SEASONS: 2 books on biblical womanhood in Hebrew scripture

I belong to a book club of sorts. SEASONS is a group of women meeting most months to discuss a book over a continental breakfast. We usually gather at Southwest Central Church of Christ which is the church that many of us attend. We read theology and fiction. Our summer selections have been two books that we grouped together as dealing with Hebrew scripture and rituals in every day:

Rachel Held Evans: A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Thomas Nelson, 2012. Available as a Kindle book.
 SEASONS also read Evans's Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. Evans is a clever, well-read, witty author. She has a particular interest in confronting injustice and, particularly, the injustices of sexism. She is both firm and funny but she's sometimes a bit "snarky." One minute I want to throw her book across the room but the next I'm highlighting a perfectly turned phrase:  "...be careful of challenging another woman's choices, for you never know when she may be sitting at the feet of God." p. 37 "...for all its glory and grandeur, the Bible contains a darkness... sometimes taking the Bible seriously means confronting the parts we don't like or understand..." p. 62 , 66 "The divine resides in all of us, but it is our choice to magnify it or diminish it, to ignore it, or to surrender to its lead." p. 73 "...most of the Bible's instructions regarding modesty find their context in warnings about materialism, not sexuality..." p. 128 "Women should not have to pry equality from the grip of Christian men. It should be surrendered willingly, with the humility and love of Jesus, or else we miss the once radical teaching that slaves and masters, parents and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, healthy and sick, should 'submit to one another' Ephesians 5:21" p. 219 "We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?" p. 296

Rachel Held Evans is not afraid to ask the most controversial questions and I often read her blog. The most current one is on Responding to Homophobia in the Christian Community.

I missed the SEASONS in both June and July so I'm eager for a time to visit with my friends and to share our gleanings from
Lauren F. Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline. I very much enjoyed reading this book. Winner beautifully expresses many things that I think. She has an interesting history as a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity in her late twenties. Two of her books Girl Meets God and Faith Interrupted tell part of her story. Her perspective melds well with my own since I am a lover of Hebrew scripture. I am a seeker of "rhythms and routines" that draw "the sacred down into the everyday."."Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity....Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought no to waver.... the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter's faith returns." Introduction. Chapter 5 p. 53 of her book is titled "tefillah prayer" and is the best short lesson on prayer that I have ever read which is saying a lot since my personal collection devotes three linear feet of shelf space to the subject. "Jewish prayer is essentially book prayer, liturgical prayer. Jews say the same set prayers, at the same fixed hours, over and over, every day. There is, to be sure, room for spontaneous prayer... but those spontaneous prayers are to liturgy what grace notes are to the musical score: They decorate, but never drown out, the central theme."   "words that praise God even on the mornings when I wonder if God exists at all."  Winner's sections on Sabbath, on grief, and on hospitality are instructive and life-giving. "Judaism connects physical acts to spiritual practice without somehow suggesting that the spirit is superior to the body."  p. 69 I plan to get to know this author much better. http://laurenwinner.net/

We're probably going to select our next books and I'll be seconding the nomination for a novel:
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. 

Evolving...

SEASONS (my women reading theology group at church) will meet on Saturday to discuss Evolving in Monkey Town:  How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask the questions  by Rachel Held Evans.  (link to amazon to sample the book)  It's a book that would have been a huge help when I was a freshman in high school and first met Mr. Darwin and his theory.  Like the author, I found  science challenged my faith.  Unlike the author, I kept my own counsel--for decades I shared my doubts with only a very few trusted ones.

After a brief time of private atheism, I found that I just could not live if life--all life, my life--was random accident. The world is full of beauty and I can never quite shake the thought that beauty has a source and a purpose and that somehow beauty and truth are linked. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." So Keats and other nature poets formed my canon. For many years, I kept a journal that consisted of each day's one moment of supreme beauty and found myself feeling gratitude.  To whom?   Having been a doubting Christian, I became a doubtful atheist.  Beauty, gratitude and those second doubts led me step-by-step back to faith.  I came to think of God as "source and sustainer."

My mother, with whom I had shared some of my doubts, encouraged me to just read the Bible, and reach my own conclusions about what it said and what it meant.  She suggested I start with the  Psalms--more poetry.  The Writings of Hebrew Scripture--wisdom literature, the prophets, the song book of Israel--became my primary biblical text.  Most Psalms are not didactic but responsive--responsive to life situations, responsive to pain, responisve to injustice, responsive to a community, responsive to God.  The Psalms are not afraid to question God and I learned to be honest (with myself at least) about my doubts because a God who is "source and sustainer of all that has being" is certainly big enough to handle my questions.

Like Rachel Held Evans, I was troubled by all the great crowd of people, past and present, who could not believe because they had not heard.  "If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn't good news at all.  For most of the human race, it is terrible news."  p. 92  I was well-versed in the Girls Auxiliary of the Women's Missionary Union but it seemed "not right" that God would condemn those who had been born at the wrong place and the wrong time and it was unrealistic to expect that missionaries could reach across geography and cultures and centuries to preach to all people and offer them the Jesus choice.   If there is a God, God must be as merciful as  just, as gracious as  righteous.   "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end." [Lamentations 3:22-24; not all biblical poetry is found in Psalms.]

For people of compassion the idea of almost universal condemnation to eternal torment is quite troubling.  For many it is the sticking point; my father was concerned for all the Native Americans and for the hypocrisy he found in the church.  Even more troubling are the Christians who "are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell." p. 113 My cousin is so troubled by what she learned as a child "from pretty Sunday school teachers who smelled like peppermint and let me call them by their first names"  p. 27, so offended by  unkind dogma, that she cannot even listen or seek the comfort that might be found in a more mature faith.

 I was very comforted by C.S. Lewis whom Rachel Held Evans quotes on p. 139:  "We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ.  We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him."  Even more comforting to me than Mere Christianity was the story from The Last Battle in the Chronicles of Narnia when the young warrior who has faithfully served Tash discovers himself in Aslan's country where he immediately loves the great lion who has always loved him. 

By the time I graduated from college, I had a very thorough understanding of Darwin's theory, as it had been first written and as it had been revised.  I understood science far better and had a fuller appreciation of its beauty.  Oddly, the more science I learned and the more open my mind, the easier it was to say with Charlotte Yonge:  "some when, some how, God..."   For me there is no conflict between science and faith but there is an almost constant conversation between them.  I understand that science itself is not "the truth" but an understanding of truth in constant evolution.

"By little and by little" [Dorothy Day] I found faith to believe... most of the time... and a few years of reading Zen taught me to think of Christian life as a practice.  Even when I feel no belief, I practice Christianity:  I meditate, I pray, I read the Bible, I assemble with the saints, I sing songs of thanksgiving, I devote myself to good works.

Like Rachel Held Evans, I learned that "obedience--with or without answers--was the only thing that could save me from this storm."  p. 106  

When I spend time studying the Bible and time reading books by serious biblical scholars, when I see new ways of understanding biblical text and the world around me, when I get to talk with others who are also asking questions, I find it easier to believe.  Among the more recent books that have evolved my faith is  N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope (previously blogged) which is also mentioned in Evolving in Monkey Town p.173.

Most of my doubts are now a faint and fading echo but, for me, faith is never simple.   I walk a somewhat rocky Way through a dark valley.  I am a believer and  a Christian.  I take biblical text seriously.  I am neither a Fundamentalist nor an Evangelical.    I believe in God and in Christ Jesus, Messiah,  who brings life from death.  I believe in "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."    Everything else is subject to change. 

"Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we're not sure we want" God "to be.  It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished." p. 23