Soelle in Summer: a course-retreat. We're on!

Remember the question I asked here?

Well, we're on!

Soelle in Summer: Challenge and Wonder

 an online course-retreat

 June 17-July 31, 2013

Read and reflect in community on the work, thought, and spirituality of Dorothee Soelle (also spelled Sölle). 

Soelle (1928-2003) was a German theologian, poet, peace activist, and Protestant Christian with Catholic, secular, humanist, and Jewish companions and allies; she was also a friend, teacher, spouse, mother, socialist, and from mid-life on, feminist.

  
Details of the course-retreat are here.

Soelle in Summer is designed, led, and facilitated by Jane Redmont (theologian, author, spiritual director). Seven weeks, $245. Write readwithredmont@earthlink.net. Registrations welcome till Tuesday, June 18. 

Interested in Dorothee Soelle? A summer online retreat/course opportunity

I don't as they put it believe in god

but to him I cannot say no hard as I try
take a look at him in the garden
when his friends ran out on him
his face wet with fear
and with the spit of his enemies
him I have to believe

Him I can't bear to abandon
to the great disregard for life
to the monotonous passing of millions of years
to the moronic rhythm of work leisure and work
to the boredom we fail to dispel
in cars in beds in stores

That's how it is they say what do you want
uncertain and not uncritically
I subscribe to the other hypothesis
which is his story
that's not how it is he said for god is
and he staked his life on this claim

Thinking about it I find
one can't let him pay alone
for his hypothesis
so I believe him about
god

The way one believes another's laughter
his tears
or marriage or no for an answer
that's how you'll learn to believe him about life
promised to all

A poem I had posted here many moons ago. It is from the series of 10 poems "When He Came" in Dorothee Soelle's book Revolutionary Patience (1977).
 
"SOELLE IN SUMMER" - *online* June 17-July 31. A mix of retreat and course, with opportunity for both individual reflection and conversation. Interested? Read more on my web space here.

Thoughts on church, change, and living the Gospel: more from Sölle and Naudé (1985)

A follow-up on yesterday's post.

From earlier in the 1985 interview with Beyers Naudé and Dorothee Sölle:  

Naudé:
 
... If we mean by the church mainly the institution, the structure, the visible, traditional symbols, then I believe that the church, in that sense, will experience one crisis after another, until it comes to the recognition, understanding, that the church, in the real sense of the word, is where the people of God are, where life is being discovered again, the true meaning of love, of human community, of mutual concern for one another, of caring of people, of seeking true meaningful relationship, understand between people, not only between Christians but between all people. Therefore, in that sense I am very hopeful about what is happening, not only in our country [South Africa], but also in other countries, because there are new perspectives, of the Christian faith and of truth, which are being discovered and which are being, as it were, agonized about by so many small groups of people... If I think of South Africa, what encourages me is the fact that sometimes the most meaningful revelation about a new understanding of Christian faith and about the Christian church and about Christian community comes from the poorest, comes from those communities which are normally not seen to be the ones with authority or with power, or comes from those who normally never believe themselves to have any real message. But when you begin to listen to what they are saying, it is absolutely marvellous ... to discover how little I know and how much I need to be constantly converted, in my whole understanding, in my whole willingness, therefore, in true humility to sit at the feet of such people, and learn and hear. ...In that sense I believe there is a tremendous future for the Christian community in the world.

Sölle:

I agree... I think the growth of the true church today comes not from within but from the outside, from the peace groups, from the women's groups, from those groups who in certain fields of post-Christian culture live and think and understand more and more the meaning of the gospel, rather than those who claim to be masters of the gospel, namely those white male, middle-class theologians. ... I think that there is a growth of faith in new forms all over the world, and some of the signs of it are very classical signs, it's base communities..., it is martyrdom, which is one of the classical signs of where does the church live and grow. We in the first world, in relative freedom, don't experience martyrdom in the strict sense of the word. But I think we have to prepare ourselves and others in our midst for more restrictions, discrimination. The price to be a Christian will be higher in the next twenty years, will become higher and higher; it will be much tougher, if you really want to be a Christian. ...I think Christ didn't promise us victory. I think that would be an illusion. Christ promised us life, and that includes death. Christ didn't tell us that we would win. Other people tell us that all the time... We hope to win; we fight to win; we give our blood and our lives... but I think we cannot understand our own struggle in terms of success and non-success.

