Sinsinawa
Spectrum
A Congregation News Magazine
Theology Class Shares Powerful Discussion
by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan
Colleen Carpenter Cullinan
I teach theology to both day and weekend students at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. Weekend College at St. Catherine is for returning students (all women), most in their 30s and 40s. Teaching an introductory theology course to 18-year-olds can be good, but a roomful of women who have an extra decade or two of life experience, struggles, successes, and/or disasters gives us all a lot more to work with. Last fall, we read Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited at the end of Theology 1000, “Theological Questions.” The heart of Thurman’s book is a discussion of three strategies used by the powerless (fear, deception, and hatred) that are, frankly, useful for survival but which will destroy you in the end. He argues that the teachings of Jesus ask the powerless to give up each one of these incredibly helpful ways of dealing with a dangerous world, because the only way to live fully as a human being, with dignity, is to act always out of love―even if it gets you killed. He admits, explicitly, that death is a real possibility, and since he’s an African-American writing out of the Jim Crow South, it’s clear that he’s not kidding. I always wonder if white women from Minnesota are going to be able to make the imaginative leap it would take to really hear him.
The day we were going to discuss Thurman, I opened class by asking for an example of a situation in which he was clearly wrong―a situation in which, of course, it was right to lie. I’d had the conversation with a class of 18-year-olds three nights previously, and it was fun―a completely theoretical exercise, with wilder and wilder situations being tossed out and then shot down by another student. But this time it was different. A woman in the back of the room said, “You should lie if you know that your husband will beat the hell out of you if you don’t.” I barely had time to register my shock, and had no idea where to go, when another voice said―in a voice that was brittle with anger, “Tell the truth. He’s going to hit you anyway.” There was silence for a few moments, and then the class launched into the most powerful 90 minutes of raw discussion of how to deal with the violence in our lives that I have ever, ever, had the privilege to participate in. Women spoke of abusive husbands and fathers, of ghastly family situations, of their persistent struggle to find the right thing to do in order to protect themselves and their children not just from violence but from the hatred that might grow out of being a victim. These women knew exactly what Thurman was talking about, knew intimately how much it cost to live as a loving human being, and, for the most part, had not until that discussion thought about this core work of their lives as “theological”―in fact, most of the women would have described themselves as not at all religious. It was humbling, phenomenal, and haunting.
I got into theology because it matters, because I think it’s the most important thing in the world―and during this conversation, I heard students talking about the most difficult, most important parts of their lives and making connections not only among themselves (including an immigrant veiled Muslim woman, nearly silent throughout the semester, who found her voice during this discussion) but between their lives and the theories and categories of “academic theology,” between their lives and history, their lives and a much bigger story . . . it was staggering. It was beautiful. It was glorious.