The Sacred Feminine

One of the elements of The DaVinci Code book/movie phenomenon that has caused a lot of controversy is an allusion to "the Sacred Feminine."

Other religions have gods and goddesses; a few - like some of the Gnostic writings - actually elevate the feminine as superior to the masculine in deity as well as humanity. But Christianity does not, this work tells us; it's a men-only leadership club that doesn't recognize the human feminine, let alone the Sacred Feminine.

What is the Sacred Feminine?

Wikipedia describes it as a concept "rooted in the idea that all life flows through those bodies in nature that are feminine:"

Philosophically, following the path of the Sacred Feminine calls on followers to embrace somewhat essentialist views of spiritual femininity. Cooperation is valued over confrontation, nurturing over domination, peace over war, creativity over destruction. And while these concepts are reductionist and essentialist, followers believe that these concepts must be brought into balance with the predominant patriarchal power structure in contemporary culture.

That may sound prejudicial and gender-incorrect, but as a reaction to centuries of what its adherents perceive as male-dominated culture, perhaps it can be understood as having some basis, and a reasonable emphasis on balance.

And while detractors (inside and outside of Christianity) may snort that there is no such thing as the Sacred Feminine, I beg to differ.

The Sacred Feminine is real, just as real a part of scripture as salvation by grace through faith. And though I don't buy into a conspiracy theory that it's been suppressed, I do believe it has been neglected.

It's a real yearning on the part of many women (and a number of men!) who perceive an imbalance in the description offered in scripture of God the Father, Christ the Son and even the Holy Spirit referred to in the masculine by Jesus.

If we'll look carefully, we'll find the Sacred Feminine there, too.

It's not the Gnostics' Sophia (wisdom) or - forgive me, ZOE Group - Zoe (life) that is the Sacred Feminine.

It's not childbearing that makes the feminine nature more godlike or closer to God than the masculine ... anymore than it's the tendency to be authoritative and to claim omniscience that makes the male more like God.

It's more like the old Pogo comic strip punch line, "We have met the enemy - and he is us!" ... with a twist.

The Sacred Feminine isn't the enemy.

But it is us.

It's God's people. It's us. As Israel in the Old Testament, we were the unfaithful bride. (See Jeremiah 3, Hosea 1 and others.)

As the followers of Jesus since his incarnation, we were ransomed and taken back and intimately washed. (Remember that embarrassing bath metaphor in Ephesians 5?)

We're the bride of Christ. In the Revelation to John, the Visionary sees us coming down from heaven, a bridal city encrusted with jewels and pearls, ready to mee the Bridegroom. Before that, we appeared as a woman in travail giving birth to a man child and fleeing to the wilderness for protection from a destroyer. We've been washed, clothed, decorated, and given a garden with the river of life embanked by groves of the tree of life - the one Adam and Eve never got to touch.

We're "sacred" in the sense of being set apart, sanctified, forgiven, washed - not by our own wit, power or righteousness - but by His. We become immortal, divine, reigning with Him forever and ever.

And that reunion restores the balance that creation has lacked for so long.

Some of Gnosticism's creation stories posit a far superior Eve created by one goddess or another, breathing life into limp Adam - then being villified and blamed for the fall in the Garden which, for various reasons in each version, wasn't her fault.

Perhaps you've encountered the same kind of idiotic, chauvinistic sermon which probably gave rise to that myth as a reaction, centuries ago. Don't fall for either stupid extreme.

Eve was created by the Godhead to be from Adam's side, at Adam's side. To her credit: when she was tempted, she did not fall prey to the temptation of selfishness. She wanted to share the fruit (misrepresented to her as something wonderfully good and able to level the playing field with the God-parent who loved them) with her husband.

I have to wonder - given masculine-kind's predelictions - would Adam have shared a purportedly "good thing" if the serpent had pulled him aside to convince him? If he had doubts, at least we can credit him with being willing to share in the responsibility and risk with her.

Just as Christ (the last Adam) was willing not only to share, but to shoulder, all of the risk for his beloved bride.

