July 2006 Reflections

Sometimes Wisdom sashayed; ofttimes She peeked out!

Scruples! Resurrected bit of protest; matter of mindfulness
Taken from the days of colonial fathers
One can say, ‘To this I cannot assent,
This is my way,
Can you accept my way as part of our way?’
Peeking bits of wisdom; personal insights into Truth
Invitation for today’s mothers of thought
To speak of Sophia inspired ideas
Contained in vast debates.

Accompaniment! Sophia sisters commissioned
Go to Colombia! Walk with the persecuted!
Be a shield of faith -
So others might live without threats of death.
Sophia, tree of life for those who hold her fast!

Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water
Celebration of women’s ordination-
Painted picture of Christ’s acceptance
Grew before our eyes
Remembering when the Church said yes
Recollection of years of stretching yes into full acceptance
Discovering the cloud of witnesses includes Sophia’s sisters
Margaret, Ann, Lois, Bertha, Eve, Erin, Priscilla
Waters of baptism; waters of birth; waters becoming wine
‘I was at God’s side, a master craftswoman’

Frolicking in Paradise for breakfast, none the less!
Speaker Rita sashayed through the delight of early Christianity
Days of celebrating Christ without implied parental abuse,
Years of joyful Eucharist focused on this world as blessed by God,
Indwelling Spirit, living saints, celebrated saints.
(Those days morphed into Eucharist with the corpse on the table- a violent God emerged, false Paradise arose). Sophia weeps!
Retrieve a faith that affirms our love, a faith grounded in wisdom
Through Rita, Sophia calls, ‘make again the path in paradise.’

Proverbs 3:18
Proverbs 8: 30

www.faithvoices.org contains Rita's full speech to the Voices of Sophia Breakfast

(registration form at bottom of page)
[posted 7-14-06]

Come for Refreshment

Renew body, mind and spirit through worship, conversation, sharing the wisdom and dreaming the vision.

Our speakers and leaders of our conversations will be:

Issues that we hope to address in our time together:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gathering Registration

Name____________________________________________

Address__________________________________________

City_____________________________________________

State___________________ ZIP__________

(includes Thursday dinner, Friday and Saturday breakfast and lunch, Sunday breakfast and Program Fee)

_____$290 Double Occupancy registration by August 15

_____$320 Double Occupancy registration after August 15

_____$110, Commuter Fee (includes all meals except breakfasts)

Registration by August 15

_____$130 Commuter Fee (includes all meals except breakfasts)

Registration after August 15

_____$75 single room adjustment (includes all 3 nights), limited single rooms

Roommate:________________________________ (If no name is included, Ghost Ranch Santa Fe will assign rooms)

Make Checks payable to

Voices of Sophia

Mail registration and check to:

Ann Olson
1974 W Summer Street
St. Paul, MN 55113

For more information, contact judystrausz@comcast.net

The Voices of Sophia website >>

[From  Judy Strausz-Clement, Voices of Sophia, 5-24-06]

This is an excerpt from Rita Brock's forthcoming book with Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise, which will be a part of her presentation to the Voices of Sophia breakfast at General Assembly, on Monday, June 19, at 7:00 am.

Excerpts from Saving Paradise, Beacon Press, forthcoming Spring 2007.

More on Dr. Brock >>

For the first thousand years of Christian art, Jesus Christ was not depicted dead. Why not? Initially, we didn't believe it could be true. Surely, the art historians who reported this fact were wrong. The crucified Christ was too important to Western Christianity. How could it be that images of Jesus' death were absent from first millennium churches?

The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a touchstone of meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the Christians who worshipped in the churches of early Christianity. The Christ they worshipped was the incarnate, risen Christ, the Lord of life.

Like most western Christians we were accustomed to images of a Christ who died in agony, hanging dead on the cross. We had been taught in church and in graduate school that Christians believed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ saved the world and that this idea was the core truth of Christian faith. In our book Proverbs of Ashes we showed how this idea contributed to sanctioning intimate violence and war by claiming the highest form of love was self-sacrifice, modeled by Jesus on the cross.

