberating,\u201d that\u2019s their word, \u201cthe metaphor reverberating in the accounts of women, is the metaphor of gaining a voice.\u201d\u00a0 Silence.\u00a0 Gaining a voice.\u00a0 Not having a voice.\u00a0 Dominance as a starting point for creating. The absence of women\u2019s voices in all fields.\u00a0 Adrienne Rich wrote, oh maybe 15 years ago, \u201ctaking women students seriously,\u201d and you may remember that Adrienne Rich described the faces of women students in her classes then 15 years ago, and she said, \u201clook at the faces of the silence and of those who speak.\u00a0 Listen to a woman groping for language in which to express what is on her mind, sensing that the terms of academic discourse,\u201d and I would add theological discourse, \u201care not her language.\u00a0 Trying to cut down her thought to the dimensions of a conversation not intended for her or,\u201d and how many of us would relate to this, \u201cor reading her paper out loud at break-neck speed, throwing her words away, putting herself down with a kind of reflex prejudgment, \u2018I don\u2019t deserve to take up time and space.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 I have to say as one who lived in Boston for more than a decade, this tends not to describe women this side of the Charles River, as much as it does women throughout the country.\u00a0 Those who would say, \u2018oh that was 15 years ago, things have changed,\u2019 I have to tell you just even going south to that center of the universe we call New York, the silence of women is still very, very much with us, west of the Charles and west of the Hudson.\u00a0 And you who are spending your time in the local church I\u2019m sure can corroborate that.<\/p>\n

Well, there are many responses to the silence.<\/h3>\n

The first one, and appropriate, is sorrow, and a kind of sense of loss.<\/em><\/p>\n

A friend of mine who works with teenage young women wrote to me not too long ago and she said, \u201cMaria, I\u2019ve spent the last year speaking and preaching to teenagers and using people from the Scriptures as real people they can grab hold of and embrace.\u00a0 Every time I bring up Miriam,\u201d and she hadn\u2019t read Phyllis Trible yet, \u201cbut every time I bring up Miriam,\u201d she says, \u201cthey have no clue to who she is.\u00a0 Yes is,\u201d Rosie went on in her letter, \u201cyes, is, not was, Miriam holds great lessons for us.\u00a0 What does it mean to hold life as sacred?\u00a0 What does it mean to use creative problem solving to deal with the impossible?\u00a0 What does it mean to look for what you have in common with your greatest enemy?\u00a0 Lessons as great as the one\u2019s of her brother.\u201d\u00a0 And then she finishes, and she says, \u201cMiriam is part of my flood, my life.\u00a0 As alive to me as she was for Moses, I heard about Moses when I was five.\u00a0 I found Miriam when I was 30.\u201d\u00a0 And what she\u2019s expressing is sorrow, loss because of the silence.<\/p>\n

AWAKENING<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Another kind of response is awakening<\/em>,<\/p>\n

and no on articulates awakening to silence, I think, as powerfully as Margaret Atwood does in her novel Surfacing, <\/i>where one of her characters coming aware and awakening to the silence in her life says, \u201cThis above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing.\u00a0 The word games, the winning and losing games are over.\u00a0 And at the moment there are no others, but they will have to be invented.\u00a0 Withdrawing is no longer possible.\u00a0 And the alternative is death.\u00a0 Awakening and saying, I\u2019m not going to put up with this anymore.\u201d\u00a0 But in all the responses to silence, awakening, sorrow, pain, awareness, as important as any of those is the step of silence where we use silence itself, not as a negative force, but as a positive one, and as a healing power.\u00a0 Silence is multi-faceted and multi-layered.\u00a0 And in some instances, although silence is a demon to be exorcised, we also come to realize that silence, notably that contemplative silence is a companion to be befriended.\u00a0 What I\u2019m talking about is the silence of listening to ourselves, to what we are really saying, to one another and to our world.<\/p>\n

Receptive contemplative listening, that silence can be a power, healing the wounds that the other silences inflict.<\/strong>\u00a0 As you know I\u2019m sure, silence can lead us to the discovery of the divinity within ourselves where we say, \u2018I found God within myself, and learned to love Her, learned to love Her fiercely.\u2019\u00a0 We won\u2019t find God within ourselves, I don\u2019t think, and learn to love Her and love Her fiercely, unless we take on- Maria, do you know what I have to do in my local church?\u00a0 Yes I do.\u00a0 Unless we take on the time and the texture of contemplative silence, and learn to use Her wisdom and Her truth, and Her power as we create the world, and as we create the word.\u00a0 It is the power of silence as the Shekhinah<\/i>, the hovering, rooting presence we can hear as well as feel, that contemplative silence brings us.\u00a0 And in Her company, we can begin to hear all of the silent, muted voices, which are speaking, but speaking often so quietly we don\u2019t hear, and move from the step of silence into the second step of the dance, and that step I would call Remembering.<\/p>\n