Hope for Faith: A Conversation

jointly published by Eerdmans and the World Council of Churches in 1986

A post on a related topic (Sölle on the church), from last summer: click here.

This post is especially in response to Claire's comment in the previous post.

Taking the long view

C.F. Beyers Naudé and Dorothee Sölle, at the end of a long interview-conversation in 1985.

(Published first in Dutch --the conversation took place in the Netherlands-- the interview came out in English as Hope for Faith: A Conversation, jointly published by Eerdmans and the World Council of Churches in 1986.)

Sölle:

I think Christ didn't promise us victory... Christ promised us life, and that includes death. Christ didn't tell us that we would win. Other people tell us that all the time... We hope to win; we fight to win; we give our blood and our lives... but I think we cannot understand our own struggle in terms of success and non-success.

Naudé:

Well, the question that I would like to put to you would be this: Do you, in yourself, have the strength to endure whatever may come to you by way of disappointment, by way of rejection, by way of non-recognition, by way of waiting, perhaps your whole life, without being able to participate in the victory of the truth that you are standing for? Do you believe that you will be able to sustain yourself through these years up to the very end?

Sölle:

I am thinking of a friend's answer to that when I was in a state of despair, and had this sense of meaninglessness and never reaching anything, and then he talked about the cathedrals which were built during the Middle Ages. Most of them were built over 200 years, some over 300 years even, and some of the workers in those cathedrals never saw the whole building, they never went to pray there, they never saw the glass and all the beautiful things they gave their life for. And then this friend said to me: "Listen, Dorothee, we who are building the cathedral of peace, maybe we won't see it either. We will die before it is complete, and yet we are going to build it. We are going on even if we won't live in that building." 

XXX

xxx

Updating the book list, and a plug for Anita Diamant's new novel

I am digging out from under all manner of things. In the midst of this and the usual house-cleaning, literal and metaphorical, that accompanies the advent of Advent, I am updating this blog. I hadn't updated the reading list at the right in months. It isn't complete, but it gives you a snapshot of what I'm reading or re-reading these days.

The Aquino and Rosado-Nunes book is composed of the proceedings of the first Inter-American Symposium on Feminist Intercultural Theology. This was the first ever formal gathering of Latin American and U.S. Latina feminist theologians. Some social scientists also participated in the meeting. Why is this book significant? Because, one of its introductory essays notes, for the first time in the history of Christianity in the Americas, feminist theologians of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean were able to meet together to share our common concerns and visions about the present and the future of our theological work, on the basis of intercultural hermeneutical frameworks. ("Hermeneutical" in this case means "interpretive.")

The book by Renate Wind (which is way overdue at a certain library in California) is a biography, the first, I think, of the late Dorothee Sölle. {This next sentence added a day later after the original post:} Wind has previously written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer; it's not surprising she would be drawn to Sölle, who in so many ways was spiritual and theological heir to Bonhoeffer. The eco-books by McFague and Ruether (the Ruether one is an edited volume featuring writings from Asia, Africa, and Latin America) are triple-purpose books: they are part of my reading and referencing for the Big Tome; I have students reading a couple of them; and I am looking at them as I ponder my sermon for this coming Sunday, the first in Advent. I haven't preached since September. What does the environmental crisis have to do with Advent? You'll find out after I preach. Unless the Holy Spirit sends me in another direction.

I actually cheated by listing Anita Diamant's new book, Day after Night, because I read and finished it last weekend. Anita gave it to me last Friday when she came to my talk on prayer at Harvard (about which more later) and I started reading it that night and finished it on the first of my two plane flights the next day. It's both deep and a page-turner.


I am just starting Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which a colleague lent me. "It's about a woman who dresses up as a man so she can work as a Catholic priest, so you can see why it made me think of you," he said. (!) The priest in the book is a member of the Ojibwe Nation, as is Erdrich.