We regard such theology as a travesty - a poisoning of souls to acquiesce to evil. It is also a theological justification for God's use of violence to save the world. We found nothing life-giving or redeeming in a theology that sanctified the torture and execution of Jesus as God's will. Even so, we were unprepared for the possibility that Christians did not focus on the death of Jesus for a thousand years.

After our investigation of early Christian art and research into art history, we stepped back, astonished at the weight of the reality: Jesus crucified was just not there.

Only after it registered on us that the crucifixion was absent did we begin to pay attention to what was present in first millennium churches. The images were beautiful. Worship spaces placed Christians in a lush visual environment. They prayed and processed in their churches, surrounded by a cosmos of stars in night skies, sparkling rivers, and exuberant fauna and flora.

The paradise we saw was not an imaginary, idealized afterlife, not a perfect world. It was, in fact, often rather homely and ordinary in its loveliness, life depicted with irregular forms and rough edges. Nor was it a return to a primordial Garden of Eden, though its best features resembled the Genesis descriptions of creation at its dawn. It was something else. It was paradise as this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God. Divine power illuminated ordinary life from within. The images of paradise captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape and agricultural fecundity of the Mediterranean world. In landscapes of flowers, trees, and birds, fed by the four rivers of paradise, departed apostles and saints stood serenely, clothed in white robes of glory.

Early theologians reasoned that God had created the garden on the earth and it was found here in this world. Through baptism, Christians entered the church, "the paradise in this world."  Sanctified souls lived in a transfigured world and found paradise there. Paradise was the earth filled with the Spirit of God that was breathed on all creation in Genesis 1—the same Spirit Jesus Christ later bequeathed to the church. Paradise was not heaven. The divine realm of heaven was remote, mysterious, in the sky, where God dwelt with the angels. The paradise garden was created on the earth from the materials of creation, or so Augustine asserted in his third commentary on Genesis. Joy and wonder seeped into a world afflicted with violence and sorrow. Life, granted through the re-birth of baptism, encompassed death and overcame it.

Paradise was especially in the church, where a great cloud of witnesses who had passed through the curtain of death returned to bless their communities. The paradise of the dead was not a place removed from paradise on earth. Physical death separated the departed from the living, but it was a gossamer golden curtain, strong enough to keep Satan from passing through, but sheer enough for prayers to seep across and for the dead to visit in dreams and visions to bless the living. Paradise was infused by a life-giving power, one that could outlast the betrayals, denials, despair, violence, and sorrows inflicted by political might—the power of love, the Holy Spirit of God.

In the cross-cultural inter-religious brew that produced early Christianity, the assurance of paradise in this world was an inebriating grace, a life-giving recipe drawn from many ancient sources. Christians believed the spiritual journey was not toward greater innocence and purity, but toward a complex understanding of the forces of life, an understanding they called wisdom, Sophia, and its fruits were works of love, a passion for justice, an appreciation of beauty, the discernment of the spirit in the world, and the embrace of this world as good, as blessed.

This life-affirming sensibility began to fade in Western Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the unpredictable violence that escalated in the seventh and eighth centuries. Paradise was shifted into the afterlife. Western Christianity transferred salvation from incarnation, transfiguration, and resurrection to crucifixion, judgment, and the destruction of this world. The hunger for paradise lingered after it was displaced by crucifixion. By the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Western Christianity had replaced paradise with purgatory.

Rita Nakashima Brock is an award-winning author, and a respected international lecturer and scholar who worked for two decades as a professor of religion. From 1997-2001, Dr. Brock directed the Fellowship Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, formerly known as the Bunting Institute, one of the nation’s premiere research institutes for women, called "America’s think tank for women" by the Boston Globe. From 2001-2002, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. Among her books are Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power, Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, andProverbs of Ashes. Her current book project is Saving Paradise, forthcoming in the spring of 2007.

As a discipleship of equals, the church would...

Those who