REMEMBERING<\/h3>\n

The turn from silence, and think of the turn as something you do in bodily ways. The turn from silence to remembering is a natural one.\u00a0 Because out of the awareness and the listening provoked by silence, and sometimes out of the loss and alienation provoked by a tradition which often excludes women previously, unheard voices start to make their claim.\u00a0 And the voices sometimes are those of people whose names we simply did not know, sometimes are voices of people we knew were there, but did not have the time to meet and to listen to, sometimes they\u2019re the voices of the unheard divinity.\u00a0 So this remembering is a listening to voices<\/strong>.\u00a0 But in the work of creating the word, especially in preaching, remembering also pushes us to get involved in several processes, which are processes of remembering, which we can incorporate into our preaching.\u00a0 The two forms I draw your attention to are dangerous remembering, and liturgical remembering.\u00a0 It\u2019s John Baptiste Smith, who\u2019s given us the theme of dangerous remembering.<\/p>\n

There are memories in which earlier experiences break through to the center point of our lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for the present.\u00a0 You know you\u2019re in the presence of a dangerous memory when you say, \u2018I don\u2019t want to look at that.\u00a0 That\u2019s enough.\u2019\u00a0 Dangerous memories, they illuminate for a few minutes and with a harsh steady light, the nature of things we\u2019ve apparently come to terms with.\u00a0 They show us the banality of our supposed realism.\u00a0 They break through the cannon of the prevailing structures of plausibility, dangerous memories.\u00a0 And they have certain subversive features.\u00a0 Metz says, \u201cSuch memories are like dangerous visitations from the past that we have to take into account.\u201d\u00a0 And there are two kinds of dangerous memories, more dangerous than any other- memories of suffering and memories of freedom.\u00a0 And the work of creating the word is a re-membering the memories of suffering and the memories of freedom.\u00a0 The memories of suffering certainly are those of the suffering of women throughout the world.\u00a0 Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin have detailed these for us at length- The Chinese foot-binding, and African genital mutilation, and U.S. removal of wombs and breasts and European witch burning- the history of women, the suffering simply because we were women.\u00a0 But also, the present suffering.\u00a0 Anne Sexton says in one of her poems, \u201cI cannot walk an inch, without trying to walk to God.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m always struck by that when I go out in the street in New York City.\u00a0 I cannot walk an inch without meeting someone who is homeless.\u00a0 Memories of suffering are as recent as this morning and last night for most of us.\u00a0 And these are dangerous memories because they push us to look at what we have apparently taken for granted.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to play the notion, perhaps we can talk about it later, that one of the reasons there has been a failure in remembering dangerous memories of suffering is the neglect of the image of the Christa. <\/i>There\u2019s an evasion, a resistance to the image to remember, that image of crucified woman, called the Christa.\u00a0 <\/i>We\u2019ve enumerable representations of the male crucified figure, and I do not mean to move that to the side, but the representation of the suffering woman.\u00a0 Edwina Sandys sculpture that came to the \"Christa\"<\/a>country 2 or 3 years ago starting in Berkley, of the crucified female figure, or the crucified female figure who I\u2019m sure most of us remember.\u00a0 Is there one of us really, who does not recall the figure of the naked and screaming Vietnamese child\u00a0 Kim, her back ablaze with Napalm, a picture that more than anything else made us confront the suffering of the Vietnam war.\u00a0 That was an image of the Christa. <\/i>That is what I am trying to speak of.\u00a0 And the failure to remember the Christa in all of her forms may be one of the reasons why we do not emphasize dangerous remembering as much as we might.\u00a0 Memories of suffering.\u00a0 But dangerous memories and dangerous remembering is also memories of freedom.\u00a0 My own great heroine, Molly Rush, Molly Rush, the director of the Thomas Merton Peace Center in Pittsburgh, the Brothers Baragan, – do you know that name, Baragan?- would call Molly Rush regularly, and say, \u201cMolly, we\u2019re demonstrating in front of the Pentagon, would you come and join us?\u201d\u00a0 She, mother of six, and grandmother of two, would respond, \u201cI can\u2019t.\u00a0 What about the children?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And they\u2019d call the next month and say, \u201cWe have another demonstration, we need you.\u201d\u00a0 And she\u2019d respond almost a mantra, \u201cWhat about the children?\u201d\u00a0 And eventually, she started to hear her own words, not so much in relation to her children at home, but to the children of the world and of the relation of their lives to nuclear arsenals.\u00a0 Or same mantra, \u201cWhat about the children,\u201d the mothers and the grandmothers of the desaparacitos, <\/i>walking around in a circle when nobody would confront the Argentine military, walking with the pictures of their children, saying nothing.\u00a0 But in their walking and in the holding of their pictures saying, \u201cWhat about the children?\u201d\u00a0 Or Jean Donovan, if those of you who are using Women Guide, <\/i>Rosemary Reuther\u2019s Women Guide, <\/i>a set of wonderful possibilities for worship have probably come across a letter home from Jean Donovan, one of four churchwomen killed in El Salvador in \u201980.\u00a0 And she wrote, \u201cThe Peace Corp left today.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t blame them.\u00a0 It is right to go.\u00a0 But I look out the window, and I look at the children, these bruised innocent victims of what is happening, and I can\u2019t get myself to leave.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat about the children?\u201d\u00a0 These are women who asked in their own persons the questions of dangerous remembering.<\/p>\n

