The Gleanings Project: Ordinary Heroes: Celebrating United Church Women

“Walking on Water” Acrylic on Paper, DS

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)

Mary’s prayer shawl ministry (54)

Leading worship . . . collecting postage stamps . . . (59)

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)

Harsh Reflections on a Sunny Day

“Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver” Phone Photo DS

Trigger Warning: violence against women

Pussy Riot Exhibition

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.

In Canada, in 2022, 184 women and girls were violently killed, primarily by men. One woman or girl is killed every 48 hours (Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, 2022).

https://canadianwomen.org/the-facts/gender-based-violence/ Accessed April 14, 2024.

The Gleanings Project: Faith Unravelled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

“Glass Baubles and Wooden Waves” Phone Photo DS

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)

The Gleanings Project: Field Notes for the Wilderness

“Century Gardens” Phone Photo DS

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)

We are unlearning bad habits . . . (47)

The Gleanings Project: Reflections

“Good Friday Icon Still Life” by DS

Reflections on Gleanings

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.

The Gleanings Project: Recollections of My Nonexistence

“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)

Poiesis Life Collection: Unforgiven

“Two Bees” Still Life by DS

Unforgiven 

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.

The Gleanings Project: The Blue Parakeet

“Mountain View, Early Morning” Phone Photo DS

McKnight, Scot. The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Grand Rapids, 

MI: Zondervan, 2018.

500 words

“When I prayed something powerful happened, and I went to breakfast that day a new person.” (9)

“Whatever they were claiming was not in ‘fact’ what they were doing. (Nor was I).” (11)

“I must confess, I loved the thrill of these debates.” (17)

”A pressing question of our day . . . “ (19)

“We are asked why we think the instruction from nature in Romans I about homosexuality is permanent and applicable to day, but the one in I Corinthians 11 is evidently disposable.” (21)

“Which way do I read the Bible . . . “ (22)

“What kind of blue bird is this? Could it be a stray mountain bluebird . . . Then the blue bird moved a bit . . . I was disappointed. It was someone’s pet blue parakeet. It had escaped its cage and was now a free bird.” (23)

“They let the blue parakeet be a blue parakeet . . . Chance encounters sometimes lead us deeper into thought . . .  a woman in the church foot washing  . . . is this passage for today or not? (24)

“If we sit down and think about it, it is impossible to live a first-century life in a twenty-first century world.” (26)

“The danger in ‘retrieving the essence’ is that there can be too little adoption or not enough faithfulness and consistency with all the Bible itself. “ (27)

“God is on the move . . . return and retrieve . . . we need to go back to the Bible with our eyes on the Great Tradition so we can move forward through the church and speak God’s Word in our day in our way.” (34)

“My desire to master the Bible and put it all together into my own system, drained the Bible of its raw, edgy, and strange elixirs. I was caging and taming the Bibles blue parakeets.” (36)

“Jesus changed everything . . .  God asks us to read the Bible as the unfolding story of his ways to his people. Stephen was killed for telling that story.” (59)

“The Bible contains an ongoing series of midrashim, or interpretive retellings of the one story God wants us to know and hear . . . each of these authors tells his version of the Story . . . they tell . . . wiki-stories of the story; they give midrashimon the previous stories . . . the ongoing reworking of the biblical Story by new authors so they can speak the old story in new ways for their day.” (64)

“Many New Testament specialists will tell you that nearly every page of the New Testament is a wiki-story on an Old Testament wiki-story.” (65)

“If we learn to read the Bible with tradition –– it’s a bit like sitting down at a table with three or four generations in our family . . . we can enter into a conversation in which we can learn from the wisdom of the past.” (100)

The Gleanings Project: Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Piper at ECUAD” Collage by DS

McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler. Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. Grand Rapids, MI: 

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009.

385 words

“Foster the kind of community that comes from shared stories . . . “ (Mc Entyre, xi)

“There is, in all of us, a hunger for words that satisfy, not just words that do the job of conveying requests or instructions or information, but words that give a pleasure akin to the pleasures of music. “ (27)

“Mere lists of nouns can be poetry.” (38)

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant. . .” (Dickenson, Emily, in McEntyre, 41)

“Opinions are the stock-in-trade of thoughtful people to be earned and held strongly until further evidence requires their modification.” (41)

“The practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort; it may also require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment.” (44)

“Healing involves naming the insults and offenses.” (59)

“We inhabit narratives . . . every story provides a space in which author and reader meet . . . some readers . . . become the guides or docents in those spaces.” (78)

“Once we have dwelt in a particular house of fiction, we hold within us the memory of the landscapes and intimate spaces it affords. And that memory furnishes and redesigns our interior spaces where thought is born and nurtured.” (79)

“Our lives are lived in relationship to words, written and spoke, sacred and mundane. They are manna for the journey.” (86)

“Conversation is a form of activism . . .” (89)

