Episodes

In this episode about the body, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May shares her love for the physical world, while Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe is a bit skeptical. They explore how their attitudes impact their relationships and their faith.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service.

DDM [00:03]: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09]: And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11]: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action.

MET [00:39]: Hello and welcome. Today could be kind of interesting because we’re going to explore 1 of Reverend Deborah’s favorite things.

DDM [00:47]: Puppy dogs?

MET [00:49]: Maybe. And 1 of my least favorite things. Okay, I have to tell you. So I came up with the idea for this topic and I was like, oh, Reverend Deborah, we could do this. And over the past time that we’ve been working on this, she has been getting increasingly more excited and I have become increasingly regretful that I suggested this. So, it’s going to be a…

DDM [01:12]: Sorry, Elizabeth.

MET [01:14]: No, no, no, it’s fine That’s why it’s a good idea, right? Mm-hmm. You remember the creation episode where we came at things from a very different perspective? Today we are taking it up a notch. We are talking about bodies, which, as you will see, Reverend Deborah sees as holy and essential to the faith and I would just as soon do without. If I could be a Cartesian brain in a jar and skip the whole body thing entirely, I think I might. So we thought it would be a good topic to explore together to see if we can get to the bottom of this juxtaposition and help each other see where we are coming from.

MET [01:50]: So I am gonna let Reverend Deborah start us off, if you don’t mind.

DDM [01:54]: Not at all. So you said it, Elizabeth. I mean, I love bodies. I love my own. I love other people’s bodies. Is that okay to say? I love my puppy dogs’ bodies. I love my goats’ and my fishes’ bodies. I love the earth’s body. I feel at an emotional level, bodies for me radiate love, companionship, deep warmth. But let me also equally say that has not always been the case for me. You know, as a teenager, bodies were highly traumatic for me. You know, sexual assault, being beaten, hated developing breasts, oh my God, you know the body was like a minefield of trauma and anxiety for me.

DDM [02:40]: And I think so like many other young people I struggled with bulimia and anorexia, cutting myself, really not feeling safe or at home in my own body or with anybody else’s body. And so in my own journey, I just escaped into music and the arts and through those things, I mean, eventually discovered spirituality. But in the beginning stages of my faith, it’s interesting because I loved spirituality, but if you, Elizabeth, could be the brain in a jar, I could be the spirit in the heavens. I could also simply bypass the body. And so in those early years of my faith, I could spend hours in trance or in prayer, visions of Mary and God.

DDM [03:28]: As a young person, you could say I had either the gift or the curse of seeing those on the other side, hearing and communicating with them. And so in some ways spirituality seemed the perfect fit for me. Bypass the body and soar into other worlds in the spirit. But thank God as we’re being shaped and formed for priesthood, we have spiritual directors. We have to have a spiritual director. And the idea is, is your spiritual director has this wisdom and whose task it is really to keep us rooted on a healthy path. And my spiritual director was like, no, no, you have to root girl.

DDM [04:10]: You’ve got no problem with mystical prayer and visions, but you cannot bypass the body. And so she really encouraged me to walk, to swim, to garden, to find ways to root my physicality in this world. And so doing that and going obviously into long-term therapy over time really led me back into my body. And it took a lot of lessons to learn, a lot of having to avoid bypassing, but now at age, I was going to say 50, but it’s actually 52. Now at age 52, You know, for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling so rooted.

DDM [04:54]: In fact, I’m feeling so rooted that honestly, if you found moss and mushrooms growing out of me, I wouldn’t be surprised. I know. But I am so much happier and healthier now that I’ve been able to in some ways deeply integrate the body and the spirit into 1. So that’s kind of my context. But let’s just, did you want to say something? You’re staying well away from moss and mushrooms.

MET [05:26]: This is all foreign to me.

DDM [05:27]: But in terms of spirituality and our faith, you know, we are for this lifetime born into a human body. Now that’s not accidental. We could have been simply placed here by God as little spirits floating around but God didn’t. God places us in bodies and not just us but every other living being is given a body. Dogs, given dogs bodies. Butterflies, given butterflies bodies. Elephants in these huge bodies. The earth itself Is God taking time and care to fashion and create every living thing in a body? So this can’t be accidental for God to have taken so much time physically creating not just each thing, but also with this amazing diversity that we see.

DDM [06:21]: But I think if we watch in Scripture how quickly the story unravels. After the fall, we see human beings beginning to eat other animals, to kill them. We see human beings beginning to kill each other, we see men beginning to dominate over women’s bodies, we see violence being acted out on other bodies by those in bodies, and over time disease, which is if you split that word, dis-ease, simply no longer being at ease or at peace in our bodies, as disease begins to root in us physically, we now see people dying and beginning to die at earlier and earlier ages.

DDM [07:01]: And so by the time Jesus comes again, we see God again choosing a body in which God enters physically into this physical world. But it’s interesting that God comes as a tiny baby born through a woman’s vagina, born in blood and water and mucus. And so God enters into our world in this most physical way. Now if you think about it, I mean, God could have chosen to enter this world In any way. Why this way? And I think for me it’s because God does not see the body as being unclean, but as beautiful, amazing, a miracle.

DDM [07:44]: You know, God creates blood and water and mucus, each playing their own amazing function. But the problem is as human beings, we are so un-at-ease with our bodies, and especially women’s bodies. I mean, think about it, Elizabeth, we don’t even like to talk about vaginas or menstrual blood or mucus, right? But why? Our bodies are walking miracles. And then if we look at Jesus, I mean, Jesus was incredibly physical. Most of Jesus’s ministry is about healing the body, helping those who have been cut off from society because of bodily issues find their way back into wholeness.

DDM [08:24]: Jesus heals in public out loud the woman who has been menstruating for years. I mean private bodily issues that need healing are for Jesus just part of his public ministry. But by the New Testament we see how quickly people began to spiritualize again the gospel. It became about heavenly salvation, about the Spirit, and the body became something to discipline, something to control, because it was seen as the root of sin and temptation. And so bodies shift from being these miraculous creations of God that can see and hear and touch and taste and smell this wondrous world into which God places us, now into sources of temptation.

DDM [09:13]: And so bodies become imprisoned, bodies become mistrusted, bodies face discrimination and hatred, and we become alienated not just from our own bodies, but from the bodies of each other and the bodies of other creatures, and therefore, the body of God. And I think alienation for me is just 1 of the best words I can think of to describe sin.

MET [09:37]: Okay. Bodies are very difficult. It’s a difficult topic for me. And that is because in my early life, I was definitely taught that bodies are shameful. My body was always something that had to be controlled and covered, right? There were definite rules about how much skin could be showing at all time. And there were people in my life who I was very close to who constantly commented on other people’s bodies in some sort of judgmental way, right? There was always some comment to make about how attractive or unattractive somebody’s body was. And that was generally the value of a body, specifically a woman’s body, whether it was attractive or unattractive.

MET [10:20]: And of course, that was a matter of how thin somebody was. And like many people, and like I said, we talk about women specifically this way, But it’s a larger people problem. I’ve never liked my body. On the 1 hand, I have a number of health problems. I tend to think of my body as a Judas, which is a bit of a double bind. Yes, my body presents me with any number of huge problems, but I have also survived a dangerous pregnancy and childbirth, meningitis, and brain surgery. So my body is a fighter, but I have a hard time seeing this body as something beautiful or as a blessing that has borne me through this life, so much as a traitor that keeps throwing monkey wrenches my way.

MET [11:14]: And Then there’s just the body image unhappiness. I was happy with my body once. And it was when I was treating my body so poorly that the only reason I stayed healthy is just because I think I was young and resilient. I was eating once, maybe 1 and a half times a day and working out about 2 hours every day as well. It was unhealthy and it was obsessive and I was driving myself to do things that nobody should. And yet that was when everybody told me I looked my best and was my healthiest.

DDM [11:48]: The irony of that.

MET [11:50]: Yes. The other time I was kind of happy with my body was when I was in grad school and I was so poor I couldn’t eat. My hair and nails were brittle and breaking all the time because my nutrition was so poor. So even I recognized at the time that my dress size was maybe secondary to my health, but hey people love to tell me how good I looked.

DDM [12:11]: But you know Elizabeth, could I just interject here, you know it’s always struck me as so ironical that men are told to make themselves bigger. And as women, we must shrink and become as little as nothing. And I’m always like, there’s a deep misogyny and hatred in this whole thing.

MET [12:28]: Well, I say all this to emphasize that it’s not just me, as you say, that has an unhealthy relationship to the physical self. It’s that all of us have an unhealthy relationship to the physical. Because we don’t know what healthy is. We don’t know what’s good for us. We have made the physical completely aesthetic, which is 100% a classed thing, and as such, bodies are commodities. We trade them for influence and money. I laugh at the people who get so wound up about sex work because people are quote-unquote selling their bodies. But honestly, what do you think we’re all doing every day all the time?

MET [13:11]: If you don’t think an oil hand is selling his body just as much as a stripper or a football player, or a kindergarten teacher, you’re just freaking out about some purity fetish and like, whatever, get over it. And besides the obvious, we’re all trading our physical bodies for profit or influence or attention. And I think that’s why, even as I learned to be more okay with myself, I kind of still bristle at a lot of investment in the body sometimes, because in this world in which we live, our bodies aren’t just where we live, they are capital, and I’m kind of uncomfortable with that.

DDM [13:53]: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the sad thing as well is that in so many of our traditions, women’s bodies, gay bodies, bodies of color, bodies who are incarcerated, Palestinian bodies, they’re still not seen as being as worth as much as the white male Western wealthy body, you know. And That sense of shame you speak about, I mean, Elizabeth, it’s really real, you know. And it’s interesting that shame is the first thing in the Christian tradition Adam and Eve feel after the fall. You know, so that shame, I think, It’s deep and it’s ancient. But we have to remember that there was something before that for me.

DDM [14:36]: It’s not the way we were created in the beginning to feel and to create it to live in. I know for myself, the issues that always most affected me as a woman were the ones that I was told, please don’t speak about publicly, deal with it privately, you know, as though they should be a source of shame. And so we don’t speak about menstruation, we don’t speak about rape, we don’t speak about anorexia and all the other issues that actually affect us and affect many of us. But what is interesting is that at the heart of the church, every time we come together, certainly as Episcopalians, we have communion, that physical, bodily receiving of the body of Jesus through real bread and wine that goes into our mouths, into our stomachs.

DDM [15:26]: And this act for us becomes the heart of worship. It’s this real tangible sacrament, taste and see in your body, become 1 with yourself, with each other, and with the body of God, that I think in some ways is so subversive of everything else that we’ve been taught.

MET [15:46]: I have really tried to unlearn these negative things that were kind of my input about physical presence, but it’s an evolving, ongoing process. And the issue of communion is particularly poignant to me. In the tradition I grew up in, communion was not emphasized at all.

DDM [16:05]: Interesting, yeah.

MET [16:06]: Like, we didn’t even call it communion, we called it the Lord’s Supper. And it was relegated to an evening service when very few people showed up and it was just every few months. There was really no emphasis on the physical. It was a purely symbolic thing, you just took a little cracker and the grape juice, I mean, not wine, can you imagine? It was definitely grape juice. And Jesus was there in spirit with you. They weren’t called sacraments, They were just representative. And I’m not gonna lie, to this day, the idea of transubstantiation just seems ludicrous to me.

MET [16:40]: Consubstantiation, I can get, but the idea that the bread and the wine actually become Jesus’s body and blood are just total nonsense to me. I am completely unconvinced of that physical part of the sacrament, but thankfully I am not Roman Catholic.

DDM [16:57]: Some of us Episcopalians believe that too, but carry on! Right, right, right.

MET [17:02]: But it’s not required.

DDM [17:03]: No, definitely not, definitely not. I don’t think Episcopalians require much.

MET [17:09]: Right. But I have been thinking about the physical expression of identity, and that makes sense to me in the framework of communion. Jesus said, here I am, I am the sacrifice for you, here I am, broken for you, that I get. It’s a physical representation of an essential truth. And actually, the thing that helped me make sense of this was something really random and seemingly unrelated. Again, I do that. But bear with me, I’m going to make a really random connection to something we talked about much earlier. So do you remember we did an episode on women and gender in the church and I talked about the first wave of feminism?

DDM [17:52]: Yes, yes, yes.

MET [17:53]: 1 of the things I mentioned is that the first part of the women’s movement was pretty exclusive. It was kind of this middle to upper class affair, like white women. In fact, I mentioned a work by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I gave you 1 reading by another. I gave you 1 way to look at it, like, oh, I can retreat into my solitude, which is very much a privilege of the wealthy. And a lot of people read that not so much as the I have my rights, but as like, I’m retreating into my white woman solitude.

MET [18:27]: Around that time, there is 1 figure of the first wave that stands out as someone very different than that kind of retreating into her white womanhood. And her name was Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth is pretty much the opposite. She was an ex-slave who became a celebrated speaker in the women’s movement. She was 1 of the few black women who really became kind of a cause celebre in the first wave. And she was an important link between the abolitionists and the first wavers. Her most famous speech was, “‘Ain’t I a Woman?” And it was given at a women’s conference in Akron, Ohio.

MET [19:09]: And the reason I bring it up is because I have learned from Sojourner Truth that arguments can be physical. Truth’s speech is about how she is a woman, just like all of these white women who are arguing for equality, but she points to her womb, which has born children, and she argues that she has worked as hard as a man and deserves the respect given to any worker, and she points to her arms and back and describes the strength it takes to do the labor of the field. So what she does is Sojourner Truth couches her argument in her physical self.

MET [19:51]: Her body is her argument. Her presence is her proof. And I find that really profound.

DDM [20:00]: Absolutely

MET [20:01]: She takes that Cartesian dualism – like, I want to be a brain in a jar. She does the opposite, right? She takes that Cartesian dualism that we’ve been laboring under for a few hundred years and she’s like, nah, sis, we’re not doing that anymore. This is really brave and profound And I could talk at length about the theoretical or rhetorical importance of that, but the truth is, what happened is she made herself, not an intellectual process, the basis of her pursuit for equality. Her person is the proof, which means if you’re going to argue with her, you have to argue with the strength of her back and arms, not her appeals to logos and pathos, and that is a completely different creature.

DDM [20:41]: Wow. I mean, that is powerful. That is powerful. You know, the body, not the mind or spirit, although of course they are woven into the body, but this whole body is the basis for equality and sacredness. And I think that’s why in our faith there is this emphasis on, you are a part of the body of Christ. You, together with others, are the body of God. I think in the Western world there’s that strong temptation to want to privatize spirituality between me and Jesus. You know, me as an individual and Jesus as an individual, which I think is so ironical, given that even Jesus is part of a trinity, you know, part of a community.

DDM [21:22]: But that’s not… because it’s not what Scripture presents. Scripture roots our relationship with this communal God in a communal body, in a corporate body, a body made up of others that are very different from me, see things differently, express things differently, love differently, act differently. And I think there’s a real messiness in that, Because communal bodies are not easily controlled, they’re not easily owned, it’s harder to make them 1 thing. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom in God rooting our relationship with God in a body, and a body that is a communal body made up of other bodies.

DDM [22:06]: But again, if we look at Scripture, Jesus locates his body while he is here on earth in the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the child, the lamb. And so we have that iconic passage, when you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visited the prisoner, you did this to me. And so Jesus directly locating his body in those that are hungry, naked, imprisoned. And if we take these words and the life of Jesus seriously, then these bodies need to be always central. These bodies in some ways in our society should be seen as the most sacred and these bodies should be the most loved.

DDM [22:48]: But instead, I think in the Western church, we’ve so spiritualized the message of Jesus. And so we’ve managed to push these groups to the outside, making them no longer sacred bodies, but once again, shameful bodies. And that for me is sin.

MET [23:09]: So, you know, I talk a lot about old speeches and theorists and philosophers because I intellectualize. But, as I’ve said before, the truth is my specialty is free speech and the law. I can talk about the First Amendment longer than any person should. I say this to make 1 final pass at this subject, and that is to posit that for me, 1 of the ways I am learning to appreciate the body is to understand the body as expression.

DDM [23:42]: Nice.

MET [23:43]: I’m really interested in speech and identity, and that’s actually how I got interested in the law. There’s this theory that the law is 1 of the ways in which we write our national identity into being. And I’ve been thinking about the body recently in regard to this. I could give you a bunch of theoretical or philosophical foundations for all this, but what it comes down to is I have come to understand the body as a kind of speech. Our bodies say who we are out into the public. We say something about how we relate to the world and how we want people to understand us by how we comport ourselves physically.

MET [24:26]: Our bodies or our physical presences speak our identities out into the world, right? Like my person, the way I am physically, here I am, says something about who I am. That actually really helps me think of a body as something more than just like meat or a walking carcass and as a statement. It is constitutive, it is expression, it is speech. And we know from earlier episodes how much I value that.

DDM [24:54]: The word became flesh. I love this, Elizabeth. I love it. Right.

MET [24:58]: A body is 1 way in which we establish our personas. And if we think of the body as speech, then many of the laws out there that are trying to restrict bodies, like anti-trans laws, for example, or anti-drag laws, aren’t just disciplining the body, they’re infringements on speech.

DDM [25:15]: Right.

MET [25:16]: Now, I am a person who values free speech to a fault, probably. But for me, then these laws that aim to discipline bodies are immoral in ways of magnitude because they are infringing on people in a variety of ways. There is the most basic, right? These are people. Their lives matter. They deserve to be able to live their lives unmolested and unfettered as much as anyone else, right? That’s just the basic. But there is also the expression part of it. People should be allowed to speak and express themselves and the body expresses identity. When bodies are disciplined, that ability to express yourself is denied.

MET [25:57]: And I think that is 1 of the most basic and fundamental speech rights. I’m actually writing a book chapter on this right now in fact.

DDM [26:03]: in fact.

MET [26:04]: The body speaks ourselves into the world, so laws that discipline the body are censorial. So, you know, if you want to email me, I can just go off on it for however long you want me to. This issue cannot be understood outside the current political climate either. There are 2 things you have to bring to bear on this conversation, the Dobbs decision, which is the decision that overturned Roe and the fact that 1 of the campaigns was pretty much fueled by anti-trans and anti-immigrant sentiment. The Dobbs decision is fundamental to understanding the place of bodies in the public eye right now.

MET [26:46]: And just in case you think I’m exaggerating or making connections where there are none, within 24 hours of the election you could buy sweatshirts online that said, your body, my choice.

DDM [27:00]: You know, I heard about that, That was frightening.

MET [27:03]: Yes, the election was and still is about control of bodies. There was a concerted effort in this campaign to control bodies, specifically women’s bodies, queer bodies, and immigrant bodies. People want to control health, sex, gender, space, and access. And all of these things are about freedom. The people who are affected by these efforts to control bodies are already marginalized. These are the people who chafe under both policy and hegemony to begin with. These are bodies that are already disciplined in some way. But politics as it is, is literally premised on the notions that some bodies absolutely must be locked down tight and not allow the freedom of motion or expression that other bodies are privileged to have.

DDM [27:53]: You

MET [27:53]: You know, if control over your body means freedom, then there’s a big portion of the country that wants to make sure a large swath of the population is not free.

DDM [28:02]: And it

MET [28:02]: And it would be really easy to point to 1 campaign or 1 person and say, yeah, that’s bad, don’t be like them. But the problem is much more widespread than that.

DDM [28:10]: Absolutely, far deeper.

MET [28:11]: Yeah, people on all sides of the aisle have devalued Palestinian bodies, for example. And in that same vein, there is an ever-growing strain of virulent anti-Semitism that wants to curtail the physical lives of Jewish people. We’ve discussed before about segregation, But newsflash, that’s not history. We still live in a segregated society. Redlining worked. White flight absolutely realigned social stratums. Private schools and homeowners associations 100% created whites-only spaces. To the point that in many places in America, we are more segregated now than we were in the 1970s. And if you don’t believe me, shoot me an email and I will respond with the stats and references.

DDM [29:02]: Elizabeth, what you’re saying is resonating because I remember when I first came from South Africa, having lived and grown through apartheid, and I came here to the USA, and I was like, this is more segregated than we were under apartheid. It stunned me when I first came to this country, just how segregated it is. It is. Unbelievable.

MET [29:24]: Yeah, I think people live under this notion that that’s a time past, but we are still 100% a segregated country. The disciplining of bodies keeps people oppressed, and we are really concerned with people’s bodies. If you doubt me, listen to the LGBTQIA episode we put out. I lay out the legal history of how we have restricted bodies in the most literal sense. And the church has played a big part in this. I spent years of my life believing God wanted me to drive every natural instinct out of my body and clamp it down so I never sinned, strayed, or tempted anyone to do the same.

