Boughton, Noelle, Ed. Ordinary Heroes: Celebrating United Church Women. Toronto, ON: United Church Publishing House, 2012.
497 Words
[For] those who continue in their footsteps.
Like the Samaritan woman at the well, I have been offered living water here, inspiration to carry a passionate witness. Like Huldah the prophet, I am excited by a book that offers rich resources for learning about who we are as people of God. Like Joanna, I am reminded to the joy and pain of being a friend of Jesus. And like the Shunamite woman, I celebrate the good that comes of service.
Jesus said, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. (Matt 22:37) (Tindal, 7)
As we read the gospel stories and engage their meaning for our time, we need to find even more creative ways to witness to the gospel story that calls us and challenges us. (12)
It isn’t just the church that is changing; just about all aspects of Canadian society have changed in the past 50 years . . . demanded new formats of Christian practice to allow people in changing times to continue to benefit from the riches of our scriptures. (15)
Our church’s engagement in a addressing the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools and the impact of colonization is already providing new narratives for the church in relation to radical reimaging and sustainability. (16)
Congregations as we know them will continue to be an active and a valuable option, but not the only option . . . Imagine new ways of being church together . . . (17)
Artist Caroline Pogue created a 16-inch (40.6 cm) Poverty Doll . . . presentations of dolls to dignitaries and celebrities . . . (52-53)
The older UCW members . . . were a great resource for the younger members. (60)
The UCW members worked hard holding afternoon teas, strawberry festivals, and other projects to raise needed funds . . . with God anything is possible, transformation, rebirth, and even reopening of churches become realities. (63)
The studies included, for example, questions about Aboriginal rights or Aboriginal women . . . (71)
New approaches to Bible study such as lectio divina . . . (73)
Beads of Hope . . . HIV/AIDS . . . (77)
Because our labyrinth has been created out of painter drop cloths that have been sewn together . . . we remove our shoes to keep it clean . . . holy ground . . . (80)
She was there to share her Spiritual Journey with a series of original oil paintings . . . how the Bible relates to today’s world . . . It made me remember the first time God spoke to me . . . (82-83)
I made some good friendships and valued being with other young parents as well as grandmothers as we built community . . . (93)
The Barbie movie did not cross my mind while I was exploring the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. That thought came the next day. While at the festival, I was mostly in the moment. In the Uber ride back home, as we passed the beauty of the mountains and the opaque windows of the DTES, it came to me that the Cherry Blossom Festival could be a symbol for Canada; a pink oasis of peace in the midst of a world social upheaval of the post-Covid years.
As I went to bed that night, I relived all that I had experienced during the day. Picnic blankets like a huge quilt squared the lawn. Strollers and dogs dotted the muddy green. False Creek sailboats luxuriated on the edge. Sushi pre-ordered, and homemade lunches brought back forgotten traditions. Selfies taken, hanging notes under trees and craft tents were fun to look at. Music brought life to winter bones. Daffodils were like sun until itself came out.
I was out, away from my desk, in nature. My shoe had sunk into dog feces just before I descended the ramp to the Granville Island Aquabus ferry. The smell was embarrassing, when I realized it was me. People did not quite look.
Later a Vancouver-sized seagull swooped down behind my head and violently tipped the Easter egg ice cream out of my hand onto the seaside deck, splat. In shock, I kept looking up behind me to see where it had come from. The innocent sky now seemed fraught.
I continued my pilgrimage of sites symbolizing my years of art school on the Island. I reminisced about avid student contemporary art history discussions. And how one woman and I went overboard in our comments one day (apologies later). Dundarave Printmakers had a display of onyx-like pieces in the window. A longing for the ones I had created and donated hit me. I considered becoming a member and continuing my etching practice there.
Ahead my gaze went to the Lafarge silos; “Giants,” painted in 2014 by twin brothers (Os Gemeos) from Brazil. Further on, the windows of the former Emily Carr U studio spaces, classrooms and library were blank. The call of buying beautiful art supplies at Opus overcome, I went on to the Federation Gallery and saw what others were painting, hoping for a spark of problem-solving in my current painting challenge. I crossed the four corners, past the green and white, Prof. Landon Mackenzie-painted awning, to the lobby of the Granville Island Hotel.
