some quotes of the day-carter heyward

Selected Carter Heyward Quotations

• ... the shape of God is justice ...

• I believe contemporary Western religion, especially Judaeo-Christian, to be in throes of rebirth; and I believe this rebirth is being brought about by the feminism emerging in the midst of institutional religion. It is to this movement -- feminism in Christianity -- that I am fully and radically committed -- and to the probing of the various tangential "issues": family and life style; human sexuality (including homosexuality); abortion; economic distribution to the benefit of all humankind; creation of deep-flowing religion.

• It's obvious through secular and church history that significant legislation follows only after dramatic action.

• I think people who would stand opposed to the Church's blessing of gay and lesbian relationships or ordaining gay and lesbian people are wrong about this. I simply assume there are many ways in which I stand in the wrong place on the wrong issue, but I don't believe this is one of them.

• Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world - it's better than being invisible!

• The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world. This is a basic tenet of feminist liberation theology and it is also Anglicanism at its best.

• I have a really hard time with the Nicene Creed as a statement of my personal faith. I don't have trouble with it as a statement of the corporate movement, the history of the Church, or as our collective sense as a Christian body.

• The church is not a social club of folks with the same tastes or manners. Christianity is not an artificial sweetener.

• In the Spirit which draws us into honest engagement with one another, including those who may be very different from us in various ways, God calls us to wake up and learn how to love and respect one another, period.

• If we are to live with our feet on the ground, in touch with reality, we must help one another accept the fact that we who are christian are heirs to a body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually repressive religious tradition. If we are to continue as members of the church, we must challenge and transform it at the root. What is required is more than simply a "reformation." I am speaking of revolutionary transformation. Nothing less will do. (source: Touching Our Strength, p. 47)

• As we come to experience the erotic as sacred, we begin to know ourselves as holy and to imagine ourselves sharing in the creation of one another and of our common well-being.... (source: Touching Our Strength)

• We begin to realize that God moves among us, transcending our particularities. She is born and embodied in our midst. She is ground and figure, power and person, this creative Spirit, root of our commonlife and of our most intensely personal longings... (source: Touching Our Strength)

• Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.

• Perhaps the erotic power of God will be most often the dark, woman-loving-women energy among us as long as we are living under heterosexist, racist patriarchy. If so, it will be this way for a long time. (source: Touching Our Strength)

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/qu/blquheyw.htm