But the other form of remembering is liturgical remembering.\u00a0 You must have had a worship class at some time or another where you were thrown the great big word, which is a somewhat poetic word, anamnesis.<\/em> Anamnesis, the kind of remembering we do in worship.\u00a0 The kind of remembering where through liturgy and through worship, we bring a past event through ceremonial representation into the present.\u00a0 At the core of liturgical remembering is the human capacity to take hold of an event or a person and bring it into the present, and in doing that allow the event or the person take hold of ourselves.\u00a0 Liturgical remembering, and doing anamnesis demands the creation of ceremonies based on the kinds of remembering I have been speaking of.\u00a0 There are innumerous possibilities, our workshops I think will deal with them.\u00a0 Two of which I will call to your mind.\u00a0 Two forms taking liturgical remembering seriously.\u00a0 The first occurred for me, here at BU.\u00a0 A number of us, students and faculty, had met together to pray and to have supper.\u00a0 And after we had shared a meal, we moved into the prayer by each one being asked to complete on a piece of paper the sentence \u2018I am in the Church because\u2026\u2019\u00a0 Then we folded them up and put them in the center of the room, and lit candles, and someone else took the paper and read it.\u00a0 Nine people gave comments that you might not find unfamiliar.\u00a0 \u201cI am in the Church because there\u2019s no where else to go.\u201d\u00a0 But the tenth was the one which was a dangerous remembering, because the tenth person wrote, \u201cI am not in the Church because\u2026\u201d\u00a0 And it was a memory of her exercising her freedom, that then became part of all of us present, who perhaps truthfully are in the Church, and at the same time are not.\u00a0 Anamnesis.\u00a0 The other liturgical remembering I took part in for the first time over at EDS, and subsequently took part in almost the same form of liturgical remembering in Melbourne, Australia.\u00a0 We used Judy Chicago\u2019s dinner party.\u00a0 Where all the women present designed a place mark, remembering forgotten women.\u00a0 And I have as I assume many of you have, by using the dinner party as a form, toasted the memories and the lives of Mary- Jesus\u2019 mother Mary, that Mary- Madea, Anne Frank, Lilith, and in doing so, I like the other women whose company I shared ceremoniously, liturgically remembered the past, and a past which not until then had been fully mine.\u00a0 Those moments however of remembering were not without pain and not without tears.\u00a0 For in genuine remembering of suffering and freedom, there is loss, there is grieving, there is sorrow, there is anger, and often there is rage.\u00a0 And the steps in the dance now pause as the memories of the loss is faced, and the next step is entered- from silence to remembering and having remembered, we realize we have to commit ourselves an even deeper ritual, and so we come to the third step, the step of mourning.<\/p>\n

M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G,<\/h3>\n

Mourning. It often strikes me, and I\u2019ve often said that one of the dynamics in the step of remembering is the inner urge we feel toward movement, I\u2019m going to design some rituals.\u00a0 There\u2019s an inner urge to do something, but mourning is along the lines of not \u2018it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness,\u2019 but along the lines of \u2018let\u2019s curse the darkness for a while.\u2019\u00a0 Don\u2019t just do something, stand there.<\/strong>\u00a0 Mourning is the antidote to every preacher, pastor, teacher\u2019s occupational temptation, and that is to say, \u2018courage God, I come.\u2019 \u00a0Mourning.\u00a0 Standing. Creating the word.\u00a0 The step of mourning is the step where we take time to grieve.\u00a0 To grieve.\u00a0 The remembering pushes us to a grieving over what has been lost.\u00a0 And what is grieving?\u00a0 In 1942 here in Boston, a tragic fire struck the Coconut Grove Nightclub.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the local lore.\u00a0 How many of you have ever heard of that Coconut?\u00a0 Yes, it\u2019s in the local lore.\u00a0 And at the time, Eric Lindeman did the first study of what happens when someone is engaged in bereavement and grieving.\u00a0 And in interviewing survivors of the fire as well as those closest to them, Eric Lindeman found there were 6 characteristics especially evident in mourning.\u00a0 Somatic, bodily distress, pains in the stomach.\u00a0 Intense preoccupation with the image of what\u2019s been lost.\u00a0 Guilt, it\u2019s part of mourning.\u00a0 Guilt.\u00a0 Four, a disconcerting lack of warmth.\u00a0 Disorganized patterns of conduct, and finally, the feeling you no longer fit.\u00a0 The feeling you no longer fit.<\/strong> I think there\u2019s a remarkable degree of correspondence in the presence of those characteristics and those who are mourning actual death, as well as in the lives of persons, notably women, moving into a role and into work which was not designed for us.\u00a0 Guilt, preoccupation with the image of what was lost.\u00a0 The feeling you no longer fit.\u00a0 Disorganized patterns of conduct.\u00a0 Elisabeth Kubler Ross, as you know, picked up on that research and named steps or stages in dying.\u00a0 Denial, anger, rage, bargaining, acceptance, depression.\u00a0 I think that the anger is particularly appropriate for women to look at.\u00a0 Anger as part of mourning, not as the end, but as something to move through.\u00a0 Chrysostom, John Chrysostom of all people says, \u201cWhoever is without anger, when there is cause for anger, sins.\u201d\u00a0 Next time somebody says, \u2018you shouldn\u2019t get mad!\u2019 ah ha!\u00a0 But even better than John Chrysostom, Beverly Harrison.\u00a0 Beverly Harrison saying to us, with reference to anger, which is part of mourning, it is better understood as<\/p>\n