We had spent the first night of our honeymoon there. As we looked at the sailing boats with our champagne brunch the next morning, we planned all that we would do with our two boys; now happy step-brothers. In memory, now, I ate sliders with Pilsner on the patio, then called Uber to meet me in front of the fire-pit water feature. I took a photo of the ancient yellow crane (now public art) way above.
In the middle of the night I received a news alert about a shooting. It had occurred just a few blocks from where I had spent the day. This superimposed image of violence on my pink peace dream, disrupted the night while I tried to reconcile them.
The Cherry Blossom Festival has grown from its quiet beginnings in 2005 by the Vancouver Board of Trade. In the 1930’s Japan had donated 500 trees to Vancouver in honour of Japanese WWI veterans. I had often felt that more people ought to know about the pink beauty and history of friendship.
There are more venues now since the festival’s inception. A marketing firm must have taken it up from its more folk tradition-like beginnings. Locals were joined by tourists and then more locals to enjoy the beauty of pink.
Petal pink sparkle heels in plastic with elastic straps to teeter around the living room in, what did it mean to me to wear these shoes as a shy platinum blonde girl? From time to time, I see them in my mind over the decades. Were they a symbol of hope, of the beauty of being grown up, mature at last and free to be me?
Pink had always seemed to me to mirror frivolity and innocent fun, something extraneous; an add-on to bless the day with a moment of joy, if you had the time.
Now I see that pink is what life is made of down deep; a joy that cannot be quenched, a love that has died and risen to spread seeds, a companionship that is always with us, even to the end of the age.
Later in the evening news I saw the shootings in Vancouver that afternoon within the hour I was there. Coffee shop windows had bullet holes. People in the street scattered and would not tell their stories on camera for fear of gang-related revenge.
Like a trauma, (or as a trauma) I keep thinking about the events happening so near and what I was doing at the time. I was chatting about the beauty of the pink trees with the Uber driver. I recommended that he bring his wife to see them. How could I be so innocent, so naïve, so looking through rose coloured glasses about the city I drove across Canada to move to?
Again I am struck by how life can change in an instant. One cannot prepare, but one can be in prayer; a practice of daily prayer. Like Anne Lamott we can say, help, wow, thanks.
I don’t know why the news of the shooting was a jolt of trauma for me. I guess it was added to the news last month of the sentencing of a man for a stabbing at the mall near me, or the run-in I had with a man shouting in my face on a street nearby.
When I moved here from a quiet suburban neighbourhood, I was at first frozen for a few hours by the difference of present danger in an urban environment. I saw an old woman trailing a grocery carrier along the sidewalk and asked myself this question, does this woman have more courage than me? Fathers escorting children to the school in the next block, do they have more courage than I do? The answer was, no, I have great courage, at times.
Apple blossom time in New Brunswick was the next layer of processing my weekend of beauty and danger. You were born at apple blossom time; I could see the trees from the hospital window, my mother had relayed with eyes bright.
Perhaps apple blossoms are more Canadian. They bloom later. Their beauty is nuanced, ivory, baby-cheeks pink, deep coral, green. Their petals do not line the sidewalks and do not blow down the streets pinking wherever they gather and cover, making one think of a foretaste of heaven. Rather they are most seen in apple orchards with ladders, in green stubbly fields, like ancient blessings blowing heart prayers of ancestors.
We too are like trees planted to bring beauty, to offer shade, to feed passersby with our red and green fruit. Our roots are deep touching down into wells bringing water to healing leaves for the nations. We are the new Barbie, a harbinger of peace to a world of violence, and a new Ken working to pollinate together the seeds of beautiful pink change, a canopy of green stretching to the city and beyond. A silent witness of seedlings germinate, sprout, dialogue as watered and fed; living emblems of friendship with all people and other creatures of an earth at peace, holy ground.
I entered the Polygon Gallery: I wanted to be a witness. Even before the first image performed, a whole body sob escaped from my throat. I had to take a moment before continuing. I was fine, even happy that day, in the middle of the North Shore Writers Festival. I think it was the yellow bruises on her inner thighs. I think it was the thought that women have to go to such lengths and suffer so much to push back against injustice; to be heard. The Gorilla Girls information was there alongside the Pussy Riot Graffiti. I had the ear mufflers on to survive the volume of the 50 plus videos of Pussy Riots in Russia.
