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Eve, The Mother of All by Br. Robert Lentz

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I think so much about how female sainthood is essentially raising your head, staring the world into its blind eyes and then saying no. 

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If one were to get into reading theology, what are five books you'd recommend?

Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament by Ellen Davis

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence

The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation by Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The Ignatian Adventure: Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in Daily Life by Kevin O’Brien

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me @ my female ancestors: girl help 

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— also entitled: this is not a gospel worth the telling

— inspired by: S.T. Gibson’s ( @stgibsonofficial )  Lamentation of Mary Magdalene (from the Aramaic: they have taken away my lord) and Lamentation of John (alternately titled Some Manuscripts Read: The Prophet does Not Come)

also inspired by: @notbecauseofvictories’  mary magdalene, at the tomb

( text-friendly version can be found here )

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my favorite metaphorical language in the Bible is the personification of the earth as a witness to the lord, like the earth remembers what happened and it was so important that the rocks cry out to God. like that’s metal. the poetry in the Bible is so metal 

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Jesus with the Woman at the Well by 20th Century Chinese artist Lu Hongnian

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noah's unnamed wife's pov while her husband builds the ark

She picks the splinters out of his palms at night.

She lights a fire, filling the air with the smell of burning tinder and bubbling fat drippings, and she kneels at her husband's side.

Noah sits, his eyes glazed over with wretched awe as he ponders what his God has asked of him, and his wife diligently removes the shards of cypress wood from his calloused hands. She washes the dust from his feet and scrubs the pitch from his rough-hewn clothes while he picks at his dinner, pushing lentils around without ever taking a bite.

It's as though the divine is a sort of wasting sickness gnawing away at his bones, taking him further and further from her with each passing day.

It is not easy, loving one whose mind is licked by sacred fire, and it's no simple thing, trying to cleave to a man who is already split down the middle in two. One half of him is here, with her, in their marriage bed, breathing in the throes of deep animal sleep, instinctively reaching for her in the dark. The other half of him is forever marooned on that mountainside where he heard God speak for the first time.

The earth will be consumed in a great flood, Noah says, crushed under a great purifying weight so that it may be washed clean.

Most days, he seems to believe it.

During the sunlit hours, when he is busy at work on his ark, she weaves and grinds grain and rubs salve into the skinned knees of her children. Oftentimes, there is no moment to pause to consider the fate of the world. But some days, when the sun dips low on the horizon and her back aches from a long day of labor, she surveys the long arch of creation.

She marks the brutalities of her species, the sins of all the neighboring cities, the black rot hidden in own heart.

But then she sees her youngest smile, or she breathes in the scent of petrichor, or she dips her blistered feet into the coolness of a narrow stream, and she wonders if perhaps, there is not much on earth still worth saving.

Perhaps, verdant life will take root even in the deepest waters of death.

And perhaps, she muses in the quietest part of her heart, God is speaking to her as well.

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lots wife is told not to look back. she looks back. וַתְּהִ֖י—"and she became"—a pillar of salt. but וַתְּהִ֖י is in qal consecutive imperfect, which means that it’s not that she is rendered salt, or passively becomes salt in accident. instead, it’s something she does, chooses. is active in. lots wife undoes herself this way. god had never threatened a salt-body, anyway: he had said only that those who look back will fall right into the hole of the city. lots wife becomes sorceress, then; a kind of prophetess unattached to the biblical god. turning flesh into salt on her own accord. finding ways to not die and yet to not live. knowing that sometimes the biblical god needs to be reminded that there is always a third way out

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[writes about Jesus but it’s actually about being trans] [writes about being trans but it’s actually about Jesus]

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Born to be a heretical mystic on trial for plunging her nunnery into indecency, forced to hold down a corporate email job.

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Good Friday.

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— A Prayer for Gaza's Children

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judas was probably like "jesus has pulled off so many wacky things, he'll get out of this one lickity split, and i get three shiny coins out of it, too"

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Sallie McFague, Models of God for an Ecological, Nuclear Age

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Caroline Bynum, excerpt from Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

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Transfigure, 2024

16 x26 in

Oil on canvas