It isn't scriptural - and it is blatantly gender-incorrect - but it is also a telling moment in Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve when the mother of mankind has passed on and her husband of many centuries mourns in tribute to her that wherever she was, was Eden.

And Christ, the Bridegroom of Heaven, feels exactly the same way about His Sacred Feminine.

In Cognito Ergo Sum

By the way, how do you know that I exist?

You read my blog. Someone has to write it. Therefore it must be me. Right?

But how do you know it's me? How do you know it's the me that I have represented myself to be, here, with these very pixels? Have you ever met me? Have you ever sat at a table with me and eaten a burger with me? Even if you have, was it enough to get to know me well enough that you'd swear in court that the person you met is the same one who writes this blog?

How do you know I'm telling the truth?

Do you know someone who knows me better than you do? Can you really trust them? How well do they know me?

How do you - or they - know that I've done the things I've said I've done, or been the person I've described here, or that I'm not an amalgam of several other bloggers who all log in with the same user name and password, edited by one particular partner for style?

If I do exist ....

How do you know I went to Harding? Married twice? Lost my dad to a coronary episode? Have two adopted children? Attend a church? Used to watch too much Star Trek?

How do you know I wasn't fathered by a Roman soldier, don't have an identical twin brother named Thomas, didn't marry a nice Jewish girl named Mary and start a divine dynasty, and didn't fake my own death or coerce one of my close friends into orchestrating it so that I could be free of this corrupted mortal body?

Is it possible that you actually believe what some others say who have met me, talked to me or even know me pretty well? That you swallow wholesale what they have to say about me because they have no real reason to lie to you about me? That you accept without demand for proof that I live fairly transparently and am, for the most part, a WYSIWYG kind of person?

Is it conceivable that you believe I exist and write this blog because all of the other possibilities fail to meet Occam's Razor; that they're too complex and improbable to be of consequence?

Is it acceptable to do so because I am really a person of relatively minor consequence - but if I started making difficult demands on you and claimed to hold your destiny in my hands and proved that I loved you deeply and completely by taking an extravagantly sacrifical loss in order to profit you ... wouldn't it just be a whole lot easier to say, "Look, I'm not even sure Keith Brenton exists. It's just a name on a blog, after all.

"There's no proof he was ever real.

"Who would do something like that, anyway?"

Who, indeed?

Sad to say, it almost certainly wouldn't be me.

It'd be the One I try so desperately and so pathetically to emulate.

It'd be the ultimately WYSIWYG Person.

It'd be the One who took the loss for my profit.

It'd be You-know-Who.

The Church Bowling Alley

The church I grew up attending in Indianapolis built a new building about forty-two years ago. I can still remember - not long after it had been built - an evening when my dad, an elder there, came home from a meeting at that new building and told my mom about it, still looking bemused and a little baffled.

His meeting, you see, was with a lady from another church within our fellowship, a church that was convinced that we did everything wrong. She had been told at her church that we had built a bowling alley in the basement of our new building. Ever gracious, my dad gave her a full tour of the new building, assuring her that no bowling alley had ever been planned or constructed there. (There was an extremely long and wide hallway in the basement serving classrooms and a fellowship hall/kitchen which, during the foundation and wall-building, might have looked suspiciously like ... a hallway.)

At the close of the tour, he asked the lady if she had any questions. She was troubled that she had been told something untrue, but she had no questions. So he asked her one: "What exactly would be wrong with having a bowling alley in the basement of our building, if we used it to provide good, clean entertainment for the inner-city kids in our neighborhood?" She wasn't happy about the kitchen being there, but she had no answer to that question, either.

I stand by the wisdom of my late dad.

There are many of my brothers and sisters at my home church, now - and more who have left it - who have been uncertain about whether it was wise or even right to build a Family Life Center with a gymnasium and cafe, along with needed classroom space. Those are legitimate concerns, and there was a time when I shared them. It cost a great deal of money. It costs money to maintain. Certainly the money could have been spent in many other ways - but I should point out that my home church spends about two-thirds of the congregation's gifts on mission outreach.