MET [30:08]: Because the Church has, for hundreds of years, been teaching us that the body is corrupt and it is our job to control it, and that 100% shows up in our public discourse.

DDM [30:19]: It’s frightening, but you’re 100% right. And for me, the real sin is not seeing our bodies and the uniqueness and the senses that God created us with as being pathways for that fullness of life that Jesus came to remind us of. You know, because this is our birthright. It’s everybody’s birthright. And so much damage has been done, as you say, by clamping down the body and our bodily instincts, because we literally then are shutting down pathways to sacredness. I mean the senses, if you think about it, have always been used to connect us with the divine.

DDM [30:58]: Music, dance, sex, touch, taste, I mean these are pathways for the spirit to experience unity, ecstasy, sacredness and in all of this, God. And so to wrap up this episode today, where has this episode touched something in you? Where are you in your relationship with your own body? How are you relating to bodies that you have been taught are worth less than yours? How could you explore your body as an amazing gift and blessing, not just to you, but also to this world.

MET [31:40]: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [32:15]: Music by Audionautix.com.

In this impassioned episode, Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth discuss their love and exploration of language. They talk about the cultural differences in how they approach language, and the challenges of translation and interpretation.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service.

[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. So Elizabeth, I thought it would be amazing to do an episode on language. And I’ll tell you why. Because the other day on Facebook, the Aramaic form of the Lord’s Prayer, which is translated by Neil Douglas Klotz, was circulating on Facebook. And some people were reposting and absolutely loved it and found it so helpful, and others in the comment section absolutely hated it.

[01:11] DDM: And 1 of the biggest reasons was because it was not the Lord’s prayer that they knew, and so they felt it was not, and I’m putting in inverted commas, biblical. And I was fascinated by this discussion just happening on this Facebook post that was circulating and it got me thinking, How did an English translation of the Lord’s Prayer that’s not even actually well translated, how did that become the biblical version and the actual Aramaic form that was the language Jesus actually spoke the Lord’s Prayer in, became seen as unbiblical. Like if you think about it, isn’t that crazy?

[01:55] DDM: And so here’s the issue for me. The whole of our Scripture is about language. It’s through language that we learn about God. It’s through language that often we communicate back to God. Language is so central to our relationship with God. But The problem is that the language of the Bible was not English, it wasn’t Spanish, it’s not Latin, it’s not even predominantly Greek. It’s ancient Hebrew, which is not the same as modern Hebrew in the Old Testament, and then it’s Aramaic and an everyday form of Greek in the New Testament. So to understand what the Bible actually says to us we have to rely on scholars of those ancient languages and secondly translators who can then translate them into our language, whether that’s English, Zulu, Russian, whatever.

[02:56] DDM: Now scholarship of ancient languages is always improving because as they discover more scrolls or even secular documents at the same time, they can then correlate these words, see how these words were used in other shapes and forms and contexts. And So in some ways, when we have a Bible, our translation of our Bible should be reflecting the newest scholarship around whatever those particular words or phrases meant. But that’s often not the case. Often we’re using scriptures that actually were from biblical scholars from like decades ago. And then the other problem is that our translations that we have into say English for instance, they are so affected by our own cultural attitudes towards gender, towards race, towards sexuality, towards a hundred thousand things.

[03:59] DDM: And so some of these translations are simply incorrect because of our own biases. So it’s not just that we’re wanting the most accurate translation available, but we also need ones that are really working in some ways very consciously to not shape their translation by our own cultural lenses and viewpoints and trying to keep our translations more in line with actually the biblical worldview.

[04:31] MET: Okay. When you first said you wanted to do an episode on language, I was so pumped. So, if you don’t know about my history at this point, I have 2 degrees in English and 1 in communication. So, language is probably one of the top three things I am thinking about all the time. Like, you can ask my producer, like, it’s probably not healthy. In fact, so when we were talking about this, I got interested in something the other day and I looked up something that speaks to this. Supposedly, you can’t read in dreams. Okay, whatever.

[05:14] MET: But I have read in my dreams many times. Sometimes it’s really challenging or slow and arduous, and I have woken myself up, because I’m struggling with words. But there are times when I have read whole pages or sometimes in really weird dreams subtitles. So I looked this up, why can I read in dreams? And apparently there is a small percentage of people, I mean small, like 1, maybe 2% of the population that can read in their dreams. People like writers and poets, but people who think about language and words a lot. And it isn’t just how they communicate, but it is a part of our lives.

[05:53] MET: People who are immersed in words and our lives revolve around them can sometimes read in dreams. It’s not just a matter of, oh, I read and write a lot. It’s like, because a lot of people read and write a lot. It is a very small part of the population that is intimately engaged with words and language so that it drives us, it shapes us. We think about words and how they work and why. It’s not just choosing the right word at the right time. It’s about crafting your life this way. So I say that because I want you to know that is how intimately connected I am to words and language.

[06:29] MET: So if I get maybe a little bit too excited about this episode. I need you to understand this is a way of life for me. But as we talked about this and as we got ready for this episode, I thought I should indicate, like, I might be part of the problem here when you’re talking about kind of Western versions of language and translation, etc., because my approach to communicating is very Western-centric. I know this, and I tell my students this, and we have to acknowledge this in classrooms. But I wanted to talk about how there are reasons for this.

[07:14] MET: I am specifically Western-centric when I talk about language because I’m a rhetorician, and rhetoric is a 100% Western idea.

[07:24] DDM: That’s so interesting.

[07:25] MET: Yeah, I want to explain that a little bit so you can kind of understand where I’m coming from and then we can talk about like language kind of overall. But I want to give you a little bit of insight into this like specifically Western approach that I come from and then we can broaden out from there. But for example, the first graduate thesis I advised was about the idea of rhetoric in China, and half of the paper was about how this notion of rhetoric as we understand it just doesn’t exist outside of the West. Now, we can argue all day about whether that is because of geography or context or whether rhetoric is just inherently exclusive.

[08:05] MET: And I actually think there are good arguments for all of those. But some of it is just kind of the nature of the beast in terms of its development. And I’m not going to give you a lecture on this weird esoteric subject. I’m just explaining why my perspective is the way it is. But rhetoric was developed about 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece, specifically around Athens. And the particular point I want to make is that rhetoric was developed at the same time in the same place and sometimes by the same people as democracy. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of it all, but if you know much about either rhetoric or democracy, that actually makes sense because democracy runs on persuasion.

[08:48] MET: Rhetoric is only useful if people are in a position to have a choice to make a decision between options. So, to be persuaded, if you will. So, this thing that I study and talk about all the time, rhetoric and democracy, go hand in hand. They don’t really exist without each other in this kind of Western perspective. So the way this all comes together for me when we talk about language is that we use language to move and shape the world around us. Language isn’t just transactional, right? It creates narratives, it’s constitutive, that just means it creates us, or at least who we are, and it in many ways powers our world, right?

[09:29] MET: You’re talking about that’s how we know God, it’s not just a spiritual thing, right? It has impact in so many ways. There are whole theorists in my field who argue that truth and reality don’t exist without it. We might talk about that later. So to say I’m invested in this is pretty lightly. But as I said, this is a very Western perspective because we’re talking about how language can be used to grow and even heal democracy. And these are pretty lofty ideas. And honestly, they may even be moot at this point. At the same time, 1 of the things that is particularly powerful, rhetorically speaking, is narrative.

[10:10] MET: And I could go on and on about people like Walter Fisher and Kenneth Burke and all these people that there’s no reason for you to have heard of who wrote about the importance of narrative or drama or whatever. And the thing about those is that they transcend cultural boundaries, right? Like narrative is important.

[10:28] DDM: Absolutely.

[10:29] MET: Whoever you are, wherever you go. Now, originally my field was very Greek and very Roman and very organized and very classical.

[10:36] DDM: Hence, Persephone the cat.

[10:39] MET: You should know I have a cat named Persephone and we can talk about why she’s named that, but she’s adorable and everybody should love her.

[10:45] DDM: And I, who had no Greek training, called her “Persa-phone.”

[10:50] MET: Absolutely. But since we’ve moved on from the Greeks and the Romans, things have gotten, I don’t want to say messier, but it has gotten less traditional, less rigid. And as we think about things like narrative and identification, we start to consider not just public speaking, but whether things like folktales or music or any of those other things are rhetorical. So we’ve opened up the field and started to think about just, is this a proper way to build an argument? But this is powerful. How and why? And those are different questions. And that’s a much more apropos question for approaching something like scripture as opposed to just like the State of the Union Address or whatever.

[11:33] MET: So it also gets to some of that slippage that comes from translation issues. For example, you could speak to this way better than I could, but I know throughout the Bible there are many times in the original where it talks about a man and a woman doing something, but when it’s translated to English, the words husband and wife were used. I’m not pointing to specific verses because it happens so often. On the 1 hand, that may not seem like much of a difference. On the other hand, this is a huge difference, because that’s putting some cultural baggage on those verses that weren’t there to begin with.

[12:09] MET: And it’s creating this narrative of biblical marriage that people have used for generations just to beat down women and the LGBTQIA population until they’re really just a shell of what they could have been. These are translation issues. They’re just small words that really can create whole cultural shifts.

[12:28] DDM: Absolutely. I mean, the words we use matter. And you know, you touched on this a little bit with the husband and wife issue, but you know, it’s, for example, we have instances in scripture where the actual name of a person was feminine, And they would change that in their translation to a masculine name. Because when they read the feminine name, they said to themselves, but hang on, this can’t be because only men were in leadership, so this must be a grammatical error. And so they changed the name to a masculine name.

[13:02] MET: Yeah, of course.

[13:03] DDM: Yeah, you know, but I mean, that’s an incredible. And, you know, again, you know, you said the husband and wife issue, but in the Old Testament, there’s so many places when the text actually is referring to a temple prostitute, to temple prostitution, and when the translators saw that, they changed it to homosexuality instead of temple prostitution.

[13:28] MET: Really?

[13:28] DDM: And so a lot of biblical stances against homosexuality were fueled, of course, by these translations. And then in the New Testament, instead of translating concepts like paedophilia, which is sexual acts with a minor, When these words appear, once again they translated them to homosexuality. So that again fueled that whole comparison of homosexuality and pedophilia that we now have in society. I mean, if we go back to the husband and wife issue, the entire headship argument of men in marriage is based on a mistranslation. The word kephale actually comes from the source of a river. So the scripture was saying just as Christ was the source or the spring of life for the church, so man was the, and generic man, was the source from which Eve emerged, right?

[14:28] DDM: Had nothing to do with power or with authority. It was about this word source. But again, poor translation. We’ve ended up with this authoritarian headship model. And so I think really we need a lot more energy to be invested in developing far better translations of our texts and scriptures for our ordinary everyday common people to have access to.

[14:54] MET: That is fascinating.

[14:55] DDM: Yeah, because I mean your average person sitting in the pew or sitting at home is not going to be studying these, you know, going back to the ancient Hebrew or Greek words. It’s just probably not going to happen. But unfortunately, I also think it’s more complex than that, because you speak about rhetoric being such a Western concept. Well, in the Western world, we value accuracy, right? And so language has become so precise that it’s almost like a science. You know, we search for the right word to describe most accurately what we are trying to say.

[15:31] DDM: And so English has become a precise but also a literal language. And so we read the Bible paying attention to precise words and interpreting them literally. The problem we have when we come to scripture is that Middle Eastern languages were not precise languages. In fact, you might even say Middle Eastern languages still are not precise languages and they never wanted them to be. If English has thousands of words, Middle Eastern languages ironically actually have far less words. But their words instead of going broad and wide in terms of number, their words go deep. Now what do I mean by that?

[16:20] DDM: So Middle Eastern Semitic languages work from what is called roots. So you will have a root three-letter word from Which many other words, almost like a family of words, stem. But they’re all related to that root. So you can use a particular word, but anybody within that cultural framework knows, by its root, how it relates to all these other words. So for instance, the word for salvation comes from the root for wholeness. So what that means is that you cannot therefore understand salvation outside of the concept of wholeness. So words form patterns that relate to 1 another.

[17:06] DDM: No word ever stands on its own. But unless you know the root of that word and therefore know what words it relates to, you wouldn’t know how to translate that word within the body of those other words.

[17:22] MET: Interesting.

[17:23] DDM: Isn’t it? It’s a completely different way to understand language and to understand words. It’s also said that you really don’t understand a Middle Eastern word or phrase unless you’ve discovered at least seven layers of meaning. And so words were almost like throwing a stone into a pond and that word would ripple out into different ripples, each unique but related to the original stone that fell into the pond, right? So if we take, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, spoken by Jesus in Aramaic. We simply have in the beginning, our father, right? But it’s nothing like that in the Aramaic.

[18:07] DDM: So in the beginning, our father is in heaven. It’s Abwoon d’bwashmaya. Ab refers to all fruit, all germination of seeds and life, everything that comes from this original source of unity. So it’s the very life forms that are emanating or coming from who God is. Ab, from which we will get Abba or Abun, Ab has nothing to do with gender, with mother or father or daddy as people commonly say, right?

[18:42] MET: I hate that.

[18:43] DDM: Oh my god, I mean it’s like where did we get these, right? Ab has much more to do with this cosmic birthing from that which is good, that which is the source and unity of all that is, right? And the rest of that word, “abwoon,” right, for which we say our father, “abwoon,” if you actually say that word with your mouth, like “woon,” “woon,” right, it refers to the sound that the air makes as we make that word. So it’s the flow of spirit coming from God. It is the flow of blessing of oneness. And then as it goes “wooN,” the “N” is when it’s taking material form.

[19:32] DDM: Like in Christianity, we say when it’s becoming incarnated, when that spirit takes physical form. And for all of that that I’ve just said, we say our father, Right? Can you see how inadequate that translation is? And also how misleading it is? But also how poor it is. Now, let’s be honest. The Our Father means a lot to a lot of people. Because it’s the 1 prayer that children have been taught from the time they’re tiny and it’s probably 1 of the last prayers they’ll say in their lives right? So we know people love the Our Father.

[20:10] DDM: It means so much to them. But is it biblical? Well it’s a very poor translation in our English of a far deeper and richer concept. And what we’ve done is really stripped it down to a gendered, individual, personal name for God. So I don’t know, like, I mean, maybe we’re not making anything easier for anybody, but this is where translation does become so difficult. And that’s also why I think that clergy should be doing a much better job of really studying what the original words and phrases used are and what the best scholars and translators are now saying about these.

[20:58] DDM: Because if we do a better job of teaching, We end up, I think, with much better, richer theology and an understanding of God and our own faith.

[21:11] MET: Okay. That is fascinating, and I’m going to be thinking about it forever. 1 thing I want to, I’m gonna, it’s a Western thing, but I’m gonna, I think I’m gonna bring this home a little bit and show specifically how language affects us as a society in ways that are clear outside of translation as well. Because it’s easy to point to translation issues as example of how words have created slippage, especially cross-culturally. But I wanna point out how even in the context of just the West, we have to understand that words shift and change. Because I think it’s really important to understand how this isn’t just like, oh, kind of this esoteric out there, translation matters, like this matters to us in the local.

[22:10] MET: Those shifts don’t just mean we talk differently, we behave differently. So there’s this philosopher theorist guy who wrote about the history of madness. Now that in and of itself seems kind of macabre, I guess, but it’s actually pretty pertinent to all of this. Now there’s a problem with the word madness to begin with.

[22:30] DDM: Any woman knows this.

[22:33] MET: Problematic word. But what this guy says is that people haven’t changed that much even if the word has. And what I mean by that is madness for all the problematic things implies has changed over the centuries, but the people haven’t. So the people who are afflicted with madness are actually the same throughout history. People have the same problems with the same illnesses and a lot of the same traumas in many different times and places, but what we have called madness has changed drastically. So 100 years ago, somebody with PTSD or postpartum depression syndrome or even extreme ADHD might be labeled as mad and institutionalized.

[23:20] MET: Now we recognize that these are treatable things and we help these people and they are generally okay, right? Like these are functioning members of society. But we think about that word madness. The diseases haven’t changed. The people haven’t changed. But our definition and our relationship to that word has changed. And that has real repercussions for people’s lives. People gain and lose their freedom based on how we define that word. And depending on when and where you live, The definition of that word can be the difference between a life on your own, living at home, or a life of institutionalized torment.

[24:07] MET: Right, 100, 150 years ago, you were mad, and mad people got put away. Now, you are anxious, and you take a pill, and you go to therapy, and you are a productive member of society. Mad means something very different now. That’s a word that is used to discipline us as people. It keeps us in line. And in the past, it was much more disciplinary. And I think this is a telling example because in 1 sense, it is very separate from what Reverend Deborah is talking about, because she’s getting at the way language slips from culture to culture and how we take a very Western approach to translation and language.

[24:47] MET: But what I’m telling you is even if that you stay in 1 language, even if you are just a 100% Western centric, English speaking, an I don’t care about anyone but me kind of person, You have to acknowledge that language affects how you live your life. We are made by the things we say. Well, you know, that’s the concept I’ve devoted my life to anyway. I don’t know.

[25:13] DDM: Absolutely, but it’s so true. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, language definitely shapes how we understand ourselves. You know, how we understand our gender, how we understand our relationships, how we understand our faith, and even how we understand God. I mean, I don’t think any of us can say that there is anything that is not shaped by language. But what that means is that we really need to pay more attention to what we are saying, how we are saying things, what we actually mean, and maybe what those words now mean. But I also think, and when it comes to faith, it means we need to be a lot more humble in what we think the Bible says.

[25:59] DDM: Because unfortunately, in many case, it’s not what it says. And I think being a lot more humble about our faith might be a good place to start.

[26:10] MET: I am going to jump right in with something that just seems so wild, but I’m actually going to take us back in time. I’m going to tell you about some of the first people to really think about how language affects us in kind of a philosophical sense, I guess. There were these people called the Sophists. This is like 2,500 years ago. We’re talking a long time ago. They were some of the first rhetoricians, but they do have some ideas that I think play into this conversation. So I’m not gonna give you a lecture on the Sophists, though I really think you’d enjoy it.

[26:50] MET: They were wild, like crazy hair, crazy clothes, they got thrown out of places a lot, golden statues, like there’s a whole narrative I could give you that is wildly entertaining. But I do want to tell you a little bit about their ideas about truth. The Sophists believed in an idea called Kairos. Now, As we are talking about it now, Kairos doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly, which sort of fits into what we’ve been talking about all this time. But the way I’m asking us to think about it for today is the idea that truth is made in the moment.

[27:35] MET: At that time you had Plato doing his thing and he hated the Sophists. Plato was a capital T truth kind of guy. He believed in transcendent truths that really couldn’t be questioned. They were not contingent on anything on this earth. No real word on what those truths were a lot of the time, but that’s neither here nor there. There was a lot we could say about Plato, to be honest. One, Christianity borrows a lot from Plato, like a lot. Early Christianity is not surprisingly influenced quite a bit by Rome, and Plato is one of the aspects of Rome that they borrow most heavily from.

[28:18] MET: And the reason I bring this up is because if you’re going to talk about translation and cultural issues, you have to acknowledge that our religion is moving around culturally a lot. You know, We have the religion of the Hebrew people, and a branch of that eventually became Christianity. But it was kind of a mishmash of Judaism and Platonic and Greek thinking. So the cultural and philosophical touchstones kind of become hard to pin down sometimes. I’m sure Reverend Deborah could talk extensively about all that. We can make four or five episodes on it one of these days.

[28:55] MET: Plus, when you take Platonic thinking to its natural end, you get things like fascism, which should give you pause when you think about the connections between Rome and Christianity, but that’s another four or five episodes someday. So, Plato thought the Sophists were dangerous because they taught this concept of kairos, which was pretty much the opposite of those big T truth ideas. Truth, according to the Sophists, is the best thing at that moment. So you create truth using the best ideas in that context at that time truth happens. And that’s a pretty powerful position because it means A, truth is contextual and contingent, and B, people are truth makers.

[29:41] MET: And the reason I even bring this up is because for the Sophists, this happens via language. The truth was basically what you convinced people of. So language wasn’t just pretty, it wasn’t just style and poetics, it was the means by which you created the truths that governed your life. I bring all of this up to point out that these notions about language being a powerful force in the world, a force that moves and shapes us, like really changes the world, these ideas are not new. We tend to think of things like language is truth and language is reality as these sort of newfangled postmodern ideas, but this actually goes back thousands of years.

