Purim: How Does It Work? - Contributor Post

Today, Kate Allen from Life, Love, Liturgy talks about the history of a really cool, and slightly unknown by some of the masses, holiday.

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If any religious people can put on a daringly joyous and raucous holiday, Jewish people can. Purim, celebrated on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar, will be celebrated this year starting at sunset on March 15 (and continuing till sunset on March 16).

Purim is a holiday based on the book of Esther, which is a ten-chapter tale about Esther and her cousin Mordecai, who are Jews, along with the Persian king and his advisor. The king's advisor, Haman, persuades the king, Ahasuerus, to eliminate all of the Jews, mainly out of anger and jealousy he bears toward Mordecai. Mordecai persuades Esther, who has become the most favored woman in Ahasuerus' harem and thus the Persian queen, to go to the king and ask him not to fulfill Haman's request. After fasting for three days, Esther goes to the king, thus risking her life, because no one is supposed to approach the king without a summons. The king continues to look on Esther favorably despite her unexpected appearance before him, and afterward Esther reveals her Jewish identity, asking him to spare her people. In the end, Haman is hanged on the gallows he had built for the leaders of the Jews, and Purim is declared a holiday by Esther herself.

To celebrate Purim, Jewish folks prepare for Purim by fasting. Then they get together to read the Megillah (i.e. the book of Esther). This is no drab reading of scripture, however. Folks show up for Purim in bright costumes, armed with groggers to boo and blot out the name of Haman. The celebration of Purim is a lively ritual enactment of the salvation of the Jewish people from those who would have them annihilated.

According to Esther 9:22, people offer food to their friends and money to the poor. Purim is also a time of obligatory drunkenness--observers of this holiday are supposed to get so drunk, according to Talmud, that they can't tell the difference between cursing the name of Haman and blessing the name of Mordecai!

If you don't make it to your local Purim celebration this weekend, you might try your hand at making triangular, jelly-filled Hamantaschen so you can join in the feasting!

picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Saint Valentine: The Story Behind the Guy - Contributor Post

Thealogian Kate Allen from Life, Love, Liturgy, has been going through some amazing and exciting changes! And yet she still made time to explain the roots of Valentine's Day to us. We are so lucky.

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As Americans flood Hallmark and grocery stores and 7-Elevens everywhere for chocolates, pink paper hearts, and roses for their beloveds, some will wonder who this Valentine guy was, and what the connection is between him and Cupid.

The connection is rather tenuous, it turns out. 

St. Valentine’s Day has been around for ages.  Legend has it that the actual saint named Valentine was a Roman martyr for the Christian faith.  His feast day on the Western liturgical calendar is February 14 because that is the day he is said to have been beaten with clubs and beheaded.  In any case, that was the day set aside for him in A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius I.  This pope was the same one who banned Lupercalia, a Roman pagan fertility festival lasting February 13-15, during which observers of the festival ritual would run naked through the streets to counter sterility.  Most contemporary scholars reject any direct connection between the banishing of Lupercalia and the instituting of the feast of St. Valentine’s Day by the pope.

So why the violent death?  Some say Valentine failed to renounce his Christian faith to Emperor Claudius II in A.D. 269, when it was still a big no-no to be a Christian (Christianity wasn’t tolerated by the Roman Emperor until Constantine early in the fourth century).  Others say on the night before his execution, he wrote a letter to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had healed of blindness, signing his note, “From your Valentine.”

There is no substantial evidence that Valentine had anything remarkable to do with romance and lovers, however, until the time of Chaucer.  Chaucer is widely argued to be the one who made Valentine a man of fame and romance in his “The Parliament of Fowls” (a modern translation of which is available here).  It’s in this poem, written in the fourteenth century, that we get talk of lovers, birds, flowers, and finding the perfect mate on Valentine’s Day.  The earliest known reference to calling one’s beloved “Valentine” is in the fifteenth century letters of Margery Brews to her future husband, John Paston III.  The rest is history!