a feeling signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups, or to the world around us.\u00a0 Anger is a mode of connectedness to others, and it\u2019s always a vivid mode of caring.\u00a0 To put the point another way, anger always is a sign of some resistance in ourselves to the moral quality of the social relations around us.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

And what is this to do with creating the word?\u00a0 You cannot, you cannot move on to the more positive work of actually engaging in the creative process until you have moved through.\u00a0 The way out is through.\u00a0 But more important, the work of mourning, which includes anger, is a testimony to those who have gone before.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just be angry.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just rage.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just mourn.\u00a0 The point of mourning is its particular pertinence in developing a spirituality of preaching, in that mourning signals a movement toward justice.\u00a0 If there\u2019s any answer to, at the heart of the question, why mourning, it is not only that it comes out of remembering suffering and freedom, it is that mourning in fact, and the answer to the question, why mourn, the answer is this- the failure to pause, to acknowledge, and to name is a desecration, a de-sacrilization of memory.\u00a0 The hurry to do our own work without pausing to notice the holiness of unnumbered women dead, who go crying through our singing, and our preaching, their ancient call for bread.\u00a0 The failure to do that is to violate them.\u00a0 The absence of care toward those who are sedimented in our flesh and blood, living on in us, is to invite death of the spirit.\u00a0 And so we name in our preaching, in our creating the word, our mothers, our grandmothers, our foremothers.\u00a0 We name our sisters, our daughters, our lovers, and our friends.\u00a0 We name women of ideas and women of slavery.\u00a0 We name bruised women, broken women, battered women.\u00a0 We name brilliant women, artistic women.\u00a0 We name women become numbers in the ovens of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, and women become castaways on the streets of Boston, and we hold our own dinner party, and that moves us to doing the work of justice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And when we do that work, that mourning and naming, that work we discover, is not the serious solemn work it looked like in the beginning.\u00a0 It is neither sad, nor terrifying.\u00a0 Indeed, as we name in song and silence, and in mourning, it pushes us into laughter, and often into dance.\u00a0 Everyone in this room I am sure, has been in the situation because things are so bad, there is nothing else to do but laugh.\u00a0 So mourning need not be a getting stuck.\u00a0 It is liberation into laughter and into dance.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve ever been at an Irish Wake, I should name an Irish wake today, but so do all persons come together to acknowledge life, and accept its passing.\u00a0 The grieving is real, the pain is real, the loss is real, but the power of mourning lies in its capacity to name the pain, to free us from it, to exorcise that demon, and to grant the pain burial.\u00a0 And when we do that, mourning prepares the way for imagination and creative power to appear on the stage, and mourning moves us into the fourth step in the dance, and that step is artistry.<\/p>\n

ARTISTRY<\/h3>\n

Creating the word moves me from silence, to remembering, to mourning, to artistry.\u00a0 In artistry, we turn to the work of shaping those forms demanded in creating a new word, a new world, including creating the words we are.\u00a0 We could choose to work as technicians, as scientists, or as politicians or theologians, and as preachers, we have to work those ways very very often.\u00a0 But if we are about the work of creating, a far richer starting point in my view, is to understand ourselves as taking on the activities of reshaping, redesigning, and reforming that which has been given into our hands, especially in the forms of preaching and of worship.\u00a0 \u201cWe are often blocked in artistry,\u201d says Ben Shahn, the great graphic artist, \u201cby a fear of our own creativity.\u201d\u00a0 We\u2019re blocked in artistry by not realizing what it is to be an artist, and we\u2019re also blocked by being dilettantes, engaging in non-serious dabbling in serious business.\u00a0 But the work of artistry, as a step in the dance of creating the word, is a work of reshaping, to begin with reshaping symbolism, and we do that simply in our bodies as women.\u00a0 We don\u2019t look like preachers.\u00a0 Preachers are people, well, they\u2019re another sex, they wear long robes, and they talk in a deeper voice.\u00a0 We reshape symbolism simply by doing the work.\u00a0 And people may resist it, but we\u2019re reshaping, we\u2019re engaged in artistry whenever we stand, or sit, to preach.\u00a0 Another reshaping of symbolism I\u2019ve seen it work to some extent at the Chapel at Union Seminary in New York, is a reshaping of the settings where preaching goes on.\u00a0 I did ask that we meet in some place other than this, I want to tell you that.\u00a0 Because the form, the symbolism, not of Marsh Chapel, it\u2019s a wonderful chapel, and BU\u2019s a wonderful university, yes.\u00a0 But the symbolism of what it is to create the word together is deeply undercut it seems to me by the form of the architecture, the geography of those places where we speak.\u00a0 In addition to reshaping symbolism, artistry means reshaping rituals. It\u2019s Anne Johnson who\u2019s out in Ethel these days, Anne Johnson who says, \u201cYou know in our rituals, we use blessings all the time, but most of the blessings we use are blessings such as, may the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you, and may the Lord give you peace.\u201d\u00a0 Anne says, \u201cwhy don\u2019t we now and then reshape rituals so that we now and then say to one another, the Lord plague you and torment you.\u00a0 The Lord set an impossible task before you.\u00a0 The Lord give you strength to do your best and not to falter.\u00a0 Then and only then, may the Lord grant you peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reshaping ritual, reshaping language.<\/p>\n

