Concerns of the world leave Presbyterian Women breathless

There’s nothing easy about this. The concerns are so enormous, so overpowering, so unrelenting, they take one’s breath away.

These women came by plane and bus and car to learn about AIDS and poverty and oppression and injustice, about 3.8 million orphans in Ethiopia and a life expectancy of age 38 in Malawi and how 85 percent of the people live below the poverty line in the Philippines and how, in a country of plenty, thousands without homes sleep on the streets each night in Los Angeles.

At one point, Ross and Gloria Kinsler, longtime Presbyterian missionaries in Costa Rica and Guatemala, asked people in the audience to turn to each other and talk, for a few minutes, about what global economic justice means to them. One woman sucked in her breath, then exhaled out an overwhelmed, “Jeez!”

Yet, as big as these ideas are, Presbyterian Women also finds ways to bring it all home, to present examples of how the big picture resonates in everyday life. The Kinslers talked about revolution and fair trade and globalization. Then they asked each person to turn to the person sitting next to them, and take a quick look at the labels on their clothes, to peek inside to see where their t-shirts and dresses and sweaters had been made. A woman wearing a T-shirt with a depiction of the U.S. flag hanging on a front porch found “Made in Honduras” on the tag. The next time these women go to the mall or to Wal-Mart, they may look at the label before they buy.

The Kinslers also talked about the women they met in Guatemala, who lived in homes with mud floors, who got loans to raise chickens, hoping to make some money for their families. But when they tried to sell the chickens, they found the prices undercut by competition from the U.S. poultry firms. Now they had no money, and a loan to pay off as well.

In another session, Monique Mukuna Misenga, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, showed a drawing of a woman with seven arms. She was stirring the pot, carrying bread on her head, searching for clean water, hoeing the garden, sweeping the house, holding the hand of a malnourished child, serving her husband a meal while he sat in a chair, relaxing. It was far away, and still very personal. These women could understand.

“I say globalization is bad news to the poor and good news to the rich,” said Elizabeth S. Tapia, a theologian from the Philippines, who grew up one of 10 children in a poor family. (Her father’s favorite Bible verse was “Go and multiply,” she said. Her mother’s, “It is finished.”) Tapia laid out the contrasts plainly: hunger for so many versus wasted food in the U.S., consumerism versus soul-scorching poverty. With the wonders of the Internet, someone can buy a Filipino sex worker for just $2,000 to $3,000 — and that’s for life. Many of the clients in the sex trade prefer young girls, particularly virgins. To this audience filled with mothers and grandmothers, she didn’t need to say much more.

But Tapia and other speakers — particularly Joan Chittister, a Catholic author and member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie — didn’t stop with statistics. They connected the dots from numbers and facts, many of them indicators of overwhelming pain, straight to the challenges. Dressed in a fire-red suit, she delivered a plain-spoken address that earned her a standing ovation and pulled absolutely no punches. She laid forth the shortcomings of churches today — centering, in many cases, around their reluctance to be more outspoken about how U.S. policies perpetuate injustice in this country and around the world.

Chittister used as her text the story from the 17th chapter of Matthew of the transfiguration, when Jesus went with three of his disciples to the top of a mountain in Galilee (the disciples, Peter, James and John, thought they’d get away from the crowds and it would be “just the boys,” she said). Instead of a peaceful interlude, Jesus lit up with light and God spoke to them and Jesus stood with Moses, the liberator of the oppressed, and with Elijah, the troublemaker. And they didn’t stay up on the mountain for long — they quickly came down, Chittister said, and “waded into the hurting throngs of people.”

That’s exactly what she faults people of faith for not doing enough of today — for not wading into the hurting up to their necks. “If there is a temptation in Christian ministry, it is probably the temptation to play church,” Chittister said — to dabble in religion, to bandage the hurt and the wounded rather than taking on the tougher work of exposing and confronting the causes of what’s inflicting the wounds.

