Denying Women Church Leadership: A Spiritual Violation

I was devastated when I learned recently that a woman–a qualified and experienced woman who I know personally as a friend and mentor–was denied a senior pastorship at the church of a North American Seventh-day Adventist university. While the church’s search committee called her, the conference blocked their call, apparently because they believed it would be difficult to place her in another church if she happened to fail in the university’s church. Until this incident, I hadn’t really experienced the SDA discomfort with women in church leadership firsthand, so I hadn’t thought much about it. But this event hit close to home and made me think more about why I believe allowing women church leadership roles is so important.

Upon hearing the news about this woman, I thought to myself: what message does denying a woman leadership at a university church send to all the women studying theology there? And, closer to home, what message does it send to me, a woman who studied theology at an SDA institution? Is the church disregarding our sense of divine calling? Is the church telling us that our spirituality is less important that a man’s?

The preparation process for pastoral leadership is one of the most arduous I know of. While theology classes may not be the most intellectually difficult on campus, they are some of the most personally and spiritually taxing because they test a person on the very deepest and most private of levels. Moreover, the interview process for pastoral positions in the SDA church is one of the most grueling imaginable. During a theology student’s senior year in college, a group of high-ranking conference officials come to his or her institution and conduct interviews, asking a series of deeply personal questions–about marital status, about religious upbringing, about theological beliefs. I remember watching my theology major friends, both male and female, waiting outside the dean’s office for their interviews, shaking with anxiety. After watching the stressfulness of this process, then, I’m deeply disappointed to find out that apparently, for my female friends, this process was all in vain. Like their male counterparts, they studied for four years and sat through nerve-wracking interviews and were thus led by theology professors and conference officials to believe that they had a chance at getting pastorships. But evidently, this was not the case.

This sort of denial–the denial of a woman’s right to follow her spiritual callings–strikes me as one of the worst possible violations of a woman’s dignity. Denying a woman education violates the integrity of her mind and declares her intellectual abilities unequal to a man’s. Rape violates the integrity of a woman’s body and sends the message that her physical needs are less important than a man’s. Similarly, denying a woman spiritual leadership, if that is what she believes God has called her to do, violates her spiritual integrity and declares her spirituality and her connection to the divine to be less legitimate than a man’s. Denying a woman church leadership denies her soul, thus striking her in one of the deepest and most effecting ways.

Now, I realize that the issue is more complicated than I’ve said. Many women who feel spiritual callings, just like their male counterparts, are not qualified for ministry. And, congregations in many geographic regions are as yet unready for female ministers. But in the instance I’m talking about–in which a qualified woman was denied a position at a North American university–neither of these arguments can be made. Even the argument that her conference might have a difficult time finding her a position in another church if for some reason she didn’t fit at the university’s church fails because I know, and I’m sure those making the decision knew, that she has been very happily received by the major SDA church where she currently pastors. Moreover, rumor has it that yet another SDA church is interested in her.

I’m not arguing for worldwide women’s ordination. I’m not arguing that women should be stationed at churches who don’t want them. I’m merely saying, first, that we ought to allow qualified women to take church leadership positions in churches where they would be accepted, and, second, that we ought to do everything we can to encourage those who aren’t ready for female leaders to come that place. Failing to do so is a devastating affront to women and to their connection with the divine.

Intimacy in Art: Lessons from Mark Doty, John Gutoskey, and a Communion Service

Some questions that have been troubling me lately: how personal is good art? how personal is good art criticism? As a literary critic in training, I spend a lot of time writing very impersonal critiques of texts, and, frankly, I often find this impersonality stifling. The texts I study move me, challenge me, exasperate me; why can’t I write about that, I sometimes wonder? Indeed, in a previous post, I asked this very question and argued that literary critics should acknowledge their emotional and spiritual responses to texts more than they do.

However, after some more pondering, I’m beginning to think that I didn’t tell the whole story. A convergence of three very disparate events in my life has changed my thinking: (1) visiting an art fair and seeing the work of John Gutoskey, (2) reading Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, and (3) participating in a communion service at my local Seventh-day Adventist church.

