Women of the ELCA

I’m a sucker for women’s magazines. Maybe it’s the inviting photos or the encouraging words. Maybe it’s the wonderful possibilities that each issue promises. Forget the fact that  the cover and its table of contents are usually more inspiring than the articles inside. I’m still a sucker for women’s magazines.

So it’s no surprise that a recent issue of Whole Living made its way home with me with its tempting cover story: “Stress-free Simplicity: Create Outer Order and Inner Calm.” Now that’s an offer for me. Every word of that title holds such promise, the promise of the life I’m always striving to have: stress-free, simple, ordered, calm. Instead, my life is often stressful, complicated, disorganized, and anything but calm.

Here’s just one example. I had this issue of Whole Living in my leather briefcase, next to the desk in my home office. I’d been working at the computer and left a half-full glass of water at my desk when my grandson got out of bed and needed some encouragement to return to sleep. In the few minutes it took, our impish cat got on my desk and knocked the water glass into my briefcase, saturating Whole Living and everything else in the briefcase. Calgon, take me away!

I finally got around to reading the now wrinkled copy of Whole Living, priding myself that at least I was reading it during the actual month printed on that issue. Due to my often stressful, complicated, disorganized, and anything-but-calm life, I’m usually reading about Christmas recipes in May or back-to-school strategies in February. That glossy (and wrinkled) cover held such promise . . . but the story itself? It held no great revelation.

The easiest way to simplify, it began, is to embrace imperfection. The stress-free, simple, ordered, and calm life that the cover promised is found in a principal of Zen Buddhism, wabi sabi. Beauty (and all those promised side effects), according to wabi sabi, is found in the natural world where things are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Abandon perfect and accept the world as imperfect, unfinished, and transient–thereby developing a stress-free, simple, ordered, and calm existence. (You can read the whole article here.)

Hmm. Long ago I’d given up seeking perfection, so I don’t think this article is going to help me with my life renovation. What advice can you offer? What helps you become stress-free and calm? What helps create order in your life?

Linda Post Bushkofsky, executive director, really does love her stressful, complicated, disorganized, and anything-but-calm life.

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I took my kids to a pumpkin patch this morning hosted by a local congregation. All proceeds went toward a local women’s shelter. A non-profit pumpkin patch! What a great idea!

So we wandered through the patch and my kids each chose their pumpkin, and the total was a whopping $9. That didn’t seem like enough toward the shelter, so I added an extra $11 to my check to make it an even $20. The volunteer taking my check seemed surprised at the additional donation, but it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like the human thing to do.

Not only that, it seems it is also a woman-like thing to do. A new giving report has come out specifically linking higher giving to women. We already knew that  single women were more likely to give than single men, but it turns out that women also give MORE than men, almost across the board, and regardless of income level.

Check out the statistics:  http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/women-give-more-to-charity-than-men-new-study-shows-105427598.html.

So, why DO women give more than men? Is it our nature? Our upbringing?

What do you think?

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I don’t have a cat. I never thought they were interesting.  The only time I found cats interesting was when I would visit my sister when she lived in Cairo, Egypt.  Cats roamed everywhere in Cairo–they sat on back steps and up on balconies like they were  pigeons in the city!  And you couldn’t complain, really, because you didn’t find many rodents anywhere. So they proved very useful.  At least in that context. But besides that, what’s so great about cats? (Cats are also linked unfortunately to one of the worst Broadway musicals EVER.  But I won’t even get into that.)

Though my feelings about cats have not changed, I did find I had to be careful (and still do) when I came to work here because I am surrounded by women who have cats! I always think twice if I want to make a disparaging comment about cats and cat owners. One cat owner I know even has a Facebook page for her cat. I’m better off making fun of dogs, since at least 5 Women of the ELCA staff have cats, and only one has dogs. (Another has both a cat and a dog, and a guinea pig–don’t know what to make of that.)

And when I meet you, the women of this organization as I travel, I find that a lot of you have cats. So I’m wondering …  is their some connection between Lutheran women and cats? Or are the Lutheran women dog owners out there just being under-counted?

How about you–cat, dog, something else, or none of the above?

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When a friend loses a job or when there’s a death in the family, what do Lutheran women do? We bake something, take it over to our friend’s house, and sit and listen. We pray for our friend too. Well, your churchwide staff is no different.

Yesterday over 60 colleagues, many of whom are friends as well, lost their jobs with the ELCA. Your churchwide staff, having known what it’s like to experience loss, turned our meeting room into a sacred space to which we invited our colleagues. We baked cookies, served up lots of chocolates, offered fresh fruit. We turned off the overhead fluorescent lights and turned on a couple of lamps. We added soft music in the background, and filled the room with plants, quilts, prayer shawls, and candles (battery-operated). We went back to our desks and offered up prayers for our colleagues, for those who lost their jobs, for those who remain, for those who made the decisions. And when a colleague asked, we sat with them in our meeting room turned sacred space.

We simply did what was needed.

Linda Post Bushkofsky is executive director of Women of the ELCA.

