Reflections on African Women's Theology - On Religion and Health 1

Some reflections on readings for seminary class: Global Theologies of Women of Color 

African Women, Religion, and Health Ch. 4-6

From the beginning of this reading, I was reminded of our class discussion last week and previous weeks as well. Sarojini Nadar quotes Teresa Okure in the beginning of her essay, describing the unique style of theological study for African women, whose “primary consciousness in doing theology is not method, but life and life concerns- their own and those of their own peoples” (78). These readings are striking contrasts to the political philosophy I’m reading in Cosmopolitan Theology and the history of Pastoral Theology in another class. In fact, after discussing last night Homer Ashby’s Our Home Is Over Jordan: A Black Pastoral Theology (2003), I Nadar’s concern that scholars are just not GETTING it when it comes to truly liberating the texts of the bible. Ashby tries to reimagine the exodus story in new ways for African American Christians to rally together in solidarity. While an admirable exercise and a compelling book in other ways, his deconstruction of the biblical text lacks depth when addressing the displacement and genocide of the Canaanite people. The stark honesty that the African women theologians are demonstrating needs to be heard by more academics, by people who influence the ministers and churches that live out the interpreted example of these texts. Women who experience, witness, and anticipate misogyny, sexual violence, abuse of body and of mind, NEED to have the troubling texts of the bible addressed. Women NEED teachers demonstrating that the Bible is not just for the oppressor. The stories of the bible relate to their lives and speak to each of them in their experience.

I loved how each chapter begins with a re-telling/re-imagining of a biblical text. My initial reaction to Chapter 5’s opening poem surprised me. I realized that my Americanized (and patriarchal) image of Psalm 23 always implies Jesus as the representative of God, the Shepherd. To see the entire psalm retold, lifting up the incarnation of God’s love and care within another, within a woman scholar, took me off guard. But once I got over that reaction, and the bits of shame that my fundamentalist upbringing still influences my perspective, I LOVED it. Now I want to use that psalm to lift up so many other women (and men) who have shepherded me as representatives of God’s love and care.

Related to Chapter 6, I contemplated my role as healer of souls. As a chaplain, I greatly appreciate the concept of a ritual of cleansing and healing after traumatic violence and violation of rape. I wonder how US culture receives such ideas. I am concerned, though not surprised, that men who act so violently are allowed to participate in the regular life of the church, village, and country without any need for cleansing or healing. While women need ways to process and heal from violence and domination out of their control, the dis-ease of the people continues to fester and grow if society does not see the  need for men to heal and reconcile this within themselves.

Why back to school? grad school reflection

Since the beginning of my discernment, my call to ministry has been to ease spiritual suffering. I continue to passionately believe that the environmental, social and physical suffering in this world will never heal if we do not first address the spiritual suffering. If our sense of self and sense of community were fully realized, how could we live in voluntary ignorance and destructive apathy? After 6 years of answering that call in chaplaincy, I wish to grow as a caregiver and scholar. Participating in the cultivation of theologically and pastorally trained leaders is a natural progression of my call to ease spiritual suffering in the world. To do this, I am seeking a PhD program to study and expand my base of knowledge in pastoral theology, cultural anthropology, psychosocial theories and pedagogy. As a pastoral theologian and scholar, I want to expand the conversation in postmodern theology and to make it applicable to today’s society, especially within the realm of fertility and infertility.  The school I'm applying to has a progressive postmodern voice that is important to me and to accomplishing these goals.

The path to finding a spiritual calling can be an interesting one, but looking back, each step along my path led me with a clear and passionate purpose towards the work I now do. Even before I could name it, discovering meaning and purpose defined my life’s path. The spiritual abuse I received as a child in a fundamentalist Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church steered me towards science and as far away from religion as possible. However, by studying and working with science, I discovered that religion is not the only place cognitive dissonance lives. During that journey, I found my best conversation partners were with progressive Christians.

