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by Sarah Strickland
As a first-time delegate to the CSW annual meetings, I can only describe my experience as “jumping into the deep-end of the pool.” I was blessed to be asked to be a delegate for the Women’s Intercultural Network by Jean Shinoda Bolen and Marilyn Fowler and I thank divine guidance for my leap of faith to say “yes!” My trade is strategic planning and co-creating “road-maps” that help people in organizations “see” where they want to go. I often find myself in a “midwife” role by helping bring an emerging idea or strategy into being. Recently, I have found myself drawing what I am seeing, hearing and understanding to be present about conversations I am in. The images flow through me and simply show up. It is my way of synthesizing and connecting many different elements into a picture-story. I was asked to share this with others. Please feel free to use it however you wish.
This picture emerged in the chapel at the Church building after I attended two days of meetings. Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday, February 23, Ecumenical Women gathered for our orientation on the 52nd Commission on the Status of Women. On that day, we joined together as women from many different areas of the world, cultures, ethnicities, denominations, and identities of all kinds, to form a coalition of women advocating for gender equality at the United Nations, from a faith-based perspective. We worshipped together, learned together, reflected together, and ate together! And after all that togetherness… we advocated together!
Photograph by Kimberly Llerena.
About a month ago, I was writing the litany for Ecumenical Women’s opening worship for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). In the first draft of the refrain, I wrote, “Shower the earth with your justice, O God, and invest life into the bodies of your people.” Bringing it to Kathleen Stone, the chaplain at the Church Center for the United Nations, I, a white, privileged, upper-middle class (by American standards), North American woman, expressed my timidity about using the word “justice” so liberally in the refrain. “What is justice, anyway?” I thought to myself, “and how do I feel about a God who openly distributes justice upon God’s enemies? What does it mean for God to have enemies?”
As I expressed these perusings to Kath, she paused before commenting. When she spoke, it was reminiscent of what my Exegesis professor at Union Theological Seminary would later say about Ezekiel 37:1-14. For those people who have witnessed the ravaging of their homes, who have experienced the debilitating scourge of poverty upon their bodies and communities, and whose flesh has been torn and wounded—indeed, for those who have seen the “dry bones” of Ezekiel—the word “justice” is never too strong a word to use. In these situations, when humanity is hampered by our inability to distribute justice, it is God who must distribute justice. The women who would be reciting my litany have seen these dry bones, and they have come to the CSW to right the injustices of this valley. With these women in mind, Kath and I changed the refrain to “Thunder the earth with your justice, O God, and invest life into the bodies of your people.”
A Study of The Kingdom of God within the “Monterrey Consensus” framework
….for the sake of all persons male, female, black, white, young, old, rich, poor,
There is a heart within those of us who yet believe in the coming of the Kingdom of God which will not rest. ”
(adapted from Augustine, 300 AD)
This study is born from that unrest. It analyzes the six themes of the Monterrey consensus. It can be used as a discussion guide for groups to analyze the concept of the Kingdom of God or the Monterrey consensus.
An excerpt:
One look at the world as we see it today with its vast inequities of privilege, power, ease of life, and economics, and we know something is vastly wrong. When we understand that women bear the disproportional burden of our erroring ways, the problem is thicker. And when we realize that women of color and indigenous women are excessively loaded with troubling powerful inequity, we must cry out. “This is just wrong.”
As the bearers of children, women have always needed the protection of community. Except for perhaps small pockets of the world, we can not escape this fact. And yet, more and more, around the world, with the direction our economy is taking us, women’s only hope of survival is to be used as a cog in a “liberalized, non-regulated economy”. And the problem? The value system of that economy has little consideration for the unique needs and the multiple responsibilities placed upon women. To see so many suffering at such extraordinary levels is unacceptable in God’s Kingdom and should be unacceptable in any ethical system of governance.
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A Study of The Kingdom of God within the “Monterrey Consensus” framework