Draw on the poets.\u00a0 Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest counsels I know of to give to preachers, Emily Dickinson who said, \u201ctell the truth, but tell its slant.\u201d\u00a0 Reshaping language.\u00a0 Read Annie Dillard, read the comic strips, read Annie Dillard.\u00a0 I know that it\u2019s important in the tradition to speak of the Church as Kingdom for some, Reign for others, Bethelea for others, household for others, but here\u2019s Annie Dillard, and I think it\u2019s a great image of what it is to be Church.\u00a0 Annie Dillard says,<\/p>\n

\u201cI am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along.\u00a0 I am aging and eaten, and have done my share of eating too.\u00a0 I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits.\u00a0 But instead, am wandering odd on a splintered wreck I have come to care for, whose trees breath a delicate air.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, maybe we could use language and call the church \u201ca splintered wreck we\u2019ve come to care for.\u201d\u00a0 And in reshaping language, get past the face of language into the depths of its heart.\u00a0 Reshape symbolism, reshape ritual, reshape language, and reshape knowledge.\u00a0 And the artistry of reshaping knowledge is found in asking questions.\u00a0 Elizabeth has been so helpful to us in her articulating of a hermeneutic of suspicion.\u00a0 Ask questions.\u00a0 Accept no dogma without investigation.\u00a0 It might be wrong; accept no dogma without investigation, it might be right.\u00a0 But whatever you do with dogma, ask questions.\u00a0 Gerda Lerner in Teaching Women\u2019s History, <\/i>is a big help to women who teach religion and theology and to preach it.\u00a0 Gerda Lerner gives a set of questions that are very helpful in reshaping knowledge.<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cWhatever you prepare, ask the questions: Where and who are the missing women in this story<\/em>?\u201d\u00a0 She says ask, \u201cWhat women do, while the men were doing what the book tells us was important?<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat did women do, while the men were doing what the book tells us was important?<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 She says ask, \u201cHow did women define the issue?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

And to be alert to asking those questions which makes us very popular.\u00a0 To be alert to asking those questions is to do the work of artistry, because it is questions such as those, <\/i>which reshape knowledge.\u00a0 And when we reshape knowledge, and language, and ritual, and symbol, we are doing the work of artistry, because the work of artistry is offering form to people. (You\u2019re saying to yourself \u2018when is she going to finish?\u2019\u00a0 I have one more step, I will finish.\u00a0 But let me say about what I am trying to do here this afternoon.) \u00a0What I am trying to do in naming the steps in creating the world, is to offer a form, the form of a dance, but also the elements that are part of that dance, that can serve as criteria for all our work.\u00a0 The great work it seems to me, of preaching and the ministry of the word, is not delivering content to the people, it is delivering people to themselves.\u00a0 And you can\u2019t do that directly with content, but you can do that when your work is artistry, and you are offering people forms.\u00a0 It is in receiving forms, and then doing the work of re-creation and artistry that we are delivered to ourselves.\u00a0 And when we are delivered to ourselves, and we realize we have come to the fifth step, appropriate, since it is a delivery, is birthing.<\/p>\n