[30:20] DDM: No, absolutely. And you know, if language was how you created the truths that governed your life, I think the biblical worldview was a little different. And when I say the biblical world view, I just want to clarify, because you were speaking a lot about Christianity borrowing from Rome, and that’s when we start to see really the development of the New Testament in Paul’s period, right? So kind of after the Gospels, you start to see a lot more of that integration of Rome and empire and that kind of thought. When I’m speaking about the biblical worldview, I think I’m very much more speaking about the ancient Hebraic worldview.

[31:04] MET: Absolutely.

[31:05] DDM: And then also the Aramaic, Galilean grassroots people from which Jesus emerges, right? And so I think it was a little different for them, largely because it was such an agrarian society. And so, I mean, we dealt with how words are used very differently in those contexts, But it wasn’t so much words that governed their lives or shaped their lives. It was the seasons. It was the soil. It was the cycles of life and birth and death, not just for humans, but for their livestock. Right? And so in many ways, the biblical world, we underestimate what a physical world it was.

[31:55] DDM: And listen, Elizabeth and I are going to be doing an episode on the body coming up and I think we’ll go more into this, but the biblical world was a very physical world. Truth was that seeds fell and reproduced plants, that small seeds could produce huge trees that would shade birds. Truth was that light was needed, especially in the dark, to be able to see and find what you need. For them, truth was that without a shepherd, the flocks would scatter and be eaten. And I think what we’ve done is we’ve kind of reduced Jesus’ teachings very often to these intellectual concepts of thought.

[32:40] DDM: But actually, Jesus’ teaching was very rooted in the earth and in the truths or realities that emerged from the earth and from the body and from cycles of life and death. And I wonder if we would see scriptures in a different way if we started to really reconnect with the earth, with our own bodies. If we started to listen to the earth and our bodies and other species’ bodies in the same way as we listen to our our minds and our thoughts, and I wonder then maybe what words might emerge.

[33:18] MET: So I think you make some really great points. And especially I think it’s fascinating to think about how Christianity comes to us, right? Because you’re talking about how, the culture of the faith started in this agrarian society, but then we think how it comes to us through a kind of Greco-Roman, like Paul was a word guy and a military guy. And Paul is-

[33:46] DDM: Law, he was trained in the law.

[33:47] MET: Yes. And that’s how Christianity gets filtered down to us. So, like, the topic at hand could not be more essential, right? Okay. So, I’m gonna do something that you may not be very excited about, but I promise I can make it all come together. I’m going to talk philosophy for a second. You had to know this was coming, right? We’re all here, this is who we are now. There are about a jillion theorists and philosophers I could talk about when it comes to the power of language. I could talk about sign, signifier, blah, blah, blah.

[34:24] MET: I could talk about reference, narrative paradigms, but I know good and well, you don’t want any of that. But I am going to do something you may not be expecting, so just bear with me. I’m going to talk about Nietzsche. Okay, we can laugh about that, right? That’s weird. And I know a lot of Christians are really uncomfortable with Nietzsche. Like maybe it’s the whole God is dead thing or there’s no truth, right? That’s problematic. I can see how either one of those positions could make people of faith uncomfortable. But I want to talk about one of his more foundational claims that allowed him to make these kind of big conceptual things.

[35:08] MET: So I want to talk about metaphors. Nietzsche wrote, and this idea was picked up later, that all words are metaphors, which at the most basic level is true. So for example, if you hear the word table or see the letters T-A-B-L-E, You probably think of a platform with legs that you can put things on. But why? Why is that thing a table? What is inherently “tabley” about it? What is “tableness?” Is there such a thing as “table-ocity?” Right? Like, obviously that is ridiculous, right? There’s that thing, and for whatever reason, it is called table. Honestly, there’s no inherent connection between the sounds we make with our mouths, the keystrokes that produce the image, or the thing we are referring to.

[36:05] MET: We have just kind of decided that is a table and so it is. Now, obviously, there’s a whole history to the etymology of words. It is much more complicated than that. But conceptually, the example serves its purpose. There is a sound and an image and a thing, and the only reason they are all the same is because we say they are. That is what is meant by words are metaphors. Words don’t inherently mean much, except for things like onomatopoeias. Words are just symbols for other things. A table is easy. We can point to a table and say, that’s a table.

[36:45] MET: But what if the metaphor is more complicated? What if it’s something like justice or fairness? Truth? We can see how this becomes complicated quickly. And the thing about metaphors is they require interpretation. Metaphors are by their very nature symbolic. So what this means is every time we communicate, every single time, we are involved in interpreting metaphors.

[37:17] DDM: Even when we’re in our own language, we are constantly interpreting.

[37:21] MET: That is what that means.

[37:22] DDM: It’s not just interpreting a foreign language.

[37:24] MET: Every time we’re communicating with somebody, we are interpreting some kind of symbol. Consider that level of complexity. If you want to say something, you have to figure out which tapestry of metaphors most closely approximates your meaning. And if I am to understand you, I have to interpret those metaphors as you have intended them, even though I come from a completely different context.

[37:47] DDM: And isn’t that the problem we’re facing in our society today, Elizabeth? It’s where people are using words, but we’re interpreting them in such radically different ways.

[37:57] MET: That’s what my degree is in! Yeah. So you see how things like interpretation and cultural paradigms make that even more wild, right? If words are metaphors, then you have to think of them as culturally specific metaphors and metaphors that link differently depending on time and place and language. So, even somebody as Western-centric as me can see very quickly that trying to read something from a non-Western culture in English that has probably been through a few linguistic shifts along the way isn’t just picking and choosing words. You are literally recasting metaphors and trying to take the symbol of one culture and change them into the symbol of another.

[38:37] MET: The metaphors of Hebrew and Aramaic aren’t the same as Latin, Greek, or English. So our understanding of the language and honestly the culture literally doesn’t easily translate. So actually that’s how Nietzsche gets to the whole there’s no truth thing because the truth is just how we organize metaphors.

[38:57] DDM: It’s very interesting if I can just add here that Jesus when he deals with it he locates it in relationship where he says I am the truth.

[39:07] MET: Yeah.

[39:07] DDM: You know, the way the truth of life. And I just always think that’s interesting, where it’s not just a heads concept, it’s like come into relationship with me and discover truth together, you know?

[39:17] MET: Okay, So how does all this atheistic philosophy help me understand my faith? Okay. We know I grew up thinking of the Bible as something that was holy, but not just holy, something that really couldn’t be questioned. But as I grew up and I started to understand the world around me, it’s not that I started to question the Bible, it’s that I started to think about it more fully, not as black and white words on a page with no history or context, but as a fully fleshed out text with the same depth and veracity as any text I studied in school.

[39:55] MET: And I started to understand that the Bible is scripture, myth, history, and literature all at once, which is a much richer text than what I was led to believe. And that’s actually how this particular philosophy has helped me with my faith. If I think about a word as a metaphor, then I know that some original author, be they somebody who spoke a story into being or even wrote it on a piece of parchment, had a particular symbol in mind. That symbol had to be understood in their context, and that includes their culture, their time, and their geography.

[40:29] MET: And Even then, it is still a symbol, so it has to be interpreted to be understood. What I have is a translation, which means somebody at some point said, well, this symbol is a close approximation for this other symbol. So good enough. Not only has the meaning changed, it has been lifted out of that context which gave original listeners or readers the ability to interpret that symbol. So for me, to claim that I have some monopoly on scripture is just kind of silly to be honest.

[41:02] DDM: Yeah, yeah. And you know, when you were talking there, it got me thinking about Islam. You know, you can read the Quran in English, but that is not how it’s supposed to be done. If you become Muslim, you learn Arabic and you recite the Quran in Arabic because they don’t want these issues of language translation. But of course, it’s again, what are we signifying? So that was a lot. That was a lot. Where do I start? So truth. There are many things, as you say, that we claim are truths, but I really do love what I was saying a little bit earlier, where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

[41:46] DDM: Jesus was obviously not a concept and so the understanding in that verse is that we discover truth within relationship. And I think that’s so important. You know, what does it mean to locate any of these things always within the web of relationships in which we live, and obviously specifically within our relationship with Jesus or with God. So, truth, I think, within the Scriptures really should not just be some propositional statement or fact, but something that we discover through our relationship with God, but also, I would say, through our relationships with each other and in creation.

[42:30] DDM: And so, maybe truth is something that actually requires relationship. And if it requires relationship, it requires therefore a specific context, specific people, a specific time period, a specific culture. I’m really myself not sure that truth can ever be found outside of specific lives and context because it’s so enmeshed in the discovery in our own human actual lives. But I’d loved your thinking around metaphor because in many ways that’s precisely what we are speaking of when we spoke of Semitic languages stemming from a root and then spiraling out from there because it is, it’s this rich, dynamic, creative, constantly in a way new way of using language but it doesn’t make translation easy in the least.

[43:23] DDM: But it does raise how hard it is to translate a Middle Eastern gospel when we do not really know, understand, and live within that culture. Just as it would be so hard for a Westerner to understand an African praise song without really knowing the language, culture, symbols, and ways of communicating particular to that group of people within Africa. And that’s why I think we have so much Misunderstanding but also false assumptions about each other and our faith.

[43:54] MET: Oh, yeah for sure Okay, well friends we got a little heady on you. But obviously, this topic is near and dear to our hearts. And if you want to email one of us, we will gladly send you a thesis length discussion on whatever you want to know about language, because I really feel like Reverend Deborah and I could go on forever.

[44:26] DDM: I think Elizabeth will respond to you.

[44:29] MET: Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s just, like, it’s just so important to us.

[44:34] DDM: Well, it’s crucial. I think it’s crucial. It’s really crucial because it’s the, what is that thing they say when it’s the elephant in the room? You know, we’re using words all the time, but we’re actually sometimes doing a really bad job at communicating because we’re not on the same wavelength in terms of how we understand these words or how we understand the words in scripture, you know?

[44:55] MET: Yeah, so, you know, it’s just, it’s so important. And, you know, I hope we didn’t get lost in the weeds for you here, but gosh, it was so exciting for us. So we have a lot of thoughts and some are clear and connecting and some are individual to our own perspectives, but that’s appropriate for a discussion on language because language is an individualized thing. You know, I wanted to make this last comment because I was really fascinated by something Reverend Deborah said about the difference between the way English works with thousands of words and Middle Eastern languages work with fewer words but deeper meaning.

[45:40] MET: And this speaks to the way I use language. I want to give an example of how that difference plays out. My students and family kind of give me a hard time because they’re like, oh, you use such big words. I don’t use big words, I use the right word. And I know, I have an extensive vocabulary, when you read as much as I do, that happens. But for me, it’s not about using an impressive word. It’s about finding the exact right word that I want to use at that moment. And I was thinking about why that is so important to me, and I realized it is because that is my way of asserting my agency.

[46:34] MET: If I can, in that moment, say, this is exactly what I mean, this is precisely what I want to say, like I am exacting control over that situation. I am asserting what I want, who I am. When I can say precisely what I want and like this is exactly what I mean There’s not any question like And that doesn’t mean everybody understands what I mean. There can be interpretive questions. But when I say precisely what I mean, I am asserting control over my environment. And when you were talking about the difference in languages, I was like, That’s exactly what it is right there.

[47:19] MET: Anyway, so that was my final comment, but I want to hear what you have to say about that.

[47:22] DDM: I think that’s so interesting. You may pick this up as Elizabeth and I have these conversations, is that our approach to language is wildly different. Because if that’s Elizabeth’s perspective, me coming from Africa, which is a much more oral culture and a not as precise a culture, when I use words, I’m painting a picture, and I want you to feel. So my wife gets crazy, because she’ll ask me, how many people were there? And I want to communicate there were lots of people. So I’ll say like 300. And then somebody will say, no, there was like actually 246.

[48:00] DDM: And I’m like, are you being serious? You know, because we’re not always using language precisely. It’s like we want to convey the feeling and the emotion, you know? And so it’s a much more evocative way of using language. So if at times on this podcast, I do not use the precise word, the accurate word, please just rather listen to me and paint pictures in the sky with me and feel what I’m saying, rather than necessarily hearing the accuracy.

[48:32] MET: That’s so fascinating. Okay, so I want to leave you with a few questions then. How do you know what other people mean? How do you know what a text means? How do you communicate your ideas clearly? And what does all this mean for your life of faith?

[48:55] DDM: Beautiful.

[48:56] MET: And we’ll leave you with those questions. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

[49:32] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode, Reverend Deborah and Elizabeth try to work through their feelings about the election and its aftermath. They discuss not just the politics of the last year, but different perspectives on parties, global and local relationships, and the media.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service.

[00:03] DDM: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] MET: And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.-

[00:39] MET: So the election has come and gone, and there has been a lot of analyzing and punditry and the blame game about what went down. Republicans are of course elated, and I want to note that I say Republicans and not necessarily conservatives because by my calculation they are not necessarily the same thing anymore. There is a lot of infighting on the left. Institutional Democrats are mad at the left flank and the left flank is furious at the center. Now I, and I think I can say we, are not here to tell you who is right and who

[01:19] MET: is wrong. Honestly, I think that is an infinitely more complicated question than anybody is making it out to be in the think pieces in the media, right? Like this is, this is huge. And honestly, often I would say, oh, maybe go to like BBC or Al Jazeera or any of those places. But I think this is 1 of those where nobody in the foreign press is getting it particularly right. Because I think outsiders usually bring in a really good perspective because they remind us how right-wing all of our politics really are. But in this case,

[01:55] MET: I think the truth is foreign media just doesn’t really understand the nuances and the finer points of American politics. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t go to an American source for real deep analysis on the inner working politics of a different country. That being said, institutional media in the US is only giving you a partial picture too. So it is very difficult to know what’s going on out there. Okay, ultimately all of that doesn’t concern specifically what I wanna talk about today. What I wanna talk to you about is the response to the election. That’s kind

[02:33] MET: of where Reverend Deborah and I want to kind of want to center today. So let me save this as an observation and this is an observation I make as a person who is a professional in political studies. The new administration came in basically on 2 or 3 strains of rhetoric. Racism, and I mean hardcore racism against immigrants, the dehumanization of trans folks, especially kids, and lambasting the Democrats’ record on the economy. Now, I could give you a whole podcast about the third leg of that stool, but for now I want to focus on the first 2

[03:22] MET: There is no way around the fact that the Trump administration rode in on a campaign of bigotry and hate and I’m gonna be very frank. Maybe you are a Trump voter and you say, well, I’m not bigoted or hateful, but what you’re telling me is that bigotry and hatred are not eliminating factors for you. Neither is rape or neither are felonies. Now we could play the same game with the Democrats If you voted for Biden in the last election or Harrison this 1, genocide was not an eliminating factor for you. But there wasn’t a choice, right?

[03:58] MET: Yeah, the Dems are gonna support genocide, but Trump is too and probably in spades. So, you know, choose your warmongering, right? Like at what level? And because all of this is going on in the background, because we have such monumentally immoral choices to make, people are having all kinds of feelings about it. And what I want to say to you today is this. Your feelings are justified. A lot of you are feeling angry or confused or hurt, and that is all a sensible reaction to what is a very wild turn of events. You don’t have to

[04:41] MET: feel guilty for being emotional. You don’t have to feel embarrassed for thinking this is a big deal, and there’s no reason to try to ignore what you’re going through. This election was not like others, and you can see that in just the vitriol of the campaigns, right? This was This was an extension of what has come before. So there were more things that hung in the balance. And if you’re having an emotional response, that’s not inappropriate. That’s a normal response to an abnormal situation. So don’t let people belittle you or diminish you. If people are dismissive

[05:18] MET: of your feelings, that says something about their callousness, not your right to be upset. So I’m going to go into something different in just a second, but I didn’t know Reverend Deborah, did you want to respond to any of that? Absolutely.

[05:31] DDM: I mean, I think so often we’re taught not to take seriously what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling. We’re always told, don’t worry, there’s professionals dealing with this. But these issues, they impact our lives. They impact the lives of those we love. And maybe more significantly, they impact the lives of those we don’t know, those we’re not in relationship with, because those are our blind spots.

[05:55] MET: Absolutely.

[05:56] DDM: And you know, we’re in a very difficult position in the USA, I mean, in so many different ways. And for better or for worse, we function as a leader in the world. So everything that happens in our country is going to have global implications.

[06:14] MET: Absolutely. Okay, so this may seem a little bit tangential, but as I often do, I promise I will bring it back. I want to tell you a little bit about Aristotle for a second.

[06:24] DDM: I love the way you always go off, like way off where we’re not expecting.

[06:26] MET: I promise I can bring it all to a head. You just have to give me a second. You should hear my family laugh at me about the way. They’re like, my child says, you have a train of thought, but it’s just off the tracks. So like this is a common thing for

[06:50] DDM: me.

[06:51] MET: So Aristotle was sort of the first guy to kind of systematize how we make an argument. So the stuff that you learned in fourth grade all the way through freshman comp about how to write persuasively that was Aristotle. And one of the things he wrote about was the notion that there are different kinds of proofs or appeals. So there are artistic and inartistic proofs. And inartistic proofs are the outside proofs you bring to the party, like your evidence. That’s your research you add to the argument. But artistic proofs are the stuff you make on your own.

[07:27] MET: The artistic proofs you may have heard of are appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos. Those are words a lot of people heard in their education going through, but if you didn’t that’s fine. This may seem very far afield from where I started, but I want you to think about this. Aristotle said to make a solid argument you have to have 3 kinds of proofs. You have to in some kind of balanced way appeal to logic and reason which is logic, character which is ethos which is like ethics, and emotion which is pathos. Path is where we

[08:04] MET: get sympathy and empathy. And the reason I point this out now in the middle of this conversation is because too many people get caught up in the idea of being reasonable at all times. And now I am not saying you should be unreasonable. No, you should strive to be reasonable as much as you can. But reason is not the absence of emotion. Aristotle’s description of a good argument requires that you appeal to the whole person, their emotion, their intelligence, and their character. And he asks you to argue from there too. And I say this to segue

[08:46] MET: into something I think we all need to hear sometimes. You don’t have to quash your emotion to partake in public discourse, right? The very first person who said, here’s how to make an argument, said, you argue from the whole person and that includes the emotional core of you.

[09:03] DDM: You know, it’s so interesting as I did have not heard those before because obviously I was in a different system of education and we didn’t, you know, deal with Aristotle. However, it’s just interesting how so often that has been an argument against women participating in discourse.

[09:19] MET: I’ve got a whole thing I write about that in later places.

[09:23] DDM: If you want to talk about that.

[09:24] DDM: Too emotional.

[09:25] MET: Oh my gosh. Seriously, I’ve got a paper I’m presenting on that exact same thing in March.

[09:33] DDM: And I like that because there’s a significance of emotion because I think even if you look at the US elections, there was a lot of emotion on both sides going around. And so much I think of our decision making is actually being rooted, not in facts, but in emotion. You know?

[09:48] MET: Oh my gosh. If you, I can talk about this for hours at a time. I’m not going to right now.

[09:53] DDM: Yeah, sure.

[09:54] MET: I will not subject you to that, but I could definitely talk about it. I do want to, I’m going to give us an example of something that I think is pertinent. So here’s my historical example for the day. Cause of course, like why wouldn’t I have one? I want to talk about Frederick Douglas. He’s one of the most amazing historical figures of the 19th century and his legacy and the work he did is the stuff of legend. We are in the area of Rochester, New York, and you really can’t get away from Frederick Douglass if you’re

[10:22] MET: up here because this is kinda his area that he kinda landed in towards the end of his career, and we are so proud of him up here. He’s buried in this area. This is Frederick Douglass Central. But when he gave his speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, he addressed this idea of civil discourse, even if he didn’t use those words, because Douglass understood something essential about democratic dialogue. And that is, if only 1 party is arguing in good faith, then the whole thing is a wash. Douglass knew that rational argumentation only goes

[11:00] MET: so far. If you have presented over and over again your sound and thorough arguments and the opposition is just refusing to listen and responding with ignorance and bigotry, then what are you supposed to do? Sometimes you just can’t argue hate reasonably. So Douglass said, “The time for such argument is passed. At a time like this scorching irony not convincing argument is needed. Oh had I the ability and could reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm and stern rebuke.”

[11:43] DDM: I’m guessing that’s Frederick Douglass, not you.

[11:47] MET: Yes. That’s just on my syllabus, right? That’s just how I start out first day of class.

[11:51] MET: No, no, no. That’s Frederick Douglass. He’s one of the greatest orators of time. He was a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and he was one of the greatest leaders of the abolition movement, and he says sometimes you just have to get salty. Am I saying you should yell at anybody in a red hat or with a Harris sign? No, that’s a good way to get hurt. But I am saying there’s no reason for you to take all this lying down. It’s okay for you to be angry. It’s okay for you to be upset. It’s okay for

[12:21] MET: you to be frustrated. And it’s okay to be open about these things. If people get mad because you are holding them accountable for their actions, that is their problem, not yours. Because at this point, emotions are justifiable. It is not wrong to be angry at things because they are morally wrong. The question is not can I be emotional or angry? The question is what do we do with this anger?

