I get the disdain. I’ve even shared in it. The language of self-care has increasingly been used by corporations looking to take a movement of self-acceptance, growth, and health, and turn it into profit. To turn practitioners back into consumers. Bubble baths, in this sense, are a symbol of everything that’s wrong with so-called self-care: consumer-orientation, short-term pampering that does little for long-term wellbeing, focus on middle-class white women as though our (self-disclosure that I do fall into this demographic) experience (and income) is the norm.

What’s being disparaged in “bubble bath self-care” is treating a single “practice” — but really a set of products — as though it’s going to magically fix the problems of a heavy workload, a hostile environment, and the impacts of stress on a body, for the low low price of $5 and an hour. “Bubble bath self-care” pretends that the issues of stress can be resolved by the individual in the aftermath of stress, rather than addressing the issues that create the need for self-care in the first place.

I get it. I’ve spoken the phrase “bubble bath self-care,” with condescension in my mouth.

And.

Recently, a couple of people in my life began to tell me about their bath rituals. They’re both former competitive swimmers, so it made sense that they loved water. As I opened myself to their experience of floating in water, I got curious. I felt the tenderness in their voices, heard the way they spoke of their bodies in the water, saw the soft look in their faces as they remembered their mental and emotional state following a bath.

So, I decided to try a bubble bath, for perhaps the first time in my adult life. I took their advice and bought one of the “bath bombs” (ugh) from a company they thought highly of, and dusted out the tub that had only been used to wash the dog.

I won’t go through moment-by-moment; baths are, in fact, a rather dull experience. Which may be a main draw into the water. Below, my defense of bubble baths as a legitimate practice for wellbeing.

First, it’s a rare place in my life that I’m able to be alone, and to be alone and feel however I want. I’m almost always ; as I write this I’m at a table with four others. Part of me wonders if that’s a result of a cultural imagination that primarily understands woman alone as being sad. (If you’re uncertain, go to a and search for ‘woman alone,’ and feel the overall tone of the photos. is so noteworthy an exception — a time women are seen alone and happy — that it became a meme.)

In the bathroom, it’s acceptable for me to be left entirely to myself. I’m allowed to quietly stare at the swirling suds or a flickering candle or the wall and not be asked “What are you doing?” (I can’t be the only one who has this problem.) Baths are where I get to reflect, meditate, even pray — for a full hour — without interruption or distraction (Apart from the distraction of my own thoughts, which goes back to the meditation piece). I can be happy, sad, reflective, concerned — the entire array of human emotions are available to me and expressed on my face, without commentary.

A second benefit: Water is a place I can’t do anything that dominant culture would consider “productive.” Having been raised in the millennial children-are-future-workers mentality, I’m almost always doing something productive. Even my down time: I’m learning French. I’m knitting a blanket for my in utero nephew while listening to podcasts in my career field. I’m reading books that I’m interested in but also, let’s be honest, are at the top of the pile because of their connection to my field. And while I enjoy achieving, I recognize there’s something sickly about it — and yet I have a hard time stopping. Being surrounded by water is a really functional way to have to stop. Knitting isn’t possible, and it’s not worth the risk of losing a book or phone into the water.

So far everything I’ve said could be done without the product of bubbles (or bath bombs, or jelly bombs, or suds bars, or whatever other marketing nonsense surrounds hot water). And 
 I bought more. This is maybe personal preference, maybe (definitely) a major area for me to work on: body positivity, self-acceptance, maybe even someday self-love. Right now, I appreciate the visual barrier around my body. The suds and salts and sparkles keep me from focusing on, or even noticing, the ‘flaws’ of my body; they keep the internalized male gaze from following me into the tub. With that distraction reduced, I can focus on sensations and emotions instead. The sparkly scented sudsy bath products are what make me actually enjoy baths and, more importantly, take an hour to be with my thoughts, my feelings, and myself.

So yes, I spend a few dollars to get myself to do something that I otherwise don’t do — be alone and tend to all the parts of myself, not only my body. For me, it’s not an issue of consumerism, but also an issue of producerism; if buying something helps me to enjoy a practice enough that I’ll stop being a cog in the capitalist machine for an hour, here’s my debit card. The practice is, in the end, forming me away from a capitalist mindset, forming me away from mindless consumption and towards more mindful materialism. That is: towards taking seriously and with deep consideration the material components of my body and the world. Making me more incarnate.

