Great Reading for Christian Lesbians...

Great Reading for Christian Lesbians

So many books, so little time!  But here are some recommendations of my own recent favorites: one novel, one anthology of essays in Christian ethics, one feminist study of process theology, one set of scholarly biblical essays, and one book of meditations.

Love

The novel is Toni Morrison's most recent, entitled simply and with great accuracy Love (Knopf, 2003). Some critics have complained that the title seems misplaced for a novel where so many characters are unloving, but I think that critique misses Morrison's point: what often passes for love-in this world may actually be something else, such as possessiveness, addiction, transitory desire, greed, or even a mask for hatred.  The major narrator, L, reveals her full name only at the end of the books:  "If your name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13, it's natural to make it your business."  What Love's "business" shows us is that the most lasting relationship in the book is the love between two girls, Christian and Heed, which is interrupted when old man Cosey takes Heed as his wife when she is only eleven. The girls' subsequent lives remain interconnected, however, and they are reconciled as Heed dies in Christine's arms.

The novel also details the moral maturation of a young man named Ramen. About to participate in a gang rape, Ramen finds he cannot go through with it and instead assists the victim, calling down mockery and hostility from his six "friends," the rapists.  Afterwards, he wonders: "What was that thing that had moved him to untie her, cover her, Jesus!  Cover her!  Cover her up?  Get her on her feet and out of there?... But he knew who it was.  It was the real Ramen who had sabotaged the...dangerous one."  Later, the same compassionate impulse forces "the real Ramen" to leave the bed of his sexy but inconsiderate lover in order to rescue Christine and Heed, whom she had abandoned.  In a culture crammed with fake love, the genuine article shines like a priceless jewel.

Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as Justice-Love

Love is also central in the collection of essays edited by Marvin Ellison and Sylvia Thorson-Smith, Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as Justice-Love. (Pilgrim Press, 2003).  CLOUT is well represented among the authors:  Beverly Harrison explains why a holistic vision of justice eludes so many Christians; Carter Heyward describes the task of teaching sex in seminary; Mary Hunt writes about AIDS and religion in a globalized economy; I write about crossing dualistic gender borders toward a new omnigender paradigm; and Jane Adams Spahr ponders the church's continuing debate over LGBT ordination.  Ironically, no single essay focuses on specifically lesbian issues.  I happen to know that several African American lesbians were asked to that very essay but all of them declined, partly perhaps because of what Kelly Brown Douglas described in her essay as "Christianity's collusion with white racist presuppositions in obstructing black freedom/wholeness."  All things considered, the volume is worth careful study and use in church discussion groups because it fulfills the
rethinking mission announced in its subtitle.

She Who Changes:  Re-imagining the Divine in the World

Dr. Carol P. Christ's book She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) was a big surprise for me.  Arguing that the time is now ripe for "sustained and shared philosophical reflection by feminists in religion," Christ provides a cogent feminist analysis of Charles Hartshorne's process theology.  I was joyously surprised by the strength of Christ's personal faith in "love divine, all loves excelling" and also by her (and Hartshorne's) theory of "dual transcendence," according to which "Goddess/God" (Christ's terminology throughout) is  unchangeable in loving relationship with the world but changing in that Goddess/God rejoices with our joy and suffers with our suffering.  Christ is wonderful on the topic of divine/human co-creatorship, although I perceive what may be a logical inconsistency:  she insists that God is "omnipresent, always here" but denies divine omnipotence.  (My question:  if divine power extends above, in, and through all things, as Christ's panentheism asserts, then the "real Self" of all creatures is empowered by Goddess/God.  In that case, doesn't our united power constitute something that could be called panentheistic omnipotence?)  But Christ is surely correct to oppose the impersonal autocratic concept of absolute divine control that many Christians mean when they say omnipotent.  And for the most part, Christ's description of process theology is persuasive and vitally important.

A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles

The biblical scholarship I have recently enjoyed is A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles, edited by Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University (The Pilgrim Press, 2003).  (Editor's note:  Levine is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender and Sexuality.  The Carpenter Foundation has been a generous donor to CLOUT as well as establishing this professorship and doing many other terrific charitable things.)  As we know the later Pauline texts contain "the New Testament's most problematic treatment of women's roles and household systems," so it is fascinating to watch scholars wrestling with the liberating as well as the constraining elements of those texts.  Margaret MacDonald describes the difficult situation of early Christian women who were married to believers in other gods.  Mary Ann Beavis illustrates the stringent economic and psychological pressures upon women (especially singles) who dedicated their lives to serving the church.  Using Ephesians 5:21-33 as the test case, my own essay calls upon biblical commentators to remember (in Levine's words) that they must "do more than arid, objectivist history when (they) approach canonical materials," because contemporary women not only interpret but "are interpreted by the text."  Elna Mouton approaches Ephesians from the context of South Africa's social divisions, emphasizing the book's transformative potential.  Angela Standhartinger investigates various Roman legal codes in order to demonstrate the subversive function and liberative elements in the Colossians epistle.  Essays by David Scholer, Jouette Bassler, Lilian Portefaix, and Bonnie Thurston complete the collection.  The overall effect is to cause readers to recognize what has previously gone unnoticed and to give voice to those who were previously silenced.

Subversive Devotions:  A Journey into Divine Pleasure and Power

Finally I recommend a dynamite little book called Subversive Devotions:  A Journey into Divine Pleasure and Power, written by the Rev. Dr. Pat Youngdahl (Bean Pole Press, 2003).  If Youngdahl is not currently a member of CLOUT, we ought to declare her an honorary member.  This former Presbyterian minister who now teaches English at the University of Arizona, is an out and proud lesbian Christian.  She writes beautifully and she is truly and profoundly subversive, passionately embodied in her love for God, for Jesus-Sophia, for nature, for her beloved partner Michal, and for justice for every creature.  Asserting that Jesus was murdered, Youngdahl tells us she annually observes fifty-one Holy Weeks and one Execution Week.  She calls her readers toward liberation from doing violence or diminishment to any body.

Bean Pole Press promises a Subversive Devotions Daily Reader in 2004.  If it approaches the lyric elegance, honesty, and passion of this brave little volume, CLOUT members will want copies of that reader as well as Youngdahl's currently available journey into lesbian feminist spirituality referred to above.