Insights Spring 2014

Crossings

Insights The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

Spring 2014

Cuéllar • Foley • Kim • Mercer • Fosua DuBois • Donahue • White • Rigby • Underwood

Insights

The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary Spring 2014

Volume 129 Number 2 Editor: Cynthia L. Rigby Editorial Board: Jennifer L. Lord, David F. White, and Randal Whittington The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

John E. Alsup Whitney S. Bodman Allan Hugh Cole Jr. Gregory Cuéllar Lewis R. Donelson William Greenway David H. Jensen David W. Johnson Paul K. Hooker

Timothy D. Lincoln Jennifer L. Lord Suzie Park Cynthia L. Rigby Kristin Emery Saldine Monya A. Stubbs Asante U. Todd Theodore J. Wardlaw David Franklin White

Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: crigby@austinseminary.edu Web site: austinseminary.edu Entered as non-profit class bulk mail at Austin, Texas, under Permit No. 2473. POSTMASTER: Address service requested. Send to Insights, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797.

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COVER: “Bipolar Coils III” by Michael Knutson; 36" x 36," oil on canvas, ©2009. Used with permission from the artist. See more of Michael Knutson’s work at reed.edu/art/faculty/ knutson/gallery/gallery-01.html

Contents

2 Introduction

Theodore J. Wardlaw

Crossings 3

Reading Border Texts as Sacred Texts

by Gregory Cuéllar

11 Gregory Cuéllar “Storied Spaces, Sacred Places”

An Interview

15 Reflections

Mapping the Ritual Body

by Edward Foley

Disrupting Boundaries and Walls

by Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Women, Congregations, and Conflict

by Joyce Ann Mercer

29 Pastors’ Panel Safiya Fosua, Beth DuBois, Consuelo Donahue

33 Required Reading

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, written by James K. A. Smith, reviewed by David White

35 Christianity and Culture When Compassion Crosses Boundaries

by Ralph Underwood

40 Questions for Study

Introduction

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hen I ponder the various essays that follow, I wander back in my memory to a long weekend trip to the Big Bend Country of Texas. This is the Texas that relatively few people know. It is only thinly populated, and is lonely and vast with seemingly endless horizons and desert basins and majestic rocky mountains—some of the tallest mountains in America. That time two years ago was spent exploring the beauty of it all, and one day we went to the edge of the Rio Grande. In this particular spot along the southern border of the United States, just a short distance of what becomes brutal desert, the river slices through tall rock cliffs on either side. They couldn’t be more than fifty yards apart and it would be easy to climb the thirty stories or so to the top and have a shouted conversation with someone on the other side. It had rained mightily several days before this visit, and there was a section along the muddy banks of the river on the U.S. side which displayed what seemed like hundreds of footprints now hardened in the mud. I wondered about those footprints. Were they from tourists, like me, just enjoying the feel of bare feet in the squishy mud and maybe a cautious wade into the American side of that flowing water? Or were they perhaps the feet of those who had crossed from the Mexican side on their way to what they hoped and prayed would be a better life?

Those footprints have repeatedly come to mind as I have read through this issue of Insights with its theme of “Crossings.” Gregory Cuéllar, in his fascinating opening piece, thinks, all at once, of the multiple daily crossings through the Rio Grande, the many retablos they have generated, and the ultimate crossings which so define our Judeo-Christian heritage—the formative crossings of the Children of Israel. Edward Foley, in his thought-provoking article on the power of ritual, parable, and ambiguity, suggests the “crossing” inherent in the ministry of Jesus that is forever dismembering and re-membering his hearers to this good day. Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s article is a must-read, and calls upon her Asian heritage to frame the movement of the Spirit in terms of “chi” and “eros” as it, too, propels our crossing through and over the boundaries that maintain oppressive structures. Joyce Mercer’s examination of conflict transformation imagines the empowering necessity of crossing from spaces that are defined by conflict to those redemptive spaces inhabited by God’s presence.

Our pastors’ panel, featuring the reflections of Safiyah Fosua, Beth DuBois, and Consuelo Donahue, invites conversation regarding the boundaries and borders that show themselves in the life of congregations. David White introduces us to James K. A. Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom, and Ralph Underwood ends this issue with a piece on the border-crossing power of compassion.

Before you read on, allow me one last note—another crossing. Professor Cynthia L. Rigby, who has faithfully served as editor of Insights for ten years, is stepping down from editing the journal as of this issue. She has been a wonderful colleague in this work, and has had a huge impact upon its quality and creativity. On behalf of the Seminary and the readers of Insights, I write to thank you, Cindy, for your amazing leadership.

Theodore J. Wardlaw

President, Austin Seminary 2

Reading Border Texts as Sacred Text Gregory Lee Cuéllar

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raversing the borders of faith, culture, and artistic expression is the Mexican migrant votive painting on a sheet of tin. Referred to in Spanish as a retablo,1 these offerings of thanksgiving create a space for Mexican migrants to paint their stories. In the words of Ana Maria Piñeda, “Recording untold stories of struggle, hope, and faith these new ‘painted books’ literally hang from church walls along the border.”2 In the 20th-century retablos exvotos, sampled in the Mexican Migration Project3 and in the book by Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Miracles on the Border, miracles are mediated through sacralized images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and cherished saints.4 As Durand and Massey describe, these “holy images provide a cultural anchor for people adrift in a sea of strange experiences, exotic tongues, and odd customs.”5 This belief in the miraculous is rooted in the Mexican Catholic-mestizo tradition in which certain holy images function as channels for prayer and are understood to be mediators of the divine to humanity.6 Hence, their appearance in retablos ex-votos is a public expression of faith and gratitude for having received divine favor throughout the migratory journey.7 These offerings hang together on the chapel wall alongside other holy symbols in the church. There, they reveal the migrant community’s sacred tapestry of border stories, all of which sustain the collective belief that God

Gregory Cuéllar is assistant professor of Old Testament at Austin Seminary. He served as curator of The Colonial Mexican Imprint Collection at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M University. He earned the MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the PhD from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. He is the author of Passages in the New World (2006) and Voices of Marginality (2008).

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Crossings loves the immigrant.

Within the context of reading scripture, can these narrativized experiences of the Mexican migrant journey inform a richer understanding of migration found in the Hebrew Bible? As Ana Maria Piñeda suggests, the theme of immigration is an obvious point of intersection between the biblical text and the U.S. Latino/a immigrant experience, “The migrant deals with many of the same dangers that strangers in the Old Testament sometimes encountered: the real possibility of rejection, of getting lost in an unfamiliar land, and not knowing how to cope with its customs and structures.”8

Rather than consult biblical commentaries for understanding the theme of migration in biblical texts, the following reading gives preference to the narrativized vision of immigration in two 20th-century Mexican retablos. Such a reading aims to place the biblical story of immigration alongside the Mexican migrant retablo in order to orient our theological imagination toward a recurring human experience.

Rather than add something new to notions of textual development or authorial intention, the proposed reading is a hermeneutical border-crossing exercise through which two seemingly unrelated sacred texts are brought into dialogue. Perhaps, they have more in common than we might expect.

The Virgin of San Juan de Los Lagos as the Female Icon of Mexican Migrants

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he image most frequently addressed in the 20th-century Mexican retablos sampled in the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and in the book Miracles on the Border is the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos. Throughout these retablos, she appears as a faithful mediator of divine mercy and justice for many Mexican migrants. The migrant community not only ascribes to her the roles of daughter of God, mother of Jesus, and wife of the Holy Spirit, but also considers her to be the maternal face of God.9 In Durand and Massey’s words, “no other image approaches the Virgin of San Juan in attracting the devotion of migrants to the United States.”10 In this regard, her dominant appearance in these votive paintings reveals less a popularized cultural image of the Virgin Mary than a shared feminine theological vision of Mexico-U.S. immigration.

The veneration of this female icon, however, does not originate from a U.S.Mexico border context. Initial encounters with the image’s miraculous abilities were reported to have occurred in the 17th-century colonial town of San Juan near the present city of Guadalajara, Mexico. According to Father Francisco de Florencia’s 18th-century religious history titled, Origen de los dos celebres santuarios de la Nueva Galicia obispado de guadalaxara en la America septentrional, the original miracle associated with the image of the Virgin occurred in 1623 in the chapel of the local hospital.11 Based on testimony was Licenciado Juan de Contreras Fuerte, a former head chaplain of the chapel which housed the image, a family of acrobats was traveling throughout the Archdiocese of Guadalajara and arrived in the town of San Juan—the territorial jurisdiction of Aclade Mayor de Los Lagos.12 The family’s acrobatic acts included the youngest daughter crossing a tightrope suspended over 4

Cuéllar a series of daggers and swords while at the same time executing multiple flips and turns. During a practice session, the young daughter lost her balance and fell off the tightrope onto the point of a dagger—leaving her dead.13

At her funeral service in the San Juan chapel, a large crowd of indigenous people came to offer their condolences. From the crowd, an indigenous woman named Anna Lucia approached the parents with the comforting message that the Cihuapilli (Nahuátl for Lady, princess) would make their daughter whole again. She then entered the sacristy and brought out the image of the Virgin of San Juan. She placed the image over the chest of the deceased girl. Not soon after, those present saw the girl regain consciousness. They removed her covering and she walked away completely cured.14 In 1634, Archbishop Gómez de Cervantes commanded that the image of the Virgin of San Juan be placed in a prominent space in the chapel.

Rooted in this story of a resurrected female tightrope walker, the image of the Virgin of San Juan continues to be a revered holy female icon—especially among Mexican migrants journeying northward to the United States. In this respect, the tightrope stands as the U.S.-Mexican border and the acrobat is reproduced in the migrant. In her essay titled, “Tightrope Walking the Border: Alambrista and the Acrobatics of Mestizo Representation,” Cordelia Candelaria refers to this bordercrossing experience as tightrope-walking acrobatics in which “there is a constant balancing of contradictions and defying of binary oppositions while simultaneously embracing the very alienation produced by colonized marginality.”16 Certainly, this remark not only highlights the chasm between the border-crossing migrant and the U.S. citizen, but also the severed kinship ties that occur as a result of the migrant’s passage.

To take the tightrope metaphor still further, the border represents a site of intense physical, economic, and cultural struggle for migrants. The U.S.-Mexican border, as portrayed by Gloria Anzaldúa, “es una herída abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.”17 It is not simply that the U.S.-Mexico border is wrought with conflict or that crossing it clandestinely violates U.S. sovereignty; rather, the issue at hand is the way in which the faith of migrants transposes their northward journey into the realm of the sacred. Indeed, as seen in the Old Testament, the convergence of faith and migratory journey cannot be understood outside of the sacred. In exploring the issue of faith attendant to the migrant U.S.-Mexico bordercrossing experience and in keeping with the focus on the Mexican migrant retablo as sacred border text, I opt to examine two 20th-century Mexican votive paintings, which, in turn, will serve as templates for reading the themes of border-crossing and desert wandering in the Old Testament.

