A Message from the Dawn

Hi,

Just to let everyone know, I’m transitioning over to a wordpress blog. When I came back to tumblr, I was alarmed at how it had changed in a year and a half - most of it was gifs.

I realize I must adapt or die (that, and I don’t want to fill up y’alls dashboard with text, when this site isn’t the place to do so). 

I’ll let you guys know when I’m fully integrated, and I’ll give you the url. You can do with it as you will, but I think I’m ready to leave tumblr again, this time probably for good. Wordpress lets me keep several blogs going at once, but the first one I write will probably be things on my mind, just like this one, but perhaps with more stories. I’m approaching a major transition in my life, so I’ll need to write it in order to figure it out. The forecast is a high chance of hilarity with a few growing-up clouds.

Y’all have been great. I wouldn’t mind hearing from any one of you anytime - let me know if I can do anything for you: 

shellytilton@gmail.com

Love, 

Shelly

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The impossible things I realized today.

• We have representatives from Tennessee who do this. No, this isn’t an Onion article. And this man gets re-elected every election cycle. One more great reason to vote in local elections.
   
• I can ruin someone’s entire week with one late email. Yesterday the music director at the church where I’m working asked for my song choice for Sunday. I answered her at ten at night (you know, a reasonable hour) because I hadn’t had time to do it immediately. The hidden bombshell: I picked a song not in the song book. All hell broke loose. I woke up at 8.30 a.m. to an email thread a mile long between the music director and my senior minister involving copyright law, musical improvisation, song leader options, split-service approaches, and a rather miffed starting sentence of “Well, I wish I had received this yesterday while I was still in the office, but…” 
  
  That really happened. I did all that with one late email. Explaining that I grew up in the CoC where a congregation picks up a new song within two minutes didn’t seem to get me brownie points, either.
   
• I realized today that I have met a young woman my age who I can’t compete with socially. Not that I’m a shining star of the social scene by any stretch, but this girl can outdo me when she’s in a dead sleep. She’s started hanging out with the group I’ve spent almost a year breaking my way into (for romantic and other purposes), and within two weeks she’s walked away with their hearts. I can’t even hate her - she’s great and I admire her to boot. No matter how many theologians I can quote or how many issues or hobbies I speak passionately about, she’s just more fun. And she’s not awkward (I mean, that’s the point - I’m exceedingly awkward).
   
• The last exam of my degree takes place 22 days from now. And I graduate in 36 days - which means I have major surgery in 40. 
   
• Today, for what seems like the hundredth time since coming to divinity school, I faced the fact that the world is unsalvageably messed up. We can’t save it by ourselves. And though my faith helps me, some days I can’t help crying.
   
• Spring has been late in coming. But it’s coming. Soon.

I received an Honors grade on my senior sem project.

File under “Unexpected twists in life that have nothing to do with whether or not you’ll make it, but everything to do with whether you’ll be singing if you do.”

Our Rape Culture

While I was in undergrad, a fellow student was caught soliciting a prostitute, and he was expelled. Why was he caught? Because the woman called the police immediately afterward and claimed attempted rape. The initial rumors had been about the rape, but when people began to hear that the woman involved was a prostitute, the mood immediately changed. If she was a whore, it wasn’t rape. Women like that can’t be raped. Whether or not she was raped, we will never know. She had a history of claiming rape, which made it all the more easy to blame her for everything. By the end of the week, people had forgotten what he had done - that could be forgiven. It seemed natural to say, “He has a problem, he’s working on it,” and to say of her, “She’s a whore, the evil one who can’t change and whom no one is interested in as a person.”

It has been a few years since the incident, but every now and then I remember. I carry my confusion and conflicting emotions with me, and they have gotten worse the more I hear and read about rape culture in the United States. Recently I watched the stunning documentary The Invisible War

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Home Again

I peered over my father’s shoulder, straining on tip-toe to peek into the room. He seemed too amused to move. 

My grandmother, stuck in the far corner behind the bed, was having a loud conversation with the middle of the mattress, gazing down at it as if her eyes could make out what was under it. My mother’s muffled voice came edging out from underneath the bed, taking the tone of an expert.

“There’s no slat under here, but you’re right, there should be! Maybe if we shifted it a little…!”

The bed jumped like it’d been tickled, bouncing about two inches toward the back wall.

