Worshipping Jesus as Phallic Symbol

Have I really written this much all at once? I guess my mind-talk is going full speed and I need somewhere to disperse it.

I am up late on a Saturday night, which comes before Sunday morning, which I am beginning to dread. I am the young pastor who is less than excited to see my church, the source of many good jokes. I may have written about this before. But it's about this time of night I recognize how frustrated I am and that I'm in for a long ride between now and May. I also know it's dangerous to write about one's parish in public, but I'm also not saying anything here I wouldn't say to them directly. Perhaps this is a rehearsal for what I know I need to say.

Basically, when newcomers visit our church, they leave more depressed than they came in. When I introduce myself before the service and invite folks to social hour afterwards, they're interested. After service, they shift their feet and claim to have things they forgot they needed to do. Our congregation has a wonderful history of progressive social action, but this is not reflected in our worship service. Instead, our worship service emphasizes male-dominant language for God. We also use lots of thees and thous and thys and sitteths, even when modern-day translations are printed right next to these, and we're not a particularly high church. Most of our music and language pre-dates both the Civil Rights Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment. Never mind that in our denomination there's a mandate to use language that is welcoming to all and a blend of music that is welcoming to all as well. Yes, in the PCUSA, you are required to be welcoming in worship to people who are three months old to three hundred, regardless of race or nationality or gender. That's one of the things that made me choose it. But that is lost on our church. No, upon first visit, even though our church is equally racially and gender-mixed, you would get the sense you have shown up at a stiffly conservative backwater. Worship here is like going to a funeral, even on the sunniest summer day: the tone is somber, the music often slow, lily white, and collapses under its own weight. Week after week after week.

This does not go over well among the student population it hopes to welcome. In my four years of living in Hyde Park, I've been to four years worth of parties where students who have had experience with the congregation proclaim that it should die because it is so unwelcoming and depressing. The congregation has many good reasons to be depressed, having survived white flight and gang wars and the devastation of a neighborhood and the loss of most of its members over the past generation. It faces many of the same realities of other urban churches. I had thought though for a while this fall it was beginning to come out of its depression, committing itself to an evangelism and outreach campaign. But, I think my hopes were premature.

What worries me is some of the nasty comments I receive from certain members when I suggest expanding our repertoire of music or using more inclusive language. "Anyone who doesn't like the way we worship here can find themselves another church." Yes ma'am, and I see that they have already done so, in droves. In a city of six million people and within one mile of a large university, only 25 people find our worship worth attending on a regular basis. "You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Hmmm...looks to me like the baby done drowned. Anyway, a few of these folks have gotten downright hostile. And you would normally otherwise call them progressives.

Now, before I go on, I need to say that not all people in the congregation favor this way of worship. In fact, I've been noticing the demographics of who is open to new material and who isn't. My congregation has no active members under fifty, and as I said is equally mixed in race and gender. It is the folks under 75 who are most vehement that we keep everything exactly as it is. The folks 80 and up are the most encouraging on the whole, and go out of their way to say so. The men are more willing to accept gender-inclusive language than the women. The women of the choir are up in front, ignoring the words printed in the bulletin, and enunciating every 'He,' "Him" and 'Father' and 'Son.'

This leads me to ask what happened to these women, who are clearly college-educated and lived through modern feminism. Why do they so insist that God is exclusively male? Really, are they only worshipping God for a phallus? Is that all God is to them? Are they really so lonely and unfulfilled?

And how do you ask them that? But, it might be that the absurdity of the question is what may finally break through the walls. Better to do so before we lose anyone else out the door. Including myself.

peace,

Le Anne

Spiritual Disciplines

My spiritual task for these days, as it ought always to be, is to try not to feel guilty about all the things I've failed to accomplish or just get done. For example, it's already 4pm on a Saturday and I still haven't saved the world. What was I thinking?

But, seriously, I do have a habit of beating myself up for being less efficient or task-oriented in my work, and it does me no good. It's what they say about workaholics, that eventually you're no longer more productive than anyone else, probably even less so. I gotta watch myself on that. It's hard to find a good balance, especially in the social justice organizing fields. Or in any field where you're doing what you love--because it will sneak up on you.