The retablo ex-voto in Figure 1 (below) was prepared by Amador de Lira. Its rustic nature suggests that the devotee himself painted the piece rather than hiring a professional retablo painter.18 In the text, Amador de Lira gives thanks to the Virgin of San Juan “for the miracle of saving him and his five friends from the dangerous river while crossing the Rio Grande onto the United States.”19 Although not 5

Crossings

Figure 1 Retablo of Amador de Lira Undated. Oil on metal. 14.7 x 24.4 cm. Durand-Arias collection.

mentioned specifically in the text, the Virgin of San Juan appears in her standard depiction above the Rio Grande. In this liminal space of the border, the Virgin of San Juan is disassociated from any national allegiance. Her only concern is the safe passage of the six migrants fording the river northward.

In the painting, five of the figures are carrying buckets, parcels, or pails in their hands, which likely contain shoes, dry clothes, and other personal items; whereas, the man underneath the letters “DR” carries a bag over his shoulder. Durand and Massey observe that, “a sense of sinister danger is communicated by the dark tone of the painting, which depicts the men crossing into a gloomy forest.”20 The hazy colors used to paint the six migrants organically link them to the surrounding landscape—perhaps, emphasizing the clandestine nature of their journey.

The text in the retablo flows along the top contours of the river—drawing attention to its ominous current. In the painting, the dammed river current takes on a wall-like structure, which allows the migrants to cross it unharmed. Supporting this view is the description in the text in which the Virgin of San Juan is credited for the miracle of damming the peligroso (dangerous) river for the safe passage of these migrants.

The Old Testament contains multiple texts that connect with the themes of God damming river waters to allow for the safe passage of Israel. In Joshua 3, for example, the central theme is the God of Israel stopping the Jordan River to allow for Israel’s safe—albeit unauthorized from the inhabitants’ view—crossing. Verses 15-16, state, “Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest. So when those who bore the ark had come to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the edge of the water, the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap …”21

It can be said that in both this text and the votive painting by Amador de Lira, there are barefoot migrant men and women crossing clandestinely a river that miraculously was made to stand in a “single heap” (single wave or dam/ ). As in 6

Cuéllar the biblical text, the migrants walk alongside waters massed together in the form of a wall, which in the retablo text is central to the miracle event. In both stories, the rivers crossed serve as natural territorial boundaries. Yet through divine intervention, both the Mexican migrants and the sojourning Israelites are given safe passage to lands considered flowing with milk and honey.

Many Christians in U.S. society would probably find it difficult to imagine the Mexican migratory journey as sacred, much less legitimate its placement alongside Israel’s paradigmatic sojourning story. Inseverable from contemporary Mexican migrant border-crossings are their negative portrayal in the U.S. press. Stories of faith and divine intervention are often subsumed under the dehumanizing label of “illegal.” Yet the migrants’ story as seen through this votive painting, and with a view toward the Bible, brings the sacredness of their humanity to the fore. Perhaps through such an exercise, stereotypes and prejudices can be rendered static—even if for a moment—to hear the other side of the story.

Figure 2 Retablo of Braulio Barrientos 1986. Oil on metal. Dimensions unknown. Sanctuary of San Juan de Los Lagos

The retablo ex-voto in Figure 2 is dated November 1986 and was prepared by Braulio Barrientos of Rancho Palencia, Guanajuato. It shows him and his three companions attempting to “re-emigrate” to the United States through the desert with a limited water supply. Both the text and the painting capture the scorching effects of the harsh desert landscape. The text reads, “Traveling in such great heat and with such thirst, and without hope of drinking even a little water.”22 In the painting, the migrants are depicted crossing a high desert, as indicated by the cacti and scrub bushes. The intense white sun rays contrast with the snow-capped peaks in the distant background.

The migrants’ shadows on the desert floor sharply define the intensity of the sun’s heat. The combination of the sweltering sun and the scarcity of water render the four migrants exhausted and powerless. Standing near the male migrants is 7

Crossings the Virgin of San Juan. Both the nimbus and scrub bush lend their aid to support her image. The two migrants on the left look up and forward, acknowledging her presence. Only by invoking the Virgin of San Juan were the migrants able to arrive safely to their northern destination.

In terms of its biblical connection, the depiction of Israel’s wilderness wanderings in the book of Exodus provides a compelling analogy to the desert crossing narrated in this votive painting. In both sacred texts, the image of migration involves a desert journey in which the theme of hunger, thirst, and external enemies are at the fore. In the wilderness, Israel is at the disposal of the elements—drought and hunger (e.g. Ex 15:22-23; 16:1-6; 17:1-7).23 Beginning in Exodus 15:22-27, the Israelites struggle to find water in v. 22: “Then Moses ordered Israel to set out from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur. They went three days in the wilderness and found no water.” This eventually gives rise to frustration and complaints in v. 24: “And the people complained against Moses, saying ‘What shall we drink?’” In Exodus 16:3, Israel lacks food: “… for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” In Exodus 17:1, Israel encounters thirst: “From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.” In this narrative, the Israelites’ fear of dying suggests a severe thirst within the camp: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”(v. 3) The themes of desert survival and miraculous provisions in the Exodus story are not far removed from the Mexican migratory experience inscribed in the retablo ex-voto above.

Increased border militarization has forced many desperate migrants to reach the “American Dream” through one of six principle routes, the 130-mile long El Camino del Diablo (the Road of the Devil), which starts in Ajo, Arizona, and goes west toward Yuma, Arizona.24 The Camino del Diablo is a tortuous, unmarked hundred-mile journey in which ample water and food supply are essential. The keys to surviving the journey are the water holes scattered throughout the arid landscape. The paucity of water holes and the miles between them (17, 23, 31, 3, 17, and 40) create the right conditions for an endless series of tragedies, hence the name “The Way of the Devil.”25 The inconsistency in the water supply often leads many migrants to wander the desert in circles. As the nonprofit Humane Borders has shown, from October 1999 through June 2013, 2,471 deaths were recorded at the Arizona-Mexico border.26 Many unclaimed skeletal remains of migrants continue to be recovered throughout this stretch of desert. Fortunately for the migrants in the votive painting, their lives were miraculously spared.

The points of intersection between Israel’s desert wanderings in Exodus and the Mexican migrants’ desert journey in the retablo ex-voto are not completely tidy.

There are many elements within these stories that follow divergent cultural agendas (e.g. Deuteronomistic history versus Mexican Catholic Mariology). Yet, even in light of these discrepancies, there are points where their separate orbits align. At these points a mutual bond occurs in the sojourning experience, in the desert crisis, and in the divine encounter.

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Cuéllar

Conclusion

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o view human life as a journey or a pilgrimage may not require much imagination. Apprehensions to such an analogy, however, may set in when this journey metaphor is viewed in conjunction with the sojournings of ancient Israel. Certainly, our social location is an important factor in determining which journey experience lends itself to an apt comparison with the Israel’s story in the Bible. Within a U.S. context, the national narrative is latent with parallels between the early Puritans and the chosen people of Israel in the Old Testament. Despite the loss of indigenous American peoples, this parallel remains an integral part of U.S. nationhood.

Such nationalistic loyalties, however, may not allow as easily a parallel between the Mexican migratory journey and the wilderness wanderings of Israel. Yet by crossing over from the Bible to these 20th-century Mexican migrant retablos, we are invited to enter into a liminal space that can stimulate new ways of imaging our world.

For our current global context, there is a dire need to reimagine an approach to the recurring reality of immigration that is more just and humane. To those committed to the Christian church, the best place to begin is with the migratory stories in the Bible, from Hagar’s deportation to Jesus’s exile in Egypt. These biblical stories of immigration have much to offer when placed alongside contemporary stories of immigration. Crossing back and forth within this narrative terrain may require transgressing our own cultural borders and nationalistic loyalties. This border-crossing hermeneutic enjoins us to sever ties with oppressive value judgments about the “Other.” Simply stated: How do we honor our differences while at the same time lift up our common humanity? The analogy between the contemporary Mexican migratory story and Israel’s sojournings may not achieve perfect alignment; however, there are enough common elements that warrant them being read side by side. Indeed, the most persuasive element between the two examined above are the themes of human journey through a desert, the crossing of a border/river, and the need for divine intervention. Perhaps this is sufficient to render both stories as sacred texts. v

NOTES

1. The words retablo and ex-voto are used more or less interchangeably to indicate a votive painting on a sheet of tin. Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), 5. An ex-voto, according to Gloria Kay Gifford, is a votive painting hung on a church wall or placed near a particular image to commemorate the recovery of the donor from some grave danger. Mexican Folk Retablos: Masterpieces on Tin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 119.

2. Ana Maria Pineda, “Imagenes de Dios en el camino,” 373. She also posits that the retablo ex-voto painted by local artists or by the supplicants themselves may be a contemporary rendering of the ancient Mesoamerican “painted book.”

3. Mexican Migration Project, http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/ (accessed October 19, 2001).

4. Massey, Miracles on the Border, 68. These votive paintings represent a portion of a larger collection of 124 Mexican retablos that Durand and Massey assembled during the period from September 1988 through December 1993.

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5. Ibid.

6. Geraldine Wheeler, “Three Theologians and their Favorite Paintings,” Arts 18 (2006): 8.

7. Massey, Miracles on the Border, 62.

8. Pineda, “Imagenes de Dios en el camino,” 374.

9. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 2003), 85.

10. Ibid.

11. Francisco de Florencia, Origen de los dos celebres santuarios de la Nueva Galicia, obispado de Guadalaxara, en la América Septentrional : noticia cierta de los milagrosos favores que hace la Santíssima Vírgen a los que en ellos y en sus dos imagenes la invocan : sacada de los processos autenticos, que se guardan en los archivos del obispado, de orden del Ilmô. y Rmô. señor D. Juan de Santiago León Garavito / por el P. Francisco de Florencia de la Compañia de Jesús (México: Imprenta de D. Phelipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1766), 52-54.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibed.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. “Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants,” in Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants, eds. Nicholas J. Cull and David Carrasco (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 140, 145, 146.

17. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 3.

18. Massey, Miracles on the Border, 90.

19. Ibid., 131.

20. Ibid., 90.

21. Unless otherwise noted, biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

22. Massey, Miracles on the Border, 135.

23. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 8.

24. John Annerino, Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999), 9-11.

25. Ibid., 15.

26. Humane Borders / Fronteras Compasivas, “Migrant Death Data” http://www.humaneborders. org (accessed, December 2, 2013).

