The risen Christ is our SUN

by John Wijngaards, Easter Sunday, 4th of April 2021

At Easter we glibly speak of resurrection without getting any closer to what Gnostics called ‘understanding’ it.

What does resurrection mean in practical terms? How does our Easter faith distinguish Christians from non-Christians? And if we who believe in Christ “have already passed from death to life” (John 5,24), that is: if resurrection starts now, what does it consist in and how can we know it? Paul said he knew the power of Christ’s resurrection (Phil 2,8-10). Then surely we should be able to know it too.

For our search, Gnostic writings may prove a help. Though Gnosticism strayed from Christianity into various heretical sects in the course of the centuries, it probably had one of its roots in the Johannine tradition and may have preserved some valuable Christian insights partly lost in other strands.

A Gnostic letter of around 200 AD states that resurrection is real for us Christians, because we ‘possess’ resurrection. “Resurrection of the spirit”, it says, “swallows resurrection of the psyche and resurrection of the flesh”. It then describes resurrection of the spirit as “being drawn upward by God as rays are drawn by the sun”.

Gnostic thinking

Gnostics commonly distinguished between three types of Christian: earthly, psychic and spiritual; corresponding to the Greek distinction in human beings of the material body, the psyche (animal soul) and the pneuma (spiritual soul). The three types expressed distinct pastoral categories which, interestingly enough, still have some relevance today.

• Material Christians are, for Gnostics, those Christians who have either never had, or have lost, any real spiritual dimension. The whole of religion is translated into material terms. Prayer means asking God for money or health. Weddings and funerals arc reduced to mere social functions.
• Psychic Christians, on the other hand, take the practice of their religion seriously. They believe revealed truth, receive the sacraments, honour Christian ethics. They fall short, according to Gnostics, in their level of awareness and of participation. Psychic Christians objectivise the truths of faith, making God speak and act as if God were human. They look on ritual and sacrament as quasi-magical sources of grace. Psychics believe the commandments were formulated by God himself/herself as the detailed guidelines of an anxious parent. In all this, Gnostics contend, psychics miss the characteristically spiritual dimension brought about by resurrection.
• Spiritual Christians, who have experienced “the resurrection of the spirit”, also accept the doctrines of faith, the sacramental dispensation and Christian moral principles. But having discovered that God is genuinely Spirit and is Spirit in themselves, they approach these realities as mysteries. God, they know, is infinitely beyond human categories and so we can only speak of God through image and metaphor. The sacraments heal and foster, as dynamic signs. Laws and regulations do not express God’s immutable decrees. They are human approximations distinct from Love which is God itself. Spiritual Christians are the true “Gnostics” (knowers) because they know God and spiritual realities directly.

Christ is our SUN

Remember: Gnostics describe resurrection of the spirit as “being drawn upward by God as rays are drawn by the sun”. What does this mean? All of us carry within us rays of light. Through resurrection we consciously relate these rays to their origin, to God, who is like the sun. God holds us fast, as the sun holds its rays, until our sunset, that is our physical death. Then God draws us back to himself/herself as the sun pulls back its rays. Through resurrection we discover we are light and start living in the day.

Now Gnostics were a varied and funny lot. Some were spiritual snobs. Some mixed their Christian beliefs with incompatible pagan philosophies. Some seem to have advocated bizarre forms of behaviour. They hardly were the kind of people to be universally trusted as spiritual guides. Yet they may have preserved valuable insights.

What does the Gnostic view of resurrection mean in practical terms? I am risen with Christ if I have become aware, in a tangible way, that God, who is above everything relates to me directly. This consciousness of resurrection shows itself clearly in that beautiful truly Christian knowledge that God is love. If I have this consciousness, I feel secure in his love. I know that whatever may happen to me and whatever my human weakness, God is there to forgive me and love me and pull me through. The realisation of God’s direct and personal love overcomes any fear I may have, even the fear of death.

I am still not fully risen with Christ, I am still a ‘psychic’ Christian, if I allow anything at all to take the place of my trust in God’s love. If my spirituality hardly rises above observance, it may well be that conformity has dethroned love in me. If I constantly feel scruples about external transgressions, my God may be fear. If I never meet God in a silent person-to-person encounter, I am missing out on my deepest potential in relationships. In all such cases the cure will probably require more than a gradual recovery. It calls for a true liberation, for an opening of my eyes to the reality of God’s love, for a resurrection of the spirit in me.