My grandmother was torn between concern and outrage. “Honey, I’ll get one of the men to do that! I’ll sleep on this one tonight - Shelly can sleep in mine.”

It was my mother’s turn, taking on the same attitude - unintentionally - of her mother. “No you’re not! She’ll be just fine in this one tonight.” Her feet appeared, shooting out from the shadows under the bed, then scrunching up and down and side to side as she extracted herself.

I giggled and turned around, walking down the hall toward the kitchen. One day of my spring break - really, less than a day - had been spent with my family. I would be back in Nashville the next morning, my parents going with me to the church where I intern.

It was dark in the kitchen, so I slid cautiously toward the wall where I knew the light switch would be, between the refrigerator and the cabinet. I reminded myself firmly that my caution was fifteen years too late. Where my feet were at the moment, a mouse trap used to sit, waiting for its next victim, usually in the form of grandchildren’s toes. I forced myself to relax, stepping closer to the wall to reach the switch and shaking my head at a habit more than a decade old but as strong as the day it had been forged. I thought about habits, and then change.

I had driven Grandma to Aunt Karin’s that afternoon where we were meeting for dinner. It’s a long drive out into the country, and brown from a clinging winter. Knowing that she would repeat stories I had heard too many times to count, I asked about specific members of my extended family. The conversation settled on her grandchildren.

“Yes, Preston’s a good boy. I know his mother’s having problems with him, but I think that’s mostly her fault. I don’t have any outlaw grandchildren.”

“No outlaw grandchildren?” I glanced at her, then back toward the road, rising steeply into one of the hills and curves that pressed gently from the background of my childhood. “You don’t think I’m an outlaw?”

She had been laughing, and though her merriment stayed in her voice, a slight change, a slowness came with her answer.

“No. You’re different. But not outlaw.”

“It’s an important distinction - don’t you think?” My eyes followed the lines of the road, curving into the branches of old oak trees and twisting into the fences that cut across the fields. Lines everywhere. Some lines too faint to make out but critical in their purpose. Life and death separated by lines made of powder, and each of us dusted and dirty from too many crossings.

My mother told me not to tell my grandmother I was considering professional ministry. 

“She might have a heart attack. I’m not kidding.” Her voice had come over the phone for an hour, sometimes serious, sometimes laughing, sometimes concerned. 

“I don’t plan on telling her. I don’t see the point of that.”

“Ok, good. You know I love you, right?”

I turned off the kitchen light and caught the sound of my father’s huge, wheezing laugh, opening out into a booming “HA!” 

“Lord have mercy! It’s just for tonight. It’s a feather mattress!” 

My mother’s voice down the hall wasn’t muffled by mattress anymore. “Momma, for the last time! Shelly will be fine in this one!”

I walked along the narrow hall toward my family. You know I love you - right?

Quotes about women in the Western tradition: from Aristotle to Luther

There are just some things I need to remember. And there are just some things that I have the privilege of forgetting, if I possibly can.

“A husband and father, we saw, rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal, over his wife a constitutional rule. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature. But in most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all. Nevertheless, when one rules and the other is ruled we endeavor to create a difference of outward forms and names and titles of respect, which may be illustrated by the saying of Amasis about his foot-pan. The relation of the male to the female is of this kind, but there the inequality is permanent.”

- Aristotle, from Book 1, Part 7 of The Politics (emphasis added)

“The fact is, the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete, and consequently in man the qualities or capacities above referred to are found in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment. As was previously stated, the male is more courageous than the female, and more sympathetic in the way of standing by to help.”

- Aristotle, History of Animals, Book 9

“A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels…Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray with her head uncovered? Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?….

…Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”

- Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11 (emphasis added), chapter 14

“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner….

…As for younger widows, do not put them on such a list. For when their sensual desires overcome their dedication to Christ, they want to marry. Thus they bring judgment on themselves, because they have broken their first pledge. Besides, they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not to. So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.”

- Deutero-Paul, 1 Timothy 2; 1 Timothy 5 (because we all know gossip is a woman problem, right?)

“There are in the world a great many situations that weaken the conscientiousness of the soul. First and foremost of these is dealings with women. In his concern for the male sex, the superior may not forget the females, who need greater care precisely because of their ready inclination to sin.”

- John of Chrysostom, Father of the Church, On Priesthood, Book 7, chapter 8

“As long as a woman is for birth and children she is different from man as body from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man.”

