Natalie Weaver – Page 7 – Feminism and Religion

Goodnight, Sweet Friends by Natalie Kertes Weaver

Yesterday, to this day of my writing, two of my friends died. Both endured years of struggle against cancers, and both finally yielded to death at nearly the same hour. I received notices of their passing within moments of one another. We sat vigil with the family of one of my friends until late in the evening, while the other friend was prepared for repatriation in the land of her ancestors.

In the home where we sat vigil, I entered the room where my friend had passed away. I wanted to feel the last fading traces of her physical presence. I don’t know whether any part of her was there or not, but I was grateful to be in the place where she had been. The room was very full. It held the medical equipment that had briefly sustained her life for the last few days, but it was mostly stuffed with the clutter and the souvenirs of a life. Porcelain trinkets, formal family portraits, travel photographs, colorful shot glasses collected from the cities she had visited, and everything covered with a fine layer of dust. Continue reading “Goodnight, Sweet Friends by Natalie Kertes Weaver”

Give Away All That You Have, and Then You Shall Receive…by Natalie Kertes Weaver

One of the loudest refrains I perceive in the Bible is the message that good spirituality means giving everything away. It is a radical concept that begins in an obvious way with material things, especially those that we have in excess. The wisdom here is not too difficult for me to grasp: one cannot meet the Lord if s/he is wrapped up in the routines of acquisition and hoarding.

But, this is only the beginning. The teaching reaches down much deeper than the critique of riches and speaks in some totalizing fashion to the very essence of personal being. It seems to say to me that good spirituality involves letting the self be so entirely poured out of the ordinary instincts and behaviors of self-consciousness and self-preservation, of the self qua self, that it is capable of receiving the inpouring of God’s wisdom and light.

Put another way, the self has to condition itself to receive that which is genuinely extrinsic, that which is outside itself, and that encounter cannot occur so long as one is self-absorbed. This insight, of course, is not exclusively biblical or Christian. Indeed, it is perhaps the most common point of agreement among all the great spiritual traditions. Continue reading “Give Away All That You Have, and Then You Shall Receive…by Natalie Kertes Weaver”

The Burden of Change by Natalie Kertes Weaver

As we embark on a New Year, I find myself customarily cautious. The New Year, of course, is hugely emblematic of hopeful beginnings, revised behaviors, fresh outlooks, and personal commitments. Yet, because renewal is so difficult to achieve, I find myself always a bit wary of the New Year talk of resolutions, whose results, like fad diets, tend to be neither sustainable nor genuinely transformative. I have the same feeling, incidentally, after I get my teeth cleaned or get a car wash in the winter in Cleveland.

I live with hope and the possibility of change in my heart, but I am concerned about the effect of boundless messaging about insufficiency and inadequacy that pervades the culture. We learn over and again that we weigh too much; don’t use our time well enough; invest or use our money unwisely; need a better job; don’t cook healthfully enough; visit the gym too infrequently; aren’t nice enough; spend too little time with our kids; need better things and clearer skin; do too little; do too much; and on and on. At least for me, socially ritualized self-critique of this sort reflects a profound narcissistic spirituality of self-help and (often failed attempts at) self-improvement. Such spirituality reinforces the self-absorption and lack of true community that lead us into individualism and over-consumption in the first place.

This year, as I embark on the New Year, I am especially aware of many things I cannot change. For one, I am watching a good friend die, and there is no longer anything that anyone can do about it. I am watching my mother’s mobility decrease from a knee injury year’s ago. I am watching my children get older, and I hear surprising things that come from them from the environments they inhabit beyond the walls of my home. I learn more acutely what I already know, namely, that they will and must live in a world much larger than my own invention. I am watching my own self deepen into the reality of multi-generational familial responsibilities, as I grapple with what it takes to run a home, care for children, and meet others’ basic needs. I know I am not alone. I read student papers in my adult education class over the break, and the weight of their realities is tremendous. How tyrannical it seems to insist that we add to these realities of ours some kind of burden of change between 11:59 and 12:01!

I have come to believe that much, probably all, of the spiritual life that leads to redemption (or liberation or salvation… whatever we wish to call it), is about reconciliation with that which one cannot change, with what is imperfect, with what we would have as otherwise. There is an enormous need for us to release control over life itself and to forgive ourselves the relative impotence we experience in the face of it all. In an even greater leap, somewhere along the way we must also forgive or reconcile with God for the gaping distances between that which is and that for which we hope.

