A New School Year

"As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects,
the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied,
the tension is held, the shuttle flies,
and the fabric is stretched tight.
Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart,
even breaks the heart--
and the more one loves teaching,
the more heartbreaking it can be.
The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments
when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able
so that teacher and students and subject
can be woven into the fabric of community that learning,
and living,
require."
--Parker Palmer--

"A God big enough to be God"

From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir, by Joan Chittister [an amazing book, which I appreciated both the first and second time my good friend gave it to me ;), and which I now consider one of my favourites]. I'm going to quote a large section of the chapter called "The God Within: Who Shall I Say Sent Me?", but I'd recommend the whole book to anyone interested.
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Finding a God big enough to be God was a spiritual task of no small proportions. I started over. If God is not God, or is at best only half a god, a male god, then where do we go? The Jewish Apocrypha teaches in reference to the picayune nature of the gods on Olympus, 'If the Greek gods steal, by whom shall their believers swear.' I knew the feeling. When God cannot possibly be God, the soul loses hope that there is any God at all. And the heart goes dry.
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But to confront the heresy of God the Father, I discovered quickly, is to be called a heretic. It is to come face-to-face with the possibility of exclusion, one way or another. We must accept the notion that God excluded femaleness from the Being that is God. Or, we must deal with the possibility that in reclaiming the fullness of what it means to be made 'in the image of God,' we may well be excluded from the community that taught us to believe that in the first place. To belong we must either diminish the very definition of God or demean the spiritual status of femaleness. A woman who is willing to do that mocks the God of creation. Any man who is willing to do that does not really want God at all. He simply wants himself writ large.
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... I began to realize that the God they were giving me to believe in was too small a God to possibly be worth a life. At least, not a woman's life.
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What's more, I found that this God did not lead to God at all. If the God we say we worship, the God of all being, lacks the feminine--rejects the feminine--then this God is not God. This God is lacking in being. And the being of woman lacks something of God.
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It is not easy to find the way back to the essence again once an image is cast in stone. This image of the superior male and a male God had been taught in male institution after male institution for centuries. By this time, it had done an untold amount of damage to the image of women. Worse than that, it had completely blinded us to God.
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But the search for God is the spiritual quest, the eternal journey, the breadth and depth and height of the universe. To find God means to be obliged to search beyond the images of limitation, to the essence, to the mystery, to the spirit. 'God,' Juanita Helphrey wrote, 'is a cloud forming, an eagle soaring, a voice from the wilderness echoing through your ear.' And so I considered my own understandings carefully and wrote,
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God is. God is love. God made woman, too, in God's own image.... Those three sentences have become enough for me. They have become my life. They sustain me; they caution me; and they drive me on. There is not much time left now and these are the ideas that go with me into 'The Valley of Death.' Not the doctrines, not the dogmas; not the so-called 'definitive' statements about the otherness of woman--all of which are just one more example of male attempts to capture the power of God for themselves.
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This time the God I sought was big enough to be the God of Being. No other spiritual idea has had as major an effect on my life, on my sense of self and of my sense of the real meaning of God as the God, who as well as being Father is also 'God my Mother.'