My breath caught when I saw that in the Medieval churches, they were pleading to the Virgin Mary to help them. I found myself praying that God would help them. I thought, could anything like that happen here? Violence against women in Canada has risen so much in the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over there is silence. But silence has always been the fallback position to continuing trauma. We Canadians are very polite.
Evans, Rachel Held. Faith Unravelled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions. Grand Rapids: MI, Zondervan, 2010.
503 Words
People tell me I exaggerate.
I tend to change my mind.
I’ve been hurt by Christians.
As a Christian, I’ve been hurtful. (Evans, 13)
Faith can survive just about anything, so long as it’s able to evolve. (17)
My security and self-worth and sense of purpose in life were wrapped up in getting God right . . . (17)
The same versatility that allowed Paul to become all things to all people applies to the church collectively . . . times of change . . . hold them with an open hand. (21)
Rather than killing my faith, these doubts led to a surprising rebirth. (22)
I realize how important it was that my father loved me so openly and listened so carefully. My first impressions of my heavenly Father were that he too was gentle, playful, and kind. (29)
[Evan’s hometown of Dayton, Tennessee, was the place of the historical evolution-creationism debate; the so-called 1925 Scopes Monkey Trials] (51-61)
Every now and then we do have what I like to call “a Monkey Town moment,” the most recent of which was when the Rhea County Commission voted to make homosexuality illegal in Dayton. In March 2004 . . . it was as if the Scopes trial had come to Dayton all over again. (62)
When it comes to different breeds of Christianity, Dayton is a Galapagos Island of sorts, a terrific destination for anyone wishing to study the evolution of fundamentalism in America. (63)
My best friend Sarah and I had decided ahead of time to live in the same dorm but to room with girls we didn’t already know so as not to get too cliquish . . . I immediately ran for student government . . . (72)
If someone said to me, “You should be tolerant of other religions and belief systems,” I should respond by asking, “What about the belief systems of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin?” . . . In Biblical Worldview we picked apart dozens of belief systems from secular humanism to Buddhism. We examined their strengths and weaknesses . . . (73)
“You know what I like best about Jesus?” Nathan asked. “How he really took care of poor people . . . whenever I’m back in Texas [from Iraq], I go to this knitting group . . . to help make blankets for homeless people. I’m like the only guy in the group” . . . I couldn’t but laugh. Nathan did not seem like the knitting type . . . something about sitting in a circle with those ladies doing something for someone else makes me feel closer to God. It’s like my church. (87)
Something about Jesus made me ask better questions . . . gave me just enough hope to decide not to give up . . . at least not yet. (104)
To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or worse . . . In the end it was doubt that save my faith. (119)
Bessey, Sarah. Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. New York: NY, Penguin Random House LLC, 2024.
475 Words
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. (Teilhard de Chardin in Bessey, 1)
Dear Wanderer . . . We are in the midst of a shift in the church . . . If the city is a metaphor for certainty and belonging, then the wilderness is for our questions and our truth. (Bessey,3)
We come across little clearings like this, where we can spread our quilt for a while, sit around the fire together, and share some time, maybe a thermos of tea. (4)
It’s here I discovered that the wilderness isn’t a problem to be solved, it is another altar of intimacy with God. (5)
My soul was as parched as the landscape around us. (6)
Every answer I had memorized had become inadequate. I wrung my soul’s hands. (8)
We’re always evolving in how we understand words and texts, and the meaning of those words. (10)
Prayer isn’t a vending machine . . . (14)
It’s always been about the love of God, for and in you, and also for and in this beautiful tragedy of the world. (16)
The invitation of rest and gentleness, of journeying with Jesus in the wilderness, is likely the exhale you’re craving. (19)
It turns out that, yes, the yoke has been too heavy. It’s not all in your head. (21)
Telling the truth is its own holy comfort. (22)
I began to see the subversiveness of Jesus, long-tamed, interpreted away, and inoculated. (24)
What I thought was exile became home, and the misfits became my friends. (25)
Sometimes reality comes to us slowly, in a dawning realization . . . I’ve learned by now that most of us cross that threshold to the wilderness because of our grief. (30)
Like most women raised in church, I was unacquainted with my own anger. (32)
Secrets were coming to light . . . (33)
We start to think that nothing is redeemable. (34)
Three are some homes –– and beliefs –– that deserve the burn-it-down treatment, absolutely . . . able to see the foundation or the character of possibilities. There is so much that love and care can heal. (35)
Those places, if left unchecked, will poison the whole home . . . (36)
The four stages of faith formation . . . Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony. (McLaren in Bessey, 38)
In Simplicity we are dualistic and committed to constructing. This is the stage of our life when we rely heavily on black-and-white thinking. We are eager to please authority figures. Like our parents or pastors. We highly value loyalty and purity. There is good and there is evil, all is sorted. Sometimes we can be narrow-minded and judgmental, sure, but we’re also very committed, and we often are trying to do good in the world. (39)
As both fiction and non-fiction books are read, places, situations and characters fill the mind. This is what was said and done here in this situation, at this time, with these results. Later we can find these things populating our own thinking.