And she lays the blame for much of that hurt directly on policies of the U.S. government — on capital punishment, including the killing of those not yet adults; on a “questionable war” with Iraq; on tax breaks for the wealthy while the elderly go without medicine and children without food or decent education; on disproportionate spending on the military and nuclear arms — a level of spending not seen since Rome, Sparta and the Soviet Union, Chittister said, all of which collapsed under the weight of it.

Chittister chided the complacency of churches — the complacency of men and women who say they’re too busy and their schedules too booked, that “I’m too good to have to do another thing.”

But “our ministry must be not only to comfort but to challenge,” Chittister said. As she reads the Bible, “if we had been holier people, would have been angrier oftener.”

For many of these women, there was so much to learn, too much to take in, too much packed in to bend their minds around. They may take home snippets, small moments, words from the heart of just one woman, something that stuck. Or maybe it won’ be words, but a face, an image, a song.

One night, a choir from South Africa performed — the Sinikithemba choir, made up of HIV-infected young men and women in their 20s and 30s. The group formed in 2001, the outgrowth of a work cooperative that produces beadwork to pay for their AIDS medicine. At the end of the day, some of the workers began singing together before they went home, said Bill Wildey of Church World Service. They became friends, a support for each other, connected by caring and prayer.

“The more they sing, the more they feel uplifted,” Wildey said. “They really feel the power of God. They feel hope in their lives.”

And “for them to declare their (HIV-positive) status is extremely difficult in South Africa. They’ve been extremely brave in doing that. Declaring your status can lose you all your friends. If you’re married, it can mean your husband will leave you” or “your family will desert you.”

But the Sinikithemba choir sang of freedom and faith and hope, of Jesus.

“Ask Him anything you need.
Ask Him.
Tell the world that Jesus is alive,” sang Kunene Phulmulali, who’s 32 with a voice as vast as the stars and a smile equally as big.

“The spread of AIDS is overwhelming,” Phulmulali told the crowd, asking each country, each congregation, each person to do something to help.

“My Lord Jesus, He can heal you right now,” Phulmalali sang.
“Give me hope.
Lord, give me hope in my life.
Lord, give me hope.”

Here are some other stories, some other words, some other ideas to take home.

FROM AFRICA

Among those attending the meeting were 62 global partners, women from around the world who came to tell of their countries, their churches, their challenges. Elisabeth Gana, from the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon, said women are the backbone of the Presbyterian church in her country, where “we dance to the altar” when the offering is presented, where some from Pentecostal churches say “we are too old-fashioned” and want to know the exact hour, the exact minute of Christian conversion, “when you knew the Lord was indispensable in your life.”

The women of her church try to provide education for girls whose parents can’t afford schooling, teach sewing and traditional handcrafts as a way for families to earn money, try to help people understand the truth of AIDS. “The disease is really ravaging,” Gana said during a workshop. “Why? Because of the mindset. The people at first did not believe it was happening,” and when someone died, they’d say it was because of purging or fireballs or that they’d been poisoned — they focused on the presenting disease or symptoms, not what had weakened the immune system in the first place.

“Not everybody can afford to pay for the medicine,” Gana said. “People resist going for testing. They don’t want to be stigmatized.”

Her church tries to teach mothers not to pass AIDS on to their children — that if she is infected, a mother should not breastfeed her newborn. “That’s tough,” Gana said. “Because if they aren’t breastfeeding, they have to buy milk. Who can afford it?”

In the Congo, AIDS is just one of many devastations. Refugees from the genocide in Rwanda have poured into her country, Misenga said, as did some of those responsible for the killings. There has been war since 1998 involving competing groups of rebels, with an estimated four million people killed in the fighting in the last five years. “Now we have many children in the streets and many children who lost their parents,” Misenga said. “Poverty is very high and people are suffering a lot.”

Many parents cannot send their children to school, and many men do not respect women. When she was growing up, “I saw people who didn’t consider girls or women a person,” Misenga said. “We were considered things. Women didn’t speak before men,” and it is still that way in many families.

“We have no clean water in the country. We have a high rate of unemployment . . . Many hospitals lack medicine. We have no peace . . . We don’t see the way of peace. But Congolese people are living with hope.”