My healing did not solely happen by leaving the place of abuse or by discovering a replacement faith system. Through secular counseling, I learned how to pull apart my emotions and thoughts, how to distinguish self from group, and how to empower myself and others to live fully. Through earnest and honest seeking, I discovered the joy and peace that the spiritual experience brings. Spiritual direction, monastic retreats, and many other experiences also helped heal my connection with God.

Then, after all that, seminary helped me dismantle and deconstruct hidden precepts and assumptions not only about religion, but about life. I began seminary with a passion for biblical interpretation, seeking to dismantle not only the misconceptions I was raised with, but also to address the assumed authority and power scripture has. My past may have taught me that scripture was the key, but seminary taught me that history of church, theology and even pedagogy are just as key.

Seminary is  a place of crucial integration. By increasing contextual awareness and understanding in many subjects, a person with a call to help others turns into a beautiful  kaleidoscope of skills.  However, my time in CPE and working among professional ministers and chaplains revealed a genuine lack of theological integration with the pastoral care they give. How people view God affects how they view themselves and the world.  As pastoral care providers, I feel we are called out not only to have a clear understanding of our own theology, but also how it relates to traditionally held beliefs. Often, when people have holes or inconsistencies within their theology, it can be due to lack of language to describe their feelings and thoughts about it.  As we listen to people, we should be able to reflect back confusing thoughts with different and hopefully clear language. In order to do that, however, we must do the work of theological construction and integration long before the conversation happens.

Many who seek such understanding attend seminary and labor through CPE, hoping and anticipating some of the theological and spiritual fog will clear. I help with Mid-Year Consultations for CPE residents and each year I’m assigned to a student from an evangelical background, often with a theology that creates separatism and exclusivism. The struggle and pain this brings them is hard for me to observe. I have no desire to convert the world to my way of thinking, but I do desire to ease these spiritual leaders’ suffering. I desire to aid them in exploring the struggle that exists for a theology that may give comfort in some ways, but cause conflict in other ways.  I want to help them discover not only how to fill their own theological gaps, but also how to minister to the diverse world compassionately and competently.

Professional chaplain gatherings also revealed to me several things.   I observed that many chaplains who teach and lead come from faith traditions rife not only with visible cognitive dissonance, but also with moral conflict. In addition, I noticed that chaplain leaders from progressive faith backgrounds often redirected or avoided uncomfortable theological subjects by encouraging religious diversity and focusing on psychosocial or ethical theories.  The field would benefit from more leaders who bring integrative and constructive postmodern theology not just to the discussion table, but to the practitioners in the field. I desire to expand my knowledge of theology and how the work in pastoral care interacts with it. My passion is for the postmodern voice, one that is steeped in understanding modern logic, but acknowledges that to authentically reflect reality, the voice of experience and context must always be heard.

Currently, my ministry entails working in hospice as a chaplain and bereavement educator. The time spent as a child ministering with my grandmother in nursing homes and to elderly church members imprinted not only an awareness of, but also a comfort around physical limitations and end of life.  So, here I am, walking the path with many, a path we all will or have taken: facing our own limitations and mortality. My personal limitations currently involve fertility, conception and pregnancy. When I faced accepting infertility, I had to search deep inside myself for the balm to my spiritual suffering. I had no ready way to process it.

My Master’s thesis combines feminist and process theology, so it should be no surprise that the language of co-creator is comfortable for me. It makes sense for a woman with a biology degree and healthy suspicion of power structures to want to find a theology that not only supports but empowers the individual. Accepting that I am unlikely to conceive life felt like I was sacrificing the very foundation of my faith system as a co-creator, not because I cannot envision other ways of creative being, but because the sacred unique creation of life is no longer within my grasp.

When I studied biology and biochemistry, they fed my desire to understand and revel in the mysteries of life as a creative and distinctive process. It laid the foundation for my understanding of who we are and how we relate to God and the world. What happens when someone with such a foundation finds out that she is not part of the cycle of life?  A piece of writing or the influence I have on people's hearts or minds is not the same as creating life. We must acknowledge the unique and complex process of creating life and the sacredness of such creativity. We cannot deny that all life is sacred and that the ability to create it is sacred as well. Therefore, the loss of such a sacred identity means infertility is not just a loss of function, but a complex web of experience. Infertility is not just a disorder or a dysfunction, it is not just a loss of anticipated future, and it is not just a loss of identity. It is all of the above combined with constant ethical and moral dilemmas, decision making that determines the rest of one’s life, and continual exposure to familial as well as societal pressure and judgment.