First, Gutoskey. As my reading log and my recent posts betray, I’ve been obsessed lately with autobiography, nature writing, and writing about the body–that is, writing concerned with real life and material existence, with immanence. So, when I stumbled upon Gutoskey’s work, I was attracted to its materiality. Gutoskey works in “mixed media assemblage”–that is, he creates by putting together diverse objects, paints, and images–so his pieces are strikingly physical. Moreover, Gutoskey’s work is very grounded in personal experience. He himself says that his work “implies a story, a line of thinking, a feeling, some issue I am mulling over.” Gutoskey does explore transcendent spiritual and philosophical themes, but ultimately his pieces are exercises in immanence–exercises in paying attention to physical objects and reflecting on individual experiences. Here is Gutoskey’s website, and below are some of my favorite of his pieces:

The Metamorphosis of Faith, 1. Prayer:

Towers and Shrines, So No One Can Forget:

Renaissance Cloning Kits, Purification of Consciousness:

Second, Doty. Doty’s book is a beautiful memoir, an insightful consideration of still life painting, and a useful philosophical discussion about materiality and intimacy. Reading it complicated my response to Gutoskey’s work. On the surface, Doty’s understanding of immanence in art mirrors my response to Gutoskey. Doty stresses that the power of still life is in its immanence–in the artist’s intimacy with the subject and his dedication to material detail. However, Doty also points out something I missed: that the power of still life–of art in general–also comes from its transcendence. Doty says still lifes are powerful not only because they portray an artist’s intimacy with his material subject but also because they conceal the personalities of their creators and because their subjects are unrealistic in their perfection. This thesis was hard for me to swallow until I got to the book’s pivotal question and answer: Doty asks, “Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so?” and he answers, “something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself” (my emphasis). In other words, even when a painting is not grounded in material reality or in the painter’s personal life, it still retains a trace of intimacy in its attention to life. Indeed, Doty suggests, art motivated by “pure attention” is the best art because it maintains a balance between immanence and transcendence.

But Doty’s new insights didn’t home for me until I participated in communion last Sabbath at my local SDA church. For several weeks, I’d been thinking about the need for immanence in art and religious practice, and I’d been privately lamenting the fact that, as a Protestant, I can’t practice intimacy with spiritual objects as Catholics do–for example, with icons, shrines, and rosary beads. And so, when the deacons passed out the communion wine and wafers last Sabbath morning, I found myself wondering if SDAs would get more of an artistic and spiritual blessing out of communion if they believed it to be the actual body and blood of Christ. But then, the pastor began to read the story of the last supper, and I was caught unawares by Christ’s words about the bread and wine: Christ says enigmatically, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” In the space of a breath, Christ says both that the bread and wine are his actual body and that they are mere mementos. He leaves us hanging, and so, like countless theologians throughout the centuries, I wanted to stand up and ask, “Well, which is it? Are the bread and wine real or symbolic?”

I’m not even going to pretend to offer a theological answer to that question, but I will say that good art and good art criticism raise a very similar question. Like the bread and wine, they bring us to the edge of our seats and make us ask, is that real or symbolic? And, while I’m unsure about the theological answer to that question, I think the artistic or literary answer is “both.” On the one hand, good art and good art criticism must emerge from material and personal reality. On the other hand, though, they must leave behind only traces of that materiality and personality–only symbolic momentos of the artist’s attention to them. The theological battles over the question of transubstantiation demonstrate that this balance is a hard one to strike, but I think it’s an important one. For me, Christ’s enigmatic words unexpectedly offer a challenging but necessary standard for appropriately integrating the personal into art and art criticism. It’s a standard I hope I can begin to live up to in my own work.

Tensions in Religion and Literature I

My father is a scientist who studies the relationship of science and religion, so, growing up, I heard probably more than your average Jane about the tensions between the scientific and religious worldviews. However, while my upbringing was perhaps unique, I don’t think I’m the only one who has heard a lot about the intersection of science and religion. Given the prominent voices in the media today of, on the one hand, America’s religious right and, on the other, vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, we–that is, Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans–are constantly bombarded with the question of how to reconcile science and religion. Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that ever since the scientific revolution, the interface of science and religion has been the primary battleground in the great war between the church and the academy, between faith and reason.

