Let's go to the text:
Schroth, Raymond A.
one of the upper northern draws. I pack a lunch and take Max blind from birth...." and part of the pleasure comes from the rhythm of long walk- The first time we met these...
...If I were pope, I'd name thirty women cardi'I'M GONNA WASH THAT MAN...' nals (I'd change the Code of Canon Law so they need not be ordained) and begin the process that would lead to women's ordination...
...CHRIS ANDERSON tion may be allowed to hear them, even though those sounds Chris Anderson teaches English at Oregon State University may have originally come from the voice and imagination of in Corvallis...
...Father"-has not been allowed to stand in this lectionary...
...will reward you...
...Let's be clear...
...Your ual and massive, they seem fixed and stationary, given, and in Abba God...
...So place the text in its historical context, explain the social and should the men...
...If so, the Deer fern and vanilla leaf grow from the bank of the stream valid feminist insight into the story-that a male-dominated rebeneath me, where Max comes bounding up, muddy and de- ligious power structure would literally execute a woman for lighted...
...Is Jesus' concept of further the cause of racial justice...
...For example, in "Let your light shine before men" younger of them said...
...I sit and eat and look at the snag's scarred wood and enjoy the woman taken in adultery has become the person taken in even the absence of bird song, the dusky quiet among the trunks...
...the Old and New Testaments, a title which again and again I always eat my lunch on a footbridge overlooking a ravine, Jesus seems to apply to himself, has become the "Promised my feet dangling...
...Finally, in perhaps the weirdest depersonalization, gap...
...I feel small among them, clarified by their bination of an Aramaic term Jesus uses once in the Garden of indifferences...
...It The huge firs have something of the dwarfing, humbling ef- has been transmogrified into "Abba God," a concocted comfect of a starry sky...
...His Edge Effects: Notes from an Oregon Forest Jesus...
...of all unnecessary impediments to freefar-off times meant two things: (a) Philosophically that old liberalism dom (the procedural half of the prosubstantively, it meant you were was based on something like Kant's gram...
...in favor of the underdog, e.g., working peo- categorical imperative: Always treat So defined, liberalism was not inple, the poor, blacks...
...Or in more exalted lanTHEY'VE STOLEN MY NAME guage: Always remember that the human person is a being of absolute and nearANY OTHER SUGGESTIONS...
...And many a neutral term in the Gospels can easily be translated as "brothers and sisters" or "men and man had two children...
...Many in ple, Luke mentions Jesus' name only once, when he first joins today's campus congregations, who can usually fulfill their the two men fleeing Jerusalem...
...and part of the pleasure comes from the rhythm of long walk- The first time we met these people-perhaps years agoing-the subsiding of other thoughts and the beginning of the they were men...
...and the sons have bethe aesthetic categories...
...The assumption seems to be that the through the gap, the snag twists out of the maple, and I am think- sounds of "he," "man," "son," or "Father" are so offensive ing of Grandfather buried on the hill, slower even than the trees, to one part of the congregation that no part of the congregaas slow as the earth...
...To shave the beard off the Since there is no sound scriptural argument against women's Michelangelo's Creator in the Sistine Chapel...
...Or in more popular language: Treat human beings as persons, never simply as things...
...What come "children...
...other, as an end, never simply as a OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...in John 9) or a "crippled one" but concrete, particular men or women whom the evangelists see when they tell the stories and we are supposed to see when we hear them...
...We'll have the same old ized Christianity and that the Scriptures have been used some- male priests who will stand at the altar, raise their hands, and times as an instrument of that oppression-for example, in intone: "The Force be with you...
...But some translations making Or: "Once there was a rich the rounds are not concerned with striking a balance between individual who dressed in pur- respect for the text and the feelings of women at odds with ple and linen and feasted every day...
...the "patriarchal" world the Scriptures portray...
...a lectionary published by a Washington D.C., group-called There's been a lot of hyperbole lately about old-growth forests, Priests for Equality-as vague, indeterminate, unsexed "someand in reaction some of the vested interests have questioned ones," "persons," and "individuals...
...means...
...Light filters down in the scholarship...
...To stick in "Abba God" every A faculty friend told me the story of the nineteenth-centime Father appears is to hit the congregation with a mystify- tury abolitionist preacher who took his scissors and clipped ing sound-more out of "Star Trek" than the evangelists-and all the references to slavery out of his Bible, as if that would to undermine the original author's design...
...Jesus' self-understanding tions between what words mean in one context and in anas one intimately related to the Father is one of the central mes- other...
...b) procedurally, it humanity, whether in yourself or in an- compatible with Christianity...
...Meanwhile, the "Son of Man," the midst of that slowness and solidity I am slowed, too, qui- one of the most mysterious and complex characters in both eted...