John Wijngaards

[abbreviated from an article I published in THE LONDON TIMES, Monday April 1 1991]

The Review  RCWP-Canada

book review by Susan K. Roll,   15 February 2021

John Wijngaards, What They Didn’t Teach You in Catholic College.  Women in the priesthood and the mind of Christ.  Lafayette, LS, USA:  Acadian House, 2020.  ISBN 13: 978-09995884-4-4.  ISBN 10: 0-9995884-4-3.  213 pp.  $16.95 US.

“This common priesthood is given through the Sacrament of Baptism.  We should note that this baptism is exactly the same for every single person.  There is absolutely no difference in the baptism conferred on women.  And this is revolutionary. … The ordination to the sacramental priesthood is an extension of the basic sacrificial and prophetic sharing that has already been given in baptism.”  (p. 92)

Here in the proverbial nutshell lies the core of the theological foundation for admissibility to the Sacrament of Orders: Baptism itself.  Vatican pronouncements on the ordination of women avoid engaging with this fact, relying instead on a handful of arguments purportedly drawn from interpretations of what Jesus of Nazareth might have willed for the assembly called Church that grew and expanded geographically when he was no longer with them on earth.  As a general rule, when the arguments for a particular position are not strong enough to support it, and those who advance the argument insist upon its absolute truth to the point that they attempt to quash all further discussion, there is clearly much more driving the issue than the arguments presented.  Something else is propelling their stance, perhaps something difficult to acknowledge, perhaps something embarrassing or something perceived as threatening.  Perhaps something that is just wrong.

In this essay I will address a few of the issues raised by John Wijngaards from a slightly different perspective – historical-critical methodology in the case of the arguments concerning the ordination of women, as well as new thinking on male priesthood, to try to shine light on the underlying issues.  But at the same time I would not want to discourage anyone from reading the book because they think it’s too academic in nature.  It’s not.  Wijngaards blends together not only history and scripture, but his own lived experiences with anecdotes, correspondence, personal reflections and his lifelong passion for justice, on an international and an ecumenical level.  There is nothing in this work that would intimidate general readers –in fact it would make a great study-group text.  It’s an enjoyable read.

Scriptural arguments concerning women’s leadership

Wijngaards matches the chief scripture-based arguments invoked by the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as justifications for the policy against calling women to ordained ministry.  He refutes each argument on the same prima facie, at-face-value basis on which the Magisterium employed it.  I believe the arguments for opening ordination would be stronger if we take a more realistic look at the nature of the scripture texts themselves, and if we remember that the Gospel writers did not intend to report facts.  They were not journalists.  They set down selected stories and sayings of Jesus that went back several generations, so as to persuade the hearers that this Jesus of Nazareth was truly the promised Messiah of Israel.  The Gospels were shaped by their authors’ overarching goal.

A chief example is the Magisterium’s use of the idea that there were twelve and only twelve apostles, with male names, in order to argue that Jesus of Nazareth deliberately selected only males to be the official ancestors of what would become bishops and priests in the later Church.  The real significance of “The Twelve” for the early generations after Christ was to set up a rhetorical argument to claim that they mirrored (and succeeded) the twelve tribes of Israel and to establish the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.  In fact Wijngaards points out that the later reference to seventy-two apostles sent to all the corners of the earth contradicts a limited definition of “apostle.”  (We might add, so does Paul when he calls Junia an apostle.)  Did Jesus of Nazareth, the night before he was executed, actually think of appointing only twelve responsible leaders?  Did he intend to exclude the many identified women in his movement?  Can we assume that Jesus really made a conscious selection of males because he was “very much hampered by the ‘social myth’ of the world in which he lived”?  (p. 57)  We can’t know, because there are no recordings, no unbiased histories.  We can only surmise, and that is the point at which Wijngaards invokes the centuries-long influence of what he calls social myth, bias or prejudice against women.  We will return to this shortly.

In his treatment of the presence of women in the Gospel of Luke and Acts, Wijngaards does encourage a wider perspective that takes account of his focus on the early Christian communities and what they may have needed to hear to move forward, develop new ministries and take the message far afield.  Of course these are not in the words of women themselves but rather an observer’s accounts, chosen for their relevance to the first generations of believers.  Do we know why Luke made the editorial selections of stories he made and shaped them in a certain way?  Again, we can only guess, but in the Lukan texts we are provided a rich variety of accounts of women’s presence and action that works against the credibility of a proof-texting approach that would absolutize one interpretation over another to justify a much later policy.

