Godspeed, Class of 2009

Commencement for the Class of 2009 takes place Sunday, May 17

Sunday, May 17, is Commencement for the Louisville Seminary Class of 2009.

The Women’s Center wishes this class well. We hope that the members of this class remember their days at Louisville Seminary with appreciation and affection, and will have daily reasons to thank their professors and classmates for their preparation in theological reflection and application, practical action, prayer, compassion, and the various other formal and informal skills that people develop during seminary education.

Of course, we hope that the Women’s Center will have earned a place in those memories, too. Maybe it will be because of a thought-provoking word or image — maybe of street kids from last year’s presentation by Rev. Bob Gamble, or something about counseling parishioners with HIV/AIDS from a panel on National Coming Out Day, or a comment by JoAnn Rowan about the difficulty of connecting with leaders of faith communities to develop partnerships for working against violence against women. Maybe it will be an epiphany realized during worship, like what it means for a woman involved in a violent relationship to appear in church, as was dramatized during V-Week worship this year led by Dr. Carol Cook. Maybe it will be of relationships formed and sustained through conversation and common commitment. Whatever it is, whether small or large, we hope it proves its value in the years to come.

We wish these graduates of the Class of 2009 well. We pray with confident hope that as they endeavor to respond to the calls they hear, they will find their way to those places where their gifts will do most good, and where what they themselves need to flourish and grow is available in abundance. We want for them what we want for ourselves, and for everyone: happiness, freedom, justice, meaning, love.

Part of Commencement every year involves receiving various charges. We have no doubt that the ones this class will receive will be profound and valuable, and will frame vital last lessons with memorable grace. We don’t need to give one more here.

On the other hand, it might not be amiss as folks are packing away their textbooks and dusting off their robes to whisper a couple of additional practical reminders, the way a friend might as someone prepares to head off down the jetway to the next destination, ones we imagine others might be less likely to mention. So —

Future preachers, please don’t forget to name violence against women from the pulpit as something the church needs to concern itself with, stand up against, and work to end.

Future worship leaders, please don’t forget that there are more names for the Holy God we worship and adore than “Lord,” and remember to use them in worship.

Future exegetes, please don’t forget that “the Bible says” is not supposed to act as a prop for unjust power and domination, but as a spur to living into God’s realm, a realm of justice and peace more radical than anything we’ve yet imagined.

Future counselors, please don’t forget to listen to women as real people with unique realities and possibilities to which no stereotypes will do justice.

[Easy to say, we know; harder to do, we know; sorely needed -- we know, and trust you do, too.]

Godspeed, Class of 2009,
and may you always behold the beauty of the Holy One.

 

Thanks to and for Debra

Student Coordinator Debra Trevino at Katie Geneva Cannon Worship, March 2009

We have been discussing the fragile and unpredictable emotional climate of the seminary for the past week or so. One of our faculty members has observed that this phenomenon recurs annually. It arises as a consequence of the impending graduation and, for the most, departure of a class of students who have formed a third or more of the ever-shifting composition of the student body for the past three years or so. What that graduation and departure precisely means varies, but it comprises a complicated brew of joy in what people have accomplished, sadness at missed opportunities, grief around saying farewell to people one cares about, to say nothing of all the other emotions people can experience around leave-takings, or the practical concerns about who will take on some of the tasks that X or Y has done so willingly and so well for however long, and whether it would be positive or unethically exploitative to encourage Z₁ or Z₂ to pick up some of those . . .

The Women’s Center participates in this emotional situation. In particular, our staffing arrangements change annually, as our Student Coordinator always moves on, whether to graduation or to another Field Education position, or even to devote more time to coursework. The Student Coordinator position is temporary, by design.

This week will officially be Debra Trevino’s last as Women’s Center Student Coordinator for 2008-2009. This does not mean, we think and hope, that we need to say a permanent “goodbye”. As Deb has repeatedly affirmed, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily!” — not as if we had been trying. She has expressed her intentions of remaining involved with the work of the Women’s Center as a friend, supporter, and possibly even (we’re working on it) participant in the dramatic activities now being planned for 2010. [Reminder: meeting about VagMons this Friday, 12:30, in the Women's Center.]

