LIVING BEYOND EVIL, i

The suicide doesn’t go alone, [she] takes everybody with [her]. –William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

My German grandfather Stichler sitting in his gold chair in the breakfast room, his room.  Surrounded by a haze of cigar smoke, listening to war news.  Brooding.  Morose.  Enraged.  Germans losing. 

Grandfather, German. Nazi sympathizer, must have been.  Years later my mother remembers watching him turn renters away from the door.  Begging to stay in his Philadelphia apartments even though they could no longer pay.  Depression desperate.

My mother also desperate, depressed.  Living in the house where her mother hanged herself, December 19, 1940.  My mother’s father promised her, their only child, that all he had would be hers when he died.  If she would keep house for him.  

My parents, newly wed June 1, my mother having said, “Let’s get married” to my father on his 25^th birthday, April 10.  Her parents, refusing to attend their simple wedding ceremony, give them $100 as a wedding gift.  

Yet they are ecstatic in the New York City apartment, loaned to them by my mother’s German professor at Swarthmore College where my parents met.  They delight in the freedom of living together, finally having left their parents’ homes.  He is an iron worker, following in his Swedish immigrant father’s footsteps.   My father proudly tells of making oxtail soup for my mother who is mysteriously sick that December, unaware she is pregnant. 

 That harsh December 19th her father calls to tell her that her mother has hanged herself in the basement.  My parents move into her father’s Philadelphia suburb house, ecstasy forgotten.  My mother seduced into believing if she does her father’s will, finally he will love her.  Sucking her into his grip, into that house where her mother has just hanged herself.   In the agony of loss and desire my mother says, “Yes.”  

My brother Robin carried and birthed in the midst of my mother’s grief and my father’s disillusionment.  I am born fourteen months later.  My father names me Joy because he is so glad I am a girl. Decades later I realize he hoped I would bring joy back into my mother’s life.  I learn to smile a lot.  I still do, reflexively hoping this will keep others happy with me and myself safe.  Robin carries my father’s disillusionment, I my mother’s grief.

April 24, 1945.  Concentration camps being opened.  Baby brother Laird born that day, too skinny.  Born into this household where each day my mother descends into the basement to do the laundry.  Where her mother hanged herself. 

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Infant.  Toddler.  I know I heard my mother and grandfather fight about the war.  My Quaker-educated mother and her Nazi sympathizer father.  No memory of the words.  My grandfather absent in photographs.  No images, except his sitting in that gold chair listening to the radio.  Living in his haze of cigar smoke and hatred.  In my seventh decade how I discover my body remembers the rage, my psyche the terror: clenching my teeth, especially when I smile, I have worn down the right jaw hinge. I still remember: looking down into his grave engraved into my brain.  It is September and I will turn three in a few days.

I remember and do not remember my mother’s raging against her father’s will.  Re-executed ten days before he dies, disinheriting his only child who had lived her promise to keep house for him.  Enraged by my mother’s fighting for her beliefs?  Her refusing to visit him in the hospital?  My father goes, offering to give his blood for “old man Stichler.”  Did my father know about the new will?  Was he hoping to change the dying man’s mind? (continued on next blog)

PART I, November 2019: “If God is male, then male is God.~~ Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, 1973.

Over the past two months as an adjusted dosage of Ibrance, a chemo-type pill for metastatic breast cancer, has taken hold, my energy has returned about 90% and my brain fog has cleared 85%–the fog returns when the fatigue does. Life in many colors has inspired me to think about writing and to do research.

Writing goal: through an op-ed piece to explicate the impact of a god who is addressed Father, King, Lord, Almighty, He, Him, His. This naming and imaging of God as male encourages and validates men’s right to exercise power over others. These others are women, children and powerless men who are human trafficked, sexually assaulted, vulnerable to violence, and/or held as slaves in every country in the world. Most often these targeted human beings, including in First World countries, are voiceless, uneducated, and live in poverty. 

First, my ongoing research. I explored online. Yes, there are websites and articles defending God as male as well as websites dedicated to G*ddess. I did not discover any discussing the possibility that G*d named and imaged as male implicitly encourages and validates men’s power over and violence against women. 

