Ruth Krall, Moral Corruption in the Religious Commons (2)

Theodore Rombouts, (1597-1617), "Christ Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple"

The essay below is the second installment of Ruth Krall's essay "Moral Corruption in the Religious Commons." Part one was published previously. In this essay, which is the sixth of a series of essays Ruth has entitled "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice," whose premise is (to quote the essay below), "Studies of sexual violence inside our denominational homes require new vocabularies and new conceptual models." 

In this current essay, Ruth argues, "If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to repeatedly enable sexual abuse of that same child." But also: "Remember this: it takes only one of us to be a healer."

The continuation of Ruth's essay on moral corruption in the religious commons follows (note that endnote numbers begin at xx because this is the second part of an essay whose first part has previously been published):

Killing of John Allen Chau, Controversy re: Pope Benedict's View of Jewish-Christian Relations, Claim of Franklin Graham That Trump Defends the Faith: Idea of Religious Mission Now in News

With the killing of John Allen Chau on North Sentinel Island and controversy about EPope Benedict XVI's understanding of Jewish-Christian relations in the news right now, religious missionizing is unexpectedly in the spotlight of the mainstream media. In the current conversations about Christian mission, it would be short-sighted not to recognize that these conversations are taking place against the backdrop of great fear in some quarters that Christian cultures are being overtaken by Muslim ones, and that Christianity needs to compete with Islam in a way reminiscent of the "Holy Wars" period in the past.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor on Charleston Church Hate Crime: "This Broken World Demands Upon Us All That We Cry Again to 'Mother Emanuel,' to Mother-God-Who-is-with-Us"

Rabbi Menachem Creditor on yesterday's racist hate crime in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina: 

Pope Francis's Encyclical on the Environment, and the Impossibility of Discussing Violence Against the Environment Without Discussing Gender Issues

Call me crazy, but if I were a world religious leader writing a major document about ecology today — one which stresses that it is addressing every member of the human community — and if I chose to use the word "sister" fourteen times in that major document, I'd find some way, I think, to include the voices of the sisters of my own faith community in what I had to say. Say, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, who have a wealth of significant things to tell us about our relationship to the cosmos and the spiritual implications of that relationship . . . . 

Is There So Much Love in the World That We Can Afford to Discriminate Against Any Kind of Love?: Remembering Mychal Judge

Is there so much love in the world that we can afford to discriminate against any kind of love? Franciscan Father Mychal Judge asked frequently, according to biographer Michael Ford in his Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero (NY: Paulist, 2002) (p. 124). Judge asked this as a gay man who came to see his sexual orientation as God's gift to him, a gift to celebrate, and who found it incomprehensible that some people sought to deny those who are gay the chance to live fulfilled lives in loving, committed relationships.

On the Feast of Francis of Assisi: "I've Spent Much of My Life Waiting for the Church to Emerge from the Mists — The Church of Joy and Welcome"

Today is the feast day of Francis of Assisi in the Roman Catholic and other liturgical calendars, and I'm re-reading what I wrote on the pilgrimage Steve and I made to Assisi before Christmas last year. At the shrine of Francis, Steve bought me a simple little olive wood tau cross as a pilgrim memento, and I wear it (now rough and cracked from my daily showers) tied together with a Celtic cross he got for me when we made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. David in Wales a number of years ago — reminders of both pilgrimages and the prayers I prayed at both places.

A Travel Report from Assisi: Francis, Where Are You?

Assisi was beautiful. The entire time we were there, it was shrouded in thick fog, turning the place magical, as the outlines of shops selling tacky tourist tat were softened, obscured by the mist. In the sheer physical beauty of the place and in its peaceful aura, I experienced St. Francis far more palpably than I did at his shrine, with its busy-ness/business so awkwardly juxtaposed against the legacy of a saint who would, I suspect, have absolutely deplored the way in which he's remembered by the shrine.