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To continue this conversation, we’re also sharing Elliot Huemann’s vulnerable plea that the pain of LGBTQ+ Christians be heard honestly, Jennifer Fernandez’s thoughtful exploration of the dangers of conflating the Church and Christianity, and Dr. Derek McNeil’s reflection about global complexity and the pitfalls of ethnocentric theology.

What a hopeful time for the Church in America.

It doesn’t look like it, at first glance (or perhaps even first dozen glances), but in the midst of grief, I feel the greater undertow towards hope. My tears are both lament and cleansing baptism.

The headlines in my newsfeed are focused on the fracturing, fighting, and forsaking taking place in the United Methodist Church. The rejection and righteousness felt by both sides. Grief is expressed, prayers offered, services held.

It’s the grief that strikes me, more so than the split. Many of the prayers and laments offered are from Christians who aren’t in the Methodist tradition. I’m also not Methodist, and have been processing the news each day with friends and colleagues who identify across a number of sexualities and come from various traditions, including some who don’t currently identify as Christian at all. From the depth of pain and grief expressed, you’d never know that we aren’t all Methodist.

Because despite centuries of denominational splits and rewritten polities and institutional barriers, we are all still the singular body of Christ.

“Despite centuries of denominational splits and rewritten polities and institutional barriers, we are all still the singular body of Christ.”

In the crucifixion, Christ’s body was wounded, but the bones remained intact. There are no breaks in the body of Christ. No fractures. No amputations.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t wounds. His wrists, his feet, the cut on his side, the crown of thorns—wounds abound. The wounds are not superficial; they go deep, and the nails go all the way through. Thomas is able to insert his fingers into the side of the resurrected Christ. The body of Christ is deeply wounded, but remains intact.

Which is why this week has hurt so much. We are still the body of Christ, and we feel the nail pierce our flesh, no matter the distance of denomination, tradition, theology, ideology. It turns out that the God who holds us together is bigger than polity, that words can deeply wound—even unto death—but cannot break us.

And this is what strikes me as hopeful in this season: the recognition of pain. Our collective feeling of our hurt—no matter tradition or sexuality—means that we’re in touch with our common humanity. The shared lament offers us an opportunity to draw closer to one another across perceived differences—even as it feels like our two hands are arm-wrestling each other.

Because I direct a program designed to cultivate pastoral resilience, the question keeps coming to me: What does resilience look like in the midst of this? It looks like grief. Like tears and lament. It looks like fully entering into grief, and the ability to do so because we know God is with us into suffering, through death, and on the other side. It looks like entering into pain with the expectation that the experience will form us.

The disciples didn’t get to fast forward from the crucifixion to the resurrection. They had to grieve through Holy Saturday, with the certainty that the man they had thought would save Israel was dead. I trust that God’s timing wasn’t off, that it was necessary for the disciples to go through this day of grief before the resurrection occurred. I believe God was inviting them to something formative on that day through their grief.

We don’t get to fast forward to resurrection or reconciliation either. But we can enter into grief with the trust that it’s formative, perhaps even necessary. And we can grieve with the memory that reconciliation and resurrection have come before: that Jacob and Esau embraced, that Joseph kissed all his brothers and wept over them, that salvation came even from a Samaritan. Sometimes years pass before reconciliation occurs, necessary time in which God does the formative work to make reconciliation possible.

May this season be an opportunity for us to identify as citizens of Heaven more primarily than members of any denomination or ideology. May we enter into the wounds of the body of Christ, recognize our shared pain, and proclaim together: “My Lord and My God.”

Rev. Steve Wolff is a pastor of a UMC congregation in Nehalem Bay, OR, and a participant in Resilient Leaders Project. I reached out to ask him how he’s doing in the midst of his congregation’s decision-making process. Steve has held different stances on LGBTQIA questions during his 35 years in the denomination, initially in the traditionalist group before moving into the open and inclusive one. I value Rev Wolff’s perspective because he’s a kind, connective soul who speaks with both strength and mercy, and I am grateful for these words he shared about his experience:

Since I serve to a progressive congregation in a progressive Jurisdiction, I have felt all along like I was pretty secure in what I felt and where I belonged. That said, I have been surprised at how much this vote has affected me. I have been part of this denomination for some 35 years, and have moved from initially being in the traditionalist group into the open and inclusive camp. It has been journey of discovery, but now I feel like I have moved from the United Methodist Church to the Untied Methodist Church and that we are adrift.

