Blog for International Women's Day: Liberation is Always Inconvenient

This woman has been consistently rocking my world lately:

"(As a point of information, there are three parallel stories about the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son. I’ve heard dozens of sermons about God as good shepherd and as forgiving father. If that is true, then why isn’t God like a woman cleaning her house? Are we afraid of God looking too much like our mothers or worse yet, the undocumented immigrant housekeepers getting off the bus in Brentwood?)"

..."Here’s something else I have been learning: Just because the religious leaders say that the real action happened in the front room that I can never enter, that doesn’t make it true. I think that woman’s grief and her friends’ love and comfort was the real story that day – even if it wasn’t the official one. If the religious leaders didn’t hear what you had to say, it doesn’t mean you didn’t make a noise."

..."So I guess there are worse things than operating outside the bounds of official sanction. It has been freeing to realize that I don’t have to beg for validation like some eternal supplicant. I don’t have to try to fit my story into the official sinner-meets-Jesus-hallelujah version. I don’t know where Jesus was when I prayed for rescue, and I never will. I still feel the effects of my abuse every single day, and I can meet God in the daily lived reality of my experience, whether or not it fits into anybody’s particular theological framework. I may be ecclesiastically stranded forever, and that will be hard – but I will be okay."

LINK to Dry Bones Dance

UPDATE: LINK to a bunch of other related posts