The Results Are In!

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for your thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to my March 26 blog post quandary over the choice for the theme for our annual Holy Thursday Witness for the Ordination of Women across from the Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul in Philadelphia (at 9am if you care to join us – PLEASE).  After much thought and debate, thanks to you we have finally chosen a theme that expresses both lamentation and possibility:

How Long, My God, Must We Wait …

Raising Our Voices in Hope

All who commented, both in person and online, were fairly evenly divided between the two, and I think including both may best express where we all actually are these days.

We are also using some calls you had for a more dynamic, attention grabbing segment to go along with, and complement, our usually quieter prayers, litanies, and songs. The “lamentation” section will, therefore, include movement, gesture, cries even, that express our mourning of the terrible loss of the gifts of all genders.

In the end, however, we cannot ever lose the “hope” part that goes along with all suffering. Here is one, we think quite beautiful, way we will try to capture that.

Adapted from the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alvez’ Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture that speaks powerfully of the juxtaposition of hope and suffering:

“What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real,
and reality less real than it looks. 
It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress us and
repress us is not the last word.
It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. 
That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. 
And that in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. 
But, the two, suffering and hope, must live from each other. 
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. 
But hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness. 
So let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. 
We must live by the love of what we will never see. 
This is the secret of discipline. 
It is a refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our own need for
immediate sense experience. 
And it’s a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. 
Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs
the courage to die for the future they envisage. 
They make their own bodies the seed of their own highest hopes.”

And let all who celebrate the hope the gift of Women’s Ordination to our Church and lives say … AMEN!