All this is preamble—here is what I have been thinking about today. A dear friend of mine brought up the good Samaritan, wondering what should this general conference have done in light of that parable? That got me to thinking of a teaching from my old Seminary professor, Bill Mallard. What Bill pointed out to us was that Jews and Samaritans hated each other. Most of us know that, but somehow when we read the parable, we forget. So, in a parable told by a Jewish man, to a Jewish audience who would be identifying with the assumed Jewish protagonist, the one who comes to save is a member of their most hated group. At least part of what Jesus was teaching is that loving our neighbor is not just about us saving the hated person or class—it is accepting that the hated person is saving us. As I look at General Conference 2019, I see that the presenting problem is Human Sexuality, but much of it is about power: who will have the power to determine who is in and who is out, and both conservative and progressive voices are jockeying for this authority. How different would this look if we were to let the most abused and reviled groups save us? Now that would be an inspiring generosity. I can’t explain how, at least right now, but that idea of salvation by the least of these keeps me going.

In the hope of fostering faithful dialogue that understands narrative, wrestles with intersections, resists reactivity, and fosters radical hospitality, we seek to feature work from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Therefore the opinions expressed on the Intersections blog are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect an official statement regarding the views or opinions of ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ”. You can read more on the Intersections landing page.

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When I first walked up to St. Luke’s, I noticed the litter, and yes, the needles left as a symptom of addiction. I nodded to a few men sitting near their backpacks, their only possessions contained therein. I navigated the maze of buildings in need of maintenance, searching for the main offices.

And I thought, as any sane person might, What am I doing here?

It wasn’t a question born out of a concern for my safety or career goals. It was a question of competence—what could I possibly have to offer a community that clearly has such deep need in such a variety of areas?

St. Luke’s had experienced a split a few years ago. When the current priest, Canon Britt Olson, arrived in spring of 2015, there were a dozen parishioners left. Mostly women, mostly in their 80s. When she arrived, the lights were about to be turned off, and there wasn’t much money in the account. Her third day on the job, a retaining wall collapsed onto the sidewalk due to lack of upkeep.

I arrived summer 2016 to fulfill an ordination requirement. My first weeks, my only goal was to listen. I heard the stories of the women who had stayed—the “faithful revenant,” as Britt likes to call them. (I’ve come to think of them as the Many Mothers a la .)

I listened to how bad things were in the years following the split. I heard about how much things had improved under Britt’s leadership. I learned about the many thriving ministries taking place on this campus. These women had stayed during the split to keep the meals ministry going—they serve breakfast every weekday morning (last summer, to 120 people; now, 200). The day the previous congregation was moving out of the sanctuary, some of the women were breaking ground to start a community garden that now provides vegetables to the breakfast program, garden plots to the community, and flowers to the neighbors. Also on campus are a shelter run by SHARE, a clothing bank run by Quest Church, an anabaptist church plant, a therapeutic arts ministry. And of course, S.t Luke’s own small worship service—about 40 members when I arrived (now, incredibly, over 100).

There seemed to be little left for me to offer.

But there was one ministry that seemed to be without a lead: the residence interns. They live in buildings owned by the church for at-cost rent (it covers utilities and taxes) in exchange for five hours of service each week. The interns live in houses on a campus that is known as a center of resource and rest for homelessness—they live amongst homelessness. The two who remained were passionate about their work, but frustrated, isolated, and under-resourced.

My work became to change that, to make it into a program that helps people develop in their passions and thrive in their work.

In just a year, the most necessary house repairs are completed, and we have a system to address problems when they come up. The two women who had been living there were joined by three others, also students of ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ” as part of this shared program, also passionate about social justice and loving their community. It’s been my deep honor to get to witness them form community with one another, find service projects that are meaningful to their passions, and discern how they might deepen those projects in connection to their vocation.

Reflecting back on the last year, I must reflect back on that first question. What am I doing here?

I’m participating in the coming of the Kingdom of God.

It’s more mundane than I ever thought it would be—it’s watching a mustard plant slowly take over your herb garden. And it’s also more beautiful, hopeful, tragic, exciting, invigorating, heartbreaking, and joyful than I could have imagined.

