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Overview
She Flies On is not really a critique of organized religion, but rather Carter Heyward’s effort to think theologically, politically, socially, and autobiographically about the world and the church in which she has lived and worked. A Christian feminist “theologian of liberation,” Episcopal priest, lesbian, Southerner, and socialist Democrat, Heyward writes about the church, but more about the people—and creatures—of God going about their lives and attempting to love one another.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819233547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
She Flies On
A White Southern Christian Debutante Wakes Up
By Carter Heyward
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Carter HeywardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3354-7
CHAPTER 1
Through The Eyes Of A Child
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
— William Wordsworth, from "Intimations of Immortality"
The Father
It's so simple — the Father — so utterly right, so powerful beyond words, an image reflecting deep-seated human yearning for One who is older and wiser to take care of us, to help us, to love us. The image of our Father God can convey much tender loving care. But this same image is also a projection of men's aspirations to control women and the world, an image of God that has done unspeakable damage to humans, especially women and girls, and other beings. Please hear me: It's not that the image of God the Father is wrong. "He" is just too small, too tiny, too limited an image of the Sacred. "He" is also too often, and too globally, violent as a social construct, functioning as a mighty theological and political tool of male domination and violence against women and children and even against the earth itself.
Of course, God the Father has always been presented by the liberal Christian communities in which I've lived and worked not as a literal description of God but rather as metaphor, a poetic way of imaging the unimaginable, that which liberal Protestant theologian Paul Tillich described as "God beyond God." My brother priest and friend, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, reminds us of the Buddhist teaching that the word "God" must always be understood as the finger pointing at the moon, never as the moon itself. So too with the word "Father."
But let me be clear. When we speak of "God the Father," or pray to "our Father God," or lift up our hearts in Holy Communion to an "Almighty Father," this explicitly gendered image of the Sacred cannot be legitimized simply as metaphor, a finger pointing at the moon. Here is why: a basic course in the sociology of knowledge teaches that language is socially and historically constructed — formed on the basis of our very real lives as people in particular societies. In ancient as well as contemporary societies, "father" references the male head of family — the human family, the church family, our personal families.
Words carry power. "God the Father" is not simply language, because language itself is not simple. Words shape the world and our lives as people in the world. "God the Father" places maleness at the top of creation. The word "father" denotes the headship of creation and cosmos. This gendered language implies a divine order of creation, in which the male exercises headship over the female.
Recognizing the historic power of this "father" language, some of the most vitriolic and honest opponents of women's ordination in the Episcopal Church were 100 percent correct. They were neither exaggerating nor silly to insist, in the words of one male priest, "God is our Father, and so shall be His priests!" In the 1970s, many of us regarded this language as limited and sexist and, therefore, as silly but also dangerous. In the struggle for women's ordination, we could not dismiss it politically or spiritually, because it was hurting and diminishing women, men, and the church itself. I would have said, and I'm sure I did say at some point, that this sexist language, which reflected oppressive and cruel relationships between the genders, also diminished God, our Spirit of Life and Love and Justice. Sexism still functions in this way throughout the religions of the world, including Christianity. Male supremacy, buoyed by language about "God the Father" continues to batter women and girls throughout the church and all around the world.
I can think of no feminist, liberation, or liberal Christian theologian who has seriously argued that God as Father is in any way a necessary or even defensible theological construct. Yet, as recently as Easter Sunday 2015, I attended the Eucharist at my home parish where we reaffirmed our faith in God the Father. I stood and softly spoke words I most emphatically do not believe except in a limited way. Because this language carries such pain, alienation, and a history of such violence against women, the use of Father-language in worship is tantamount to participating in my own oppression and that of my sisters throughout the world — regardless of how other women might regard it.
More often than I care to admit, I have allowed myself to be seduced by the argument that when we say one of the ancient creeds or pray to our "heavenly Father," we are simply affirming our historic connections to those who have gone before, including generations of Christians who, over the years, have affirmed their faith in God the Father. Today, I would insist that indeed we are affirming our connections to a tradition of male domination and female subordination, all in the image of God.
But we might wish, today, to plead that in our prayers to our Father, we are standing with our brothers and sisters throughout the world who pray to the Father and, too often, are being slaughtered for their faith, alongside Muslims, Jews, and other faithful religious communities caught up in the horrific violence being waged at this time by practitioners of a wretched perversion of Islam. Make no mistake, ISIS, the Taliban, and other distortions of Islam are not rooted in the life and teachings of the Prophet but rather in the rage, violence, and confused identities of a generation of young men and women who also imagine that their deity is a sword-wielding Super-Man, quintessential Patriarch, Master of Control, Terror, and Fear.