You may or may not have noticed that these are the first fiction books I've listed in eons, or perhaps ever since I started blogging. I am starved for fiction and haven't let myself read any, except for the occasional mystery novel, in something like four years. Ridiculous. Just because I've been trying to finish a work of non-fiction doesn't mean I shouldn't be reading fiction. I find reading fiction life-giving. Do you?

Sölle on limits, transcendence, and the Communion of Saints

At a peace gathering

We’re not only ten thousand I said
there are more of us here
the dead of both wars
are with us

A journalist came and asked
how could I know that
haven’t you seen them
i ask the clueless guy
haven’t you heard your grandmother
groaning when they started it up again
do you live all alone
without any dead who drop in
for a drink with you
do you really think
you are only yourself

****--Dorothee Sölle

******The Mystery of Death

******2007 (posthumous book - Sölle died in 2003 with the manuscript in draft)

The English version of the poem is by the book's translators, Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. The German original, "Auf einer Friedensversammlung," appeared in Dorothee Sölle, Loben ohne Lugen (Berlin, Wolfgang Fietkau, 2000).

Photo by the blogger New York Portraits, 2008.

Not so random theological quotes

I am convalescing. Whether or not the bug was H1N1 is unclear, since I have half of the symptoms from the "nope, it's not H1N1" column and half the symptoms from the "yup, you got it" column. Either way, I have been sick, without a fever but with a lot of lung involvement and some head and nose heaviness as well. The latter went away relatively fast; the former is lingering. Much better the last two days, though.

I am back at work at my theological writing during this fall break (which gave me the time to be sick and sleep and now gives me the time to think a little). I'm up against a deadline, so the time for coherent posts has not yet returned, but I'll share with you some quotes from the works of authors I have been reading and about whom I have been writing.

So this first. We're not in light material here.

To believe in God means to take sides with life and to end our alliance with death. It means to stop killing and wanting to kill, and to do battle with apathy which is so akin to killing. It means an end to the fear of dying and to its counterpart, the fear of failure. To take sides with life means to stop looking for some neutral ground between murderers and their victims and to cease looking upon the world as a supermarket in which we can buy anything we want so long as the price is right and the system is preserved.

******-- Dorothee Sölle, Death by Bread Alone
********(German original 1975; English, 1978)

Reminder:

But he answered, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

More Sölle:

****Taking sides with life is not an easy or simple thing, It involves a never-ending process of change whereby we constantly renounce the self that is dead and enamored of death and instead become free to love life. To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names. Religion can mean the radical and wholehearted attempt to take sides with life. ...

****What I have to say is said from a particular point of view. I am a Christian. When I seek help against that ever-present death by bread alone I turn instinctively to Jesus Christ, learning from him how to fight and conquer death. I do not claim, however, that this way is the only way to do so. I know many Jewish, humanist, socialist individuals and groups who, with the help of other guides and patrons and saints, fight the same battle and have similar experiences. As far as I am concerned it is not important or necessary that we all embrace the same faith, perhaps some common faith of humanity, What is important is that people be able to communicated and share their religious experiences.

****Turning to religion must not mean turning away from each other but rather turning to each other. When I try to say what Christ means to me, threatened as I am by the strangling death that is all around us, I am trying to speak about the steps that can lead all of us out of the prevailing state of death. The recollection of Jesus derives its power not from “one-way” slogans and bumper-sticker theology but from what that recollection says about happiness, peace, love, and justice. It speaks of those things not as requirements or demands to be imposed upon humanity, but as things that can and do happen in the lives of each of us. One of the things the Jesus tradition says is that learning to love means also–indeed primarily–learning to die, and therein lies the offer of finding our identity.

**** Jesus took sides with life. He battled against death wherever he found it: the death of outcast lepers with whom none would speak, whom none would touch; the death of the publicans whom society held in utter contempt; the physical death of those who had not yet begun to live. Here note must be made of something without which Jesus’ relationship to death cannot be understood. Neither Jesus nor those who, like him, battle against violent death looked upon a physical death as the worst thing that can happen to us. They feared a life that is ruled and controlled by death more than they feared death itself…. For Jesus and others like him natural death is by no means the greatest enemy.

