midpoint of the World Council of Churches' "Decade in Solidarity with
Women." Held last November 4-7 at the Minneapolis Convention Center, the
conference drew 2,200 participants from forty-nine states and twenty-seven countries. RE-imagining was sponsored by the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area and the Minnesota Council of Churches, and underwritten by a
$65,000 grant from the Presbyterian Church (USA). Among the mainline
organizations that lined up to provide additional funding were the
National Ministries of the American Baptist Church, the Division of
Congregational Ministries of the ELCA, the Board for Homeland Ministries
of the United Church of Christ, the Women's Division of the United
Methodist Church, and several orders of Roman Catholic nuns.
The purpose of RE-imagining was nothing if not ambitious. The
conference, its organizers proclaimed, signaled the dawn of a "Second
Reformation." "This Second Reformation . . . is much more basic and
important to the health of humankind" than the first, declared Virginia
Ramey Mollenkott, one of the many feminist theologians who took part.
"We're taking things forward in a way Luther and Calvin couldn't
imagine." Promotional materials left no doubt about conference goals:
"We are serious about reimagining all that has been passed on to us
through two thousand years of Christian faith."
In the preface to the conference program, Mary Ann Lundy and Bishop
Forrest Stith—Presbyterian and Methodist cochairs of the U.S. Committee
for the Ecumenical Decade—justified the need for radical theological
surgery. Our churches, they insisted, must free themselves from the grip
of sexism, racism, and classism. Speaker after speaker elaborated on
this theme: the Church remains "womanless" because current doctrine and
practice stifle women's voices. Women require a new theology grounded in
their uniquely female, everyday experiences of the divine. Rather than
pursuing the Truth, then, RE-imagining's focus was on encouraging each
woman to imagine "her own truth." The new reformation's aim, in the
words of liturgy director Sue Seid-Martin, is to "creat[e] that
wonderful space where we are truly free to be ourselves."
RE-imagining's Second Reformation unfolded in a variety of forums. Two
plenary sessions tackled the central topics: "Re-imagining God" and "Re-imagining Community." In addition, participants chose among "multi-format option groups," featuring titles such as "Racism/Sexism/Classism:
Linkages?" "Lofa Women from Liberia Doing Moonlight," "Listening with
Our Hearts: The Prophetic Voice of Lesbians in the Church," "Women and
the Song of the Earth," and "Our Names Are Legion: Clergy Sexual Abuse."
Worship services such as Sunday's grand finale—billed as the "Living in
the Struggle Ritual" and the "Struggle for Transformation Ritual"—evoked
a particularly enthusiastic response.
While Reformation No. 2 seemed short on ideas and debate, it appeared to
thrive on exotic self-expression. The Meadowlark Singers, representing
various South Dakota Indian tribes, kicked things off; as the conference
program explained, "The drum is feminine and the drumbeat is the
heartbeat of the earth." Arranged in Native American "talking circles,"
participants engaged in "scribble writing" with crayons and pastels,
blessed "rainsticks," danced "holy manna," and joined in Hawaiian chants
and rousing Zulu songs. At the urging of Indian feminist Aruna
Gnanadason, they anointed themselves on the forehead with red dots to
celebrate "the divine in each other" and to protest the oppression
wrought by Christian missionaries.
The multi-format option groups gave participants the opportunity to
learn belly dancing, to call out to the divine "from a woman's body,"
and to listen as "educator and retreat leader" Sr. Roseann Giguere
shared her wisdom on "the theology of darkness, the goddess, creation
spirituality, midlife transitions and dreamwork." The daily RE-imagining
newsletter was larded with solemn announcements—"The women of table 110
have named themselves Women of the Eagle"; "The women of table 60 are
Tawonda!"—as well as earnest pleas for social justice. "The shampoos in
the rooms at the Hyatt are made with oil of mink," ran one. "Why not
leave a note in your room at checkout time, protesting their choice of
shampoo?"
By now, these trappings of secular feminist consciousness-raising and
New Age therapies are familiar to those who monitor mainline and WCC-related church events. What was not so familiar—even to RE-imagining
participants—was the star of the show: the goddess Sophia, designated as
"the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of RE-imagining." "Sophia is the
suppressed part of the biblical tradition, and clearly the female face
of the human psyche," explained Seid-Martin, a former Instructor of
Ritual Studies at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas
in St. Paul.
Organizers pointed to scriptural passages such as Proverbs 3:16 and
8:30, Luke 11:49, and 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 to justify their worship of
Sophia as the eternal feminine. Why "Sophia" and not "Wisdom"? queried
the conference newsletter. To "remind us that the Scriptures portray
this Wisdom as a someone who walks, talks, plays, cries, eats, creates,
and loves." Though participants never seemed clear how—if at all—to
associate Sophia with the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
they appeared to flock happily to her altar. The whole assembly prayed
to her, blessed every speaker in her name ("Bless Sophia, dream the
vision, share the wisdom dwelling deep within"), and invoked her
repeatedly as Creator and Mother. In the ritual of "Making Holy Time,"
attendees were urged to "dream wildly" about "who we intend to be . . . through the power and guidance of the spirit of wisdom whom we name Sophia."