BIRTHING<\/h3>\n

In Spiritual Midwifery, <\/i>Ina Gaskin says, \u201cWhen a child is born, the entire universe has to shift and make room.\u00a0 Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.\u00a0 In that way, every birth is exactly like the birth of a world teacher. Every child born is a living Buddha.\u201d\u00a0 Birthing, bring as well as we can, bringing the forms that enable people to be delivered to themselves and the world to be delivered to itself.\u00a0 Because in the step of birthing, it is not so much the preacher\u2019s work that is the creating, once birthing occurs, the movement has been turned over to the other, and the other is now taking on responsibility for his or her life, and the community is taking responsibility for its life.\u00a0 Birthing: the step in the dance where we say \u2018I really can\u2019t do anymore except hang around, and help out where I\u2019m needed.\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0 Birthing, which teaches us that things take time.\u00a0 Human birth- nine months.\u00a0 Birthing, which teaches us that darkness is an environmental life.\u00a0 And even will all our sophisticated knowledge, the daily moving into life of the organism, takes place in a healing, living, illuminating darkness. All good preaching conveys this.\u00a0 Katheryn Shifel (?) taught me years ago that one of the people who does it best is in the play \u201cThe Corn is Green.\u201d That wonderful old teacher L.C. Moffatt, whose young mining student tells her that underneath the ground he is able, even when he cannot see, to reach his hand up and feel where the corn is green.\u00a0 And I remember Katheryn saying, \u2018that\u2019s what preaching is, and that\u2019s what teaching is.\u00a0 It is a feeling where the corn is green and enabling and empowering others to feel their life is starting and where the corn is green.\u2019\u00a0 Birthing, where what we take on is the work of the midwife. Phyllis Trible has been so helpful in reminding us of Shiprah and Puah, those of us who may have forgotten them.\u00a0 But it may be important, and in this place I think particularly important, to name one of the great midwife teachers, and one of the great midwife preachers of our century, who took all of these themes and spoke of them with an eloquence none of us can match until perhaps we get to be her age and die as she did last July, midway through her eighties.\u00a0 Yes, I speak of Nell Morton.\u00a0 Nell Morton, having this to say of birthing,<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we took the painful journey through the core of our lives, we found we were sustained, in the awful loneliness we were not alone.\u00a0 Something shaped our cry, brought forth our speech, fragmentary as it was.\u00a0 We had been told all our lives that the word \u2018created,\u2019 that the word came first, even in the beginning before the beginning.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now we know that Nell, a priority to the word, a hearing that brought forth the word.\u00a0 She too began with silence.\u00a0 She said, \u201cWe literally heard one another downpour words that was our word and the word was ourselves.\u00a0 We went down, then up from under.\u00a0 We have experienced birth.\u00a0 Not rebirth, not new birth, or rite of passage, or entry, but birth of ourselves for the first time.\u00a0 We have been heard into speech by a great ear listening to us from the heart of the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Birthing.\u00a0 Midwife.\u00a0 Midwifing the word.\u00a0 And what is it toward?\u00a0 What it is toward is silence. \u00a0Birthing is the culmination of the Dance, but you know that as in any dance, you can stop the dance at any time because you need to be still.\u00a0 And then you can pick it up again.\u00a0 And in the creating of the word when we come to birthing, we have delivered- let us hope- others to themselves, and it is time for us to simply sit back and let that which has been born take on its own life, knowing that tomorrow the dance will start again.\u00a0 Tomorrow, other voices will need to be remembered.\u00a0 Tomorrow, we will have to mourn for ones lost.<\/p>\n

But for today, we can dance.<\/h2>\n

Let me stop there.\u00a0(APPLAUSE.)<\/p>\n

MARIA HARRIS: I would ask you here, to dance with one another.\u00a0 And for the next 20 minutes, to take time if you haven\u2019t to introduce yourselves to one another. Perhaps to remember that the mind can absorb as much as the seat can, and so you may want to move a bit, around the pew, and through the pew, and over the pew.\u00a0 But for the next 20 minutes, I ask you to turn to those who are near you, and to name for one another that which has touched you in what you have heard.\u00a0 And where you are impelled to ask questions of whatever word it is demanding an answer from you, as well as from me.\u00a0 So I ask you to talk with one another-<\/p>\n

What has touched you, and what are the words you would name as demanding an answer from you at this time?<\/p>\n

And then we\u2019ll spend the last 20 minutes in a conversation to which all of us can join. \u00a0The form or format questions and answers\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0really say things as well as some other form do.\u00a0 I think the question I\u2019d like to begin with, the comment I\u2019d like to begin with, is whether you\u2019d say something for all of us of what\u2019s been going on in your discussion.\u00a0 Would you say something about what\u2019s been going on, if anything, in your conversation for all of us.\u00a0 And I have been asked to repeat whatever is said if I can, and if I can\u2019t, I\u2019m not gonna.\u00a0 So there.\u00a0 (These conversations are non-descript, but Ms. Harris responds.)<\/p>\n

She\u2019s very good\u00a0isn’t\u00a0she. (laughter.)\u00a0 Thank you, Thank you.<\/p>\n

Responses to questions from the audience (which are not heard on the tape.)<\/p>\n

Response 1: An Environment for life?\u00a0 Yes, I said both things, but I said the second in another form.\u00a0 The comment, the question is about birthing, the metaphor about birthing, and my talking about darkness as an environment for life.\u00a0 And it is an environment where life develops.\u00a0 But I also made the point where it is illuminating for darkness, which is paradoxical.\u00a0 And I think that is important.\u00a0 But I want to way one other thing about birthing, which your comments provoke.\u00a0 I use the metaphor or image of birth, which I would contrast with birthing, in class, oh, sometimes 1983 or 4, one of the responses, which made me think, really provoked me to say \u2018what do I mean by all this,\u2019 was \u201cMaria, when you offering birthing, or birth as a metaphor, you are suggesting that women tie themselves down to something that many women want to be untied from.\u00a0 Women, we ought to stop encouraging women to give birth.\u201d\u00a0 And as I said, I think that was a very provocative comment.\u00a0 I\u2019d really be interested in what you think about that.\u00a0 But at any rate, I just want to add that caveat that birth or birthing can be experienced or can be heard as burden, and certainly experienced as still-birth.\u00a0 Anyway, play with it, and take it.<\/p>\n

