In recent weeks when the news spread that the Vatican is making significant strides to revise its handling of clergy sexual abuse cases–all while allegedly linking the severity of these sins to the ordination of women–the questions came in, and I started to ask myself, “How are you feeling about this, Jessica?  How are you doing?“

I couldn’t stop thinking about the story my friend Katie told me the other day. During a recent weekend, she volunteered at a middle school camp for inner city youth run by the Catholic parochial school where she taught for a few years after college. On that Sunday morning, she went to Mass with the students and their teachers in the camp’s quaint wooden chapel. The presider was gracious with the kids, and a good homilist, too. “But the tabernacle there–” she told me.  That’s what got her. “The tabernacle looks just like the boy’s Catholic school down the street. Like the shape of their building.”  I began to smile as she went on.  I delighted in the fact that this friend anticipated the wonder I would share with her as she recounted this experience for me.  ”This is what Catholicism is about, isn’t it? Recognizing Jesus inside an inner city school like that? Like that?  Believing that Jesus dwells with the underprivileged so much that you make a symbol of it with the most important part of your sanctuary?”

I nodded as we savored this moment that captured the best of our Church.  In that small moment, we didn’t have to convince ourselves that we are so blessed to belong to this Church.  We are blessed to have  church that views inner city schools as tabernacles, and tabernacles as inner city schools.  And blessed to be raised in a church that has given us the eyes to see the world in this way, too. “I wish I had moments like that more often,” Katie said. I think she was referring to the tabernacle at the camp, but I was thinking the same thing about the moment we had just shared–that moment of unwavering pride for our faith.

I’ve been telling a lot of people that, for many reasons, I feel sad and disappointed about the recent Vatican stirrings.  And, really, I’m feeling tired of feeling sad and disappointed. But I am also trying to tell a lot of people about my hope. I’m trying to talk about that, too. I’m trying to tell them about the eyes this tradition has afforded me–Katie and me.  Eyes that recognize miraculous transformations in places and people that much of society overlooks. Eyes that see Jesus in the sometimes harsh and unglamorous realities of our cities.  Eyes set on recognizing God’s redemption of our world in any and every place.  Even in our Church.

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”  Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”  The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes… (Matthew 8:5-8)

There are many things about this section of scripture that make me squeamish.  In principle, I dislike charges of absolute authority, even as they are ascribed to the human incarnation of an omnipotent God.  I am especially uncomfortable with authority analogies related to the military, or any other institutions that employ violence as a means of enforcement, for that matter.  There is something about the centurion’s claim of unworthiness that gets me, too.  Perhaps I’ve seen too many well-intentioned Christians transform “humility” into unproductive guilt.

Despite all this, I cling to that declaration: But just say the word, and my servant will be healed.

This man knew the power of a word.

Jesus responded to the centurion, saying, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would!” I’d like to believe that “Go” was the word with all that power.  I want to believe that because it is often the smallest words that heal me.  Last semester I took a seminar that required students to circulate written reflections on the assigned readings before class. While reading the first reflection paper of the semester, written by male student, I was touched by the care with which he employed one little word. “When one does this, she experiences that…” Every non-specific pronoun he utilized in the essay was gendered female—a stark contrast to the ubiquitous male-gendered pronouns that filled the theological texts we studied all semester. With that little word—“she”—this colleague extended a powerful message: language so often excludes people of your gender, and I am invested in changing that.  This gesture brought a little bit of healing.

Big words and long phrases have power, too.  I keep a stack of blank note cards next to my bed; you will find me frantically reaching for them while reading Nouwen, Teresa of Avila, and Foucault when I have come across a line or a paragraph too precious to forget.  I scribble them down and pin them to the bulletin board hanging on my bedroom wall where they remind me that so many others out there share the truths that I have unearthed in this short life. These are healing words because they remind me that I am not alone in my search for sense and meaning in my strange encounter with this world.

When I think of being “Christlike,” I dream of bringing words that heal.  This is how I make sense of a life of so many books and computer screens. I am searching for the Word.  The Word that heals.

In Lauren Winner’s memoir, Girl Meets God, she recounts her transition from Orthodox Judaism to Anglican Christianity.  Couched among the tales of her various love affairs, the story of Winner’s tumultuous conversion mirrors her romantic relationships with men.  Winner writes of how she found herself consistently enamored by Jesus while persistently fighting against her burgeoning devotion.  In the end, she gave in to the love affair.  I read this book for the first time when I was sixteen—at the age of first love and first heartbreak—and undoubtedly, it gave me a paradigm for understanding my increasing attraction to the Catholicism of my upbringing.  If becoming Catholic was like falling in love, perhaps leaving would feel something like a break-up.

We have rituals for break-ups, for mourning the loss of a lover, a once-constant life companion.  We let ourselves cry.  We call our friends, and they show up, sit on our couches, and hold us as we try to catch our breath, like Kate. We take down pictures and put old letters into shoeboxes that we shove into our closets, perhaps opening them from time to time for grieving. When we have no paradigm for life without that ex-companion, friends tell us to wake up in the morning, to get out of bed, and they promise that someday it will be a little bit easier. Those around us testify to a hopeful future until we believe it.

Later in the day after reading Kate’s blog entry, I sat at dinner with my boyfriend Jack, telling him how I had carried her heavy words with me all day.  Jack leaned forward to speak—then paused. “I have a frank question for you, if I may?” he asked. “I know you don’t think you can leave, Jessica.  But do you ever wonder if you could, maybe some day?”  Jack has stood beside me during Episcopal liturgies where I wept silently, yearning to belong to a community like that—a more egalitarian space where, for instance, a woman could consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Afterward, I told him I was crying because I could never imagine leaving the Catholic Church, even in the moments when I want to.  Feeling stuck in my relationship to the Church hurts sometimes—but I have no paradigm for life without the liturgy and people and tradition that I have loved for so long, even with its major imperfections.

