Women, Ritual, and Power , livre ebook

WOMEN, RITUAL, AND POWER
WOMEN, RITUAL, AND POWER
Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship
E LIZABETH U RSIC
Cover art: “The Creation of Adam” (1511–12) by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sistine Chapel, Rome © creedline / Fotolia
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ursic, Elizabeth.
Women, ritual, and power : placing female imagery of God in Christian worship / Elizabeth Ursic.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5285-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Women in Christianity. 2. Femininity of God. 3. Worship. I. Title. BV639.W7U77 2014 264—dc23 2013040989
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Strategic Emplacement
1. The Resource of Leadership: Wisdom’s Feast and United Methodism
2. The Resource of Personal Prayer Experience: Daughters of Wisdom Catholic Sisters
3. The Resource of Community: Motherhood of God and the Church of Scotland
4. The Resource of Evangelization: Lutheran herchurch
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has evolved over many years, and I am grateful for the financial and institutional support provided to see it develop. The research on the Catholic Daughters of Wisdom began while I was a graduate student at Yale Divinity School as the Louise H. MacLean Scholar awarded by the Yale Institute for Sacred Music. The Norton Grant for Women’s Studies in Religion and a graduate fellowship at Arizona State University allowed the work to expand to include the Methodist and Lutheran communities. A visiting fellowship at the University of Edinburgh New College and a concurrent sabbatical leave granted by the Maricopa Community College District provided much appreciated time and space to conduct the research on the Church of Scotland and to complete the book manuscript.
The theoretical framing for studying the Daughters of Wisdom was presented in a paper titled “Feminist Theories and the Study of Contemporary Nuns” at the 2006 National Women’s Studies Conference. A portion of the chapter on the Church of Scotland was shared in the paper “Ministers’ Wives and the Motherhood of God Controversy” at the 2012 Women, Language, and Worship Colloquium at the University of Edinburgh New College. I discussed the concept of strategic emplacement during my keynote address at the 2013 Feminist Theology Facing Tradition Conference hosted by Liverpool Hope University.
I have benefited greatly from ongoing discussions with a variety of scholars of religious studies, gender studies, and theology, some of whom began as my teachers and many of whom have remained friends. The interdisciplinary collegiality in this field of gender and religion is something I value, and I appreciate those who stimulated my thinking at critical junctures of this research. My profound appreciation goes to Linell Cady, who supervised my PhD dissertation, which was the real beginning of this book. I also want to thank Tracy Fessenden, Tisa Wenger, Mark Woodward, Sarah Amira De la Garza, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Robert Orsi, Carolyn Sharp, Jaime Lara, Margaret Farley, Diana Swancutt, David Stayner, Yolanda Smith, Jenny Daggers, Cecelia Clegg, David Fergusson, Elizabeth Koepping, Ian Bradley, Keith Crudup, and Mary Hunt. In addition, I am grateful to Joseph Subbiondo, Jennifer Hammer, Beth Luey, and Christine Szuter for their invaluable help and advice in my development as a writer. Finally, I am delighted to be published by SUNY Press, and I thank Beth Bouloukus, Eileen Nizer, and Kate McDonnell for their wise counsel and guidance through the publishing process.
I owe my deepest gratitude to the religious communities that participated in this study. I particularly want to thank the individuals in these communities who literally opened their attics, diaries, and other personal archives to substantiate and augment the church files and public records, as well as to many more who shared their lived experiences of prayer, ritual, faith, and church. You have shown me the value of living life in community. To that end, I thank my personal community of family and friends who have loved and supported me through the process of research and writing. This book is dedicated to my mother, Margaret Volk Ursic, my first teacher in the ways of Wisdom.
I NTRODUCTION
S TRATEGIC E MPLACEMENT
She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
—Proverbs 3:15–17
The Sunday morning service at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco was about to begin. Individuals, couples, and families with children were finding their seats while last-minute preparations were being made on the altar. The back of the altar held a large cross and a painting of a female face surrounded with roses. The organist began to play, and the congregation sang the first hymn. Pastor Stacy Boorn, wearing a floor-length robe and stole, welcomed all and presided over the service. After the Gospel reading, Pastor Boorn preached a sermon on how Jesus advocated for women in his teachings and actions. During the service, she referred to God as “She,” “Mother,” and “Holy Other,” along with “Jesus” and “He.” Girls as well as boys helped on the altar, and the congregation formally honored the older women in attendance as the “grandmothers” of the community. During the announcements, Pastor Boorn gave an update on the scholarship the community had given to the first female to attend a Lutheran seminary in Ethiopia. The service concluded with another hymn.
This book is about Christians who worship God with female imagery and language. We examine why certain Christian communities since the 1970s have included female references for God in congregational settings, and we explore how these communities successfully managed to place these new images into their communal rituals and prayers. Worshipping God with female imagery challenges both church and society to reflect on their gendered assumptions about women, men, and God. In some cases, congregations who celebrate God-as-She prompt claims for keeping God-as-He, and they reveal internal debates over gendered church practices and social customs. More broadly, this book is a study of gender and power as we explore what happens to Christian religious communities and individuals when femaleness is expressed in their central symbols of God.
Many people are unaware that the Bible contains female imagery for God. Most notable is Sophia Wisdom, a female character who appears in the first nine chapters of the Book of Proverbs as she leads and instructs the Israelite people. Proverbs Chapter 8 tells us she existed before the world was created. The Gospel writers referenced Sophia Wisdom when claiming the divinity of Jesus because she portrayed God’s actions among the people. Matthew 11:19 and Luke 7:35 even use female pronouns to make this connection. Today, the overwhelming majority of Christians still do not know about female images of God in the Bible despite a fair amount of scholarly writing on the subject.
One reason for this lack of awareness is the lack of liturgical expression and sermons on the subject during Sunday worship. To understand what might be done to correct this deficiency, I have been studying Christian communities that have managed to sustain female imagery of God in their worship. As the stories in this book reveal, their success has depended upon utilizing four key resources: leadership, personal prayer experience, community, and evangelization.
I first became interested in the topic of gender and God while I was a graduate student at Yale Divinity School. I was studying how people expressed their devotion and belief in God through the arts, and I was fascinated by what their artistic expressions communicated about God, themselves, and the world. My interest in gender was piqued during a national art competition called Jesus 2000: Images of Jesus for the Third Millennium sponsored by the National Catholic Reporter . Artists from around the world submitted more than sixteen hundred images, reflecting a global Christianity. The new images of Jesus were more racially diverse than the predominantly light-skinned European images from centuries past. Moreover, the reviews about the competition celebrated this change. I was intrigued by the fact that the model for the winning image, Jesus for All People , was African American and a woman . It made me wonder if Christian perspectives on gender and God were beginning to change, just as attitudes about God and race had expanded over the past century.
Certainly one area of change had been language. Spurred by the 1960s women’s movement, many churches began using words such as “human” and “humankind” instead of “man” and “mankind” when referring to both male and female. Inclusive language became the term used in church circles for these revisions. Some denominations rewrote hymns and liturgies as well as revised Bible translations. Other denominations added new hymns and prayers that linguistically reflected their new sensibility. These actions often brought about discussion and even controversy regarding what some perceived as tampering with tradition