Re-Imagining

The Book, The Phantom Tollbooth, has a traveler moving through different lands. At one point the traveler finds himself suddenly on an island named Conclusions. He doesn't know either how he got there or how to get off. He finds out that you get to the island of conclusions by jumping there...and the only way off is to swim back through the Sea of Reason.

I was reading through my files and found the one that contains the 1994 reports about Re-Imagining conference in Minnesota. I wrote a letter to my colleagues and in response got replies like...I have read other things quite different from people who listened to the tapes and heard what happened -- did you attend the same conference?..and I will pray for your soul, and I don't think we are in the same church. None of these folk had attended or had spoken directly with someone who was there but they were willing to take articles and headlines over my first hand account of my experience.

All of that was very interesting and challenging. And I laugh often when I see books published by men, some of whom greatly challenged the conference with titles like re-imagining the church... Is it a gender issue.

Sometimes I think that even though I was in high school and college during the break-thru of the women's movement things have only partly changed in folks value of women. We are horrified at stories we hear about girls children being neglected and yet women in this country still make less than men in the same jobs with the same training.

I was a supply pastor in a church about four months ago when a man came up to me and said, "O they let girls be ministers now?" I looked at his face longing to see him an expression of a joke--but I found no such response. I said I'd been ordained 32 years so Yes women are ordained. How odd was that?

When my son was born in '78' one of my friends said...Oh too bad you didn't have a girl you could raise her to be good liberated feminist. I replied that if we didn't raise some liberated men then there would always be an imbalance. And to the credit of other mom's from that era we do have some wonderfully liberated men.

I suppose all of this is to say that we all have work to do in respecting one another, encouraging one another, being open to listen to new ideas, and to recognize we are not always right. (What? ha ha ha )

So this Monday I am Re-Imagining the week... and all the days ahead. Expectations are not always the same for everyone.

God Abide
Bobbie Giltz McGarey
@2011
ABQ New Mexico