Leshem Shamayim: “For the sake of heaven.”

The beginning of my confession:

I confess that there is one God, creator of all, in three persons subsisting together in one substance, mysteriously divided into three persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. Believing that God is One, Yhwh, the self-sustained, uncreated, eternally consistent, present everywhere (unperceivably), I seek to worship Him with a unity of my mind, heart, and life.

I confess to you my brothers and sisters, that there is one irrefutable and immaculate truth: that the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Ageless, everlasting He is too ancient to have beginning; Almighty and eternal, no being could have created Him: the embodiment of Truth, all things true come forth from Him. Light and love find their origins in His personhood, the One from Whom all things have their being. One God, He is Yhwh, I Am That I Am, three persons of one substance: Father, Son , and Spirit whose communion sets an example of relationship for man. The holy Father, omniscient and just, the loving Creator who bestows blessings on those who fear Him. Because of the conflict of Father’s love and justice over the state of man, I confess that the Son Jesus came as the Christ united divine and human natures as the incarnate Word of God. The crux of my life is based upon this mystery: Jesus’ birth, sinless life, saving death, and conquering resurrection. The perpetuation of this life on earth was made possible after His ascension into Heaven by conferring to us His Holy Spirit, whose residence in the inspiration of the Word continues to invigorate our hearts with the remembrance of the depth of His passion to unite us to the Father, and the obedience which springs out of love we should have for Him. Our God being One, the Body of the Son formed from the dust of the earth, human flesh and human heart, remains among us as we live out lives on earth in our own flesh and our hearts. Since we are the Body of Christ, we have chosen to identify ourselves as Christ followers, most commonly today by the word “Christian,” pursuing the life Jesus lived in unity with one another. While St. Paul spoke of the Church as Christ’s Body on earth mystically composed of all of us, my brothers and sisters, who love our Lord with our lives and cling to His truths—my vision of “Church” has never yet been realized tangibly: a collection of people…

My deepest prayer is that the devoutness of my doctrine may be obvious by the love in my life… for that is the only thing which I can give that has nothing to do with me.

When one watches such movies as The Fountain, invariably questions come up about the separation of heaven and earth, death to the body= life to the soul? Most basic to human life is this fear of our bodily death, because we don’t know what happens after. So we create systems for ourselves, ways to define our worlds, make sense of this live, and political structures to determine who has authoirty to sanction meaning over the parts of life that are ambiguous. In my quest for church, for communitarian relationships amongst humanity, I have worked within the Christian belief system,  testing the various school of thought in brief experiment to see which one I can do this faith in best: stoic, where I don’t have to engage? intellectual, where engagement is removed from my feelings? Emotional, with heart over head?

I find myself asking questions that incite fights, hit root conflicts in our humanity in Christian faith. Beyond the ‘does God exist,’ I wonder about the society of church. I have begun dialog on women’s issues, because I am a woman, and it is thus my question to ask… in the church of Jesus Christ, were we meant to become a certain structure of culture, society that was universal, or did He plant seeds that would bloom in same obedience different ways?

Ordination is an ambiguous symbol for many feminist women (and men) today. On the one hand, ordination is a central and profound symbolic focus for the lack of equality and mutuality in the church and of the equality which would enable women to share in governance, decision making, and sacramental life at every point. On the otherhand, many have come to see the clerical priesthood, the distinction between clergy and laity, and the hierarchy as it is presently structured as the wider problems in the church. Thus there is argument that the admission of women to the present clerical structure would not solve but only exacerbate the contradictions of the present shape of the church. Anne E. Carr Transforming Grace

One question leads to another, no difinitive system is worked out to explain our every questions. How much should we concoct to work out what it means to love? Should we really attempt to transcend life now to acheive the loving-like-Jesus? Emptied of self, what an interesting thought. O suppose to love is to be paradoxically empty and full. We are only able tol love in particulars, and time and space as we’ve been given: how human is our love, yet what could be more divine on earth? God in human form, in the authentic loving now. What on earth does that mean?

Referring to original patristic writings, Medieval and pre-medieval ordination rites as well as secondary studies on the history of women’s ordination, Gary Macy argues in The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West that Women received valid ordination according to cultural definition up until the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book, Macy (i.e., John Nobiti, S.J.) dissects the historical and theological opinions engaged in the women’s ordination controversy for both popular and scholastic audiences. Published by Oxford University Press, Hidden History of Women’s Ordination aims to present historical indications about women’s public offices in church organization so as to affect current theological conclusions about women’s abilities to be ordained and open a dialog about the capacity in which should be permitted to serve publicly in the Catholic Church today.

