girltheology

As a 32 year old "Gen X'ish" (depending on your definition) ordained minister, I've found myself in several positions in the last year where I had to defend my 'faith' against reason. While I think that the following excerpt from St. Augustine's Confessions leave Christianity open to its own criticism (for to say that Christians are never guilty of this same offense would be hugely inappropriate - perhaps moreso now). Yet, I find that it's important for me to read these words to remind myself of the tradition of intention in my faith... the self-critical position of many who have given their lives as an act of faith, depsite the fallibility of our lives as Christians. I know it's an ideal that many could/do find fault with, but I'm in love with this passage:

O Lord my God, be patient, as you always are, with the men of this world as you watch them and see how strictly they obey the rules of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they have received from you. A man who has learnt the traditional rules of pronunciation, or teaches them to others, gives greater scandal if he brekas them by dropping the aitch from 'human being' than if he breaks your rules and hates another human, his fellow man. This is just as perverse as to imagine that our enemies can do us more harm than we do to ourselves by hating them, or that by persecuting another man we can damage him more fatally than we damage our own hearts in the process. O God, alone in majesty, high in the silence of heaven, unseen by man! we can see how your unremitting justice punishes unlawful ambition with blindness, for a man who longs for fame as a fine speaker will stand up before a human judge, surrounded by a human audience, and lash his opponent with malicious invective, taking the greatest care not to say 'uman' instead of 'human' by a slip of the tongue, and yet the thought that the frenzy in his own mind may condemn a human being to death disturbs him not at all.

St. Augustine's Confessions Book 1, 18.

I know that several of my clergy-type friends have been reading this blog for a while, but I have to say - I LOVE PEACEBANG.

If you are clergy - especially if you are a woman - you need to be reading this site. Ok, maybe only if you are a woman minister.

At any rate, it's like Emily Post meets What Not To Wear meets Ordination:

Beauty Tips for Ministers

That's all I have to say... go read it.

While I am the "Chaplain" for the United Church at UBC, I am actually appointed as part of the ministry team at University Hill United Church. Our congregation has been going through a difficult time of discernment and decision making around whether or not we will, in the name of Christ, bless same same sex marriage. It's been a difficult, difficult process, and last night during our council meeting I kept having the words of Thomas Merton's prayer go through my head. This especially since the faith formation portion of our meeting was on "Thou shall not take the Lord's name in vain"; one of the ways in which we blaspheme God being that we presume to know what God/Jesus/Spirit thinks - that we become grandiose putting our own will as what we would hope the Divine will would be.

So, say a prayer for my little congregation as we move forward from here, and if you're in a place where you're unsure of something in your own life, I love this prayer:

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude"

So, for a class I'm taking at VST this semester, I have to re-read Douglas Coupland's "Life After God," which has long been one of my favourite books.

I was talking to an old acquaintance tonight (yup, you Peter C), and we had both basically spent our days discussing relationship issues with friends. As in issues of friends.

Anyway, tonight as I was getting ready for bed, I was reading the book, and this section stuck out to me - it seems all too accurate for many in my world, both men and women. So... for all of my hurting friends... this is for you, from Douglas Coupland:

"Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it.

When I was younger, I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.

Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.

For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinkign that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode." (Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" p. 142-143)

So... it's funny because I have been recently reading a blog called "Beauty Tips for Ministers", and this morning I took a big risk and went with the "Reformed Chic" look (my own design - not from the blog).

I was asked to preach at West Point Grey United Church in Vancouver as the UBC Chaplain for the United Church. I decided, with the exception of my shoes, to dress the way I would any other day up at UBC.

So... one pair of hot shoes later, I strutted off to church wearing jeans, a black tab-collar clerical shirt, and a white down-filled vest. I surprisingly only raised a few eyebrows (sorry, Mom), and most thought it was great. Also got to meet some UBC students who were there for their first Sunday, so that was pretty cool.

Anyways - it was an interesting day. Not sure I'd do it again. I like dressing this way on campus though.

Blessings!

This is so awesome!

OK - so first of all, I apologize to friends (mostly outside of Vancouver) for being extremely poor at updating my blog.

Secondly - I have a new work website: http://www.ubc-uniteds.ca/ which you're welcome to check out about what's going on in Campus Ministry at UBC.

Third - I went to Armenia for 11 days in September to attend the fall 2007 meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches. I spent 5 days staying with friends who live in the capital city, Yerevan. Then I joined the other members of the Executive Committee and moved to a hotel and we held our meetings at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin.
Here are some pictures of my trip: