I Hate Women's Clergy Shirts

That's probably enough said, but I'll continue ranting a few more lines. I have a supposedly modern 'Lydia Collection' shirt, but I find it itchy and not really created for a woman's body. Maybe a really flat-chested one, but not the size indicated on the size chart. It also wrinkles funny around the collar. I shouldn't have to pay fifty bucks to become a stiff-necked preacher. And they're 100% heavyweight cotton, which might hold up a few years, but you'll be melting under an alb, and at least six months out of the year. I am not amused.

I also have the option of a Friar Tuck 100% polyester 'shell' with band collar. Ah, a shell. Do I look like a sea creature to you, clergy apparell manufacturers? Plus, not only would I get to melt, I'd stink worse in said process of melting. They have a slightly potato-sack construction to them. I want to lead the congregation, not hide from them. That's what burqa'as are for.

Friar Tuck also offers a long-sleeve tab collar poly-cotton shirt. Poly-cotton is great, and long-sleeve is often also great, but these shirts have pleats and ruffles. I haven't worn pleats since I grew hips and I haven't worn ruffles since I was seven and declared my independence in all things clothing. The woman model in the catalog, who is probably even younger than me, smiles uncomfortably, as though wishing for the Rapture to spare her further embarrassment.

So if I build a better women's clergy getup, will the clergywoman world beat a path to my door? I don't understand what's so hard about it. Men can have climate-appropriate, practical, non-itchy fabric shirts. And they last. And they're cheaper.

And, really, I think that's what I'll do. I came across a second-hand men's C.M. Almy band-collar shirt. For the first time, I've found a short sleeve shirt that's appropriate (no Britney Spears extra-short pastoral sleeves for me, thanks); it's lightweight, and it fits me better than any women's shirt I've yet seen. I bet it doesn't even carry the surcharge we women pastors have to pay to be professionally attired. As long as I'm comfortable, I'll proudly be a cross-dressing cleric.

Ph.D?

No, no, no, no, no...well...?

no no no no...well?

no...well?


So that's the conversation going on inside my head these days; I like this school stuff and being done seems to be coming too quickly.

I'm worried about the money, quite a bit. But maybe I could work and do this part-time. I'm also worried about passing the GRE's. But maybe I could study extra on the math.

I'm interested in the intersection of human rights and interfaith, mental health and spiritual/pastoral care, and some feminist/liberation theology. At least, these are the areas I'm always reading and writing about. Every so often I come up with a cool-sounding thesis or dissertation title. I should really write these down for later.

And actually, if I had to give an answer today, I'd want to study psychology and pastoral/spiritual care as pertains specifically to those working in war zones. That covers nearly all my interests well enough to keep me inspired.

Nobody in my family that I know of has done one. And I don't really feel like I know what goes into one. Sure, coursework and dissertation. But what's the politics and 'soft stuff'--like the conferences, the advisor-choosing, etc.? I'm just trying to figure things out as I can.

I don't want to do tenure-track teaching--I wouldn't be free enough to say, live in other countries or do peace work in conflict zones; I think I'd actually feel trapped--which is also one of many reasons I don't want to get married. But I do want to write, and to teach adjunct; possibly to teach the courses that a regular seminary couldn't do. And still be able to pastor at least part-time. Or move back and forth between the two.

So this is the beginning of the serious consideration phase. I don't know where it will lead.

The Impossible Labrynth of Palestinian Travel

Impossible travel
By Amira Hass

All the promises to relax restrictions in the West Bank have obscured the true picture. A few roadblocks have been removed, but the following prohibitions have remained in place. (This information was gathered by Haaretz, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Machsom Watch)

Standing prohibitions

* Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are forbidden to stay in the West Bank.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter East Jerusalem.

* West Bank Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Jordan Valley.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter villages, lands, towns and neighborhoods along the "seam line" between the separation fence and the Green Line (some 10 percent of the West Bank).

* Palestinians who are not residents of the villages Beit Furik and Beit Dajan in the Nablus area, and Ramadin, south of Hebron, are forbidden entry.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter the settlements' area (even if their lands are inside the settlements' built area).

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter Nablus in a vehicle.

* Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are forbidden to enter area A (Palestinian towns in the West Bank).

* Gaza Strip residents are forbidden to enter the West Bank via the Allenby crossing.

* Palestinians are forbidden to travel abroad via Ben-Gurion Airport.

* Children under age 16 are forbidden to leave Nabus without an original birth certificate and parental escort.

* Palestinians with permits to enter Israel are forbidden to enter through the crossings used by Israelis and tourists.

