God is not a boy's name

 

This mug was gift from the rector (a woman!) at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Rockport, 30 years ago when I was a student at Gordon College. Attending that congregation and meeting with her, was a significant phase in my sloughing off Evangelical Christian culture and exploring a sense of the Divine more expansive than what that culture described… prescribed?... dictated - as in taking dictation and receiving indoctrination.

This period coincided with my introduction to Feminism. I was reading novels by women, essays by women, and research by women. I came to imagine the Divine as having been plucked from a lush wild cosmos and contained in men’s words, like the character Bertha from Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea was trapped in Mr. Rochester’s attic. But the Divine will not be contained and is ever calling out to us, ever willing us to burn down that house of words to release a bigger spirit.

To Mother Karin, of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church,

Thank you. Thank you for your patience with me when I was a young, restless, passionate 20-something, struggling against the certainties of my personal upbringing including my religion’s rules. Thank you for your life and work, which offered me an in-real-life, lived alternative to the constraints in my mind. Thank you for your time with me, discussing my questions, sharing books, and challenging me to perceive, believe, and live differently. Thank you for connecting me with my first Spiritual Director, who was able to support and encourage me for years. 

I’m 50-something now, probably older than you were when we met. I regret that I haven’t done as much with what you shared with me as I wish I had. Yet, your influence remains with me and I feel it resurging as I embrace my middle age. 

Gratefully,
Jenni