To me, the FLC is one of those outreaches. It is built; it has been open a couple of months; it is used wisely and almost constantly to welcome the community - and its potential to do so is just beginning to be tapped.

To me, the sin is not in building an edifice for God - whether it is a magnificent cathedral, double-wide trailer; concrete-block utilitarian modern monstrosity or equatorial mud hut; with kitchen or cafe; with bowling alley or Family Life Center.

The sin would be in building it and not using it to His glory.

Many times I have been guilty of "only-one-way" thinking - and this is just one example. There's only one way to worship. Only one way to evangelize. Only one way to use a church building. My way.

Or the highway.

And I have often been convinced that my way was indisputably God's way, God's only way, when on closer examination ... it became obvious that there were some matters which He leaves up to our individual judgment, creativity, conscience.

Individual. That's an important word. Because His word also makes it plain that when we use our judgment on a matter and later violate our conscience regarding it, that's wrong. So I'm trying to be less critical of other viewpoints, and more persuasive about God's trust in us, and in our own judgment.

As chilling as it may seem:

• When it comes to sharing the story of Jesus, we are Plan A.
• There is no Plan B.
• What we bind on earth will (be?/already have been?) bound in heaven.
• From the Garden, through the desert, to the cafe table and volleyball court, God's people have chosen in their day whom they will serve - and often, how.

I know how my dad chose for his house. Because sometimes my family served in that kitchen. And sometimes we served people who came in off the inner-city streets, and just needed a good meal.

But I should tell you the rest of his story.

To the befuddled woman who had come to see the truth for herself about my boyhood church building and could only be dismayed about its kitchen, Dad pressed yet another question: "You have a water fountain in your church building, don't you? It's only there to provide refreshment and pleasure for the people who attend ... not there, specifically, to worship God, is it ...?"

Dad looked a little regretful when he recounted the story to Mom: "I hope she doesn't go back and convince them to take out that water fountain."

Rude Phone Retorts

I used to have quite a cache of them in my head, ready to use at the drop of a phone receiver ... or rather, just before.

But time and the no-call list have eroded the cache, and I'd like to think that a kinder, gentler nature emerging in me has helped wipe out a few of them.

Before all of that, there was I time when I did not hesitate to answer the incessant, invasive ding-a-lings:

"Well, if you knew it was a wrong number, why did you dial it?"

"Fascinating as it sounds to spend hours trapped in Nowhere, Florida listening to some failure-in-life raving about the features of the time-share condo you wish to saddle me and my progeny with forever, I'm afraid I shall have to decline your kind invitation."

"Did you just belch while you were talking to me? Just now? Did you? How rude! Don't you ever dare to call this number again. I have caller ID and I am not too proud to deliver a world-shuddering belch in response to your rudeness. You're just lucky I haven't had a carbonated beverage for the last several hours."

"That's really interesting, but ... do you like the sound of my voice? I mean, do you find it pleasant? Would you say even attractive? Could you go so far as to describe it as irresistible?"

"Yes; right. Listen, do you actually get paid to do this or do you just enjoy annoying people?"

"Oh, thank you for calling. I'm not really interested in what you're saying but I don't have any friends and the friends I do have don't call anymore and sometimes it's just so reassuring to hear another human voice after talking to no one but my cats all day and night ...."

"Uh-huh. If your supervisor is handy, would you tell them something for me? Would you tell them that you're quitting this dead-end job and finding a real career position somewhere you can actually help people, and put your God-given talents to good use benefitting humanity and if your supervisor isn't a complete idiot, that perhaps he or she should fire the whole lot of you and you could all go job-hunting together like real colleagues in a support group, you know?"

"No, I'm sorry. They don't live here anymore. We killed them and buried them under the ... but perhaps I've taken enough of your time already."

Those were the days. But they're gone, and good riddance. Time to get those nasty retorts out of my head and tell them good-bye and put them here in pixels.

(Just in case those good old days decide they want to call back.)