* Gaza residents are forbidden to establish residency in the West Bank.

* West Bank residents are forbidden to establish residency in the Jordan valley, seam line communities or the villages of Beit Furik and Beit Dajan.

* Palestinians are forbidden to transfer merchandise and cargo through internal West Bank checkpoints.

__________________________




Periodic prohibitions

* Residents of certain parts of the West Bank are forbidden to travel to the rest of the West Bank.

* People of a certain age group - mainly men from the age of 16 to 30, 35 or 40 - are forbidden to leave the areas where they reside (usually Nablus and other cities in the northern West Bank).

* Private cars may not pass the Swahara-Abu Dis checkpoint (which separates the northern and southern West Bank). This was canceled for the first time two weeks ago under the easing of restrictions.

__________________________




Travel permits required

* A magnetic card (intended for entrance to Israel, but eases the passage through checkpoints within the West Bank).

* A work permit for Israel (the employer must come to the civil administration offices and apply for one).

* A permit for medical treatment in Israel and Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem (The applicant must produce an invitation from the hospital, his complete medical background and proof that the treatment he is seeking cannot be provided in the occupied territories).

* A travel permit to pass through Jordan valley checkpoints.

* A merchant's permit to transfer goods.

* A permit to farm along the seam line requires a form from the land registry office, a title deed, and proof of first-degree relations to the registered property owner.

* Entry permit for the seam line (for relatives, medical teams, construction workers, etc. Those with permits must enter and leave via the same crossing even if it is far away or closing early).

* Permits to pass from Gaza, through Israel to the West Bank.

* A birth certificate for children under 16.

* A long-standing resident identity card for those who live in seam-line enclaves.

__________________________




Checkpoints and barriers

* There were 75 manned checkpoints in the West Bank as of January 9, 2007.

* There are on average 150 mobile checkpoints a week (as of September 2006).

* There are 446 obstacles placed between roads and villages, including concrete cubes, earth ramparts, 88 iron gates and 74 kilometers of fences along main roads.

* There are 83 iron gates along the separation fence, dividing lands from their owners. Only 25 of the gates open occasionally.

__________________________




* Road 90 (the Jordan Valley thoroughfare)

* Road 60, in the North (from the Shavei Shomron military base, west of Nablus and northward).

* Road 585 along the settlements Hermesh and Dotan.

* Road 557 west from the Taibeh-Tul Karm junction (the Green Line) to Anabta (excluding the residents of Shufa), and east from south of Nablus (the Hawara checkpoint) to the settlement Elon Moreh.

* Road 505, from Zatara (Nablus junction) to Ma'ale Efraim.

* Road 5, from the Barkan junction to the Green Line.

* Road 446, from Dir Balut junction to Road 5 (by the settlements Alei Zahav and Peduel).

* Roads 445 and 463 around the settlement Talmon, Dolev and Nahliel.

* Road 443, from Maccabim-Reut to Givat Ze'ev.

* Streets in the Old City of Hebron.

* Road 60, from the settlement of Otniel southward.

* Road 317, around the south Hebron Hills settlements.

__________________________




Travel time before 2000 versus today

Tul Karm-Nablus
Then: half an hour, at the most.
Now: At least an hour.

Tul Karm-Ramallah
Then: less than one hour.
Now: Two hours.

Beit Ur al-Fawqa-Ramallah
Then: 10 minutes.
Now: 45 minutes.

Katana/Beit Anan-Ramallah
Then: 15 minutes.
Now: One hour to 90 minutes.

Bir Naballah-Jerusalem
Then: seven minutes.
Now: One hour.

Katana-Jerusalem
Then: five minutes.
Now: "Nobody goes to Jerusalem anymore."

The Underside of Ecumenism

Greetings friends,

I was out in the lobby of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, crying quietly, having recently excused myself from class, and checking my email. The woman at the other computer there turns to me and asks me what's wrong.
"(sniffle) oh, I'm alright, I’m just in one hell of a class upstairs."
"Really, what's the topic?"
"Ecumenism."

She looks at me and I at her. I nod. She nods. And we both crack up laughing.

"It's always the way," she says. "Isn't it?"

It was the International Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We were in Geneva, the international ecumenical city, at the Ecumenical Center, home to the World Council of Churches and Action by Churches Together. We were here to participate in a course devoted to ecumenism.