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We don’t talk about demons very often these days. I think that it’s one of the concepts we left behind in an effort to view ourselves as more advanced than our ancestors. We think it primitive to believe in spiritual forces that seek to destroy individuals and communities through possession. We hear, in scripture, about the man possessed by a “legion,” a regiment, of demons, and our first thought is: mental illness.

In today’s world, we’re much more likely to talk about ideologies and worldviews, about energies and forces. We talk about how they shape individuals and societies, how they have the power to become obsessions in some. We talk about how they can injure and harm. All of which sounds a bit 
 well, demonic.

In David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K, there is a scene that I think reads like an interpretation of . At the point we enter the story, teenaged Peter has just lied down under the sprinkler with his young twin sisters, Freddy and Bet. They’re contemplating the movement of forces in the world—what they call “humps of energy.”

“For instance,” Freddy says, “when a person gets mad at somebody
like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever—a hump of mean, witchy energy—and I think it might fly round and round in there
and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, that energy might come out of them and hurt the next person too, even though the person didn’t deserve it.”

Peter responds, “I think that can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.” The sprinkler hissed.

“Another thing,” Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed—lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the challenging thing about witches—learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can be like a river when a forest fire hits it—phshhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”

“And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there. Christ says so. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains—beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”

Bet’s mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is within you, and we dream up something after death. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth—we never look for such things inside us
 So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”

We don’t know much about the demons—the energies—of the Gerasene community, where the demon-possessed man was driven from. We don’t know how they came to possess this man, why they chose him, what type of evil they’re about. We only get to hear that they are many—a legion, a regiment. And they have converged in this one body, this one man.

There are many demons in our own culture, whose names we might know: Homophobia. Transphobia. Islamophobia. Racism. Sexism. Nationalism. Ethnocentrism. Just to name a few. Demons that too often converge to possess one person. They unite under the banners of hatred and fear for the purpose of doing violence and spreading evil.

And then there are the lesser demons: Indifference. Apathy. They may not participate in violence directly, but they compel those they possess to do nothing to stop violence.

Like Freddy said in The Brothers K, sometimes demons come to possess a person when violence is done to them. Last week, the violence that was done extended well beyond the walls of Pulse, well beyond the city limits of Orlando. Many of us felt the impact of the attack—knew that this hatred was directed, in a way, at us. Knew the energy was spreading out across the country. The week before, the anonymous survivor in Stanford named the ways that violence entered her life and chipped away at normalcy. Part of its viral spread was due to the fact that so many women have had similar experiences with those demons.

It seems we are possessed.

And that demon might sit in us, like a rattlesnake waiting to attack the next person. Or we find someone to bear our collective witchy energy, to become our witch, our scapegoat. Theologian and activist Walter Wink says that is what the Gerasene culture has done to the unnamed man. They chain him in such a way that he can break free so they can enact their cycle of drama—catch, escape, injury; catch, escape, injury. Wink says, the townspeople need him to act out their own violence. He bears their collective madness personally, releasing them from its symptoms. He secretly lives out the freedom to be violent that they crave. And he is more miserable for it, and they insure that he remains so.

Last week, people heatedly debated the motives of the massacre at Pulse in Orlando. Homophobia or racism? Religion or mental illness? But there are no easy answers; the name is Legion. Last week, Legion lived in Omar Mateen. The week before, we recognized Legion in Brock Turner. Last year, it was Dylann Roof.

I don’t know what formed these men, what moments—to borrow David James Duncan’s language—what moments caused energy to crash and smash around and wreck things in them. But I do believe they weren’t born so full of hate—hatred came to possess them.

Their actions have, in turn, sent out witchy energy—energy that no one deserved. Energy that crashes around, that possesses, that maims.

The demons are not to be confused with the one who is possessed by the demons.

Like the Gerasene townspeople, our larger culture participates in violent energies. These men bear the collective madness of our society—they internalize and embody our culture’s collective homophobia and racism, sexism, and entitlement. When they turn violent, our culture, perhaps, experiences a vicarious release through the actions of the possessed one even as we hate the possessed one.

The good news in our gospel text today is that we don’t have to keep participating in the cycle of fear, hatred, and violence. We can find, in ourselves, those pure, deep blue lakes, and we send the demons down the banks and into their depths. Like Peter said, you can’t avoid getting nailed, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. We have our model in the Holy Crucified One—we know that refusing to pass on the mean energy opens up the possibility of new life. But we have to know our inner terrain, we have to find the lakes.

In recent days, I have been brought to tears—with grief, yes, but more often with awe. I have watched people climb their inner mountains and drown hatred and fear in their lakes—sometimes in ways that are so creative and public that it feels like their lake pours out from them.

I see the demon energies die in vigils. I see them drown when for people to wear outside the victims’ funerals to create a safe space inside. In the names of the victims . In long lines of those . In a of “What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love).”

It is something truly heavenly. And it is within us.

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In the opening scenes of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), we see Max (Tom Hardy) captured by War Boys of the Citadel. A prisoner of this empire, his body is under their control. The empire enlists him into service, finding use in him as an unwilling blood donor. An IV runs directly from his vein into the arm of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of the many ailing War Boys. When the call comes for the boys to fight, Nux orders that his “blood bag,” Max, be chained to him so that he can drive into the battle.

And so it is that we find Max, our title hero, chained to the front of a speeding car as though he were a wooden figurehead on the prow of a Roman ship.

For most military ornamentation, the purpose is to demonstrate the wealth and power of the empire. An empire that has resources to put into unnecessary embellishment and decoration is certainly an empire with abundance, with surplus—an empire that rules enough land and manpower to produce such extravagance.

But here, in a land with few natural resources (Immortan Joe controls the people through controlling the water supply), there is no gold to be mined nor trees to be cut down for a figurehead. But what they do have is this prisoner; the Citadel shows its power through controlling Max’s body. It is impractical to do so; he’d be a much safer resource tucked behind the driver’s seat. But he’s up front, sand in his eyes, his weight a nuisance to the movement of the vehicle, so that this empire can show their might.

The empire controls the level of danger into which his body is placed. The empire controls his level of discomfort. The empire controls the pace at which his life-blood is drained from him.

In this sense, Max the Figurehead may be one of the best images our contemporary culture has of Jesus the Crucified One.

Jesus, like Max, was a prisoner of the empire. His body was used to demonstrate the empire’s control. The Roman empire used crosses the way naval ships and Nux use figureheads, as a symbol to say: We are strong enough to not only kill, but to control. We are strong enough to kill slowly, strong enough to control the blood’s slow draining.

As a culture, we have lost our disgust in response to the cross. The cross, today, is a decoration on the wall of our home, an ornamental tattoo on our shoulder, a bejeweled trinket that hangs on our necklace. We talk about finding comfort in the cross. We don’t feel any of the guttural responses the cross evoked in first century peoples living in fear of the empire. We don’t feel, in our guts, the repulsion, the deprivation, the dehumanizing cruelty that must occur in order to hang a body on a plank in the desert.

Max, the Mad One, the Holy One is here to show us: there is no comfort in the cross. This image of a man cruelly and unnecessarily hanging from the front of a speeding car, this man whose lifeblood is dripping from him, helps shape our understanding of what we are no longer able to see in the cross. This image in culture helps inform the image in religion. This image helps us to re-find—in our guts, in our disgust—the scandal of the crucifixion.

For just imagine, for a moment, that that man being used as a hood ornament is the Child of God, the Word made flesh, the hope and salvation of the world, the promised Holy One.

This post is part of an over at Literate Theology. We highly recommend

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I went in to the screening of Room in a sold-out theater. I had never met the man next to me, but by the end we felt like friends, largely because we had spent most of the last two hours crying next to one another.

I can’t speak to what particular images impacted my neighbor so deeply. Yet, considering that Room is a film about an abducted woman and her child who are kept in a shed for years (a circumstance that very few viewers of this film are likely to have experienced), there is something extremely connecting about it. Its themes are universal: the difficulty with transitions, the importance of gratitude, the difficulty and necessity of forgiveness.

Since everything I’m going to reveal is pretty easily discernible from both the trailer and the movie poster, I’m not sure anything counts as a real spoiler, but just in case: here’s your alert.

The first portion of the film takes place in the shed that our protagonists call simply Room. Room is the whole universe; outside of Room is outer space—or at least this is the story that Joy (Brie Larson) told her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in order to normalize his childhood and to cope with her reality. Jack treats every item as though it has its own personality; characters created by his mother to ease the loneliness. “Good morning, Lamp,” he starts the day. “Good morning, Chair.”

