I'm Back

I have not written since last July at the time of Dick's mother's death. When I recently looked at my journal, I realized that I had written almost nothing in 2011.

I finally made the connection that the grief of the past several years had taken a much larger toll that even I admitted. There have been nigglings at the back of my brain that it is time to start writing again.

A young woman by the name of Rachel Held Evans has gotten my attention. She is an Evangelical lay person who writes a blog about various Christian topics. Most recently, she has done a couple of postings about women's issues in the Christian church.

In her latest, she took on Jon Piper, a Baptist minister who is revered in many fundamentalist circles. He wrote this week about the Masculine nature of the Church, or as he put it "the Masculine Feel of the Church".

I have been in the Episcopal Church for 32 years. I am a Methodist PK, and when I came to TEC, I felt as if I had come home to Wesley's church. Women had been ordained legally three years earlier, and I found the "new" prayer book a beautiful blending of the old and new liturgies. I hadn't been in the trenches for all of the preceding warfare; in fact, I only heard stories about the zebra trial liturgies and the knock-down drag outs of the female clergy battles.

I did face my own battles for women in those days, and I will always be grateful that I did. [And I will write about it in another post.]

Rachel's posts this week, and the responses to it, have been a real wake up call for me. At almost 65, I haven't taken on too many battles for feminism lately. I have been surprised to hear younger women vehement about not being feminist. Two of my friends who are former military nurses are also vehement about not being feminists, and yet, their attitudes and actions belie that. I think it is the label they resist.

So folks, heads up--Beth, the pushy Yankee female, is back.

I am going to post several items over the next few weeks from my own experience. I can at least add some of the stories from the earlier generations.