Sophia upstages Jesus at ReImagining Revival

“Yesterday’s heresies are becoming
tomorrow’s Book of Order”
- Mary Ann Lundy

By Parker T. Williamson

ST PAUL , Minn. - “Who is not here?” That was the question conference convenor and Presbyterian minister Sally Hill asked almost 900 women who gathered here April 16-19 to revive their ReImagining God movement. “Here we taste, see and savor how good it is to be in our bodies” declared conferees in the words of their opening “milk and honey” ritual. But again Hill asked, “Who is not here?” As conference themes unfolded, the answer came clear. The missing person was Jesus Christ.

Despite the fact that conference leaders called themselves Christians, it was Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, who emerges when women reveal their inner selves, that occupied center stage in this event. “I found God in myself, and I loved her. I loved her fiercely,” declared a quotation in the conference program.

“This is the body of God for healing the bitterness of the human heart …” declared Rev. Hill as women passed the milk and honey mixture around their tables. “We have seen the power, rising from the earth … Together we have given birth to a ReImagining Community which extends to every corner of our world!”

Preparing milk and honey ritual

Light of the world
Enshrouded in darkness, the ReImagining community gathered in a Radisson Hotel ballroom on opening night to the throbbing of conference drummers. Overhead, light flashed from a rotating, mirrored sphere while flames leapt from a four-foot cauldron on stage. “We are the light of the world,” announced Rita Nakashima Brock. “What we do with our experience makes us light to the world.” Brock then named women who are examples of that light, including “Tina,” from Zimbabwe who is fighting for solidarity with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons, those whose sexual behavior is unlawful in Zimbabwe. “Tina is a light to the world,” said Brock.

ReImaginers with lanterns escorting speakers to the stage

As Brock and others appeared on stage to deliver their speeches, ritual leaders carrying lanterns escorted them while the audience sang, “You are a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.” Then the crowd blessed each speaker, singing: “Now Sophia, dream the vision, share the wisdom dwelling deep within.”

Looking within
The transcendent God was noticeably absent from most conference presentations. Instead, speakers and ritual leaders invoked a spirit that emerges out of “women’s experiences.” Women were encouraged to express the divine reality that is locked deep within their identities by sharing their stories. Special emphasis was placed on telling stories of abuse, defilement, and repression, the kinds of stories that evoke what Brock called “holy outrage.”

Mary Farrell Bednowski told the audience that story telling is feminist theology’s great contribution to the church. It is in telling our stories, she said, that traditional theology has been “brought down to earth,” made “relational,” encouraged to abandon moral absolutes, and enabled to bring about “healing and wholeness.” She encouraged her listeners to open up, and in so doing, to transform the world from darkness into light.

Troubling the waters
On the following morning the symbol changed from light to water. Women came forward to pour vials of water into a vessel on stage. As participants mingled their libations, the congregation sang, “Sacred river, flowing over rocks of pain … collecting streams of insight … blessed with light of self love, and flowing … to the vast divine sea, saying ‘I am That,’ Sacred River.”

Once the water had been poured, conferees were told that the time had come to trouble it. Dancers wearing aquamarine shawls gyrated around the basin, setting the stage for those whose words would soon make waves.

Swimming with sharks
Beverly Harrison, a Presbyterian and professor of ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, made a notable ripple. Citing a litany of losses suffered by the ideological left, Harrison lashed out at The Presbyterian Layman and other publications that she called “the Christian right.” Harrison described herself and other leaders of the 1993 ReImagining God conference as “swimming in troubled waters when the sharks are out in force.”

Harrison complained that reporters for The Presbyterian Layman and Faith and Freedom, a publication of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, “are paid to discredit what we do here.” She said these people have a “longing to kill the queers” … and making women use their wombs for the proper use of state production.”

Harrison confessed her embarrassment over being a Presbyterian at a time when the denomination is beginning to reaffirm biblical standards for its faith and life. “Don’t get me started on the heartbreak of being a Presbyterian,” she said. She attacked publications like The Presbyterian Layman for exhibiting a “Jurassic Park theology … They have out resourced us … and they have won a great deal in this society.”