“Curiosity is a form of compassion . . . ‘What is it like for you?’” (98)

“When silences are allowed, conversation can rise to the level of sacred encounter.” (107)

“Understand how richness of experience, even the most searing, blesses us in the struggle.” (115)

“Stories are pathways.” (121)

“High intelligence involved in word play offers not only entertainment but encouragement.” (188)

“The story is told of Mother Teresa that when an interviewer asked her, ‘What do you say when you pray?’ She answered, ‘I listen.’ The reporter paused a moment then asked, “The what does God say?’ She replied, ‘He listens.’ It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer.”  (211)

“When the mystics speak of prayer, they are talking about that which will create in us a new structure of consciousness.” (O’Connor, Elizabeth, in McEntyre, 220)

The Gleanings Project: Scripture, Ethics & The Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships

“Gardens at Ceperley House, Burnaby Art Gallery” Phone Photo, DS

In my youth I avidly read each book required by courses. I joined into class discussion, my hand always in the air. Debates fascinated. Once upon a time, in a flurry of defences, I argued against free will. When I listened, I became convinced of the other side, for a lifetime. Mrs. Krueger was the freedom fighter. I wonder now at her background. Were her arguments from experience?

I was more to be found on the dance floor than at the library door. I married young and had my children. It was then, in the hours after bedtime, and during naps, that I read as if my life depended on it. The first tome was Gone With the Wind. I began university and was interrupted by life many times. This became my pattern. 

The Gleanings Project will be part of one of those interruptions. I will glean books for glimpses of knowledge and wisdom, fun and study, using fewer than 500 words (with a few exceptions). Later, I will get down to serious work again. Thank you for being companions on the way. Your likes and comments are awesome.

 

Keen, Karen R. Scripture, Ethics & The Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships. Grand 

Rapids: Michigan, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018.

 

658 Words

 

The evangelical world is facing increasing tension as leaders like Hatmaker express affirmation of same-sex relationships . . . so what is causing some Christians to switch sides in the debate? (Keen, ix)

 

I had resigned myself to a celibate life and focused on serving in ministry . . . Then something happened . . . The more I dug into the Bible . . . gnawing sense that my previous conclusions were incomplete. New questions arose that I had not considered before . . .  false stereotypes . . . As our knowledge of human sexuality and sexual orientation increases, I suspect we will continue to grow in our pastoral response . . . explore the inspired authors’ intended meaning . . .  (x)

 

In what ways does the Bible inform our ethical practices? . . . explore the biblical authors themselves to see how they interpret . . . implications . . .  life-giving . . . (xi)

 

The trend of treating same-sex attraction as a spiritual or medical disorder continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (2)

 

Same-sex attraction cannot be simplistically characterized . . . C.S. Lewis in a letter to a friend, suggested gay people have a lifelong condition and declined to offer a spiritual explanation for causation . . . he suggested that gay people can find a redemptive purpose in their lot . . . The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God should be made manifest in him . . . Lewis was before his time, and it would be many years before the church at large caught up with him . . . others were rethinking the issue. Notably, gay and lesbian people themselves began challenging both ancient and modern theories of disorder; testifying that their lives did not match prevailing negative assumptions . . . 1969 Stonewall rioters launched a visible fight for dignity and fair treatment. Shortly thereafter, in 1972, the United Church of Christ began ordaining gay and lesbian pastors, the first mainline denomination to do so. (3)

 

Religious Right organizations . . . psychological theory that same-sex attraction was environmentally caused . . . In response, churches became more supportive of efforts to heal or cure gay or lesbian people rather than criminalize them . . . Gay people are admirable saints called to a celibate life. (8)

 

The 2000’s brought another significant shift in the conservative church’s response . . . awareness that sexual orientation change is unlikely for many. Like previous shifts, this was brought about by the stories of gay people, namely, young Christians whose testimonies differed from classic ex-gays . . . These young Christians often reported growing up in loving homes and had no history of destructive behavior. They remained devoted to God and committed to chastity. (9)

 

Celibate gay Christians who lend their voices to this movement include Wesley Hill [Regent College] . . . [and] gay members married to people of the opposite sex who are straight . . . This movement has made significant contributions to theologies of friendship and community . . . held up as examples of how to live a self-sacrificial life . . . Currently, the conservative church finds itself with a palette of options. (11)

 

Gay-affirming evangelicals have gained traction through the support of biblical scholars who are providing new arguments rooted in traditionally accepted hermeneutics . . . now an in-house [debate] . . . (13)

 

If historical trends continue, whatever paradigm shifts occur in the future will likely flow from gay and lesbian Christians truthfully testifying about their lived reality. (14)

 

The biblical authors do not write about the morality of consensual same-sex relationships as we know them today . . . The current debate on same-sex relationships centers on anatomical (or bodily) complementarity, including the role of procreation. (20)