This seems an opportune moment to voice a public thanks to Debra for her contributions over the past year, as worship liaison and planner, as secretary at committee meetings, as faithful staffer of space, taker of messages, schlepper of equipment, salesperson of raffle tickets, stuffer of envelopes, knitter of prayer shawls, articulator of positions, and as teacher and colleague, all under the rubric of Student Coordinator. Thank you for your work this year, best wishes for your work to come, godspeed, welcome to the new rubric of friend and supporter of the Women’s Center . . . and to that meeting on Friday!

 

Many Thanks and (Partial) Au Revoir

Much appreciated spring flowers with card

Thank you, friends — members of the class of 2009, Student Coordinator Debra Trevino, Faculty Liaison Johanna Bos, others — for the unexpected beautiful flowers and gift at the celebration Friday, but even more, for the pleasure and privilege associated with serving as Acting Director of the Women’s Center at LPTS for the past two years!

(The picture here doesn’t do the gift justice, but is the best I can offer. My family and I are enjoying the flowers thoroughly. When I at last could bring myself to open and read the card, I was deeply moved by the expressions of appreciation and affection — which I reciprocate. The card itself is an additional delight, with a gorgeous graphic — a detail from “The May Queen” by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh — and a recipe for Scotch pancakes taken from the book Taking Tea with Mackintosh: the Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms, all aside from the promise of a new book contained therein, so that taken all together this qualifies as a particularly delightful gift.)

As some readers know, I will be taking a leave of absence from the Women’s Center at LPTS beginning in June, with the express purpose, and charge, of finishing my languishing dissertation (”Utopian Discourse in the Work of Three Late-20th Century Philosophers: Adorno, Irigaray, and Agamben”). Even though I want to spend more time on that project, almost desperately, the decision to take a leave of absence was difficult to make. My ambition is to work as diligently and quickly as is consistent with some desirable quantum of scholarly integrity, so as to miss as little of the excitement here as possible.

I have agreed to continue editing the blog. And nothing can induce me to stay away from various Women’s Center events, like the Transgender Day of Remembrance, or the encore performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. So I won’t be completely absent — but, I hope, absent enough and absent well enough to meet the looming deadlines.

Breaking news regarding my developing dissertation thoughts should be available, at least semi-regularly, at Utopian Discourse. At least, that’s the current plan.

Once again, everyone, many many thanks and au revoir!

 

Space for Life

Women of the LPTS Class of 2009 are invited to a celebration in their honor on Friday, May 8, 2009 in the Women's Center

The mission statement of the Women’s Center at LPTS includes the effort to “provide a safe space to discuss and hear one another’s stories.” We become especially aware of that spatial dimension of the mission when we plan an event in the Women’s Center’s still-more-new-than-not space (WE LOVE IT!!). We can organize talks, discussions, meetings, celebrations like the one this afternoon, for women graduates, and these events can take place because we have a place for them to take place in.

But the physical space (WE LOVE IT!) of the Women’s Center is only part of the story. A room, or a program, is not automatically a context for discussing and hearing one another’s stories. That context includes what we might want to call interpersonal space, a space that we have to build between two or three or more people. That space consists of history, of relationship. It can open, or close, in response to our mutual activities; it can expand with our listening, care, attention, or contract with neglect. It supports its own language, a language that recognizes the personal meanings that attach to words, expressions, gestures, responses. In that space, in the relational space created between friends, co-workers, classmates, we can hear one another’s stories and tell our own.

Perhaps all change does happen through conversation, as my church newsletter reminds me from time to time. If so, that change has something to do with the change in the world — the interpersonal space that constitutes the world in which people actually live — that takes place in the very act of conversation. Or, at least, that can take place there, if we build the place for it to take place in between ourselves in that conversation. We don’t always.

According to our mission statement, the Women’s Center at LPTS “exists to work for equality and dignity of women in all communities, including religious professions, for the unveiling of the continuing oppression of women of all races and nations, and for the building of community locally, nationally and globally.” It sounds big. It is big, and we are small. But the interpersonal, relational space we are building — between friends, colleagues, classmates — including the remarkable classmates of the Class of 2009 — is large, and growing larger. And it is in that new space that this vision, and this mission, really take place.