Harrison decried the demise of socialism and the spread of free market economics into many parts of the world. “Capitalism destroys religion,” she declared. “It eats everything in our culture that does not bow to the bottom line.” Harrison complained that recent developments have “undone” much that liberal church leaders had worked so hard to achieve. She alleged that capitalist forces have “bought up or thrown out” many labor unions, and she bitterly decried the fact that “we have lost many of the struggles that have animated our community.”

Harrison said that the “Christian right” had “made a lot of headway” by labeling the language of the left as “politically correct.” That label, she argued, served to ridicule the progress that she and other church leaders have achieved. As this ridicule has become more prevalent, she said, the mainline churches have begun to turn away from politics. This, decried Harrison, who believes that the mission of the church is politics, has resulted in devastating consequences.

Salvation by politics
Harrison called on the ReImagining Community to help the church recover its commitment to “political revolution.” She rebuked world bankers, and she credited capitalism with enslaving people, destroying communities, and not caring when we “dump our s—-” into the environment. She won a standing ovation when she urged feminist leaders to recommit themselves to the church’s political task, challenge the “market economy ideology” and “carry placards into the streets,” inspired by “the spirit that is with us.”

Rolling stone
Mary Ann Lundy, who lost her job at Presbyterian Church (USA) headquarters following her leadership in the 1993 ReImagining God conference, was welcomed enthusiastically. Lundy’s firing blossomed into a golden parachute that landed her in Geneva, Switzerland where she was named Deputy Director of the World Council of Churches. (“I was fired up,” she quipped.) Yet conference leader Sally Hill insisted on describing her as ReImagining’s martyr, “a symbol for us … who bore the brunt of the violent backlash.”

Lundy reminded her audience of the first Easter in which women went to Jesus’ tomb, wondering how they could roll the away the stone. “The stone is too great,” she reported the women saying to one another, “Who will roll it away for us.” Lundy speculated that male church leaders would have told the women that if they wanted the stone rolled, they must do it themselves. She described males as guardians of stones that enslave women, masters who refuse to recognize the validity of women’s experiences.

In spite of “witch hungry presses” and “inquisitions” by patriarchal males, said Lundy, women are staying in the church and following their vision by establishing “safe space communities” of mutual support. In the Presbyterian Church (USA), she credited “Voices of Sophia,” an organization that was heavily represented at the conference, as one such group.

Lundy bitterly described her rejection by the Presbyterian Church (USA). She blamed her firing on distorted newspaper reporting, particularly by The Presbyterian Layman. Naming the publication’s editor, she suggested that The Layman’s reporting was “motivated by their own interests ...” She suggested that ReImaginers had learned from this painful experience that they must get the jump on press reports. “We who have strong, articulate voices must make sure that we tell our stories first,” she said.

Lundy castigated “scared religious structures” who abandoned the truth of ReImagining in return for denominational peace, seminaries for failing to pursue scholarly imagination, women conference attendees who abandoned her under pressure, and lazy preachers who avoid doing the hard work of theological exploration.

ReImagining ecumenism
Lundy said that after she was fired, she found solace wandering in the desert at Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian Church (USA) conference center in New Mexico. “The spaces that we have called sacred have expelled us,” she said, “so we have to find our own hallowed ground.” Lundy encouraged members of the audience to develop alliances, “to be ecumenical in the broadest sense of the word.” Specifically, she encouraged connections not only across gender and geography lines but those of “religion” as well. “We are learning that to be ecumenical is to move beyond the boundaries of Christianity,” she said. “You see,” concluded Lundy, “yesterday’s heresies are becoming tomorrow’s Book of Order.”

Lundy’s theme was elaborated by other speakers, who insisted that Christians are under no obligation to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of the world. In their view, Jesus is not particularly unique, being only one among many ways that “Sophia” has made herself known.