[12:49] DDM: For sure.

[12:50] MET: So for now it’s important to feel it and walk through it. The people, okay, the problem with people who are constantly positive is that they don’t process their emotions, right? And you have to do that. And I don’t think that means we have to stop feeling anything. We just have to find a way to make things productive, right? What are we gonna do with this anger? How are we gonna make it work for us in the world. How do we behave as righteously angry people to make the world a more just place?

[13:23] DDM: I have to tell you, I love the use of your word righteously angry because, you know, in Trinity here, we always emphasize how righteousness is about right relationships. So how do we exercise anger in a way that doesn’t burn, burn relationships, burn bridges, you know?

[13:40] MET: And that’s exactly what I was about to say, right? Some of you may be like, Oh, Elizabeth, you’re a Christian. How can you like argue for this sort of thing. But I will remind you, Jesus got angry, right? He got so angry that he took the time to make his own whip.

[13:56] DDM: Little premeditation there. Exactly.

[13:58] MET: And drive out people from the temple and knock over tables along the way, right? It literally, you’re right, it was premeditated. It was intense. He took action. He was righteously indignant. And I don’t think he would begrudge me the same thing. The truth is you may feel like your country has failed you on both sides of the aisle. People feel like their country has failed them. And not just now, and in this instance, I’m gonna guess Reverend Deborah’s probably gonna give us some much needed perspective in a minute about how this did not happen in this

[14:29] MET: single moment. And it’s okay for you to be heart breaking about that. It’s okay to be furious or shattered that your friends or family betrayed you by voting in a particular way. These things don’t seem congruous and I don’t know how to tell you how to handle that. I’m struggling with it too. But know that your anger is not wrong. If anything, it is the right response to a terrible situation. Your heartbreak is warranted and nobody, I mean, nobody has the right to tell you that now is the time to be quiet, be thankful or play

[15:05] MET: nice. So go ahead and flip those tables.

[15:10] DDM: I love you, Elizabeth. Thank you. So although Elizabeth and I share, I’m sure most of the same values. I think we see this election and electoral politics differently and I’ve no doubt that some of that is because I was not raised in this country and so have obviously been shaped by a very different social and political context. Now we all have our own political thoughts and feelings, I have my own personal political thoughts and feelings, but I want to respond today as a parish priest. And as a parish priest I am so acutely aware of how

[15:49] DDM: polarized our society has become, to the extent that we are even struggling to have civil conversations anymore. And I think that’s why Elizabeth and I, when we were first dreaming this podcast into being, decided to use conversation as the basis on which these podcasts would happen. Because We’re losing leaders who can model for us healthy, creative conversations. And so we’re losing, even at a local community level, even in our own families, the capacity to really listen or hear one another. And I think when we get into these places, it’s so much easier in times like this

[16:38] DDM: to label each other, to claim the higher moral ground, and then simply to dismiss the other. And I think we can see how each side, even in our own electoral politics, views their own group as all good and the others as all evil or morally lacking. But the reality is things are seldom ever this black and white. And if we are always the ones who in our mind are morally right and our neighbors or those on the other side are always morally wrong, maybe as scripture says, we’re not seeing the log in our own eye. So

[17:15] DDM: I think for myself, I’m not a historian like Elizabeth is, but I do know a little bit about history, especially growing up in the South and in what used to be called the Third World, which is really the majority world. We’ve often had to really watch what happens in America because when America sneezes, as they say, the entire country has the flu. So we’ve watched and we’ve experienced some of America, but this country was founded on genocide. And we see how even today we continue as a nation to fund and support genocide. This country was founded

[17:54] DDM: on slavery and we see how racism and the desire for cheap labor and cheap products continues to shape the USA. This country was founded as many others, most others on patriarchy, the rule of men, and we see how misogyny continues to shape every aspect of our society. And so these three things in some ways continue uninterrupted, no matter who is in power, in a very deep structural way to play out in USA policies, irrespective. Now, I believe as a parish priest, as people of faith, we have to speak out against these things no matter which government

[18:37] DDM: is in power. As people of faith, I think we are called by the gospel of Jesus to stand firm around certain values. All people are created by God, equally loved, equally sacred. Human rights are therefore God-given and our duty to work for. The poor, the most vulnerable, that is where Scripture calls us to primarily see the face of God and to respond to those groups of people as we would to guard God’s self. So immigrants, refugees, ironically are singled out repeatedly in scripture for us to protect, uphold the rights of, and offer hospitality in our communities

[19:28] DDM: too. So these are for me not political values, they are biblical values that when, sorry, yeah.

[19:36] MET: Can I interrupt really quickly? This reminds me of our first episode when we were talking about what we like find in our faith and we were talking about Like I look for an ideology and we were talking about what that ideology means. And this is what exactly what I was talking about.

[19:53] DDM: You’re right, Elizabeth. You’re right.

[19:54] MET: This harkens back to one of the first things we talked about. Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

[19:59] DDM: No, Elizabeth’s got the better memory than I have. I’d forgotten that one. You’re right.

[20:03] MET: That’s exactly what we were talking about.

[20:04] DDM: And so these biblical values, when they are being violated, the church cannot be silent. And so we are called not just to speak, but to stand with these communities, no matter the cost to ourselves. And I think we are called by scripture to use any power or privilege we may have to work for the full rights and inclusions, inclusion of these groups of people that are marginalized or more vulnerable. So for me this is what hasn’t changed. Our mandate by Jesus has not changed. This is the work of the church, the calling of the church.

[20:45] DDM: I think the problem for me is when we as the church start to do these things selectively. So for instance, we stand for gender rights, but then we say nothing when Palestinian women are being slaughtered. We stand for the poor, but we say nothing when our country bombs and decimates other countries, leaving nothing but famine and hunger behind. You know, there’s one thing I learned in South Africa, it’s that if we only stand up for human rights when those rights are our own, we’re not really standing up for human rights, but really we’re standing up for

[21:22] DDM: our own self-interest. So as the church, we always have to self-reflect on how are we holding governments equally accountable, whether it is the government we voted for or the government that we didn’t. And I think for myself, you know, I’ve watched how the church has largely been silent on drone warfare, which is really nothing but targeted assassinations in other countries in violation of international human rights. I’ve watched how the church has often been silent around some of those movements internationally of violence against black and brown bodies, and yet we are then enraged by the racist speech,

[22:09] DDM: and rightly so, of some parts of the right-wing movement here in the USA. So we have to ask ourselves where is the consistency? The Church must stand firm against all forms of war, racism, sexism, ecological destruction, the oppression of the poor or immigrants, no matter where these policies or statements come from. And the church cannot become the theological mouthpiece of either the Republican or the Democratic party. And that means we have to stand against Christian nationalism, which is a contemporary heresy. But again, we need to self-examine where we ourselves are upholding an unhealthy relationship with religion

[22:58] DDM: and patriotism. So, you know, to people of faith, I would agree that there’s nothing wrong with constructive anger. But we need to say, is our anger consistent? And can we let our anger first lead us to self-reflection and awareness of where we have contributed to these sins or been silent in the past. And I think the other thing is that we need to be cautious that our anger is always directed towards policies, not people. Because our neighbors are not our enemies. But racism, sexism, militarism, xenophobia, oppression, these are the enemy.

[23:39] MET: So I actually really appreciate what you said about policies there, Reverend Deborah. I think you’re 100% right that the focus of our energy, regardless of our political paradigm, should be on policy. I agree that if we get caught up in the trap of conservatives believe this, so that’s what I believe, or liberals believe this, so I do too. We are setting ourselves up for disaster really quickly because like you, I think both sides have some pretty problematic positions. So the goal has to be not to align with a side, right? Not left or right, but

[24:18] MET: to consider the policy in question. Now, you might say, but didn’t you just talk about how angry you are about the campaigns? Is that policy? Well, but yeah, they are. In a campaign, the administration previews what their policies will be like.

[24:36] DDM: And I think in some ways the election was very poor this year in doing that on both sides. Yeah, yeah.

[24:41] MET: Absolutely. We are concerned about policy here. And the promised policies of the new administration is going to marginalize and hurt and I mean physically, emotionally, and financially hurt some people. So if you’re gonna make it about policy then the policies need to actually be good ones And that’s what I’m getting at. I’m not just angry that the guy who won is a bad dude. I think most people who are in charge are bad dudes.

[25:12] DDM: Yeah, we agree on that one.

[25:14] MET: I’ve been studying politics for 20 years. Like I’m not impressed with any of these people. I’m angry at policy.

[25:20] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. And like you, you know, I agree that our current political leadership across the board is not serving any of our people anymore, other than the most wealthy. You know, our political system is just no longer working and something new is needed and I think people sense that. But how we get there? I have no idea. But something new has to be birthed from the ground up And for that to happen, we as local communities need to be speaking to one another. We need to be caring for one another. We need to really know and

[25:56] DDM: be there for our neighbors, whoever our neighbors are. Because I know from working in local communities, there is a lot of goodness out there in our people. People care, people want to make a difference and for myself that is where I will choose to place my hope and my energy. So I guess in wrapping up our episode for today, the question is, is where do you find hope? With whom do you find hope and strength? And as always, if you are looking for a faith community that doesn’t have all the answers but gives you space to

[26:35] DDM: ask the questions and feel what you are feeling, Trinity is always here as a place where you can belong and be loved. And if you are in need of a priest, Just remember that we are here for you.

[26:53] MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website Priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org, make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

[27:23] DDM: Music by AudioNautix.com

In this episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth talk about the relationship (and tension) between the Queer community and the Christian community. They discuss their experience with the church and how it has treated the LGBTQIA+ community and the history of the Queer movement in America, and how that has differed from the international community.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service.

[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. Action. So today we’re going to be looking at gender and sexuality and transness and for myself I think it’s 1 of the most interesting concepts to look at theologically. But a little bit about, so we name where we come from. I myself am lesbian, but honestly I’ve always wondered if I’m trans and

[00:58] DDM: again like we were saying Elizabeth, you know if 1 had different options I wonder whether I would have chosen something different. You know, I grew up in a culture where it was illegal to be gay. Many of my friends were jailed simply for being gay. Grew up listening to the hate speech and violence directed towards the gay community. And honestly, it was frightening as a young person growing up. So I married at 18, had children, but as I grew older and funny enough, it was primarily through prayer and spirituality that I really got to know myself

[01:32] DDM: so much better and it just became increasingly clear that I was not a heterosexual woman. I divorced at 32 after 14 years of marriage, but the church was not in any way ready to hear the voices and experiences of gay people. And so I remained closeted as a priest in South Africa for a number of years until that option became internally impossible for me. I was doing human rights work over in the West Bank in Bethlehem. And I met my wife-to-be, we got married and have now been married for 15 years.

[02:10] MET: First off, I cannot imagine the internal fortitude that took, so props to you. I have a much more ridiculous story. I’m gonna start with kind of a funny observation. And that is when I was growing up, my parents were absolutely horrified by the topic of sex. Like I could probably count on 1 hand, the number of times I have heard my mother say the word sex. The reason this is applicable is because on the 1 hand, I grew up in a tradition that is completely and 100% hostile to the queer community, right? Like Southern Baptists do

[02:58] MET: not like queer people. But my parents were so terrified to even mention sex or sexuality in my home that they never got around to instilling in me a hatred of homosexuality. Right? Like they just couldn’t mention it. So they were so averse to talking about sex that like they didn’t even, they couldn’t even talk about the fact that there were people who were same sex attracted. And I just like didn’t absorb that for my overall religious environment for whatever reason. So I just didn’t learn to hate gay people. And I distinctly remember 1 time when I

[03:40] MET: was in junior high and a friend made some disparaging remark about gay people. And I said, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. And this group of church people turned on me and they were like yes there is and they kind of really attacked me and started yelling at me about the bible and this verse and gay people are going to hell and I was so confused because the Bible as I understood it was all about love and not judging people. So I didn’t really say anything, but I was like, what is going on? And now I

[04:09] MET: run in very different circles and a number of people that I am very close to are queer. And I look back to that kid in junior high that I was, and I’m actually pretty proud of her. Like I knew at the age of 13 or 14, that people are people and deserve our love and respect. And I just had to get away from the others who were confused about it.

[04:30] DDM: But you know, I was thinking as you were sharing about your parents, my heart kind of felt, oh my God, I felt sorry for them, you know, because it can be so hard in these cultures. But it’s interesting how that puritanical western upbringing really created these very unhealthy understandings of and relationship to our own bodies. Right. And, and I think as well, you know, I wondered to what extent that shaped this very unhealthy reading of scripture, right? Because you know what always amazes me on this issue is when you actually go back and look at scripture,

[05:04] DDM: scripture itself, Old Testament, the New Testament, you don’t find that marriage is the primarily that Western concept of 1 man, 1 woman.

[05:14] MET: I always laugh about like biblical marriage or traditional marriage. I’m like, yeah, knock yourself out with that in the U S today, buddy.

[05:21] DDM: Polygamy is the dominant form of marriage in the scriptures, right? Yeah. And you find other forms of quote unquote, legitimate sexuality. I remember the first time I ever read, and I wasn’t in the church, but I had been given a Bible, and so I used to sometimes read it at bed at night. And I remember the first time I turned to the book of the Song of Songs.

[05:44] MET: Were you shocked?

[05:45] DDM: I was. I was like, oh wow, this is all in the Bible. A lot about breasts and

[05:50] MET: breasts are like gazelles.

[05:52] DDM: I know. And I was like, you know, I was really pleasantly surprised. Right. But again, that speaking of sexuality in very explicit terms. And so I think in some ways, if we’re honest, the Bible does not reflect the discomfort that the West has around sexuality. The West is uncomfortable with sexuality and they’ve transferred that onto scripture. It’s not there in scripture. And so I think many of the Western churches attitudes to bodies and to sex is actually far more cultural than it is biblical. But if we go back now to looking at gender plurality, right, and

[06:35] DDM: the full diversity of human sexuality, I think it’s so important always to go back to that Genesis creation story, right, because in the very beginning, Our translations say in the very beginning God created Adam, but the Hebrew doesn’t. The Hebrew says God creates the Adama. And Adama is translated as earth creature.

[07:01] MET: In my mind, I like that God created the earthling. Yes, the earthling. That’s what

[07:05] DDM: I wanted to say. The earth creature, the earthling, exactly. And so this Adama that comes into being in the Hebrew Genesis story is both fully male, fully female, and fully everything all around that, right? So God creates this earth creature or earthling in, and then this is important again, in the Hebrew text it says in their image, not in his image or her image, but in their image. And you know, again, the West always thinks of God as individual, as singular, right? And I think that’s again, that transference of Western individual culture onto God.

[07:50] MET: Can I interrupt you really quickly?

[07:51] DDM: Absolutely.

[07:52] MET: That is so fascinating, thinking about what we talked about in our very first episode, when I was talking about like my tradition being like hyper individualized. Yes. And making like that connection to what we talked about in our first episode. Oh my gosh, I’m like so fascinated by what you’re talking about.

[08:08] DDM: So God is not individual in the Hebrew scriptures and singular, right? God is their, them, our, God is community, God is plurality, right? And I think in the same ways that the being of God, if this earthling is created in the image of God, it is fully male, female, and everything else that weaves in between that. So again, the West, from this individualistic, very binary kind of concept, tends to transfer that onto God. And so the debates of, well, is God he or she? God is both and more, right? Because God

[08:48] DDM: is plurality. And so, you know, 1 thing when we talk about this issue, I think we’ve got to remember is that others cultures and traditions don’t see people or sexuality in the same way as the West. Unfortunately, where missionaries and the church got imported as a colonial strategy in colonialism, I think you do see the damage that it’s done to indigenous cultures and the way in which they relate to their own bodies and sexuality. But the image in scripture is definitely of God being imaged as plural, right? And so what does it mean to be created

[09:26] DDM: in the image of a God who understands themselves as plural? What would it mean to begin to see ourselves perhaps more in terms of plurality of being? And so secondly God creates this original earthling encompassing all of maleness, femaleness in one being and so that Earth first Earth creature is beyond binary right holding all forms of gender and sexuality in 1 and so I really think that Genesis story holds a very radically different way of understanding who we are as human beings. We’re not singular, we’re not binary, we all are so much more and beyond what

[10:10] DDM: any of us have maybe previously thought or known ourselves to be. And so I wonder if in our current thought patterns, I mean, if you listen to our current dialogues, there’s a lot of stress on, well, which box do you fit into? Are you male or you female? Are you bi or are you trans? I find myself wondering from the scriptural perspective, if this is still far too confining and narrow, asking for us to be 1 thing instead of the space for many. And I think really scripture has been co-opted by Western conservative culture to say

[10:47] DDM: things that it doesn’t say, right? It’s being used by the Western church as a tool to control people’s bodies and sexualities in ways that scripture was never intended to be used. And I think unfortunately that distorted use of scripture has really been used in highly oppressive ways, limiting human fullness, rather than ways of opening up new ways of being and exploring who we are in a far greater, more expensive way.

[11:19] MET: Okay. Can I ask you a question? And if you’re not ready to just like launch into this discussion, that’s fine. I’m asking you a question you may not be ready to talk about. This is not a personal question either. I’ve heard you talk about translation issues with largely like Leviticus and kind of those clobber passages. Could you give just like a brief overview of those kind of like, why, why do we freak out about some of these issues? Why do we freak out about some of these verses that seem to imply these behaviors are

[12:04] MET: so bad. And what is your response to that?

[12:08] DDM: Right, so largely I think it’s that whole lost in translation issue.

[12:14] MET: Yeah, I’d love to hear your take on that.

[12:15] DDM: So we’re dealing with scriptures that are written, first of all, in a context that is thousands of years removed from ours, number 1. So we’re dealing with a vastly different cultural context. We’re dealing with cultures that had very different worldviews and ways of understanding things, but they also had very different ways of understanding language. Language was not used and understood in the same way that it is in a western English approach. We’re also dealing with in the Old Testament scriptures that are written in Hebrew. In the New Testament we have Aramaic and Greek.

[12:54] DDM: And so when in the past people were translating these scriptures, very often they translated them from their own cultural perspective, which we all tend to do unless we’re acutely aware of it. And even then it’s going to impact it. But they also translated them with their own cultural prejudices. And this affects many issues in the scripture. So 1 of the issues would be obviously the issue on sexuality and homosexuality in specific. Just like I said to you, God didn’t create Adam, God created the Adama, right? Which is a huge difference, right? In the same way, when

[13:35] DDM: the, in the, in the Hebrew Old Testament scriptures, when they’re speaking about temple prostitution, because there was this concept much like tantric Hinduism, right? Where you would go to the temple there would be a temple prostitute you would sleep with that person and through that sexual act of union find union with God and Whenever they use the term for for temple prostitutes. They very often replace it with Homosexuality It had nothing to do with homosexuality, it had to do with with temple prostitution. So that’s a huge 1 in the Old Testament that you constantly find being

[14:14] DDM: repeated. And in the New Testament, the issue there is around what is, when they’re speaking about Paul is speaking about culture, he appeals to the argument of culture. Well, this is culturally done. Well, you know, in the West and in Greco-Roman culture, yes, women have long hair culturally, so perhaps that’s appropriate for them. In Africa, long hair is not appropriate. To have long hair, we’d have to straighten it and, you know, do kind of all kinds of techniques to try to make it grow long. It’s not natural for us. So, you know, appealing to what is

[14:53] DDM: natural and what is cultural is a very flexible concept. But then also In the New Testament, again, we find a mistranslation where Paul is speaking at 1 stage in what some Western, at a cursory glance, looks like homosexuality, but the words used actually arserecoitai and malacoitai, it’s referring to the sexual act of an older, more powerful man having sex with a young prepubescent boy.

[15:30] MET: Which would have been hugely important for Greco-Roman.

[15:34] DDM: Which was common in their day, but now in a Western culture, we wouldn’t consider that would be pedophilia Yeah, and we wouldn’t and you know, that would not be accepted obviously in our culture. So again, it wasn’t it wasn’t the consensual relationship of 2 adult men having a lifelong nurturing relationship. It was a more exploitative practice. So unfortunately, right throughout scripture, we find these places in scripture where there’s just has been horrendous translations. And it’s just kind of been in this catchall phrase of homosexual, which which the original text was not referring to at all. So it’s a pretty

[16:14] DDM: dishonest, you know, debate.

