Theologian urges interreligious dialogue among women

 

Fifth in a series

By Donald H. Harrison

TECATE, Mexico — It was typical for the Rancho La Puerta health spa here that on the week that my wife Nancy and I visited , she was among the 80 percent of the guests who were women, while I was among the remaining male 20 percent.  A fellow guest, The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, 16th president of the Union Theological Seminary, a New York City institution that was founded in 1836, suggested to me as we sat poolside that a similar statistic also applies to the world of religion.

“The needle moves on this but somewhere around 80 percent of the world’s religious people are women, which means that the work that women are doing around the world is motivated by that,” she told me.  “Religious stories are within their imaginations as they are doing the labor of everyday life.  Eighty percent  are doing the care of bodies (doctoring, nursing and allied fields), educating of children, subsistence-level labor, and  growing and harvesting the food people live on.”  And yet, she pointed out, the works of inter-religious dialogue — the serious, probing discussions among the world’s faith groups — for the most part have been conducted by men.

I tried to imagine what would happen at 72-year-old Rancho La Puerta, where exercise, meditation, healthful nutrition, and spirituality are staples of the visitors’ week, if decisions suddenly were made by men, rather than by such women as co-founder Deborah Szekely and her daughter and RLP president, Sarah Livia Szekely Brightwood.   How would the Rancho La Puerta experience differ?  Would it have become less responsive to its core constituency?   And if such is the case,  are the men engaged in inter-religious dialogues missing the mark, oblivious perhaps to their faiths’ core constituencies?

“It is all men who are representing the religious traditions and they are having all these wonderful  discussions about love and justice, and they are very good, but the women are absolutely absent,” said Jones, a  17-year Yale University professor of theology who was selected in 2009 as Union Theological Seminary’s first woman president, taking her place in history alongside such other Protestant theologians as Paul Tillich and Rienhold Niebuhr. “I am very concerned that if we go back to the idea that women make up these communities and are the major laborers, what would it mean for them to get together and to have this conversation?”

In conjunction with the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), with which its academic courses are cross listed, the Union Theological Seminary is in the process of setting up an experiment in which 12 Christian, Jewish and Muslim women — the latter drawn from the ranks of Columbia University — will be divided into small groups to meet together regularly and, if funding can be found, live together.

“They will live together consciously, and twice a week they will cook together, pray together and pray separately, and they will talk about their spiritual experiences,” Jones said.  “The idea behind this is if you want to completely understand another religion then you need to understand how the women, in terms of daily life, practice things.  So I hope that the women — in fact, I know they will — will talk about clothes, talk about food, talk about health, talk about their bodies, and those are the things that don’t come into the classroom but those are the things that are making the future.”

The dozen women will journal about their experiences, and with guidance from a professor, may develop recommendations for a program “for a longer term vision and a more substantive experience, but we have got to get it going to find out what is there,” Jones said.

Jones has authored three major theological books–in addition to editing many others–with the titles of Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, Feminist Theory of Christian Theology, and Trauma and Grace. She said all three grew out of her lectures and interactions with her students at Yale University, where prior to becoming a professor she previously had completed a master’s degree at divinity school as well as a doctorate in theology at graduate school — a 25-year Yale experience in all.  Her ordination was as a minister in both the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.

It was something of a surprise for her that she became so interested in Calvin, given her attraction as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma to Civil Rights Movement, ant-Vietnam War protests, the Women’s Movement, as well as to liberation movements generally and to analytical Marxism  — movements  with which one does not typically associate the name of 16th century Protestant pioneer John Calvin.

“I was so interested in social history, trying to understand why groups of people in relation to power structures behaved the way they did, and how you could imagine social forums that were liberative,” she related.  “For me, that was what religion was all about: liberation.  And lo and behold, I was doing all this liberation theology, radical politics, Marxist theory, and I started reading in a history class John Calvin.

“In reading his Institutes of the Christian Religion (published in 1536), the main book he wrote in the reform of Christianity, I found that it begins as a letter to the King of France in which he is making the argument that the king spare the life of his followers who are being persecuted because of the theological and social ideas that they have.  And I suddenly realized in this moment of insight that Calvin was writing his book not to try as a patriarchal figure to secure the allegiance of a people whose lives needed something; he was actually speaking to a community of people who had been so socially marginalized and fractured by the dominant culture that they needed a strong framework within which to reconstruct their identities in that social environment.

“And in John Calvin I found a figure for me who could redeem Protestantism because it allowed me to go back to its roots and a commitment to attending to the power of the spirit as it moves in fractionalized and marginalized communities,” she said.

The second book “was taking feminist theory from the high-brow levels of women’s studies at that time and showing why it related to some of the dominant themes of Christianity,” she said.  “My third book is about violence and how religious communities can respond to it.”

When she was interviewed for the presidency of Union Theological Seminary, Jones — daughter of Rev. Joseph Jones, a man who had served as president of the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, and as president of Phillips University in Oklahoma — told her interlocutors that the Protestant world specifically, and the religious world generally, was undergoing massive change.

Certainly the change had been great between the time she had grown up as a somewhat rebellious and far from serene, Preacher’s Kid  in Texas and Oklahoma, and the first decade of the 21st century when she was being interviewed.