Joy is in Room against her will and everything there is a reminder of her captivity; every item is necessary and conserved because her captor is not generous; every new addition to the space must be politely requested as though her abuser is her benefactor. It is an understatement to say she cannot wait to get out of Room and into another space. She’s willing to risk everything—her son’s life, her own life—in order to get somewhere else.

And then, miraculously (and it does feel like a miracle, full of more hope than my heart is accustomed to bearing), she gets out. We see her in the clean, well-lit hospital, happy to shed the clothing that her abductor had given her, delighted that someone else has prepared her a meal (and we realize this is likely the first time this has happened in seven years). We see her in the comfort of her childhood bedroom and the spaciousness of her household—we can’t help but notice how many rooms there are here.

It’s in her childhood home that there’s a when Joy lands on the couch and bursts into tears. From behind her hands she says to her mom, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m supposed to be happy.”

I lost it.

I feel the same way about my own life transitions, the most recent of which is from seminary to post-graduate life. I had looked forward to being done with classes, had looked forward to being able to do work in the world, had looked forward to being able to write my own pieces instead of what was assigned—and now I’m here, and I’m not as happy as I thought I would be, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

It strikes me that the power of this scene is that it applies to anyone who has ever transitioned; the universal experience of transition is manifested in its essence in this particular transition. We, like Joy, were in a place that we did not want to be; we anticipated escape. And then we’re out of where we were and in a different space, but it’s not what we imagined. We’re supposed to be happy, but we aren’t. And as long as we keep trying to live into what we’re “supposed to be” feeling, we can’t name how conflicted and ambivalent we really are. We would never dare admit that on some level we miss the routine and familiarity of the place where we once were captive. We’re unable to integrate the blessings and curses of our captivity into our present life, and to the extent that we cannot bear that complexity, we are held captive by it. Until we are able to bless the complexity of our experiences, we’re held captive by them.

We would never dare admit that we miss the routine and familiarity of the place where we once were captive.

We’ve all been Joy on the couch, wondering why we aren’t happy. We’ve all been wandering in the desert, wondering why we ever left Egypt.

In the end, it’s Jack who is able to name what he needs, who is able to ease the transition. He asks to go back to Room, to visit; we get the sense that Joy would never have done this otherwise. While Joy lingers right outside the Room, Jack enters into its familiar corners. He notices that it’s smaller; he’s able to see it with new eyes, a clear sign that his transition is well underway and that there is no going back. When it’s time to go, he gently touches everything as he leaves it, with the tiniest benediction: “Goodbye, Chair. Goodbye, Wardrobe. Goodbye, Room.”

Jack knows he can’t stay in the nostalgia and safety and familiarity of Room. He knows it’s time to go, and I believe he actively desires to go—to play with his friend, to run with dogs, to explore the world that is now open to him. And yet, the leaving does not diminish his gratitude and affection for what he leaves behind. He is able to bless what his life was even as he moves forward into what his life is.

Perhaps, he must bless what his life was in order to move into what his life could be.

Through Jack’s eyes, Joy is able to see Room with tenderness. Yes, it was a prison, it was the site of countless rapes, it was the site of the death of her firstborn. And, it was in that prison that she bore her son, that she taught him to read and to bake, that she breastfed him and bathed with him with an intimacy that the world was not present to scrutinize, that they shared good and beautiful moments of play and tenderness.

When Joy, at her son’s urging, finally says goodbye to Room, we know that she has begun to receive the blessings that it offered her. She has begun to bear the complexity of the place. It’s the same moment that she begins, perhaps for the first time, to truly cease to be its captive.

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The librarian’s request was the simplest invitation down a rabbit hole:

For Theological Libraries Month, please reply with books or films that are meaningful to you theologically or that have been formative in your theological education or imagination.

An inundation of titles began to flash through my mind. Gertrud Mueller Nelson’s Here All Dwell Free, a psychological read of a fairy tale that deeply informs . Song of the Sea (2014) opened up the magic of the incarnation. The Book of Symbols, which continuously invites me into the mystery of the tangible everyday. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything, both of which weave the mundane with the mythical until questions of “what really happened” are irrelevant. David Eagleman’s Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlife exploded everything I had been taught about heaven and hell. Away We Go . The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss . Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

As the wave of titles slowed, I looked over the list that sat in my drafted email reply, and it began to strike me what a strange list this was. In the last few years, I have read thousands of pages of theological material, and I have been formed by beautiful, intelligent, well-researched theological prose. Yet when asked what has been most formative for my theological imagination, my answers are immediately, overwhelmingly fictional narratives. Stories.

