…the kind of imagination it will take to re-invent the world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes said that the words “wild” and “woman” create a fairytale knock on the door of heart. Theologian Paul Ricoeur convinced us that words create worlds. “Deplorables” as a word used to describe a group of people with heartbeats who pay taxes and love their children is unacceptable, too.
Words create worlds and we are all wondering what kind of world we will wake up to on Nov. 9th. Whatever that world looks like, the reality is, it will be up to us to re-invent it and it will require a great deal of imagination and care for the words we choose.
The truth is, as much as I am reluctant to admit it, one whose very profession is studying the nature of God in the world,much of our impoverished imagination comes directly from the ways in which we have interpreted Bible.
Depth Psychologist C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, one must read the Bible. And what he meant by that was that America was built largely through an early partnership between politics and church. My own denomination, Methodism, was the largest Protestant sect in early America, forming towns, cities, schools, hospitals and was the a great center of the civilizing force of our country. Ulysses S. Grant said that there were three great political parties in America: Republicans, Democrats and Methodists. The best selling book in the world, the Bible, still has major game and influence when it comes to worldview.
The wake up call for us is that the Bible’s social and political framework for a delivery system for the Word of God was patriarchy, and not necessarily the benevolent kind. The stories that narrate our faith world and have formed the psyche of a nation, the stories that make up the best selling book ever in the world, the stories that tell us who we are as a people are often hostile to over half of our national population. That said, even this realization hasn’t hindered individuals and faith communities from practicing the Bible’s mandate of unconditional love, it just doesn’t seem to make the daily news.
What we realize, faith communities who choose to re-imagine faith in the 21st Century, is that just because the Word of God came to us in the framework of a social and political system beginning over three thousand years ago known as patriarchy, doesn’t mean faith communities are confined to a system that is oppressive for many people. In fact, even Jesus challenged to reform by saying to his followers “you will do greater things than me.” And we all know he was a liberator of those oppressed by the system, particularly women.
And just because the candidates for leaders of the free world (one of them Methodist) may lack imagination in the words they use to describe one another doesn’t mean we have to go and do likewise. In fact, we can do better.
Our world will only be as good as we can imagine it to be. Because imagination is actually our built in communication system with God, we can even re-imagine our interpretations of Bible. Because there are also stories that tell of a counter-narrative, hidden in the Bible’s unexplored territories in which women rise above their status as property and become leaders: warriors, prophets and military heroes.
We don’t have to throw out our old traditions in order to grow to a place that creates an environment of flourishing for everyone. In fact, that would be tragic. We hold on to the traditions that help us move forward even as we let go of the ones that hold us back. Tradition pulls one way, progress pulls the other, and we arrive at a third way forward. That is how we grow. Because love is always preferenced as the way of God in the end and to love is to allow people to grow. Too much emphasis on either tradition or progress causes stagnancy or deterioration. We learn to grow best in the tension. Our democratic system is actually built for positive movement forward, that is, if we can only imagine it.
On November 9th, we will all have a new reality no matter who is elected and the truth is, we will all have a big job on our hands, the re-imagination of our world. Perhaps the true leadership is in our hands and our hearts and yes, even and especially in our faith communities.
A woman doesn’t become a hero overnight and she doesn’t do it alone. It takes a village to make a hero in the form of an Olympic athlete. A village of men and women working together to make something spectacular occur in one rare and gifted human being. But that’s not the point, the thing about watching women set some of the world’s greatest records in this year’s summer Olympics is simply that we are not accustomed to seeing women shine so brightly on center stage and we don’t know what to say. Even seasoned commentators seem to stumble, searching for excuses as to how this can be happening, preferring to lay the proof of her success on the shoulders of the (perceived) real hero, her male counterpart.
Quite simply, we are seeing things we never saw before and it’s magnificently stunning.
We’ve known it all along, that women are heroes, leaders, strong, wise, and the equal of men, not the same, that is, but equal, nonetheless. But these facts have remained hidden in plain sight. Even in the Bible, there is a whole class of women warriors hidden in the pages, but with just a little digging, we can find at least six scripture references to the class of warrior women in the ancient Hebrew culture who led, fought, strategized and prophesied in Yahweh’s army. Perhaps we are just now able to welcome them onto the scene of religion, though they have been there all along.