Second, I have been digging out my feminist theology books, seeking the same connections and updating my knowledge. I perused Elizabeth Johnson briefly; then went on to Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza where I hit pay dirt. Reading Elisabeth again stimulated my research juices. Even before I studied with her at seminary 1984-86, I was intrigued by her radical thinking–radical: going to the root of thinking, in this case the roots of Christian biblical and traditional white male theology. Now I sought her most recent writings and plan to listen to the latest YouTube recordings of her lectures. (to be continued in later blogs)

Then, I began attending a study group led by a recently appointed gay male minister to a Peaks Island church. I was amazed that the group was reading Womanist Midrash by Wil Gafney. I knew Wil when she was an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of PA, and a professor of Hebrew Scripture at Lutheran Theological Seminary. 

She has researched as well as imagined every woman named and unnamed in the Hebrew Scriptures from a Womanist (African-American feminist) perspective. She tells the biblical story, then she imagines her way into the story through a Womanist perspective.

One of the first comments I heard from the group was “All of the women we’ve read about have been raped!” From there the conversation centered on doubts and questions raised by this revelation and Wil’s Womanist imaginings. Absorbing and exploring these questions exposed the rote and cherry-picked knowledge taught by both in both Judaic and Christian traditions. To question is to begin to claim a personal faith that has been incubating within us as well as to claim a faith that explodes the traditions, letting in the breath and fire of the Spirit we call Holy.

Accompanying me as I deal with the rough and unpredictable emotional weather of metastatic breast cancer has been three slim morning and evening prayer books by John Philip Newell: Celtic Benediction; Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter; and Prayers with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace. 

Celtic spirituality celebrates that we and all that is have been created in the image of a loving God revealed through as well as beyond the five senses; human beings are integral to the goodness of creation. This Gaelic heritage is opposed to the Mediterranean tradition which focuses on our original sinfulness: only our spiritual nature can redeem us from our condemned physicality. This sin comes through Eve/women; thus the abusive treatment of women and of this fragile Mother Earth our island home is justified as is violence, both aggressive and passive-aggressive. In Celtic spirituality body-mind-spirit are one we all are one with every other aspect of creation.

Reading these Celtic prayers which include brief passages from the Biblical Wisdom tradition has stilled my racing thoughts. These prayers have drawn me into an expansive vision of the pervasive presence of the Sacred “within and all around.” As I have literally rested into the prayers, I have sensed the immense mystery of this universe contained within other universes. Infinite. Imagined but not understood. Words inaccessible. Breaking open our finite, constrained, unimaginative images of and words for “God.”

“God” for whom I have sought meaning beyond the traditions suddenly sang out to me once again. The traditional narrow understanding and imaging of God as male, patriarchal and hierarchical had haunted me for decades. Now I know viscerally, in my body, and mystically, in my soul, that this mystery of which we all partake is infinitely beyond our ken as well as the lived reality in which we live and move and have our being.

From “Sounds of the Eternal,” Sunday Morning Opening Prayer

In January 20, 2018, I was diagnosed with Metastatic Breast Cancer.  By mid-May my husband and I had both retired and moved to what had been our summer home on an island off Portland, Maine.

Now in July 2019 I am relaxing into writing my cancer reflections from the physical, emotional, relational and spiritual fronts of living into dying. As with my sharing in Part I written in 2017, I write these explorations so that others might know what I am learning as I live further into my living into my dying.

It wasn’t until a month after my diagnosis that I asked my oncologist what stage cancer I have. I had researched stages but had not connected the dots that metastatic is Stage 4 cancer. For me understanding the complexity of having metastatic cancer is a gradual awakening.

“Metastatic,” as most people do not know means “beyond stasis”; in other words, the medications I take will be chasing cancer cells for the remainder of my life. My primary breast cancer was Stage 1. I had a lumpectomy and an excellent prognosis–operation, radiation, very low probability of returning cancer.

