The mere mention of theology evokes images of lofty but distant places and people: church spires, ivory-turreted universities surrounded by verdant landscapes-and male gray eminences such as the late Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.
It hardly evokes the image of a block of small businesses in a treeless corner of suburbia: diverse enterprises such as an African-American hair salon and a Korean-American-run cafeteria-and women like Mary Hunt and Dianne Neu.
But upstairs, above the salon and cafeteria, one finds the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, or WATER, run by Hunt, a theologian, and Neu, a former nun from Indianapolis, who are among the new female voices raised in an ages-old debate over ultimate meanings and ethics.
Feminist theology is a recognized area of studies at many universities, where theology was once taught almost exclusively by men for men-especially those with a calling to the all-male clergy.
Hunt is among the leading proponents of the new theology and with Neu founded WATER in 1983 to put their ideas into practice. Both are Roman Catholics whose work has attracted people from around the world to their plain headquarters in this Washington suburb.
This summer two Australians are here as part of WATER’s continuing scholar-in-residence program. One is a Protestant minister who is developing a program to deal with people who have suffered from abuse. The other, a Catholic nun, is studying the problem of violence within the church.
Elizabeth Dreyer, a Chicago native who heads the department of ecclesiastical history at Catholic Washington Theological Union, places this ferment historically within “the second round of concerns of women.” The first round, says Dreyer, began in the 19th Century when early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in response to churches’ and societal bias against women, produced the Woman’s Bible.
As graduate programs in theology opened to women in the last 25 years, Dreyer explains, history, ethics and Bible studies could finally be examined from the perspective of women’s interests and well-being. Feminist theology at first focused mainly on what was wrong with institutional religion before it began the search for ways to change the status quo.
Dreyer describes Hunt and Neu, who are in their 40s, as pioneers doing “positive, constructive things” to make the church more inclusive. WATER provides an alternative structure for putting their ideas into practice.
A Georgetown University theologian, Chester Gillis, considers WATER within the mainstream of the new feminist theology. He places Hunt among the reformists who want to remain within the Judeo-Christian tradition but at the same time wrest it from what they see as institutionalized bias, hardened over centuries, against women and minorities. Other feminist theolologians such as Boston College’s Mary Daly, whom Gillis describes as radicals, have abandoned Christianity as repressive and incapable of redemption. Instead they have replaced the traditional concept of the supreme being-traditionally spoken of in metamorphic terms as a he-with a religion and theology of the goddess.
Hunt uses women’s friendships as the basis for her thinking. In her 1991 book, “Fierce Friendship: A Feminist Theology of Friendship,” Hunt has rejected the model espoused by Aristotle and embraced one way or another as an underpinning of Western Christianity.
Under the Aristotelian model, Hunt points out, only men could achieve the pinnacle of friendship and, therefore, women’s experiences were left out of this crucial human equation. In her book she tells how the seminal Greek philosopher classified friends along three lines: acquaintances, companions and, at the highest level, intimates of whom there are only one or two in a lifetime.
By contrast, she says, women experience friendship in a way that resembles the circle: “It’s not that I have one best friend at the top of my pyramid, but I have a number of people with whom I experience friendship.” Much as men do, women experience the phenomenon of “best friends,” she argues, but to survive in an often unfriendly environment, women need lots of friends.
As a result of Christianity’s borrowings from Aristotle and its patriarchal practices, marriage-especially of the romanticized variety-became the standard relationship for men and women. This tradition, Hunt says, has largely excluded the unmarried, the divorced and homosexuals as being relationships below the males-only pinnacle.
A model for inquiries
Hunt’s model of feminine friendship is a sharp contrast to the dominant and familiar male system in which men consider themselves the breadwinners and competitors on a personal as well as a global level. Early on, males develop a buddy system that provides them with a sounding board and with partners in the continual competition to succeed.
A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Hunt has degrees from Marquette University, Harvard Divinity School, the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., and the Graduate Theological Union, also in Berkeley. She taught for several years and has lectured widely-frequently in Latin America-on women’s issues and human rights.
In her writing Hunt stresses the need to make theology more accessible and meaningful to people, especially those outside regular church and university circles who are turned off by the jargon and esoteric methods of the “erudite guild” of many traditional theologians.