Janet Guyer and Caryl Weinberg are regional AIDS consultants for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Africa, working with partner churches to confront the disease. They do not come in with a prearranged program; instead, they find out what people already are doing, how they identify the needs. It is complicated, inspiring and heartbreaking work.

They have learned about local customs and traditions — about tattooing, about wife inheritance — that can contribute to the spread of AIDS. They have talked with women who ask, “Can I as a Christian woman ask my husband if he is having an affair?” They have heard local women, in the Congo, express concern that the sexual activity of United Nations troops is a factor as well.

They have talked with teen-age boys who say it is not physically possible to be abstinent before marriage. They have seen the faces of children who “eat once a day, at most,” Weinberg said. “AIDS is not the major thing in their community. Food is the major thing.” Education and hope are hard to come by.

The proceeds of the Gathering’s Churchwide Offering will be used to help women and families affected by AIDS in the United States and Africa. Before the offering was collected, Weinberg and Guyer spoke to the plenary.

Weinberg told of a doctor in Kinshasa, who opened his door one day to find two children asking him to come to their home. When he arrived, he found another child, sitting by the body of their mother, who had died the night before of AIDS. “The children had washed her, they had dressed her and they had guarded her through the night,” Weinberg said. “Now they needed a doctor, because they didn’t know what to do.”

Their father already had died of AIDS. Their mother, once it became known she was infected, was shunned by family and friends.

“What breaks the heart of God,” Guyer said, “must also break our hearts.”

FROM YOUNGER WOMEN

As an organization, Presbyterian Women definitely faces challenges. Like the PC(USA) itself, it’s an aging group: the median age of its members is about 65. Attendance at this gathering was just over 4,000, down about 1,000 from the last one, probably partly from the impact of a sagging economy on the investments and incomes of many of the older members, its leaders say.

“You’ll hear it talked about all the time in Presbyterian Women — how to attract younger women,” said Susan Jackson Dowd, the organization’s communications coordinator. There are real efforts — bridge-building with the National Network of Presbyterian College Women, for example, and outreach efforts to young racial-ethnic women — but “a lot of times when it plays out in the local congregations, people see it as an older women’s thing.”

One pastor, Mary Westfall, said of Presbyterian Women that “to me, it is one of the most lively, life-giving parts of the church.” But in her congregation, “they still have the Thursday morning Bible study. For working women, that doesn’t work.”

Lynn Hasselbarth, a 20-year-old junior from the University of Michigan, and Kim Kavazanjian, a 22-year-old student at Bates College, both took time off from work to come to this Gathering. Both are considering going to seminary.

“The Gathering itself is perfect,” Hasselbarth said in an interview. “It definitely touches me because it’s so focused on activism and global issues” — something she doesn’t often find in her local church.

When information was presented to older Presbyterians about the PC(USA)’s boycott of Taco Bell, undertaken to try to pressure a firm that supplies tomatoes to Taco Bell to negotiate better wages and working conditions for farm workers, “they didn’t even want to hear about it,” Kavazanjian said. But “it’s something that really speaks to the younger generation. We have to ask the women to keep their minds open and hearts open.”

Both young women said they see more openness to activism at the national levels of the church — in Presbyterian Women and at the General Assembly — than they’ve found in their local churches, although they also feel supported by their congregations. The women in Kavazanjian’s church, for example, raised the money to bring her to the Gathering.

But “it’s not enough to have activities that are sewing quilts or baking food,” Hasselbarth said. She wants women in local churches to be “committed to drastic change . . . They don’t want to change things as much as I want things to change,” she said. “I just felt I was sounding so impatient.”

Some of the older women, too, worry about complacency.

Lois McConnell, 77, of Florence, Ore., was attending her sixth Gathering. She comes “for my own assurance that women are still caring about being with other women and feeling the actual power of the numbers, this many women agreeing and caring about the world.” Without that, she said, “it’s easy to get discouraged about the church.”