...The other twelve references religion requirements without reading the New Testament, are to Jesus as "he," clearly to underline the fact that we the will have virtually no knowledge of Scripture other than what readers know Jesus' identity, while the travelers, up to the they hear read to them in church-all the more reason to prelast minute, do not...
...We can try the same tacGod culturally conditioned...
...I feel moving into the old trees is very close to the calm and In Ash Wednesday's Gospel (Matthew 6), Jesus tells us to release and deepening I felt with Grandfather McRae in the blue- pray and fast in secret and the Father who sees us in secret will berries and Grandma Gottwig at the graves, with Ruth and reward us...
...tic, and we'll end up with a wishy-washy religion that elimSure...
...What I feel is not awe but calm...
...sages of the New Testament...
...Meanwhile, preachers should not theology and good prose...
...They want it Or: Jesus and the disciples meet "someone who had been all...
...Sound (Matthew 5:16), the Greek anthropos could just as well be f familiar...
...In front of me a giant snag points out of maple One"-a translation which Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J., editor of the and oak, the twisted stem of a fir cracked off in a storm or bro- Jerome Biblical Commentary, assures me has no foundation in ken under its own enormous weight...
...But once we start seeing the basic Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., a male person, is a journalism texts of our religion as obstacles to our belief, we are in deep- professor at Loyola University in New Orleans...
...But priests and parishioners, parscenes come into view-the stream, the glimpse of the valley, ticularly on college campuses, are meeting them now through the little grove of maple...
...about "the individual in question" (originally a man born blind The next issue will be dated September 10...
...From this philosophical premise it followed that we should get rid of all unnecessary social inn my younger days I did not hes- meant you were in favor of civil liberties, equality (the substantive half of the libitate for a moment to describe e.g., freedom to speak and organize, the eral program) and that we should get rid myself as a liberal, which in those right to a fair trial...
...The danand ever...
...Of course...
...Are we to visualize this person as a man...
...Can we go beyond it...
...6: 13 August 1993 Commonweal What is gained...
...Their growth is so slow, their movement so grad- Gethsemane (meaning "Father," or "Papa") and "God...
...Shakespeare, and Tolstoy...
...Just the Commonweal 13 August 1993 7...
...But the word Father-either here or in the "Our Mildred and Ray standing around the altar...
...Some satisfaction for some women (and probably some men) in the congregation...
...Nor is this an argument against adapting the LET'S GO TO THE TEXT liturgy so that both women and men are comfortable with the THE GOSPEL WITHOUT SEX prayers...
...women-like Jairus's daughter and the persistent woman Culturally conditioned, yes...
...Yes and no...
...adultery...
...We might enrich both our public and private prayer by dwelling on God's femininity as well as on our own...
...God is not masculine, God is spirit-neither He nor She, yet She as well as He...
...ger is that by the year 2000 this kind of movement for "equalUnderlying these rewrites is not just the obviously valid idea ity" will have so unsexed the liberating power of the Gospels that women have historically been oppressed by institutional- that we won't have women priests...
...ly infinite value...
...If so, the preacher's job is to with the hemorrhage-retain their sex in these rewrites...
...But the rewriters can't abide "he" and bom- sent them with an authentic, not an amateurish, or ideologibard us with Jesus' name again and again, violating both good cal, translation of the text...
...The familiar and our own imaginations...
...Have we a right to monkey with his terminology...
...presume that their listeners are too dumb to make distincAlso lost is theological precision...
...Or change ordination, the Scripture, truly understood, must be the best Handel's "Messiah" to "And this person shall reign for ever weapon for the liberation of women and men alike...
...There are hemlock etched on Grandfather's gravestone, and The lectionary's operating criterion seems to be the dethere are hemlock growing in the forest behind the cemetery termination to eliminate masculine words wherever they apwhere he is buried, and I think about those trees now, eating pear, with little regard for what the original authors of the my sandwich, dangling my feet over the bridge...
...will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press...
...Characters in the New Testament, often vividslower, deeper thinking, the emergence of the old themes and ly etched by a combination of the Gospel context, Jesus' words, images...
...This is not a case against giving women power in the church...
...Max trots on ahead, nosing in the brush...
...Light filters texts wanted to achieve...
...denying women ordination-but also the notion that the New RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Testament itself is oppressive...
...this sin-is lost...
...The In keeping with Commonweal's usual schedule, only power of the original stories, which, like all stories, are not one issue is published each month during July and August...
...And God the Father...
...Some er trouble than we realize...
...The women...
...The inates anything from the gospel message that makes us feel same right we have to tamper with the texts of Aristotle, Plato, ill at ease, anything odd or foreign or difficult to understand...
...In Luke's story where the resurrected Jesus sexual relationships of first-century Palestine, and make the appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, for exam- original words relevant to Brooklyn and Bosnia...
...What is lost...
...people" or "human beings...
Vol. 120 • August 1993 • No. 14