So yes, I believe it can be argued, legitimately and compassionately, that we can, and even should, lift up our prayers in solidarity with our sister and brother Christians and with people of all faith traditions who are being persecuted for their faith. But it is not an either/or. Praying with other Christians does not relieve us of our responsibility to do whatever we can, in our own times and places — literally our churches and homes and throughout our lives — to un-mask an image of God the Father as the Male Head of a patriarchal family. That responsibility includes pointing out the connections to violence against those perceived to be a threat to power, whether Palestinian families in the West Bank having their homes bulldozed by the state, Coptic Christians in Egypt being beheaded by ISIS, European Jews still today targeted by neo-Nazis in the Netherlands, or disobedient daughters and gay sons in conservative Christian families and churches who are punished, disowned, or worse, here in the United States, in the name of God the Father.
Falling into Good and Evil
In 1945, at the end of what is sometimes referred to by Americans as the "Good War," the Spirit of Love and Justice and Compassion for All had been battered and bombed, gassed and blown up, and torn all to pieces. It was a terrible time, filled with pain and sorrow, as war is always terrible and sorrowful. But, true to Her eternal form, God was being liberated and lugged on the shoulders of strong soldiers to Her new beginnings. And, somehow, in the midst of all this terror and hope, a whole bunch of human babies fell out of that universal womb into infancy on this terrestrial ball.
That is how it always begins for God, and that is how it began for me and all the other babies who arrived in 1945.
Over the years, some of the most vocal critics of feminist theology have read my work, and that of other feminists, as "narcissistic" because we use experience as a primary source for theology and because, in statements like the one above, it may appear that I, as one feminist theologian, am comparing myself to God.
But I ask you: Does any theologian or artist, any scientist or poet, any framer of words about anything under the sun, not draw on her or his experience as a primary basis for, and source of, her work? For example, in The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee draws extensively from his own experience — his perceptions and interpretations, his choices and opportunities and encounters — as oncologist, surgeon, researcher, and the particular person he is to help him make sense of one of the most devastating, challenging, and baffling phenomena in human history: cancer.
Ah, but you may ask, how then can we ever know the errors of our ways, our experiments, or our ideas about God or cancer or anything else if we base most of what we claim on our experience, or if our own judgment is the standard by which we measure truth and falsehood, good and evil?
This is a hugely important moral question.
The key here is that you are as important to my understandings of God and the world as I am. My experiences of matters of life and death include almost constant, interactive engagement with your experiences of such matters. This is as much the case for any relatively wise claims we might make about God as it is for the discoveries of research oncologists like Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose ongoing experience, personally and professionally, is forever being challenged, corrected, and sharpened by the research — and experiences — of others.
But still, am I comparing myself to God when I say things like, "That is how it begins for God, and that is how it begins for me" or, as in these pages, I suggest that we are called to learn how to see ourselves and the world "through the eyes of God"?
Most people, including theologians, take words literally rather than metaphorically. Many assume that, when we personalize God, when we attribute agency to "Him" or "Her," when we assume that God has power to act "like us" — to create, destroy, love, hate — we are actually imagining both God and ourselves chiefly as individual "persons." For example, we assume that, when we are being good, we bear some resemblance to a supernatural version of our human selves. Or we imagine that ifwe are learning to see the world "through the eyes of God," we are like school children imitating a wise teacher who has eyes like ours but also greater wisdom and who, therefore, can see more deeply and fully and further than our young, inexperienced eyes can see.
But God cannot be understood literally to look or think like us, to be made in our image, any more than we are literally made in God's image. The Sacred cannot be boxed into the limits of our imaginations. God is not a "person" like me or like you — nor is She unlike either of us. God is not a turtle, horse, rattlesnake, or blue spruce tree, either. He is neither like, nor unlike, any person, creature, or species. To speak of God as a father or a mother, a child or a teacher, a friend or an enemy, an animal or a plant, a rock or an ocean, or to refer to God as "Her" or "Him," does not mean, literally, that God is a supernatural person — like us, but bigger and wiser and invisible — or that God is any one of us.
When the German political theologian Dorothee Soelle contended, as she often did, that "God's hands are our hands in the world," she did not mean that God is some giant being with hands, or that she, Dorothee, was God, or that I am God, or that you are God in any static or absolute sense. Soelle was attempting to convey throughout her life as a poet, theologian, and activist that God does indeed act through us in the world to make justice and bring peace and that, in this way, we are all God-bearers to the extent that we make justice and bring peace.