With the founding of the Hallmark Cards company was founded in Missouri in 1910, the feastday of St. Valentine was destined (or doomed), among other holidays, to become a highly ritualized day in the United States and other Western cultures.   Now Valentine’s Day, rather than serving as a memorial to a martyred saint, has become a feast of love.  Adult lovers celebrate it with everything from jewelry to store-bought Valentine’s cards to sweet treats to hand-written poetry to lace and lingerie to sex.  Meanwhile, the ritual of sharing some sentiment of “love” is taught early to children, who create Valentine’s card boxes as art projects and exchange miniature Valentine’s cards with all of their classmates.  Whatever its actual origins, and regardless of its actual connection to the man named Valentine, the Western rituals of Valentine’s Day won’t be going away anytime soon.

From my perspective as a liturgist, the lesson of St. Valentine is this: don’t underestimate the power of a retold story to change a community’s ritual, even if the community is as large as the Western world.  If the likes of Chaucer decided your life were worthy of a retelling centuries after your death, what rituals might spring up around you? 

Courtesy of “Presbyterian Voices for Justice” Facebook page

 

Five Ways Advent Is Like Potty Training - Contributor Post

M. Kate Allen from Life, Love, Liturgy has a signature look at the prep stage to the holidays, and one I can totally understand!

Advent and potty training, are, in fact, very similar. lol

Way #1: There’s a lot of waiting around.  My kid became daytime potty-trained last week.  We started potty-training her over a year ago.  Advent’s like that—you only get to light one candle a week on your Advent wreath, or open one little door on your Advent calendar per day.  The church hymns, if you’re in a liturgically oriented church, are subdued, like the mood of a parent thwarted by uncontrolled toddler bladders and bowels.  If you’re super-observant, the Christmas tree doesn’t come home till Christmas Eve and the Christmas music makes way for the usual dose of Muse and Metallica (okay, that’s the music at my house, but you get the idea).  “Fun” isn’t the first word that comes to mind in either case.

Way #2: It takes repetition—lots of it—to get the idea.  Without our many-times-a-day repetition of “Do you need to go potty?” our kid just had no awareness of it, and oops! There went her diaper (or, worse, on the days we were foolish enough to dress her in it, her underwear).  At my Anglo-Catholic church, we sing O Come, O Come, Emmanuel—several verses of it—every Advent Sunday to start the liturgy procession.  Wait, what are we singing about?  You mean Jesus isn’t here yet?  You mean he’s still in the dark, nourishing womb of the one who bears him?  Reminders of what hasn’t happened in the midst of everyone’s celebration of the it-already-happened do help.

Way #3: Rewards help.  For a while we used potty treats in the form of little gummy fruit-flavored snacks.  It didn’t really work unless our kid was hungry, though, so we shifted to a homemade chart for which she earned shining metallic stars.  And you know what?  Going square by square works!  That’s what makes Advent calendars a raving success.  My husband is especially fond of the ones from Trader Joe’s, loaded with chocolate.  I’m fond of the Jacquie Lawson virtual Advent calendar, which I’ve received as a gift for the last several years.  The wait for the lighting of each Advent candle on a wreath takes seven times as long—but oh, that moment when you finally get to light the next candle, multiplying the light that will eventually manifest as a bright, beckoning star! 

Way #4: Taking time is kinder than a sudden total shift in reality.  When I first got the idea to potty-train my toddler, it was right after I learned that I was pregnant with my second child.  We wanted her to be potty-trained by the time the second one arrived, so I found a three-day fail-safe method on the internet that a friend had used.  The author of this method said as long as her directions were followed to the letter, it would work for any age, period—in three days.  She lied.  And this mama wept and wailed before (and after) admitting defeat.  The shift from Thanksgiving to Christmas (or the Fourth of July to Christmas) wrenches my heart like that.  Really, I need time to prepare, and I need the experts to respect my need for time to prepare—like John the Baptist—for the birthing of the Christ in my world.  If I take seriously what Isaiah writes, my lioness self just isn’t ready to lie down with a lamb.  I need time to step back, shut up, and listen to the quiet, quieting voice of God, whether as the voice in my dreams or as a prophetic voice speaking out to me in waking life.