In any case, I have to confess to a lurch when I read the section heading, “Jesus wants women in the priesthood.”  There was no priesthood in Jesus’ entourage of followers, and none in the first generations following his earthly lifetime either.  Fortunately Wijngaards makes a save, so to speak, by returning repeatedly to the role of the Spirit in guiding the Church.

Arguments from “Tradition”

“Tradition”, with a capital T, presumes the power to enforce with penalties universal conformity to the laws and policies that take their justification from it.  Wijngaards helpfully points out that throughout Church history the exclusion of women from the priesthood is rarely put down to Jesus, but instead justified by arguments from natural law that purported to demonstrate women’s natural inferiority to men.  He also supports this part of the argument by noting that the early episkopoi, the overseers/bishops, were drawn from many communities and were not solely Jews who succeeded the apostles/twelve tribes of Israel, thus pointing to a lacuna in the line of tradition.  But a deeper question about Tradition needs to be posed.

In the words of feminist liturgist Marjorie Procter-Smith, is it our tradition?  To expand a bit, is this a tradition shaped, or co-shaped, by women theologians and promulgated by women who hold authority?   If the question sounds ridiculous, then there’s a good answer to the credibility of “Tradition” for the whole Church, both now and over the course of time.

What propels the question?

The initial context in which Wijngaards sets his advocacy for the ordination of women — the advancement of women’s prominence and women’s rights in politics, society and secular culture — is also known to those who frame contemporary official Church doctrine.  Even Pope John XXIII admitted in 1963 that women in his day were no longer willing to accept second-class status.  So why does this argument not move the question in the Catholic Church when it played some role (along with scripture and theology) in mainline Protestant churches?  For that matter, why does the desperate need for sacramental ministry in the Roman Catholic Church worldwide not push the question of the admissibility of women and married men forward, as seen in the conclusion of the Synod on the Amazon?  Wijngaards alludes to both of these as significant contextual issues profoundly affecting the Church today.  Clearly neither of these, obvious as they are, is enough.  So what constitutes the underlying entrenched core that we’re not discussing?

I would say, the deeper core is already peeking out at us from Wijngaards’ well-summarized survey of the long trajectory of belief in the natural inferiority of women as such.  In his Chapter Three he presents a concise summary of the history in the Church of the concept of women’s inherent natural inferiority: from Aristotle and Greco-Roman society, through Aquinas and Bonaventure, through the earliest canon law, up to today.  Later in the book he illustrates modern misogyny in world cultures.  There are of course volumes that could be written full of examples.  (A logical problem: if women are truly inferior by nature, why work so exceedingly hard to keep women inferior?  Won’t it just happen on its own without the polemics?)

What underlies it all is primal contempt for women and women’s bodies.  This plays out, among other areas, in the theology of the Mass as a sacrifice.  Sacrifice, as enacted by Catholics in the Eucharist, has its roots in an exclusively male act of union with a male-configured god/God and patrilineal adoption among men — as a” remedy for having been born of woman,” in the words of Harvard sociologist of religion Nancy Jay.  What is really at play here?  A belief that “weak” women represent the evil negative identity that men must reject?  Ancient blood taboos by which women’s bodies are thought to defile the sacred altar?

Wijngaards refers often to the role played by what he terms prejudice, or the social myth, of women’s inferiority.  For me these terms are so mild that they verge on misrepresenting the evil of misogyny, not only in the Church but in the way contempt for women accompanies the newer extreme right-wing movements in society.  Calling it merely “prejudice” lets them off the hook too easily.

Twenty years ago prominent liturgical historian James F. White wrote of “the Vatican’s war on women.”  Was this hyperbole?  My seminary students certainly thought so.  I think it touches a neuralgic point, and it’s high time we named it and massaged it a bit, so to speak.

An unhelpful side argument

I was perturbed to see that Wijngaards includes as an appendix an excursus designed to demonstrate the absolute reality of stereotypical male and female characteristics on biological grounds, citing a scattering of research studies.  This is flat-out biological determinism, and it plays straight into the hands of those who would keep women confined to the home.  Wijngaards seems to have intended to point out how much the Church is losing by arbitrarily suppressing the agency and the leadership of over half of its members.

This book is a valuable resource in the work of advocacy for opening the criteria for ordination.  It contains a variety of types of texts.  Of the theology, take what makes sense to help build the discourse on ordination.  And read the personal anecdotes and stories for the pleasure of meeting a new, wise, experienced and undaunted friend in the struggle.