My effort here is something very much like my friend Dorothee's. Neither she nor I have imagined ourselves to be better, or smarter, or closer to God than any other creature, and neither Dorothee nor I have imagined that there is any "God" who thinks that we are better, or smarter, or closer to God than any other earth creature.
To the contrary, the great Spirit of Life, our source of making justice-love and the root of our compassion, is not a giant human being with whom we, as individuals, can compare, much less identify, ourselves. This reality — the essentially collective, social, relational character of God — ought to prevent any of us from imagining that any one of us is God.
I am not God and neither are you, but neither are we "un-godly," because God is the Spirit moving between us, infusing each of us with an impulse to connect. God is the wellspring of our yearning to love, here and now and everywhere, forever and ever. This vibrant Spirit God was the ground of Jesus's being, as it also the ground of your being and mine.
So when I say that this is how it began for God and for me — as I came squeezing out of my mother's womb into life — I am neither comparing nor identifying myself with a personal God. What I am doing is what artists and poets do: suggesting metaphorically that the Spirit of Love is born again and again in times of great trouble and times of great joy.
As Elie Wiesel suggests in Night, God is indeed the small, Jewish boy hanging on the gallows at Auschwitz, just as God was the young Jewish man hanged on a cross between two thieves. This same God was the Allied liberators who rescued prisoners from the Nazi death camps, just as She was the women who came to the tomb to pay tribute to their crucified friend and found that the tomb was empty.
And the two thieves, flanking Jesus, where were they in relation to God? In what sense were they also God? More challenging to our sensibilities — theologically and ethically — where in relation to God were the Nazi exterminators, Hitler, Eichmann, and those who followed their evil lead? These terrible questions about good and evil, about God and "the devil," will be lingering over these pages, much as they haunt our life together. I believe that any worthwhile theology is necessarily pressed by such questions to which, very often, our human imaginations have no answers.
As a sister concerned about good and evil in our common life and world, I am not saying that God is everyone in every moment, because there are surely people, events, and processes that are un-godly or evil in particular historical moments. I am not saying that God is, or is in, everyone and everything all the time. I am suggesting that God is never far away, never entirely absent from anyone or anything and that, even in relation to the most egregious human behavior, those acts and attitudes that are evil beyond dispute, God is only one heartbeat, one courageous creature, one movement for justice, or one well-placed word away. I am suggesting, moreover, that in God's eternal ongoing Spirit, evil is only relatively problematic because the darkness does not overcome the light, ever. How this can possibly be true is not ours to know or even to imagine at this moment, but I believe it to be true and deep in my soul, I know it is. I regard this as a terrible and sacred mystery.
I also believe that we humans need to be spiritually concerned with doing all in our power to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter those without homes, welcome the strangers, care for the sick and elderly and those with special needs, set the prisoners free, become advocates for the earth, bring hope to one another and, in the prophetic words of the Hebrew prophet Amos (5:24), let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
To live this way, immersed in God's Spirit, is to live counter-culturally to the ways many of us have been raised in the United States, at least those of us who have benefitted from white privilege. To live in God — in right relation to one another and all others — we consciously commit ourselves to learning to work together, collectively involved in struggling for, and celebrating, the justice-love we are forging in our life together on this planet.
Because I am one person and you are another, it is easy for us to mistake the radicality and depth to which God, our sacred root, calls us. Throughout this book, I will be referring to God as our power to create, generate, or struggle for right or mutual relation whether we are individual people writing/reading a book or nations, races, religions, genders, cultures, or species.
One of my primary efforts in these pages is to call attention to the stunning, sparking presence and movement of the Sacred all around us, between us, and within each of us as we help shed light on forces of evil present in our life together.
Without regard for the evil and its ugliness, the vision of who we are in right relation to one another has always been — and will be forever — accessible to each and every gathering and person, regardless of our religious or spiritual traditions, insofar as we are open to this vision, to being drawn to it, and to sharing it. I submit that whether we are Christian or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, Hindu or Sikh, pagan or "other," we can learn to see one another — and notice our shared worth and beauty — through the eyes of God.
This happens as we wake up and begin to see who we are, as sisters, brothers, siblings, on a shared journey. We notice that what makes us most deeply and honestly human is our capacity to share whatever is good and that, in this sharing — which is what it means to love one another — we are "godding," a word I use to promote an understanding of God as active verb (to god) rather than as a noun, much less a proper name.
Indeed, that is how it begins for God, morning by morning, and day by day, something womanist ethicist Katie G. Cannon would say — and that is how it began for me, a kid in the mountains of North Carolina in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from She Flies On by Carter Heyward. Copyright © 2017 Carter Heyward. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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