Way #5: The final reward, after all that waiting, is a little odd to talk about if you step outside the immediacy of the moment.  The toilet is filled, the diaper at last remains dry.  There’s nothing else you can think about, and you can’t stop squealing.  If your non-parent friends could see you now!  So the Christ-child is born and laid in a manger of animal hay to become food (“manger” means “to eat,” after all).  Um, whose food?   And did you notice that the child got swaddled swaddled like a mummy?  Same way he’s going to be wrapped in the tomb thirty-three years or so down the line when he actually does die, and…becomes bread for the world?  Birth and death.  Death and resurrection.  Birth and risen bread.  Whoa.

Toilet-training is to Advent what Potty-Training Day is to Christmas--the necessary prelude to the main event.  And you know what?  The wait renders the main event absolutely glorious.

 

An Open Letter to Pope Francis

Hey there, Pope Francis,

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to address you, so forgive the informality. It's been quite a while since I Catholicked. I'm a bit rusty on the when-to-kneel part right now.

But that's what I wanted to talk to you about. See, I lived in a Catholic-laden town, was born and raised Catholic, got all my sacraments, and even did my first year of undergrad at an all-girls Catholic college.

When you're a kid, you don't know any better, you know? You trust the adults around you. You believe what they say because they know things. And they say those things with authority. And you love and respect them.

So that God and Jesus existing as these beacons of light and life was just a given as a concept. I couldn't imagine a world without that.

One day, walking through that Catholic campus, I looked up at the chapel, and I didn't feel God anymore. I know that sounds silly, but pretend this image of Him was like a blanket covering me in my youth, and suddenly, for no discernible reason, it disappeared. I was pretty pissed. It felt like abandonment, in an equally silly way. But I carried on. I started doing some research, asking some questions, poking some holes. I ended up switching colleges and majoring in evolutionary biology. (Yeah, you heard me.)

There were several times I tried to go back. When life felt too hard, or something was lacking. I held onto the hope that God may yet return. I went back to church a few times and didn't find Him. I worked for the Church, and found the opposite of Him there. In the Church's infrastructure lies a great evil, a bullying, narcissistic, abusive presence. Literally the opposite of all the Jesusy things I'd been led to believe as a young girl. It was heartbreaking.

That's not to say there wasn't some good, there. Our Archbishop was an incredibly kind and gentle man and the former bishop of the area nearby was perhaps the most compassionate man I've ever met. There were priests fighting for families, immigrants, the poor. There was love and happiness. But the good up top was manipulated by middle management, and the good below was stifled by that same middle management.

I began to think I hated the Church, its manipulation, its trickery. I moved far to the left, supporting abortion rights, birth control, gay marriage, human rights. (And I will continue to do so, regardless of all else).

But it wasn't that I was against the Church. It was that I was for goodness. Goodness as I understand it. Goodness as charity without strings, goodness as kindness without judgement, goodness as unconditional love and compassion for all people.

I didn't believe goodness was some guy in a ridiculous hat and robe, riding around in a "Popemobile." I still don't.

But you don't even use the Popemobile!

I used to say my kids didn't know who God was. And they didn't. They went four years of their lives never hearing his name. Because I wasn't going to do that to them. I don't know anything about this stuff, and I wasn't about to mess them up by telling them the wrong thing, leading them the wrong way. Slowly this year, we've introduced some of the old bible stories. When they ask if God is real, I tell them He's a story that some people believe. When they ask me if I believe it, I say I don't really know. They still don't know about Jesus.

I got them baptized, "just in case." Because, you know, the Church has some scary-ass stories, like Original Sin, and I didn't want my preemies burning in hell just because I didn't symbolically wash away that sin. Which is ridiculous. These are the ridiculous things, you know what I mean? Well, those things, and the scandals, the sex, the money, the generally bad apples that can get to the top (in life as well as in the Church, it's across the board).

