I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
—Revelation 22:13
The ballroom at the Parliament of the World’s Religions was packed to capacity, about three thousand women. A huge banner hung over the stage: “2015 Inaugural Women’s Assembly—Salt Lake.” I sat under the sign.
Although this parliament has gathered for more than a century, this was the first time in history there would be a meeting for women in advance of the general assembly. Native women opened the ceremonies by telling stories of the place where we convened, land sacred in their tradition, once inhabited only by their people and great herds of beasts. Women from different faiths offered prayers. One by one, sisters came to the podium, wearing everything from Western business dresses and religious robes to tribal clothing, carrying books and beads, some with hair flowing free and some with heads covered by veils. They spoke prayers of many traditions with words, drums, dances, incense, poetry, and liturgies.
I felt nervous, sitting there on the stage as one of twenty keynote speakers. The organizers had seated me between a Wiccan and a Hindu, one seat removed from a Muslim. Of those on the stage, only two were Christians: a Mormon and me. Only six or so were white. I had spoken to groups of Jews, groups of secular people, and groups of African American clergy where I had been the only white woman or only Christian in the room. But never had I been in a place where Christianity was one religion among many, where white was just one shade of humanity among so many others, and where Christians sat on a stage they did not own and were present with no intent to proselytize. Yet there I was: one of two women representing hundreds of millions of Christian women across the globe, sitting with my sisters.
I was scheduled near the end of the presentations. One by one, the women seated ahead of me spoke. And then it was my turn. I walked to the lectern. I addressed the vast congregation, speaking of spiritual wisdom passed on from my mother and my two grandmothers to me. Then I shared this story:
Last week, I was at my neighborhood coffee shop. My favorite barista was there, a young Muslim woman. I noticed something different about her. She was not wearing her usual black hijab. Instead, she was wearing a bright green scarf edged with sparkling sequins.
“I love your scarf,” I said.
She looked pleased. “You know, they told me I had to wear black.”
“What?” I asked.
“The rules. They said I had to wear black. But I didn’t believe it. So I looked it up myself. I don’t have to wear black. I can wear any color I want.”
I didn’t know whether she was speaking of some religious authority or her boss. But it didn’t matter. She had searched the “rules” for herself, not listening to someone else’s interpretation, but reading the text on her own: “I looked it up myself.”
“I looked it up myself” has thundered throughout history. This is the stuff of what we Protestant Christians call Reformation, of a new spiritual revolution. When the women of the world take on words for themselves, when we seize our sacred texts and search them for truth, for wisdom, for strength. To interpret our traditions for ourselves. Not to submit, but to claim authority and look it up for ourselves, to do that which we know to be beautiful and joyful and just. Women with the power of words can change the world.1
The audience roared approval! I looked out over a sea of women whose words and wisdom were remaking all their traditions. It was, quite simply, overwhelming.
I returned to my seat. The Hindu woman smiled warmly at me; the Muslim sister reached out and squeezed my hand. At that moment, an image flashed in my mind of Jesus sitting in a circle with Patanjali, the Buddha, Muhammad, Guru Nanak, and Confucius; with saints and mystics and seers. In the circle. Not above it, not beyond it. In the circle. With me, with all of us in the circle.
* * *
In a famous quote, the medieval mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1282) relates an all-encompassing vision of her own: “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.” And the New Testament often uses the word “all” in connection with Jesus, especially in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, where Jesus is depicted as the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (1:19), “all things hold together” (1:17), and “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hidden (2:3). “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created” (1:16), and Jesus is the one through whom God “was pleased to reconcile to himself all things” (1:20). In what is the most mystical of the letter’s claims, the ancient author proclaims: “There is no longer Greek and Jew, . . . but Christ is all and in all!” (3:11).
The all in all. Contemporary writers and theologians have turned toward the spiritual inclusivity of Jesus, emphasizing his “all-ness” with many titles: the Cosmic Christ, the Ground of Being, the Heart of Creation, the Universal Christ.2 “The life of Jesus,” insists Catholic theologian Ilia Delio, “sets the pattern of whole-making, which includes reconciliation, forgiveness, peacemaking, and compassion, and . . . this pattern permeates the mass of creation—humanity and cosmos.”3 The story of Jesus unfolds toward unity, toward making all things one, to the ultimate wholeness of healing, peace, justice, and love. “God is unbroken wholeness in movement,” Delio continues, “and creation is movement toward God-centered wholeness.”4
This is the truth of Jesus. That Jesus—the one known intimately as friend and teacher, experienced as Savior and Lord, who guides on the way and inhabits the ordinary—is also the universal Jesus, the welcoming and inclusive Jesus, the Jesus of the circle and in the circle, the all in all.