More (and Final Installment) from Augustine Thompson's Biography of Francis of Assisi on Francis and Gender

As I've said previously, I'm intrigued by the number of times Augustine Thompson's new biography of Francis of Assisi shows Francis contravening what are now regarded as "traditional" gender lines inscribed in stone by natural law. I think it's worth noting these instances because the current pope also contravened longstanding tradition to choose the name Francis, a name that has, as theologians Matthew Fox and Leonardo Boff insist, a certain resonance for Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Augustine Thompson's Biography of Francis of Assisi on Francis and Gender Roles: Mother Hens and Chicks, Etc.

In previous postings, I've noted that the saint whose name the current pope has taken, Francis of Assisi, strikes many of us as a saint whose life corrects the heavy emphasis on male supremacy and female subordination that has captured the imagination of many Christians today. From the start of his spiritual journey, Francis repudiated the traditional male role that his father Pietro di Bernardone sought to impose on him. He began his journey by stripping himself and placing his clothes at his father's feet, stating that he no longer had any father except his father in heaven.

Augustine Thompson's Francis of Assisi: On Preaching the Good News Always, Using Words Only When Necessary

Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012):

Matthew Fox, Letters to Pope Francis: "It Is Essential to Talk of Women's Rights"

Throughout his book Letters to Pope Francis, theologian Matthew Fox points out that one of the major gifts to the church of the saint whose name Cardinal Bergoglio chose for his papal name--Francis--is the gift of gender balance. Fox notes (p. 12) that Francis of Assisi's actions "reveal a man who recognizes the necessary balance of masculine and feminine, yang and yin, in all beings and in all relationships if we are to be a sustainable species."

Happy Day After St. Francis Taco Day, Y'all

For a man who chose radical poverty and lived a life of great asceticism, Francis of Assisi sets a lavish table. Here are two leftovers from his feast yesterday that are well worth chewing on today:

Matthew Fox, Letters to Pope Francis: "Let's Be Honest--Francis Never Attended a Seminary"

On this feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, another excerpt from Matthew Fox's book Letters to Pope Francis:

Matthew Fox, Letters to Pope Francis: "We Are All Hoping" That You Rebuild a Church in Desperate Need of Rebuilding and Reform

As the "gang of 8" meets right now in Rome, another excerpt from Matthew Fox's Letters to Pope Francis (CreateSpace Publishing, 2013) on the eve of the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi: 

Matthew Fox, Letters to Pope Francis: The Name Francis and Stories about Fathers

Another excerpt from Matthew Fox's book Letters to Pope Francis: in the opening chapter of his book, Fox explores the promise he sees in the new pope's choice of the name Francis. Part of that promise is the way in which Francis of Assisi was willing to bend rigid gender lines, to honor (and incorporate into his own discipleship) the feminine and repudiate the aggressive masculine insofar as it is determined to dominate others:

Leonardo Boff on New Pope: "Francis Isn't a Name, It's a Plan for a Church"

At his website now, Leonardo Boff has an important theological statement about Pope Francis and his call to rebuild the church, which Rebel Girl has helpfully translated at her Iglesia Descalza site. Boff notes that he had predicted that the new pope would be called Francis, because the Catholic church today stands in imperative need of rebuilding, as it did when Francis of Assisi heard the Lord tell him, "Francis, go and rebuild my church." Boff thinks that the new pope deliberately chose the name Francis because he recognizes that the church is in ruins now due to scandals and demoralization that have eroded the church's most precious possession: its moral voice and moral credibility.

Pope Francis: More Testimony to Be Considered

And yet more commentary--this by way of corroboration of the primary testimony of the three key pieces of testimony to which I just pointed readers, which have caused me to stop and listen (and keep praying and hoping, even as I refuse to shut down my mind and to silence the voice of my conscience):

Remembering Francis of Assisi: Love Puts Flesh on God's Face

As Sunday arrives, I'd like to recommend two thought-provoking online articles from this week and a blog posting--reflections that feed the soul--to readers.

