Together at the Table: Bishop Karen Oliveto on Embracing Diversity in the Church

My husband is a retired United Methodist (UM) pastor. He started seminary in 1972, the year the UM General Conference first created the statements to guide the church in social piety called The Social Principles.

The Principles assert that all persons are \’of sacred worth\’. It \”affirms that sexuality is God\’s good gift to all persons.\” They also state that homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teaching and they support civil laws defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman. \”Self-avowed practicing homosexuals\” are barred from ordination by the church rules in its Discipline.

How does one put aside one\’s sexual identity and desire for intimacy and love? asked my husband\’s fellow seminary student, a self-avowed homosexual.

The UM church is a world-wide organization. Some nations support the current language of the Principles, while conferences or churches support full inclusion of LGBT persons. Expectations of a split within the denomination has increased over the years. The denomination is considering allowing individual churches or conferences to make their own decisions.

In 2016 the Western Jurisdiction of the UM church elected a bishop who is a married lesbian, Rev. Karen Oliveto. The Judicial Council ruled that although she is in violation of the Discipline, she also was legally elected and the Jurisdiction can only act to remove her.

Has the time come for the church to take a stand, once and for all, to embrace and love all persons, or will we untie the \”United\” in our name?

When I saw Westminster Press had published a book by Bishop Oliveto I had to read it and was pleased to be granted the e-galley through NetGalley.

The book relates Bishop Oliveto\’s faith journey and pastoral career. She writes in a very accessible and direct way.

She confesses her own challenges as she learned to be inclusive and open to diversity while serving as senior pastor at Glide Memorial in San Francisco, a predominately Afrocentric church in the Tenderloin district. The community was guided by a saying, \”We are all in recovery from something,\” uniting people in their admission of imperfection and struggle for wholeness.

I appreciate her candor regarding the need for perpetual self-assessment, asking \”Is what I am saying, is what I am doing, increasing compassion and connection in the world, or rupturing relationship with others, with the divine, with the earth, with myself?\” I know from experience that one must be vigilant for it is easy to fall into stereotyping or group-think.

Bishop Oliveto writes, \”I believe that we are currently facing an empathy deficit in this country and, unfortunately, also in the church.\” I remember in the 1960s hearing the saying \”don\’t judge a man until you walk in his shoes.\” Today we don\’t want to even try to understand each other. Race, economic class, and gender have become reasons to exclude people. Our current government leaders foster this division and labeling of the other.

\”We have lost the capacity to listen to one another, to be open to the truth another brings to the conversation. We stand ready to rebut, rebuke, and reject.\” We see this daily on Facebook, Twitter, in the news. I have seen it in the local church as well, causing schisms and division.

Bishop Oliveto affirms that accepting everyone to the Communion table is messy; allowing everyone a voice is messy. Ambiguity can be frightening. Dispensing with surety and black and white rules requires living on faith.

But isn\’t that what faith is all about–being willing to step into the unknown, trusting in God?

\”We don\’t really believe in the Trinity, otherwise we wouldn\’t have such a hard time accepting diversity,\” Bishop Oliveto quotes Episcopal Bishop C. Andrew Doyle\’s challenge to the UM Council of Bishops. We love diversity in nature, the flowers and animals. yet we are only comfortable with people \’like us.\’

Research has shown that diversity in experience and insights lead to better decisions and creativity in the workplace. If the church puts love at its center, Rev. Oliveto says, we can remain in relationship. Unity does not require uniformity. We can be stronger and better together.

Bishop Oliveto has a vision of people gathering at the table, all kinds of people with conflicting beliefs and backgrounds, breaking bread and listening, learning. A healthy community based on love.

During my husband\’s career, we saw persons harmed by exclusion, a transgender student pressured to conform, churches schism over the Social Principles, pastors facing charges for being gay. Will the church reflect the intolerance of secular society and continue to divide into \”us and them\”? Or can we pattern The Beloved Community, as Bishop Oliveto dreams?

Together at the Table: Diversity without Division in The United Methodist Church
by Karen Oliveto
Westminster John Knox Press
Pub Date 31 Jul 2018
ISBN 9780664263607
PRICE $16.00 (USD)

“Bishop Oliveto’s story touches on one of today’s deepest fault lines in church and society. Hers is a deeply personal, revealing memoir about love and unity in a denomination wrestling with division. In an engaging, even gripping, style, she brings the reader to the table where issues are no longer abstract but fully human. This book has the power to change hearts and minds.”
—Jim Winkler, President and General Secretary, National Council of Churches

“Bishop Oliveto reveals a pastor’s passion, theologian’s rigor, servant’s heart, pioneer’s courage, and disciple’s extraordinary capacity to articulate hard truths with clarity and love. This book is a blessing in multiple ways. It speaks to pastors, laity, leaders, and pilgrims on a faith journey with deeply moving stories and respect for persons of all persuasions.”   
—Jane Allen Middleton, retired Bishop, Northeastern Jurisdiction, The United Methodist Church

Mary B: The Plain Bennett Sister\’s Story

Mary Bennett begins her story with, \”A child does not grow up with the knowledge that she is plain or dull or a complete simpleton until the accident of some event should reveal these unfortunate truths,\” later adding \”It was therefore acknowledged\” that all beauty and goodness and intelligence had been given to Jane and Lizzie, while Kitty and Lydia had ignorance, and Mary herself plainness.

