Please bear with me while I make some changes in the blog. You may notice deleted sections of previous postings, or entire postings that are now deleted.
I appreciate your readership and your patience with me while I engage in editorial work. Meanwhile, for your perusal, some pictures from previous blog postings to occupy your attention while I am not posting.
Since today is the feast day of Joan of Arc in Western Christian churches, I am thinking today of how Joan paid a price for speaking truth to power--including to the powerful rulers of churches. Joan dressed in men's clothes and heard God speak to her, though she was not ordained and was a peasant girl. The church of her day did not wish to hear what a woman wearing men's clothes might say to them, and martyred her.
In a world in which courage to speak the truth is so often demanded as we walk the path of Jesus in faithful discipleship, may we take heart from Joan's example. The pictures below are commemorations of Joan and her courage.
4 comments:
Hope you're back soon, Bill. I enjoy your blog immensely and wish I had been reading it when our Lutheran-Catholic church went through the process of becoming a "Reconciling-in-Christ" community. I would have had your pithy words with which to counter those who FEARED we would become "a gay church." "Why," they would ask, "are we not welcoming to everyone, such as African-Americvans and Hispanics?" What a smokescreen! As I pointed out during that discussion, African-Americans and Hispanics were not being defrocked and hounded out of the Lutheran or Catholic churches, as far as I could see.
Happy editing--and come back soon.
Michael
I've often thought Joan's persecution for wearing men's clothes was most interesting. Her rationale was to protect herself from the lusty thoughts and actions of the men in her army, and they from their own sinful thoughts, but I guess she was in a no win situation, and was burned by men in women's clothes. How's that for ironic.
If the powers that be wanna get you, I guess they're gonna to get you no matter how illogical the rationale for the gettin' is. I look forward to future posts. Thanks for your good work Bill. The spirit of Joan and her Archangelic military advisor are alive and well in the world. Now we use pens instead of swords--well keyboards anyway.
Dad, I appreciate the support very much.
Thanks for reading, Dad, and I'm glad you're finding some resources here--and grateful that your church has become a reconciling community.
Sad to say, the tactic you have encountered, in which "good" minorities are played against "bad" ones, is typical of right-wing political and church movements today.
The worldwide Anglican communion is being torn apart by this dynamic, in which wealthy interest groups in the U.S. and elsewhere, which resist women's rights and gay rights in the church, want to use race and the Christians of the global South as a weapon to stop movements to give women and gay people full rights in the churches.
As I have noted on my blog, the same dynamic is strongly present in the United Methodist Church, too.
The ironic (and revelatory) thing about this movement of resistance, though, is that the people now using every dirty weapon possible --including pretend sympathy for racial minorities--to undermine movements to empower women and to include and empower gay folks in churches, are the same groups who, a half century ago, did the same thing to keep people of color out of the churches.
We just keep on fighting for what we know is true and right, don't we, knowing that in the end, truth and right will triumph, since the moral arc of the universe bends to justice.
Colleen, as always, profound thanks for your solidarity.
Joan's story is fascinating from many standpoints. Here was an uneducated young lay woman to whom God spoke, and the men who ran the church of her day just couldn't tolerate that fact.
To add insult to injury, she wore men's clothes. Their order to place her in a dress as they burned her at the stake demonstrates how profoundly disturbed they were by her claim that God could speak to someone who crossed gender lines, and to someone who was not ordained and not educated.
Thanks for reminding me (I didn't mention this in my posting) that the day I shut the blog down temporarily was Joan of Arc's feast day. It was interesting to learn that, since the psalm going through my mind all day before I heard from you was Psalm 46, with its reassurance to keep trusting in God even if the mountains crumble, since it's God who breaks bows and snaps spears.
The power of humans intent on whipping others is illusory power, in the final analysis. It's the power of those who may have more money, more power to command attention, more power to manipulate public impressions.
But real power resides in knowing and doing what is right, and persisting in speaking truth even when those with the illusory form of power try to shut us up.
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