And understandably so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from hearing my father talk about his work, it’s that reconciling science and religion is a tricky business deserving of extreme care and attention. However, while I think discussing the science and religion interface is important, I can’t help but wonder if, in our attention to the religion and science front, we’re neglecting other fronts in the war between the academy and the church–fronts that were discussed more often in the days before the scientific revolution and that today, in a postmodern age when some argue that how we talk about truth is at least as important as truth itself, require our attention again. I’m thinking about the front between religion and the humanities, and in particular between religion and literature.

Most people assume that religion and literature make good bedfellows. When I tell friends or relatives that I study religion and literature, the usual response is, “Oh, they go together well!” Certainly, on some level, religion and literature do go together well. Afterall, biblical studies is really literary criticism, systematic theology is really philosophy, and church history is really, as its title suggests, history.

However, my experience in the literary world has taught me that the relationship of religion and literature isn’t so simple. Over and over, I’ve observed that in Christian colleges and universities, it is the English departments and not the science departments that are, as one of my English professors put it once, “the liberal holdouts.” Far from easily swallowing their institutions’ theological lines as some might expect, then, English professors actually seem to be the most eager to challenge theological teaching.

Indeed, after graduating from an Seventh-day Adventist undergraduate institution and watching my SDA friends go their separate ways, I’ve noticed that, at least within the SDA church, it is the humanities majors who stop attending church, not the science majors.* To be sure, many of my scientist friends do have questions about their faith. However, maybe because they see that the church is interested in talking about their questions, they seem to keep attending church faithfully. My humanities friends, though–perhaps seeing that the church doesn’t address their questions and then concluding that it is uninterested in, unaware of, or unable to answer them–seem to give up on church altogether.

Which leads to the million dollar question: what are the questions that humanities majors are asking that the church isn’t? Or, to phrase it differently, what are the tensions between religion and the humanities? For the next few posts, I plan to describe what I think are some of the big conflicts between religion and the humanities–and, in particular, between religion and literature. My goal is not so much to reconcile religion and literature or to encourage the church and my humanities colleagues to reunite; like science and religion, literature and religion are not easily reconciled and sometimes I’m not even sure thay should be reconciled. Instead, I hope merely to bring to light in an articulate way some of the tensions between religion and literature that have long been overlooked.

*I think it would be fascinating to compare the retention rates of humanities students in other Christian faiths. My hunch is that Catholic or high church Protestant humanities majors would be more likely to stick with their churches than their low church Protestant counterparts because Catholicism and high church Protestant faiths have historically engaged more in pre-scientific revolution issues like the tension between religion and literature than have low church Protestant faiths.

How Seventh-day Adventism Taught Me to Appreciate the Natural World

I’ve recently discovered that I like reading nature writing, particularly spiritual nature writing, and, as my reading log betrays, during the last month I’ve gone on a bit of a spiritual nature writing binge. I’ve enjoyed Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger, Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope, Stanley Kunitz’ The Wild Braid, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, and on my “to read next” list are Diane Ackerman’s Deep Play and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

All of this reading about the relationship of spiritual things and the natural world has prompted me to think about the relationship of the spiritual and the natural in my own experience. In particular, it has made me think about Seventh-day Adventism’s relationship to the natural world and about what Seventh-day Adventism has taught me about nature. Though I’ve only had limited experience with other faiths, I’m beginning to think that the SDA faith has made me appreciate nature more than other faiths might have.

Seventh-day Adventism stresses the relationship of spirituality and nature in important, if not immediately obvious, ways. For instance, in her writings, the SDA prophetess Ellen White heavily emphasizes the role of nature in one’s spiritual journey. I’ll always remember her famous line from the opening chapter of Steps to Christ–“‘God is love’ is written upon every opening bud, upon every spire of springing grass”–because the quote hung in needlepoint at the entrance to my Seventh-day Adventist grandparents’ home.