As a theologian teaching in the department of religious studies at Santa Clara University, Macy is highly critical of his own field in the historical discussion of women’s ordination; perhaps motivated by his own position in favor of women’s ordination to the priesthood. In spite of this opinion, Macy attempts to remain objective in discussion of what ordination was considered in the early medieval ages. Distinguishing between the current Catholic theological definition of ordination as a metaphysical superiority limited to a male priesthood and the pre-twelfth century understanding of ordination as appointment to a particular church office, Macy argues that a theological shift in opinion negated previous history of female leadership in public ministry. This negation results in the barring of women from previously held offices (such as the deaconate) that were permitted in the wide expanse of “church.”

Having distinguished between the approaches of historical and theological scholarship as well as the change in understanding of ordination, Macy emphasizes the difficulty of interpreting what the historical data actually means because “there was no ‘the church’ even in the high Middle Ages, much less in even earlier periods… ‘the church’ rarely spoke with one voice on any issue.” (52) Thus, Macy describes the ministry of ordained women ranging from deaconesses to abbesses (who seem to have been ordained in the same rites as bishops). Without explicitly questioning modern appropriation of medieval sources, Macy’s emphasis of historical fact versus theological assumption reveals two forms of church (one estate based around a family model and the other a monastic model which devolved into divisions between the genders, favoring a more patriarchal structure) of which the monastic model gained preeminence, dictating current Catholic perspective on ‘tradition” of women’s ordination. The dialog Macy hopes to open, in spite of admission to ambiguity in interpreting the actual offices women held, is one that, acknowledging the validity of women’s ordination in historical context, will eventually permit modern ordination of women, not just to the deaconate, but also to the priesthood.

To be in love with you, Jesus, is like a marriage to a story-book figure. How impossible to really see you in this mind of mine; undepicted, yet existent. Somehow I cannot imagine life as it has evolved to this point without the love of You. Love of you? A romance? The language is deceptive, maybe that’s what I hide from in here with you, so exclusive it invites some, scares others away. The point was the focus, the doing of the life You have left to my care. I remember the mystical times, between heartbreak and ecstasy, when I gave you emotion … perhaps feeling was only possible when it was farther from me than it had yet been. Maybe therein lies the intrigue of our affair: how far you are from me, yet how close. The times when I would voice “feeling” to You, it was never more real. And yet, other times, I worked in the very flesh of Your earth, and nothing was more godless. The point of loving You might have begun as escape, but O Lord I am human. Perhaps Thomas was the most honest, wanting to touch You and know that You are real. Perhaps that is why You have given us to one another, Your Body of bodies, reassurance of life. The sweet aloneness with You, ravishing my soul with the Words that give life, Narrowing the focus of heart, soul, mind into a singular focus of doing Word. You commission and ordain each of us, Your servants, and we beg You, the Lord of Your Bride, To return quickly because we forget, we have forgotten, we are finding. It is something we voice as kingdom, heaven, at least I do; the forgotten unity that was once all. So I began to pursue You, to remember, to pray not to forget, and to go out and find You in and with others. You showed me a part of You I never dreamed of, in that aloneness. Isolating my heart in meditative adoration, all I wanted was to reach out and touch You; Like the woman who had been hemorrhaging 12 years, my heart had been bleeding all my life. I just wanted to touch the edge of Your robe: what is it about You that shows us the Father. Do I want to step into You to see Him? I don’t know the end of my own pursuit, yet here I am, Insatiably running after… the addictive strain driving me on and on, You are all I want. You gave me sweet consolation, longer than I could have imagined asking for— Perhaps it was consolation in imagination, interpreted feelings… but what is real to one might never express the truth to another. You showed me that the love of You could not be directed to the exclusion of other, as I tried- Community is necessary to know; so love for You is love of others: for their own ends/sakes. You are present when the relationship is not pursued for any purpose than their best, in which striving together to know one another as we know You, the experience deepens. Each person, such a treasure beneath the shells that we all carry, the heart in the exterior— And the love encompasses it all. I still wear the wedding ring, Jesus, I am my love’s and my beloved is mine… Yet in choosing You for lover, I choose Your whole Body, this mysterious church… universal entity within each who loves you: paradox of individual/whole. Alone with You, my world spins until I am thrown to Your Body, and there I ache to love as You… to love with the love I have for you, intuitive to a place inexplicable, and to give that tangibly. You only told us once not to touch You. God removed and God within… we know You in the now, and know You are yet coming. We remember the stories of others and trust, but love for you… how we forget everyday. If I am to holy Your hands with another when I gather with just one other in Your name, how much more can we know You, know one another in You? Why is the tension between exclusivity still pushing within the need for community? To love you, Jesus…human emotion, holy passion, truth? So what is loving You now, what texts, what action, what obedience?