The first is John Cory's "Marching Backwards: The Spectacle of Fear," at Truthout. The heart of his statement:

The spectacle of fear is not new. Whether financed by Wall Street or organized by FOX News, fear is the product being sold for the sole purpose of maintaining power and control by those who themselves fear the power of the people. And that includes today's mendacious media that see themselves as the "stars" in this political circus while collecting thirty pieces of silver for entertaining the public and betraying the people.

Fear is the root of hate and bigotry and racism. It drives the mob to build internment camps and free speech zones and segregated facilities. It sets fire to books and thoughts and people who would challenge the darkness. It seeks to paralyze the vision seeker and the dreamer. Fear is the flame that ignites war and genocide and collateral damage. But most of all - fear is the tool of demagogues and tyrants who offer themselves up as our red white and blue champions with the promise of salvation for one easy payment of obedient servitude. Fear is never free.

The GOP is nothing more than the recycled fearmongering of a hundred years ago. A party that would march us backward with banners flying and Hosannas shouted while people die from fear of health care reform or corporate regulation or the fresh oxygen of science and climate change.

. . .

Everything old is new again.

The GOP clutches fear in its tiny fists because it is all it has. It is the touchstone. It is not even original. Darkness never is.

So, Democrats, tell me again - what exactly are you afraid of?

The second article I want to recommend is Ilia Delio's "Confessions of a Modern Nun" at America. Her powerful conclusion:

To be a Christbearer is to focus on the inner depth of love. It is love that puts flesh on the face of God, love that makes Christ alive; love is the power of the future and the unfolding of Christ. History will not remember what we wore, where we lived or how we prayed, whether as Concilium or Communio Catholics. In the evening of life we all shall be judged on love alone.

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan, a follower of Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Her reflections dovetail with a rich meditation yesterday at Fran Rossi Szpylczyn's wonderful There Will Be Bread blog.

Fran summarizes the significance of Francis's life as follows:

God did not become human just so that we might spend all our time on our knees, tending him and hating others. Rather, I think that if we work to love others, we might indeed be tending to God and God's business, on our knees and otherwise.

What the hell do I know? I tend to stink at this, but I keep trying or at least wanting to try.

And then she notes that we drag our icons of Francis out every year when we want to remember the connection of humans to the rest of the animal world. We remember Francis by blessing animals--and that commemoration is certainly in tune with Francis's ecstatic love of all creation.

But as we focus on Francis and Brother Dog and Sister Cat, we forget that Francis also walked into Islamic territory to meet a sultan, at a time of great enmity between Muslims and Christians. Francis dared to make his enemy a friend.

And that may be the greatest lesson of all we can learn from Francis, Fran proposes. If that lesson meant much to those of us who call ourselves Christians in the U.S., or if the lesson offered by Ilia Delio and St. John of the Cross--in the evening of life we will be judged by love--meant anything at all to American Christians, we would not be driven by the ravenous need for a foe evident throughout our history, articulated so well in John Cory's article.

We talk a lot about Christianity. But that talk seems hardly at all informed by the gospels that are the cornerstone of the Christian faith, or the tradition that the fear mongers and enemy makers seem hellbent on claiming as their exclusive birthright. With Francis and John of the Cross and Jesus, or Dorothy Day or Jean Donovan or Teresa of Avila as chief exemplars of that tradition, it's impossible to justify the version of Christianity that the American Christian right wants to promote as "traditional" and "orthodox" today. The talk of blood-drenched swords and holy war that dominates the discourse of the American religious right today is an absolute perversion of everything Christianity means, at its heart.

Francis of Assisi and Mother Birds: The Story of Jesus Always Renewed

I’ve begun my Holy Saturday listening to Paul Robeson sing “Were You There.” And thinking about rivers, about Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan. About vocation, and about how crucifixion and resurrection is everyone’s story.