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Have you seen the Geico Insurance commercial with the gecko and his human boss debating who will pick up the lunch tab? The one where the  gecko is fishing money from a full size wallet bigger than him? Or any of those Capital One commercials with the tag “what’s in your wallet?”

These came to mind when I ran across an article in the Chicago Tribune on purses. The reporter left no compartment unturned. And by this article’s definitions, I was as a haul-a-holic. The nerve. But it was true. And it’s unhealthy.

Recently, I pinched a nerve in my neck, and some time ago I dislocated my shoulder with the backpack that had become my purse (I even had a very tiny purse inside the backpack). This article and those commercials got me thinking about why I and so many of my friends are wrecking our bodies lugging around stuff we rarely look at or use. While we’re working toward Raising Up Healthy Women and Girls.

Why do I carry around a brag book full of pictures stuffed in it of my nieces and nephews when most of those same pictures are on my mobile phone? Why do I carry junk mail and church council minutes and use my purse/backpack to archive every worship bulletin my church as ever printed? I have Sunday School handouts from 2008. Aaaugh!

I can never find my glasses or the spares, and keys are a lost cause.

Look at the results of The Chicago Tribune article:

• 48 purses weighed on August 24 outside Tribune Tower
• 6 lbs. average bag weight
• 5 participants complaining of back pain
• 8 lbs. heaviest single purse without laptop
• 20.4 lbs. heaviest total load
• 2.9 lbs. lightest single purse
• 9 women claiming to have just cleaned out their purse

I’m going to give up my purse and backpack for Lent. Or maybe make a New Year’s resolution about it, which would be sooner. It might take me ’til them to clean it out.

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I love to sing, always have. I especially love to sing a good alto line, listening to the harmonies working together with the other choral lines. Last week I had an odd experience, though. I was singing during worship but couldn’t hear my voice at all.

How could that be? No, I hadn’t lost my hearing. I was worshiping with the Conference of Bishops, all but five of whom are men. Despite my strong voice, I couldn’t hear myself at all in the midst of the bishops. Don’t get me wrong–the bishops could form a great male chorus, and it’s fun to listen to them sing a rousing hymn. It was quite disconcerting, nonetheless. And it got me thinking about what it must be like to regularly not have your voice heard.

Because of my upbringing, education, experience and positions, I’ve always been able to speak my mind and have my voice be heard. Granted, there were times in the 1980s when as a female lawyer in what had been a male-dominated field I found it challenging to make my voice be heard. But I was tenacious enough to make it happen.

Some will say that when we engage in advocacy we are working on behalf of those who have no voice. I disagree. Everyone has a voice. Some have not yet learned how to use that voice. Others are using their voice (or their actions or words) but for any number of reasons (most of which have more to do with the potential listener than they do with the speaker) their voices are not heard.

I think that when we engage in advocacy we are working on behalf of those whose voices are not being heard.

Right now there are so many whose voices are not being heard. Gay teenagers who are driven to take their own lives. Women forced into the modern-day slavery of human trafficking. Children who will go to bed hungry tonight. Seniors who have to choose between prescription medicine and paying the rent. All of this right here in America, the fabled land of opportunity. If I experienced even just a minute fraction of their frustration when singing with the bishops last week, I got a glimpse of how emasculated our sisters and brothers feel when their voices are not heard. It’s time we all started listening.

Linda Post Bushkofsky, once a first soprano and now a relaxed contralto, is executive director of Women of the ELCA.

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Some words just trigger misunderstandings. We had a caller to the magazine the other day who took issue with a mention of the Sojourner’s community in our Bible study.

“They stand for social justice, and I just don’t agree with social justice,” she said.

That stunned me. “But, but . . .  Lutherans are known for social justice,” I blubbered. “We have adopted 10 social statements since 1991 addressing social issues.” (If only I had been so coherent.)

Clearly her understanding and my understanding of the phrase social justice are different. When I think of social justice, I think of standing up for the equal rights of all people. I think of Jesus. This caller had something else entirely in mind. But what?

The same happens when the word feminism crops up. A few years back, we ran an article in Lutheran Woman Today titled “Fuzzy-Sweater Feminist.” The woman who wrote it was married, a mom who spent her days “taking a sick child to the doctor, vacuuming the living room, running a couple of loads of laundry through the washer and dryer, and baking a loaf of whole wheat bread.”

The article questioned how the word feminism got such a bad rap when its dictionary meaning says it is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.”

Equal rights for all people: male or female (white or brown, rich or poor).

Oh my, did we get calls on that article. From women! Some people apparently have the idea that feminists are something like gun-toting Annie Oakleys who want to obliterate all the people who get in their way.  (Actually, Ms. Oakley was a talented markswoman who ironically brought in more money than her manager husband, Frank).

When did equality became a four-letter word? LWT’s 2010-11 Bible study, The People of God: Unity in the Midst of Diversity, teaches us to express our different opinions “with civility, courtesy, and respect for every member of the community, especially toward those with whom I disagree.” Or whom I’m just not sure I understand.

What other words and phrases create misunderstanding? How do we overcome that?

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