Anyway, the point of this ramble is that kids believe in things because they like and trust the adults telling them those things. I haven't liked or trusted the Church in a long time. But maybe it's not cynicism, maybe it's hidden hope.

It's too early to say yet, but you seem to be doing a lot of things I can get behind. Not as a believer, but simply as a human being. You seem to understand religion's place in the world today, and you seem to understand the goodness at the heart of all the dogma.

I like your stance on atheists (thanks for understanding, bro).

I like that even though you're still wrong about gay marriage, you agree it's none of your damn business.

I love the idea that you might possibly be sneaking out of the Vatican at night to help poor people. In. Love. With. That. Idea.

I'm down with your dismissal of stupid trickle-down economy.

I'm super excited about the fact that you are looking the child sex abuse issue in the effing face.

I mean, this is some yes, we can shit right here, am I right?

Suffice to say, if we ended up at the same party, I think we'd get along just dandy. I mean, you are lacking in hugely  important areas to me (mainly that women are actually equal human beings), but I understand we can't just change everything all at once. We'll just steer clear of talking about my vagina. I'm pretty sure you'd agree to that, anyway.

I wrote a Facebook status saying that if you were actually for real, I might consider going back. Because if Catholicism is going to do goodness and kindness right, I can get behind that. I can teach my kids that. I can give them a framework that may well be a story, but at least not worry that I'm telling them to trust corruption and 'sin' masquerading as truth and goodness.

As a friend of mine said, in reply to my status: "If we were doing Christianity right it would be irresistible. Because, truthfully, Christianity is sexy, dangerous, challenging, and bad ass."

That's the Christianity I want to be a part of.

In essence, perhaps it's not so much that I'm a non-believer, that I hate Catholicism, or anything like that. I thought I would side-eye the Church for the rest of my life, no matter what they did. But now, in just a few months, I'm tilting my head rather than squinting. Perhaps I just needed to be shown a little bit of hope, a little bit of humanity. Perhaps I wanted to belong all along, and needed just the slightest sign that you all were at least trying. 

I'm not going back yet, and I can't say I ever will. But I am paying attention. And I'm starting to give you (you the Pope, not you the Church. That will take much longer) the benefit of the doubt. Which I never thought would happen. I'm starting to smile a little when I see your picture. I'm starting to allow you to represent the Christian ideals I thought were at play when I was a very little girl. Those ideals that I soon found were nowhere in the Church at all. I'm starting to hold out hope that one man can make an institutional change.

Basically what I'm saying is, you've got the potential to bring a lot of people on board. If not as true believers, as helpers to the cause of goodness.

It's goodness we need, and goodness we're after, regardless of what God, if any, you believe in.

Please do not fuck this up. You're giving yourself an awfully big task, but you're also making people believe you might possibly be able to do it. And if not do it, at least try without falling to dogma, pressure or wealth of station.

I don't want to be crushed again. I don't want to have played the fool. Twice, after all, is shame on me.

So, Pope Francis. Go. Do it. For all of us. Make it happen. Good luck.

Darlena

PS - I hear you have the direct line to God, or something. Tell Him hi for me. And Merry Christmas (or happy holidays, whichever you prefer.)











 

Finding Religious Formation Good Enough for my Daughters - Contributor Post

Today, Kate Allen who blogs over at Life, Love, Liturgy (and CornDog Mama!) shares her struggle to find the right religious landscape for her kids.

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My oldest daughter turns three next month, and I can no longer put it off: I have to decide what sort of religious formation my kids are going to have growing up.

I wrote recently about resources parents can draw on for their kids' religious formation, but, the thing is, there's a bigger issue than resources at stake for me. I mean, I have more theological training than most ordained pastors--I am and always will be a walking theological resource for them. But I want more for my kids than what I can teach them. I want my kids to grow up in religious community. And it'll take a serious leap of faith for me to stick them in religious community and trust that they'll be formed well.