Paul Robeson: that deep, rich voice that sounds like something emanating from the center of the earth. And which, for the same reason, has the power to touch the depths of one’s soul, such that the words of the spirituals he sings becomes the song of one’s own soul. The genius of African-American spirituality is to take biblical texts, read them through the prism of historic injustice, historic unmerited and imposed suffering, and cause them to shine as though the texts had been written just the day before yesterday.

The bible as our story. This is one of the many significant contributions of African-American culture to American culture at large, this genius for making the text meaningful here and now, so that the call and response of the text implicates us, implicates me, and is not simply a perplexing word from a strange, unfathomable past with no obvious significance for the here and now.

At a time in which American culture seems curiously, willfully amnesiac about the manifold contributions of African-American culture to the nation’s culture at large, Paul Robeson—and the spirituals—bear remembering. And bear hearing anew.

The immediacy of the biblical story in the spirituals’ rendition is a reminder that the story of Jesus is not simply his story, but everyone’s. I think today of a remark that I believe Henri Nouwen makes in one of his books—that, when John plunged Jesus under the water of the Jordan River, the river took Jesus.

In submitting to baptism by John, in going into and under the waters of the flowing river, Jesus let go of leading his life as if it were his life. His life became the life handed over to God. The river took him. From the Jordan to Calvary, Jesus lived out the consequences of a vocational decision to live utterly and completely for God, for others, and not for himself.

The river takes us. The river takes us when, in the depths of our own souls, we somehow lay hold of our unique calling in life. The river of vocation runs through each human life, giving depth meaning to the shallows of everyday existence. When we reach into the depths, when we reach the rivers flowing at the depths of our own being, and when we give ourselves to those depths, the river takes us. Our lives become not our own, but the life lived in the sway and current of the river flowing through us.

A river that leads inevitably, in every human life, to crucifixion. Crucifixion is part and parcel of the human experience of life. It happens to us over and over again. It is where the river takes us, if we plunge into the river and allow ourselves to be taken: if we give in to vocation.

But inherent in that giving up of our own command of our destiny is the simultaneous—and insane—hope that the self-abnegation will become a fruitful gift: not for ourselves, but for others. This is the resurrection half of the diptych that forms the central mystery of Christian faith: in dying we are born to eternal life; in death, we rise again. We live to become the grain of wheat sown in the ground, which produces sheaves of wheat in abundance for others we will not see, who will come after us.

Or, as Maya Angelou puts the point, “When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor’s gift.”

A certain kind of distorted piety has often led Christians to think of the story of the crucifixion and resurrection as unique to Jesus. And yet the implication of the four gospels’ account of Jesus’s life is clear: this story of grappling with the voice of God, with a calling to submit to the river, to be plunged beneath it, to let it carry us where it will, to die in order that others may live—this story of Jesus is our story, as well. This is the raison d’etre of the gospels, the reason they were written: to link our human stories to the story of Jesus, such that the story of Jesus becomes our own story, and our story part of the story of Jesus.

We do not dishonor Jesus and his memory when we appropriate the story to our experience, or when we use our human experience to hear and understand the story of Jesus. In doing these things, we show that this story has become paradigmatic for us, that it casts ultimate meaning on our lives: that it has become the hinge story of our own vocational lives.

This recognition that the story of Jesus belongs perennially to the people of God, and not to the hieratic classes that, in any church and any culture, keep claiming the story as the unique possession of the guardians and purveyors of the sacred mysteries, is a recognition that, again and again, enlivens the churches with reforming experiences. This recognition again and again calls forth reformers whose task is to point to the possibility of living the story of Jesus in a new way in new cultural settings.

I have been thinking in this vein this week as I finished Linda Bird Francke’s On the Road with Francis of Assisi (NY: Random House, 2005). Francke writes about a pilgrimage she and her husband took several years ago, in which they sought to visit every place of significance to the life of Francis of Assisi that they could discover.