 I want to develop a way for pastors and chaplains to approach this rapidly growing area of spiritual discernment among individuals and families. I want to make the language of fertility issues normalized and eliminate the negative repercussions of shame and guilt. Above all, I wish to find an integrative postmodern theology that not only provides comfort to the infertile, but also provides a spiritual and ethical compass during a difficult time. I have my own thoughts and experiences, of course, but I want to dig deeper as a scholar and as a chaplain to add this particular context to the training of our pastoral leaders.

My call to ease spiritual suffering continues to evolve and I greatly desire to be a postmodern theological and pastoral voice in our world. I wish to not only contribute to scholarship, but also to the transformation and growth of pastoral care providers. The PhD program at this school combines the crucial elements of respected scholarship with the spirit-filled mission to cultivate competent and compassionate pastoral leaders. I request approval for admission to the PhD program for Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care.

Heavy hearts exist in chaplains too

My heart is heavy today. It has been a week of loss at hospice this week. That sounds redundant, but honestly, hospice is about living, not dying. It is about quality of life and comfort, of course, but it is also about acceptance, normalization of something that can be scary, isolating, and miserable, something that is a part of every living being's existence and yet we as a culture and as individuals try to deny its power over us... death, ending, beginning, loss, change, transition, absence, limitations, waiting and more waiting, anticipation, regret, the list is endless, just as endless as our experiences.
My heart is not just heavy over the loss of the person, but for the heartache left behind, for the misery leading up to the death. I have been in hospice for 5 years now. I have met hundreds of people who have died and even more of families who remain to grieve for them. I miss them all. I'd be lying if I said that I don't miss them. The laughter I share, the tears, the songs and whispers, the hugs, hand holding, prayer sharing, tear-wiping, humble-inducing meaning of life, what wisdom and what courage, what inspiration these wonderful people give me.

My heart is also heavy with the burden so many caregiving professionals carry... the burden that there will always be more that I could have done.. It sounds so trite, but honestly, I was not present at any one of these deaths and it weighs on my heart. Five years is a long time in hospice. I'm considered a veteran of hospice, how funny is that? I would not have made it this far if I hadn't learned boundaries, if I didn't have faith that no one is ever alone in this world, that not only my team look after these patients and families, but also the workers at the facilities they live in. I watch those new to hospice struggle with where to place those boundaries, with the burden of "just one more thing, or just one more visit, or just a few more minutes" and my heart aches for them... while at the same time struggling with guilt and wondering if I'm burnt out just because I set boundaries and stick to them most of the time.

I put in a long day yesterday, 7 visits... including explaining hospice to a man going on service and to a son putting his actively dying mom on service, and 3 people I visited can no longer speak to me and the other 2 have declined significantly. I'm not using that as an excuse, but as an example of when, even with good boundaries, the sorrow seeps into my bones. Tomorrow I will sit with a woman who wins blackout at bingo or smiles for the first time in months to the hymn I'm singing her and I will be healed.

My Clenched Fist and the Seed I Wish to Hold

• A year before I started self-defense and karate, I would have laughed in your face if you said I could ever be graceful and skilled enough to do martial arts.
• A few years into martial arts, and I would have laughed at you if you suggested I would ever become a black belt, train hundreds of kids or teach battered women at half way houses.
• A year before high school graduation, I would have laughed at you if you said I’d ever walk into a Christian church again.
• A year into college, I would have laughed in your face if you said I would stop working with wildlife and never work as a scientist.
• A year after college, I would have laughed if you said I’d be a scientist ever again.
• A year into seminary and I would have laughed at you if you told me I’d never work in campus ministry, but become a hospice chaplain and love it.
• A year into seminary, I would have laughed if you suggested I'd consider any PhD work in Pastoral Theology and not Biblical Studies.
• A year into seminary I would have laughed at you if you told me someday I’d feel compelled to choose between academic goals and starting a family.
• A year before I graduated from seminary, I would have laughed in your ear if you said I'd be married a few months after graduation.
• Two years ago I would have laughed in your face if you told me I would let go of my dream to be pregnant.
•  A year ago I would have laughed at you if you suggested that I may be able to go back to school for my PhD.