Human-angel I long to be, innocent but not naïve.
Pilgriming down this pavement, my goal is to wear
Down these human soles, and shake the mortal she from the deepest parts of me.
Scuffling up the street, trying in vain her to break-
from this mortal coil, a breath to take.
The finite dragging behind, I break free- in the run I divorce from humanity
And with the angels my soul rises to fly…
But woman in me is running too… between heaven and dirt suspended I rise;
Running towards earth and into sky, by being confused, not perfect to be.
I question, what is this purpose of me, this complex holiness?
Pondering vocation, I tarry on, my life droning an unending hum-
Untouchable above, released from all but fear and awe here,
Engrained in the groves of lives’ pavement, indiscernibly intertwined?
Bleeding with Jesus, my heart, my self, it comes with the running and searching.
A confusion of paths, so many choices to make, which to embrace, which will break?
Each one questing after our own fates; holiness, in a different color, different shape.
The form we imitate particularizes to self.
My ideal is angel, in woman I am found- wrestling.
He comes to me and whispers softly, my love it is not to be…
Heaven and earth are one in me.
So peace on earth, the image of divine, life of Jesus flowing in me.
Father above, Son creating in, we give up our holy spirits to be free/
7 miles tonight, 9 more in the morning…
Running, my legs take me to euphoria, a loftier goal each mile, each day.
Until at its peak, I hit a wall, and emptied at last, I finally fall…
Back into a sea, lost in my own humanity.
Its not lost we’ll stay, the mist clears in the end- until then,
There’s only a long rugged race, the joy of the journey, in angelic humanity,
Yearning and aching, exploring joyous longing, because
We can’t believe here is the end, enough, but what if it is,
A heaven on earth, Jesus in our blood and dirt.
Christ alive here in the breaths we exhale, in the thoughts we intake,
Can we open His arms to give, receive our own broken embrace?
The run to unite, the run to divide, soul into body, heart into mind,
Colliding at corners, with lampposts, at each turn-
Running until our aches have returned, to pass right through us;
Will we be real enough yet to hold life loosely, and take its full embrace,
Being fully human, fully light/love at the same pace?
So on we run, for absolution.

Beginning my class on women in religious leadership this evening, I am excited to explore all the subjects and problems that arise for women pursuing vocations in lives dedicated to the Lord. Is this to be a singularly religious vocation, one dedicated to the Lord, or a married one, sharing in the divine life differently? So many questions, so many things to work through, how very exciting. But in a sense, the vocation of public ministry has always been testy ground to walk on for a while. But I am not concerned about power, publicity of a vocation, or a specific office… isn’t a ministerial calling truly about imaging Christ in the service we take on for His glory? Perhaps a position of being leader comes from that following Christ, joining in His walk and journey… but lets never ask for such a position, that might be pride. Shepherding is something one is drawn to, leaderships is where one finds oneself on the walk with God.

I am curious as to the intensity of conservative Protestant/Catholic sentiment regarding female ordination… a lot seems to revolve around title/power/function… and I hope to recreate the arguments convincingly against on my own study time, so as to accurately evaluate them and see if they hold water. Thus far, I have not read any convincing theology as to keep women out of ordination. I must recognize the sense of equanimity between the genders that I firmly acknowledge and believe– we both image God equally (No, I don’t believe the old man in the sky stories about God, but think to personalize the transcendent, God used anthropomorphic language to make Himself known to us. Thus I say ‘He,’ regardless of arguments made against the undeniably patriarchal context of the whole divine written revelation… at least for Father and Son. In that I want to believe, there is some purpose. The Spirit is even more ambiguous. But God the father as Mother is also a picture that makes sense to me); yet is there a natural order, an innate and differentness to male and female? I tend to think so, from the human relations I see all around me in the world, tendencies I study, etc. So what would be the big deal about women’s ordination? I frankly don’t give a care about women being ordained; if it is a calling from God, go for it. So maybe for me the deeper question here is how do we define and hear our calls? Has God limited some via gender beyond mother or father? That is not something I have an answer too. The moment a man is given power over a woman via and office, I will arise to the conversation… we are not here on earth to dominate one another. We women should not allow subjugation to suffer silently, because it is wrong for the men’s imagind. God is love. Did He make one gender superior to the other? Is authority necessarily a heirarchy of value? To both, I would say no. How shall we have communitarian dialog between men and women, then?