This time cancer cells are in my bones. Cells can travel to the bones, liver, brain, anywhere they choose; eventually the game will be up. Bone metastases are the most hopeful starting point. I am thankful that my present medications are still working according to my scans taken in June. My oncologist tells me I have “very little cancer.” PET scans or a combination of CT scans and bone scans are the principal ways we can know where the cells are active since they light up these places. My next scans are in November.

Those are the physical facts–other than the considerable pain which can surface in my joints wherever it chooses plus other side effects which blindside me. Just as I think I know what to expect, I am surprised by a new and unexpected side effect, putting me on notice that I am not in control.

However, over this past year I have been able to track what is happening–the first six months I plowed through all the side effects except the fatigue which drove me to rest on the bed for an hour at a time. We had to move on moving day, a daunting challenge which we completed by keeping on keeping on until the last counter was wiped down and the front door closed. I have begun to acclimate to expecting the unexpected. Since I cannot anticipate what will happen next, I am learning to cope with what is happening from moment-to-moment in my physical being. As I have been told my palliative care doctor: Joy, this is your life now.

Future posts on the emotional, relational and spiritual fronts.

Addendum: FYI, As I return to posting after a post-Trump election hiatus, I am learning more WordPress.com operational details that I expect will turn up in my posts. More to come.

As one small step for womankind—humankind–I now raise up the women’s stories by remembering a changing variety of women with a variety of roles, “God of our Fathers and Mothers, God of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, of Deborah, Ruth and Naomi, Jacob, Rachel and Leah.”

When we read seeking deeper levels, Biblical stories become complex and enriched and a complex, multi-dimensional God hidden within flattened patriarchal and male-centered interpretations of these narratives appears. As you read or hear Biblical stories, I invite you to focus on the women, take the bits and pieces and interpret them through your eyes, bring them out of the shadows of the traditions into the light of new revelation, out of silence into proclamation.

Ask questions. What are this woman’s characteristics? What is her importance to this story? How is her story told in my faith tradition? Does she have a voice? If so, what does she say? If not, what do I imagine she wants to say? How could her story be told differently?

Today I invite you to begin with the Book of Ruth, a six chapter short story of women, by considering the characteristics of these two women. You might recognize the power of the elder Naomi’s radical crone wisdom when it is joined with the adventurous and risk-taking spiritedness of the young foreigner Ruth. Together they use their energies and resources to devise a plan for survival in a patriarchal culture which does not look kindly on women without male protectors. By the end of the Book, they not only have survived but are thriving. A child has been born to Ruth, a child whom Naomi helps care for. Women of their chosen community name the child. Women helping women, a younger woman and an older woman teaming—and scheming– together, for the welfare of all, surrounded by a community of women welcoming the child of the foreigner and celebrating new life.

I also encourage you to try imagining God explicitly as a woman. How might she be imaged creatively? How might your naming God as female empower you to work to change your faith tradition? Expand your worldview?? Shatter the ultimate, the stained glass ceiling? What feelings are awakened as you question and imagine?

As women have released energy repressed and blocked by abused, oppressed, and ignored Biblical women, space has been created for narratives and images to evolve into greater fullness. These discoveries invite other women and men to play along by re-imagining their own faith images, narratives and journeys.

Within this space, created by rage and outrage held in tension with delight and celebration, the ancient Hebrew figure of Divine Wisdom is re-members. In Hebrew and Christian testaments she is Divine Wisdom, Sophia in Greek. She who was present in creation calls us to revel in that Creation. She calls all who will listen to come to her and eat at her groaning table filled with food for body, mind and spirit. She is ready to impart her wisdom to those who yearn to exchange their heavy and unbearable burdens for a yoke which is substantial and meaning-full, yet easy and light. In this image of the Divine Feminine who was present with God in creation, we re-member the image of God in which we, women and men, were created: male and female God created them.

Through our ongoing work, wo-men continue to reclaim authority and voices both to interpret the scriptures and to name the Holy and themselves, moving from rejection of our bodies, minds and spirits toward self-love and self-acceptance, using our imaginations to connect the snippets of our heritage to create greater fullness of life for all Creation. (End)