I read Trish Warren's response to the fiasco around Nadia Bolz-Webber's commissioning of a vagina sculpture with a great degree of affinity. After all, Bolz-Webber is rather late to this game.
But Warren's essay for Christianity Today's website, posted on social media, elicited one memorable "throwing the book" response: Taking umbrage with the liturgy of the Churching of Women. The interlocutor's only exposure was the proudly secular Masterpiece series Victoria, when the young queen seems to be forced into a degrading ritual of repentance after the birth of her first child. This person, battling the same complicated portrait of sexuality that so many women have experienced over the years, prickled at the implication that bearing children required some kind of forgiveness by the Church. Of course, that's exactly what the plot device was meant to do in this episode, but it's a far cry from the intention of the liturgy, or even its general understanding and reception among the churched.
In my former days as an Anglican pastor in the sleepy little town of Holmfirth, I recall the story of a wizened English man who, soon after his first son's birth, asked me if his wife would be enjoying the Churching of Women, and immediately went on to wax nostalgic about the importance and belovedness of this ritual during their childhood. He said it was one of the most culturally popular events in his young life. Even those not particularly pious loved the liturgy of thanksgiving for safety and asking blessing upon the child and the enlarged family in their earliest days. We prayed the ritual of the Churching of Women that Sunday, and the entire parish celebrated.
I get it. In 2001, the Churching of Women wasn't that popular, and by 2019 it's practically unknown. For the last 100 years or so, the liturgical act has involved "Thanksgiving for the Birth or Adoption of a Child" or "Thanksgiving of Women After Childbirth" (at least in the US). But then again there are secular rituals at the time of birth in the US everyday: Placenta-encapsulation, womb-closing, Mayan medicine, dedicated prenatal and postnatal yoga. You get the idea. Clearly women have an idea that something spectacular is going on in their bodies and they want to mark those moments and acknowledge their bodies as sacred space.
And I have to wonder if that's what Bolz-Webber is trying to do, too. Granted, it's in sadly banal, secular terms, so she neglects the centuries of recognition of baptism as a yonic act and the Church as the Womb of Christ, connected to its very lifeblood in the Body of Jesus.
But Warren's essay for Christianity Today's website, posted on social media, elicited one memorable "throwing the book" response: Taking umbrage with the liturgy of the Churching of Women. The interlocutor's only exposure was the proudly secular Masterpiece series Victoria, when the young queen seems to be forced into a degrading ritual of repentance after the birth of her first child. This person, battling the same complicated portrait of sexuality that so many women have experienced over the years, prickled at the implication that bearing children required some kind of forgiveness by the Church. Of course, that's exactly what the plot device was meant to do in this episode, but it's a far cry from the intention of the liturgy, or even its general understanding and reception among the churched.
In my former days as an Anglican pastor in the sleepy little town of Holmfirth, I recall the story of a wizened English man who, soon after his first son's birth, asked me if his wife would be enjoying the Churching of Women, and immediately went on to wax nostalgic about the importance and belovedness of this ritual during their childhood. He said it was one of the most culturally popular events in his young life. Even those not particularly pious loved the liturgy of thanksgiving for safety and asking blessing upon the child and the enlarged family in their earliest days. We prayed the ritual of the Churching of Women that Sunday, and the entire parish celebrated.
I get it. In 2001, the Churching of Women wasn't that popular, and by 2019 it's practically unknown. For the last 100 years or so, the liturgical act has involved "Thanksgiving for the Birth or Adoption of a Child" or "Thanksgiving of Women After Childbirth" (at least in the US). But then again there are secular rituals at the time of birth in the US everyday: Placenta-encapsulation, womb-closing, Mayan medicine, dedicated prenatal and postnatal yoga. You get the idea. Clearly women have an idea that something spectacular is going on in their bodies and they want to mark those moments and acknowledge their bodies as sacred space.
And I have to wonder if that's what Bolz-Webber is trying to do, too. Granted, it's in sadly banal, secular terms, so she neglects the centuries of recognition of baptism as a yonic act and the Church as the Womb of Christ, connected to its very lifeblood in the Body of Jesus.