[16:17] MET: That’s fascinating. Thank you for that. I’m so glad I asked that. Okay, so speaking of cultural context and kind of where we are and who we are in this, I want to provide a little bit of background for our listeners about kind of what the queer movement has been for the last few decades in our cultural moment, at least here in the U.S. And it’s important to know that the queer movement in the US has been influential in other parts of the world. It has kind of spilled out across the borders and had a

[16:55] MET: difference in other places. So I am gonna focus on the queer movement here in the US, but acknowledge that it has, like the queer movement is vibrant and happening in other parts of the world. Absolutely it is. But I’m just going to focus on the movements that have happened here because that’s the context in which we’re working. I do want to note though, that for example, in a lot of places in the world, they have like pride celebrations and that kind of thing. In the summer months, That is because of Stonewall. Stonewall was something that happened

[17:38] MET: in the 1960s in America. So it is important to note that like the American queer movement has had impact worldwide. So let’s talk about that.

[17:49] DDM: That’s definitely true. That’s definitely true Because I remember my first time coming to the USA and I went to San Francisco. I knelt down. I placed my hands on the ground and I was like, I am finally on holy ground. Because San Francisco, for many of us living in other countries around the world, had become, it was the holy land, you know? It was the place that captured all of our visions and dreams of being free, you know?

[18:17] MET: Yeah, So actually, so let’s talk about that. Let’s go back in time a little bit. Let’s talk about, let’s start with Stonewall. In 1969, it really wasn’t okay to be out, if you will, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t gay bars. The thing about the gay bars, mostly in New York, was that they were kind of this open secret and a lot of them were actually run by the mob, if you can believe it. I know, right?

[18:49] DDM: Interesting.

[18:49] MET: It was a bit of a scam. You knew the bars were a front for the mob and they were laundering their money there, but it was the only place that queer people could go. So you couldn’t really complain about the drinks that were overpriced and watered down Because that was sort of all you had And the cops were well aware of this situation, but many times they were on the dole So they just let things slide and that was kind of the only queer community that you had in New York at the time.

[19:20] DDM: I’m sure some of the cops were in there too darling.

[19:23] MET: Yeah for sure village people all over the place right?

[19:28] DDM: Absolutely.

[19:30] MET: But for whatever reason on June 28th in 1969 in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn, the cops weren’t having it anymore. There’s some background to that. In the early 1960s, the mayor of New York went on this crusade to shut down all the gay bars. So in late June, the cops went undercover and many of them were sent to smoke out these supposed reprobates in Greenwich. So on the early morning of the 28th, 2 cops tried to start arresting people at Stonewall. And what happened was the patrons fought back. They just weren’t having any of it.

[20:11] MET: The cops tried to line up and cart out a bunch of the patrons, but there were over 200 people there and they just pretty much said, no, we’re not going. And the story is that Marsha P. Johnson, a trans woman of color was the first person to throw a brick. And that’s what happened at Stonewall. Marsha P. Johnson said, I’m not going, I’m not having it. And she threw a brick at a cop. And that is what started Stonewall. It spilled out of the bar and into the streets and people from all over the neighborhood, which

[20:45] MET: was a very queer friendly place just came flooding out and this bottles were thrown and Like windows were broken and bricks and rocks were being thrown and people were out there screaming queer power and gay power and it turned into a multi-day riot Okay, this leads me to a few observations before I move on. For 1 thing, we have to acknowledge that the movement for queer rights and acceptance, and I am making a generalization here, people usually think of it as starting with Stonewall, but there were things like the Madison society and other attempts to make progress

[21:20] MET: for the queer community that had existed previously, but for a lot of people they think of it starting it as Stonewall. This movement was anti-cop, anti-establishment, and riotous from the beginning, right? Like this was an anti-establishment movement and pride and the gay and trans rights movement has a long and storied history of being what you would call like extra rhetorical or extra legal, right? It moved outside of normative means. It was radical, that’s how it started. It was violent in many ways. And this also speaks to the nature of things like Pride or pro-queer movements today.

[22:08] MET: So for example, there is an ongoing debate about the appropriateness of family-friendly Pride or pro-queer events. On the 1 hand, the queer movement has always been about fighting the establishment, celebrating sexuality, and even celebrating sex and the body and free will.

[22:30] DDM: That’s what I was thinking of, sorry to interject. Yeah. You said that because again, that ties in family, quote unquote, family friendly, is that again, our aversion to dealing with and engaging with the body and sexuality. Exactly. Normative. Yes. Right.

[22:46] MET: Yes. Well, and that’s exactly what I was about to say like this celebration of the body and sex doesn’t necessarily lend itself to what we would think is kid-friendly events and There’s a lot of people who think maybe we shouldn’t demand that queer people make their events into something that they were never intended to be. On the other hand, there are a lot of 11 and 12 year old kids out there that know they are gay or know they are trans. And it would be really nice to have events where they could go and find a

[23:24] MET: community and have a safe place. So this is actually a conversation that happens, you know, every summer, like who gets to be involved, where do we get to go, who gets to be included, that kind of thing. So all of that is to say the fight for queer rights started out as this radical fight against the establishment But what is interesting and that in the last few decades? Queer Activists and allies have absolutely co-opted the tools of the establishment to advance their cause Specifically what I want to point out is that much of the advancement in

[23:55] MET: the queer rights in the last 20 years Has come through the court system Okay, I’m gonna warn you This is 100% up my alley In my other life. I am a free speech and legal rhetoric scholar, and I spend a lot of my time with things like Supreme Court opinions. Let me tell you something. I am such a nerd about things like this, but like years ago when the Obamacare decision came out, I remember exactly where I was. We were at the Children’s Museum that day, And I was so glad that my child was well behaved

[24:32] MET: because that meant I could pull up the Supreme Court decision on my phone and read it while my child played with foam blocks. So like reel me in. Okay, my producer is nodding right now. He remembers. Yes. Okay, so I’m gonna give you a quick rundown of queer rights in the last few years. I actually am going to take us back a few decades to 1967, which sounds like a long time ago, but it kind of is to Loving v. Virginia. This may seem not completely relevant, but it 100% is. Loving v. Virginia was what you

[25:10] MET: would call a miscegenation case. Basically it was about interracial marriage. There was an interracial couple that was arrested just for being married in Virginia and the Supreme Court decided that You have a right to marry who you want in 1967 right like in many ways that should have been the end of the discussion. The Supreme Court decided you have a constitutional right to marry the person of your choice. The end. What we argued about for the next, what, 60, 70 years, I guess, was what marriage means. So we know you have a right to get married

[25:53] MET: and we know you have a right to marry who you want. What people argued about was the definition of marriage. Does marriage automatically mean between a man and a woman? And people argued about that forever. Okay, fast forward to 1986, there was this really important case called Bowers v. Hardwick. And it’s like, I’m gonna tell you these things, you’re gonna be like, people cannot think this way, but they do In 1986 the Supreme Court decided that there is no protection for homosexual sex Like can you imagine being the people who present these arguments in front of

[26:30] MET: the Supreme Court? But the Supreme Court decided that you do not have a right to have certain kinds of sex. Right, you’re looking at me like this is nuts. It is nuts.

[26:45] DDM: It’s incredible how the government can feel it can overstep into your bedroom.

[26:51] MET: This got shaken up in 1995 with Romer v. Evans. This was a really complicated scenario, but basically what it boiled down to was Colorado passed a law that said you couldn’t discriminate against gay people. Then there was an amendment passed that said you couldn’t have a law that said you couldn’t discriminate against gay people. And then the Supreme Court came in and said that amendment is discriminatory so you can’t have that amendment. It was very complicated, but basically they said, no, you can’t say, you can’t have laws that are like against gay people. So progress, right?

[27:34] MET: The big turning point was in the early 2000s with Lawrence v. Texas. And I have to tell you a personal story. I remember when Lawrence v. Texas came out because I was at a party, I was, you know, 2021, maybe a little bit older than that. And we’re all sitting around at this party, standing around with our red solo cups, we’re like young adults, you know, cheap beer, whatever. And Lawrence V. Texas came out and Lawrence V. Texas overturned Bowers. And Lawrence V. Texas said, basically, you can have sex with who you want however you want

[28:06] MET: right like anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional and I remember standing her off my friends drinking our cheap beer and talking about how this changes things right Like Lawrence v. Texas is going to change the lives of people we know and love. And it was kind of 1 of the first moments where I had this realization that like the stuff that happens out there in the political and legal world, literally changes lives. And I don’t think I had recognized that outside of, you know, presidential elections before, but I realized this Supreme court decision, which seems so foreign

[28:45] MET: and out there and not related, was literally going to change, you know, my friend Bob’s life. Like his relationships would be different from here on out after that. And that was huge for me. Then in 2013, you had the US v. Windsor decision that was the DOMA decision that basically said there is this Definition of Marriage as being between a man and a woman in federal law and that was struck down, which led the way just 2 years later for Obergefell v Hodges. And that is the decision. It’s pretty simple. Some folks wanted to get married, so

[29:27] MET: they went to court and they won. So in 2015, gay marriage was made legal. There have been any number of cases come through since then that was like the Bostock case that dealt with trans rights. And there are a number of cases coming through the courts right now dealing with gender affirming care. But what people are really worried about right now is that Roe v. Wade has been struck down. That may not seem pertinent, but what most people don’t know is that Roe was decided on the merit of privacy, not abortion. You had a right to

[30:02] MET: abortion not because you specifically had that right, but because you had the right to make private medical decisions between you and your doctor. That right to privacy is very much in question now. And without the right to privacy, which is very much at the heart of the gay rights cases, there is a lot of anxiety about whether queer rights can be rolled back. This cannot be overstressed in the wake of the election. The incoming administration has tried to be very cagey in the last few months on abortion and Dobbs. Trump has tried very hard to distance

[30:41] MET: himself from past statements on this. He’s tried to make his position something like abortion should be a state issue, but that has not been what he’s been about in the past. He has been very proud of the fact that his court overturned Roe. That is huge for gay marriage Because gay marriage is predicated on the rights codified in women’s health cases, specifically a case on birth control, the Griswold case, and Roe. When the court overturned Roe, Clarence Thomas specifically said if he had his way they would come for gay marriage next. And it is very tempting

[31:24] MET: to say, oh that’s settled law they can’t do anything about that. But folks that is what they said about Roe. And another case to consider is a case that nobody ever talks about, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the Bostock case from a few years back. Bostock established trans rights as protected by rights that prevent sex discrimination. That has largely gone unenforced and states break it all the time. It doesn’t really have any teeth. But with the anti-trans legislation being pushed through in multiple states and the Trump campaign largely being ushered in on anti-trans

[32:01] MET: rhetoric, we can largely kiss that goodbye. Bostock will be overturned within a year. Okay, so what is the point of all this? I just dumped a ton of information on you. What am I getting at? What I am saying is that the movement for gay and trans rights has evolved a lot over time. It started as something radical and outside of the legal system and grew into a movement that utilized the law for its own ends. However, we are seeing the downside of that too. The movement used the law, but the law has turned in

[32:39] MET: a completely different direction after decades of conservative leadership. And let’s be honest, some of the Dems who have been in charge have been pretty conservative. So where does the movement go from here? So we’ve seen the movement encapsulate some really interesting positions, even binaries, if you will. It started as something radical and has kind of become institutional. The question is, will it need to radicalize again? And that’s sort of a question for any movement that wants to make a difference. The church itself could ask that question. We didn’t start as an institutionalized body. We were outside

[33:20] MET: the norm in the beginning. The early church was persecuted. Then as the church grew, it became institutionalized. Like all movements and organizations, there comes a time to ask, was that the right move?

[33:36] DDM: Absolutely, and the cost and what we’ve lost in that process of becoming institutional. But you know, I think the problem for me is that institutions always want us to fit into categories, because we’re so much easier to manage and control that way. But from a scriptural point of view, how do you make the miracle and the magnificence of a human being, an earthling, right? Fit into a category. I mean we were never created for that by God in the very beginning, you know, and even liberation movements I think often tend to want to create new categories

[34:12] DDM: into which we must fit. But why that constant need to define and to name who we are again going back in singular ways. You know, like I think to scriptures, God is both light and darkness. God is the still small voice and the thunder. God is male and female and them. And this is the garden whose image we are created. We are not 1 thing, but everything. And so much more than we realize and know right now. And I think so often it’s not just society that is constantly seeking to limit us. I mean, that whole

[34:49] DDM: story you were telling about the legal definitions and arguments in court. I mean, it’s a constant need to define, categorize, and box, right? And once we’ve nailed down this little box, now we’re gonna turn even to the definition of marriage. Right. I mean, I always laugh when we want to even as the church define marriage. Marriage is this very amorphous concept in scripture. Right. I mean, it really is, you know, and how much of our definitions of marriage are actually just more cultural definitions with a little smattering of of of of of kind of sort of

[35:22] DDM: theological sprinkles on the top.

[35:23] MET: And I have to tell you like when you talk about this, there’s a part of me that gets anxious because you know in my job what do we do? Define your terms, define your terms, state your claim, define your terms. So like, nebulous, amorphous, oh no.

[35:37] DDM: And yet I think that’s the movement of the Holy Spirit.

[35:40] MET: You’re 100% right. I’m just like, that’s just my context.

[35:43] DDM: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think part of the problem for me, just as a priest and as a human being, just kind of watching what’s happening in our world today, is that I feel like the LGBTIQ, whatever letters you want to use in that, that community of people have really become weaponized in the political debates, which we see playing out in the legal courts, right? Gay people and especially nowadays, I mean, if we’re talking about the last 6 months, trans children being used as a political tool. It stuns me that as communities, we are

[36:15] DDM: prepared to use our children and our children who in some ways are most vulnerable as a political tool in these political games that we’re playing today. I mean, for me, the abuse that is inherent in what is happening is absolutely appalling, right? But it’s such an easy community to target as scapegoats. So we can get our communities to focus on gender alternatives rather than on the massive wealth transfer that’s taking place at the hands of our leaders or the ecological raping that is taking place in our culture. So rather than focusing on those issues, Let’s scapegoat

[36:57] DDM: our young children who are grappling with issues of identity. When has that ever become a crime? When has that ever become a problem in our society? But I also have problems maybe with the way in which we are doing that to some extent because instead of asking our children to name themselves sexually at such young ages, why not just simply give them the space to explore the fullness of who they are? Give them space! Give them space for self-discovery. But I feel like already at such young ages, we are wanting to box children and put pressure

[37:35] DDM: on them to name themselves. Sometimes before they ready. It’s different if a child is clearly able to articulate and name themselves. Wonderful. We should be supporting and encouraging that. But I think there’s a huge pressure to kind of where do you fit and to name that, you know?

[37:52] MET: I feel like I have a lot of confidence in sort of the youngest generation that’s coming up right now. Yes. They are so much more chill about that kind of thing. Absolutely. Like people my age, you know. Absolutely. I see young

[38:13] MET: teens just being

[38:13] MET: cool about that kind of thing. And I remember when I was in junior high and high school, Like gender roles were rigid and sexuality was defined. Like these were hard and fast rules. And young teens that I know are just, They’re just chill.

[38:43] DDM: Trying to live their best life.

[38:44] MET: Yeah, they’re just, they’ve got, you know, they’ve got social media bullying to worry about. They’re not, they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna let gender binaries be the thing that stresses them out.

[38:59] DDM: Right, right, right. But I think for myself, you know, we’re just as a clergy person and as a gay person, you know, that threat of violence for me still is a huge concern, targeted violence against gay community and trans people. You know, I mean, when I was leaving South Africa, I hardly knew a gay woman who had not been raped. And again, if you’re talking about the private, you know, what are the private stories that we’re not hearing? You know, what are the private stories of what people are actually going through to try to forge

[39:31] DDM: a space of Integrity for themselves and at what cost you know And you know so from a church’s perspective I mean if we were to talk about what should the role of the church be in this shifting sea of sexuality and gender identity. I mean, for me, the biblical viewpoint is that we always need to be standing in solidarity. You know, What does it mean to stand in solidarity with those who are most vulnerable in our society? What does it mean to create spaces and space for healing and for transformation? And what for me is the

[40:09] DDM: irony of that word transformation, which we all seem to love so much, is that you don’t know what you are going to become when you are being transformed. You may become something that you had absolutely no idea of. And you know, for all we know when we’re talking about sexuality and gender, we don’t know what transformation is going to mean in another 10 or 20, you know, years time. But for me, when you were talking about institution and destabilization, the Holy Spirit of God, always there to destabilize. If you look at the role of the Holy

[40:39] DDM: Spirit, right? The Holy Spirit is never the aspect of God that has brought stability. The Holy Spirit is always the 1 who is blowing and changing things and enabling us to see and experience things we’ve never encountered before. And so my question is really how might the Holy Spirit be blowing and shaking up our old categories of sexuality, of bodies and of human beings because those old categories have damaged and limited all of us, right? But if you think of that concept of Ubuntu again, I am because you are, I can only be whole if I

[41:16] DDM: give space for you to become whole and isn’t that what God does in creation you know God creates space and says let there be and out of that space everything becomes right so for me sexuality and the full spectrum of sexual expression, it’s not really just about gay people or trans people. It’s about human beings. It’s about earthlings, earthlings loving their bodies, loving their sexuality and trying not to fit into nice little neat boxes because we are so much more than that.

[41:51] MET: Okay. Before we go, I do want to say something specifically to our listeners before we sign off. Depending on where you are in your life, this episode may have hit you a little bit differently. Some of you may be coming from a place of hurt or pain because of something you may have experienced because of churches that you have been to before. Some of you may be trying to figure out how to be the best ally you can be. And some of you may be just confused because this is all a little bit strange to you

[42:32] MET: and maybe you don’t know how you fit into this narrative. The thing we need you to understand above all else is that you are loved and if you have questions or concerns about any of this feel free to reach out to us or to your local church community and if your local church community isn’t supportive let us help you find 1 that is. This podcast comes to you from Trinity Episcopal and at Trinity Episcopal we celebrate diversity. If you need some of that and you think we can help you, let us know. But most importantly, this

[43:10] MET: is a message of hope and inclusion. If God’s love encompasses all, it is incumbent upon us to do the same. So if you are hurting, you are not alone. Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, PriestandProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@PriestandProf.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestimprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope

[43:57] MET: you have enjoyed our time together today.

[44:00] DDM: Music by AudioNautix.com

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe shared this brief note about the election: “We at the Priest and the Prof acknowledge that the election occurred, and it was a major event in American politics. However, Reverend Deborah and I have not had the opportunity to record new episodes since the election because of travel and work schedules. We will address this as soon as we are able.”

In this very spirited episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth discuss their very different understandings of death. Elizabeth recounts her fearful understanding of death because of its connection to sin and damnation, while Rev. Deborah describes it as a beautiful transition into something better.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service.

[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. Action.

[00:39] MET: Okay, so listeners, I’m going to tell you a funny story about the creation of this episode. Reverend Deborah said to me, hey, I’d love to do an episode on death and dying. We could talk about the transitions of life. And I said, sure, if we talk about death, then we could talk about sin. And she looked at me as if I had said, sure, we could also talk about five-legged, solar-powered plaid cats. Like, she honestly thought I had lost my ever-loving mind. I wish you could have seen the look on her face. But what we realized at that moment was that this was then a pretty essential conversation to have. Like if we were coming at this from such wildly different perspectives, then we needed to talk about what these things mean because it could have a pretty big impact on how we understand things spiritually.

[01:36] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. Because in my mind, I had never even thought about the issue of sin in an episode of death. My mind had never gone there.

[01:47] MET: Right. And that’s like my immediate reaction. So I know you’re used to telling, me telling a long, like historical context story or some legal history, But this time, things are pretty simple. I have a very clear association between sin, death, and damnation in my head. And this is just because of, you know, who I am, where I come from. Death isn’t the next step. It isn’t, as Pan said, an awfully great adventure in my mind, and like I’m working through this. I recognize this is a spiritual thing I need to figure out, but as I understood death as a child, It is where you go to meet your maker and if you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and prayed fervently and penitently for forgiveness and salvation, you will go to hell. If you have accepted him as your Lord and Savior you will go to heaven But you need to be very aware of the fact that you don’t deserve to go to heaven You deserve to go to hell,

[03:00] DDM: you know Elizabeth That is such frightening theology and I mean if you talk about a fear-based theology, I mean, I mean that’s just classic

[03:08] MET: Yeah, well, I mean you are a sinner and sinners deserve damnation. I was even taught that when the Bible talks about death, it doesn’t mean just like your body dies, it means eternal death. In other words, damnation. And I really cannot emphasize to you how strong the connections between sin, death, and damnation were in my childhood. So this impasse between Reverend Deborah and myself cannot be overstated. What she sees as a liminal space to transition from one state of life to another, I literally see as the threshold to hell.