****But Jesus’ attitude toward death and that of others like him is contrary to ours. We prefer to cling tenaciously to the “honeysweet Christ.” We want no part of the Christ of vinegar and gall. We accept more or less as fate the kind of death that surrounds us in all its forms, the kind of death imposed by society’s structures and forces; war and starvation; robotized, impersonal existence; the monotony and routine of going through the motions of living. But what we struggle against is natural death from sickness and age, regarding it as our bitterest foe. It is natural death that we fight and resist with every means at our disposal. …

****The desire for a future life and for some form of continued personal existence is most deeply rooted in the resistance to death of those who have not lived an authentic and genuine life. The only weapon against such death is that of love. Those who die without ever having plunged into the stream of love die a hopeless death. Death can be accepted only by those who know what it means to live. Only they can take sides with life against the death that comes by bread alone.

****Being a Christian means that we have passed from death to life. We have gone beyond death. In the case of a Christian, the biological order of birth followed by death is reversed. The Christian dies first, then [s]he is born. Passing from death to life, the individual Christian will not need such a crutch as the hope of reunion in heaven with loved ones. Nor will the Christian need the crutch of a hope for continued personal existence in a heavenly realm. Absolutely nothing –not even the knowledge of our transitory personal existence—can separate us from the love of God.

************-- Dorothee Sölle, Death by Bread Alone


Discuss...

Image: "Jesus of the People" by Janet McKenzie

Dorothee Sölle on the church

As promised in the post below.


I believe in jesus christ
who was right when he
like each of us
just another individual who couldn’t beat city hall
worked to change the status quo
and was destroyed
looking at him I see
how our intelligence is crippled
our imagination stifled
our efforts wasted
because we did not live as he did
every day I am afraid
that he died in vain
because he is buried in our churches

from "Credo"

in Dorothee Soelle

Revolutionary Patience

translated by Rita and Robert Kimber

Maryknoll: Orbis, 1977

*****In the face of the Christian church and its role in the First world, I feel alienation, aversion, disgust, and sometimes even shame. I see this empirical church as a structure "from above," based on injustice and continually betraying it s own truth. I often think that the church is like Judas, who handed Christ over to the established religious authorities. Sometimes I think that the church is like the other disciples who, discouraged and defeated, left Jesus alone and fled. And then there are times when I think the church is like Peter, who denied that he had ever known anything about peace and justice. Very seldom do I see the church, like Peter, shedding bitter tears.

*****Nevertheless, I have never regarded myself as post-Christian. I have also experienced something other than what I have just described. I have seen the church in a group of women who did not flee, who stayed, and on Easter Sunday went to the tomb because the one who had gone was not dead for them. However, my overwhelmingly bad experiences have changed my image of the church. It is not a house for me any longer; instead, it is a tent for the wandering people of God. Then tent is not always where I am, but sooner or later I encounter the tent people again --on the street or in the courtroom. The sacred is not so much a building or an institution as an event, something that happens. Not long ago Daniel Berrigan, in conversation, employed the image of an umbrella that shelters us from the cold rain. Sometimes it opens too slowly, and we are left standing in the rain. Sometimes it is not very effective. Still, it is there, and I would not want to be without it. But the image of the church that continues to impress me most is that of an old woman looking for food in a garbage can --an unmarried mother with bent back, unattractive, unhealthy, of indeterminate age-- my older sister, whom I need and who needs me.

*****I suspect that the post-Christians do not want to have anything to do with the dialectic of a religious institution. But it is just this self-contradictory experience of the church as traitor and the church as sister that stares me in the face, and I have to live with it. Post-Christianity seems to me like a slick formula that covers up the two-sided encounter with the church and reduces it to the "church from above." Then the church from below is forgotten, and with it what tradition has identifies as the "mystical body of Christ."

Dorothee Soelle

The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality

Translated by Linda M. Maloney
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990

Photos:
Homeless woman and bicycle, Oslo, Norway (BBC)
Dorothee Sölle

On the church

Did I post this already months ago? I am not sure. No time to check right now , but I just ran into this quote while editing a piece of writing and it has a post-it on it saying "blog" which I obviously left there for a reason, so here it is.