As we learn to see the world through the eyes of women, we see our world changing, both the old and new. This is scary for a lot of people, but it need not be. Things are changing in our world largely due to the perspectives female leadership is bringing. New perspectives are often frightening when we’ve lived so long in the old. Take the Bible, for example, it’s been the bestselling book in America for a very long time, the cornerstone of the “swearing in” of legal court procedures, and yet many popular Biblical interpretations support perspectives that promote practices of violence against women, sexism and silencing as the norm.
Depth Psychologist, C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, we need to read our Bibles. This is also scary because many oppressive biblical ideas about women became the foundations upon which our culture was constructed. While I’m a female pastor and search for new perspectives on the old, old stories to inform faith in the 21st Century, I try and remember that the Bible didn’t invent patriarchy, but many interpretations of Bible portray a system in which women were conscripted to become subservient to males as a form of moral, civil and religious practice. In other words, Bible culture often promotes a world view like Etta James sings about in the old blues song: “it’s a man’s world but it would be nothing without a woman or a girl.”
But there is a way forward, a kind of third way, something Jung was popular for promoting. The tension between the opposites, and we’re seeing it now in our world and we can see it in our religion, too, if we’re willing to open our eyes and hearts to a new perspective, accepting not only a woman’s leadership, but learning to see the world through her eyes, backwards and forwards.
We can still do Bible and believe in women’s identity, it’s not an either or situation, we don’t have to isolate ourselves from society to adhere to a morality system built for the first millennia BCE, and we don’t have to ditch our Bibles to see something new.
As woman becomes more and more the hero, the champion, the lead character in her own story, we begin to see our old, old stories differently, too. The women in the ancient stories who led men, became warriors and war strategists, and through their leadership, accomplished heroic acts on behalf of God, become more present on the pages that undergird our faith world as women become more prominent leaders in our world, too.
Jung also said that what is needed in our time are new narratives from old stories. If we can learn to read our lives through the eyes of the women who are leading us forward, with the seeds of new life in their hearts, we just might see things we never saw before, the future just might be brighter than we think.
Trickster figures are stock characters appearing in myths and stories from all over the world. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the trickster moves across traditional boundary lines, causing chaotic events to unfold by exposing what is hidden, often through reprehensible behavior. Trickster figures can appear in real life as well, some say we all have aspects of the archetype within us, we see the trickster looming large in the persona of Donald Trump.
Tricksters generally come onto the scene when there are important decisions to be made and something big is at stake. They challenge the main characters of the story to reconsider their views, question the journey they are on and become reconciled to their truest path. Tricksters expose the dark realm within us all where fear lives, namely, the shadow. Trump represents this trickster figure who has come into the story of our culture for such a time as this and we are the main characters, each one of us. He forces us to either ignore or examine, at the shadow level, what we really believe about issues that have largely remained hidden, particularly what we believe about women.
While we might be outraged at his perspective on women, if we look at the statistics of violence against women, (1 in 3 women have experienced violence against them) we see that his degrading views actually support the statistics. This is how the shadow works when it is ignored inside of us, it begins to have power over us and becomes extremely uncomfortable with the truth, rationalizing or intellectualizing the facts and protecting its power through responses of hatred, rage and control. While we may feel that the ways in which we devalue women in our culture are unacceptable on the surface, we still somehow have enabled the system to function as our dominant state for whatever reason. Perhaps we feel helpless to change it.
But, strangely, the key to changing the treatment of women and examining our core beliefs about women resides less in our common responses to people like Trump, such as anger, outrage, blaming, shaming or doing nothing at all, and more in the shadow he brings out in all of us. The question is not necessarily, do we support, are we afraid of, or could we ever believe in Trump, but rather, what do we really feel about women, daughters, mothers, grandmothers and sisters? Do we really expect them to be subservient to men? And if we feel this statement is off base, then why do our statistics not support it?
We are engaged in an epic battle for a woman’s voice to be her own. We are in between two systems, the old and the new, the known and the unknown woods, where the action takes place, where the shadow is revealed, sometimes dressed up in grandma’s pajamas. The question is not what will we do with Trump, but what will we do with us? How will we invite change into our own hearts to produce the kinds of leaders who value us, all of us?