In past situations of isolation and stress, I foraged my mind for solutions, or at least ways to think about what was happening. I came up with very little. At times it felt like my thinking had frozen. This can happen in grief. It can also happen in times of boredom or discouragement. Our thoughts can become dull.
A way forward I decided, was to set an agenda of random reading, of podcast listening and of YouTube watching. I read what was unread in my bookcase. I perused previously read non-fiction on Kindle. I actually drove to the library and gleaned from the shelves there.
I did not really know what writers meant about the imagination. I saw it as being able to create. I created many interesting artworks. In art school, we were taught that when we ran out of ideas to paint, to look through images from art history.
I never really ran out of ideas. Mine was a mind that came up with more ideas than my body could paint. Yet, curiosity pushed me to research. In some of the images, I saw work similar to my own but more advanced. So those images filled my imagination, gave my work validation, and helped me to grow as I put some of their techniques into practice. I also saw things like how to place a figure in the ground, how to ignore perspective and develop a flattened style, and a way to enflesh what I saw in my mind.
As a follower of Jesus, I had attended the requisite Scripture study groups. Some were fill-in-the-blanks questions, which in the beginning, before I got my theological footing, were quite helpful with both information and devotion. As I applied to seminary I began to see the world beyond the text. This included the world of the text, and the contemporary context, as well as the world inside me. Perhaps I was on my way to becoming puffed up by knowledge. After all, I had systematically figured out my beliefs in detail and they fit together well.
I then began to work in the gaps of what was in Scripture, behind Scripture; the things that Scripture did not say, especially the second-hand invisible viewpoints of the place of sometimes unnamed women. There were also gaps in me. As I began to study the skill of writing midrash, I was enlivened by seeing how others had filled in gaps in Scripture stories with cultural knowledge.
A course in the culture of the First Century helped me with the ancient text. The gleanings here from my eclectic readings from the contemporary culture, fill in places, people and situations from my own living. The facts and the stories fill in the gaps of my own knowledge and experience. My goal is for these two cultures to collide in the work to give it depth and a certain width. Like visiting a vineyard, I see the vines, taste the grapes, then back at the welcome centre imbibe the resulting goodness as well as listening to the history or the grapes, the land, the vineyard’s story and that of the vintners. My imagination formed compositions of painted vineyards in full colour.
The gleanings here are about exploration. A few quotes from readings are offered to catalyze interest in reading further; to begin or continue the curious to form a reading and writing practice of their own. This is how we fill our imaginations for later use. Like my grandmother’s ancient water pump, first it had to have a ladle of water poured into the top and the lever pulled up and down a few times, for the resulting water to be poured out. Scripture offers that we can be given living water by the Spirit. In my imagination I can see our reading and writing as priming the pump for the living water to pour through our words to others. Both the ancient and the contemporary source is the risen Jesus.
May the meditations of our hearts and the words of our mouths (pens) be pleasing in your sight oh God.
“Light in the Darkness” Acrylic on Canvas, Deborah Stephan
Solnit, Rebecca. Recollections of My Nonexistence. penguinrandomhouse.com, 2021.