This women in religious leadership class is going to be fascinating: we are going to look at models of leadership amongst historical and current female leaders, stigmas to female leadership, what historically has been most effective in women’s religious leadership. We talked initially about some topics we are going to cover this semester: how dress affects a woman’s authority, the authority which can be derived from a mysterious aloofness/removedness, and the different relationships women leaders had to men (how they often achieved a position of influence). Seems a lot were married and then widowed… or in some other way dependent on a male figure. For example, my favoirte saint, besides the biblical ones, Catherine of Siena, an ‘associate’ of the Dominicans (third order dominican who was not a nun, had no office in church, etc)… who wrote letters back and forth with kings, popes, and theologians was almost illiterate because of her Confessor, who was the head of the Dominican order and thought she had something to share with the world. Authority; I question it. I supposed God gives and directs us through authrotiy… but it is the last who shall be first, Jesus said. He made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, a slave. He washed me filthy feet. He bought me out of slavery by taking the price on His own head, from His own blood. Maybe only those who debase in love to the point of Jesus should lead. If pride really goes before a fall, I would rather have a leader whose face is buried in the dirt worshipping our God than one who is so taken with gazing up that they must take a horrible fall to reach the dust of their existence before Him. if in Him we live and move and have our being, lets be as Jesus lived, wherever that manner of loving takes us.
In class we also spoke a little bit about qualities of different historical female leaders, and how there is this tendency for prominent qualities to be a combination of good and bad, and really the extremist tendencies are what women tend to become leaders over: the admire-but-dont-emulate model. Aspire after, not to. I We’re going to have some interesting conversations… there are 8 women and 2 men in the class… I hope the guys don’t give into the female sentiment, but honestly voice their thoughts, and I hope the women dont try and dominate. Communitarian dialog, right? I might work on that whole interesting component of male/female dynamics over positions of leadership… in office or not. We are going to address the issue of burn out, when women get into ministry and something about the nature takes over. What about men? Is it better when working in teams? How so we women support ourselves physically alone, how do men emotionally? Im not even talking about marriage, but some sense of community.

As I begin reading The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy and the Medieval West, I am curious to see if a balanced dialog can be achieved between proponents of women’s ordination and those against: what personal reason motivates our choice of stance?

The end of a month of silence… well, the end of the month would be tomorrow. I was going to try an experiment of not writing for a year’s time, but after one month and at the beginning of a new semester, I think the need to consecrate a new conversation with my Lord, in public or not, on this blog to allow the process of thoughts to work themselves out without impedement. A journal is great, and there I have the more intimate dialog with my God, but I realized that this manner of writing, like my daily runs, is one of the practices that has become spiritually meaningful to me, a place to open a personal dialog, a sense of ordering where thoughts might be cleared and the cloudiness of life pierced now and again.

First day of the semester, another intense credit load, but after the first day, I am quite excited to see what the prospects are going to be; a lot of exploration of new and old questions with different groups of people. Conversations over Christmas break started heating up the water as I began a journey towards membership in the Catholic Church with official rites starting in February. Besides internal conflict, I have had numerous discussions with Christians of all dimensions: Catholic, Protestant, somewhere in between, and while my love has not diminished for the Catholic ideals and spirituality, the sense of the peace of Christ I have held onto in spite of other doctrinal conflicts has ebbed into a harshly cut duality as I have sought to try and join myself to the a specific church group. This semester, I am taking an ecclesiology course in which I hope to hash out some of these questions which have haunted me and become more concretized over the years: what is church? Why do we need church? How is church lived rightly? Moving steadily towards official acceptance into the Catholic church, I found that what I had desired and idealized much of my life was causing a great sense of unrest.

