She’s gonna teach seminary for those who want seminary AND want to lead with Love.
A dear Spirit-friend threw this out into a circle of coffee-time this morning, smiling impishly as she said it. “I’m just gonna throw this out there,” she said, “but I’m serious.”
Twice within twelve hours have sister-friends suggested sacred work for me, beyond my current vocational identities and institutional commitments. Work that yet requires these vocational identities, in some fashion.
Is it becoming time for me to trust I have what Godde’s given me, what I need, to let the Flow take me beyond where I am?
One distinctive change in me is that I have no pretend-visioning that any human collective or even (eventually) institution I’d participate in creating would be any different in all the challenges that come with human community. It would still have the messiness and utter irreconciliability that human beings bring into being when we gather, as ecclesia of old, or circles anew. This realism, this healthy skepticism, reminds me that working within what-is has value, contribution to make. And I am making contribution in this way.
My friend’s words have landed in an unexpectedly fertile place, however. Twice within twelve hours…women whose faith I respect deeply, whom I have come to love in our journeying together, are seeing something in me that I am receiving somehow. Writing here helps me honor it somehow...
If I were to “teach seminary” for those who hunger for deeply embodied, deeply traditionally-rooted but innovative learning-teaching, so to better lead in Love…what would it look like? What would it mean to gather beloved communities together, in serial fashion over years, held in circle-way wisdom, to re-engage the questions of becoming fully human, anew, acknowledging the deep-woundings of patriarchy in all human beings today and allowing whatever-might-grow-evolve-now space to do so? So much of our era has done this with a secular flair--just get rid of religion--but that is never going to work. I felt it in the circle this morning, the projected-outward wounding-by-religion, which is inner-work that needs to be done by all secularists, of any flavor. So...moving forward...? Co-initiated, co-sensing, presencing, prototyping…rinse, repeat, again?
Principled pluralism is the academic-snooty-term for this—living deeply rooted within traditional wisdoms without relinquishing or fragmenting within them, while also living within irreconcilable differences with intellectual humility and an embodied holding, peaceable abiding amidst the pains of it all… Basic questions arise within me then:
What are we to do with the ancient texts, seemingly irreparably damaged-damaging without women’s voices, sensibilities, yet also irreparably-intimate with generations of human-sacred-divine wisdom, relationship, history? What are we to do with, or better, how are we to continue to be-with the ancient texts?
How do we re-member together who we are as human beings in equal dignity and mutual loyalty, when so many of us have forgotten (intergenerationally) how to gather, how to be community in vulnerability, non-violence, justice and mercy? Our wounds are so deep, refused, projected outward onto "others," "them," etc.
What do we do with--how do we continue to be with--the traditions we’ve inherited, internalized, such that so much fear has taken root, speaking through us as sacred word when such word-belief-practice is actually separating, wounding, deceiving us…?
So very curious...and hungry am I. And now laughing. This Sunday is Reformation Sunday. Image? Mothers of the Reformation...
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