471 words
“In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other.” (Solnit, 3)
“To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or flee it or the knowledge of it, . . . I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic . . . (4)
“When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl . . . “ (6)
“The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there.(8)
“Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears . . . when I was young, ignorant, poor, and almost friendless, I went to look at an apartment for rent . . . ” (9)
He was a big black man of sixty, tall, stout, strong . . . overalls . . . When he handed me the rental application my heart fell . . . already been turned down by slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form . . . I didn’t make enough money . . . told me if I got an older woman to apply, he wouldn’t tell them of my deception . . . asked my mother . . .” (11)
“I changed too; the person who moved out in the twenty-fist century was not that person who’d arrived all those years before . . . not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer. (13)
“You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail . . . Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door opens . . . abandon that power . . . freedom from agency. . . but I loved my independence and privacy and agency and even some of my deep solitude, and there was never a chance that I was going to give them up.“ (15)
“In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond. I accrued skills and knowledge and eventually friends and a sense of belonging.” (16)
“Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying . . . in that luminous home that Mr. Young made possible for me.” (17)
I saw in her eyes that she had forgiven me. She did not try to get away as she had done five years before when she saw me coming along the sidewalk and slipped in between stores. Her dark-eyed beauty was undiminished by retirement. She chatted happily at the round festive table, her husband at her side.
Another group is where I knew her, where our conflict resides. She was one of them. I saw that I was not.
“Get lost or you will be found” her friends warned her. Every forest trail hid her. I saw her go in.
I had tried to seek her out at that weekend retreat. Her actions and words I needed to correct, for her own good and for those she served. “I was the one to receive gossip it seemed and not her who deserved it,” I thought. I quit not long after that and gave up my role. It was a thankless task. I became one of them again, which is what they silently asked. It hurts to be unforgiven. It costs to forgive.
Down the long years I thought of her. I ran scenarios through my filter. She became white and me strangely black as I looked back.
Last night amidst the words, smiles, music, red and green, I see that she must have seen I had dangled long enough from that guilt tree. She now set me free. I no longer needed to ask. She offered me a glass of red wine from her bottle. I refused red as I drank white. Yet I imbibed graciously of her generosity. My feelings now intact from her tiny act.
Photo Collage of Paintings and Shells Deborah Torley Stephan
Silf, Margaret. Sacred Spaces: Stations on a Celtic Way. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press,
2001.
492 words
“In ancient as in modern times, the human heart has always been looking for a way.” (Silf, 7)
“The spirit of the Way will not allow us to pitch camp and stay forever with these artificial certainties.” (8)
“One branch of the human family, in the Celtic regions, in the early centuries, after the life of Christ . . .” (8)
“We speak even today of some places as being ‘thin places’, meaning that the presence of the invisible and the spiritual in those places is almost palpable. Our Celtic forebears revered such ‘thin places’ as sacred space.” (9)
“Space can become sacred . . . when it is saturated in prayer, perhaps because it has been a place of retreat and reflection for prayerful pilgrims through the centuries. It might be an island of Iona in sacred history or it might be an island of prayer in our own daily lives.” (10)
“Woven into this exploration of sacred spaces is the thread of our own story . . . weave their own patterns . . .“ (11)
“Beginnings . . . times of commitment . . . seasons of setting out . . . turning and returning . . . seasons of companionship . . . boundary seasons . . .” (12)
“Christians believe Jesus is God’s sacred space –– one in whom the transcendent creator interpenetrated the created world . . . the Christ-life is being lived out through time, energized and directed by the Holy Spirit, until every life has been lived and every death has been died. This is the scale of the journey . . . from Alpha to Omega.” (14)
“The Celtic infinite knot is one picture of God’s weaving . . . What is it about this symbol that has the power to reconnect?” (25)
“My small piece of thread is just one snippet of an eternal spool that God is weaving into [the] Dream.” (26)
“Weaving can only happen when two or more strands come together. It is a symbol of community.” (28)
“The High Cross . . . the ladder of reconnection.” (43)
“In the summer of 1999, British TV viewers tuned in to the sight of the liberation of 800 cats and kittens that had been breeding them for the sole purpose of medical research. It was the last farm of this kind in Britain . . .” (53)
“The Weeping Stones . . . Outside the window there was bright sunshine. A short summer heatwave. The garden beckoned. I couldn’t resist to find a few moments of healing peace beneath the trees. A final vigil . . . my on mother . . .” (56)
“I have spent many weeks of my life walking the hilltops of my homeland . . . strings of summits . . . “ (61)
“They feel like something very significant is breaking into our lives.” (67)
ShellseekerReflections 