The retablos in Figures 1 and 2 are reprinted from Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States by Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey © 1995 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

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Interview

Gregory Cuéllar

“Storied Spaces, Sacred Places”

Professor Cuellar, you mention that the retablos often reflect belief in miracles. In your view, what can those who are uncomfortable with accounts of the miraculous learn from the stories of those who speak more freely of miracles?

I think the “journey” theme of the retablos speaks to anyone from whatever background or perspective they come. These stories speak not just about miracles but also about families. They speak about community. Understanding this is a helpful entry point into these forms of artistic expression. If you look at the history of any church, there is most definitely a story. There were founding pastors, founding families. It is this shared experience of stories, families, and communities that unites us, rather than our different emphases on the miraculous. I think we need to start our conversations together at this intersection.

All of the stories of immigrants, as you say, include families, communities, instances of resistance and solidarity. But they always also include the supernatural. I wonder if studying the retablos might inspire “mainline” churches in the United States to remember and retrieve the supernatural dimensions of their communal stories.

If they just turn to remembering the founding families of their church, they’ll see that there are moments of the miraculous that they could draw out and be encouraged by. Their spirituality would be enriched. And they would be more open to dialoging with, rather than keeping at arms’ length, the miraculous stories such as those reflected in these votive paintings.

You complicate the relationship between the sacred and the illegal. I was thinking about how the Boston Tea Party was illegal, but is remembered in American history as sacred. Harboring Jews in Germany was illegal, but we work, now, to preserve these incidences as signs of human goodness and hope. Do you think there’s a chance we might look back to this time of intense debate about immigration and recognize that a lot of sacred things were going on even if they were mingled with the “illegal.”

I think that the sacred has an important place in the political discourse, especially 11

Crossings when it has to do with immigration. This is because you’re dealing with human lives. The very nature of life has this sanctity that lies beneath it. Understanding the fullness of that sacredness requires a broader vision of not just the literature that’s coming out of the social sciences, but experiences of those who are actually migrating through the desert. What are their realities? What is their sense of home? And what is their sense of the American Dream? How do they understand their place in the debate? We can get a sense of some of what they are experiencing through oral tradition, either through song or, in this case, votive paintings.

When I think of liminal, I think of the Spanish word frontera, which means border. The border is a place of conflict. But it’s also a place of significant change. It’s that in-between space. It’s sacred.

It’s oppressive. It’s transformative.

Are there still churches that provide sanctuary for immigrants? Places where their stories can be told and heard? Or do churches now set aside the promise of sanctuary for the sake of supporting the law?

I think we need to be honest that we’ve often subsumed the Kingdom of Heaven under the U.S. interpretation of democracy. This is problematic because it means we have circumscribed significantly the gospel message. What these votive paintings do is show that there’s a definition of humanity that’s happening outside of those maneuvers. The challenge is: are we willing to relinquish some of those political loyalties to allow a broader definition of humanity?

What would this broader definition of “humanity” look like?

A larger vision of family, perhaps. What I’m really hoping is that these paintings 12

Interview will help us recapture the importance of family. This is what churches have always been about, actually—families coming together and worshiping together, experiencing God together. And by family I mean not only blood relatives, but also those who have journeyed with you and have in that way become brothers and sisters.

Experiencing together the miraculous rescue of crossing the Rio Grande—that’s part of what it means to be of a family of God. Why does Mary appear so often in these retablo stories?

What these paintings do, in highlighting the Virgin Mary as one of the principle vehicles for the miraculous, is to offer some new ways women and girls can understand themselves in relation to God’s movement in the world. The inclusion of Mary represents a staunchly feminized vision of God intervening in these migrants’ lives.

There are also always elements of “conquering” that are consistent with machismo.

The presence of Mary in the stories of these men invites men to be more vulnerable.

In order for them to be masculine, they need depend on a feminized version of God. You use the word “liminal” quite a bit in your article. Is that a word all of us should add to our vocabulary?

Yes. When I think of liminal I think of the Spanish word frontera, which means border. The border is a place of conflict. But it’s also a place of significant change. It’s that in-between space. It’s sacred. It’s oppressive. It’s transformative.

Do people want to be in the limin, the noun form, or is there a goal of moving into the center? Or is there even that option? Should they want to move to the center?

That’s a good question. There are songs that have been written by many migrants after they’ve migrated and have found employment and then lived several years in the U.S. and become disillusioned by the American Dream. I’m thinking of “The Golden Cage”—this is a migrant song. Migrants assimilate, but then don’t know where they have come from. They feel as if they’re encaged in this golden house. The point here is that liminal space may be the only space that allows for the dream to be actualized without the homeland being completely dismantled. What I mean is: on the limen, there’s still a sense of home.

What is the Old Testament attitude toward and about the migrant?

Well, the very word in Hebrew for Hebrew comes from the root word “to cross over.”

And early on—from the patriarchal journeys to Israel’s wanderings—you have this identity of Hebrew present among them, that they are a people group who cross national boundaries. They’re sojourning to a place of settlement. And they experience exile. Old Testament texts consider how identity formation happens within those places. How do you remember your ancestors in exile? How do you think of Zion and Jerusalem and the return? So you simply cannot avoid that theme in the Old Testament. From the very beginning it speaks of Adam and Eve being expelled.

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Crossings There is human movement happening early on, all the way to the pilgrimage experiences and to the prophetic literature.

Well, and into the New Testament Jesus says the man of God has no place to lay his head, you know. And about Christians, that this world is not your home. Essentially, Christians are told they are immigrants in the world.

Even the holy family was exiled to Egypt. It doesn’t take much philosophical or creative imagination, then, to see the theme of journey or migration in the Bible.

It’s simply just there outright.

How might paying attention to the retablos help us read the Old Testament better?

One hope is that when you look at the retablos, especially those that highlight a female vision of the divine, you will begin to see the feminized voices in the Old Testament texts. It may not be in the actual pronouns or even characters themselves, but there are ways to discover the feminine without stretching the text. I think you could become more sensitive to those feminine elements by reading the retablos in tandem with the biblical text. Another hope has to do with the fact that the stories of the Old Testament have been shaped by multiple hands developing stories through time. Especially if you’re using modern techniques for interpreting the biblical text, you can lose the human experience behind the biblical stories. I think that the retablos can help us remember that the stories of the Bible are personal stories given to us by particular communities with particular realities and crises. The retablos can help us see the humanness of the Old Testament stories. v

Please support the publication of Insights by making a gift online: AustinSeminary.edu/donate or by returning your gift in the enclosed envelope.

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Reflections

Mapping the Ritual Body: The Geography of Dis-Membering and Re-Membering Edward Foley, Capuchín

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or some of us of a certain age, geography was a required area of study in our primary school education. While I do not remember being required to learn any definition of geography—for, like arithmetic and our other subjects, we simply studied it—the definition instilled by that ritualized practice of learning was that geography was a subject that examined the surface of the earth. More precisely it seemed as though it was a study of capitols—like the capitols of the then 48 states—and boundaries. The test of our geographic knowledge was usually a cartographic exercise in which we had to reproduce a map of some area, attentive to notable mountain ranges and bodies of water.

Even while I was drafting my primitive maps of my country or state, however, scientists had long recognized that geography was more than a study of hills and gorges, arbitrary borders, or official political centers. In the 19th century, for example, the English physician John Snow produced one of the first works in medical geography by mapping a cholera epidemic in London.1 Snow’s work is one notable hallmark in the long tradition of human or social geography whose history stretches back to the beginning of physical geography. A work such as the Oxford Dictionary of Geography is a mind-boggling introduction to the myriad models and frameworks for thinking about the ways to map the broad array of physical and social geographies of both our planet and our universe.2

The smallest unit of geography from a social perspective is the human body. It is possible to inscribe, on both the individual and social human body, “power and resistance … a map of meaning and power … or a cultural representation of masculinity or femininity.”3 Susan Bordo is a scholar who—especially in her studies of how

Edward Foley is professor of liturgy and music and The Duns Scotus Pro-

fessor of Spirituality and at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He has written twenty-one books, including From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist (Liturgical Press, 2011), and more than 300 chapters, articles, and reviews. His current research projects include an exploration of interfaith theological reflection.

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Crossings women inhabit their “goodies” for good or for ill—demonstrates how important it is to reckon with bodies as culture texts where power and politics are perceived and performed.4

Ritual has often been understood as a vehicle for communicating content or information to the individual or corporate body, e.g., cultural identity. More recently, there has been a trend away from this “communicative” understanding of ritual and an increasing belief that ritual is a way of acting and can be righty understood as a strategy or even a technology.5 Some have identified this as a move away from a “classical consensus” around the nature of ritual to a more dynamic, even political, understanding of ritual. A particularly influential voice in this move was that of Catherine Bell who argued that “ritualization is a strategic play of power, of domination and resistance, within the arena of the social body.6

As a theologian I believe that ritualizing is not only about power, domination, and resistance and can also be, for example, a rehearsal and experience of trinitarian love. Nonetheless, I also think that Dr. Bell is correct in asserting that all rituals are, at least in part, exercises of power. Moreover, it seems theologically appropriate to consider ritualizing—and even that subspecies of ritual we call liturgy—as an exercise of power and a technology of change because of the revelation we have of Jesus Christ in his earthy ministry.

The Turn to Jesus As argued more extensively elsewhere, I believe Jesus was a gifted ritualizer.7 While I do not find most of the conclusions of a group like the “Jesus Seminar” very convincing in regards to how many of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament are authentic, I find it notable that even they agree that one of the authentic acts of Jesus was his continuous eating and drinking with social outcasts.8 He ate with throngs of Gentiles (Mark 8:1-9), even though food from Gentiles was considered unclean. He spent two days with the Samaritans (John 4:40) presumably eating and drinking with them, even though “Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans” (John 4:8). Even more shocking than these affronts to Jewish sensibilities is the frequent accusation that Jesus eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners: a charge leveled against him at virtually every strata of the New Testament (e.g., Mark 2:16, Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:34).

It is well recognized that one of the most characteristic forms of Jesus-speech was his use of parables: there are almost forty parables or parabolic images in the Gospel of Luke alone. One of the characteristics of parabolic speech is an element of surprise that disrupts the world of the hearer. In the words of Dominic Crossan, parables “are stories which shatter the deep structure of our accepted world and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity of story itself. They remove our defenses and make us vulnerable to God.”9 More mythic forms of storytelling—such as the classic tale Beauty and the Beast—demonstrate that all opposites and tensions can be resolved. Thus, despite the contradictions of beast and human, powerful and weak, rich and poor, male and female, captor and captive in that tale, all is so resolved in the end that we are told they lived “happily ever after.” Parables, 16

Foley on the other hand, suggest that while reconciliation is possible, it is not going to happen in the presumed way that the hearer expects.