The shadow is always shocking when it is revealed, tooth and claw, exposing our core beliefs about women. Women are even shocked when they get to the bottom of what they believe about themselves. But the truth doesn’t have to be paralyzing and it doesn’t have to jump up and swallow us for lunch. Trump, with his big-ness, though he seems to have paralyzed half a nation with fear, has actually done us a huge favor, he’s brought the shadow out into the open, named the elephant in the room. And now the choice is ours, what do we really believe about women? Our answer to that question could change the world.
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When I tell people I’ve taken up fishing again, they often ask me, “do you bait your own hook?” When I was a young girl, I didn’t think much about it, it’s just what we did to catch fish. We dug up earthworms, threaded them carefully so that the writhing tail swished in the water, covering the sharp hook, and waited with excitement for the bobber to go under. I caught my first large mouth bass at age six at Ms. Loduska’s pond, a secret, swampy fishing hole hidden down a country road. When I left for college, I left fishing, too, and that’s when a part of my soul went missing.
Today, a lifetime later, I felt the urge to fish again. Fishing is an act of soul conjuring and I have been away for far too long. I am not the first to make the connection between fishing and the soul, Jesus used the metaphor of fishing often to speak of luring the soul from the depths, no longer fishermen but fishers of men, he would tell his disciples. Perhaps he had a different metaphor for the women, or perhaps the women who stayed by his side didn’t require an image for bringing souls into the world from the depths, some things are just second nature. Perhaps they baited their own hooks, too.
“Fishermen Must Register,” the brown and yellow sign read at the Tennessee Wildlife Refuge lake where I decided to take up fishing again. I just assumed the sign meant that even though I’m a woman, I still had to register my intention to pull fish from the water. Like most women, I find that there are many “man made” barriers in this world I’ve just learned to see past in order to do what I need to do. It’s a trick I learned from fishing, you go where the fish are calling, through fences, briars, out beyond signs warning you that you do not belong, sometimes out into the deep, deep water; you learn to listen to what is beneath the surface and go and cast your line there. It’s just how you catch fish.
Like Mary Magdalene, breaking all the rules to find her true self, sensing some route to her very own soul was there at Jesus’ feet. She was not going to let a few men prevent her from throwing herself down and spending everything precious she owned to know the truth, even though she probably knew full well that she would be shamed for it, it was her nature to do so, to go where her soul was calling. Nature is always breaking the rules we set for ourselves to show us the beauty of our souls.
We cannot decide how or when it happens, the opportunity to follow a heavenly light in the world, we can only respond, like fish to bait in the depths, innately, to what is before us, both the casting and the lure to be real in the world, the searching and the being found, to catch and to be caught up at once by the motion of our truest nature. This act of fishing was more than re-enacting a childhood memory, it was another way of loving the beauty inside of me, and maybe I would even catch a fish or two.
There were two retired African American men fishing next to me, just down the trail a bit, and having a great time. They looked to be in their seventies, which meant they had lived through much harder times than I could imagine, more discrimination and shaming than I had felt in a lifetime, most likely. Still, they had mercy on a white woman, giving me three juicy earthworms because my three dollar and fifty-nine cent lure wasn’t doing the trick.
I thanked them; headed past their spot into a more remote part of the bank, I was looking for some solitude and shade. “It’s nice back there,” they said, “but watch out for papa goose around the corner, he’s sitting on a batch of eggs and he’s likely to attack.”
Forewarned, I spoke to father goose about passing and, begrudgingly, showing his long, pink tongue and hissing a little, he let me pass, the mother swam off the shore, just a few feet away to run interference. As soon as I got past the geese, it was as if I had slipped through a veil into a hidden world. All sorts of alarms began going off, large toad frogs signaled my arrival, shouting to one another across the lake, their bellows echoing off the hills. Two more geese flew in, landed on the water and began doing some kind of formal ritual I’ve never seen before, swimming towards one another and turning, in the exact same rhythm, and swimming apart in a straight line as if they were pacing off for a duel. A blue heron flew low; a snake swam beneath my feet dangling from the bank. I had penetrated the territory of the unseen and found it to be incredibly serene, even with all the noise. Whenever I venture into nature, I always find that I am penetrating Eden and my deepest self, simultaneously.