Over the years, I have been with Jesus in many circles. Sitting in a Sunday school circle and hearing flannel-board stories about him, singing with others in a circle around a campfire, and praying in a circle in a Mexican village for justice and peace. Teaching students theology seated at round tables, offering Communion in a circle around an altar, dancing in a circle with Sioux women at a protest march in Washington, and being in the circle of faith in Salt Lake City. Circles are dynamic and communal. You cannot be in a circle by yourself. “Where two or three are gathered,” Jesus promised to be present.
The cross is, of course, the most familiar spiritual symbol of Christianity. But the circle best illustrates my experience of Jesus—around tables, altars, and campfires; in classrooms and church rooms; at rallies and protests. There have been times in my life when I liked lines, wanted to draw lines, and tried to consign others—or myself—to neat rows of pews or desks. I imagined that life was a straight narrative line, with clear beginnings, happy endings, and solutions to all of its mysteries.
It took some time to understand that the mystery of Alpha and Omega is more like a spiral or the mythical snake that eats its own tail—the circle, that infinite geometric form symbolizing the “all.” Despite the hesitations that held me back sometimes, the ever-inclusive Jesus kept inviting me into circles, beginning with the Methodist Sunday school room and extending to the stage at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Encountering Jesus in the widening circles stretched my own heart to love more, embrace more.
Not only has Jesus shown up in these circles, but the circle has become an apt image for my spiritual life. When I was in seminary, someone introduced me to the literature about stages of faith. Based on the work of psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, James Fowler worked out a trajectory of spiritual development that moved through six stages, from fantasy to logic to belief, then to disillusionment and skepticism, then paradox and, finally, unity.5 I appreciate the framework that Fowler described—and found it meaningful in understanding my own spiritual journey. However, Fowler seemed oddly committed to spiritual development as a linear process, implying that one finally arrives at “universalized faith” on the journey.
Ultimately, however, he misses an important aspect of faith experience. In the “unitive” stage, I find myself returning to the start, wanting to incorporate the wisdom of the entire journey—all the Jesuses—into my life now. What he depicted as an ending, I’ve found to be a new beginning. I go back in the spirit of informed wonder, what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the second naïveté,” reimaging Jesus as my friend, learning from the teacher, thankful for the ever-healing Savior, serving the kind Lord, staying on the way, and mindful of the quotidian presence. To find the wholeness of Jesus on a platform with women from many world religions is one thing. To find wholeness with the Jesuses I have known is quite another. Too often, we find it difficult to embrace our own past, to accept our full experience as sacred. Because of that, we cut ourselves off from our own wisdom. Yet, even as the universal Jesus reaches through the whole cosmos; that same Jesus enfolds all the insights of our hearts, the whole of our story. The Cosmic Christ is also the Jesus of Sunday school memory, the Heart of Creation is found in every crevice of our own hearts.
May the circle be unbroken. By and by, Lord, by and by.
* * *
As I reflect on the circle, I consider all the Jesuses I have known, six of whom I have shared here: friend, teacher, Savior, Lord, way, and presence. There are a few Jesuses who were hinted at in different parts of the narrative, but not specifically mentioned in this story—Jesus as Lover, a rich image from medieval spirituality, one who meant a great deal to me when I was going through a divorce and speaks again now that I am in my sixties; Jesus as Word (and the corresponding Jesus as Silence), who shapes my vocation as a writer; Jesus as Wisdom, the feminine Sophia, who breathes and births the world into life; and Jesus as Bread and Wine, the familiar Jesus of Communion, who feeds and sustains me. Perhaps Jesus as Lover, Word, Wisdom, and Sustenance feel almost too intimate to share publicly; or perhaps that is the Jesus who is worming his way into my heart at the moment, making it hard to put the immediate experience into permanent prose. Who are you? A question with myriad answers.