Parabolic Rituals In many respects, Jesus’s ritualizing can be considered as enacted parables that disrupt and disorient both the participants and the observers. His continuous pattern of eating and drinking with sinners was a form of boundary crossing and boundary shattering. Similar to his spoken parables (e.g., Matthew 22:1-8), the enacted parable at table rewrote the guest list not only for the dining moment, but also for sharing in the reign of God that was being revealed in and through the Jesus table.

This was certainly disruptive for those gospel characters presented as more fixated on observing purity laws than exercising a godly love of neighbor.

Jesus’s table ministry was also happily disruptive for the tax collectors and sinners who found themselves as unexpected guests at the Jesus table. Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10) was not expecting that he would have to shimmy down that tree in Jericho and take in the young rabbi as his house guest. My imagination tells me that he was planning on staying safely up in that tree until the crowd dispersed, so that he could then make it home without being hassled by his neighbors and eat his dinner in quiet. But Jesus had another plan, as he always seemed to have. In parabolic mode Jesus dis-membered the Abrahamic body of the Jericho community, and re-membered it by naming Zaccheus as a child of Abraham (Luke 19:9) and heir to the reign of God revealed in that unlikely dinner invitation.

It also seems that Jesus’s own disciples—even the inner circle of the twelve— were being dis-membered and re-membered individually and collectively through Jesus’s parabolic practices. His foot-washing surprise at their final supper was clearly a shock to Peter, and presumably to the others. The social disruption enacted by the rabbi washing the feet of his disciples dismantled the presumptions of privilege in leadership that yet lingered among them even in this late stage of their formation. Apart from this particular parable directed to his inner circle, for almost three years the disciples witnessed the barrage of parabolic words and deeds that marked the public ministry of their teacher. In so doing, it was not only the world of the Samaritan woman, Pharisees, or tax collectors that was being deconstructed and reconstructed, it was also their own.

The Power of Ambiguity Parables are meant to be disruptive but not destructive, as they invite hearers and participants into a reimagined way of being. Foot washing dis-members and remembers; calling Zaccheus a true child of Abraham deconstructs a religious framework as it reconstructs a new one; eating with tax collectors and sinners disorientates diners and onlookers, as it reorientates them toward a different image of God and God’s reign. Parables have such a capacity because of their inherent ambiguity.

C. H. Dodd underscored this capacity decades ago when he wrote that the effect of a parable is to leave “the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”10 Parables are not puzzles that can be solved in only 17

Crossings one way. Rather, whether spoken or enacted, they provide a series of metaphorical dots that need to be connected by the hearers or participants, but not necessarily all in the same way. As each individual and community inhabits a particular body, so parables will confront and comfort each body in its own particularity.

As a public ritualizer in words and acts, in preaching and praying, I have a preference for shaping texts and actions so that they are consonant with the parabolic revelation we have in Jesus. At the same time my preaching and prayer leadership need to provide sufficient metaphorical and real space so that the hearers and participants can connect the dots in a way most helpful to them in their contexts and at this unique stage of their journey. To my way of thinking, one of the most powerful and underestimated gifts of the ritual experience is the power of its ambiguity. As the ritual inscribes itself on the individual and ecclesial body, so does that individual and community engage and interpret that ritual in ways most beneficial for themselves.

Many individuals already have enough disruption in their lives: trauma because of illness or financial distress, grief because of loss of job or death of a loved one. While my instinct is to shape ritual speech and ritual action so that its disruptive and disorientating gifts are apparent, my responsibility as a ritual leader is to provide enough ambiguity in the ritual so that its integrating and reorientating gifts are also in play. Ritually balancing the mythic with the parabolic recognizes that our liturgical actions and texts, song and speech, by definition must be acts of pastoral care. It is also resonant with the whole of the revelation in Christ whose own parabolic existence in history was resolved in Easter joy. Through his Resurrection, the promise of that deep joy was also inscribed on the ecclesial body of the baptized. Thus, as Emily Dickinson cajoles us, we should “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” so the truth can “dazzle gradually” and the seemingly disruptive gospel can remake us in the image of the Holy One. v NOTES

1. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

2. Susan Mayhew, Oxford Dictionary of Geography. 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Ibid. (under the heading “Body”)

4. Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Eds. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 13-33.

5. Edward Foley, “Eucharist, Postcolonial Theory and Developmental Disabilities: A Practical Theologian Revisits the Jesus Table.” International Journal of Practical Theology, 15: 2011, pp. 57-73.

6. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 204.

7. For example, see Edward Foley, From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009)

8. Robert Walter Funk, The Acts of Jesus: What did Jesus really do? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco), 352ff.

9 John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, IL: Argus Communications, 1975), 122.

10. Dodd, C. H. The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), 5.

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Disrupting Boundaries and Walls: Spirit-Chi and Eros* Grace Ji-Sun Kim

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n our world, everyone is close enough to be our neighbor. Intermingling cultures and religious practices can raise problems as we seek to raise our children. In such a world, it becomes vitally important to love, welcome, and embrace the stranger who comes to live by us. Rather than building fences and walls, we must reflect on how to connect with different cultures and religions.

The Presence of Spirit The Spirit, God’s presence in the world, works actively through us in pursuit of justice. This Spirit transforms the world by transforming us. Many theologians and philosophers describe the Spirit as imminent and willful. The Spirit blows and sweeps through the earth. It will bring about change and new life.1

The Spirit is movement. The Spirit, who goes between, moves through the borders and boundaries of space and time.2 The Spirit can move into the in-between spaces that marginalized people occupy. These are the hybrid spaces that marginalized peoples and foreign women are oftentimes relegated to. These hard-to-reach spaces can be obtained by the Spirit who can move into all places to bring healing *Editor’ s Note: In popular contemporary usage, “eros” connotes carnal lust of the flesh, contrasted, for example, with spiritual love or agape. In ancient philosophical and theological usage, however, it does not connote this opposition (see, for example, the work of Plato, Gregory of Nyssa, and Thomas Aquinas). Similarly, many contemporary feminist and aesthetic theologians use the term to denote the fundamental visceral pull toward the Good. Augustine observes “Our heart is restless until it rests in You” as a way of pointing to how humanity longs (with eros) for its true home in God.

Grace Ji-Sun Kim is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University.

She is the author of several books and articles, including most recently Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit (Palgrave, 2013). She co-edited with Jenny Daggers Reimagining With Christian Doctrines: Responding to Global Gender Injustices (Palgrave, 2014) and writes regularly on her blog, http:// gracejisunkim.wordpress.com/

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and wholeness. As the Spirit moves into these spaces of marginalization, wonderful and great things can occur. Spirit can bring liberation, new life, empowerment, life-balances, and life abundant. The Spirit makes life beautiful and meaningful. The Spirit provides the sustenance and flourishing which provide wholeness. The Spirit is timeless, suffusing memory across past and future, sharing with others to bring meaning in our lives.

Spirit-Chi We Asian-American women recognize the richness of our own religious, cultural, and historical heritage. We recognize that the Spirit is not a new concept but has always existed in our Asian identity. We closely identify our personal being with the amount of Spirit within us. We talk about how low or great our Spirit is on a daily basis. The word we use is “Chi.”

Chi is the Chinese word for “life energy.” Chi is the animating power that flows through all living things. A healthy person has more chi than one who is ill. Health implies the chi in our bodies is clear, like fresh tea or eucharistic wine, rather than turbid. Chi flows smoothly and clearly, like baptismal water, not lying stagnant, like death.

Chi is the life energy present in nature. Earth itself is moving, transforming, breathing, and alive with chi. Modern scientists speak the same language as ancient poets when they call the Earth “Gaia,” a living being. When we appreciate the beauty of animals, fish, birds, flowers, trees, mountains, the deep ocean, and floating clouds, we are sensing their chi and feeling an intuitive unity with them.3 We feel that same chi in ceremonies such as the Eucharist or the Asian tea ceremonies, which focus on ritual and blessed, simple ingredients.

The word chi is often associated with the divine and the Spirit within Asian understandings. Chi possesses the qualities described by the biblical understanding of the Spirit. Therefore, it may be meaningful to speak of the Spirit as Spirit-Chi.4

Eros Eros was the Greek god of love, and one of the Greek words meaning love, suggesting the more sensual, “erotic,” visceral aspects of the experience of love. Eros is not only about sex, though it certainly includes it. It connotes intimacy through the engagement of the whole self in a relationship in the absence of doubt, decorum, or duty. Eros fuels the passions of our lives by a sensual drive of physical, emotional, psychic, mental, and spiritual elements. Eros can be felt through our unique presence and the presence of others to us. Eros underlies all levels of spiritual experience and compels and propels us to be hungry for fairness in our depths. Eros binds us together and powers life and hope. It connects us to one another and even to ourselves. This connectedness is important as we try to live in community, neighborhoods, family, and society. When we connect with eros, we become less willing to accept powerlessness and self-denial. We are able to reject what makes us indifferent to the suffering, apathy, and self-hate of others. We can stand up against oppression and allow the empowering Spirit to energize our lives. As eros enables us 20

to connect all of us, it also connects us to the beauty of Gaia by sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.5

The notion of eros can help illuminate our conception of God as Spirit. Feminist theology adds a new voice to the work of liberation, salvation, and justice in the world by examining the power of eros. Spirit-Chi can be understood as possessing this power that transforms us and the world.

The Power of Embodied Love The power of eros is magnetic, attracting others. Magnetism creates motive power (as joules of heat can create newtons of force).6 As eros creates forces, we need to recognize the Spirit, which is the raw power within all of us that can create powerful transformations, moving people “to be of like mind.”7 In a fearful world, this connecting power of the Spirit is deeply needed and cherished. It will bring healing to the broken-hearted, comfort to the distraught, and wholeness to a world wounded by hate and despair.

The power of the Spirit, understood as eros, freely moves in and between us. It sets us on a path of dismantling destructive hierarchies. This powerful force challenges and erodes damaging institutions, which hold people captive.8 This loving, connecting power gives us enthusiasm for equality and love. “Through the erotic as power we become less willing to accept powerlessness, despair, depression and self-denial. The erotic is what binds and gives life and hope. It is the energy of all relationship and it connects us to our embodied selves.”9

This power of the Spirit stirs us to change. It inspires us to resist and dismantle institutional oppressions such as patriarchy, sexism, or racism. The power of love as eros empowers us to pursue justice everywhere. This fully embodied love energizes us to live at the fullest capacity of love. It is through this love that we can achieve unity and justice.10

Disrupting Boundaries and Walls In the mysterious abyss between God and us, we come to experience the power that will give us new life and encourage us to create new life in others. The uniting, justice-seeking power of God’s Spirit, the Chi, will transform our lives so that we can live a prophetic life by how we treat race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of our humanity in a broken world. As we open ourselves up to this power of the Spirit-Chi, may we take each other’s hand, walk in harmony, delight in our differences, and work to allow the Spirit-Chi to spread to the ends of the earth.

Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression build walls and boundaries to maintain and contain power by the powerful. These boundaries result from, and perpetuate, discrimination, prejudice, and subordination. Because of the pain and problems they cause, oppressive structures need to be dismantled.

Spirit-Chi can replace these spaces and change the dynamics of power. SpiritChi is present in these spaces; Spirit-Chi springs from the margins and grows in the margins. Spirit-Chi disrupts, contradicts, and also reconciles. Spirit-Chi empowers the marginalized to challenge the margins and expand the boundaries of privilege 21

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and oppression. Spirit-Chi contests the walls and boundaries to set up new ways of being. The dynamics of power become altered so that new energies and creativities can be released. Furthermore, the powerful are not abandoned. The oppressive systems and people who participate in them can heal and become whole. They can then join hands with the marginalized and walk together. This can be accomplished through the erotic power of the Spirit-Chi.

Spirit-Chi can disrupt spaces and bring wholeness to the marginalized and the oppressors. Boundaries and walls can be dismantled by the Spirit-Chi’s presence.

Spirit-Chi’s work disrupts and interrupts power structures. It challenges and transforms systems, communities, people, and worldwide currents.

Spirit-Chi embodies eros and will help us in our connected selves. The uniting power of the Spirit-Chi transforms us so that we can be instruments of love, peace, and harmony. The embodied power of the Spirit-Chi empowers us to work for justice where there is no justice and to bring love where there is no love. We need to recognize the mystery of the Divine and embrace the restorative power of the Spirit-Chi, embracing the healing of broken women’s bodies and celebrating their coming to wholeness. v NOTES

1. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 71.

2. Sigurd Bergmann, “Invoking the Spirit amid Dangerous Environmental Change,” God, Creation and Climate Change (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2009), 173.

3. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other: A Model of Global and Intercultural Pneumatology (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13, 14.

4. For further discussion on Spirit-Chi, please consult Kim, The Holy Spirit, Chi and the Other: A Model of Global and Intercultural Pneumatology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

5. Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: The Crossroad Publishing House, 1992), 40, 41.

6. Ibid., 25, 26.

7. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 75.

8. Ibid., 76.

9. Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power, 41.

10. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 78-79.

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Women, Congregations, and Conflict:

Why Church Conflict is So Difficult For (Some) Women Joyce Ann Mercer

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onflict transformation is sometimes described as the work of making safe spaces for difficult conversations and actions to take place. In recent years, many North American congregations have weathered intense conflicts over issues as wide-ranging as human sexuality, church music, and styles of worship. While some faith communities succeed in becoming safe spaces where persons of diverse viewpoints come together for tough conversations in search of ways to move forward together, others experience instead the destructive power of conflict as their faith communities became distinctly “unsafe” spaces for many people.

Some scholars suggest that women have greater difficulty with conflict. If this is the case, then it follows that women in faith communities are likely to have especially negative experiences of congregational conflict. While one cannot possibly graft any single way of dealing with conflict onto all women, any more than one can attribute a singular identity to women as if they constitute a unified group, it does make sense, given many women’s gender-role socialization as harmonizers, accommodators, caregivers, and peace-keepers, that there are gendered dimensions to congregational conflict.1

Conflicted Spaces Using the geographical metaphor of space to think about church conflict allows attention to dynamics that otherwise might be overlooked, such as the role of boundaries in constituting space, or the ways space can be organized to structure inclusion and exclusion and to shore up certain forms of power. People working in conflict transformation pay attention to space and its organization for just those

Joyce Anne Mercer is professor of practical theology and the Arthur Lee

Kinsolving Professor of Pastoral Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. She is the author of Girl Talk God Talk: Why Faith Matters to Adolescent Girls—and their Parents (Jossey-Bass) and of Welcoming Children: A Practical Theology of Childhood (Chalice). Joyce’s current work focuses on conflict and peace building.

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Mercer reasons. International negotiators, for example, carefully plan the location of diplomatic negotiations so that no party in the conflict will feel favored or slighted.

Family therapists carefully pre-arrange the seating for the therapy session, spatially orchestrating through the organization of the meeting space the parental unity and diminished triangulation they hope to effect in the family system. And conflict consultants working with churches pay close attention to the way contending groups position themselves in relation to one another, not only physically but also rhetorically and ideologically.

When the church becomes a space defined by conflict, that space can have a shaping impact, as conflict begins to surface in personal conflict-histories. Many women bring past histories of conflict, including some involving violence, into church conflict. An example may be seen in this comment by a church leader in a conflicted congregation: It was just horrible, the way the people in this church carried on. It was not a safe space, this room. They were shouting at each other and it almost came to shoving at times. No one actually threw a punch, but sometimes it felt like it to me. I should know; I’ve taken my share of punches in my life.

My former husband was abusive and it took a long time to get out of that relationship and feel safe again. This is a church, though. It’s supposed to be a safe place, about closeness, caring and love, without conflict and fighting.

—Ann K. (church member and elder) Ann speaks volumes about her experience of the conflict taking place in her congregation. Ann uses the term “space” to refer to a geographical location. But she also speaks out of a symbolic-imaginary notion of space that bears little resemblance to the actual situation in her church at the present time. In this conceptualization, churches are a particular kind of (idealized) space, notably, space that is safe and conflict free. A significant gap exists between these two notions of space for Ann, yet they operate simultaneously, informing her experience of church.

Church conflict is particularly difficult for Ann because her imagined, desired sense of the church as a safe space of close relationships gets called into question by her lived experience of the church-in-conflict’s power to evoke the past painful feelings and memories of not being safe in an intimate relationship.

As a woman, Ann is part of a group more likely to experience conflict as dangerous: women live and work within oppressive systems in which gender-based violence happens with considerable frequency. Whether physical (e.g., domestic partner violence, sexual assault) or symbolic (i.e., the violence of exclusion, greater economic vulnerability, etc.), violence against women remains a part of the physical, social, and psychological context in which women as a group differently experience conflict.2 The pervasiveness of gender-based violence means that many women bring personal and collective histories of conflict-related trauma and injury with them when they arrive at the church doors. These personal histories of trauma, of course, take shape in relation to other intersecting identities such as race, class, sexual orientation, poverty, military veteran status, etc., that further complicate the expe24

Crossings rience of church conflict. Traumatic events take many forms, but have in common a sense of threat and loss of control that is or feels as if it is beyond a person’s (or community’s) capacity to respond. Trauma creates “profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory. Moreover, traumatic events may sever those normally integrated functions from one another.”3 In trauma, the past refuses to stay in the past, continually intruding into the present with unbidden memories and emotions.

Not all conflict becomes physically violent, nor must an event involve physical violence to produce trauma. One common area of psychological trauma comes from what contemporary psychologists call “attachment injury.” Relational attachment is crucial for psychological well-being. Therefore, when conflict threatens to tear down the bonds between people and unsettle attachments it can wound deeply and even produce trauma.

Attachment injuries, unhealed, may well surface as recurring experiences of trauma, bringing forth disembodied feelings (panic, fear, anxiety) in the face of a new triggering event such as a conflict. Such feelings, objectively speaking, have nothing to do with the present situation: they are about an event from a different time and context. The feelings remain in the memory and in the bodily experience, yet are now unattached from the particular story of their origins (i.e., in Ann’s case, a previous abusive marriage). In a nutshell, this is the stuff of post traumatic stress. Church conflicts easily become opportunities to re-experience feelings from previous, traumatic attachment injuries that they attribute to the church conflict, because churches can be spaces of close relationships and relative intimacy. This often lends intensity to church conflicts as the space becomes one of trauma reenactment, particularly for women.

Conflict Geography Feminist geographer Doreen Massey offers a theory of space as a social reality, “thinking of space, not as some absolute independent dimension, but as constructed out of social relations”(2). This re-defining of space matters for Massey because power relations are embedded in space: “[S]ince social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification”(3).4 Such power arrangements often are played out in efforts to draw boundaries around a space and fix its meaning, thus “controlling” the identity attributable to that space. In recent church conflicts over sexuality, for instance, parties on various sides of those conflicts worked to draw lines around the space known as church in efforts to stabilize the meanings possible within that space (e.g., “what it means to be Christian is to be a person who believes/acts in this or that way about sexuality”), controlling the allowable identity of church/Christian in relation to sexuality.

Massey is keenly aware that space and place both are significant in the construction of gender relations because these terms carry symbolic meanings, many of which are gendered. As an example, she considers the historical construction of “home” as a woman’s place, noting that certain associations with home such as sta25

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bility, reliability, and comfort, come to be “coded female.” Massey’s work explores the deep connections between how gender identities take shape and the gendering of space in society: in the gendered social relations in spaces signifying home, notions of home participate in shaping the meanings attributed to being female, and at the same time, notions of what it is to be female participate in constructing the concept of home.

The church in the early twenty-first century is, arguably, also a space that has been “coded female,” as attested in the vast array of scholarship across the political and theological spectrum declaring the feminization of religion.5 Many characteristic dynamics stereotypically associated with Christian congregations bear associations with equally stereotypical, culturally feminine attributes, such as care, love, nurture, unity, and harmony, even in denominational and local contexts in which formal congregational leadership remains restricted to men. At the same time, patterns of gender-based oppression continue to operate on social relations between women and men in the church, in everything from the gendering of who does what kind of work in church life and forms of leadership to the use of language.

Although women obviously engage in conflict in churches (and elsewhere), conflict as a phenomenon appears culturally “coded male,” particularly in the form labeled as fighting. Women’s conflict behaviors, like those of conflicted churches as female-coded spaces, disrupt expected gender arrangements in the social-relational space that is church: women, like churches, are not “supposed” to fight. When they do, they become something of a spectacle. This creates a situation of double dis-ease about conflict for some women: they may struggle with it because it creates a sense of gender incongruity (women don’t fight) and in addition because it creates a sense of theological incongruity (churches don’t fight).6 There are important theological and biblical sources behind the symbolicimaginary notion of church that Ann expressed in her comment. There are equally important reasons, both theological and pragmatic, for preventing conflict where possible in the church. I am not making an argument here against those attributes and interests as appropriate norms for Christian faith communities. Rather, I see in Massey’s space/place theory a helpful way of making sense of the particular difficulty with which many women may experience church conflict, as the gendered and power-laden aspects of those spaces play out.