[03:45] DDM: But I mean, Elizabeth, doesn’t that then create a huge amount of fear around the death and the thought of dying?

[03:54] MET: Like I was thinking about that, and I had kind of a light bulb moment. Like many people, I have kind of always wanted to be famous right but I was thinking about why that is and I think it’s because I’m afraid of dying right like if I disappear from this earth completely that’s terrifying to me And I think that’s because some part of me is afraid of death. Just, I don’t know if that makes any sense at all, but I think that’s just like my mind working to figure this out. I know that’s weird. Okay, I’m gonna back up a bit. I want to tell you a little something about Bible drill and the Roman Road You’re gonna love this Roman Road the Roman Road. Okay. Yeah When I was in grade school I was in something called Bible Drill for a few years. And I’m going to tell you what this was and I’m going to ask you not to dismiss me as a total weirdo. Bible Drill was competitive Bible memorization. And every year you are given a set of something like, I don’t know, 50 verses and about a dozen Bible references or Bible passages to memorize for that year’s competition. So you have to memorize all the verses plus something like the birth of Jesus, Luke 2, 1 through 7. I know that was an actual passage because I still remember it. You’re also given an official Bible drill Bible. It had to be a Bible drill Bible because you had to be able to look things up at a certain way in a certain time. Throughout the year, you move through levels of competition at the local, regional, and state levels. And there were 3 areas of competition, verse memorization, passage reference, and books of the Bible. So for every category you were given 10 seconds to recall a verse or find a specific book or passage. I don’t know if you can tell, but Southern Baptists take their Bible very seriously.

[05:53] DDM: Well, at least in the in the head.

[05:57] MET: That’s fair. I do want to make a quick note about liturgy too, just in case you don’t understand how these things work. In most mainline Protestant churches, there’s a basic liturgy that priests or pastors follow, so there’s a pattern to the year. Southern Baptists have no calendar or liturgy, so the pastor just kind of chooses what he wants to focus on and that’s the direction of the church. So the scripture is very selectively chosen for a narrative and that narrative has profoundly impacted the way I see things like death. So things like knowing the Bible and knowing where things are become very important because you kind of have to understand where the church is going in terms of understanding the scripture. All right. So honestly, even as I’m saying this, like I know how wild it sounds, but Let me make it even weirder for you. I always used to get frustrated with my dad because he called Bible drill the wrong thing and so did my grandmother and that annoyed me. You know kids get annoyed when the details are wrong. They called it sword drill. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood why. When my dad was young, that kind of activity was called sword drill, not Bible drill, because they referred to the Bible as the sword. When scripture tells us, I think it’s in Corinthians, but I’m not sure, maybe Ephesians, when the scripture tells us to put on the whole armor of God, Baptists really get into the militarism of that. So they spent decades teaching young kids that the Bible was literally a weapon, and the best way to know how to use it was to know it backward and forward.

[07:35] DDM: You know, I have to be honest when you said that the weight that entered into my chest was quite something. It almost makes me want to cry, you know, because the thought of scripture, which is something so sacred and is meant to be so life-giving is then used as a weapon against other people. It is such a violation of the intent of sacred scriptures. And in a way I’m just I’m so sorry for your experience but I’m also desperately sorry for anybody who’s had the experience of scripture being used against them as a weapon, because that is nothing but spiritual abuse, and it is so wrong.

[08:18] MET: So I would like to affirm to you at this point that I am a functioning adult with a job and a family and a reasonably healthy outlook on life.

[08:26] DDM: I know, despite, despite.

[08:29] MET: And I say this to you to emphasize that I was raised to understand that scripture is sacrosanct, like that’s why I went through all of this. It was my job to know as much of it as possible and to use it whenever I could to advance the will of God. There’s a whole lot of spiritual and psychological work being done there to assume that because I memorized some verses and the books of the Bible I would know the will of God but whatever hence sword drill.

[09:01] DDM: And you know Elizabeth I just want to disagree with you here. And it’s not you personally, but that worldview, because if scripture really was viewed as sacrosanct, I think a lot more energy then would have been put into understanding it in context, understanding the original languages into which it was written, understanding the problems we have with translation, understanding the way in which text was understood in completely different ways from the way we understand text today and that most of these were actually from oral based cultures and so the idea that despite all of those issues you can simply pull out a few verses string them together to justify an agenda that’s so un-Christ-like and unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, I think for me shows that deep down there really isn’t a view of scripture as being sacrosanct.

[09:58] MET: Well, one day we’ll do an episode on biblical inerrancy And we will just blow some minds.

[10:07] DDM: Yeah, it would be interesting to do an episode, I think on text.

[10:10] MET: Yeah. Yeah, okay. So producer, write that down. Okay, one of the many things we had to familiarize ourselves with in scripture, not necessarily in Bible drill, but in like Sunday school and Bible study, which I did as well. And it all had the same kind of fanatical approach to scripture was something called the Roman Road. The Roman Road is a set of verses in the book of Romans that young evangelicals are encouraged to memorize because supposedly the entirety of Christian theology or the gospel, it can’t be the gospel because it’s in Romans, but they like to talk about that, or whatever can be distilled into these verses. And all of this may seem like a roundabout way of getting to a discussion on death, but I promise it is all coming to a head. Okay, so have this in your background. I grew up with a view of scripture that honestly was almost idolatrous. The Bible was almost more important than Jesus in some ways. And the Roman road, or at least some of the verses in Romans were specifically chosen to shape our understanding of the biggest questions about our faith. So we’re going to look at what the Roman road has to say about things. We start with Romans 3 23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Okay, so we’re all sinners, but that’s not all of it. God is glorious and because we are sinners we are less than God. Got it. Robbins 5 8, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Okay, cool, this is fixable. We know God loves us because Christ died for us. An observant reader will note that we are only two verses into this and we can see death is not a good thing and it is definitely my fault because I’m a sinner. Romans 6 23, for the wages of sin is death but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. Couldn’t be too much clear. We’re all sinners and sin equals death. We will die for our sins. And I would like to reiterate that it was impressed upon me that this meant eternal death. So I wasn’t just gonna die for my sins, I was going to be damned for them too. However, God gives us the gifts of life through Jesus, so this is important to understand. Jesus conquers death. Jesus is the opposite of death. Romans 8 1, therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. So if you ask Jesus into your heart you can avoid all this condemnation stuff, which according to everything we’ve learned from the Roman road means avoiding death. Hooray for eternal life. Romans 10 9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him, I just lost it, God raised him from the dead you will be saved. Okay, so this is the evangelical part of evangelicalism because it’s not enough to love God or clothe the naked or feed the poor. That’s all good. But you have to actually tell people that Jesus is Lord. All those folks going on mission trips and standing on street corners, they’re just doing as they have been commanded as part of their Christian duty.

[13:38] DDM: You know what I just think is so interesting about everything you’ve shared? It’s all from Romans. And Romans is number 1, not the gospel. Number 2, Romans is in some ways trying to make sense of the gospel through the mind of Rome, which was the mind of empire, the mind of colonialism. And it also is through Paul, who himself was a military man. So it’s interesting for me the amount of military language in that which is in some ways very, very unlike the language of Jesus. But carry on. Sorry. I don’t know.

[14:15] MET: That’s fine. I mean, I feel like I’ve established myself as a crazy person at this point. So it’s fine to move on. But I want to consider this for a moment. So here I am an Episcopalian. I’m living in the Northeast. I’m generally a respectable person. Now, if you saw me, you might take a second look because of the hair and the piercings, but I’m not operating wildly outside of normal means of operations. So what I need you to understand, you and Reverend Deborah, you and listeners, really truly understand Is that when somebody in America says they are a practicing Christian it is very likely They have some version of this narrative playing in the background of their head Self-professed evangelicals make up the majority of practicing Christians in this country There are more people walking around who think like this than we care to acknowledge and I know because I’ve been to all their baptisms

[15:07] DDM: You know Elizabeth and you know when you say that I almost don’t even know where to start with With all of that because there’s a way in which I feel a little breathless Perhaps I want to be honest at the horror of what has been done to our faith. So let’s go back to scripture, but not just a few verses pulled out and strung together, but a more broader overview of scripture. In the Hebrew understanding in the beginning of creation, we’re told that all things, everything that is, is created through the Word. Not meaning scripture, right? But the Word meaning Jesus. So already, I would say from the very beginnings of Genesis, we have this very different understanding of what is the Word of God. As Episcopalians, the Word of God is Jesus. The Word is the embodied incarnation of Jesus. It is not necessarily scripture, right? But then we’re told that every human being, each other species, let’s, you know, even non-human beings, right? Everything is created by Jesus and through him. So everything that has life holds this sacred life of God within these bodies of ours. And so in some ways we begin with this original concept of everything that is is sacred and holds this blessed life of God within it. That’s why scripture understands the body to be as sacred as a temple or a church. And I mean if you think about it, that’s why we bury people. We treat dead bodies with great dignity because the body we understand to be a sacred temple, this vessel for the sacred Spirit of God. But you’re right, at some point in the narrative, whether it’s a collective narrative or our own individuals, we turn away from God. We become alienated in our relationship from God. We become alienated in our relationship to creation. We become alienated from ourselves, and we become alienated from each other. And so in theological tradition, sin, if you want to use that term, Sin is simply a breaking of the relationships. Right? And so it’s this concept of being alienated from one another, alienated from ourselves, alienated from creation, alienated from God. And so from this alienation, yes death does enter the story, but death is not a punishment, it’s more a consequence. And I think those two things are very different. What you were describing, it’s almost like death is a form of punishment. Whereas in scriptures death is a consequence of this breakening and in some ways this destruction of relationship. So in some ways yes as human beings we are inescapably caught up in broken relationships and alienation. But scripture is very clear that this was never how God intended it. And so a lot of scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, is a description of how this plays out in future families and cultures and generations. And it’s showing us in the Old Testament how devastating the effects of broken relationships actually are for us as human beings but also for God and at some point in human history God decides according to Christian theology to take flesh to literally become a human being to show us in the flesh what it means to live a holy life. And that holy life as we see in the life of Jesus was nothing like the priests had been teaching. That holy life is radical, turned their religion and their ethical laws upside down, it broke down the barriers between all the categories of us and them. And so the result of living a life like this God shows us will invariably end up in death, because the life of God in the flesh is so destabilizing both to the powers at that time but also the powers in our own life that the world’s response is often to eliminate it and so in some ways on the cross what we see is what we as human beings do when we’re confronted with truth, justice and integrity in the flesh. And so yeah in some ways you might say the wages of sin or death, the consequences of alienation and our need to preserve our power does result in death, but none of this is the will of God. It’s the invariable outcome of a world obsessed with power and the self. But I think that the New Testament is clear that from the time of Christ’s death, that death was meant to be once and for all. And I think this is the problem. Because all actually has to mean all. Christ died for all, whether we understand it or not, whether we deserve it or not, whether we accept it or not, right? And in fact it’s an interesting concept this because in South Africa in the Diocese of Natal, which was my birth diocese, In the mid 1800s we actually ended up with two bishops. one was Bishop Colenso and one was Bishop Macrorie. And the church actually split at that time Because Colenso believed that Christ died for all. That you didn’t need to accept it, you didn’t need to understand it, you didn’t even need to have heard about it. This was something that God did for all. So from that moment that Christ dies on the cross, literally all people are saved. Now at the time, Colenso was declared a heretic. Ironically though, his understanding, I think of Christ’s death, has become more common understanding that all are saved through the life and death of Christ. That this is God’s gift to us. And if you think about it, a gift, you don’t do anything to earn it, to deserve it, to make it happen. It’s simply the impetus of God or the impetus of the gift giver, right? So in fact, all already are in Christ, and yes, there is no condemnation. So when God looks and sees our brokenness, it’s more in our understanding, as Julian of Norwich, the mystic, says. That When God sees our brokenness and our wounding, God doesn’t look on us with judgment, but with compassion, right? Because God sees the pain. And if we look at the Gospels, that really was the way of Jesus. Each time God sees the wounding, the human being hurt and responds always with compassion. And it’s that compassion, ironically, that ends up being what heals and saves. I think the other problem as well with a lot of this talk is that salvation, we need to remember, comes from the root word for wholeness. So to be saved is actually to be made whole again. Whole within ourselves, whole in our relationship to other human beings, whole in our relationship to the more than human world and whole with God. So to die is to have that sacred breath that was breathed into us in the very beginning when we were born, leave the sacred body and return to the one from whom the breath originally came. So we say that the spirit returns to the heart of God. And so to die is then simply to return to the one who knit us together in our mother’s wombs, to return to the one who breathed that gift of life into us, and to return to the one who sustained and loved and longed for our wholeness and joy our entire lives. So as Paul then says, what do I have to fear? Because nothing, and nothing must mean nothing, can separate us from the love of God. So Paul, same Paul, right? Is clear that we should not fear death. And he says, mockingly, death, where is your victory? Where is your sting? So death in scripture is simply the gateway, the passage from this life to the next, to what is called resurrected life. And as we were born into this world, so death is our being born into the next. But I have to tell you honestly, as a priest being at the bedside of so many people dying, it strikes me almost every time how much dying is like labor. You know, you watch as a person’s breathing changes, the focus changes, so often they’ll see a loved one come to meet them. You know, it’s hard work dying, just as it’s hard work laboring and birthing a child. And this is something that we all will face because no one who is born through labor into this world escapes the labor of being born into the next. And so I don’t want to minimize the grief around death because really death is about birth. It’s about being born again into that greater wholeness and love of God. And it can be something both painful and beautiful just as our own births were into this world. And so for me the question is how do we begin to see death not as something to fight, which I think our culture spends a lot of time doing, but as something that is so natural. How do we come alongside those who are dying, like we do those in labor, and help them with this transition into the next life? And how do we make space for grief, but also deep peace, knowing that those we love are enveloped in this expensive unending love of God. And for me, those would be some of the real questions that I think death asks of us.

[24:59] MET: So What we have heard today are two very different approaches to what is kind of an integral part of like, we are not getting around this subject, right? At the end of the day, we’re all facing the same thing. And that’s why I thought this would be such a fascinating discussion, because all the world over, people have such different ways of approaching this. And I just wanna leave us with this. Reverend Deborah said something about Julian of Norwich. And if you’re not familiar with Julian of Norwich, honestly, there’s no reason why you should be unless you’re like a medievalist or a theologian. But if I’m recalling, Julian of Norwich told us that all would be well. And I feel like ending with Julian of Norwich is kind of an optimistic way to sign off today. Because if you’re talking about death, there has to be some hope. Otherwise it just becomes overwhelming. So we’re gonna leave you with Julian of Norwich today. All will be well.

[26:20] DDM: And all manner of things shall be well. Thank you, Elizabeth.

[26:28] MET: Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof, find us at our website, PriestAndProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@PriestAndProf.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at PriestAndProf.org/Donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

[26:58] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth talk about the history of the women’s movement and the connections between their faith journey and feminism. They talk about their experiences as women in church, and how that has shaped them.

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Transcript

Transcription provided by automated service

[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. Okay. Action.

[00:39] MET: Okay, so when I was in college I was part of this college youth group at the church that I was going to And we spent some time talking about the spiritual gifts in first Corinthians. And of course, as Southern Baptist, like really specific and kind of literal about it. So, you know, these are the spiritual gifts and you have one of them.

[01:01] DDM: Only one.

[01:01] MET: Yeah. Maybe you have more, but like they were very specific. So, there was a lot of talk about, Oh, which spiritual gift are you imbued with? And everybody kind of danced around the idea that I may have the gift of prophecy. Now I am not here to say whether that is or is not the case or even what that could possibly mean. But I do remember thinking like, if that’s the case, what a terrible waste it was. Because even if somebody like me did have the gift of prophecy, nobody was going to listen to a woman.

[01:42] DDM: Oh, wow. And what age was that?

[01:45] MET: That was when I was like 19 or 20. Because, and it’s not like a woman couldn’t be a prophet. It’s just that the way I grew up, that was just the way it was. Nobody was going to listen to a woman. Women couldn’t be leaders. And then in that same youth group, I remember one of the church leaders talking to me about ways I could help serve God. And he told me, I think you could have a real knack for preaching. And I laughed because as a Southern Baptist, that basically meant nothing because women didn’t lead that way. And I look back and I think if I had grown up in a different tradition, there’s a possibility that my life would have taken a very different path. If there had been opportunities for leadership outside of children’s ministry in my church, I think I might have found a different calling. My parents always assumed I’d grow up to be a missionary or something as it was. But that’s just not where my place was. You know, there was no place for women with my skills in my tradition. You know, missionaries went out into the world and served, but they weren’t preachers. They weren’t scholars. They weren’t the things that I was gifted at. You know, the best we could do for somebody like me was enter some speaking competitions as a teenager and then maybe marry a minister or maybe go out and do kind of like nursing kind of things, which is not what I was good at. So it was kind of like, well, you have these gifts. Congratulations. You’re not good. Not able to use them. Yeah. So like, you know, I wanted to be a servant of God, but there was just no, there was just no place for me there. So I don’t know. I was just very kind of a conflicted position.

[03:48] DDM: A lot of tension within that. I’m sure. I’m sure. It’s interesting. You start this discussion around the topic of spiritual gifts because in some ways that was a little bit like my experience, but in a different way because I came into the church only in my late teens. And honestly, the church was not the place at which I was familiar. I hadn’t grown up in the church. I was much more comfortable sort of in the quote unquote world and much more rooted, I would say, in issues of social justice and medicine, funny enough. And I think for me where it began was a minister actually came up to me once after a service and said to me, I really believe you have the gift of preaching. Well, I almost fell over. But actually, and I didn’t share this with anybody ever before, but I actually had started just getting these bursts of like inspiration and I would write them all down and then put them in my desk drawer in my bedroom, not having any idea what I was ever gonna do with them. So when that priest came and said, I think you have the call to preaching, there was a resonance within me, but doing anything in the church seemed very daunting to me. But luckily enough, that was a particular tradition that actually welcomed women’s gifts. And so I started exploring preaching, I started doing lay preaching, and really pretty quickly in that journey realized that a lot of my deepest passions that I had always lived out in the world really came together in ministry, which was exciting for me. But what there was, I think, was a difference in the sense that it was fine to do ministry as a woman, but to be ordained was still for men. So there was that distinction where, yeah, a woman could do full ministry, but ordination and especially around the sacraments that was still reserved for men. And I remember just absolutely loving theology, just beginning to fall in love with, I think we spoke before about the kingdom of God and that alternative vision. And so I started studying theology as a seminary student, actually not having any idea why I was doing it, because I couldn’t become a priest, right? And like you, sometimes the idea was, well, I guess I could go into mission work, but I actually had no desire for mission work because I think of the colonial sort of imperial baggage that comes with that. And it was only later in my diocese that they actually started studying women. So for me, going to seminary really was a step of faith, not knowing where it was going to end up. But then as a woman, I think I had some pretty harrowing experiences in the seminary. You know, I mean, I remember women preaching and men, male students, literally standing up in the chapel and just walking out because they believed coming from other traditions like you were sharing yourself, that a woman should never be preaching. The sexual harassment in the seminaries and the rape, that was ridiculous because it was such a male environment. And so honestly, really it was a pretty hostile environment to enter into as a young woman. But I remember that call to ministry I think being so strong, but if your conflict was I have these gifts but my tradition doesn’t allow me to use it, I think mine was well I can use my gifts but at what personal cost to myself, my sanity and my body, because this male structure and environment into which one was entering was highly dysfunctional and unhealthy.

[07:30] MET: So I think that speaks to a huge difference in character between us because I was told, oh, there’s not a place for you. And I was like, well, I guess I’m out. And you were told, oh, there’s not a place for you. And you’re like, I’m making a place.

[07:43] DDM: Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it has a huge impact on you because I remember just prior to ordination, realizing how much I had internalized that misogyny because I remember in my ordination retreat the issue that I was still struggling with is if I consecrate will it be authentic or will it just be a joke?

[08:12] MET: Oh my gosh.

[08:13] DDM: And I remember it was only as I was grappling with this, should I go through with it? And I was still at my ordination retreat thinking, am I still gonna actually go through with this? I had this vision of Mary and Mary came to me in that little room that I was like sequestered into for praying for that week. And she came into this room and this is Mary the mother of Jesus by the way. Just in case there was any doubt, the main Mary. And Mary came into the room and I remember her saying to me, who do you think first produced the body and blood of Christ? It was me. And if I can do it, you can do it too. And I remember her just very clearly answering that question. And from that moment onwards, I had no internal doubt, you know? But it just shows you to what extent we grapple with that culture of misogyny when we internalize it ourselves.