I didn't make a "Dorothee Sölle" label till recently, so I can't track through that label whether or not I have already posted this, and there are too many posts under "theology" or "church" for me to take the time to sort through them, since I am working under deadline. Perhaps this will ring some bells for you.

Well, we can’t simply be "yes-people"‘ for the church. We are embarrassed on account of the church. It’s like we come from a lousy family: father drinks, mother yells, and the kids fight the whole day. Bishops drive limousines to hunger conferences...

Funny thing is, it’s our family, in spite of it all. We find it to be unbearable, stupid, next to impossible, phony–but we still stay with it. In other words we say: Dad drinks, and Mom yells... but Grandma is super and my little brother is absolutely the greatest. Clergy talk too much, church members have been asleep for centuries... But Jesus simply can’t be done away with, and there isn’t much to be said against people like Albert Schweitzer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is these people –and God knows they are not just people who say yes and amen to everything– that we want to think about in this book. We want to talk about them. We want to try to say what it is that we find good about religion, why we need God and Christ and the Spirit, and why we put up with the church.

********Dorothee Sölle and Fulbert Steffensky
********Not Just Yes and Amen: Christians with a Cause

More later in the same vein.

A poem by Dorothee Sölle

I have posted before poems by Dorothee Sölle. This one is from her book Revolutionary Patience (published in English in 1977, with poems written in the original German in the late 1960s and early 1970s).


When he came (10)

I don't as they put it believe in god
but to him I cannot say no hard as I try
take a look at him in the garden
when his friends ran out on him
his face wet with fear
and with the spit of his enemies
him I have to believe

Him I can't bear to abandon
to the great disregard for life
to the monotonous passing of millions of years
to the moronic rhythm of work leisure and work
to the boredom we fail to dispel
in cars in beds in stores

That's how it is they say what do you want
uncertain and not uncritically
I subscribe to the other hypothesis
which is his story
that's not how it is he said for god is
and he staked his life on this claim

Thinking about it I find
one can't let him pay alone
for his hypothesis
so I believe him about
god

The way one believes another's laughter
his tears
or marriage or no for an answer
that's how you'll learn to believe him about life
promised to all

Morning Prayer - Psalm

Summer Series is over. It's fall. Life is busy. Contemplative spaces are scarce. Acts of Hope is bringing back opportunities for meditation and prayer. This one is simply the Psalm appointed for today's Morning Prayer in the Episcopal Church. It had a timely ring as I read it. Then again, most Psalms do. The late Dorothee Soelle said you should eat a Psalm for breakfast every day. (I am paraphrasing, I have the exact quote somewhere.) Chew on this one.

Or as the old words say: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.


Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea
1
Hallelujah!Praise the LORD, O my soul! *I will praise the LORD as long as I live;I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.
2
Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, *for there is no help in them.
3
When they breathe their last, they return to earth, *and in that day their thoughts perish.
4
Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *whose hope is in the LORD their God;
5
Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *who keeps his promise for ever;
6
Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *and food to those who hunger.
7
The LORD sets the prisoners free;the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; *the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
8
The LORD loves the righteous;the LORD cares for the stranger; *he sustains the orphan and widow,but frustrates the way of the wicked.
9
The LORD shall reign for ever, *your God, O Zion, throughout all generations.Hallelujah!

Eating the words of God

Dorothee Soelle said that you should eat a Psalm for breakfast every day.

In the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Episcopal and Catholic and Orthodox and many other churches, there are Psalms, of course, as there are (in greater number) in the various monastic offices.

But one Psalm will do.

In fact --I have written this before-- the words of Morning Prayer are often too much for me. If I am alone (the group prayer experience is different) I have to break up MP if I say it, because I just want to chew on the Psalm for a while.

This morning's scriptures in the Daily Office offered a related story:

I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. [God] spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe.

[God] said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and [God] gave me the scroll to eat. [God] said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

******** Ezekiel 2:9-3:3