Practicing Conflict by Fighting Like Christians What practices might the church engage in to help create congregational spaces in which people “fight like Christians”? What if congregations treated conflict as a practice of faith, into which they apprenticed disciples? When congregations become spaces for skillful engagement of conflict as a practice of faith, harmful narratives of conflict may be disrupted, even transformed toward healing for women along with others in the church. What might this look like? First, churches must attend to how we shape the spaces in which we fight that take seriously the relationalsocial, and power-laden, nature of congregational space. Second, skillful facilitation of difficult conversations is an essential leadership skill in Christian community 26

Crossings into which many disciples (not only clergy) need to be apprenticed. This skill includes the ability to work with the multiple levels on which persons experience conflict, along with response to trauma dynamics. Third, Christian communities must model and teach deep listening. Listening well, a basic component of conflict transformation work, also is foundational in any genuine effort to care well for others. Fourth, apprenticing Christians in prayer practices that connect “head, heart, and spirit,” offering ways to center thoughts and feelings in awareness of the Divine presence as a way of keeping destructive conflict impulses in check, is also crucial. Last, cultivating community awareness of the ways different groups within the church, such as women, racial/ethnic and sexual minorities, children, older adults, etc., may have distinctive experiences of conflict is a way of nurturing persons in the art of valuing differences, a key part of practicing conflict as people of faith. v NOTES

1. Pamela Cooper-White. (1994). “Women and Conflict,” in The Living Pulpit Vol 3: 3, July-September 1994, pp. 44-45. Cooper-White maintains that women’s difficulties with conflict stems from the “loss of voice” that is socially imposed on them: “Conflict is frightening to many women, including those who consider themselves feminists … Women often avoid disagreement in order to preserve relationship, but often at the expense of their own truth—and sometimes their safety as well. In a social context of unequal power, where disagreement means disenfranchisement, agreement unconsciously becomes equated with respect and love.” (1994, 44).

2. B. Van der Kolk, S. Roth, D. Pelcovitz, S. Sunday, J. Spinazolla, “Disorders of extreme stress: The empirical foundation of a complex adaptation to trauma,” in Journal of Traumatic Stress. Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 389-399. Van der Kolk, et. al. (2005, p. 389-390) sum this up succinctly by pointing out the kinds of relationships in which women experience trauma: “Women are more likely to be traumatized in the context of intimate relationships than men are: 63% of the almost 4 million reported assaults on males are by strangers; whereas 62% of the almost 3 million reported attacks on women in the U.S. are by persons they know.”

3. J. L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery. (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).

4. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). http://site.ebrary.com/id/10151123.,

5. R. Griffith, Feminization of the clergy in America: occupational and organizational perspectives. Church History, 67(1) (1998)., 206-207. A. Halsall, The identity of young Anglicans: the feminization of the Anglican Church. In Religion, Education and Adolescence Cardiff, (Wales: Univ of Wales Press, 2005), 70-93. L. Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. (Dallas: Spence Pub, 1999)

6. While I am happy for such gender stereotypes to be disrupted, the phenomenon of concern here is how this situation contributes to the difficulty some women experience with conflict.

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Pastors’ Panel We asked religious leaders to reflect on the concept of boundaries and borders. Here is what they told us.

Can you identify a time in your ministry that it became evident that borders/ boundaries got in the way of the service to the gospel in church and world?

Safiyah Fosua, assistant professor of Christian ministry and congregational worship, Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University Early in ministry (in the United Methodist Church), while serving under a bishop that believed firmly in making pastoral appointments according to a minister’s gifts and graces for ministry, I frequently found that race, often more than gender, was a border that got in the way. When I accepted my first full-time ministry appointment, it was clear to me that my ministry gifts were well matched to the needs of the congregation. I was fresh out of seminary and ready to invest in a long-term relationship with this congregation. It was only a matter of days before I received hate mail and learned that fifty people had given up their church membership because they heard that I was coming and at least another fifty members would be staying away until I was gone. When I looked at them, I saw sheep in need of shepherding, but when some members of the congregation looked at me they could only see a black woman, as one said, more suited to be the maid or the janitor. Over time, the congregation became polarized and combative, and I spent valuable ministry years heart-broken and defensive. There was one year during that time that I seriously considered leaving ministry. I am sure that God wept with me.

The Reverend Beth DuBois, pastor, South Valley Presbyterian Church and pastoral minister for L’Arche Syracuse My congregation and I serve in a liminal space. We are located on the border between two sections of Syracuse—the Valley and the Southside. As a small urban congregation in the rustbelt of the Northeast, we work with both ecumenical and interfaith colleagues to maximize our resources in meeting the needs of the city— from offering free to inexpensive meeting space to a food pantry to housing repair to afterschool tutoring and summer programs. We merged with our brothers and sisters at South Church, hoping to create a new mission and ministry together. We continue to struggle with boundaries between our members from different cultures and congregations. When the housing and church market fell, we were unable to reach a consensus on next steps toward mission and, as a result, are frozen between our original vision of a new mission and ministry and a clear future. Our current building, while sustainable economically, is not fully accessible nor located 28

Crossings in the Southside of town with its high poverty and cultural diversity. We are on the boundary in many ways: between communities, discerning our future, and joining with diverse partners in mission.

The Reverend Consuelo Donahue, chaplain to Goodwill Industries of San Antonio I have served as a teaching elder in a Hispanic and an Anglo congregation. Both were poised to take advantage of new outreach, but suffered from inappropriate boundary maintenance. The church facilities became the principal concern for the Anglo congregation. They were unwilling to share their largely unused office and meeting facilities with neighborhood groups or even other churches for fear that they would not take care of them.

Both congregations had difficulty in crossing ethnic and class boundaries. The Anglo church was in a changing neighborhood that presented exciting opportunities for evangelism and mission. The majority, however, were elderly who were comfortable with the way the congregation was ethnically homogeneous.

The Hispanic congregation was located in an ethnic barrio, but there existed significant class differences among the neighbors. The church members were pleased to reach out to members of the lower classes with programs such as VBS but were less welcoming to those persons with a different educational and economic background.

Can you identify a time when borders/boundaries were disrupted in a way that allowed for a new and life-giving thing to happen in your congregation (or ministry) and/or your congregation’s commitments to the world?

Consuelo Donahue I have served as a chaplain in three different arenas: in a hospital, with hospice, and in a non-governmental agency. I have noticed that in situations of stress brought on by illness or imminent death, class, religious, and ethnic boundaries tend to dissolve in a common human experience. In such circumstances I have found opportunities to witness to the Gospel in sometimes-unusual ways. In the maternity ward, for example, I witnessed the pain that young mothers felt when their child was stillborn. Their pain was eased somewhat when the family and I baptized the stillborn and buried him or her in the cemetery.

In hospice the boundary between life and death is crossed not only with the dying, but also with the entire family. Oftentimes some family members are willing to let the loved one go and others are not. In such circumstances I would lead the family in prayer in which I explicitly prayed for reconciliation among family members for the good of the loved one. Those were moments of intense grief and also relief as family members prayed and said their good-byes.

Most recently I serve as a chaplain to staff and students of an NGO that provides services and employment for the working poor. Many of the people with whom I interact are “unchurched,� and are not found within the boundaries of orga29

Pastors’ Panel nized religion. Still, I find that people are open to the good news through personal witness and service. As a chaplain, I listen to their stories and offer to pray with and for them, then and there. They appreciate the listening ear and prayerful concern. I am often asked to bless their office, which may then become for them their place of work and worship.

Safiyah Fosua After such a disastrous first appointment in the city, the next cross-racial ministry appointment was to a rural parish of three churches in the cornfields of the Heartland. Again, our family went, not knowing what to expect. To our surprise, we were greeted by farm folk who demonstrated a willingness to embrace the reality that our family was the first to “integrate” both the parish and the neighborhood! Of the three churches, only one remained preoccupied with gender and race; the other two were more concerned about my age and experience leading congregations.

Once we became comfortable with one another, something surprising and wonderful happened in the neighborhood. This parish had been known and respected in that farming community for more than 100 years. News traveled quickly that their new minister was a young black woman with braids! Soon people began to visit the parish in numbers to see this oddity for themselves and many stayed! They were received into the parish by the dozens as new members bringing what we now call postmodern configurations of family. After a while, some who had been living together for years decided to get married. Others had their children baptized. Together, we caught glimpses of the Beloved Community. The respected parish became a friend of the community with porous borders through which many who were both curious and seeking flowed in and out. I often smile when I remember this time of grace and wonder if we all thought that the Kingdom had come! Maybe it had come, for a little while.

Beth DuBois One of my favorite moments in worship is when we have communion. For some it is a quiet, reflective time. When Kevin, a twenty-something member of our congregation with disabilities, was little he would be so excited he would laugh with joy. Now, when he is in church, he comes up and helps me with communion by imitating my actions and repeating portions of the prayers. Now, communion is a joy-filled and visible sign of Christ’s body that includes all of God’s children. Now, as a parent, I directly experience the joys and sorrows of two adopted children with disabilities. Now, my ministry includes walking with the core members (the central focus or core of the community) of L’Arche Syracuse—sixteen adults with disability.

Communion disrupts the boundaries of time and barriers of humanity. Joining in ministry with people with disabilities disrupts boundaries of what we consider fully human and what we consider limited. My life, my family, my vocation, my day-today ministry, continues to be transformed in unexpected ways through the disruptive in-breaking of the Spirit along the boundary of God’s image.

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Crossings Can you identify times when borders/boundaries were helpful, freeing, or created opportunity?

Beth DuBois Many congregations in the urban centers are declining. This is striking in the Northeast among mainline denominations. My church is no exception. Within those boundaries, our congregation responded creatively. As we began the merger process, we had two buildings and very little capital. We began to look for partnerships to bring income into our ministry and expand our mission. As a result, we built relationships and brought in income through sharing my services as pastor and educator with Lutherans, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and, most recently, L’Arche Syracuse. We used our building to welcome Buddhists, African-American and Hispanic Pentecostals, and Baptists. We allocated staff time so that I could moderate the Presbytery of Cayuga-Syracuse, serve on boards and task forces for Community Wide Dialogue Against Racism and InterfaithWorks, meet with Syracuse University members and explore connections in the city, and co-found ACTS (a local faith based community organization). These interfaith connections created a network of opportunities to share resources and ministry opportunities. This city-wide, interfaith network is the community where we will hear the voice of the Spirit challenging us in new ways to ministry and mission, breaking through the boundaries of our limited vision.

Consuelo Donahue: I have found boundaries to be valuable when the members benefit from internal camaraderie. When I give retreats for Hispanic women, the fact that they are all female and of the same ethnicity, allows them to experiment with forms of religious expression that they otherwise may not have experienced. I am referring to centering prayer, liturgical dance, and healing rituals. Because they are within “safe” ethnic and gender boundaries, they are more apt to be open to innovative approaches in religious expression.