Response 2: Other comments, responses? Yes? Thank you.\u00a0 The comment is about the congregation feeling burdened by what the preacher has said, and the necessity for, correct me if I\u2019m miss hearing you, the necessity for the congregation to be partners, companions with the preacher.\u00a0 It seems to me, the shape of worship, and I mean the shape, this, is critical for whether there\u2019s going to be distance and separation or coming together as community.\u00a0 I find us here, I certainly experience myself as trying to overcome great hindrance \u00a0on the part of the geography.\u00a0 We just\u00a0wouldn’t\u00a0have the same congregation if we were on the same level etc.\u00a0 So the burden is on you today to be hearers, and into a kind of passivity that I\u2019m naming, because I think when you name things you help overcome them, or you move to overcoming them.\u00a0 You dissipate them.\u00a0 But I think that burden you named is increased by what we school teachers call the implicit curriculum, by the design and the shape of the place where you come together, and the centuries of someone being up high speaking down to- the imagery there is incredible.\u00a0 You want to respond to that?\u00a0 Yes. Come.<\/p>\n

Response 3: Time to worship, and time to preach.\u00a0 I think another false understanding we can convey that it is one hour or a week, if that, or two hours a week.\u00a0 The reason I was trying to push the contemplative side of silence was, I used to say at Andover Newton, Sabbath, Sabbath, take small Sabbath\u2019s in every day.\u00a0 I just love, don\u2019t you all love, sometimes I just sit and think, and sometimes I just sit.\u00a0 But if you grow up in good old Puritan New England, \u2018An Idle Mind is the Devil\u2019s Workshop.\u2019\u00a0 Bologna!\u00a0 It is when we sit, not even think.\u00a0 So your point about time is just as critical as place.\u00a0 Thank you for that.\u00a0 Yes?<\/p>\n

Response 4: Thank you for that, I think you\u2019re right that the burden is in the role.\u00a0 But I would take the position, which for .60 cents gets you on the Boston Subway, I would take the position, this form was not designed for women.\u00a0 It is not a woman\u2019s form.\u00a0 We don\u2019t speak\u2026.Our bodies are round to begin with.\u00a0 There\u2019s a roundedness in femaleness.\u00a0 Let me put it this way- if you could design a setting for the preaching of the word, and there was not previous setting, would you design a setting like this?\u00a0 Pour Old Marsh Chapel is getting the brunt of this, and this is probably a good place.\u00a0 But if a community is not only breaking bread, but breaking the word together, you do break the word in ways you break the bread.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a position, and it\u2019s certainly arguable.\u00a0 Yeah- and washed feet.\u00a0 The woman said \u2018Jesus sat down.\u2019 But then it doesn\u2019t get caught on the tape if you sit down.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the camera- The Alps exists on the camera, and what you remember is the picture and not the Alps, well\u2026Yes?<\/p>\n

Response 5: You\u2019re welcome.\u00a0 Let me say something about the blessing, which could be understood as a mantra for the week.\u00a0 In the tradition I come from we finally gave up Latin about twenty years ago.\u00a0 But the mass, the Catholic mass, while it was celebrated in Latin always ended with the phrase \u2018ite, missa est\u2019<\/em>\u00a0 Which was translated in our mass books, our Missals, Go (ite)<\/em> the mass is ended (missa est)<\/em>– the mass is completed.\u00a0 An alternative translation of that, which is simply thought of as a null curriculum is \u2018ite, missa est<\/em>,\u2019 Go, now is the mass.\u00a0 Now is the worship.\u00a0 Now is the celebration.\u00a0 And I thank you, because I\u00a0didn’t\u00a0even hear what you heard in the blessing, that the blessing is \u2018here\u2019s your mantra to repeat for the week folks.\u00a0 Take this with you when you have those small Sabbaths of everyday.\u2019\u00a0 Yes?<\/p>\n

Response 6: I don\u2019t know (laughter.)\u00a0 I do think in naming the issue.\u00a0 Naming something is so critical.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think women don\u2019t want to take authority though.\u00a0 I think we experience it very often as risky and troublesome.\u00a0 And I think the woman behind you points out rightly it\u2019s a burden, an \u2018oh, gosh do I want to do this?\u2019\u00a0 But the kind of grief that most of the women here know.\u00a0 That\u2019s masochistic if you subject yourself to that because you don\u2019t want to take on authority.\u00a0 So in doing what you\u2019re doing with your life, you\u2019ve said yes to authority.\u00a0 But somewhere deep in our lives, the authority, the office, the pastoral office is not designed for us.\u00a0 It\u2019s like, I used to get into a size 4, and it just\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0fit.\u00a0 A size 16\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0either.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not this shape.\u00a0 And that\u2019s where the difficulty is.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very painful thing.\u00a0 And this isn\u2019t just the Church.\u00a0 There are very few institutions in our world that are designed from women\u2019s perspective.\u00a0 I suspect one of them is nursing.\u00a0 The activity of nursing.\u00a0 It\u2019s very painful.\u00a0 Even birthing itself, we\u2019re finally getting back to the point where the woman is taken into account.\u00a0 But as you know, birth was designed to be so kind, to the benefit of the physician.\u00a0 Only in American, yeah, thank you for that.\u00a0 Others?\u00a0 Yes?<\/p>\n