The Seedkeepers, February 2021, Book review by Susan Roll

John Wijngaards, What They Didn’t Teach You in Catholic College.  Women in the priesthood and the mind of Christ.  Lafayette, LS, USA:  Acadian House, 2020.  ISBN 13: 978-09995884-4-4.  ISBN 10: 0-9995884-4-3.  213 pp.  $16.95 US.

I daresay anyone who’s part of CNWE, whether a longtime member or a relative newcomer, needs no introduction to the Vatican’s chief arguments against opening all ordained ministries to women, or why each argument is in its own way problematic.  We would also not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that there is no hard proof that Jesus ever intended to exclude women from leadership in the community gathered in his name.

Even knowing all this in your bones, you will find the latest book by theologian and life-long activist for the ordination of women, John Wijngaards, very much worth reading.  The friendly approachability of the title is enough to tell you that you’re in for an intriguing conversation, not a scholarly discourse.  The style is engaging and easy to read, the content toggling back and forth between the author’s refutations of the dominant official arguments against ordination, and interesting anecdotes from Wijngaards’ own life that shaped his awareness and activism.  You’ll meet a fascinating individual who first came to see the incongruity and injustice of the Vatican’s teaching, not at university nor in the Western church, but while he served as a missioner in India in the 1960’s.  The book includes an assortment of his lived experiences, stories, conversations and correspondence that colour his advocacy convincingly and vividly.  For this reason Wijngaards deserves a place among the pioneers on the question of the ordination of women, and a good deal of credit for his faithful lifelong commitment to advocacy in the face of opposition.

If you read nothing else in the book, push yourself to read his disconcerting overview of the false assumptions of women’s innate inferiority that have shaped Church doctrine, beginning with Aristotle, through the early church fathers, up through the Middle Ages and Thomas Aquinas, and well into the 20^th century with its prohibition on women touching any sacred vessel.  This section does much to explain why narrow interpretations of scripture and tradition have been used to keep women in a secondary place, and why no appeals to women’s increasing leadership in secular society today or the Church’s obvious need for the sacramental ministry of women have budged the question.

Keeping in mind the fact that in 1976 the Pontifical Biblical Commission studied the question of whether Scripture alone could decide the question of women’s ordination one way or the other, and concluded that it cannot, take a look at the assumptions made too often that we today can decide what Jesus was thinking.  The official arguments pick out justifications for a preexisting policy.  Wijngaards’ arguments take a much broader, contextual perspective on Jesus in his own time.  In the end, as he writes, “…the Spirit of Christ is speaking to us now – loudly and clearly.”

Still though, I have two reservations about the book.  First, when a Church authority unilaterally enacts a rigid policy and then presents “reasons” why the policy must be followed without question, it’s a good guess that the real reasons lie under the surface.  The point is clearly not what Jesus of Nazareth may or may not have said, or may or may not have done.  The issue is rather the use of a skewed interpretation of the surviving written texts to justify a position arising from a much later form of church government shaped by imperial power.  Something different, something not scriptural, is driving this primordial misogyny.  Fear?  Envy?  A belief that “weak” women represent the evil negative identity that men must reject?  Ancient blood taboos by which women’s bodies are thought to defile the sacred altar?  This mystery might well prove impenetrable by theology – psychology or anthropology might give us a firmer footing.

My other concern is over the fact that Wijngaards includes in his Appendices an excursus designed to demonstrate the absolute reality of stereotypical male and female characteristics on biological grounds, citing a scattering of research studies.  This is flat-out biological determinism, and it plays straight into the hands of those who would keep women confined to the home.  Any rigid male/female split does not account for the rich variety of gender identities represented among the people of God, and the fluidity of these identities.  Wijngaards seems to have intended to point out how much the Church is losing by arbitrarily suppressing the agency and the leadership of over half of its members, and that is true enough, but not by further marginalizing other persons.

Nonetheless, I recommend that you pour a cup of tea and relax over Wijngaards’ book.  Let its common sense, scripture-shaped insight and lived wisdom strengthen your spirit and give you hope.

Review of What They Don’t Teach You in Catholic College by John Wijngaards

by Gloria Ulterino

Have you ever pondered the question: should women be ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church?  Or perhaps: why on earth can’t women be ordained today in this church?  This book’s author has lived these questions for years, with a passion.  Beginning in 1965, as a young priest, Wijngaards would experience first-hand the devastating results of a lack of church leadership in southern India, where he served for nearly twenty years.  While he admittedly honors the teaching authority of the church, he’s also compelled to point out its errors—such as its position on slavery over the centuries.  (In fact, he devotes an entire chapter of this book to this issue, as an example of the church’s devastating error.)