Safiyah Fosua: After thirty years of beating against or being pommelled by the borders and boundaries of race and gender, I am learning to regard them as gifts from God meant for the service of God. I find that my temporary place of residence outside of the borders and boundaries of many conventional congregations frees me from the tyranny of the typical and often makes space for innovation. For example, we have always done it this way means nothing to me; I live in a once nebulous, now numinous space called “Bordertown.” Since most know so little about people from Bordertown, I am often free to do things like choose music that breaks with tradition, use words in a different way, or write liturgy for “outsiders” without the resistance that my Inlander friends receive. At times, I feel like Ananse the Spider in West African folklore, able to get the job done because I live on the borders. v

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Required Reading Books recommended by Austin Seminary faculty Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, James K. A. Smith Cultural Liturgies,

in peace to serve God” or “Have a nice day!” Smith observes that the rituals of the mall, university, and stadium are not as innocent as they seem, but effectively shape our consumeristic or nationalistic desires contrary to those required by the Kingdom of God. Yet participation in such secular liturgies, however distorted, nevertheless points to the fact that we are liturgical animals.

Smith identifies several elements in the “person-as-lover” anthropological model: Human persons are intentional creatures whose fundamental way of “intending” the world is love or desire. This love or desire— which is unconscious or noncognitive—is always aimed at some vision of the good life, some particular articulation of the kingdom. What primes us to be so oriented—and act accordingly—is a set of habits or dispositions that are formed in us through affective, bodily means, especially bodily practices, routines, or rituals that grab hold of our hearts through our imagination, which is closely linked to our bodily senses (62-63).

Part Two of Smith’s book consists of his constructive task in which he claims that a liturgical anthropology demands not a “topdown, ideas-first picture that prioritizes beliefs and doctrines (‘worldview’) but rather a bottom-up, practices-first model that prioritizes worship as a practice of desire” (136). Eschewing “dualistic” worship, he argues for a sacramental understanding of the world that resists the temptation to separate nature from grace (141). Smith writes that [a]spects of the material world like bread and water are not “made” to be sacramental by some kind of magical divine fiat that transforms their created nature; rather, when they are taken up as sacraments in the context of worship, their “natural sacramentality” is simply intensified and completed. So, too, worship is not some odd, extravagant, extra-human thing we do as an add-on to our earthly, physical, material nature; rather worship

vol. 1. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009, 240 pages, $22.99. Reviewed by David F. White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education, Austin Seminary.

James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College, joins a long line of contemporary scholars challenging the assumption that our doctrines or ideas—our thoughts—alone result in faithful behavior. Smith asserts, in good Augustinian style, that we are not primarily thinking creatures; we are distinguished, instead, by our desires—our worship. Smith’s goal is “to push down through worldview to worship as the matrix from which a Christian worldview is born—and to consider what that means for the task of Christian education…”

(11). In Smith’s view we are liturgical creatures, organizing our lives around what we love and do—which, for Christians, articulates, “the shape of a Christian ‘social imaginary’ as it is embedded in the practices of Christian worship” (11).

To illustrate what is at stake in theological anthropological questions, Smith invites readers on a guided tour of the corollaries between the mall and medieval houses of worship: they both inspire awe in their airy designs and light-filled architecture; they both evoke a sense of time “out-of-time”; the artistry of their icons, whether statues of saints or mannequins, draws the attention of the pilgrim by projecting a vision of the “good life”; they both demand decision and commitment at cash register or altar; consummated with a benediction--“go

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Crossings is the epiphany of the world (143).

Smith’s project has broad relevance, but holds special significance for Christian universities. According to Smith, the university should be nourished by the heart of the church—by reconnecting the church with the chapel and the classroom; by reconnecting the classroom with the dorm room and the neighborhood; and by reconnecting the body and the mind, which would involve a “liturgically informed” pedagogy concerned with formation and not just information.

In this book, Smith treats serious questions with philosophical skill; nevertheless lay readers should not be frightened by such gravitas. Smith’s book is well-written and exquisitely argued and has already become a minor classic among seminarians. I highly recommend this book to clergy or lay people who care not only about the church’s past, but its future as a transformative community of worship and practice, manifesting the beauty of Jesus Christ in the world. v

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Simon Weisenthal New York: Shocken Books

story, told as a first-person account of Weisenthal himself. It is the story of how one day, when in a concentration camp, he is called into the officer’s wing of the hospital. There he is brought to the room of a dying Nazi soldier, who offers a graphic and heinous confession of the crimes he has committed against Jews. He then asks Weisenthal for forgiveness. But Weisenthal is not able to grant forgiveness, and this fact is the trouble point driving the remainder of the story. It plagues Weisenthal not as much because he thinks he should have forgiven as because he senses there was no right way to respond. Not forgiving the Nazi plagues him, since the man seemed sincere. But how could Weisenthal have forgiven, on behalf of all Jews?

The second, and longer, part of the book is a series of responses, offered by people whom Weisenthal invites to address, “What would you have done, in my place?”

The list of contributors, here, is impressive, including The Dalai Lama, Robert McAfee Brown, Flannery O’Conner, Matthew Fox, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin E. Marty, Dorothee Soelle, Albert Speer, and Desmond Tutu. Contributors include Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, and atheists; survivors of the Bosnian genocide, survivors of the WW II Holocaust, and Nazi perpetrators; novelists, historians, philosophers, politicians, and religious

(Kindle edition), $10.46. Reviewed

by Cynthia L. Rigby, The W. C. Brown Professor of Theology, Austin Seminary

T

he Sunflower is a now-classic text that all people who pray for forgiveness should read, and read again. It tells a story that undoes any superficial notion that forgiveness can be easily extended, or easily received. And it offers a range of “takes” on forgiveness that challenge us to think about whether we can really forgive on behalf of another, what forgiveness has to do with justice, and whether forgiveness is possible apart from belief in God.

Weisenthal devotes his life to negotiating these matters in all their complexity. An Austrian Jew, he survives the Holocaust after working in five concentration camps. Until the time of his death in 2005, he works to uncover Nazi war crimes and bring the guilty to trial

Weisenthal frustrates some of his critics because he tells stories that are grounded in historical fact but exercises a great deal of literary license in order better to teach and persuade. The first part of The Sunflower offers one such well-crafted

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makes no discernable difference in the way we treat those in the world who “owe” us, are not we making the same mistake as that unforgiving servant?

Third and finally, the insight that has especially captured me. Asserted primarily by the Jewish respondents, and in contrast to their Christian colleagues, it is the idea that no one can forgive on behalf of another. Again, it is the one against whom an injustice has been perpetrated, and this one alone, who can forgive.

How true this rings, despite the fact that I, as a Christian, have assumed all my life not only that God can forgive any sin, but that we can offer forgiveness to perpetrators even when we are not the ones who have been directly harmed by them. Don’t we who are ministers extend forgiveness, in the name of Jesus Christ, every time we offer the “Assurance of Pardon,” following the “Confession of Sin,” in worship? By what right do we do this, when it is not we who have been harmed? our Jewish colleagues ask us, in this book. This question makes sense, from a Christian perspective. Our scriptures teach that, when we offend someone, we are to go directly to that person to make amends (see Galatians 6). It is perhaps time to take this direct approach into more serious consideration, in our understanding of forgiveness.

Finally, could it be that Christ’s death on the cross communicates that God doesn’t forgive as an outsider to crimes that have been committed, but that God is authorized to forgive because God truly suffers with those who have been harmed?

While Weisenthal’s book does not directly address the question of what the cross has to do with forgiveness, it certainly gives a lot of food for theological thought. v

leaders. Fifty-three responses, all of which are thoughtful, none of which are identical, many of which squarely conflict.

It would of course be impossible, in this space, to summarize all of these, and selecting one or two would violate Weisenthal’s intention, which is to show the range of possible approaches to the question. I will share instead, three lines of theological inquiry into what we mean by “forgiveness” that have thus far been provoked by my study of the book.

First: Does “forgiveness” apply merely to the “spiritual” realm, or does it have implications for the way we do justice in the political realm as well? Several contributors argue that forgiving the dying Nazi officer is fine, as long as—in the political realm—his actions are rehearsed and condemned. The reasoning seems to be that, when forgiveness is seen as solely a spiritual matter, justice can be pursued in the political realm with no real theological interference. And yet this separating out of the spiritual from the political; of “being forgiven” from “facing the consequences of wrong actions,” causes problems. Because we believe our faith matters “in real life,” we need consider how forgiving those who have done harm affects whether and how they be punished for their sins.

Second: What does belief in God have to do with forgiveness? Respondents who self-identify as atheists demonstrate just as much compassion, overall, as those who claim belief in God. Those who say they believe in God are at least as likely to argue that crimes have to be punished than those who claim no such belief. My questions about this are: Shouldn’t we Christians forgive others because we understand ourselves to be forgiven by God? Isn’t the problem with the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 that he demands the other servant pay? If our forgiveness by God

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Christianity & Culture

When Compassion Crosses Boundaries Ralph L. Underwood The Life-giving Power of Jesus’s Compassion

L

ast year I was reading Luke 7:11-17. This is the story of how Jesus restored life to a widow’s son. As I looked at this passage a strange thing happened. Out of the blue I remembered a conversation that took place when I was a young man. An elderly man and I were talking about a hymn many of you know: “There’s a wideness in God mercy like the wideness of the sea. There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.” I loved that hymn, but this man did not. He told me that he had done something he never could tell to another human being, and he did not believe that God’s mercy was wide enough to reach him. As I recalled this conversation something really strange happened. I began to pray for this man. He was long dead, so I was praying for the dead! Why? I’m not Roman Catholic! What was happening to me? Perhaps when reading this I experienced a moment of compassion. Let me assure you that my familiar Protestant boundary lines returned

Ralph Underwood is emeritus professor of pastoral care at Austin Seminary, having served on the faculty since 1978. The author of Pastoral Care and the Means of Grace and Empathy and Confrontation in Pastoral Care, Underwood is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.

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Christianity and Culture after this experience of praying for this dear man from my past. I did not convert!

As for Luke’s story, at the mid-point of this account we read that Jesus “had compassion for” this widow (v. 13). With her husband gone, and now her only son, she was without male support, and in that time this placed her among the poorest of the poor. All at once she was confronted with grief and the challenge of survival.

And so Jesus was moved with compassion for her. In restoring life to a young man, Jesus crossed the ultimate boundary, the boundary between life and death. Where there is compassion there is power, power to cross boundaries in life-giving ways.

