Happy Belated Ordination Mom!

Today, I celebrate my mother’s ordination into the denomination of churches that she and my father serve with. Her ordination happened quite some time ago, but at the time, I didn’t see it as something extra-ordinary. I didn’t post news of the occurrence anywhere. I didn’t plan a celebratory dinner, buy her a gift for the occasion, or even send her a card. Weird, since I usually look for excuses to celebrate and give gifts and write gushing love letters to those I love. Today, I realize that I took it for granted. It was a natural progression of things…as normal and everyday as taking a shower or getting the diploma in the mail that you already walked across the stage for. See, my mother has ministered alongside my father since before this soon-to-be-36-year-old-girl was even thought of. I grew up watching her gentle, calm, assertive wisdom minister to women and men alike. Sure, there were lots of women’s aglow type meetings that I went to with her, but I never really took stock of whether or not there were men and women in the room, or just women, because it was never an issue. She spoke on Sundays, Wednesdays, in between the week days and for all kinds of occasions. She exemplified all those lovely things we typically ascribe to the feminine: gentleness, patience, forbearance, meekness, traits that belong to any good teacher, leader, or pastor, male or female. Furthermore, I sat under some serious, good old-fashioned fire and brimstone preaching from both women and men. It wasn’t an issue. So, I never thought of it….until some recent church experiences, conversations with friends, and the can’t-seem-to-avert-my-eyes-from Mark Driscoll reposts and the debates that follow. I have mostly come to terms with the things I didn’t like about my experiences in the mostly rural, seemingly traditional, charismatic, sometimes fundamentalist churches I grew up in, making friends, so to speak with them, holding tight to the beautiful things like sharing meals, buying groceries for one another, cleaning each other’s houses, and learning the language of the Holy Spirit, but I failed to include the affirming women voices in the church thing, yes, even in the pulpit in ways I, as a burgeoning little girl and young woman was able to witness and partake in. I was reading about the voices of women in Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds and going through my own longings for those voices of women that were silent growing up or that I would have liked to of heard more from, or hear more from now, in the present from those in my family. However, now, as I belatedly reflect on the ordination of my mother, I realize that some of those longings were already met in the past, along with the messy conservative and charismatic church stuff too. Then, recently, I started delving a little back into some of the feminist and liberation theology books I read a while ago, when I was in the beginnings of my doctoral studies, to see if I might use some of those ideas to contribute to lenses I might look through regarding my dissertation in the field of education. Since I went a slightly different route, I haven't looked back into some of those books for a while, but then I reread some of these articles recently and couldn’t believe the relevance to what I’ve been feelin’ pretty fired-up about lately: “The critical principal of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive...The goal of feminist theology cannot be simply to reverse the distortion [in which males are made the norm of humanity and women or the other are used as a scapegoat for evil] by making men or certain classes and races or nonhuman creation subordinate. Rather, feminist theology must search for a new mode of relation that is inclusive of all." -Reuther The New Vision of Feminist Theology Then, a succeeding article in the text states this: "A feminist theology of ordained ministry takes seriously human embodiment, in all its various forms, as the place where humans encounter God. The example of Jesus' inclusive, destabilizing, and nonhierarchical ministry serves as a model. This understanding of ministry is inclusive, in that distinctions of sex, race, and class are irrelevant. Many are called to ministry, although some have gifts for certain roles, such as leadership or preaching. This approach to ministry is destabilizing, in that it questions the usefulness of all human structures. (as Christ did often I add) The extent to which structures and institutions serve the message of the gospel is the measure of their value. And this ministry is critical of hierarchy for its tendency to concentrate power in a few. A feminist theology of ministry is one of empowerment, serving to energize the community, not to rule over it." -Ross in God's Embodiment and Women." I also read in Jan Richardson’s book, In the Sanctuary of Women this beautiful quote that compliments these writers from a few decades ago: “Across the centuries, women have carried prayers in our bones and in our blood. We have passed down the sacred stories from body to body. We have struggled to know our lives as sacred texts, to perceive the ways that God has written God’s own story within us, to understand how the Word still seeks to take flesh in and through us. And we have hungered for places of safety and of community in which to do this, to gather in the company of others whose stories and prayers both echo and challenge our own.” How is it, that as an educated woman, thankful to be confident in my field, equally feeling competent and humbled by the grace of God to have moved within the circles I live and breathe in, confident that God has breathed divine life and spoken prophetic words to me towards a way of living, working, studying, teaching, and speaking on many life-giving and humanizing topics, that all of a sudden, I am struggling with feeling unsafe, unworthy, and disaffirmed as a woman to use my voice in particular spaces? How do some circles in the year 2013, that have all the marks of being progressive, feel more oppressive to me as a woman than those communities I grew up in? To combat this, and do some good-ole Pentecostal proclamations against the evil and untruths swarming in my head and heart, causing the unsteadiness, I call out a celebration of a woman affirmed, a woman who is my favorite woman on the planet, my biggest fan, my mother: HAPPY BELATED ORDINATION MOM! YOU’VE MADE ME THE PROUDEST AND MOST AFFIRMED GIRL IN THE WORLD! And I also add thanks to my dad, for whom, it was never an issue, for whom, he never needed to proclaim how good he was for “allowing it”, because it was the most natural thing in the world.