[09:08] MET: So I think it’s really interesting to think… So the Mary conversation is so fascinating, And we could absolutely talk about Mary and how she fits into the conversation about women in the church for like hours at a time in and of itself. One of the things that I think is really interesting in terms of women in the church is how the conversation about women in the church is part and parcel with women in public, right? This is not just a conversation about women in like the priesthood, there has been a long conversation about what is a woman’s role in public, right? Like this is not specific to ecclesiastical studies, right? Like we have not known what to do with women in public. So, and I can, okay, I could go on and on and on about the women’s movement and feminism. This is my jam. But what I wanna do is kind of give you an overview of what women have been doing in public for just a few minutes, because I think that gives us a little bit of a background about how this has played out and kind of the interplay between public lives and religious lives and that kind of thing. So I want to kind of make some connections really quickly. So I want to talk about the women’s movement. And let’s see if we can kind of draw some some connections really quickly. The women’s movement and this is as we understand it in America, and then by extension in Europe, I’m going to talk about it in a kind of Ameri-centric way. And some of that is because a lot of the women’s movement has been a little bit Ameri-centric, like it didn’t really spread out into other parts of the world until a little bit later. It’s just been sort of a Western thing in many ways. So, and some of that Is cultural and some of that is political and there’s a lot of reasons for that. So if this seems kind of Ameri-centric it is But the women’s movement is Kind of organized into what’s called waves and I’m gonna tell you what those are. So there’s the first wave which basically deals with women’s suffrage and you can kind of pinpoint the dates on this one right like it pretty much started in what 1848 with Seneca Falls and it deals with the right to vote. There are other things that go on, but basically these women and a few men were interested in the right to vote because it doesn’t get much more basic than that, right? If you’re going to be a citizen, You need to be able to vote And that wave pretty much ended when the 19th amendment was passed right women got the right to vote That was pretty much over. We’ll get back to the first wave in a little bit The second wave is a little bit more complicated the second wav it’s got its precursors in the 1940s, but it really gets going in the 1960s. And it was a very kind of pragmatic political wave. You get people like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem involved, but it focused on like the political and legal parts of equality, equal pay, equal protection, equal rights, that kind of thing. And it was very much a movement to establish and maintain those legal and political things that you can point to as like, this is a thing we can say, this has to be established, right? This has to be like, we want this equality. The thing about the second wave though, is it was kind of limited and who was involved, right? It really focused on middle-class white Americans. Yes, there were other people who were involved, but it tended to be a little bit exclusive in that way.

[13:21] DDM: Was the suffragette movement also a little exclusive?

[13:25] MET: Yeah, for sure.

[13:28] MET: Also. Those 19th century white women were like, that’s, that’s kind of a given, right? The second wave was also exclusive. And you can also point to like the second wave, there was a big victory, right? Roe v. Wade, they say, yeah, that was like, we did that. But you can also say the second wave kind of failed when the ERA didn’t pass. That’s the Equal Rights Amendment. It kind of fizzled out when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass. And what a lot of people don’t know is that to this day women are not guaranteed equal rights legally in the United States and it’s not in the Constitution and that like people have tried to change that seriously up until the last two years People have been trying to change that and it has been defeated over and over and over again and the argument for that is Specifically, oh women don’t need to be guaranteed equal rights because it just says equal rights and that covers everybody But then you get people like conservative hero Justice Antonin Scalia saying things like well since women aren’t guaranteed equal rights we don’t have to give them equal rights so a very clear picture emerges here in terms of how we feel about women legally whatever okay so Equal Rigts Amendment fails Later on we get to the third wave Third wave is really interesting because it tries to kind of address some of the limitations of the second wave. One, it becomes a very international approach. So you start moving into things like thinking about indigenous rights and moving beyond the limitations of European and American understandings of what it means to be equal. There’s a lot of emphasis on the value of domestic work and thinking in terms of women’s labor is What powers economies and we need to value that so it’s not so much like women deserve To work it’s that women deserve to have their work valued. And that’s kind of a, that’s a nuance switch. If there is a motto for the third wave, it is that “Women’s rights are human rights.” That also includes, something called intersectionality, which a lot of people think is some kind of like really woke liberal indoctrination thing. But I think it’s actually just really a good observation. And that is the idea that our identities are a mishmash of a lot of things, right? Like I am a straight white woman. That means I understand the world differently than a black queer woman. And that means I don’t understand the world just as a woman or just as a white person being a white woman means I understand the world differently than a white man or a queer white woman or I mean these are just and our relationships to power are different because of these different parts of our identity.

[16:38] DDM: So would you say that intersectionality is really around understanding that we really function from multiple identities?

[16:44] MET: That’s exactly what It is. That’s exactly what it is. And specifically the way we relate to power is different because of we’re made up of all these different things. And because of that, we also have to consider things like men relate to things differently. Right. The third wave comes along and says, yeah, the thing about gender roles and intersectionality means that like men are screwed in all of this patriarchy too, right?

[17:11] DDM: Absolutely.

[17:11] MET: I mean, the third wave says we’ve got to include men in all of this because men are just as oppressed by things like toxic masculinity and gender roles as women are, which is why that human rights thing becomes important. There’s a fourth wave, which is basically just kind of the mediated part of it. You think about #MeToo, that kind of thing. And some people say we’re in a fifth wave. I honestly don’t know enough about it to talk about it. Anyway, that is a long story. But the reason I go through all of that is because it’s really important to understand what is going on in the world to understand what is happening in the church as well. So there’s your background to think about how women are functioning out there to think about what are we doing to function kind of in this ecclesiastical liturgical space. I don’t know. So you can probably speak more to what the church is doing within that environment.

[18:15] DDM: Right. So it was interesting in South Africa because for traditions that ordained women prior to the Anglican church in South Africa, like the Methodist church actually started ordaining women prior, there was a sense that they ordained women but really didn’t understand the implications of what that actually was going to mean. So for instance, it was a great idea to include women or deign women, but what was that actually going to translate into? So I’ll share a silly little story that might in some ways illustrate that. I remember the first inclusive retreat that we went to male and female clergy together. Of course, the place at which the retreat took place was an all boys school, predominantly urinals, rows and rows of all boys urinals, one or two little stalls sectioned off. But I remember the male clergy and trying to be very welcoming to us, a small little handful of female clergy had done this beautiful pink sign and it said woman and then they put it on one of these doors and I remember as a woman I opened the door and I walked in and literally all I saw was rows of urinals and I thought to myself you know that in some ways for me was a silly little story, but it summed up the struggles. Because there is this attitude of we want you here, we want to be inclusive, but our structures, our ways of doing things are literally all geared towards men. So maybe in some ways ordination was the first step like your first wave for voting but then that second wave was really about the church starting to grapple with okay what is ordination actually gonna mean? Maternity leave and policies right? We’d never had to face those issues before. Woman menstruating in the sanctuary. That was huge, right? Because we come from a tradition where, especially in the West, theologically women’s bodies have been unclean, even though the idea of a blood sacrifice of a man is what saves us, right? I mean, think of the irony there. Woman’s bodies and blood is unclean, but it’s a male blood that is actually what saves us. I remember the first time I saw a woman priest with her baby in the sanctuary and she unbuttoned her cassock and started breastfeeding, right? That was a first, a first visual, visceral, bodily image in South Africa, beautiful images, but ones that you don’t forget. You’re not going back after those images. But the church still, I think, has a lot of work to do on this issue. I think there is still so much of dismantling of patriarchy that is needed. I mean, we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot of issues. But I think like in that secular wave, second wave, that women really had to grapple then with their own diversity. So as we began to name where the structures were hurting, limiting, causing damage, we started to realize that amongst ourselves, there were different perspectives. And so that diversity in race and culture, in economics, who was going to speak for us women, right? If it was simply educated white privileged women speaking, well then we weren’t really addressing women’s issues. And so of course, womanist theology develops and some aspects of the women’s liberation theology I think was very helpful in naming the problems. So it wasn’t just good enough in some ways to try to dismantle patriarchal power and methodology, but we really also had to focus on dismantling the specific racism experienced by women of color, the economic disparities for women of color, the specific oppression and violation of their bodies and how that was manifesting in society. And if we couldn’t engage these issues, we really were not transforming the system for women, but just for white women. And I think to be honest on this issue, we are far further back. I think the church has not yet paid nearly enough attention to women of color or indigenous women’s voices and I think the church has really not been open to allowing those perspectives to change the structure and the way we do church. Honestly, I mean, in the Episcopal Church right now, I take encouragement that ironically, we’ve had this whole new wave of women bishops, but also a whole new wave of black and indigenous women being made bishops. And, you know, I really pray that in some ways they will be able to help facilitate maybe a next wave of change in the church that’s desperately needed. But of course, again, there’s always the question of why place that burden of transformation on their shoulders and not on ours as a collective body. And I think for me the real question is does the church really want to be transformed and to deal with the consequences of wanting to be transformed? And I’m not always sure that the answer is yes.

[23:21] MET: Wow, okay. So much there and I love it all. Okay, so what I’m gonna do Is I’m gonna take us back in time for just a minute and I’m gonna tell you why You were specifically talking about how women and specifically women of color Are dealing with issues that like we’re just this is a brave new world We’re in right now like women women of color in the church, etc. So I am going to take us back to that first wave, the 19th century. And I’ll tell you why. These were women who were not good on race. Right? Like, I mean, they, for most of the women in the 19th century, it was a different thing to support women than it was to support women of color. And that’s why, you know, someday we’ll talk about Sojourner truth and some of the other women of color who were, you know, fighting for abolition, like supporting abolition. I shouldn’t say fighting abolition, right? Supporting abolition, that kind of thing. But I want to look at two women who made completely different arguments for women’s rights, even though they left. It’s interesting because it’s like they’re making arguments for equality, even though they kind of leave out certain women. And it’s interesting because it’s like, well, they’re making arguments for equality, even though it’s not for women of color, but it’s also interesting to see these arguments for equality. These are from the 19th century. How have they carried through? How have we progressed? So I’m going to take us back to the beginning and see what has changed. Does that make sense?

[25:02] DDM: Yeah, sounds great.

[25:03] MET: Yeah. Okay. So the first person I want to talk about is Susan B. Anthony. Okay, we are in Rochester, New York area. And if you are from this area, you know all about Susan B. Anthony because Susan B. Anthony is from here. And like she’s everywhere, right? Like if you can’t get away from Susan B Anthony, if you’re from this area, I have my students read this speech by Susan B Anthony called, “Is It a Crime for a US Citizen to Vote?” And it’s so funny because I assigned it to my students and they come the next day and they’re just completely glassy eyed and they’re looking at me like what did you do? Because it is the most boring speech in the history of speeches. It’s, It’s long, it’s dull. And the first thing I do is ask my students, okay, why on earth did I have you read this? Because it’s awful. And they look at me like, what? I’m like, no, I recognize this is a very long, it is very boring, like, why on earth would I have you read this? What could you possibly get out of something this long and dull and hard to read? And they’re shocked because like how many professors come in and admit to you, I just had you read something that was terrible. And I don’t even like reading it like what what are we doing here? The speech is 100% like logical syllogistic it’s based on the most foundational form of logic it’s a syllogism: All citizens deserve the right to vote. I am a US citizen. Therefore I deserve to vote. And the whole thing is just pages and pages of that kind of foundational logic punctuated by some appeals to ethos, right? Some name dropping and that’s all it is just logic logic logic and we talk about why on earth I mean it’s just dull right like you can’t write pages and pages of pure logic without putting your audience to sleep and we talk about why she would do that And what we get to is the stereotype about women then just as now is that women are overly emotional.

[27:12] MET: And Susan B. Anthony knows that. So she gets up in front of wwell this is the speech is being made like in community centers and You know town squares and she gets up in front of a group of men and does the exact opposite of what is expected She is not emotional She is not overworked. She does the exact opposite of what they say women are supposed to do and is 100% rational, logical, no emotion. The other thing you have to know about this is Susan B. Anthony has been arrested for voting. Women are not allowed to testify in court and women are not allowed to be on juries. So Susan B. Anthony is about to be tried and she can’t defend herself and there’s no women on the jury. So Susan B. Anthony is going around from town to town, giving us 100% logical speech, defying all of the stereotypes about women. She’s seeding the jury pool. So she’s playing chess while everybody else is playing checkers is what it comes down to. And when you put it in that context, my students are like, oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant. And I’m like, I know it’s brilliant. It’s just boring. Right? Like I admit it’s boring. But like when you think about what she’s doing, like this is, this is smart stuff. And then they like they get really into it. They’re like, Oh my gosh, let’s look at it. Let’s read it. I’m like, yeah, I know. Like women can be smart too. But it’s just it’s a very simple. We have given citizens the right to vote. I am a citizen. I deserve the right to vote. It is not hard, right? Compare that to this other person I would like to talk about. And that’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Elizabeth Cady Stanton does the opposite kind of reasoning. It is not a logical argument. It is a very kind of, I don’t know, spiritually oriented argument, but still kind of Western in its thinking. She wrote something called “The Solitude of the Self.” And basically she says, when it comes down to it, we’re all kind of alone in this life. Not like alone and depressed, but in the sense that nobody can carry your burdens for you. And that is especially true for women, right? Like you birth your children, You do your laundry, you do all of these things that we are required to do and nobody can do it for you, right? Like you carry your worries for your children, you do all of these things. And ultimately, you are the only person who can do that. You go through this life on your own. Nobody can understand this world. It’s kind of like that intersectionality thing, right? Like you understand this world as you understand it, and nobody can do that for you. So ultimately we live in solitude. But that is the thing that ultimately unites us because we all live that way together. Right? Like, And that is ultimately her argument for equality. We ultimately experience the world that way together, right? You understand the world your way. I understand the world my way. And because we are individuals and we experience the world that way, we deserve to be treated as individuals that way. And it’s this very like because we experience the solitude of the world, we deserve to be treated the same way through that world. And it is like this really kind of nuanced, wild, like I’ve never heard anything like that. Yeah. Like 19th century. You don’t expect that. And it’s coming from a woman and people are like, what is this? It’s very strange. And this is the arguments that get carried through to the 20th century and they progress. Anyway, this is how we start the arguments about equality and think about how they get carried through to like intersectionality and the third wave. It’s just wild. Right?

[31:16] DDM: Right. Anyway, so interesting. It’s interesting. Cady Stanton’s perspective, you know, because I think when you were speaking, I was finding myself struggling a little bit with that kind of solitary sense of self-concept, because I think in South Africa and in Africa there is that alternative always worldview of kind of Ubuntu Which is “I am simply because we are” without without you without us There is no ever even capacity for that solitary sense of self. But again, that concept of solitary sense of self, how can my being have any meaning except in relationship with others? Because it’s the community that gives us our sense of humanity and our sense of identity. I love in African philosophy and particularly within Ubuntu, there’s this concept that humanity is what we owe to each other, which I think is such a profound concept, you know, and maybe in some ways the community and the community of the church owe women their full humanity, and men in the society will never be fully human until women are fully human, you know, because I think stripping each other of equality, full inclusion, equal access to wealth, power, it really just diminishes in some ways our collective humanness. But I think the other side is that from the church’s perspective, I think part of the real problem in the church is that often we’re working from sacred scriptures written thousands of years ago, you know, where women were seen and viewed very differently, You know, I mean, we can’t even correlate 3,000 years later, sort of, you know, the role of women, you know. There was a large aspect in which, in the scriptures, women were there for procreation. They were there to build that ancestral patriarchal family line. And so that really is in some ways the dominant narrative around women. But then you also find these subversive elements woven through scripture. You know, God who, God’s self is portrayed in feminine language, right? The El Shaddai, the many-breasted God, the Shekinah, the feminine face of God. You know, the Holy Spirit is Ruach, or the wind of God always with a she pronoun. You know Deborah the judge, Mary the birther of God. You know there’s these glimpses and narratives of women and womaness breaking through almost that patriarchal concrete but they are definitely not the dominant. And I think if we can begin to try to understand scripture as really part of that progressive revealing of God’s self and who God is in relationship to us in creation. I think the danger is that we tend to very often in the church stop theological thought and development in the first century AD, right? And that’s why some church communities literally function and teach as though they still living in the first century AD.

[34:32] MET: And that’s so interesting because, you know, it’s like I was just saying some people want to stop those reasons for women’s rights in the 19th century, right? Like we have to move forward.

[34:42] DDM: Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s a continual development. And I think we’ve also got to understand that just because some books of the Scripture were canonized into what we have today as the Bible, that does not mean that God is still not speaking, that God is still not revealing God’s self, that God is still not actively leading us deeper and deeper into a transformation of who we are both as individuals and communities, even today in the 21st century. And so our understanding of God needs to be growing, shifting, just as momentously as it did for those early disciples who in some ways literally turned their whole world and their understanding of Judaism completely upside down And I think we do see that many church communities are trying to do this You know Women’s ordination may have been practiced in the early church, but I think the understanding was different from what ordination is today. And I think ordaining women has been a big shift in theological consciousness and understanding and practice. It’s ironical that we’re doing this episode today because just this weekend we actually consecrated in Rochester our first woman bishop in this diocese. And I mean, that is huge. As I sat there in that service, I thought, I’ve never had a bishop who looks like me. And I went home, this you’ll find interesting Elizabeth, I went home that Saturday night and I dreamt of our new bishop, Kara. And I dreamt we’ve just gone out and we were talking about dishes and we were talking about kids and we were talking about, she literally felt like a friend in my dream. And I woke up and I thought, I’ve never had a Bishop dream like this in my entire life. Right. It’s, it’s that, Oh my God, there’s so much that we share simply by being woman, you know? These are big changes in the church. But I think the real question is, is if we don’t change the structure, if we really don’t change the way we do ministry, the way we think and act and relate in the church, then we have to ask the question, are women simply being co-opted, even if they’re clergy or bishops, into a patriarchal system? And then we actually just become a part of the problem.

[37:02] MET: So here’s what I think is incredibly cool about this conversation. We’re talking about women in the public, we’re talking about women in church arguments for why women should or should not be in these spaces. And we’ve talked about wildly different ideas, you know, Ubuntu and “Solitude of the self,” like different ideas from different cultures, different times in history, all of this stuff. But substantially, it all comes down to the same thing. And that is God recognized this humanity of women too. Right? That is what we’re getting at. And that, you know, it’s because of their citizenship, because of the burdens they carry on their own, the importance of community. There are a number of reasons we have given here, but all of the people and cultures that we’re talking about here have latched on to one of the myriad reasons why the Holy Spirit says, “Hold up, you do not get to diminish part of my creation.” That is what it comes down to. Each of these arguments or concepts in some way is somebody’s attempt to show that women literally half of the population deserve to have their humanity recognized. And this is a really fascinating conversation because for people like us, this is a spiritual thing, right? There is a spark of the divine in all of us and that has to be acknowledged It’s kind of like how we talked about with the creation stuff the other day. And thinking about Ubuntu, it is that we share our lives with each other, right? So we have to love and respect and acknowledge each other to keep ourselves whole. The first way there’s those first savers talked about (Susan B.) Anthony and (Elizabeth) Cady Stanton, they made very secular arguments. We deserve to be treated as whole people because we’re citizens or because we share the same personal and legal burdens as men, right? Like these are all arguments we’ve heard. And I think it’s fascinating and telling that regardless of where or when you’re coming from, people come to the same point, and that is that women are deserving. So projects like what we’re doing right now are really fruitful because you can see that it is not the concept of equality that is wild at all because people are coming to the same conclusions. It is the opposition to that that makes no sense.

[39:27] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the biggest fear maybe as a woman is that the visual optics will change so we’ll start to have women coming in as lawyers, women coming in as priests or bishops, women as educators, but if the culture of patriarchy remains intact what than have we actually achieved.

[40:00] MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest & the Prof. Find us at our website: priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org, make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

[40:23] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com.

In this episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth talk about the miracle of creation. They discuss their very different attitudes toward time outdoors and how our conversations about nature are a problem not just for politics and science but for the faithful as well.

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Transcript

[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action.

[00:37] MET: We are so happy you were joining us today. We are going to be talking about something that I know is particularly near and dear to Reverend Deborah’s heart. I am excited because it’s fun for me. We’re talking about creation. This is, it’s fun because Reverend Deborah and I are very different people in a lot of ways. We’ve talked about this. I am what you would call an indoors person. I like, you know, when I go on vacation, I want to go to a museum and, you know, sample the ethnic food. I’m like, When I was relaxing, I stay inside and have a glass of wine and put my feet up and watch TV. Whereas Reverend Deborah, what do you do when you have spare time?