- Jerome, Father of the Church, in his commentary on the Ephesians

“…let a woman learn from the man who is her own, taking ‘man’ in its generic sense, as the counterpart of woman. For it is improper for a woman to speak in an assembly, no matter what she says, even if she says admirable things or even saintly things; that is of little consequence since they come from the mouth of a woman.”

- Origen of Alexandria, Father of the Church, in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 14

“With women, the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.”

- Clement of Alexandria, Father of the Church, Pedagogues II, 33, 2

“And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account your desert - that is, death - even the Son of God had to die.”

- Tertullian, Father of the Church, in his On the Apparel of Women, Book 1 (no emphasis added - this is Tertullian in all his misogynistic glory)

“If it were not the case that woman was created to be man’s helper specifically for the production of children, then why would she have been created as a ‘helper’ (Genesis 2:18)?…I cannot think of any reason for woman’s being made as man’s helper, if we dismiss the reason of procreation.”

- Augustine, Father of the Church and major theological source for all Western Christianity, in his commentary on Genesis

“Good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.”

- Thomas Aquinas, most influential theologian of the Western tradition after Augustine, Summa Theologica, I, q. 92, a. 1, reply 2

“God has created men with broad chests and shoulders, not broad hips, so that men can understand wisdom. But the place where the filth flows out is small. With women it is the other way around. That’s why they have lots of filth and little wisdom…Women are created for no other purpose than to serve men and be their helpers. If women grow weary or even die while bearing children, that doesn’t harm anything. Let them bear children to death; they are created for that…The man has been given so much dominion over the woman, that she must name herself according to him. For that reason, a woman adopts her husband’s name and not vice versa. This has happened because of God’s gracious will so that she stays under her husband’s rule, because she is too weak to rule herself.”

- Martin Luther, who began the Reformation of the Church, Sammtiliche Werke

Full Official Draft of 1st Sermon - Given at Lipscomb University, Feb. 13

Sermon 1: Christian Identity (Acts 17)

I attend Vanderbilt Divinity School. I mention it because, along with all the perks of the place, there are a few drawbacks. One of these drawbacks visits regularly in the form of a man dressed in a billboard gown of epithets, toting a megaphone and a nasty temper. He stands at the corner of the street right in front of the school and throughout the day informs us generally that we are going to hell, sometimes telling each of us individually as we pass him. This typically produces a couple of results. The first is that he is ignored. The second is that plots are devised by some of the more outspoken students, who go down en masse to pick apart his logic. Neither of these are what you would call constructive dialogue.

Not even accounting for content, I believe if Paul were alive today, he would take issue with this man’s approach. Though I don’t think VDS would be his first stop in preaching the gospel, if Paul really wanted to promote his message, he would have come to our weekly coffee hour, which the entire community attends, and where, under the influence of massive amounts of caffeine and pastry, everyone is inclined to listen. If Paul had a motto – besides take a pair of sunglasses on every road trip, just in case – it would be “Meet them where they are.”

Here’s where the Athenians were. During Paul’s day, there were two lines of idol worship going on. What we usually think of is the old Greek Pantheon – you know, Zeus, Hera, goats playing harps. But after Aristotle’s time, another, more philosophical paganism had taken hold – that of the unmoved mover, the god that set the world in motion but by definition couldn’t be bothered to take care of it. So, working with the assumption that there are gods out there that might or might not care, the Athenians had done the pragmatic thing: made another idol to worship, another altar to visit. Where’s the harm, right?

Now, we know that Paul wasn’t a big fan of idols, and from his letters, I would guess he wasn’t thrilled about the Unmoved Mover theory, either. And yet, here he is, at the top of the acropolis, having an informed conversation about both. He knew exactly where the Athenians were, and he went out to meet them.

He starts with what the Athenians know about God: that God made everything. He even quotes Greek poets and philosophers – “For in him we live and move and have our being…We are his offspring.” This is the God that animates all life, that acts through every movement, that sings through every voice. And this the Athenians could agree with.

And this is when Paul starts to really preach. Coming from the Jewish tradition where iconoclasm is written into the most fundamental text of the law, Paul tells them that the human race cannot create God, cannot mold God into statues of gold, cannot make God into what they want God to be. God is more than that and cannot be controlled through human mechinations. But neither is God untouched, a transcendent being above all knowledge and contact. This is the God they name Unknown, but the unknown is not unmovable.