As I cast my rod and reel in a cadence, click, cast, plop, reel, I thought a great deal about mother earth, about what is hidden beneath the surface, calling, in subtle tones, to be revealed. I thought of the many things women are taught to hide about themselves, to be ashamed of. I thought of all the fishing we have to do in ourselves to find those things, to bring them to the surface, all the barriers we have to break down, the intuition we must learn to follow, the briar patches within we have to wade through, the no trespassing signs we must ignore. I thought of the very cycle of womanhood itself, the vulnerability of the emotions in the rising and falling of the various chemicals and fluids that are produced each month in a woman’s body in a seemingly inconvenient and strange ballet of order. The ways in which the difference of being feminine causes so much disorder in the world because it does not fit into the structure of being regularly productive, emotionally together, neat and tidy, it does not even fit on the official wildlife refuge sign.
Sitting on the banks of a lake and casting a line into the deep water, I realized mother nature has a way of revealing what is hidden in gentle and beckoning tones, for those who would take the time to listen. She has a way of ordering what is wild without sacrificing one ounce of wildness, of bringing calmness into chaos without apologizing for her disasters, of finding what has gone missing if you are willing to break through a few barriers for the search. I realized a woman’s true nature is close to the heart of creation, whatever she does in the world, she brings this creative energy to play just by living close to her heart.
At a time in our world when the statistics tell us that one out of every three women worldwide is a victim of violence, it is vital that women (and men) go fishing for the creative energy within themselves, that which heals, orders and renews, giving life to brokenness. It is time to claim a woman’s body for something more than violence. There, in the depths, beyond the barriers, just beyond the veil, a woman’s soul awaits herself.
When I was a child. I was in awe of the concept that a dream could come true, that I could travel to the edges of the waking world, pluck something from the imagination and then make it appear in real life, out of sheer desire, the idea shimmered with magic. But if you have ever tried to make a dreams come true, you realize that your beautiful, shimmering dream can so easily become a taskmaster, requiring hard work, dedication, belief, money, sacrifice, risk and lots of support. Sometimes the pursuit of dreams brings more disillusionment and brokenness than success. Learning the art of when to let go and when to hang on to a dream can be brutal. I don’t think any of us master this until we are around age 75, I am told, the letting go, that is. It is difficult, often, to let go of that which gives us a view of the mystique of the world, a world that seems so bent on the rational, logical and most prudent way. Dreams are not logical, they are mythological.
Life dreams emerge from the place where our mythical self lives, a land of risk, adventure and wonder, deep within us, just outside of our grasp, on another plane, an other dimension. We are so fascinated by the field of dreams that we engage in all sorts of practices to capture, study and understand them. We chase them furiously, like butterflies with a net, we spend lots of money on coaches, retreats and workshops that enable us to turn our dreams into reality, make our dreams come true. There is the whole field of learning to dream the dream of wealth, success, fame and love, make our wildest dreams evolve through the power of dream thinking. But when we finally glimpse something greater than what our own will, ego and drive produce, usually at the bottom of a so called “broken dream,” we realize we might be staring, at last, through a door-way at something sacred, the soul itself. Often, it is shattered life dream, that leads the way:
C.G. Jung said, “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)
Perhaps the language of making our dreams come true or turning our dreams into reality is just another way of saying that we long to see our soul’s life become real in this world and we are completely at a loss as to how we make this happen. We also feel that we should be in control of such a thing as important as our soul and so we feel it should be something we ourselves can conjure or manipulate into existence, and once it’s here, we feel we should make a profit from it, because, after all, a profit is the only way to show that the business of catching dreams has real value and purpose. We feel we must make the whole endeavor have a tangible meaning, that our dreams should pay us something, give us a larger house, more money in the bank and less anxiety in the world about uncertainty. Just like everything else in our culture, dreams fail to make sense to us unless we can turn them into a commodity.
Yet, the true dream of the heart resists such exploitative measures, like nature, it thinks itself, it has its own narrative, it flies, leaps, evolves of its own accord, it only requires nurture to live. You may manufacture a slice of your dream life, turn a hint of it into the machinery of your great expectations, but it is difficult to do soul work as long as you insist that dreams serve your purposes, enslaving dreams to the world of production.