I eschew welcoming the New Year as a series of televised media extravaganzas that make me feel somehow bad-about-myself-yet-wildly-energized-about- how-much-better-I-can-be (especially if I use the right products). Rather, the New Year might more helpfully be greeted as a gentle continuation, one next persistent push in the sequence of the tide’s rush against the shore. It is just another moment in a larger history that carries on independently of us. We cannot change the seascape; we cannot outrun it; the tide will bring in all sorts of beautiful things that we did not make and also dangerous things that we cannot sidestep. It will be what it will be.

What we can do is notice it better. For my part, I can quietly adjust my perspective near and far, and then perhaps I might also quietly find my values realigning with my more intentional vision. I might thereby experience the beginnings of a soft metanoia toward more mindful creatureliness. And, here, I might also begin to become the proverbial change, within my limited spheres of influence, that I wish to see in the world.

Constructive agency must begin in the prayerful appreciation of limited creaturely life. It is only then, I suspect, that one might have a chance at sustainable, transformational being in oneself, in relationship to others, and in the world. It begins, however, with letting go of Luciferian ambitions for a more prefect world of our own design. My New Year’s meditation, then, is this: I will try to accept being a human creature: a finite, earth-dependent, truly human animal. I will try to understand the balance between what I can and should do as a responsible, moral being on the one hand and where aspiration becomes an idolatry of dominion on the other. I will try to understand limitation as its own sort of revealing grace and eject constructions of fall and punishment that badly theologize what is mere creaturely disappointment at not being God. I will try in earnest to understand and to live in these words:

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, about your body; or what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet… not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. Who…by worrying can add a single hour to his life?… Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matt. 6: 25-34)

Natalie Kertes Weaver, Ph.D., is Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Natalie’s academic books include: Marriage and Family: A Christian Theological Foundation (Anselm, 2009); Christian Thought and Practice: A Primer (Anselm, 2012); and The Theology of Suffering and Death: An Introduction for Caregivers (Routledge, 2013). Natalie is currently writing Made in the Image of God: Intersex and the Revisioning of Theological Anthropology (Wipf & Stock, 2014). Natalie has also authored two art books: Interior Design: Rooms of a Half-Life and Baby’s First Latin. Natalie’s areas of interest and expertise include: feminist theology; theology of suffering; theology of the family; religion and violence; and (inter)sex and theology. Natalie is a married mother of two sons, Valentine and Nathan. For pleasure, Natalie studies classical Hebrew, poetry, piano, and voice.

On the Transmission of Life by Natalie Weaver

Among the more controversial Roman Catholic documents is Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI on birth control. This encyclical famously instructs against the use of artificial contraception methods in the regulation of birth. This position is based on the theological warrant that the natural law of God’s reproductive design requires human sexuality, if it is to be moral, to be always nuptial, companionable, and open to new life. The encyclical anticipates a number of reasons why people will object to this teaching, including: population problems, family and personal limitations, economic concerns, and so on. It also anticipates that some will suggest procreative and unitive ends must be seen diachronically in the context of the fullness of nuptial sexuality, such that sexuality would be understood holistically rather than as a series of individual sexual acts. Despite its acknowledgement of these concerns as legitimate, the encyclical argues that grave harm flows from the distortion of natural law and leads inevitably to the degradation of sexual dignity and nuptial integrity (for example, in making free sex more available to young people outside of marriage or cheapening male regard for women on account of women’s sexual objectification). The encyclical thus opts for an approach that evaluates sexual morality in terms of individual sexual acts.

The perspective of the document has been critically unpacked for decades, and its instruction is in the very least unconvincing to many Catholic couples. I find in my teaching that Catholic college students today are unfamiliar with the document’s language and rationale, even though they may know the basic instruction that Catholics aren’t supposed to use birth control. Since this issue is both topical currently due to the healthcare legislation and since birth regulation is a requisite discussion in my course on sexual ethics, I have the students read the encyclical itself. Now, this is a hard task because I know by and large what the student reactions will be. Their most favorable reaction is generally that the document has no instructional or binding value for them. Their least favorable reaction is that the document makes poor sense of the human situation today, especially because human sexual expression reaches well beyond the Church’s vision of normative, heterosexual, marital union. Continue reading “On the Transmission of Life by Natalie Weaver”