[01:25] DDM: Oh my gosh, I wanna get into the barn. I wanna hang with my goats and my sheep. I love to go hiking and camping. If I had my way, I’d never live in a house and I’d live in a tent. Unfortunately, we live in Western New York and there’s way too much snow for that. But I love to sleep on the ground. I love to swim in ponds. I might even say that I sometimes even like the feeling of mud between my toes.

[01:51] MET: Right on. So when she said, let’s talk about creation, I was like, this is going to be fantastic. But the reason it’s going to be fantastic is because we have such wildly different attitudes about the great outdoors. I think it’s going to be fun because we actually come to pretty similar conclusions about some of this stuff. So I thought it would be interesting to talk about kind of our approaches to thinking about creation and how we think about this thing, this planet that we are floating around on. Anyway, so there’s our intro, if you will. Reverend Deborah, please tell us about our relationship to the world.

[02:33] DDM: Well, you know, let me start by sharing a story. And I wasn’t planning on this, but when you were speaking about it, it kind of made me think about it. When I was about 18 years old, I remember going on a retreat. It was 1 of your traditional, you know, clergy going on retreat. It was a silent retreat. And the 1 day I was, it was a hot South African summer afternoon and I didn’t have a towel. You know when you normally lie on the ground, you put a towel down, always something between us and the

[03:00] DDM: earth, right? Have you noticed that? And I didn’t have a towel with me and I thought oh I’m too lazy to go back and to the room to get a towel and so I simply laid down with my chest facing the ground you know how you do and you put your head on the ground mostly you’re lying on a bed and I could hear you know when you’re lying in the sun on the earth and you start to hear your own heartbeat, and I could hear my heartbeat. And at some point I started to hear a second heartbeat. It wasn’t my own. I could hear my own heartbeat. I started to hear another. And I thought, where is this beat coming from? And I realized that it was the earth. And I thought, does the earth have a heartbeat? And as I lay there and just listened to the difference between my own heartbeat rhythm and hers, right? I heard this voice and it said why do you hurt me? Why are you hurting me? Honestly, if I tell you from that moment onwards, my life changed. Because I suddenly, for the first time, realized creation isn’t just a thing. It’s not just material matter. That there actually is an essence of being that is distinct and individual, that feels pain, and that in some ways can we relate maybe if we if we quieten ourselves down enough to hear. So that’s just a little experiential story to kind of share, you know, really what was a fundamental shift for me in my own relationship to creation. But in terms of the church in September, what we call the season of creation. Now that liturgically was not always there historically, right? Let me just say upfront, this is a new introduction to the liturgy in a response, the church’s response to I think the incredibly severe catastrophe of the environmental crisis that we’re actually in and walking further and deeper into. So the season of creation really, I think has been instituted by the church in order to try to educate us around the importance of creation and our relationship with creation. But for myself, whenever I hear the church speak about the season of creation or just creation in general, There is a deep ambiguity for me in this, right? And so I may be a priest, but I’m not always an apologetic for the church, okay? Just upfront. So if you go back in our scriptures to the original Hebraic understanding, right? So if you look in your early chapters of Genesis there is this understanding that God creates everything number 1 right everything is sacred it’s this world of beauty and diversity and whose relationships are primarily named by Shalom, by peace, right? And so this understanding of all matter being sacred is really important in those beginning chapters of Genesis. There’s not this distinction between the spirit and matter. And so in the Hebraic original understanding it’s almost like spirit is so woven through matter almost at a cellular level that only God can birth spirit into matter and only God can pull spirit out. So you think about a child being born, right? God breathes spirit into that child and at death, the breath returns to God, right? But we can’t separate that deep intertwining and interwovenness of spirit and matter. That’s an important point because that’s going to shift hugely by the time we shift to the New Testament. But in the Old Testament still there’s this understanding that everything has a name. Everything is named and naming is so important because when I know your name, I know something about you, right? To be nameless, I think is 1 of the most terrible things, right? To never be named. And so for everything to be named means that it is there to be known, it is there to be related to. The irony is in the early books of and the early parts of Genesis animals are not even killed for food, right? Only fruit and seed bearing plants are given for human consumption, not even other animals at this stage are killing other animals. And so it really is this image of complete integration, wholeness and that Hebrew concept of shalom, peace. But as Christianity emerges out of those indigenous roots, we start to see a very different way of relating to creation. So in the New Testament ironically it’s an interweaving between the Hebraic understanding but now the Greco-Roman understanding starts to come in, right? And that worldview was far more dualistic, meaning that things were always separated, right? So spirit was seen as sacred, matter was seen as defiling or polluting, right? And I mean, they went on to say, you know, male is like the divine, female is unclean and polluting, right? And they would divide everything. The mind was superior and the emotions in the heart, certainly inferior, right?

[08:40] MET: That gets picked up in like enlightenment thinking later. Cartesian dualism.

[08:44] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. And that really comes out of that whole Greco-Roman tradition. So you start to see that worldview now being imprinted onto our relationship, not just to creation, but even in some ways to human bodies, particularly female human bodies, bodies that are in some ways perhaps seen as quote unquote deformed, all right, or the poor, right? So you see that dualistic viewpoint really being implanted on. But by this stage, if we’re to be honest, by this stage, even the indigenous worldview of the Hebraic people had also shifted and devolved into the clean and the unclean, polluting and non-polluting concepts around matter. Concepts around matter. And then of course if you take Christianity further by the time it becomes the faith of the empire in Constantine’s time, right, we have such a hierarchical, I would almost say militaristic view of Christianity developing that that original wholeness and integration by this stage is really literally shattered. And so it’s very interesting because you see these contrary views even within the Christian tradition. So we have these aspects of the Christian tradition that are phenomenal in terms of creation. But later on, we see the Christian tradition really becoming a part of the problem of the destruction of creation, and so emphasizing the spiritual that we start to have very little regard for the material and the physical.

[10:29] MET: So I’m going to use that to kind of transition into a conversation that’s going on in my field, not specifically about creation, but also kind of about creation. Right? So you’re talking about the church kind of being a problem. As you know, I’m in the field of communication, specifically on rhetoric. The field of science communication is a huge thing right now. It’s like a burgeoning field. And it’s specifically because of these problems that you are talking about, right? Like my discipline recognizes that these issues of what we are talking about creation, But these issues of what do we do about climate? What do we do about all these things that we’re talking about are specifically things that we need to be concerned about. So we’re asking about how do we communicate about science and how does science communicate to us, which if you’re a person of faith is a question about creation as well. So I’m going to kind of tell you about what’s going on, where I’m coming from and see if we can make a few connections if you don’t mind.

[11:48] DDM: Nice. Yeah.

[11:52] MET: So I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal experience. I actually taught, Okay, let me go back a little bit. I actually taught a class in scientific rhetoric a couple of semesters ago. And I think that was a little bit surprising to my students because you don’t think of science is particularly rhetorical, right? Like science is about facts, right? There are facts and they’re not facts. But when I present this idea to my students is science rhetorical, they’re like, no, science is not rhetorical. And I’m like, well, let’s choose an example. And when I choose this example, Reverend Deborah, I’m going to make some wild generalizations, but then I’m going to acknowledge the problems with those generalizations. But I said, okay, let’s take vaccines. Okay. Right. Right. Vaccines. Many people would say that vaccines are a good thing. Many people would even argue they are a universal good thing. Like vaccines save lives. Like we can point to the fact that vaccines save lives. Now, we have to acknowledge there are some cultural things there, right?

[13:16] DDM: I was going to say Africa has a very difficult relationship with vaccines.

[13:19] MET: I am sure Reverend Deborah could point to the fact that vaccines have been used to cover up a lot of ills in various parts of the world. Like vaccines have been weaponized in certain places. Western medicine has been weaponized in various parts of the world, but we can point to the fact that vaccines have been like saving a lot of lives for like we eradicated polio, right? Like smallpox is not a thing in many parts of the world. And I feel assured in saying that a lot of the people who are doing this anti-vaccine rhetoric are not thinking about what happened in South Africa and Palestine, right? Like they’re talking about different conversations. Yeah, They’re talking about, oh, it causes autism and oh, COVID vaccines didn’t save any. That’s nonsense. Like none of that is true. So the question then is why are we debating vaccines? Like Why is America having a vaccine debate? Right? Like the people who are anti-vaccine are not concerned about Tuskegee. Right? That is not what they are arguing about. We could have a discussion about Tuskegee. It would be a important and good discussion, but that is not what we are talking about. So what is happening? Science is rhetorical, right? Like that is what I am saying. We don’t argue about facts anymore. The fact is that vaccines save lives. That is not what we are talking about in public anymore. We are arguing about who has the best argument. And that is an important part of thinking about creation at this point. The reason I bring that up is because if you’re gonna talk about climate, which is essential to creation, we have to think about this as a rhetorical maneuver. And it is wild to me because I think about like when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, this wasn’t an argument, right? Like the world was getting hotter. There was a hole in the ozone layer.

[15:28] DDM: I remember that.

[15:29] MET: We just did something about it. Like as a planet, we just decided, well, the world’s getting hotter. We should do something about it. CFC is we’re going to fix it. And we did it. And like, the ozone got fixed and like, we’re like, okay, problem solved. It wasn’t until much later that there was this rabid vitriolic anti-science narrative. And that is 100% a capitalist issue. We can talk about that all you want to later, if that’s your jam, but this anti-science narrative really picked up. I don’t even know if I could put a date on it, but it is a rhetorical problem as much as anything else, right? And 1 of the things we talked about in my class is that the both sides-ism of it is hugely problematic, right? Like there is consensus on why this is a problem. There is not a question in the scientific community. Climate change is a problem and humans caused it. That’s the end of the story. But it has been such a misguided narrative in the public. If 99 scientists agree this is the problem, this is why it happened, and 1 scientist disagrees, And you have 1 scientist who says it is a problem and we caused it. And then the 1 scientist who disagrees, and you put them in conversation, you are not representing the debate. That is, That is a misrepresentation of what is going on. That is not democratic or egalitarian or whatever it is you’re trying to do. And in America, we are so obsessed with, oh, we have to have a democratic debate. That is not a democratic debate. That is a misrepresentation of the issue. And we have like, there are people of ill will who have used this, oh, we have to be democratic to misrepresent the debate. And the reason I bring this up is because this idea that science is rhetorical and the both sides of it, we have made the discussion about creation sinful. Science is rhetorical. And we are making the discussion sinful in my mind because we are lying about it.

[17:57] DDM: Right, right.

[17:58] MET: And that’s not what I taught in my classes, obviously, because I don’t preach the word when I’m teaching.

[18:05] DDM: Elizabeth, it’s so interesting you use the word sinful, because when you said that, I was trying to unpack in what way you were meaning that, because the root of sin is to alienate us from 1 another. And so when you’re representing the climate catastrophe that we’re in and facing, in a sinful way, it’s a way that actually does alienate us from 1 another because we no longer can even agree on the facts, but it also alienates us from the reality of the context that we’re actually having to face. 100%. Yeah, it’s very, it was an interesting choice of words, you know, because I always like to unpack theological language, you know?

[18:43] MET: Right, and like, this is, once again, this is not how I teach this concept in my classes, but in my mind, the climate debate is sinful because we are misrepresenting what we know about it. It is. It is a lie. And I have, it is 1 thing to say, Oh, I disagree with this argument. It is quite another to say, I am going to lie to you about what is being said. For sure.

[19:18] DDM: I mean, That is an unethical position to take.

[19:23] DDM: Absolutely.

[19:25] MET: And so I think the creation argument that’s out there is, As it’s purported right now, it is a state of sin. If I can be so judgmental, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s just my, whatever. The other thing, I don’t know, did you want to jump in?

[19:47] DDM: No, no, I was fascinated just by that.

[19:49] MET: The other thing that I would say is there are ways that creation talks to us, right? Like we talk about creation that way And there are ways creation talks to us. I’m gonna talk about, there’s this article in my field and it’s so funny, because I absolutely hate it. But I keep coming back to it. By this guy named George Kennedy and it’s called “A Hoot in the Dark.” And in my mind, it’s just nonsensical. But whatever, I’m going to talk about it.

[20:24] DDM: Okay.

[20:25] MET: And it’s, he claims that rhetoric predates speech. And the way he makes this argument is he says animals have been making claims and arguments way before we were talking and he uses owls as his examples, right? A hoot in the dark. So he’s like owls and other animals, like they are out there in the wild and they’re marking their territory and they’re saying things like, don’t come my way and I’m looking for a mate. And like, and he’s talking about, owls are out there in the twilight in the middle of the night and they’re telling you things. He says, so animals make arguments, they make claims, like they stake out their territory. They are out there making noise, telling you things. So he says that this is rhetoric. Animals are involved in rhetoric. I think that is a nonsensical definition of rhetoric. But he then goes on to talk about, if that is the case, then rhetoric is this force that enlivens all of us. So rhetoric is not this argument. It is not identification the way this guy Burke talks about it. It’s not this Aristotelian like make your claim, provide your proof, blah, blah, blah, which you learned in fourth grade, you know, persuasive writing, whatever. Rhetoric is an animating force at the heart of all of us that leads us to announce I am here. I have wants. You know, I am. Right. Okay. That’s interesting. But in my mind, that’s not rhetoric. That is like creation. You know, that’s the divine spark at the heart of all of us. That’s for theologians, not people in my field, which is why I keep coming back to this Kennedy article because I’m fascinated by the idea that there is something we all share that is at the heart of us that is spark of us. But I don’t think that’s rhetoric. I think that’s something much more divine. I don’t know, so that’s my…

[22:48] DDM: But you know, it’s interesting you say that Elizabeth, because you know, that divine spark in all of us, how interwoven that divine spark in us has to do with communicating. Like if you look at it, I mean, the first thing God does when God creates is begin to communicate. And the first thing we do is we start to communicate. I mean, think about a child and a parent. The first thing we do is we start to communicate. I have no idea on the definition of rhetoric. I have no idea. So whether what is rhetoric and what isn’t, I have no idea.

[23:20] MET: Like when I tell people what I do, that is a 100% conversation killer.

[23:25] DDM: But I love that concept of, of that, of, of that big, that’s something that is alive within us and within creation. You know, I mean, for me, spirituality is always essentially about being known and knowing another, right? I mean, theology is not essentially about concepts, laws, right? You know, concept essentially is about is about relationship and that expanding relationship.

[23:56] MET: That takes us right back to that first episode where we talked a lot about relationship versus rules. I think that’s going to be thematic for us.

[24:04] DDM: Absolutely. And so it’s an expanding concept of knowing God, knowing myself, knowing other human beings and knowing all of creation, but in this deeply relational way, right? And what does it mean to even be known by creation? You know, like, I mean, it’s something I think we seldom think about, like, how does creation know me?

[24:31] MET: That is a great question. You know,

[24:33] DDM: You know, how does the earth know me? Like, does the earth know my footprint and my steps on her body? Does the earth know the sound of my laugh? You know, What impact does my physicality in this world have on the earth and how does she feel about it? And I’m sorry, I’m just using the pronoun she. I guess that’s just my own experience. That’s my own experience with God, you know. I think what’s also so interesting is in theology, there is this concept of, it’s not like we have creation and it simply is and how do we save it but there really is this concept of in latin it’s called creatio continua right but this understanding that God didn’t just historically create, but that God is consistently creating new life every single moment of every day. And I love this concept, right? That in a way that divine spark is manifesting every single time the skin cell on my body regenerates or the hair cell on my body regenerates. There is creation happening within me at this very moment and there is creation happening within the soil at this very moment and there is creation, you know, new species are being born and so I love this idea of creation not just being a thing, so we talk about creation like as a thing that we, how do we deal with or relate, but creation as this living dynamic, constantly evolving being that has life, you know? And so constantly literally is alive at the heart of everything. So I just think that’s incredibly beautiful. I think the other thing that I love about a theological perspective on creation is really that that naming That everything is given a name and you know, I think about for myself the difference between I’ll tell you a sad story tiny little 1 right now I’ve just got a new flock of sheep and I named my animals I and I know a lot of people would laugh and in farming right I name every 1 of my animals because it’s a way of saying, I’m gonna get to know you and your little personality and what you like and what you don’t and how you relate. I’m gonna give you that dignity of really relating to you, not just as a member of a whole flock of sheep, but you as little Rosie, for instance, right? But I have a little sheep right now that is going to become lamb. And it’s very interesting that I haven’t named that sheep. He’s simply, sorry to Chanel, but he’s, he’s sheep number 5, right? He’s sheep number 5. Right. And there’s a way in which I’m reluctant to name him because I’m scared to build a relationship with him knowing that that’s going to be the end of that relationship.

[27:33] MET: Isn’t that what they tell all the farm kids, right? Don’t name the ones you’re gonna…

[27:37] DDM: And what does that say? Is that I’m not able to enter into a relationship with you. So naming is essentially about relationship. And, you know, I think like, I mean, we think about the Genesis, the naming of everything, but I think to myself, like, how do we relate to trees around us if we don’t know their names? Because a tree is not just a tree. There is an oak and there is a maple and there is a locust and they’re very different and they have their own energies and their own medicinal qualities and their own relating to their own tree kin folk, right? And so, you know, I feel like there is a duty for us as human beings to actually start learning the names of those that we share this planet with. What are the names of these birds? What are the names of these trees? What are the names of these flowers and these herbs? And start, because we can’t start to build a relationship with them if we don’t know their names. And so I think there’s something very profound about making the time and the effort and the energy to learn the names of those that surround us. And then the other thing that I love also in theology is this concept of God so often coming in non-human form. You know, we live in this world where we’ve literally made God in our image, right? I mean, 100%, we’ve made God in our image. And yet, if you go back and you look at the scriptures, you know, God comes as a burning bush. God comes as light. God comes as a pillar of cloud or as fire by night. God is the dove or the lamb, you know, and, and I think we’ve, we’ve in many ways in the Christian tradition forgotten that God chooses equally to reveal God’s self in non-human form as God does in human form.

[29:29] MET: Well that relates directly to what I was talking about with that ridiculous article, right? Like, right. If there is something within us, then God can communicate, like creation can communicate to us in any number of ways. And I say this as somebody who is not out there in creation that frequently, but I am well aware that creation can speak to me as well. I mean, and if I can be receptive to a message from creation, anybody can. And like I say this jokingly, yes, I am not an outdoorsy person, but rest assured, I am well aware it is beautiful out there and we should be doing everything we can to conserve it because this is the existential crisis of our time. I have a child and if we don’t do what we can to preserve this miracle of creation, the world is not going to be habitable for my child. Like, just because I am not an outdoorsy person doesn’t mean I recognize this is the crisis of our time. Right? Like I can, I can talk all I want to about race relations? We can, you know, we’ve talked about poverty, we’ve talked about so many things, but This is it. This is the thing that’s going to face us all in the next 50 years and is going to be the thing that decides whether our planet is livable.

[30:54] DDM: Right. And I think part of for me, the essence of the problem is that we’ve lost the capacity to see creation as sacred. So we no longer see our forests as sacred, they’re commodities. We no longer see our rivers as sacred, they’re commodities. We no longer see the the animals that we share this planet with as sacred beings in their own right, they’re commodities. And so I think for me at the heart is we’ve lost the sacred worldview, to see ourselves and everything around us as sacred. And so what would it mean for us to really begin to reclaim that sacred worldview that says everything holds the life of God. Everything has a life and has a right to be and to flourish in this world just as we do as human beings.

[31:41] MET: And I think that’s why for me it was such a profound realization when I was thinking about like the way we talk about creation, these conversations are not just a rhetorical contrivance, right? Like when we talk about creation and we misrepresent the debate, it’s a sin. We were talking earlier, I have a bad relationship with that word because of the way I was raised, but sometimes you just have to call it out, right? Like, this is a misrepresentation of God’s will.

[32:16] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the other side as well is to really recognize, you know, like for instance, there’s this beautiful book called, and I’m going to forget the name of the title now, The Life of Trees, I think it is. And I mean, it’s all the scientific research on trees that actually communicate. Oh, right. Trees feel emotion. Trees have compassion, you know? And it was really fleshing out almost the inner life of trees, right? And so what does it mean for us as human beings to actually begin to say, hang on, I’ve actually got to learn to begin to see how do these other species communicate? How do these other species forge a life for themselves that is about wholeness and integration, right? And yeah, I think we need to be called much more back into relationship with creation.

[33:30] MET: Thank you for listening to the Priest & the Prof. Find us at our website, priestandprof.org. If you have an questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

[34:00/span> DDM: Music by Audionautix.com