 

On the Celebration This Friday

Women of the LPTS Class of 2009 are invited to a celebration in their honor on Friday, May 8, 2009 in the Women's Center

Yesterday, staff and volunteers at the Women’s Center busied themselves with preparations for Friday’s celebration of women graduates in the Louisville Seminary Class of 2009. On Friday, May 8, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m., in the Women’s Center, we will celebrate the achievement of staying the seminary course and attaining the prize of the upward call to a diploma. The agenda includes food, flowers, music, and a few (very brief) speeches, as well as, we hope, lots of conversation, congratulations, preparatory reminiscences — “Do you remember when . . .”, “What about . . .” — and elated “I can’t believe it’s!”

In fact, it seems we designed this celebration with the “I can’t believe it!”’s in mind. People need celebrations like this precisely because of the “I can’t believe it!”’s that accompany the achievements they celebrate.

It takes awhile for the meaning of big events to sink in, take root. We can use some time, some space, to ponder and appreciate the fact of having accomplished something, before rushing out to do the work of living with it . . . and with everything it means.

It takes awhile to come to terms with what a big accomplishment means about us. If we don’t take the time to notice, we can miss the revelations summed up and transformed into an accomplishment: revelations of persistence, determination, intelligence, creativity, depth, thoughtfulness, wit, humor . . . We may not always recognize these things in ourselves; others may not always remark them in us. Women, in particular, have not always been led to expect to see these qualities in ourselves. We can use an occasion that calls us to pay attention to the revelations embedded in what we’ve achieved — and to make them something to remember. Because at least half the value in revelation lies in remembering it in the times when we don’t have the same clarity and confidence, and need it.

We think women, in particular, can use a special celebration in their honor. Women often have had the role of organizing celebrations: baby showers, birthday parties, receptions, fellowship times. Food, flowers, and getting people together — according to Thomas C. Foster¹, all earth-motherly motifs. Women less often have had the role of being celebrated, at least historically. Pericles articulated the sentiment, that persists even today in some quarters: “. . . and greatest [glory] will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad.”² In that scheme, the best official memory of women is none at all.

The mission of the Women’s Center, insofar as it includes “celebrating the gifts and achievements of women in the church and the world,” expressly challenges that sentiment. Instead, we insist that women’s achievements, half of humanity’s achievements, ought not to go unnoticed, un- or undervalued, and unsung. And since they have gone precisely this way for too long, they demand extra attention from those who have made it their task to redress the imbalance.

It takes awhile to redress imbalances that have become a deeply imbedded part of our culture, that have had the sanction of every facet of our tradition for centuries, that have generated adaptive attitudes and behaviors that people have inculcated generation after generation, and that we ourselves have cultivated in ourselves, mistakenly thinking them virtues. The attitude that people shouldn’t make a big fuss over us. The idea that taking time out from work to rejoice makes us frivolous and maybe even a bit despicable. The practice of minimizing our own achievements — to the point of making them invisible, even to ourselves.

So we can all use some time, some space, that weighs in on the other side of the balance. We can all benefit from some food, flowers, and getting women together, in the spirit of celebrating these women’s real-life-historic achievement, in the church and in the world that church serves.

References
¹ Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like A Professor (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 271, 274.
² Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Bedford Anthology of World Literature Vol. 1, The Ancient World, Beginnings-100 C.E. ed. Paul Davis et al. (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004) p. 1141.

 

Last Week of Class

A class for women at Manzanar, 1942, by Dorothea Lange

Yesterday began the last week of classes, spring semester 2009, here at Louisville Seminary.

People here observe this with a mixture of relief, panic (”I have two papers to write tonight!”), regret (”Where did this semester go?), anticipation — especially for those students who are looking forward to accepting, or receiving, calls. We noted that yesterday’s Gender and Ministry committee meeting closed the year, with finality: that group of people will not assemble again for that purpose, as student representatives move on to other assignments or away from the Seminary entirely, as faculty representatives shift to other committees, as our Student Coordinator Debra Trevino moves on to work with a congregation. Such final scenes will be played out over and over again across the campus, as first one and then another class meets for the last time.