From fairy tales to science fiction to “serious” literature, it is stories that fundamentally shape my understanding of God, my awareness of the Kingdom, my insight into the human condition, my imagination for what makes a good life. It has been stories that mirror my own beauty and brokenness back to me. We talk a lot at ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ” about a person’s story: the way you understand your story shapes the way you understand yourself. In reflecting on my own life, it seems to be just as true that my identity has been shaped by the stories I have engaged about princesses and orphans, robots and prophets, detectives and diviners.

Of course, God’s own self seems to prefer to communicate through story. Some laws, letters, and poems aside, Christian scripture is largely a collection of stories. Stories, early on, about this profoundly messed up family trying to figure out how to live with one another and what to do with the hurt they can’t seem to keep from causing one another. Stories about a young nation trying to find its place in the world. Stories about suffering and anger and betrayal; stories about comfort and love and hope. Stories about a man who himself told stories that confronted previous theologies and invited a new imagination. Stories about a man who lived and died and lived again, and in doing so, changed the way we read all the stories that came before and shaped the stories that have been told since.

Perhaps the scriptural authors knew what they were doing, when they chose to record narratives. Perhaps they chose to forego a written form that would prove and persuade in order to write in a form that has the power to confront, invite, and shape. Perhaps they understood that a story is able to convey meaning at a formative depth that no logical syllogism or composed research is able to reach.

By the time my selections are on display in the library, I find I’ve made peace with the lack of “theological” works on the shelf. Why shouldn’t I find God within these stories? Our holy scriptures, the biblical texts, have taught me to see a shepherd boy as a king, an orphaned slave as a savior, a barren woman and a virgin both as mothers, and a pacifist dissenter as the Messiah. Our theology has always been communicated and shaped through stories full of unexpected characters and unbelievable narratives. My list simply reflects the culture in which I live, while it is my tradition that enables me to see handless maidens, lost selkies, and slave princes as the Holy Ones of God.

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Visitors to ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ” are often surprised. Not by the industrial-chic design of the building, which they’ve seen in our viewbook; not by the outspokenness of our students, which they often know by reputation; not by the depth and breadth of our work, which they’ve read about on our website. They’re surprised by a loud bell that interrupts, mid-sentence, regardless of classes in session or conferences taking place. They’re surprised by the mild manner with which everyone else seems to receive such an interruption. They’re surprised that, even in the midst of animated discussion, everything seems to mellow after the bell has faded.

In these walls, we have a practice we call “nine noon three” in which bells chime at these hours to remind us of…well, whatever it is you need reminding of in your spiritual practice. Some people say it’s to remind us that we live our lives before God. Others use it as a reminder that they came to the school to better learn to love God and neighbor, and that those two are intimately tied. Still others use it as a reminder simply to breathe.

For me, the bells were always a call to prayer, often brief and silent, breathed inside my being. After years of this, I began to feel a desire for us to be a community that prays together, rather than simply praying near one another.

This year, my co-facilitator of the MDiv group Eagle & Child and I began meeting in the chapel every day at noon. The bells are our call. We meet there and read the Prayers of the People from the Book of Common Prayer. Or one of us will bring an ancient prayer. Or we’ll simply speak and formulate our own prayers for the community.

At least, I thought we were doing it for the community. A few months into this practice, I have to admit that I’m not sure how much the school-wide community has responded to our prayers, or even noticed that they happen. God was always at work in these lives; we do not take credit for the continued goodness we see. But for those of us who regularly interrupt our days to be called to the chapel at noon, the practice of noonday prayer is connecting, and we notice when one of our number is away. The practice of noonday prayer is calming in a place that can be full of the anxiety of three hundred students struggling through both emotional and academic work. The practice of noonday prayer is centering in a place where the categories we’re asked to consider are as big as the cosmos.

I’m still skeptical about the way prayer works—can it really have the power to change the world (even the limited world inside this one brick building)? And yet, as this prayer practice forms me, it does change the world through changing the way I interact with it. Prayer changes my world.