“I told them that in terms of where theological education was going, I would think very hard about several things — one was the obvious fact that the mainline church that Union represented is in decline but even more importantly is undergoing a process of profound transformation,” she related. “That is why studying John Calvin matters.  I think we are going through something like a Protestant Reformation. It happens every 500 years when major religious groups turn themselves inside out and become something different and we can’t imagine what it will be from where we are standing right now.  I really believe that.

“The best that a seminary could hope to do right now is to have a faculty and an administration that is brave enough to stay awake in the midst of that change and not run away from it, but to continue to breathe and take it in and try to give it guidance, and which doesn’t see itself as trumpeting the transformation but also doesn’t see itself as trying to stop it,” she said.

“That means that the work that we have to do has to be global in purpose,” Jones added. “It has to be international because the world is increasingly interconnected.  It has to take economics very seriously because we can see where we are right now as a nation: everything hinges on these questions of poverty and economic distribution.”

Further, she told those interviewing her for the job, “issues of gender were not going away and that the biggest social change that any of us confronted in the 20th century was that birth control created the possibility that women would have productive work lives and that is true globally and still reverberations are being felt.

“And then finally I told them that in the midst of all this change that would be happening, the most important thing to pay attention to was not necessarily the world of logical ideas but the world of beauty because of the deep unconscious levels that compel social transformation.  It has to do with affections and desires more than it does ideas and that (therefore) we needed to be a seminary that helped people understand our unconscious lives and what it is that shaped our desires.”

I mentioned to the seminary president that I have heard some liberal rabbis say that they feel more in tune with liberal Christian ministers than they do with Orthodox rabbis–in that their world views are more similar.  I asked if in this great reformation she senses coming, whether religions might realign based more on concepts of social justice than on theology.

Jones responded that the younger generation appears more interested in social justice issues than in whether they are Christian or Jewish. “I guess my pause is that I think moving toward a social-justice-inspired new thing is all very positive and good, but there is so much in our traditions that is necessary for that to go in the right direction, that we need to make sure that we don’t lose, because it is not a natural thing for people to care about each other. That comes out of our religious traditions.”

She explained that in both Judaism and Christianity there is a basic teaching that “people are created equally by God and that you cannot eradicate them, you cannot kill them;  it is wrong.  That is counter-intuitive when you look at evolutionary biology.”  She added that it is necessary “to have spaces in our social life where we insist on these counter-intuitive things like fundamental respect for the integrity of individual human life.”

Recently, there was a large debate within the ruling body of the Presbyterian Church over calls for divesting from companies that do business in Israel as a way to apply pressure on Israelis in their dispute with the Palestinians.  By the narrowest of margins, the call for divestment was rejected, and delegates instead decided in favor of investment in companies that help to promote peace in the Middle East.

Asked for her views on the Middle East, Jones responded that she has been involved with Jewish and Christian colleagues in numerous campaigns in Israel and in other parts of the world to promote justice. “The kind of organizing I have done has been as much with Jews as it has with Christians,” she said.  “I love traveling in Israel, I love Israel.  It’s a beautiful, powerful state and its vision of justice and social problems is remarkable in the world today,” she said.

“But that doesn’t eliminate the fact that there is a huge and intractable problem with respect to how to create a just system where Palestinians feel seen and heard and respected economically and not exploited and we are not there yet.”

She said that an approach to an answer may lie in studying “people in communities that have suffered tremendous loss and what it means to heal from them.   I often think that you can see this in the United States when you deal with racism and how these historic traumas, these enormous acts of violence that marred our communities, live into the present and we keep reenacting them.

“Then, you look at Israel, West Bank and Gaza, and you see how the trauma gets into the bones of the individuals and, even despite their best efforts, they reenact the scenes of violence that destroyed them, and that is true for Palestinians as it is for Israeli Jews.”

She added that the Arab-Israeli conflict “when you look from the outside at the displacement of the Palestinians, it looks like, and it is, a horrible injustice.  But when you begin to understand the dynamics, and it doesn’t justify that,  but you look at the place of Israel and its vulnerabilities.  I have traveled in Egypt and talked to people who refused to admit that Israel even exists and it is frightening. And it the tension between these two realities.”

The seminary president confided that “in my own life when I feel afraid and vulnerable and under attack, the realm of possibilities shrinks in terms of what I can imagine for my own future, and these fears are very real.  The older I get the more I realize that these fears are real in the case of Israel.”

Small steps toward understanding can be taken in the United States with such programs as the 12 women of Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith living together.  Another was recently conducted during the tenth anniversary observance of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.  At the Trinity Chapel, a church at Ground Zero, Jones participated with a Muslim woman and a rabbi in a four-week program on trauma, recovery and religious traditions.

“We started with a discussion of violence and what our religious traditions said about it, what healing looks like, and the future, and we packed the church to the gills every time we met and I think that it brought to the 9-11 ten-year anniversary the depth of insight that religions bring that wasn’t there before.  It was a powerful experience for two schools (Union Theological Seminary and Jewish Theological Seminary) to be working on something that immediate to people’s lives.”

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Next: An interview on early childhood education with Vicki Milstein, another Rancho La Puerta guest who is  principal for 22 Brookline, Massachusetts, schools.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com