FROM THE PREACHING

Using as their text the fourth chapter of Ephesians, these women were challenged to think about how are called to live out God’s vision for the world — from simple, everyday choices about what one buys and eats and showing grace to those around us, to the big-picture views of world economics

As the meeting opened, Joan Martin, a Presbyterian minister who teaches Christian social ethics at Episcopal Divinity School, prayed for patience, open hearts, unclogged ears, and for God to “give us electricity from the very depth of your Word.” And she preached what she admitted were incendiary words — the idea of Presbyterian women having “a dangerous calling, a subversive identity, a radical communion.”

To use those words in a post-September 11 world, one friend told her, means “you must be out of your fourth-generation Presbyterian mind.” But Martin preached that what God is calling women to a vision that is scary, that’s outside the old familiar patterns, that includes the alienated and the marginalized: those on the fringes, the undocumented workers, the young people who feel estranged from church, those of Middle Eastern heritage who are suspected of being terrorists, the two-thirds of the world’s people who are poor.

The session ended with slides from photographer David Young, photographs of faces from around the world. “To greet a stranger,” the narrator said, “is to encounter one of God’s children.”

Janice Elizabeth Catron, a Presbyterian minister who’s editorial director of Geneva Press and has written Bible studies, spoke of the idea of calling — that “we have responsibility to be about the business of God,” that “we may only be able to do it in one church, one community, one little corner of the world,” but that doing right even for just one other person is to do God’s work.

Gloria Tate, pastor of Presbyterian Church of Teaneck, N.J., talked of moving past the mundane and the comfortable, of turning the dream into reality, of the work — in race relations, for example — that still needs to be done. “When we are complacent, we fool ourselves into thinking there is no problem, or if there is a problem, we are not part of it,” Tate said.

And throughout the Gathering, women told their personal stories of call — of listening for God, of sometimes being reluctant, but still setting forth.

Aida Faris, founder of the Center for Middle East Studies in Buffalo, N.Y., is a Presbyterian from Lebanon. Before moving to the U.S. in 1990, she was the national president of the YWCA in Lebanon and was deeply involved in peace work. She got up each day and thought of her husband and children and how much they needed her. And she prayed, “Protect me, as I go out under the shelling to do God’s work . . . My prayer was always, ‘I’m a tool in your hand. Use me.’ “

Mary G. Small, from northern Illinois, is a fifth-generation farmer. She spoke during a workshop on the economic challenges small farmers in the United States face, and the power of consumers to make a difference, by advocating for changes in agricultural policies and by making choices, as they shop for groceries for their families, that help small farmers and ranchers instead of just big agricultural interests. Among the possibilities: buying directly from local farmers, patronizing family-owned groceries and markets, reading food labels and being aware of which companies are responsible for the food we eat.

Farming is ‘a way of life,” Small said. “It’s not a sentimental link to the past,” but a belonging, an identity. “We do believe we are responsible for the soil,” she said. “Not for this year and not for next year, but for a lifetime . . . Everything we have is God’s.”

At the Gathering, the newly-elected leadership of Presbyterian Women also was announced — including Kris Gerling as moderator and Lillian Oats and Kathryn Baker as vice moderators. Gerling, who said her mother always warned her about buying dresses without pockets, grinned as she reached into the neckline of her dress and pulled out her speech notes. Among the challenges she sees for Presbyterian Women: how to relate to the PC(USA), now to bring in new and younger women, and “how to do this work while maximizing our finances.”

The Gathering’s final preacher was Martha Sadongei, a Native American pastor from Arizona and member of the PC(USA)’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity in the church, who described her own experience of being called to the ministry, after working 10 years as a first-grade teacher. Being called to do God’s work is like hearing a high-pitched whistle, she said — sometimes you can barely pick out the sound, and at first others around you may not hear it at all.

When God called Moses, Moses did hear the whistle — although it was a lopsided conversation, with God doing most of the talking, and Moses protesting that he didn’t have enough authority or experience, that he didn’t know what to say. Sadongei said she wasn’t exactly looking for a burning bush, but she did hope maybe for flashing lights spelling out, “Martha, this way!”