In this readable book, Wijngaards draws upon personal experience, as well as theological scholarship, to plumb the depths of this question: can women be ordained priests in our beloved church?  His resounding “Yes” emerges out of his efforts to probe the following: the mind of Jesus; the role of cultural prejudice against the full humanity of women throughout the Tradition; the hints of Jesus’ regard for women, as found in Scripture; the origins of sacramental love for all; the devotion over the centuries to Mary as Priest; the ordination of women to the diaconate during the first millennium; the sense of the faithful in helping form church teaching; the hardening of Vatican teaching in light of ecumenical ordination of women; and the persistently disastrous church error in its teaching on slavery.  Is it not possible, he asks, for the church hierarchy to be just as wrong about ordaining women to the priesthood?

What do I most appreciate about this book?

• First of all, it has become the author’s passion to right this wrong in the Roman Catholic Church—the church of his youth, the church of his entire life, the church that must speak truth in our world.
• Second, he is like a sleuth, searching out any and every hint for the mind of Jesus. In this endeavor, of course, he points out the difference between the Jesus who walked the earth and the Christ of faith.  While Jesus lived in this world, he was immersed in the culture of his day, a time in which it would have been unthinkable for him to ordain women.  As he puts it, on page 45: “A society floats on its ‘social myth,’ that is, on the cultural framework by which it lays down its objectives and norms of behavior.  It is that social myth that has in many regards dictated the fate of men and women.”
• And yet, the earthly Jesus held women in high regard. Here Wijngaards plumbs the depth of Luke’s Gospel and Acts of the Apostles, the only evangelist to have a Book Two of his Gospel.  This becomes a perfect example of God’s Holy Spirit at work in the ongoing creation of our church.  (I would only add that the author might also have been well-served to include a few of the strong women of John’s Gospel, as yet another example of the Spirit at work in the church.)
• Jesus’ vision (in chapter 7) of a new kind of priesthood: one based upon grace, one opposed to a “setting apart,” one based upon service (yes, even to the point of sacrifice) and inspiring preaching, one we humans continually struggle to claim for ourselves.
• The importance of and need for the sense of the faithful (in chapter 10) in determining our beliefs. This is clearly, in the author’s view, the way that the church has grown and developed; thus, it is also the pathway to ongoing Gospel growth and change.

As for the rest, I urge you and your friends to purchase and read this book, that it might become a source of enlightenment and courage for us all.

Gloria Ulterino
leader of the Women of the Well
storytelling group in Rochester, New York.

on the way

NEW WOMAN – ME!  no 18

 

 

full of hope and trust
I am walking
through the days
of my time

not knowing
the distance
or the destiny
of my journey

strengthened by
God’s powerlessness
as the driving force
of my continuing
commitment

© Tina van Lieshout
translation John Wijngaards

Theological Note. When Tina talks about ‘God’s powerlessness’ she is referring to the insight of the Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen. This is what he taught: “We usually talk about God as the all-powerful, almighty God on whom we depend completely. But God wanted to become the all-powerless, all-vulnerable God who completely depends on us. Jesus is God-with-us, Emmanuel. The great mystery of God becoming human is God’s desire to be loved by us. By becoming a vulnerable child, completely dependent on human care, God wants to take away all distance between the human and the divine. By having become powerless God is closer than ever.”

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible thrust the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse women I accuse men my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

Tina van Lieshout was a Dutch Catholic woman who felt called to the priesthood. Her diocese refused her admission to the priestly formation programme which she challenged in high-profile court cases. She lost. Being both a gifted artist and poet, she described her despair in a series of paintings and meditations. But she also expressed through them her determination to realise her potential as a free and equal person.  Her work was published in the Dutch book Ook in de Naam van de Moeder en de Dochter [= ‘Also in the Name of the Mother and the Daughter’], Wilco, Amersfoort 2000. She died in 2010.

and God saw that it was very good

NEW WOMAN – ME!  no 16

 

God – They – created our world
made it purposeful and perfect
and moulded human beings,
woman and man
in Their image
God – They – delegated part of Their own task
to the image

God entrusted to human beings
the option to act
the option to omit
and human beings were crowned
to be king and queen of the earth
“..and God saw that it was very good” (Genesis 1,31)

© Tina van Lieshout
translation John Wijngaards

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible thrust the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse women I accuse men my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

Tina van Lieshout was a Dutch Catholic woman who felt called to the priesthood. Her diocese refused her admission to the priestly formation programme which she challenged in high-profile court cases. She lost. Being both a gifted artist and poet, she described her despair in a series of paintings and meditations. But she also expressed through them her determination to realise her potential as a free and equal person.  Her work was published in the Dutch book Ook in de Naam van de Moeder en de Dochter [= ‘Also in the Name of the Mother and the Daughter’], Wilco, Amersfoort 2000. She died in 2010.

