..egalitarianism

[Insert snappy intro about me being a 'feminist', 'liberal', 22 year-old Christian talking about submission...]

Equality in a relationship is becoming less and less about opinion and liberation for me and more of an necessity in my understanding of God and the kingdom. The submission conversation has become more frequent and ordinarily pretty contrived due to my social location as young woman in Christian circles.  For a while I pushed back wholly on the topic but recently have wanted a logical and holistic understanding of what it means to me and how I want to live into it.

Equality, in light of the stratified world we live in, is one of the most compelling and important markers of the coming kingdom, and thus one of the central tenants of my faith.  Reading the Bible as a woman puts me in an interesting location within these ideals, finding myself placed somewhere between socially constructed gender roles, controversial biblical passages, and a slue of strong opinions on all 'sides'. 

1. I am told that I need to live in the world but not be of it.  For me this isn't a statement about morality.  It doesn't conjure images of bearing existence in a fallen reality without defiling my spiritual purity, it seems like a calling to imagination.  Live does not mean grin and bear it, it is far more robust and a primary reason why Jesus came to earth, to show us a new way of living in abundance.  For me it means remaining in the broken social structures of society with an informed imagination/knowledge of something better.  This also impacts the way I interpret my Bible.  Rather than trying to spiritualize failing systems (through the scriptures) it shows me ways of living into a new reality of life and equality.

2.  An understanding of equality seems to be founded upon humanity.  I have different characteristics that make me distinct from other people, but primarily I am human and this is the way that I try to think about myself and others.  Rather than trying to understand myself as a woman/white/middle class/Christian in relationship, equality is much more tangible when I am a human in relationship with another human.  I am in process, trying to figure out life like  everyone else and focusing on that dimension of interaction eliminates hierarchy, replacing it with mutuality through journey.

3.  So, as a woman who is in process, it seems like a sinful contradiction for me to try to live into relationship as a submissive, passive partner. It also seems to make me a lazy reader of Bible, choosing to follow small, isolated texts rather than thinking about its broader themes and the purpose of the Bible as whole. 

Christian imagination is critical to my faith and life and to not exercise it is sin. So, living prescriptively on very few sections of scripture does not make any sense to me.  I am to submit and love in relationship because everyone is to submit and love in relationship.  The conversation about female submission seems to be a limiting, narrow distraction from larger kingdom mandates.  It just seems silly at this point and a failure of imagination.  The equality of the kingdom isn't to be an abstract set of  ideals that I will embody in the future, they are the motivations of my current life and my current relationships.  To live into inequality of any form is laziness on my part (or a unwillingness to challenge contemporary social roles) and the best way to neutralize my existence as a person who is to incarnate the world as it will be.

Whatever.

..hope

Over this last break I had a chance to read Bob Zurinsky's dissertation. Mucho Moltmann. Reading it I felt like many of the ideas would be easy to adopt since they were articulations of underdeveloped thoughts that I have had recently.  Adding theological concepts because they are convenient/attractive seems dangerous to me, and intellectually lazy.  But it made me think more specifically about the role of hope and what it actually is.

These are my current thoughts:

Hope is often thought as wishing but this definition makes it a very weak/useless concept.  It also makes it unreliable (or completely dependent upon the outcome of the wish) and not a very confident way to interact with an all-powerful God.  It also makes it unnecessary to my theological framework, like I can just sprinkle it in here or there when I want to sound optimistic in my faith.  But I think that it's a little bit more than that.  Hope is one of the (few) things that makes Christianity distinct from other religions/belief systems. 

Hope is a form of knowledge.  If part of Christianity is that we know what certain aspects of the Kingdom will be, we can say that we know parts of  the future.  Granted, we might know exactly what the Kingdom will be like in detail, we do know that specific aspects of it will be true (equality/no hierarchy among people, for example).  Knowledge has power whereas wishing, which is passive, does not.  So if hope is a form of knowledge about the future then it should have the power to influence my thoughts about what the future looks like, how I think about it, and how I live in the present.  Hope as knowledge gets me excited and it makes an abstract, weak concept compelling for me to believe in.  Also, out of all of the books in the Bible, hope is most commonly referenced in Job.  This makes me excited too because I think that it makes hope more powerful than an emotion or an emotional response to the world.

So if hope is knowledge, perhaps there is also a system of thinking that can be marked by hope.  Over the last three years most of my theological exploration has depended primarily on my personal experience in the world and with God.  Mostly this is in response to the first 19 years of my life where my experience was always in tension with my religion and that meant my experience was wrong.  While this has been very liberating and important in my development, I feel ready to add other ways of thinking to my theology.  I think hope will be that.

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune--without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity, 
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

..resolutions

New year, new resolutions.  Here are mine:

1. Think more about fear. 

1.5. Do more things that scare me.

2. Drink more water.

3. Get my tattoo.

Words that describe my break (in alphabetical order): 

Angsty, artichoke, cider, contemplative, crafting, escape, family, gender roles, imagination, McCauley family, Moltmann, not using my computer, puzzles, quiet, questioning, Raising Victor Vargas, Scum, sewing, smoked salmon, snowing, stenciling, zoo lights.

Right now:

I want to be asking the right questions.  When I think about the future I want to be asking the right questions of myself, God, and the world.  I don't really know what that means but I feel like it's the ambiguous task that I need to be in at the moment.  Overall I feel peace-filled about life and the future.  Hope is a very confusing concept to me right now but I like not understanding it and feel a exciting sense of discovery when I  think about it.  What am I allowed to hope for?  I am thinking about Christian imagination too.  More specifically the connection between imagination and complete faith.  Also, limits - God's limits, my limits, the merits of limits, are they beneficial or a condition to overcome?  Right now I am interested in cacti, Rilo Kiley, swimming, the nature of preferences, and riding my bike again.  I want to go to Georgetown and the coffee shop in the alley.