Francis lived at a turning moment in European history, a time of urbanization in which the traditional monastic patterns of spirituality no longer reached the lives and cultural experiences of the newly urbanized masses of European nations. Part of Francis’s genius—part of his unique calling to rebuild the church—was his ability to act out, with a band of followers, the gospel story in a way that made this story fresh to those living in a new cultural setting.

Much has been written about the charism of Francis and his followers, and the ways in which they reframed the story of Jesus to fit new socio-economic patterns. Something that I have not seen discussed much, however, and which crops up here and there in Francke’s re-telling of the life of Francis, is an interesting gender-transgressive tendency of Francis and the early friars.

Francke notes that, in a letter to Brother Leo now held by the cathedral of Spoleto and dated sometime before 1220, Francis refers to himself as Leo’s mother. “I speak to you, my son, as a mother,” the letter begins, after Francis has greeted his devoted companion (as cited, p. 25).

The use of the maternal language is also found in Francis’s 1217 rule for hermitages. In the rule, Francis called for each hermitage to have three or four friars, in which two would be the mothers of the hermitage, and the other(s) the son(s) (p. 129).

My posting yesterday noted that, from the first creation narrative in Genesis, through the prophets, to the gospels and the words of Jesus, God is continuously imaged as a mother bird seeking to bring her chicks under her wings, to enfold them with love and protection. Francke notes that Francis also employed this imagery (p. 176).

As his community struggled over the question of how or whether it was possible to live Francis’s ideal of absolute poverty, Francis dreamt of himself as a hen spreading her wings to enfold and protect her chicks. Francke indicates that this dream is depicted in paintings in southern Italy, with Francis holding his cloak around his followers.

What to make of these whispers of an alternative view of God and gender in medieval Christianity? First, the whispers can’t be dismissed. Francis’s goal was to tell the story of Jesus in a way that reached those living in an entirely new cultural setting. Like Jesus himself, he acted out his message in dramatic ways—disrobing and handing his clothes to a father who sought to make him over in the father’s image, dramatically repudiating the paternalistic vision of his life. Francis acted out the Christmas narrative in a way that has radically influenced all subsequent generations of Christians. It was he who developed the idea of staging nativity scenes to make the story real (and human) to Europeans of his day.

Francis’s kissing of lepers, his sitting on the floor to eat scraps with lepers and other dispossessed wanderers of the roads of a Europe in which urbanization was widening the economic gap between rich and poor, also brought the gospel message home to his countryfolk. Francis is known as alter Christus because, in so many radical ways, he sought to enact the life of Jesus in a new cultural setting, to keep the story alive, and as a result, his own life is seen as an exemplary emulation of the life of Christ.

This being the case, Francis’s choice to echo Jesus’s use of the maternal imagery of the Genesis creation narrative must not be dismissed or taken lightly. This choice may have been ignored for generations, as Christians focused on other aspects of the story.

Today, however, when currents within the churches seek to use distorted interpretations of scripture and tradition to force women (and men viewed as feminized) into submission, the story takes on a new, portentous, radical (and radically important) significance. If we take Jesus seriously, if we take Frances as alter Christus seriously, we must also take seriously the willingness of both to bend traditional gender lines by using maternal imagery to refer to themselves.

At the very least, the story of Francis illustrates that those rooted firmly in Christian tradition should not find it shocking—as many Christians do today—to see a male assuming what is thought of as a “female” role, when the nurturing role is warranted for a male. There is a quicksilver quality about the varied gender appropriations within the Christian tradition that makes our current fixation on using religion to assure that men be real men and women be real women seem outright bizarre. It did not bother Francis to assume the “female” role of nurturer, of mother, of the mother hen drawing her chicks beneath her wings.

It does bother many Christians today to think in these terms. To the extent that it does so, perhaps we have lost sight of some central strands of the scriptural text and of Christian tradition. And Easter is about remembering that the most central strands of all—the message of ongoing dying/rising—belong to all of us and have to be lived by all of us here and now.