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Staying in the area I lived in wasn’t an option, as every pastor I spoke with made sure to impress upon me. The schools were dated in their questions and conservative in their answers—I would be isolated as a heretic. Worse, I wouldn’t be pushed to ask questions for the future church. I realized that I would need to move.

I had never lived outside of my little tri-county area; now, the entire country opened up to me. I had the grades and references to go anywhere I wanted. I pulled up lists of seminaries across the US. I made a spreadsheet and tried to determine what criteria would form my columns for comparison.

Through a lot of talks with pastors and sessions with my counselor, runs around the lake, coffees with friends, and asanas in the yoga studio, I finally came to realize that I didn’t need more training in how to do academics. That isn’t to say I didn’t need training—I very much did—just not academic training, which I could do well already. I didn’t need more brains as much as I needed more heart. I didn’t need to learn how to argue as much as I needed to learn how to connect. I didn’t need more texts as much as I needed more soul.

I had heard, and I’m guessing you have, too, about ÌìĂÀÊÓƔ’s emphasis on “text, soul, and culture.” I took it to be a contrast with many other schools, who emphasize the texts their faculty have written, the texts to be read as their student, the importance of the scriptural texts. But at ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ”, text doesn’t stand alone, but is joined by soul and culture.

However, that joining does not lessen each individual part. It’s not that most schools spend their time on the One Thing and we divide our time, with less depth, between three. It’s relational—text is even more important to us because it’s not just text, it’s a text that influences our souls, a text that influences our cultures. It’s not just text, but text that we read through the narratives that have shaped our souls, it’s text that has been shaped by the narratives of our culture.

I came to ÌìĂÀÊÓÆ” because I thought I already had the abilities to read and understood text well enough on my own. I thought what I needed was the balance that adding soul and culture would bring to my life and my self.

I stayed because I realized that text is never understood well enough until it is in conversation with soul and culture.

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Everyone was surprised, most of all myself. I’m usually bold and outspoken; in what cave of my soul had this patriarchy been hiding? Members of the group discussed and discerned with me; books were recommended and read; pastors at our church met with me several times.

Six months later, I attended as a prospective Master of Divinity student.

During that weekend, some faculty introduced themselves to the applicants. Three professors gave their names and shared a little about their work inside and outside the school and the courses they teach.

And then Dwight Friesen spoke. I recognized him, but didn’t know much about him. He’s all over the school promotional material, and understandably so: he’s pierced, tattooed—the all-around cool kid who also exudes a welcoming warmth. From the moment you see him, you want to get to know him.

That morning, Dwight introduced himself like the other faculty—but then continued speaking. He shared that just the day before, he had given up his ordination. For years he had been vocal about women’s rights in the church, and had asked his denomination’s leaders yet again to grant women ordination. They said it wouldn’t happen—not in his lifetime, anyway.

So, as an act of solidarity with the women denied their roles in leadership, Dwight did the Christian thing by stepping down from Christian leadership. He aligned himself with the marginalized. If the church wasn’t recognizing the absence of women’s voices, they would at least know the loss of Dwight’s voice. As he shared this with us, it all felt so fresh, so tender. In his voice, I could hear his tears building, and I clenched my jaw and looked upward to contain my own.

The internal struggle for me to even be sitting for an interview as an MDiv applicant that morning had been great. A woman leading in the church—what right did I have? I felt audacious, scandalous, dangerous. And here was a man laying down his ordination so that someday I might be granted the opportunity to be ordained.

He had no reason to share such information with a group of prospective students, and yet I’m so grateful that he did. In that moment, my internal turmoil was quieted, I felt desired, I felt empowered, and beyond that, I felt needed.

I didn’t yet have articulate statements of scriptural interpretation for women leaders in the church, I just had a feeling that this man’s decision had instilled in me. I had, at once, a sense of urgency and a sense of peace, both with the same source: the church needs me as I am, not in spite of my breasts and womb and gendered experience, but because of them.

I’m now finishing my third year in the MDiv program and ending my internship with a priest who also happens to be a strong woman. My work of understanding myself—both as a woman and a leader—is nowhere near complete; yet it was during that moment of recognition, of deep calling to deep, of my experience being recognized by another, that I was invited to embrace my call.

(Image: Kate and her mentor during her internship, Mother Melissa Skelton, Bishop of the Diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver, B.C.)

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