So, I will not feel so bad about only looking out the window at the pretty day, but electing to stay inside and do a sewing project, or read, or watch YouTube. I will appreciate those quieter moments even if they weren't spent enjoying nature or maximizing my health benefits through walking. I will not get grumpy because I let that mailing project slide "all day." I slept in. I listened to the radio. I read the Funny Times, and I drank coffee. Next, I'll be re-heating leftovers. Life is actually not too bad.

peace,

Le Anne

Winehouse, and other entertaining mischief

I have to confess that I have developed an affection for the music of Amy Winehouse. I think it's partly the torch singer voice, partly the anti-star schtik, and partly the lyrics. Favorite line: "They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no."

Curiously at the same time I've become a fan of Sarah Silverman. Her stuff is absolutely sacriligious, and perhaps that's why I've doubled over laughing. My favorite is her encounters with anti-abortion activists and fundamentalists, and her guise of pure innocence.

Otherwise, I've expended my viewing hours for the month on '30 Rock,' and realize I am now no longer not watching television. In some ways this makes me feel like I'm having more fun; in other ways, I miss all the extra time I seemed to have on my hands. Netflix. Dangerous consumer of time, and yet oh so good.

But I finished sewing a dinosaur hat I started last Christmas, and I even embroidered a little bit and also sewed a cover for a bulletin board today. I am so proud of these small domestic accomplishments I need to boast in a public forum. If you know me at all, you understand how rare this is.

Ayyyy....back to work. I need to produce the final edition of the newspaper for this semester, and get a mailing ready for the monastery, and try not to forget the conference call about Iran tonight.

peace,

Le Anne

In the Dark

[Editorial for this week's Chicago Seminarian]

I’m kind of bummed, moping around lately like I don’t want to do anything. In fact, I will proclaim at random intervals, “I don’t wanna do ANYTHING!” So there.

I actually do want to do some stuff, it’s just not necessarily seminary stuff. This could be senioritis. This could be feeling like four years in seminary has been long enough. This could be feeling like there’s a whole world out there and I wanna be in it, only, I’m in here.

That feeling hasn’t abated much since I dropped to part-time to devote more time to my activism. However, I do think my activism has kept me sane. It gives me a space in which I get to meet lots of new people, see new places, and do something that feels real. I’m learning the practical skills that one can only begin to learn through a field site. So, even when it wears me out, it feels otherwise kind of right.

However, lately, I’ve found myself even procrastinating on my organizing tasks, those things which I say I do truly love. Because of this, I started wondering if I was truly called to do these things. I wondered if I’d gone wrong somehow, or hadn’t listened to God well enough. I wondered if I was a little crazy, or crazier than usual. It seems like the clear vision and the drive to get there that I’d felt even a few weeks earlier was missing.

The upcoming conference about the recently-published letters of Mother The-resa helped me to understand this and stay calm. Here is a woman who really had no idea for decades of her life if she was doing what God wanted her to do, and yet she found the faith to do remarkable things in our world. Some people have since ridiculed her as a fool. Rather, I think she is a help to all of us in ministry, when the light seems to go out and we are unsure of the way.

For me these days, the path is not as clear as I’d like, but I still believe it is a good one. And I had a few glimpses of what it could be, that were quite clear actually, earlier in the year--and they are helping me to get by now. And where these aren’t enough, I have a circle of friends and mentors who can reflect to me that it is a good vision, a good path, and to keep trying and not give up.

So I prepare for School of the Americas, I keep editing the Seminarian, I pack my bags for Iran, and I keep trying to fundraise for a monastery that would make a wonderful home for the Center for Faith and Peacemaking. Perhaps it is all possible.

Even in the darkness or the fog, may you find enough glimpses to carry you through; may you have enough mirrors to push the shadows aside.