Theopoesis and the Interior Divine by Natalie Weaver

Last week I traveled to Leuven, Belgium for the 9^th Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology conference. I have been to this conference before, and I find that my perspective is generously enlarged by hearing voices that emerge from contexts and concerns that differ from my own in the USA. This year, the conference theme was “Mediating Mysteries: Understanding Liturgies.” The keynote speakers offered inspiring investigations into what “full, active, and conscious” participation of people in the Catholic liturgy means today (for, such were the goals for liturgy articulated at the Second Vatican Council). Some provided critical evaluation of the newly revived Roman missal. One speaker offered a searing critique of the distinction between true mystery and fabricated mystique in the Mass. The breakout sessions were exceptionally well designed. Here I noticed a common thread of people searching beyond the formal magisterial liturgies and studying the value of those mediated mysteries that are celebrated and communicated in culture, literature, and art. Continue reading “Theopoesis and the Interior Divine by Natalie Weaver”

The Sisters In Our Midst by Natalie Weaver

On September 28, 2013, Ursuline College hosted a symposium entitled The Impact of Vatican II on Women Religious in the United States. The symposium featured five speakers. Sister Karen Kennelly, CJS. gave the keynote address entitled “Women Religious in the U.S.: From the Vatican Council to the Present.” Four other speakers gave breakout talks. Sr. Mary Frances Taymans, SND, spoke on education. Sr. Kathleen Feely, SND, spoke on social services. Sr. Patricia Talone, RSM, spoke on health care, and Sr. Loretta Harriman, MM, spoke on foreign missions. The symposium began with a Friday evening event featuring a lecture called “Progress and Promise: Local Conversations,” which surveyed the history of women’s religious communities in Northeast Ohio (FAR blogger Michele Stopera Freyhauf worked on this project with our team as well!). In addition to the talks, the Northeast Ohio component of the national Women & Spirit exhibit (now retired), which was produced by the Leadership Council of Women Religious and which toured throughout the country from 2009-2012, was on display.

Having been a collaborator in the organization and management of the symposium, I had several months to reflect on the intentions, purpose, and hoped-for outcomes of the event. As our conference committee reflected on an appropriate theme for a conference commemorating the 50^th year anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, we wanted to focus on women religious, a group often conspicuously overlooked and generally under-represented in Vatican II anniversary conferences. Continue reading “The Sisters In Our Midst by Natalie Weaver”

The Institutional Silencing of Women by Natalie Weaver

On July 26, 2013, I had the opportunity to hear Rev. Helmut Schüller speak at the City Club of Cleveland’s Friday Forum. He spoke to a convened audience of around 150 people, in addition to the much greater broadcast audience, and he responded to questions that ranged from wholly supportive, to sincerely questioning, to highly critical. I myself sat with a group of vowed religious women from Pittsburgh who seemed enthusiastic about Rev. Schüller’s Austrian Priests’ Initiative, while behind me sat a table of obvious, vocal critics.

Rev. Schüller’s initiative, now represented by over 400 priests, began in 2006 as an effort to mobilize priests to lead the way for change in the Catholic Church in at least four crucial areas: women’s ordination; married priesthood; same-sex marriages; and lay participatory voting in the election of their bishops. Of course, Catholics have been having these conversations long before the Priests’ Initiative. What makes Father Schüller’s work different is that it is an “insider job.” He argued that the laity have done their part, and now it is time for the clergy to speak, even at some personal and professional risk to themselves. Continue reading “The Institutional Silencing of Women by Natalie Weaver”

To Dust and Ashes by Natalie Weaver

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans. I contributed a chapter. A few days ago, I was contacted by the editors and asked for an update. “What had changed for me in five years?” they asked. As I tried to respond to their questions, I was surprised by the gravity in my heart. When I wrote about motherhood and life as a professional theologian five years earlier, I was a new mother, applying for my third-year review, and trying to navigate my nascent roles as both mom and scholar/educator. I felt overwhelmed to be sure, but I was overtly grateful to have such a rich and full array of choices about how I lived my life. Here, a few years later, I am applying for full-professorship. I am a more seasoned mother with two healthy children. I chair two departments at my school, and I am generally more established in the many things I juggle simultaneously. Had I given it any consideration, I would have anticipated a more cheerful five-year check-in. Continue reading “To Dust and Ashes by Natalie Weaver”