Standing guard throughout were fifty monitors who admonished and
exhorted attendees whose participation seemed less than heartfelt.
Hanging back in Sophia-worship would not be tolerated, the conference
newsletter advised: "[P]articipation is intended for ALL in the
gathering-rituals are not spectator events . . . We thank you all for
your full, active, conscious participation. May Sophia continue to bless
your pilgrimage."
"Naming" Sophia was the central focus of "RE-imagining God," the first
plenary session of the conference. To the sound of the "water drum,"
participants gathered in their "talking circles" to ask, "Who is your
God? What does your God sound like, taste like, look like? Name God—tell
each other at the table! Reimagine your God in name and image!"
Yet despite all the hubbub, Sophia's identity should have proved a
mystery to no one. Participants had only to look in the mirror to find
her. The conference program put it succinctly: Sophia is "the place in
you where the entire universe resides." As deity of the Second
Reformation, Sophia seemed the answer to the prayers of a multicultural,
therapeutic world. She does not judge, nor does she recognize any sin
but the corporate transgressions of racism, sexism, and classism. Sophia
has only one commandment, as participants learned—"Freely bless your own
experience."
While the four days of RE-imagining left no doubt that Sophia resides in
one's own navel, it became increasingly clear that she is most fully
manifest in bodily functions and sexual encounters. At Sunday's communal
"blessing of milk and honey," for example, two thousand women clinked
glasses over rice milk ("found at most health food stores, and safe for
people with allergies to milk products"), while repeating the following
prayer:
Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image . . . With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new
life . . . Sophia, creator God, let your milk and honey
flow . . . With nectar between our thighs we invite a
lover, we birth a child; with our warm body fluids we remind
the world of its pleasures and sensations . . . We
celebrate the sweat that pours from us during our labors. We
celebrate the fingertips vibrating upon the skin of a lover.
We celebrate the tongue which licks a wound or wets our
lips. We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the
sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water.
Not surprisingly, Sophia seemed to reserve a special blessing for
lesbian love. The prayer above was read by individual women, except for
the "vibrating fingertips" line, which was read by two women together.
In delivering the final proclamation, the Rev. Christine Marie Smith of
the United Church of Christ envisioned God's Kingdom as a place where
"women will be able to embrace each other and love each other feeling
beautiful and unafraid." Melanie Morrison of Christian Lesbians Out
Together (CLOUT) received a standing ovation as she celebrated the
"miracle of being lesbian, Christian, and out!" and invited lesbian,
bisexual, and transsexual women to join hands and circle the stage.
One looks forward to hearing mainline RE-imagining organizers like Lundy
and Stith explain to Christians who pray the Creed every Sunday why
their hard-earned dollars financed a conference at which the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit didn't even put in an appearance. How will they
defend Christine Marie Smith's indictment of Jesus as guilty of
"violence against women," or Chung Hyun Kyung's assertion that God
speaks equally "through Buddha, through shamans" and through Christ? How
will they justify Delores Williams' offhand dismissal of Christ's
atonement: "I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all. I don't
think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird
stuff . . . We just need to listen to the god within."
At first blush, it appears paradoxical that people who contemptuously
reject Christianity's most fundamental tenets should persist in calling
themselves Christians, and locating powwows like RE-imagining within
Christian history. In fact, their behavior is easy to understand. Those
who claim to be "reimagining Christianity" get headlines about a new
Reformation. They get endowed chairs in seminaries, money, power,
legitimacy, and a captive audience that must be the envy of the self-declared followers of Wicca. "Sophia" serves these "reformers" as an
invaluable tabula rasa. Their adherents' ignorance of Sophia—far from
being an obstacle—is essential to their project of fashioning a new
religion while retaining tenuous links to Christian Scripture and
tradition.
What is truly puzzling—even to those familiar with the mainline
denominations' recent self-destructive tendencies—is why the churches
would lend their funds and prestige to antics of this sort. The United
Methodists' Division of Women, for example, designated RE-imagining as
its staff's quadrennial spiritual renewal event, and picked up the
expenses of the fifty-two directors and staff members who attended.
Far from representing the wave of the future, RE-imagining was a vestige
of a movement that seems almost to have run its tired course.
Significantly, speakers' and attendees' average age appeared about
fifty. One wonders whether these women ever seriously considered what it
would be like to attain their elusive promised land—a world without
rules, limits, or Truth, "that wonderful space where we are truly free
to be ourselves." Humankind's natural proclivity to greed, lust,
injustice, and cruelty suggests that such a space would closely resemble
the Christian conception of Hell.
From November 4 to 7, 1993, the Minneapolis Convention Center was home
to a spiritual Disneyland. In this fantasy world, well-heeled women with
strings of graduate degrees pretended together that they inhabit a dark
and oppressive world, a world where "hope burns through the terror." How
odd to pin one's hopes for salvation in such dire circumstances on a
goddess whose chosen milieu seems to be women's bodily fluids. One
wonders how soon Sophia's eager devotees will discover that she can
never sustain those who "walk through the valley of the shadow of
death," as we all must.
Kathy Kersten, a new contributor to First Things, is an attorney and a full-time mother. She is a board member of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.