I grew up Roman Catholic. I have a Master's degree in Roman Catholic theology. The easiest thing would be to stick them in Catholic Sunday School and correct whatever they're taught that strikes me as off-base or wrong. In fact, that was my plan before I had kids.

In the last year, though, I've come to the realization that pragmatism won't be able to overcome one vitally important fact: the Roman Catholic Church isn't good enough for my daughters.

I don't want my daughters to grow up in a faith tradition where only men are allowed to do the most important things, like acting in persona Christi to say the consecrating prayers over the bread and wine. I want my daughters to look to the center of the action in religious services and see a woman leading, rather than making way for a man.

I don't want my daughters to hear weekly Mass readings that systematically exclude women. I want my daughters to hear regular references to the many bible stories featuring women who do awesome, even outlandish things.

I don't want my daughters to have to fight their way into the idea that women can do anything men can, especially in a truth-charged religious context. I want them to be empowered by everything they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in their religious formation.

The thing I've learned as a follower of Jesus is that Roman Catholics aren't the only ones who do Christianity wrong. Christianity has evolved into an exclusivistic club where you have to buy into Jesus as the sole son of (a male) God to get the most grace.

I don't buy it. Christian creeds alone aren't good enough for my daughters.

I do want my kids to learn about Jesus and all the ways he broke the status quo of his religious context--that's critically important to me. I also want them to see beyond what Jesus' followers have canonized and creedalized as right and good. I want them to know that Jesus was born Jewish and died Jewish. I want them to know that Jesus wasn't out to start a new religion--that what he was really doing was being an extraordinary interpreter of Torah. You know, the way rabbis often are.

I want them to dance in the presence of God the way the people at Chochmat HaLev did at their High Holy Day services earlier this month. I want them to laugh and sing out in the presence of Goddess. I want them to regard all places and creatures as holy, and that "more holy" or "less holy" are labels that can only apply to one's actions. I want them to learn that God is both-gendered and beyond gender. I want them to learn that they are sacred bodies as ancient and substantial and changing as the stars, not merely immortal souls as immaterial as infinity. I want them to see how extraordinary--even divine--Jesus is (and isn't). And I want them to see how extraordinary--and divine--they aren't and are.

So maybe I'll take them to a Christian church, and maybe I'll also take them to a Jewish synagogue. Maybe I'll choose a Christian place that rehearses radically and intentionally inclusive table fellowship in its liturgy, and maybe I'll choose a Jewish place in which all are welcome to dance with and kiss and learn and interpret Torah. And maybe both of the religious communities I choose will be led by women as awesome as my daughters are.

Because that would be good enough for my daughters.



 

Teaching Kids About God - Contributor Post

Kate Allen, resident theologist (no, really), who blogs over at CornDog Mama and just had her second beautiful baby, was able to take time out of her busy schedule to write an important post about children and God. Thanks, Kate.
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Parenting in the United States looks different in 2013 than it did in, say, 1982, the year I was born.  One of the quandaries I face as a parent, an issue that my own parents didn’t have to mull over quite as much, is the issue of religious education and “churching.”  Although I’m a self-proclaimed Christian like my parents, I don’t limit my religious practice to Christian practice.  I also don’t believe Christianity has an exclusive claim to what is good, true, and right (in fact, I believe Christianity, or at least Christians, often get it Jesus’ message wrong).  My practices and beliefs put me on the margins of Christianity (not to mention the margins of my childhood family!), and I find myself in growing company.  Many of my parent friends, though they grew up in some sort of faith tradition, have either come to pick and choose what they’re willing to pass on to their children from that faith tradition, or they eschew religion altogether.  The big question I hear, especially from friends who no longer embrace religion or believe in God, is: “If I don’t believe in God or don’t know what I believe about God, how am I supposed to teach my own child about God in a way that feels authentic rather than misleading?  Should I teach my child about God?”