I Think of Myself As ....

I caught a few minutes - my favorite few minutes - of the movie Guess Who's Coming To Dinner a few days ago. It's the part where Sidney Poitier's character, John Prentice, finally confronts his father (who opposes his engagement to a white girl) by saying: "Dad ... You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself ... as a man."

This post isn't about race. It's about identity.

I grew up in a church that was somewhat uncomfortable among fellow congregations proudly bearing the sign "Church of Christ." Our preaching minister, David H. Bobo, was not exclusivist in his view of fellowship and brotherhood. At the time, my parents - and my late dad was an elder there - tended toward that exclusionary view.

How many I times I heard David Bobo recite by heart (not just memory) the poem that closes "... but love and I had the wit to win; we drew a circle that drew them in!"

There were times when I wished I could tell my folks how I felt; conjure the words I would have patterned after John Prentice's revelation:

"Mom ... Dad ... You think of yourselves as members of the Church of Christ. I think of myself ... as a Christian."

Dad has passed on, and I think he was moving toward a wider definition of Christianity in his later years. Mom has certainly begun to.

These days I find a less-cultured metaphor in an ALLTEL television commercial: seeing myself wanting to move to embrace those icons of other fellowships that I have included in my "friendship circle;" longing to answer their objections "But that's not the way we do business!" with the same confident reply of the ALLTEL guy:

"It is now."

What do you think of yourself as?

How's That Workin' For Ya?

I think I've found a new ministry.

But I don't fly on planes often enough to put it into practice.

On my Tuesday flight from Dallas to L.A., I happened to be seated close to Victor and Evelyn Knowles as well as Dwight and Charme Robarts - all guest presenters at the Pepperdine Lectures where I was headed.

I also happened to be sitting by a sweet young lady who was reading one of Dr. Phil's books. I don't know which one; I'm not familiar with 'em. From what I could read on the back cover you could have titled it Be Your Best You.

Well, back up. She was trying to read one of Dr. Phil's books. She would read a few paragraphs, then fall asleep. This happened three or four times, and one time when she awakened she saw that I was about three-quarters of the way through an excellent book, Rumours of Another World by another Phil, last name Yancey. She asked to read the back cover and how I liked it.

I was really liking it. It's all about those little hints and evidences in the world around us that God is real, and is behind it all: the complexity of the human body ... our innate sense of right and wrong ... the motivation of Jesus Christ. I told her so. She smiled, and said it sounded interesting.

I finished the book just as the plane touched down. I really liked it. It was one of those books that I just knew I would read over and over.

But then I surprised myself.

I closed the book and said, "I really enjoyed this book." Then I handed it to her. "And I hope you do too."

She thanked me several times, and seemed genuinely grateful.

I told her "You can't keep a good book to yourself."

I had resisted the urge to ask her, Dr. Phil-style, if her book was working for her; obviously it wasn't. Maybe the other Phil's book will.

Okay, it's not much of a ministry. I don't even know if she'll read the book. She might, and it might not touch her heart at all. Don't complain to me that I didn't preach the gospel to her right there in front of several better-qualified witnesses. There's only so much you can communicate while a plane is waiting to taxi into a gate, even at Dallas-Ft. Worth.

So I asked her what put her on a plane and she told me about her sister's upcoming wedding and I surprised myself again by being genuinely interested rather than pretending I was interested, because she had been gracious enough to accept my gift. And we chatted until we deplaned; crossed paths at the airport a couple more times before my Thrifty Rental van picked me up ... and we'll probably never see each other again this side of heaven.

But Who knows?

As I said, I think I've discovered a new ministry. But I don't fly on planes often enough to put it into practice. Maybe if you fly on planes or ride buses and trains or sit in waiting rooms and coffee shops more than I do, you could.

Just give someone a book that you love, then tell 'em why God inspires you through it.

Then tell 'em you have a friend named Keith who says "You can't keep a good book to yourself."

And, if you do ... drop me an e-mail and let me know how it's workin' for ya.