We know Jesus through our experience. There is no other way to become acquainted with one who lived so long ago and who lives in ways we can barely understand through church, scripture, and good works and in the faces of our neighbors. In these pages, I have shared six Jesuses whom I experienced through something I call “memoir theology” (not theological memoir). Memoir theology is the making of theology—understanding the nature of God—through the text of our own lives and taking seriously how we have encountered Jesus.
In seminary, I asked a professor why we only read theology written by men—books by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, and Wesley. He told me that women did not write theology.
I quickly replied, “What about Perpetua? Julian of Norwich? Hildegard of Bingen? Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena?”
He replied, “That’s not theology. That’s memoir.”
I fell silent, unsure what to say.
I stewed over that remark for a long time. It is clear that we call it “theology” when men write of Jesus. But we call it “memoir” when women do? What—other than memoir—are Augustine’s stories of stealing pears and weeping over his lost love? Or Luther writing of his fear of death or proclaiming, “Here I stand”? Or Wesley sharing his experience of the heart strangely warmed. Or Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisting the Nazis? All the “big-name” theologians in church history wrote of Jesus from their own stories; their theologies were born from experience. Without their struggles and sins, their theologies would not exist. Theology is born when we wrestle with God in our lives. Spiritual memoir is theology, and experience is a text of Christology.
Of course, women are not the only ones whose experience has not counted in the making of theology—men and women of color, indigenous people, LGBTQ people, disabled people, working-class people, laity, anyone outside of the academy, the poor and outcast. For centuries, church authorities silenced all these theologies by discounting the experiences of most Christian people, consigning them all to some category of “less than” the few men whose experiences were deemed normative to interpret the experiences of the rest of us. As a result, Christianity has lost the wisdom of millions and millions of faithful people whose journeys with Jesus may have reshaped the faith and perhaps inspired the church to live more justly and compassionately.
The limited notion of theology as one thing and experience as another has been the source of untold pain and incalculable loss, surely something that causes the universal Jesus to weep. Our frame is so narrow, and Jesus’s is so wide. If only we knew all the Jesuses who have been hidden from view, all the Christs never heard. Thankfully, more voices count now—the experiences of many are arising to bring every Jesus to light the world.
There is an old Berber proverb: “The true believer begins with herself.”6 Your experience of Jesus matters. It matters in conversation with the “big names,” when you argue with the tradition, and when you read the words and texts for yourself. It matters when you hear Jesus speaking, feel Jesus prompting, and sink into despair when Jesus seems absent. It all matters. The Jesuses you have known and the Jesus you know matter.
* * *
The oddest thing happened while I was working on this book. My story began with Jesus’s words at the Washington National Cathedral, “Get me out of here.” During the months of reflecting and writing, the coronavirus pandemic broke out across the world, forcing us to distance and church buildings to close. Christians could not gather in familiar places, their buildings empty and dark, their sanctuaries without prayers and sacraments.
If you wanted to find Jesus in a church, you couldn’t. The doors were shut tight.
But as millions have discovered in these many months, Jesus was not confined to a building. Jesus was around our tables at home, with us on walks and hikes, present in music, art, and books, and visible in faces via Zoom. Jesus was with us when we felt we could do no more, overwhelmed by work and online school. Jesus was with us as we prayed with the sick in hospital over cell phones. Jesus did not leave us to suffer alone. COVID-19 forced Jesus out of the cathedral into the world, reminding Christians that church is not a building. Rather, church is wherever two or three are gathered—even if the “two” is only you and your cat—and where Jesus is present in bread that regular people bake, bless, and break at family tables and homemade altars. I did not liberate Jesus from the cathedral; a pandemic did. Jesus is with us. Here.
One day, the doors will open again. Many will not go back to church, mostly because they left some time ago. They did not need help to find Jesus in their lives and in the world. They were already discovering what it meant to follow Jesus beyond the church. Perhaps the pandemic hastened the process, caused them to ask new questions, or renewed their courage on the journey.
But many others will return. And, as before, people will sit close, hug and pass the peace, and share bread and wine. I suspect I will pray again at the altar in the National Cathedral, under the gaze of Jesus. I cannot predict what he might say. I do, however, know what I will say: “Thank you.”
Whatever happens, however, I hope none of us will ever forget the Jesus we have met in our own lives, who has been with us in fear and confusion and loss, in forced isolation and the surprising moments of joy, and through the ministrations of our shared human priesthood. It all matters. All of it.