As someone who sees systemic problems in her own faith tradition, I struggle along the same lines.  I don’t want my children learning about Christianity from just any Christian church community—I need to know that the Christian message they receive is more than mindless dogma that is inconsistent with the radical teachings of Jesus.

So how do I go about teaching my child about God in a way that a) isn’t contrived, b) offensive to me, and c) illuminating and helpful to my child without being oppressive?

I offer the following questions as starting points for any parent who asks this question, whether they belong to a faith tradition or have rejected religion and God but still wish to offer God as a possibility to their child.

First, what is it that teaching God/religion/faith to my child will accomplish?  Is this for me, or for my child?  What do I hope my child will gain from learning about faith?  Is it an intellectual exercise, or is there something more—something I remember from my own childhood that I want my child to experience, even if she rejects it later? 

Second, do I want to give my child a variety of faith perspectives, or do I want her to experience one primary tradition with occasional references to others?   Do I feel competent enough to teach my child about many faiths?  Do I feel competent enough to teach her primarily about one without tearing down others? 

For someone who wants to go the former route but isn’t sure where to start, a good place to begin is the Unitarian Universalist Church, which is intentionally embracing of all faith and no faith at once—Unitarians include theists, atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, you name it.  For someone who prefers to allow her child to experience one faith tradition primarily (in my case, Christianity), one might start in a “safe” denomination.  The United Church of Christ is a Christian denomination that is progressive, socially conscious, and warmly inclusive—all things I know I want my children to be exposed to (and formed by) in a religious context.  On the other hand, my childhood denomination, Roman Catholicism, is home to really rich, symbolic ritual, and it’s extremely important to me that my children learn about the power of great ritual, the sort that gets repeated often enough to get into their bones.  A compromise might be to search for religious communities that straddle the margins as much as I do.   One way to figure out whether a community honors and dwells in margins without risking an in-person visit is to visit their website.  Is there anything about this place that stands out as unusual (and good!) in comparison with other communities of the same tradition?  To use a personal example, my husband and I heard about and joined an African American Catholic Community and eventually had our marriage blessed there, even though neither of us is African American.  African American Catholics certainly aren’t a majority among African Americans or Catholics, so they’ve had to make their own creative way, weaving those two strands of identity together in a way that honors each without diminishing the other.  Church communities like this, that push against whatever “the usual” is because of their “unusual,” marginalized status, are the most likely to honor the questions and concerns that I bring to the table where the religious education and formation of my children are concerned. 

That brings me to the final big question: to what religious institution can I go and share my own concerns and misgivings about religion and God while being taken seriously, rather than dismissed (or, worse, regarded as sinful/shameful/naïve/unfaithful)?  A religious community that fails to admit its own ability to be wrong is a community that I’ll never want my child to learn from.  I need my child to learn that even though God is good, religion sometimes really isn’t.  A religious community that can’t admit its own failings is a religious community whose images of God I won’t be able to relate to (and certainly won’t be able to teach my children about with any conviction). 

Even though I’m a lifelong Catholic, I am more importantly a person who has put “God” and religion to the test—questioning whether masculine images of God are the only valid ones, or even the best ones, for example.  I’ve also dug deep into Christian scripture to see how/when Jesus and other holy figures contradict themselves, promoting prophetic good in some ways and making grievous wrongs in action and judgment elsewhere.  I don’t mind the digging—I’m not afraid of what will come of my search.  I surround myself with people who can help me explore—I trust that they haven’t planted answers ahead of time, even if they’ve dug their own digging and found gems of their own for me admire.  For me, the search is the point, and I think this is especially the case for parents who have rejected religion and/or God but want to give their children the option to embrace one or both. I want my kids to see that my answers about God (and the answers of the faith traditions I choose to expose them to) are not final, because if they were final, they’d be missing the possibility of transformation, expansion, and surprise.  Whether my kids ultimately choose to embrace religion or God is not so important to me as whether they learn what my own faith-on-the-margins has taught me: to love abundantly, to turn again and again toward goodness, and to approach both new and familiar experiences with wonder.