The business of dreams will promise us that dreams come true. But here is the hole in the sales pitch, the dreams of the heart are alreadytrue, we move towards the dream to become truer to ourselves. We move towards wonder, towards the realm of the myth we have forgotten, towards the story that is so much older than us. We belong to something greater than ourselves, we belong the great Dreamer, the Divine, the beauty, goodness and truth that is dreaming us. We move towards ambiguity and the very qualities of the dream, while keeping one foot planted on the earth, in order to move toward our soul’s life, the seed of the dream is in us, dreaming. We nurture a dream by nurturing the sacred within and bringing it back into the waking, working rhythm of our domestic lives. Too much time in each world, and we lose the enchantment of dreaming altogether, we lose our sense of what is really true.
It is perhaps only in our enslavement of a dream that a dream seems broken. Dreams cannot be broken, they exist beyond the category. It is usually our expectations that are shattered rather than the dream itself.
Perhaps this is why the ancients made dream catchers, to remind themselves that the realm of dreaming is sacred and the pursuit of dreams, a holy endeavor, requiring special equipment and rituals, perhaps they realized they were opening a door-way to the soul. It becomes important to remember that when we seek to play in the field of dreams, we are playing in a sacred space, a place of wilderness and awe, and this field of dreams may perhaps be the last place on earth where an idea can still run free. Maybe the point of dreaming is the dream itself, the miracle of wonder it produces in us. A dream is a thing worth nurturing and protecting, perhaps a true dream is a thing that can only be caught and lived from the heart.
The world can be a confusing place these days when one tries to pair speech to a belief system on the topic of gender. Words create worlds. Just put the words “we uphold the doctrine that woman is subservient to man and that Eve is responsible for the fall of humankind” together in a modern day press release and prepare for the foundations to shake. Somewhere between the two creation stories in Genesis, in a garden of paradise where God’s footsteps and the voice of a talking serpent can be overheard, there lies a belief that women are not the equals of men and it has made it into our modern day.
We all know, as former President Jimmy Carter recently stated in what seemed a painful departure from his Christian denomination of 60 years, his open letter to the Southern Baptist Convention, that the Bible was written in a time when the system of patriarchy was preferred. The Bible did not invent patriarchy, it’s been around a long, long time as one of culture’s tools of civilization. These ancient stories in Bible come to us through a cultural construction that held women as property, at a time when it was also legal for all God’s children to own slaves and practice polygamy. Carter’s point is that he fears that the doctrinal perspective that views women as subservient weakens the argument against degrading practices towards women such as human trafficking, sexual and physical abuse, gender and sexual harassment as well as pay inequity, objectification and shaming speech. Great problems in our day we have not quite been able to solve, and so he decided he could no longer, in good consciousness, practice his faith with that perspective holding sway. So he left, though he still believes the Bible.
The truth is, not all Southern Baptists treat women as if they are second-class citizens and not all Christians interpret the Bible that way, and the system of patriarchy has provided a cultural framework that has built nations and won wars, though the ends do not justify the means by any means. Someone recently reminded me, it is men, not women, who are required to register their names upon their 18th birthday for the draft, it is still the law of the land, an important realization around the topics of assumed gender roles for all of us. However, when widely held doctrinal understandings are soaked in the idea of a God ordained hierarchy among human beings, it makes for some confusing conversations, a world of hurt, lost opportunity, unachieved potential and a whole host of other maladies of the soul that occur around those who fall into the well populated category of the oppressed.
When some Christian doctrine (having seeped, too, into the foundational layers of our cultural DNA) teaches us that Eve, the created woman, is the scapegoat for the sins of the world, the one who is responsible for the downfall of humanity, it conditions us to perceive the female gender as fundamentally flawed, untrustworthy and suspicious. When all women are filtered through the lens of the first woman template deemed subservient to man, it is not just women who struggle to succeed inside this dominant ideology, it is all humanity. This is Carter’s point in leaving the SBC, this is what makes it difficult for him to practice a faith in such a framework. I noted with interest, however, that he did not leave his faith, only his denomination. He still believes in Biblical truth, he just chooses to interpret the story differently. And that is the beautiful thing about Bible story, it is the story that is fluid, flowing beneath the layers of systems, carving new grooves, new pathways, new possibilities into the foundations of time.Stories tell us who we are. Stories, like the creation stories in the Bible, consist of many layers, many depths, many facets and an underlying truth. Some storytellers call this underlying truth the story beneath the story, the world beneath the world, and the master storytellers of the Hebrew Bible were some of the best in the world at their craft at expressing these depths, sometimes even working around the imposed patriarchal lens. We often get at this underlying truth by looking at the story from other perspectives within the story itself such as the narrator or other characters, and as we do, we are changed by it, it has a way of writing us. The story is timeless, though the mode of the manifestation of the story in the time it was written may be fixed, the story continues to move through time as a living thing, regardless of how we might like to appropriate it to whatever conventional idea supports our agenda. Stories refuse such containers, they are meant to be read and re-read, lived and re-lived. Why else would a child beg to hear the same story over and over again?