What isn’t in between those lines of incredulity is the turmoil of blood, sweat, tears, laughter, pain, sorrow, joy, loss, gain, and ever continuous cycle of change.

I don’t think that as a young idealist intent on changing the world I had any clue the amount of heartache change entails. When I look at this list, there are goodbyes and heartache cracked through all the accomplishment and growth. There are life-threatening diagnoses that resolved but left ghosts behind, there are relationships born and relationships shattered. There are epiphanies of great transcendence and epiphanies of profound despair. I see the world through fresh eyes every day. I see with increasing clarity and increasing murkiness the tension between how finite and limited our experience is and how infinite and expansive the universe is.

We all make choices about how our life will proceed, even if by passive means. However, I’m not sure I ever chose a passive way to discern my life’s path since I was born. I fight and struggle and attempt to make meaning in places no seed would normally grow. Each of these milestones that seemed so impossible is stacked on top of hard life experiences, lessons that left profound influence upon my soul. To become empowered and grow, something else had to be released, let go.

As I face my current life change, there is a difference. I had no qualms about the choice I made to start a family. I knew that I wanted to have enough time outside of my career/calling to focus on my personal commitments of family and community. But so many of the options were eliminated from my list of choices until it felt there were no choices left to be made.  I would trade the heartache and despair I feel  instantly for the my denied dreams of a life filled with meaning from hands-on ministry and hands-on birthing and child-raising. I would give up in a heartbeat the thoughts of PhD work, the path of growth and discovery this will bring if I could just have the dreams of feeling a baby grow inside me, the sight of a child with my husband’s eyes and ginger hair.

But first we must unclasp our grip around the emptiness it held to be open to receive the gift we will be given.

Oh how much time and sorrow are wasted on clasping our fist around emptiness, nothingness, the if-onlys and why-nots, the lack of choice, banging our head on the impenetrable wall blocking our path. Imagine the tension, the energy exerted to keep a fist clenched. Imagine how much more it cramps without anything to hold onto, the nails biting into the palm of your hand. Imagine the slow burn of releasing cramped muscles, the amount of effort it takes to relax them and release that tension. It is painful, but it is also a release from pain. It burns and aches and bites. But oh, how much sweet relief there is upon loosening it, unfurling the fingers and stretching the hand. The muscles are not used to it, though. It is so easy to close that hand again to grasp at nothing, to grasp too soon or to flinch at contact.

So now I place the idea of pursuing my academic dreams in my palm, like a beautiful seed. I hold it and observe how light it feels to me compared to the clenched fist, how right it feels in my palm. Tentative touches and attempts to plant the seed are interspersed with comedic yet devastating Buster Keaton antics. I clench with grief and it slips from my fingers. I try to plant it and I kick it onto a rock or slip in the mud. I clench my hand around it, not giving it up despite my fist wanting to clench, and it bruises my palm. I release my grasp and it falls. I try to pick it up and the wind rolls it away from me. A merry dance a dream will give you if that path has bumps of grief.

I have said goodbye to dreams before. I have compromised, found alternatives and substitutes. And this dream I am attempting to let go has no real replacement. There is only letting go. I will have a family always. I will have children, but they will not be from my womb. I have purpose and meaning and hope. But it looks nothing like it did 6 months ago.

With each step I take and with each attempt to hold that new seed, I release the pain and say goodbye to a dream.

Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Tears

When I began working at this new hospice 8 months ago, I kind of got into a funk. Without any patients yet, I was spending most of my time performing church services, doing bedside communion, and developing grief group presentations. It's not that I dislike these parts of my job, but I really thrive from one-to-one spiritual care. Ritual is important to me because of the potential to provide people with a powerful moment. I'm not really into writing and developing and planning it all out... but I also am finicky about what is said or done.  So now I have a routine,a format for the services, and can now focus on providing meaningful moments for the residents.

This afternoon I went to a memory care assisted living place and went room to room. I ended up not giving a single person communion, but I had a lot of conversations, held hands, rubbed backs, said several Our Fathers, and prayed for about a dozen people and their families.  During that time, I made people smile, I eased their hearts a bit. There was one woman, whom I visited several times before, who is no longer able to say the right words for what she needs or wants, but smiles all the time. I wanted to try to spark recognition in her mind and heart. After I said the Lord's Prayer for her,  she showed no response. So then I decided to try singing. I sang a few verses of Amazing Grace. For the first time I saw her eyes get sad and teary while she looked as if she were remembering bittersweet memories. I can't tell you what a gift it was to reach her in that way.

This isn't the first time I've seen this response to that song. (No, it isn't from my singing, I have a fairly pleasant voice, I promise) Others with dementia have responded to Amazing Grace with tears and even sobbing. There is something sacred in tears. Instead of feeling like I was causing her pain, I felt like she was able to set free emotions that were hard for her to express anymore. When a person with dementia goes through a phase where she is paranoid, angry or violent, it disturbs us. It is painful to watch someone you love or who was so sweet turn into a stranger. And you can feel like the person is trapped in hell. But when it is all smiles and/or flat affect, I think we forget the person is still trapped in her own way. Those tears and sad, far-away eyes meant something to her. That song meant something to her.

So, for all the smiles I helped bring about today, it is the tears that I am most thankful for.

Why Hospice? Part 2: Spirit Healer

Why Hospice? Part 2: Spirit Healer. I am a hospice chaplain because I feel called to help heal and transform the spirits of those who are seeking.

The church and I have a love-hate relationship. The church is like a 2000 year-old older brother and I'm the rebellious younger sister. We both love the same parents. We both love Jesus. And we fight. All the time.

Sometimes I think my older brother has some sort of dissociative disorder (split personality). There are the fundies and the liberals and the brimstone throwers and the social gospelers and the charismatics and the reformed and the orthodox and the bible thumpers and the guilt mongerers and somehow they are all connected by a book and a historical figure named Jesus. I always found church history to be fascinating and utterly disturbing at the same time. I think that the churches who avoid theological training and claim to teach only the bible are trying deny their roots. As if by not studying the interconnected history and doctrine, they can pretend they don't have part of the same theological DNA as Catholics or Jehovah's Witnesses. It's kinda funny.

After a childhood in an ultra fundamentalist church, I became a nomad of faith... one of the many seekers who call themselves "spiritual but not religious". I had a desire to heal the world and make a difference through science. It didn't work out so well. I've got a knack for science, but my esoteric questions about the meaning and purpose of the universe made my professors a little twitchy. My college chaplain was the first to name my call to ministry, even when I was hesitant to call myself Christian. And he was right.

The AHA! moment I had in college is that I could come up with a solution to the worst pollution problem Earth has and I'd still only be putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. The real problem is a dissociation with the universe (aka God, aka spiritual...) which creates a sense of apathy towards what is happening to the world today. So, to get at the source of the world's suffering, we must first heal its spirit. Does it really matter if we rescue one tree if we allow the forest to die? What if we could heal the apathy and spiritual numbness inside us... perhaps we then could encourage permanent change in the masses, not one minute piece at a time.

So, I knew I wanted to be a spiritual healer, but not how that would look. Once I found a church community I fit in well, I began realizing more and more my call was to be with people who had no church home. Those IN the church, for better or worse, have spiritual direction available to them. The people not in church, and let's face it, that is the majority of the U.S. population, often have nothing. I took a traditional route to become educated and trained. It wasn't easy, and even after accomplishing all the tasks to be ordained, I questioned it. To be blessed and authorized to do ministry by my big brother, whom I love AND who drives me crazy, was an important step for me. I commited myself not only to a vow to represent God and the Gospel, but also to be loyal to my church. I have many strong feelings about the church- not all bad, but not all good, either.