And we seemed about ready to kill each other. We had got pettiness, bickering and infighting, snobbery and cliquishness, shunning, pontificating, and patronizing, rolling our eyes and enjoying the sound of our own voices. We built our fortresses against one another according to school, age, wealth, appearance, physical ability, as well as ideology. There was plenty of backbiting and gossip among the teaching team as well as the students. (The majority of open contempt, though, appeared among the teaching team itself). And in all this I also have to confess my own thinking of, and uttering of, certain un-Christian thoughts about my immediate neighbors. By that day though, I was just ready for a good cry. My heart had become too heavy to breathe or laugh.

If the course were called 'Living Ecumenism 101,' nearly all of us had failed.

It is the brokenness of our human condition that even in a study trip devoted to ecumenism, to inclusion and reconciliation, that our group did not even necessarily get along—it only took us one week to reach this level of distress. With this abysmal status among our own small group in such a short period of time, it’s hard to have hope for any larger ecumenical or interreligious effort.

I've been thinking that there has to be a term coined for this something-shortness of ecumenism, and I think I'll call it ‘exclusionism.’ It is a sort of anti-Christ actually, appearing as a distraction to the real thing. Exclusionism is defining ourselves according to who we are not, and setting up walls against the Other. We all learned it somewhere along the way, and it plays out --probably even in the face of our best intentions. This course was truly an immersion into exclusionism as much as it is ecumenism.

Yet here is the dirty gritty reality of the church, isn't it? You could say that if we didn't have all these humans, the church would be divine. Yet here we were, jockeying for the place at the right hand of the Father, not knowing the impact of what we do.

And what drives all this? Maybe it is simple insecurity. Wondering, 'do I have a place at this table?' 'Will my voice be heard?' 'Perhaps it is better to make alliances with the familiar against the foreign.'

I had been wondering how much of interchurch strife was simply personality-based; two bishops hating how each other chewed his food and finding theological bases for why to avoid contact. Yet I think personality can drive good ecumenism as well. I see now that one person with genuine warmth and curiosity about others and the ability to listen will make far more progress than those schooled for years in comparative religions or text studies.

I have also come to realize there are really two types of ecumenism: There is soft ecumenism, where we gather to study how great and useful ecumenism is. Then there is hard ecumenism, where we have to realize the ways in which we are different, and recognize that we will come to no agreement on one 'right' answer. I believe it is when this ecumenical honeymoon is over, when the dazzle wears off, that the real marriage begins: namely, learning to disagree with one another without abandoning the relationship. And perhaps it is only at this time that we can realize the necessity of agreeing on what constitutes mutual respect for one another. And on naming those things which we hold in common, those connections we do have which can withstand the discord.

And so it goes with the prospect of peacebuilding among religions. We are all broken, and as Dr. Schreiter at CTU put it so often during our course on Reconciliation last semester, full reconciliation will not be realized until the Eschaton. In the meantime, we need heaping doses of grace to enable us to examine our own shadows honestly without being consumed, or doomed, to the horror of our failures. Grace also frees us from the chains of debilitating shame and look to the future. It is only the Spirit that can overcome our human divisions and heal the wounds, and inspire the souls involved to work for understanding.

--

Having said all this, I also need to say I don't regret coming to Geneva for even a moment. The rest of the trip has been truly wonderful, as have been our speakers and visits in the class itself. I'll write more in detail about these when I can.

Until then, peace,

Le Anne

We Have Not Learned

We have not learned
To live together

We have not learned
To listen together
To speak together
To disagree together
To share together
To invite one another
To work together
To love one another.

All else is empty theory:

We shoot each other down
We have built walls of silence:
Our own, and enforced
We define ourselves
by who we are not

If we cannot live into ecumenism
in our own classroom
in our own hotel
in our own
small community
with our own hands
and ears and mouths

We gain nothing.

(Written in Geneva, reflecting on the ELCA-sponsored course: 'the Ecumenical Church in the Globalized World')

The Transgendered Jesus

Inside the chapel of the World Council of Churches center in Geneva, there exists a large, beautifully detailed mosaic of the baptism of Jesus. It is done in the Eastern rite style; the colors are intermingled with gold pieces. As I stood to examine the handiwork, I realized something about this full-length representation of the Christ, transparent through the waist-deep water, angels circling overhead:

Not only did this Jesus have the traditional beard and long hair, he also had a vulva.

It occurred to me that perhaps in the detail that it may have been too difficult to create an ‘anatomically-correct’ male figure. However, the tiles are detailed in their shadows to create folds of skin between the legs. I then thought that perhaps the artist felt it too indiscreet to create a Jesus with a penis. However, the artist could have easily raised the line of the blue water streaming past to cover this spot, or even added white tiles to create a loincloth. The artist did neither. The artist could have made the rest of his body look uber-masculine to make up for this absence of male genitalia. But no, this Jesus looks actually a little soft, perhaps even ‘delicate.’

