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.

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.