Firstly thank you to those of you who have commented on yesterday evenings post offering to pray for me, and giving words of encouragement, I really do appreciate your support. I have spent most of today struggling with this cloud of darkness and with back pain, which I am sure has added to the general feeling of gloom.
One thing that I am acutely aware of within myself is a creeping tendency towards destructive patterns, this is particularly noticeable in the winter months, and it is subtle. I enter in to a pattern akin to hibernation where I sleep longer than I need to and forgo the life-giving time to meditate and pray, I snatch at scriptures, rather than savouring them...
.. along with this I suffer from a constant battle with my weight, this has been a real problem ever since I began studying again, as the pressures of work, and home and study together squeeze out valuable exercise time...
...it becomes easy to berate myself for not taking time, and to feel guilty about weight, especially in a world where I am increasingly aware that these light and momentary troubles are the luxury of the rich; and so I take another stepon the downward slope...
...am I a compulsive cope-r?... yes in truth I am...when I don't want to get out of bed, when I eat and procrastinate, when it becomes easier to slip out to Tescos for junk food where I invariably spend too much, rather than make a meal with the ingredients we have... Yes hands up this is me... and this is the sin I would like to hide from...
... but where is God, and can I find freedom in Christ in all of this?
God is for me! S/he does not want me to continue digging a hole down into darkness, but when I look up I have come so far down that I cannot climb out, no matter how much encouragement I receive... but here is the miracle, there in the bottom of the hole I find God, and s/he holds me in the dark and the quiet making no demands upon me, and s/he helps me to understand that I am loved anyway...
I return again to Serene Jone's writing on sanctification for women- this book turns the traditional readings of grace and sanctification on it's head offering sanctification first... God sanctifies me...Joy Ann McDougall writes this account of Jones'theology;
In exploring justification and sanctification, Jones first takes the reader to Luther’s courtroom and recounts his familiar drama of justification. Here the prideful sinner bent on earning his own salvation meets his undoing -- the crucifying wrath of God which reveals both the sinner’s impotence and his guilt before God. Instead of receiving his due punishment, the helpless sinner receives the unexpected and undeserved verdict of divine forgiveness. Through the proclamation of the gospel, the sinner is released from the bondage of his sin and comes to faith -- saved by grace and not by his own righteousness.
To this classic Reformed drama, Jones poses a simple question: What happens when a woman performs Luther’s dramatic script? With the help of feminist theory, she demonstrates how this drama of justification all too often "misses the mark" of women’s lives -- lives that are very often marked not by boastful arrogance but rather by an inadequate sense of personal agency. Women who already suffer from a lack of self-definition, and whose existence has already been undone by unjust relations of power, find themselves undone once again by the crucifying wrath of God. Rather than releasing a woman from her bondage to sin, Luther’s courtroom drama recapitulates the very dynamics of her oppression -- the "shattering she knows all too well."
Given the doctrine’s potentially debilitating effects, Jones proposes a deft response: Why not reverse the plot-line of the Reformed narrative, offering women the story of sanctification first, followed by that of justification? In this way, women would first be given an empowering script about divine grace that secures their personal identity, affirms the goodness of their embodiment and sends them forth into the world with renewed agency and purpose. Clothed in sanctifying grace, a woman is no longer "a dispersed and fragmented identity" determined by gender roles not of her own choosing. She is held together within "the envelope of God’s grace" and therein gains the freedom to "write new scripts of faithful living."
Once women inhabit this life-giving space of sanctification, justification returns to Jones’s salvation drama, but within a revised script. Justification is a release not primarily from the sin of one’s self-righteousness, but from the prison of gender constructions that bind women and men alike. It frees women and men from replaying inherited patterns of gender identity and social order.
I recognise again that I need to dwell in God's creative spaces in order to grow, depression brings with it old baggage and condemning voices. These voices demand repentance instead of offering grace, and accuse me of pride where none exist but rather prides' opposite dwells. These voices are not Godly voices.
God comes and wraps me in love and clothes me in grace, God bids me stand, and like a fragile thing hope is reborn within me....
It is hard to remind myself to deal with traditional doctrine and theology with a hermeneutic of suspicion, but it remains necessary for me because as a woman I recognise my own fragmented nature, and need to escape the debilitating effects that they all too often bring. In doing so I am not declaring myself free from sin, but acknowledging my need to meet God in a life-giving way, and to release myself from negative and harmful narratives....
I do not need to be undone, I am undone... with that realisation this place of darkness becomes a place of safety, a place where hope can be re-kindled within...
I want to be rid of the self-destructive patterns in my life... and I slowly become aware that the Holy Spirit is here with me, picking up the fragments of self that I have discarded;
... to my self worth she whispers- you are worthy!
...to my body she whispers- you are beautiful!
...to my souls ache she whispers words of love and comfort...
...and to my heart words of peace...
She bids me to rest in her presence; to receive strength and succor from her, to remember that each day and each moment is another opportunity, and that my life is neither a battle nor a competition but a thing of beauty to be offered to God....
For now I will rest... she knows my needs....