The rhythm of the academic year may not uniquely focus attention on the passage of time — consider the cycles of the agrarian year, and the related but different cycles of the liturgical calendar. But the academic rhythm adds to that pattern the uniqueness of classes: groups of individuals who assemble, negotiate mutual expectations and arrangements, pursue a common course for a time, in the process making one another’s deeper or more superficial acquaintance, gaining insight and appreciation. Classmates come to stand inevitably in one another’s debt, as all will become for each, for ever afterwards, part of that past which serves as ground for every present to come.

None of us springs fully formed, like Athena, from the Godhead. Not even Jesus, who as our partner in the human condition for profound and even now not fully fathomed reasons, like us became a specific, concrete someone, identical to no one else, through specific, concrete, and finite interaction with concrete individual others. Classmates learn more than the content of specific subject matters. We learn, unavoidably, from one another, something about living with others as ourselves. We could say, and not say too much, that the selves we become owe something to our classmates. And the selves our classmates become owe something to us.

Of course, our participation in classes doesn’t end with school, nor did it begin there. Sessions have classes; congregations make up complex classes; perhaps even our neighbors are our classmates, though that might be stretching the point. So as we reflect on classes, in the light of classes here reaching their stopping points and parting of ways, we hope we do so as generous classmates, made wiser and happier by the members of our various classes, who have themselves become wiser and happier thanks to us.

 

In the Mail

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Jan Vermeer

Here are a few things we’ve learned from recent correspondence:

Kentucky Women’s Book Festival

News has come from the Women’s Center at University of Louisville about the Kentucky Women’s Book Festival, Saturday, May 16, 9:00 – 5:00 p.m., at the Ekstrom Library on the University of Louisville Belknap Campus. The Festival will feature Kentucky authors like opening speaker Bethany Griffin, luncheon keynote speaker Sena Jeter Naslund, and independent publisher Kate Larken of Motes Books, along with others, speaking on their work and other issues of interest to readers and thinkers. (Our Acting Director Heather Thiessen think’s it’s particularly thoughtful of the Women’s Center at U of L to organize something like this for her birthday!)

Alliances for Social Justice Conference

Our role-models at the Barnard center for Research on Women sent us word on the National Council for Research on Women’s annual conference, “Igniting Change: Activating Alliances for Social Justice”, to be held June 10-12 in New York. A glance at the program indicates that it will be an interesting, exciting and informative three days for anyone with some time to spend in New York and an interest in social justice and women (i.e., like Wimminwise readers).

News from the Benedictines

We’ve gotten the latest Benedictine Bridge, the newsletter of the Benedictine Women of Madison, where our friend Lynne Smith, OSB, works and lives. We took a particular interest in the article about “green roofs” — a way to save energy by covering all or part of a building’s roof with soil and planting it with grass or other vegetation, and began speculating about the fact that White Hall, where the Women’s Center at LPTS lives, has a pretty flat roof . . .

Global Media Monitoring Project

An invitation to learn more about the Global Media Monitoring Project, which monitors the presentation and positioning of women in the world’s news media. This project began in 1995, and since then has uncovered the striking absence of women, women’s viewpoints and women’s voices from the “factual” presentation of the world’s news. According to the project’s website:

GMMP 2005 showed that news paints a picture of a world in which women are virtually invisible. Women are dramatically under-represented in the news. A comparison of the results from the three GMMPs in 1995, 2000 and 2005 revealed that change in the gender dimensions of news media has been small and slow across the 15-year period. Only 21% of news subjects – the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about – are female. Women’s points of view are rarely heard in the topics that dominate the news agenda; even in stories that affect women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, it is the male voice (64% of news subjects) that prevails. When women do make the news it is primarily as ‘stars’ or ‘ordinary people’, not as figures of authority. As newsmakers, women are under-represented in professional categories. As authorities and experts, women barely feature in news stories. While the study found a few excellent examples of exemplary gender-balanced and gender-sensitive journalism, it demonstrated an overall glaring deficit in the news media globally, with half of the world’s population barely present.

The leaders of the project are now gearing up for the Fourth Global Media Monitoring Project, which will take place in November, 2009, and we are considering how the Women’s Center at LPTS might be able to participate in the project.