Here is where Paul makes his masterstroke, where he offers them a revolution, a path between paths: God has a face, but not one made of gold. And God is not portable, but neither is God unmovable, for here is the proof: God came, died, and was resurrected. This God, we hear Paul say – the God that gives you life and is present even in your living bodies – this God is the one who has spoken through Jesus, who was resurrected.

Now, the Athenians are quiet during Paul’s sermon, but this is where one of my friends from school would speak up. “That’s all fine,” she’d say. “Beautiful. But why are we hearing about this? Why are you even talking?”

There is a kind of stigma that exists at VDS that can be summarized with a story. On some days, our reading room at the school is invaded by an undergrad prayer group. An amusing pastime of some of the grad students is to watch other grads walk into the reading room, see the prayer group, and begin to become visibly uncomfortable. And these are grad students that, in the main, believe and confess their faith in God. There’s something going on here that Paul would have to adjust himself to. He may have had an inkling of the issue – that what we worship speaks more to our identity than it does the identity of God – but his Christian identity was under a different kind of duress than Christian identity today. Christians during his time were in danger of being stoned; Christians of our day are in danger of quietly slipping away.

In a society in which identity is the most lauded and sought-after aspect of an individual’s being and – paradoxically – the most readily diffuse and contingent concept that we can talk about, we must face the question of Christian identity. Even within Christianity itself, divisions – denominations – indicate many issues, but the most fundamental is the question of who we are and where we take our stand. The Christian must ask herself what makes her different from her neighbor, in order to have any idea of how to act toward that neighbor. “Boundary” is sometimes considered a bad word in our present lexicon. What are boundaries but walls of separation, chunks of concrete and barbwire over which we shoot our guns and with which we keep the other out? But boundaries, besides being limits to openness and possible barriers to our hospitality, are also our defining lines. They are what make us who we are. They may sometimes act as detriments, but they are also our source of identity, the anchored points we can defend with faith and where we proclaim, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

And I’m sure we all believe that – but why are so many people unwilling to identify it publically? Paul’s proclaiming enthusiastically on the acropolis, and divinity students are obviously shaken by God’s name whispered in prayer.

Perhaps it is because the God of our public discourse is, in fact, an idol. If nothing else, the upcoming generation can peg idols as expertly as Paul did as he walked into Athens. Today God’s name is being shouted from street corners and associated with hatred and violence. God’s name is being paraded on inaugural platforms where millions bow down and worship the American Dream. God’s name is scrawled on bombs that treat God’s children as collateral damage. The gods of our culture are made by human beings to kill other human beings and destroy creation. And in such a world, many have turned to the theory that the true God, if he exists, does not care about his creation – how could he? All evidence points to the contrary. So when my friend asks Paul why he is speaking, it’s not because she gets her kicks from kicking back. It’s because God, in our culture, is molded by the hands of greed, hatred, and militarism. And people are tired of worshipping such a God and are embarrassed to be seen with him. Who would want to tie their identity to something as heinous as that?

So, Paul, for God’s sake, why are you still talking? What is it about your God that makes you qualified to speak? And Paul offers not another name, but a story – the Christian story. There was once a God who became a man and stayed with us for a while. And while he was here with us, he wiped the blindness from people’s eyes and brought good news to the poor. He fed thousands and told us that the food would never run out, that water would never run dry. He looked out over the land and said, “This is not how it is supposed to be. This is not how I made it.” Then God, instead of resorting to violence and reinforcing our habits of fear and hatred, took up a cross, the death that only political uprising warranted. Then God, who wanted to be with us always, followed us down the long road of suffering. And then God died.

This is no human name, no idol, no unmoved mover. This is a story of a love so strong that shame and death could not stand in its way – that overcame the power of death and all its worshippers with it – a love so revoluationary that an empire shook in its armor. And as a Christian, Paul found his identity there and could not help telling that story. This is why the Christian message is so important. It’s important because the idols never really went away, they just got bigger, and their worshippers launched nuclear weapons, when before they bandied words. It’s important because without it, the God clothed in billboards and toting a megaphone will be the only God the world can see, when what we need to see is a God carrying a cross and clothed in his love for us. It’s only when we can see that God that we can start the hard work of preaching against our own idols. It’s only then that we can call ourselves Christians and not be ashamed.

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