Peace,

Le Anne

On Seminary, Identity, and Going to Jail

[For the seminary newspapers]

I'm Le Anne. I'm a 29-year-old, female, white, spiky-haired, loud-laughing, trouble-making, fun-loving, seminary student. I grew up Lutheran, am a Presbyterian candidate for ordination, attend a UCC seminary, take human rights classes at CTU, have a degree in Christian-Muslim relations, dine at the Divinity School, and party with the Unitarians.

I'm a final-year ministry student at Chicago Theological Seminary, and co-chair of the Student Senate. I am student pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn. I am also coordinator of SeminaryAction and the new Center for Faith and Peacemaking here in Hyde Park, which organizes new religious leaders as well as young global activists (our current website is www.seminaryaction.org).

And I'm planning on spending part of spring term in prison.

I'm preparing for civil disobedience, or 'crossing the line,' at this year's public witness to shut down the SOA in Columbus, GA ( www.soaw.org).

And, I'd like you to come and bear witness as a seminarian also--there are plenty of things to do there even without getting arrested.

I went to SOA rallies in college and again in seminary, and decided last year that I would attempt civil disobedience this year. Oddly enough, it is a sluggish year for seminarians--I don't know that many others are going. I served three years with the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and the US/Mexico border. I have also been involved with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and the Occupation Project here in Chicago. The first part of December, I hope to join the Fellowship of Reconciliation interfaith peacemaker delegation to Iran. I have constantly been looking for ways to blend my life as a human rights activist with my life as a seminarian. I am grateful for friends who continue to encourage me along the way.

I am going now, in seminary, because it is a cause I have believed in for so long and an action I feel I have put off long enough.
I am going now, in seminary, because I believe that nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience is an important part of my formation in ministry.
I am going now, in seminary, because I have fewer responsibilities to others now than I will once I graduate, financial and otherwise; and my faculty has been willing to walk with me in this process.
I am going now, in seminary, because my church and my candidacy committee are also willing to walk with me in this process.
I am going now, in seminary, because I was a human rights worker in Iraq before I came to seminary, and I worked with the families of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
I am going now, in seminary, because I have friends who have come to seminary, who were once tortured, and are now refugees, and our country is responsible. The SOA is one big way in which our country is responsible for torture.
I am going now, in seminary, because religious leaders have been tortured and killed by the SOA.
I am going now, in seminary, because last year we were only 6 Congress votes away from shutting down this terrible place, and I believe my arrest will inspire others to 'inspire' those remaining Congresspersons to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.
I am going now, in seminary, because the American Academy of Religion conference is in Chicago next year and I can't go to SOA then.
I am going now, in seminary, to witness to other seminarians that it can be done.

There are a few things I'm worried about before going. My greatest concern right now for civil disobedience is raising the money for bail, which is now $1,000. I am trying to ask my communities for support. I am also nervous that I might end up with more than a month or two in prison, but I have found friends who will help me with my work at the Center if I do go into prison for a longer time.

I'm looking forward to joining the 8th Day Center for Justice bus, and I'm looking forward to getting to know as many folks as possible who are working for peace in Chicago. I am excited by the De Paul University students who have organized busloads to attend. I am excited by the monastic orders, religious communities, and other religious leaders who attend every year.

If you, as a seminarian, or as a person preparing for ministry, feel called also to attend this year, let me know at info@seminaryaction.org. If you need transportation, contact 8th Day Center or DePaul at the details below. It's doesn't cost too much for the hotel and bus. It doesn't take that much time away from your classes, and it's at the beginning of Thanksgiving Break. You don't have to get arrested: you could join the die-in, the drum circles, the puppet crew, or just told a cross with the name of someone who was killed by an SOA graduate and say, 'Presente!' Be present, and remember their presence. Be present with tens of thousands of other people who will come from all over the country to protest our government-sponsored torture school. Be present with people from all walks of life. Be present for those who can't be present.

It's not too late to sign up. If you haven't gone before, it will change the way you look at ministry.

DePaul bus contact: Sarah Gelsomino sarahgelsomino@gmail.com
8th Day bus contact: Stephanie Dernek stephid2@gmail.com

peace,
Le Anne