Essays on Mariam, the Magdalen and the Mother

Hat tip to Deirdre Good who has edited this book of essays, and whose blog "on not being a sausage" is one of my favourites.
Find out more about the book here.

Good's edited book is both a challenge and a delight. The challenge is watching ten competent scholars working carefully with a multitude of languages and religious traditions to bring a fresh assessment of the woman named Mary Magdalen. The complexity of the endeavor is captured in the book's stated intention, Rather than revisiting her singularity, Mariam, the Magdalen and the
Mother argues that the Miriamic roots of her composite identity and prophetic vision are prominent in all religious traditions of the first five centuries of the common era. The delight of the book is discovering the relationship of the names Miriam, Mary, and Maria, and the relationship of the women bearing these names. The scope of the book widens with essays dealing with Mary in Gnostic gospels, Islam, and Manichaeism. This work has copious footnotes, an impressive array of works cited, and a useful index. It would be a difficult task for the general reader, but advancing students, scholars, and professionals will find it
revealing and rewarding.

What are you reading at the moment?

Women will be forever strangers unless their words and their voices revise the social and symbolic rules of language, transforming the law or ordered hierarchy in language, in subjectivity and in politics into a grace of rich plenitude for human flourishing.

Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak, feminism, language, God.

Readers of my blog will know that I am reading Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine at the moment. The above quote is one of two she uses to begin her chapter on trustworthy community. The first quote come from Julian of Norwich. The thing I am beginning to really appreciate abotu Jantzen's writing is how she weaves together insights from mysticism with radical theology. Her push in this book and her subsequent writing is to encourage a philosophy of religion that concentrates much more on our natality than on our mortality.
What I am finding particularly moving reading this is that a woman who is now dead is calling me to live as a natal and not as a mortal. It's difficult for me to put in words how inspiring, comforting and encouraging I find this. A real call to live life in a different way from beyond the grave.
Reading what Grace has written has made me realise how powerful a symbol each one of we women in ministries is. Remember everytime you do what it is you are called to do you are in some way giving birth to a new future.
Anyway what are all of you reading - as you can perhaps tell I have almost run out of crime fiction which is why I've had to turn to philosophy of religion instead!
Jane

Reading as a way through ministry ...

I apologise for reposting this from my own blog but Sarah suggested it might be a good idea. Also it strikes me that we all make sense of our ministry in very different way, some by walking or jogging, others by writing poetry, others like me by reading detective fiction ...
Reading is a great solace and support in ministry and Kate has also been writing about reading so I encourage you to go and read that too, and please why not share something about what nourishes and supports you in your ministry. What helps you make sense of it all?

On Saturday morning I finally finished reading The Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson. It's not a classic crime novel in some ways but I found it a therapeutic and interesting read. (If you're intending to read it then I should probably warn you that what follows may contain "spoilers".)
I found it a very satisfying read, and have been trying to work out why. It spoke to me at quite a deep level in part no doubt because I left my last pastorate due to a conflict with a retired minister who never accepted my authority. The book depicts quite elemental and base emotions and jealousies that are aroused by the arrival of the woman priest and the way she does her work. As the book opens she seems to be a rather cardboard cut out feminist hate figure but as the story progresses her personality and ministry are fleshed out much more. Despite being the corpse at the beginning of the book Matilda remains its main character throughout, somehow that spoke to me about resurrection.
Perhaps I found the read so satisfying too because it also has a good selection of other strong female characters. It was helpful for me many years down the line to recognise what very deep emotions are triggered by the arrival of a new person who is also a woman in a clergy role. A new woman priest will tend to always be more visible and will represent consciously and unconsciously so many fears and prejudices to some people. I realise now that this is what happened when I arrived in my last pastorate.
When I preached with a view in the parish the lectionary text was the woman taken in adultery, it was passion Sunday. I preached a good biblical, gospel, sermon. I hadn't chosen the text, the text had chosen me and the service went very well.
The retired colleague I later had so many problems with was the only person who didn't shake my hand that morning, he stalked haughtily out of the church barely nodding at me. Not surprising really that after a few years in the job I was thinking up crime novels with some good choices for cadavres on the first page! Only now does it all make sense. It helps a bit to feel a bit less guilty about it.
I don't normally find reading crime fiction quite so meaningful but I'm very glad I picked up this one in the bookshop in Rome. I'm also glad that I was not found strung up from the organ loft in my former parish.(Given that the retired colleague was treasurer of the organ committee this would have been fitting no doubt!)
However, joking apart, the level of harrassment that many clergy have to live with in the jobs is also a form of violence that churches do not readily open their eyes to or admit. The level of harrassment dressed up as theological disagreement that some Anglican clergywomen have to put up with is also I believe deeply abusive in many cases.
Perhaps the very physical violence in Asa Larsson's book has helped me recognise the verbal and political, spoken and unspoken violence I had to put up with. In the book Matilda's ministry continues after her death and the she-wolf still dances in the forest.

Caravaggio and Salley Vickers for the remembered Bible

One of the books we listened to extracts from this morning was Salley Vickers' The Other side of You which has some fascinating scenes where one of the characters is confronted at differnt points in the book with the two very different paintings of the Road to Emmaus that the artist Caravaggio painted at the beginning and end of his life respectively. So now maybe you can guess which is which - I think all of us will be wanting to buy Salley Vickers' book now. (And just a note to all you editors Salley is spelt with an e in this case - from willow in Irish - click on the links to her website to find out more.)

The beginnings of a remembered reading list for Vision4life

One of the great things about all meeting up as a group is that we get to talk about books we're reading, have read or might like one day to read. Over supper on our first evening Sheila Maxey talked about a Book of Silence by Sara Maitland that she's reading. As is the way when talking about books and remembering this led some of to remember other books by Sara Maitland and I think that the one many of us remember reading first is Walking on the Water: women talk about spirituality from 1983 which she edited together with Jo Garcia. (I have to say that none of us could actually remember the title but thank goodness for google which helps us piece our failing memories together!)
Meanwhile Janet Lees prepared a booklist to help us make connections between the Vision4Life year of the Bible and techniques for remembering the Bible and we'll post the whole of that to the blog as the dazs progress but at our Tuesday morning session she showed us some of the wonderful work of Sheffield artist Dinah Roe Kendal and her book Allegories of Heaven: An Artist Explores the Greatest Story Ever Told Piquant, PO Box 83, Carlisle, CA3 9GR (www.piquant.net) ISBN 1 903689 12 0. The pictures are wonderful and helped us share and meditate on some classics by the old masters that we'd been given in our scrapbooking treasure boxes the previous evening.
Janet also encouraged us to read two books by William Herzog Parables as subversive speech. Jesus as pedagogue of the oppressed and Prophet and teacher an introduction to the historical Jesus. She encouraged us to think about his perspectives on the strucutres of society in 1st century Palestine and the differences between that time and British 21st century culture. Weaving and enabling the remembering of the Bible we have to be aware of the connections and the diconnections between that time and society and our own.
Anyway, now we've done the beginning we can promise more of the middle and the end of the reading list as we progress. In the meantime I'm hoping that once I've posted this some of my colleagues here may make some suggestions in the comments section about other books they are reading.