I accuse men

NEW WOMAN – ME!  no 12

 

we allowed it to happen that male domination
degenerated into avarice and abuse of power,
that the Tyrant could exploit people unhindered,
that an economy of destructive ways of life
was justified

we allowed the male human to abuse
his creative energy for destruction
we allowed him to plunder the earth until it was empty
to oppress his own kith and kin

but the commission we received
has never been withdrawn
we, women and men, have to take charge
in order to protect and maintain
the earth that was entrusted to both of us

© Tina van Lieshout
translation John Wijngaards

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible thrust the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse women I accuse men my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

Tina van Lieshout was a Dutch Catholic woman who felt called to the priesthood. Her diocese refused her admission to the priestly formation programme which she challenged in high-profile court cases. She lost. Being both a gifted artist and poet, she described her despair in a series of paintings and meditations. But she also expressed through them her determination to realise her potential as a free and equal person.  Her work was published in the Dutch book Ook in de Naam van de Moeder en de Dochter [= ‘Also in the Name of the Mother and the Daughter’], Wilco, Amersfoort 2000. She died in 2010.

the dragon of money and the dragon of religion

NEW WOMAN – ME!  no 7

for so long I lived in credulous naivety
I trusted people blindly
especially those I had been taught
to look up to —
respect for traditions and rules
were a part of my inner constitution
of my social ordering
that blinded the normal logics
of my powers of assessment

now, having finally regained my sight
I am disturbed by the dreadful overwhelming power
of a banking system without love
through which people are paralysed and exploited

now, having finally regained my sight,
I am disturbed by the dreadful and colossal power
with which religions
wielding false arguments about God’s will
and God’s revenge
keep people imprisoned —
I see it all and I feel powerless

© Tina van Lieshout
translation John Wijngaards

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible thrust the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse women I accuse men my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

Tina van Lieshout was a Dutch Catholic woman who felt called to the priesthood. Her diocese refused her admission to the priestly formation programme which she challenged in high-profile court cases. She lost. Being both a gifted artist and poet, she described her despair in a series of paintings and meditations. But she also expressed through them her determination to realise her potential as a free and equal person.  Her work was published in the Dutch book Ook in de Naam van de Moeder en de Dochter [= ‘Also in the Name of the Mother and the Daughter’], Wilco, Amersfoort 2000. She died in 2010.

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible energy the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse woman I accuse man my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

1. desert journey
2. three selves in me
3. me broken in pieces
4. male and female
5. my choice
6. irrepressible energy
7. the money dragon and the religion dragon
8. evolving identity
9. women carry the church
10. the force of time
11. I accuse woman
12. I accuse man
13. my inner struggle
14. past present future
15. my dream
16. and God saw that it was very good
17. phallus worship
18. on the way

three selves in me

NEW WOMAN – ME!  no 2

 

in me lives a hunger for higher things
for belonging and infinity
in me I experience, in spite of my humanness,
the warmth of an attentive power
in mutual connectedness

in me rise feelings and values that struggle
with norms and rules of tradition and law
I note in myself, born from growing self-respect,
rebellion and aggression about my womanhood
denied by male distrust

in me grows hope–filled confidence
that the human spirit will prevail
I see my changed mentality
as basis of an equal future for women and men
and mutual respect

© Tina van Lieshout
translation John Wijngaards

MEDITATIONS

desert journey three selves in me me broken in pieces male and female my choice irrepressible thrust the money dragon and the religion dragon evolving identity women carry the church

the force of time I accuse women I accuse men my inner struggle past present future my dream and God saw that it was very good phallus worship on the way

Tina van Lieshout was a Dutch Catholic woman who felt called to the priesthood. Her diocese refused her admission to the priestly formation programme which she challenged in high-profile court cases. She lost. Being both a gifted artist and poet, she described her despair in a series of paintings and meditations. But she also expressed through them her determination to realise her potential as a free and equal person.  Her work was published in the Dutch book Ook in de Naam van de Moeder en de Dochter [= ‘Also in the Name of the Mother and the Daughter’], Wilco, Amersfoort 2000. She died in 2010.