Response 7: Oh, Bravo, Bravo.\u00a0 Oh, I want to get that on the tape if I can.\u00a0 The, \u2018tell the truth, but tell it\u2019s plan\u2019 is complemented by our natural capacity if I\u2019m hearing you, to hear the truth plan, illuminating darkness, but also a mantra for the weak, W-E-A-K, as well as W-E-E-K.\u00a0 You should write, you know, you\u2019re very good.\u00a0 Yes?<\/p>\n

Response 8: How do we bring about a balance between the mis-fitting of the profession for women and as women, the not quite fitting, and the unction of the call?\u00a0 The thing that comes into my own mind is I consider it a blessing that we don\u2019t fit.\u00a0 Following \u2018to tell the truth, but to tell it\u2019s plan,\u2019 Kathryn Shifel- do any of you know Katheryn?\u00a0 One of my great mentors.\u00a0 Kathryn Shifel used to say to me, \u201cwe have to be ware of the tyranny of the inner circle.\u00a0 And when you don\u2019t fit, it can be lonely, but it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0have to be lonely. There\u2019s something about not quite fitting that goes with the depth of humanity.\u201d\u00a0 I think Camus, Albert Camus was right.\u00a0 We are come into the universe, and there is some not quite fitting even here.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t mean to suggest a theology where heaven is our home and so\u2026no, earth is our home.\u00a0 But there\u2019s a restlessness and a longing of living in the midst of paradox.\u00a0 We\u2019re like Tevye in \u201cFiddler on the Roof\u201d on the one hand, and on the other hand, I think it\u2019s a value to not fit, and yet to try to accept what we believe is a call from divinity.\u00a0 An arrogance, and yet worthy of us.\u00a0 We really are at the center of creation.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s arrogance, and it\u2019s also true, because it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0fit. We know of our inability, disabilities, secret sins.\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell you a small story about secret sins- you can use this in one of your sermons.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the wise woman.\u00a0 It was said that the wise woman in this town talked to God and talked to God regularly.\u00a0 God talked back with her all the time.\u00a0 And the Bishop of the town was a little put out, because the Bishop did not talk to God regularly, and God did not talk regularly either.\u00a0 And so the Bishop sends for the wise old woman and he says, \u201cI\u2019m told you talk to God regularly.\u201d\u00a0 She said, \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cAnd God speaks with you regularly?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWell, if you are on such intimate terms with God, you ask God what my deepest, most secret sin is.\u201d\u00a0 She said, \u201cI will.\u201d\u00a0 A week later she came back, as said for, and went for.\u00a0 He said, \u201cDid you ask?\u201d\u00a0 She said, \u201cYes I did.\u00a0 I asked God what your most secret sin is.\u00a0 And God said \u2018I forgot.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 The power of that for me is, we are capable of terrible evil.\u00a0 And the paradox is that God, who was the one who will judge us, seeing the terrible evil we are capable of, forgets. And there\u2019s no justice in that.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0match.\u00a0 It\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0fit.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Books Referenced in the Sermon<\/h3>\n

\u00a0Teaching and the Religious Imagination-\u00a0<\/em>Maria Harris<\/p>\n

Women and Preaching-\u00a0<\/em>Maria Harris<\/p>\n

Spiritual Midwifery-\u00a0<\/em>Ina Gaskins<\/p>\n

Silences-\u00a0<\/em>Tillie Olsen<\/p>\n

Of Lies, Secrets, and Silences-\u00a0<\/em>Adrienne Rich<\/p>\n

Unspoken Worlds-\u00a0<\/em>Rita Gross and Nancy Faulk<\/p>\n

In a Different Voice-\u00a0<\/em>Carol Gilligan<\/p>\n

Reclaiming a Conversation-\u00a0<\/em>Jane Rolland Martin<\/p>\n

Stealing the Language-\u00a0<\/em>Alica Ostriker<\/p>\n

Unlearning Not to Speak-\u00a0<\/em>Marge Piercy<\/p>\n

Women’s Ways of Knowing-<\/em> A study<\/p>\n

Surfacing-\u00a0<\/em>Margaret Atwood<\/p>\n

Teaching Women’s History<\/em>– Gerda Lerner<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maria Harris March 17, 1988 INTRODUCTION: She called yesterday, the Shaw Center, with a few little details, and the first thing she asked for was a box.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve mentioned that to a couple of friends today, and they didn\u2019t understand what that was all about.\u00a0 But, as another person who when I stand on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7986,"featured_media":0,"parent":318,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7986"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2206"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2273,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2206\/revisions\/2273"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}