“Sometimes I think it’s possible,” I responded.  “But, I think I would need a funeral first.” Jack tilted his head, wearing a confused look.  This was not a clever way of saying I will be Catholic until I die.  It had simply occurred to me, “I would need some sort of ritual. You know, at funerals everyone who loves you gets together, and they celebrate your life with them.  They mourn your absence but they commend you into another space.  At the very least, I think I would need that to leave Catholicism.  To feel okay about it.”

For many people, leaving Catholicism is a courageous decision made in response to the painful circumstances imposed on them by the Church.  Many suffer within Catholicism for many years before they leave, and for many leaving is a concerted effort to salvage Christian faith.  It is not a rejection of it.  More than ever, it is apparent to me that we need a pastoral response for those who need to leave.  We need some way of communicating those messages of condolence and hope that we share with our friends as they mourn the loss of a lover: “It seems that this is the best thing for you right now, even as it hurts,” or simply, “It’s going to be okay.” We need to go sit with them, and listen to the stories of their grief.  We need some way to say, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry…”

It was a friend’s mother who gave me Girl Meets God in high school.  She was raised Catholic, and during her college years she increasingly attended a local Protestant church. She became involved in their ministries, and eventually she found herself identifying with this new community much more than the Catholicism of her upbringing.  One summer she was at a Christian camp with young people from her church, and she befriended a Catholic priest who was also there with a group from his parish.  She told him about her life in the Church, and how she had decided to leave Catholicism for this new Protestant community.  This priest offered to say a prayer with her, one that would mark her departure from Catholicism and her entrance into this other Christian community.  And indeed, their prayer marked this transition for her all those years later.

When she told me this story as a high school student, I thought it was so strange. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would intentionally seek a mark of separation from Catholicism. Excommunication was the only thing I could equate to this type of event, and that is something forced on people—not sought out. But today I wonder what a prayer like that could do for people like Kate, or for many of the people I know and love.  And I wonder what the offer of a prayer like that would do for me.

“Speak your mind, even if your voice is shaking.”  -Maggie Kuhn

I have memories of being a typically-gregarious little girl who was afraid to speak in class.  Maybe it was more self-consciousness than fear. My young male peers taunted me on the basketball court at recess and inside the classroom walls–”like children do”–because I was a young female with something she wanted to say.   They told me this.   They explained to me my boundaries “because I was a girl.”  Even though I sensed that all of us knew these were untrue, these young men said all this because it had power.  It had power because we all knew it had once been thought to be true.  And that was a powerful reminder.  (Where do second graders learn this?  Probably Nickelodeon sitcoms).

Generally speaking, I imagine these situations evoke two types of reaction: Either young females learn not to speak up in class; studies have confirmed this.  Or, they start talking louder.  With the impassioned cursive script of a second grader, I decided to report gender confrontation after gender confrontation in our class “Conflict” notebook, which my teacher read aloud once a week before facilitating a detailed lesson and class discussion concerning conflict resolution skills.  I started talking louder.

And I’ve been loud ever since. I’m the kind of person who steps out into the middle of Boston traffic to yell at taxi drivers who spit out racist and homophobic slurs in moments of senseless road rage.  I have this intense moral compass (undoubtedly learned from my mother) and I will simply shatter if I don’t speak up sometimes.

That’s why I don’t know what to do with the trembling voice and unsteady pen I have found myself with in recent times.  In moments like these, I don’t recognize myself.  I ask myself, “What happened to that little girl with that strong, loud voice? The young woman who believed in the potential power of her voice?”  I am second-guessing my words, projecting onto myself the presumed judgements of others.  I doubt whether anything I have to say could possibly make any difference for the causes I address.  My voice trembles when I speak, and I struggle to silence its shaking doubt.

I keep speaking, though. I keep writing, clearly.  One of my favorite quotes reads, “No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”  It’s from Rilke, the writer who told a young poet to keep writing when he doubted himself.  I think my voice shakes these days because I have given myself to a sort of danger–to the danger of a challenging academic environment, to new friends and brilliant peers, to a world far from the comforts and tangible love of home.  It feels vulnerable. But it is getting better.

I still believe that one day I will open my mouth and the words won’t shake anymore.  I hope they will resound louder and stronger than before.

Until then, I’ll keep talking.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/manjidesigns/2924530940/

Yesterday in the New York Times his op-ed was titled, “Religion and Women,” so naturally I was eager to read.  And I really appreciated many things about this piece.  It highlighted a multiply of oppressions against women, both some regularly witnessed and experienced by women in the US, and some more commonly associated with other parts of the world. He also illustrated how widespread these problems are in relation to religion–many types of religion throughout history and across the globe.

Most of all, I appreciated how Kristof demonstrated the complex relationship between gender and religion.  While religion is often sighted as a source of women’s oppression (and rightly so, I think), frequently it is also a context wherein women receive opportunities to exercise their power and authority. In my experience, people commonly dismiss religion as entirely sexist and misogynist, missing the complexity of gender dynamics that exist within many religious communities. Kristof points this out with an example of conservative Christian and pentecostal churches in Africa, which often recognize women’s leadership more than their other community’s outside religion.

We absolutely need to call out religion whenever and wherever it oppresses others, but I hope we can do this accurately so as to honor the women within religion.  If we simply dismiss religion, I think we run the risk of dismissing the reality of the women within the world’s many traditions.  That would be a very contradictory attempt at battling women’s oppression.

Image from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/opinion/ts-kristof-190.jpg.

Check out my article, “This Is What A Catholic Woman Looks Like,” featured  in the “Young Women & Catholicism” column at www.Patheos.com.