In Luke’s story and in so many of the gospel stories of Jesus, compassion is more than momentary. It is the very core of Jesus’s life and the source of his awesome presence. Jesus is moved with compassion to heal two blind men (Mark. 8; John 9), for example. And several times the gospels speak of how Jesus has compassion on the crowds, for they are like sheep without a shepherd (Matt. 9; Mark 6). Compassion is part of Jesus’s vocabulary. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan is moved with compassion when he sees the robbed and beaten man at the side of the road (Luke 10:25-37). When the prodigal son returns home, his father is moved with compassion (Luke 15: 20).

There is no way to describe the depth and energy of Jesus’s compassion. It is beyond calculation. This kind of compassion is not duty. Jesus is not accused of being a do gooder; he is accused of being an extremist. This is because the intensity of Jesus’s compassion disclosed the very nature of God.

Compassion is not magic, of course. We do not control what can and what cannot happen when compassion moves us to action. It may not be magic, but compassion does cross boundaries. When Jesus reached out to touch the bier (the open casket on which the son lay), he crossed a ritual boundary that made him unclean.

Compassion crossed a line. Jesus’s compassion was not to be contained. Jesus embodied the very essence of compassion.

Boundaries and Borders Boundaries are essential to life. Boundaries exist in nature, in law, in personal relationships, in identity, in enduring principles, in ethics, in culture, in religion.

Boundaries are personal, social, gendered, economic, ethnic, racial, national, religious. There is a kind of boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and between sacred and profane. We chop up the natural flow of time into boundaries and bits—minutes, seconds, nanoseconds, and on down to Planck’s time. My, aren’t we the organized ones! Countless boundaries are of our own making. We construct them, we can cross them, and many can be deconstructed.1 People make boundaries and borders in ways that sometimes are constructive, creative, and life-giving; people cross boundaries to conquer, subdue, or destroy. There are ally boundaries and enemy borders. These have a way of becoming barriers. Some boundaries are flexible in the extreme while others are very rigid.

These days, crossing rigid political boundaries gets attention! Currently the space between the super-rich and the poor is more than a boundary—it is a chasm!

Permeable boundaries, internal and external, result in our crossing boundar36

Underwood ies—and in having our boundaries crossed by others and all their otherness. Both movements reek of risk, and both are basic to creativity and caring. Abraham was called to cross borders to a strange land. He journeyed by faith, and so do all his true sons and daughters.

There are boundaries that can be crossed only when compassion rushes in, and there are boundaries that should not be crossed when something other than compassion leads the way. Compassion crosses the divide between the outside and the inside, between the seen and the unseen. At times compassion induces a transcendent moment, after which boundary lines reform. At other times compassion obliterates boundaries and launches a true re-alignment. Compassion discloses pathways toward reconciliation and undergirds the quest for social justice.

Compassion gives life to the giver as well as the receiver, because it fills the giver with wonder, the wonder of the unknowable power of love. Compassion transports us beyond ourselves, rescues us from the hell of our own worries and self-preoccupation. Compassion has the power to dethrone our own egoism and frees us to walk the way of wonder, to live and breathe in the realm of what cannot be measured, predicted, or controlled. Compassion delivers us from our tendency to think in silos. We think in silos when we associate with people just like us, in our personal lives, our work environment, our neighborhoods, our politics, our religion. Compassion liberates the mind from our self-constructed silos, opens the spirit to fresh air and sun. Awareness of the dual dynamic of compassion, its lifegiving influx into the lives of both givers and receivers, is vital to understanding compassion. Furthermore, it helps to minimize paternalism in social justice policies and actions as well as charitable deeds.2

Life-giving Ways the Church Crosses Boundaries and Borders Our way of caring is a Christian witness to the culture in which we are embedded.

I think of four major dimensions of being a caring community. First, the church is a community of worship. What is the place of compassion in our worship today?

Second, the church is a community of inquiry. The Christian ethics scholar James Gustafson emphasized the role of the church as a community of moral discourse.3 Can compassion expand our readiness to examine openly the deepest moral dilemmas of our time? Third, the church is a community of primary relationships. By this I mean relationships that exist for their own sake. In a congregation, for example, persons may become acquainted when engaged in a task together, such as a voluntary mission project. Quickly enough their relationship acquires its own value and they enjoy each others’ company for its own sake. This is one reason why often congregations are like families. Lastly, the church is a community of service. Such service is both charitable and systemic; i.e., accompanying and helping persons in pain and need as well as addressing social injustices in prophetic and radical ways.

Can compassion help advance this role of today’s church? By the way, how often in this world do we find all four aspects of compassion and caring in one place or community?

Like prudent investing, compassion diversifies, casting its bread on many wa37

Crossings ters. Why? Because it cannot calculate results and does not know the extent or reach of its own power. Compassion is pragmatic because it is not pragmatic.

We are baptized into the Christian community, baptized in Christ, baptized into his compassion. The Spirit calls us into the life of compassion. God sets before us the adventure of exploring what love can do and dare, day by day and everywhere. Where there is compassion there is power for Christians in our personal and work lives, in our congregations and church bodies, to cross boundaries in lifegiving ways.

Compassion comes from God. It is a gift of God’s grace. Compassion can be stronger than addictions. It can outlast the mistakes of a lifetime. Compassion is stronger than all forms of human frailty, physical or otherwise. Compassion is more powerful than the sins of an age. And yes, compassion is stronger than death itself.

Where there is compassion there is power, power to cross boundaries in life-giving ways. Let status quo boundaries beware! v NOTES

1. For a philosophical discussion see Charles Scott, Boundaries in Mind: A Study of Immediate Awareness Based in Psychotherapy (Crossroad Publishing Co., 1982). Ernest Hartmann provides a psychological rendering in his Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality (Harpercollins, 1992).

2. See Khen Lampert, Traditions of Compassion. From Religious Duty to Social Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) for an historical and cultural analysis of compassion. For a reflective discussion of Christian compassion see Henri Nouwen, Donald P.Mcneil, and Douglas A. Morrison, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (Image, 2005).

3. James M. Gufstason, The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1970).

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Professor Asante Todd on “Power” 38

Find back issues of Insights by visiting our website:

AustinSeminary.edu/Insights Click on “Go to Back Issues” “Identity and Interpretation,” Fall 2013, Suzie Park “Spaces for Learning,” Spring 2013, Timothy Lincoln “Honoring Ismael García,” Fall 2012, Lewis Donelson and William Greenway “The Church Faces Schism,” Spring 2012, Theodore J. Wardlaw “Preaching Out of Place” Fall 2011, Kristine Saldine “Honoring Ellen Babinsky,” Spring 2011, Cynthia Rigby and David Johnson “Reading Sacred Texts” Fall 2010, Whit Bodman “Confession,” Spring 2010, Allan H. Cole, “Word and Sacrament,” Fall 2009, Jennifer Lord “Immigration,” Spring 2009, John Ahn “Reading Scripture,” Fall 2008, Cynthia Rigby “The Vocation of Youth,” Spring 2008, David White “Resurrection,” Fall 2007, John Alsup “Globalization,” Spring 2007, David Jensen “Spirituality,” Fall 2006, David Johnson “Debts and Debtors,” Spring 2006, Monya Stubbs “God and Suffering,” Fall 2005, Ellen Babinsky “Left Behind,” Spring 2005, J. Andrew Dearman “Politics and Faith,” Fall 2004, Ismael García “Women in the Pulpit,” Spring 2004, Carol Miles “Global Christianity,” Fall 2003, Arun Jones & Whitney Bodman “Youth,” Spring 2003, Theodore J. Wardlaw “Tolerance,” Fall 2002, Michael Jinkins “All God’s Children,” Spring 2002, C. Ellis Nelson “The Christian Scholar,” Fall 2001, William Greenway “Worship,” Spring 2001, Stanley Hall and Kathryn Roberts “Books,” Fall 2000, The Austin Seminary Faculty “Atonement,” Spring 2000, Cynthia Rigby “Fifty Years of Christ and Culture,” Fall 1999, George Marsden “Healing and Wholeness,” Spring 1999, Ralph Underwood “Human Dignity,” Fall 1998, Ismael García “Christian Formation for the Next Generation,” Spring 1998, Laura Lewis 39

Questions for Study Here are some study questions to help you or your group reflect on this issue of Insights

1. According to Gregory Cuéllar, how do the stories of the retablos help us better read the stories of the Old Testament, and vice versa? How does setting the two sets of stories in “conversation” help us better see the place we and our particular communities have in salvation history?

2. What is your experience of immigration? Did you or members of your family immigrate to the United States? Are there immigrants who are members of your faith community? How do the stories of “crossings” in your faith community shape your understanding of what it means to be the family of God?

3. At the end of his article, Edward Foley asserts “our liturgical actions and texts, song and speech, by definition must be acts of pastoral care.” What does he mean by this? How does he advance this argument? Do you agree with him? If so, how do you engage the liturgy (as a worship leader and/or as a participant in worship) as a form of pastoral care? How does it heal you and other members of your worshiping community?

4. According to Grace Ji-Sun Kim, the Spirit of God crosses boundaries in order to heal and make whole. She relates the Spirit to the Asian concept of “chi,” or “life-energy.” She talks about the Spirit also in relation to eros, or fully embodied, connectional love. How do these concepts of “chi” and “eros” help you think about the presence of the Spirit in your life, and in the life of your faith community? How do these concepts help you reflect on the ways the Spirit critiques, reconciles, and transforms?

5. Joyce Ann Mercer explains that women often have greater difficulty with conflict than do men. One reason this is the case, she says, is because women are more likely than men to experience conflict as “dangerous.” How does she develop this idea, in the course of her article? Building on Mercer’s insights, how do you think faith communities might work to create “safe spaces” in which both women and men r may “fight like Christians”?

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Theodore J. Wardlaw, President

Board of Trustees Thomas L. Are Jr., Chair Karen C. Anderson Claudia D. Carroll Elizabeth Christian Joseph J. Clifford James G. Cooper Marvin L. Cooper James B. Crawley Katherine Cummings (MDiv’05) Consuelo Donahue (MDiv’96) Jackson Farrow Jr. G. Archer Frierson II Richard D. Gillham Walter Harris Jr. John Hartman Rhashell Hunter Roy M. Kim James H. Lee (MDiv’00)

Michael L. Lindvall Jennifer L. Lord Lyndon L. Olson Jr. B. W. Payne David Peeples Jeffrey Kyle Richard Lana Russell James C. Shaw Lita Simpson Anne Vickery Stevenson Karl Brian Travis John L. Van Osdall Sallie Sampsell Watson (MDiv’87) Carlton Wilde Jr. Elizabeth Currie Williams Hugh H. Williamson III

Trustees Emeriti Stephen A. Matthews, John McCoy (MDiv’63), Max Sherman, Louis H. Zbinden Jr.

Spring 2014

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