A church without walls
Delores Williams, a Presbyterian professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York who stirred waters in the first ReImagining conference by suggesting “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff,” underscored Lundy’s call for a Christianity that is not limited to the Lord Jesus Christ. “We shouldn’t be persecuted for being heretics,” she said.

Williams said that women must create “a church without walls … a community” where people can be free …” Williams described the emerging community as a “context of the sacred” where no sexuality is unclean: “In the heart and soul of the deities, we are all loved, and it doesn’t matter who we’re sleeping with …,” she declared.

“Jesus is not God”
“What does it take for us to break rank with the slave masters’ religion?” asked another speaker, Carter Heyward. Her answer was to reimagine Jesus Christ. Heyward said that it is a mistake to emphasize “the singularity of God’s presence in Jesus.” Describing what she believes about Jesus, she said, “It was not Jesus’ identity with God, as if Jesus somehow thought of himself as divine … Jesus in reality was not God … Jesus was human like us, and also, like us, he was infused with God, with sacred spirit, and in that sense was divine, and he had a clue.”

Heyward proclaimed the view that all of life is simply an extrusion of divine reality, meaning that all persons and things are essentially divine and no person can claim to be unique, not even Jesus: “While nobody, even Jesus, is divine in and of him or herself, every body, like Jesus, is able to god, and I use this [god] as a verb … That is what we are to do … to god, and that is what the Jesus story is all about.”

Heyward’s theme flowed through conference litanies, prayers and rituals. The conference prayer that opened the Saturday morning session declared: “I feel my intimate connection with every molecule of creation, every star, every leaf. I feel how the universe is me and I am the universe. I notice how every thought, every word and every action I make ripples out and changes everything.”

So who is Jesus Christ? Heyward credited Jesus as “a window into the ongoing presence of the holy in our lives.” But she cautioned her audience not to make too much of his uniqueness: “The salvation of this world of ours did not begin with the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus,” she said. Heyward readily admits that her theology “breaks ranks” with biblical faith (“the religion of the slave masters”) but she insists that her beliefs are authentically Christian, so she remains a member of the Episcopal Church.

Heyward, a professor at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who told the audience that she is “a therapy patient in early recovery from alcoholism and bulimia,” teaches a seminar titled “Queer Theology.” “Being queer means living feeling and thinking in the connections between our struggles and those of others … the connections between life and politics and liturgy … and the bedrooms of our lives,” she said.

Reimagining Mary
“If Carter can do Jesus I can do Mary,” quipped Roman Catholic feminist, Mari Castellanos, who says that she does her finest theological reflections “walking on the beach or deep in the Everglades.” Castellanos said that she found Mary, the mother of Jesus, much more appealing when she thought of her as the “cosmic mother” and combined images of Mary with images of goddesses who have been revered by many cultures throughout history. Mary is for Castellanos what Jesus is for Carter Heyward, one of many manifestations of the divine presence that lives in us all.

A touch of Gospel
Only two of the 12 conference speakers affirmed anything that resembled the Gospel of Jesus Christ that has been historically proclaimed by the Church. Brigalia Bam of South Africa and Musimbi Kanyoro from Kenya, apparently chosen to address the conference because of their efforts on behalf of women’s liberation, testified to the power of Jesus Christ in their lives. Kanyoro, in particular, focused on the faith of the early church as described in the Book of Acts, and pointed to places in Africa where that faith is being lived today.

But the main conference themes, rituals and liturgies proclaimed something very different. In fact, those instances where the difference was most radically expressed - Williams’ description of a congregation’s removal of the cross from its sanctuary as “life giving,” and Heyward’s denial of Jesus Christ’s uniqueness as the Son of God for example, brought standing ovations, drum beating, whistles and cat calls from the audience. Ironically, in a conference called to welcome the bizarre and combat the forces of exclusion, one person was officially and systematically denied a place at the table. His name is Jesus Christ.

Sylvia Dooling's first-person account

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