Dear Ones of St. Columba's,

I am currently cautiously preparing for my annual backpacking pilgrimage - a week long journey that I take every fall with around nine other clergy off the map and away from everything to renew and reflect while in nature. We have changed the location of our planned trip twice now, and have yet another backup plan in mind. Part of our preparation each year is reading a book together and this year we have chosen Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin is a botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, a people group indigenous to the region of North America now known as the state of Indiana. In her book Kimmerer writes a lot about language and how it shapes our relationships with the world. She speaks of the loss of her people's native language, stripped from them by the USA government through the use of mandatory boarding schools where Potawatomi children were forbidden to speak any language other than English. And she writes about how her people's language - now spoken fluently by just nine people - shapes relationships with the created world in radically different ways than English, or any other language on earth, knows how to do.

We have been having pop-up church since the first Sunday in July, every week until this past one when we canceled it because the air was too unhealthy to be outside. At pop-up we use the BCP as it is, reading psalms and collects as they are written in this iteration of our common worship which was approved in 1979. As we have prayed together in this way, I have noticed the language in our prayer book. In particular I notice how many times God is referred to with "he/him" pronouns in these versions of our psalms and prayers. I have become used to reading psalms that alternate between male and female gendered pronouns for the divine, or seek to avoid gendering God at all, which has been our practice in worship at St. C's for several years now. 

Words shape reality, but they remind us of reality as well. If you are joining us for pop-up church, or if you are exploring any of the scriptural or liturgical resources that help us describe God with words, I invite you to notice how these descriptions work. What God is being described here? What images are being made sacred, and what images, genders, reflections of the Divine are being left out? 

I invite you to wonder, what would it feel like to explore other words for God, and even to wonder how the languages we speak limit our ability to imagine relationship with the Unbounded Creator of the universe, or with each other. 

However you are worshiping with us right now - online or in pop-up church, and however you are imagining God, I want to let you know it's okay to experiment. You can say "she" instead of "he" when we read the psalms out loud from the BCP together. (You can say "he" instead of "she" when we read them from our bulletin as well.) Our worship, prayer, lament, intercessions and common expressions have room for imagination, and even some holy cacophony. We can imagine God differently, and do it at the same time, together.

When we do, let's notice what this says about us. Let's notice whose voice, image, and ways of knowing are well represented in our language, and who is missing from our expressions. As we notice, we can start to talk about what we see, and maybe find new language to speak new ways of knowing God and each other into being.

with care and gratitude,

Alissa