My words will read much more confidently than they are written… since many weeks ago, I have been struggling within myself between joy and dismay, between conflicting desires, between an idealized beauty and the reality of a continued path, between ecstasy and the mundane. In a physical sense, I shook on Sunday when I partook in a rite of welcoming the candidates for acceptance into the Catholic Church: I was totally washed in a belief and sense in my heart that this was my own consecration, an entering into a renewal of holiness and purity… a joy filled me. It was not pure emotion, though how can I deny being emotionally affected after so long wondering and at times pining after that unity of belonging to a particular group of Christians… to, in greatest hope, the Church of Christ. Receiving the signs of the cross, I pictured Jesus Himself taking me as His own. And yet, the sweetness, the light that filled every part of my, the holiness which Jesus’ Spirit radiated within the love of my heart was obstructed by a silver of shadow. A shadow, which could not be denied because so often it creeps until it entirely drowns my own mind in doubt.
I have not clearly identified what it is about ‘becoming Catholic’ that I find so difficult, because I do have a deep love for that church. Yet, how can I say with honest conviction that it is the only means through which God’s grace is transmuted to the world? I feel extremely blessed to be studying at a Dominican seminary, learning about living my life before God in an intensely Catholic environment, but I realize that another ‘conversion’ would no more change my spirituality, my practice of faith, my heart for God than would drawing stripes on myself with a permanent marker and calling myself ‘Tiger.’ Over the past several years, since 2002 or so when I began a different sort of faith journey with my God, I wondered what to call myself, what kind of Christian I am, what should define me: all those questions we developing young people ask. As early as 2002, I was studying Catholic theology on my own, intrigued and drawn towards it be the essence of the faith that is present there beneath different devotional practices and theological positions. I truly did find in Catholicism some of the depth my journey needed to take with Jesus… the richness and vastness Catholicism has to offer continues to show me a diversity of faces. It has taught me that diversity does not matter within the body of Christ: it is precisely the diversity which gives us all the distinct abilities to be unified as people.
And yet, something about the brokenness of the fall still tends to stymie us in our attempts to know and love Jesus through knowing and loving one another. I took a course over the intersession period here at GTU (3 weeks of January) called “Popular Religiosity,” in which I was more directly exposed to sociological structures of faith than I ever have been before. The course was a difficult one for me, grappling with the truths I have accepted as faith, the reality of what I am and where the grain of my being is not allowing me to go, and the shaping affect humanity has undeniably had on faith. That does not mean I am an atheist; I find in myself still the desperate need to believe in God. Yet it is loving God in the community of faith that I find so unsettling; what community can I be a part of it I will not take on their doctrines, their labels? It puzzles me to no end how terribly we bicker about theology. I would live and die for the doctrine, I espouse, but heaven forbid I kill anyone, emotionally, spiritually, relationally or physically over a disagreement. Especially within what is supposed to be church.
I have struggled with the question: right now, am I a part of a church? Is it truly a sense of belonging that persuades so many to adopt doctrines and stances? I am not questioning the devotion of anyone’s faith or practice, except my own. Catholicism’s beauty is like a great pool… but I need an ocean more vast than the universe that I might free-fall with my God. Religious life is my greatest temptation to fully initiate in Catholic faith.
But what makes us become what we are, what leads us in our various paths? Honestly, I struggle with an intense dualism that I have perceived for a couple years: love of God and love of man. Perhaps because, in the realm of faith, I have held the two in confliction by my actions for a long time: I cannot do what the core or my being would feel to be untrue to my God and Savior. The dialog needs to remain open, and I have fought so hard against compromising factors for so long, that to give in now because of a desirous spirituality, because of a really beautiful sort of faith, which in the end would free me to much and limit me from more seems so futile. Why enter into a system that would ultimately cut me off from giving to some over others? It is truly the very idea of belonging to a particular group, an agreement to particular doctrines which would make fellow brothers and sisters ‘other’ to me that I struggle against. There truly is one holy, catholic, and apostolic church, I think… but is it one earth? Must we visually construct what might only be possible of existing in the love that binds us, that pervades our essence?
What does it mean to love like Christ? My heart’s sole desire is to, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, live like Him, love like Him, and be His hands and feet to the needy, to anyone. So what are the things that impede this desire? Besides my own choices not to obey, I have been rather zealously plowing through my life on a desire to purge what, because of my nature and because of His, I feel cannot reside in me to truly, fully belong to Him. I look back on my younger, 6th grade self and remember how violently I fought others over doctrines. Doctrine is never an excuse not to love… love cannot be done harshly. But at the same time, one cannot forfeit doctrine. As I grew older and immersed myself in work, I found how much I longed to give the love of Christ, how deeply blessed I felt to know Him.. since there was so much in life that I feel I would be lost in without Him. I have wept over my sin, which divides me from my Lord, from others. I have been so confused about how we can so zealously choose to tear each other apart in a sort of emotional/verbal inquisition which denigrates the gift of life we each have been entrusted with… not only our own but those of our fellows. Why do we continue to refuse to live like Jesus. Who would object to that, it was heavenly, it still can be.

Through a myriad of labyrinths I continue to wander as I explore what it is to image my God, to learn the life He has given me through His footsteps, and to empty myself of even that which I might desire most to surrender to the time He has given me. If only this moment lies in my hands, how can I best love and serve in the now. I wonder what Jesus thought of His Apostles, of those He loved and cherished who would fight among themselves and feel that power should come from His favor. If He empties Himself to take in the love of the Father, shall we not too become such humble vessels, offering ourselves as undeserving chalices to carry the precious sacrifice of our Lord to those who are just as worthy as we? No one has ever been given enough love.

Seeking to follow in His steps and offer His hands,
Pax tecum,
Hannah