I do not know what the artist actually had in mind, but I know that I like this mosaic. First, as a woman, I know I find it hard to feel close to a god represented primarily in male imagery. Despite searches for more inclusive language in the most recent generation of our faith, I am still painfully aware that I am a little less imago Dei. For God to look a little feminine as well as a little masculine, seems to communicate that God is more than one or the other, and open to both, in ways we the church on earth have failed to be.

As such, I have a second reason for liking this mosaic. Even if unconsciously, it seems to speak hope into a future when we as the body of Christ can accept our transgendered brothers and sisters as one of us, equal with us. Does the day have to be so far off when we realize those of God’s creation that do not fit so neatly into our binary categories may also be good, and called to minister to others? And not just in a few Christian denominations, but all?

For a moment, I worried that if I pointed this out, some outraged party might do harm to this work of art, or have it taken out of the assembly. I hope not. Instead, I hope that here in this one place, a center that tries to work toward inclusion and reconciliation even in its own brokenness, the fullness of this symbolism can be embraced and reach to the far corners of the earth.

Women Against Women in the Church

The book I am staying up late to read lately is _Beauty Secrets_ by Wendy Chapkis. It's twenty years old now, but I find that most of it could have been written last week.

Beauty Secrets:Women and the Politics of Appearance http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/BeautySecrets

It pre-dates _The Beauty Myth_ (by Naomi Wolf, also on my docket) by about five years, and may have been a source work. Secrets combines brief personal testimonies of women confronting their looks compared to society's standards, along with a look at the beauty industry, class, race, ethnicity, and GLBT concerns. The GLBT discussion impressed me most for its candor. Also quite good was her exploration of how women actively put self over other women to rise in the ranks, even causing further oppression to women coming behind them, creating a basically unsustainable form of women's 'em-power-ment.' (My term, not hers).

I'm reading Beauty Secrets and the Beauty Myth because I'm thinking of doing more writing on precisely this last topic and how it has manifested in the institutional church. In my experience, it is quite widespread, to the point where I would say that the greatest obstacle to young women in church leadership is not men, but other women. In fact, with a few exceptions, I no longer seek out female professors or advisors in my seminary education. By and large, I have found I will be more encouraged to express my creative gifts or opinions, and not be treated like a threat, if I'm studying under a reasonably liberated male. The women I do go to more than once for professional advice, meanwhile, are ones I really respect.

I'm guessing a great deal of this has to do with the trauma of having broken through the glass ceiling in the last generation (you can never break a glass ceiling without bleeding, after all), and projecting a need on women of the next generation to be 'toughened up'--not realizing that they have now become the oppressors, playing a critical role in keeping alive the very system they sought to oppose. I think there is also a sentiment of why should the next generation get in any easier than they did. I think that exploring and healing the impact of trauma, and looking at healthier inter-woman dynamics and male-female organizational relations, would be quite helpful--particularly for encouraging younger women to stick with it in the church, and for offering an alternative legacy for women who have attained positions of power in thier lifetimes and are only a few years from retirement.

I don't anticipate this will be an uncontroversial thesis, but I hope that it would provoke a much-needed discussion on the future of women in the church.

Haggert, or Swaggert?

I found myself missing Dana Carvey's 'Church Lady' sketches this evening and got on YouTube to find old episodes. This is one of the first to come up, the interview of Jimmy Swaggert after disclosing his problems with prostitutes:

Church Chat

I was surprised just how timely it still was; how the excuses were the same, the phrasing of the problem; and appreciated how the Church Lady, while characteristically brutal, got to the real point.

How is it that our so prominent and powerful right-wing leaders keep getting into trouble like this? We had one wave in the eighties, and are back for another round.

There are two factors, I think: one is being in the limelight after making so many judgmental claims, a takeoff on the old adage that 'people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'--not only are they fragile, but they're fishbowls.

The second is the loss of love and compassion, the isolation and loneliness that a life of actively combating Gospel love and forgiveness might have wrought. When you are alone at the top; it's easy for the demonic to sneak in.

I don't enjoy the suffering of these fundamentalist leaders, or feel smug about my own life. I just think it's time to do some good preventative work to keep such disasters from happening. And that means reaching out with arms of the Beloved Community, and teaching us all not to make a life of tearing others apart.