This helps me as a chaplain, because I identify not only with the religiously faithful church-goers, but also those who reject the church out of a sense of betrayal, shame, rage. I recognize the presence of God in all traditions and faiths and I respect the people who doubt God even exists. I feel as if I've experienced almost all of that in my own life.


When I talk of this to others I often hear, "Well, people in a church need pastoral care too."  This is true. But there are a couple things to consider: 1. All pastors whose titles don't specifically say "Associate for Pastoral Care" will admit that finding time to provide such care is hard. There is SO much more to being a pastor of a church. 2. If I were a pastor in a church, I would be providing spiritual care to those who feel comfortable and safe in the church, which means they may be more open to receiving care from the pastor or congregation than many of those I'm with in chaplaincy. There are so many for whom the church walls are oppressive. With my help, they can seek spiritual care without ever entering the church.

The other thing I hear is "Why don't you become a counselor or a medical doctor? You'd be helping people that way." The problem with that is I truly believe that spiritual suffering is the root of our discontent. I don't believe that psychology or medicine has all the answers for how to help a person. Chaplains often call what we do "psychospiritual" and that term acknowledges we incorporate both the learnings from science AND the spiritual in our practice.


When we experience loss and anticipate death, it is a potent time to explore our metaphysical  or theological foundation. What is the meaning of life, death, suffering? Where do we find hope and how can we anticipate the future despite suffering? Who am I and where is God? What happens after we die? What is point of the passage of time if all we do is die? How has my perspective changed due to my experience? What is my relationship to others and why do I have all these different reactions and emotions? Can I find peace?

The list goes on. The point is, I chose to be trained in the art of asking these questions as well as sitting with people while they answer them (or ignore them). To be honest, there is not really a right or wrong way to approach these issues, only many perspectives on how to make it easier or smoother. And with experience and continued training, comes understanding to make it so.

Not every person I visit with needs or wants spiritual healing. Not every person likes my personality or how I ask questions. But with each seed planted towards spiritual transformation, I am making the world a better place. Some days, like today in fact, i don't talk with one single patient or family member because I work on Medicare required paperwork. It gets boring or tedious to do all that paperwork and drive for 10-20 hours a week, but it's worth it. I get those special moments where I know I eased someone's suffering for just a little while and it fuels my spirit and eases my burden as well.

The Scent Memory of a Chaplain

One of the strange side effects of being a chaplain at a level one trauma center I did not expect is my new library of scent memories. I recall somebody somewhere with a fancy degree has said that our scent memory is the most accurate form of memory we have and triggers subconscious responses based on past experiences connected to that smell. neat, nifty, wonderful... if you're a pastry chef or a florist. But I now have these smells burned into my memory with images and emotions that nightmarish and horrific... very surreal. I have the almost sweet metallic smell of blood dried and caked and flowing freely mixing with images of disfigured bodies and trauma room chaos, exposed body parts, and frantic and crying family members. I see images of bereft patients and families talking close to my face with the smell of vomit and bad breath passing over me. When I smell stale urine, I remember rumaging through the urine saoked clothes on a dead man, looking for something that might tell me who he is or who might want to know he's died. The smell of excrement recalls images of patients soiling their beds as they talk to me. If there is a body fluid smell out there, I've got a sad or atrocious memory to match it. I don't have nightmares about my scent memories. But I do have those flashes of memory interrupt my thoughts when I pass by or catch a whiff of something similar. It reminds me that I am human. Underneath the logical analysis, mountaintop mystical experiences, and amazing sentience, I am still literally flesh and blood. Nothing more humbling than the reminder that I am a sack of fluids held up on a frame of bones, working on electrical impulses. It also reminds me that despite my calmer demeanor and more efficient manner regarding trauma and suffering, I am still affected. My heart is not stone, my soul is not numb. I've smelt suffering, I've smelt death. Of course I know I will also die. The point worth remembering, however, is that today I live.