Why would we? It is because stories enable us to find our place in the world, the world is made of stories, stories hold the world together.
Re-reading the two creation stories through the eyes of Eve enables us to re-live the story again in a new way, opening up a whole new world and new layers of insight, giving us a way to connect with ourselves, the Divine, our life of faith and the ancient stories once again.
The primary perspective that has been maintained about Eve is that her choice to eat the forbidden fruit caused a great fall, sin, the teaching of this doctrine maintains that the original woman was responsible for original sin. But attempting to read the story through her eyes gives us the opportunity to lift the veil of this curse and peek at another perspective. What if instead of being an anti-hero, Eve’s actions placed her in the category of being heroic? After all, none of us would be here if the first couple never left the garden and moved out, past the forever sealed gate, into the world. They would have been perfect forever, never becoming fully human.
Eve is punished in much traditional doctrine for her desire, yet it was her desire that compelled the transformation, it kicked the whole thing off. Desire is the device used by storytellers to move the character forward. In acting upon her desire, Eve initiated the human journey, she took advantage of the offer to become real in the world, to feel the full spectrum of the human experience. After all, before taking the fruit, Adam and Eve may have been created human, but they had no functional idea of the difference between being human and being Divine. She would have to choose the opposite of perfection to obtain the knowledge of what it meant to be human, the knowledge offered through the tree of life.
This is a difficult choice for all of us, choosing whether or not to become real in the world is to risk knowing the full spectrum of the human experience, it is, as Eve proved, the choice to live life in the world, not in a protected bubble of certainty. The journey beyond the gates of paradise involved coming to know opposite emotional realms such as love and hate, joy and pain, trust and deceit, success and failure. The capacity to know trust, as it turns out, also requires the capacity to know its opposite, betrayal. Eve teaches us that becoming human involves risk. Risking the journey outside the gates of paradise requires a trust that God’s love goes there, too, to the depths of despair and darkness. To take of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to risk becoming real in the world, in all the hurt, pain, failure and even death. The knowledge that the world is hard, it turns out, is real gold when it comes to true spiritual growth.
Eating of that fruit of the tree of life is perhaps the great free fall from which none of us ever fully recover, the very fall we need in order to understand that God’s love is bottomless, that we will never come to the end of it. After all, this is how the soul is born, that kind of spiritual birth canal called life, where our souls become real as we choose to risk being in the world, taking the great risk of ultimate belief in the Divine even though we are still mostly convinced we are the masters of our own destiny. Coming out of the darkness into the light.
To risk belief is to risk walking blind for a while, out beyond certainty, until a kind of second sight occurs, the ongoing healing of the human wound. Risking the journey through the gates of Eden into the unknown is to risk your own great healing. Perhaps Eve had an intuition of the risk she was taking, perhaps she knew there was something important inside of her that had to be born, inside of us all, something that would cause a tear, a great ripping of perfection, and being created in the image of God with borrowed man parts, fully equipped, she walked bravely and heroically into the wilderness to be born, regardless of the consequences. The good news is that Adam walked with her, her male counterpart, her partner and God did not abandon humanity but also moved out into the world to protect and provide, to nurture and care, sometimes from a distance.
Perhaps in the world beneath the world, in the story beneath the story, we will find ourselves knit back together, someday, as we take the risk of re-reading the story through her eyes, so many years later, and experience, perhaps, the lifting of the curse. After all, we are created in the image of God, and creation is meant to grow.
When I tell people I’ve taken up fishing again, they often ask me, “do you bait your own hook?” When I was a young girl, I didn’t think much about it, it’s just what we did to catch fish. We dug up earthworms, threaded them carefully so that the writhing tail swished in the water, covering the sharp hook, and waited with excitement for the bobber to go under. I caught my first large mouth bass at age six at Ms. Loduska’s pond, a secret, swampy fishing hole hidden down a country road. When I left for college, I left fishing, too, and that’s when a part of my soul went missing.