The SDA belief about the nature of man may also contribute to its interest in nature. Many Christian denominations believe that a person’s body and soul can be separated and, in fact, are separated at death. SDAs, however, lean on the Hebrew term nephesh–meaning a living being composed of an inseparable body and soul–which is used to describe the human person in Genesis 2:7, and they argue that a person’s flesh and spirit are thus inseparable. The consequences of this doctrine are far-reaching. If the human person is composed of both a body and a spirit together, the natural and the spiritual realms are inextricably linked. Moreover, if a human is created to be as much flesh as he is soul, his flesh–and by extension the fleshly or natural world–is esteemed more than it might be in faiths that shun fleshly things. For an SDA, the natural becomes something to be prized.

Finally, I think the SDA emphasis on the Sabbath contributes to the value it places on nature. The classic Sabbath afternoon activity–one with which I grew up–is the trek into nature. Whether a mountain hike, a trip to the beach, a visit to the local nature museum, or just a walk around the neighborhood, SDAs frequently spend the hours after their hearty Sabbath lunches enjoying the out-of-doors. In fact, for some traditional SDAs, one of the only acceptable excuses, outside of sickness, for missing church is spending Sabbath morning in nature.

I am extremely thankful for what my SDA upbringing has taught me about the connection between the natural and the spiritual realms. Whether or not I buy all of the theology behind the SDA esteem of nature, I think the idea that nature and spirit are inseparable is beautiful and powerful. In fact, it’s an idea that I think SDAs could take even farther than they do. Particularly after my reading of nature writing, I am even more convinced that as human beings we need to be more careful about how we treat our environment, and I think SDAs, if they would go a few steps further in their thinking, could make a significant contribution to the effort to preserve our world.

Pronouns, Confessional Identity*, and Truth-telling

When one of my professors invited our class to his house for dinner last semester and we all ended up discussing our religious backgrounds, I noticed, much to my chagrin, that my confusion about my confessional identity is evident even in the way I use pronouns. In fact, my pronoun usage is perhaps the most obvious indicator of my confessional confusion.

When it came my turn to tell everyone about my religious affiliations, I began by explaining, I think coherently, that I had been raised in a Seventh-day Adventist home but that now I’m not sure whether or not I am an SDA; while I usually think of myself as SDA, I’m not sure if other SDAs would include me in their fold if they knew what I believe. At this point, though, my professor broke in and asked me to describe Seventh-day Adventism, since he didn’t know very much about it, and his seemingly obvious question threw a wrench in the works of my cogent explanation. I began by explaining Seventh-day Adventism to him in terms of “their” history and “their” unique beliefs, but by the end of my description I found I was describing it in terms of “our” history and “our” beliefs. While I began by distancing myself from the faith, I ended by including myself within its boundaries.

No one mentioned, or perhaps even noticed, the pronoun shift in my explanation or the confusion that it betrayed about my confessional identity, but I was embarrassed about my inability to clearly and truthfully describe my position. I suppose I could write off my pronoun mix-up as a result of the inability of language to fully describe reality, but, while I do think language is flawed, I also think it’s all we’ve got and that we have an ethical responsibility to use it as accurately as possible. And, I don’t think I used it as well as I could have.

In the end, I probably won’t worry too much about my mis-speech because I don’t think anyone was harmed by it. This time. I can’t help but wonder, though, if even little inaccuracies like misusing pronouns can be hurtful. For instance, I worry that the way I use pronouns to describe myself to SDA church members may falsely lead them to see me as a traditional SDA and that they may feel betrayed if they discover otherwise. I try to be as honest about my beliefs as I can, at least with close SDA friends, but I’ve noticed that even after I reveal my heterodox beliefs to them, they still treat me as a traditional SDA. Are little inaccuracies in my speech–like including myself in the SDA “we”–giving them a false picture of me?

I don’t really have a solution to my pronoun problem, but I suspect it is connected to larger questions about truth-telling and the importance of good writing and speech. Maybe all I can say is that this incident at my professor’s home reveals just how critical learning language skills is for being a good church member and, more broadly, a moral and spiritually-aware individual.

*Confessional identity is a term I’ve learned recently in my study of Protestant/Catholic relations during the Renaissance. It refers to how one identifies oneself in relation to religious confessions–for example, whether one calls oneself a Protestant or a Catholic . I like the term because it captures the important connection between what one is and how one names oneself.