“What I tried to do was take a common topic which people can relate to and show how our fundamental cultural understandings will shift when we take a look at the world through a new lens,” she says. “Friendship is the normative human adult relationship that is good and available to everyone-between men and women, between women and women, between men and men, and between people and their pets, between people and God, between humanity and the earth.”
In her view feminine friendship is an ideal model for theological inquiries. “Friendship with the divine, whether he, she or it, is inspired by human friendship and vice versa,” Hunt has written. “This does not trivialize the divine nor elevate the human.”
At WATER, Hunt and Neu have developed ecumenical rituals and liturgies reflecting their belief that theology should be grounded in religious practices.
“Most people meet religion and encounter spirituality in ritual and liturgy,” explains Neu. “If their baby dies, they don’t want to sit around and think about it. They want someone to hold their hand or tell them it’s going to be OK. That’s what people do in liturgy.”
Drawing from her experience as a teacher, chaplain and social worker, Neu has injected feminist concerns into new religious services. The language speaks of women as well as men, humankind instead of mankind, and matriarchs as well as patriarchs. Song, chant, prayer and dance complement the visual elements of each celebration.
Flames of healing
Neu describes one of her rituals, called “Drops of Water,” which is designed for women who have encountered abuse, rape, incest or other physical violence. It contains a litany of healing in which the participants pray aloud for safe places for women and children who have been violated.
During the service there is a blessing and a prayer in which they invite the Holy One of Justice “to empower us to enkindle flames of healing.” A stone is passed around and women are asked to pour all their pain and anger into it.
The stone is then placed in a bowl of water and the participants engage in washing it. They speak of a new community in which truth takes precedence over power.
Neu speaks of the catharsis she has witnessed and “the many kinds of emotions” released in this simple liturgy. But what is crucial for Neu and Hunt is that they are trying, in new religious settings, to confront the rampant violence and hurt of contemporary society in their work and to provide new models of religious expression.
These and similar rituals, however, are more likely to be found in someone’s living room rather than at the parish church or another mainline religious institution. Everyday objects-for example, candles, ribbons, an egg, wine, a meal-are used in these celebrations of women’s power and justice, and such routines of life as menstruation and aging.
According to Hunt and Neu, these new ways of worship have sprung up in response to the so-called woman church movement, the discontent with institutional churches and their second-class treatment or disenfranchisement of women.
While Hunt and Neu support the notion of women’s ordination, they seek a new model of ministry more attuned, in their view, to the pastoral needs of the times. After all, women ministers and priests often find themselves relegated to inferior roles in the church that is reminiscent of their plight as laywomen or religious.
“The ordination of women can distract,” says Neu, “if we continue to enforce the same structures of clericalism, the laws of celibacy or any model of hierarchy that are, in my judgmemt, contrary to the best of what Christianity is about in terms of justice and certainly inadequate to the pastoral needs of most people.”
Personal stories
There are many personal stories to tell at WATER. Neu talks about the Protestant minister who came for advice on how she might counsel a distraught divorcee, and the parent who came troubled by her daughter’s lesbianism.
Another minister, a woman in her 70s from a Disciples of Christ church, does research in WATER’s extensive book collection for her Father’s Day sermon on new ideas for fathering. A Catholic nun, also in her 70s, who no longer goes to church, seeks help in a struggle to find her place in an institution she no longer believes in.
Hunt and Neu refer to WATER’s headquarters as “a low-budget operation” that relies heavily on interns and volunteers. Books, videos and audio cassettes can be bought there, and among the programs it offers are Saturday seminars, monthly breakfasts, feminist religious rituals, and discussions of books such as Mary Daly’s “Outercourse,” Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s “Discipleship of Equals” and Delores Williams` “Sisters in the Wilderness.”
WATER’s newsletter, Waterwheel, zeroes in on the many happenings and dialogues in the rich landscape of feminist theology. Last fall’s issue, for example, had a short interview with Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian feminist, who spoke of the need to change “our image of men and women in the cosmos” and to “resituate the human within, not above, the cosmos.”
Neu sums up WATER’s mission thus:
“While we do alternative, new kinds of things, it is always one that comes out of a base. My grandparents didn’t give to the church so that I have to create something totally other than that. They gave so that I can bring the interpretation of my generation to their foundation. I think that’s what WATER is all about.”
———-
For more information about the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual write to WATER, 8035 13th St., Silver Spring, Md. 20910-4803, or call 301-589-2509.