The child Mary saw her future as an old maid, dependent on the charity of her married sisters, unloved and lonely, living in the shadows of life–like Miss Bates in Jane Austen\’s Emma.

In Mary B, author Katherine J. Chen often mirrors some of Jane Austen\’s most well-known epigrams and she uses the characters from Pride and Prejudice, but reader beware: this is not Jane Austen\’s Bennett family.

And that\’s alright with me. As much as I love Austen–and my adoration goes back 40 years–I enjoyed Mary B on its own merits.

Mary Bennett in the 1940 movie version of Pride and Prejudice

Society finds Mary a boring, untalented, and an ugly object of derision, expanding on Austen\’s comic scene where Mr. Bennett stops Mary\’s public entertainment. I felt the instances of people bullying and denigrating Mary were too frequent at the beginning.

Jane and Bingley barely figure in this retelling, but Lizzie and Darcy are key characters. Just as Cassandra and Jane Austen spent time at the home their brother Edward Austen Knight, Mary spends months with Lizzie after her marriage to Darcy.

I thought the idea of Lizzie being a slob hilarious. She does, after all, walk through the dirt and rain to see Jane when she became ill while visiting the Bingleys. She had lack of pride and vanity in that scene, sisterly love more important than making an impression. In Chen\’s imagination, Lizzie is just a slob strewing clothes and jewels across the floor of her room.

Chen gives Lydia and Lizzie endings that will offend some Austenites.  The married Lydia and Lizzie both become examples of the real world evils left out of Austen: Sexual relations = pregnancy = potential for maternal illness and death and/or the death of the baby. Lydia\’s ending is actually quite probable.

At times we see a hint of Charlotte Bronte\’s Jane Eyre in the action, particularly in scenes between Mary and Col. Fitzwilliam.

We–as well as several menfolk in the novel– discover that Mary is observant, thoughtful, and creative. Several men confide in her and we learn their back stories. She is a voracious reader and writes to entertain herself.

Mary relates a life that is fuller than she could have imagined as a child. She has loved three times. She has a fulfilling sexual romance. And she finds a way to be independent. Her story becomes a Feminist bildungsroman.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Mary B: A Novel: An Untold Story of Pride and Prejudice
by Katherine J. Chen
Random House
Pub Date 24 Jul 2018 
ISBN 9780399592218
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

A Collar for Cerberus by Matt Stanley

Matt Stanley\’s novel A Collar for Cerberus entertains while presenting deep conversations about life lessons.  I found it immensely enjoyable and chose it to begin my day\’s reading.

It is a love song to Greece. The descriptions of Greece are vivid, with beautiful descriptions of the landscape and its literary and historical associations offered through the dialogue and action. And the food! My mouth was watering!

The characters are wonderful. There is a young man who must decide what kind of life he wants to lead, and his literary hero, a cantankerous and manipulative Nobel Prize winner whose colorful life is legend.

Mosiac, 3rd century, of the labors of Hercules

The older man who lived life to the fullest teaches the unformed youth through a series of experiences that mirror the 12 labors of Hercules from Greek mythology. Hercules last task was to face and subdue Cerberus, a monster who guarded the gates of the Underworld. Literary and Greek mythological references are part of the travelers\’ mutual language.

Can the young man throw off the conventions of his background, take risks and rise to the challenges presented to him? Can he learn to be fully alive? Most of all, can he trust Irakles Bastounis? Or is he merely a willing tool? Is this author he has admired his friend?

Stanley has taken his experiences and presented them in an engaging novel. His story and love for his subjects is authentic. The plot may deal with death and big choices, but the distillation of the novel is joy.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Collar for Cerberus
Matt Stanley
Thistle Publications
Publication July 26, 2018
ISBN 9781786080622
PRICE $14.99 (USD)

from the publisher:

Never meet your heroes…

A naïve English graduate arrives in Greece seeking experience and perhaps an encounter with his literary hero: Nobel laureate and irascible old hell-raiser Irakles Bastounis. Agreeing to act as driver for Bastounis, the young man finds himself on a hectic, adventurous and always challenging tour of Greece’s wonders – an apprentice in how to live life to the fullest.

As the road trip progresses, the questions arise. Is Bastounis still an addict? Who is following him and why? Is he researching his final, much-anticipated novel? Who are the people he’s meeting along the way? And how far will one young man ultimately go in the name of experience?

A Collar for Cerberus is a story about time, life, pleasure and the decisions we make.

Suspenseful Reads: In the Garden of Blue Roses; Truly Madly Guilty; The Marsh King\’s Daughter

Summer is a good time for genre fiction, novels that are plot-driven and compulsive reading. If they have great characters, that\’s all the better. 

I needed something completely different to read and so picked up my Goodreads friend\’s novel The Garden of Blue Roses. I found it to be a stylish, creepy story with an unreliable narrator who may be insane. Thankfully, the atmosphere of horror and mayhem is mostly in the narrator\’s imagination, but for a final bloody deed. The story moves at a good clip, nicely suspenseful.

The novel opens just after the narrator Milo and his sister lose their parents in a freak car accident. Their father was a well-known horror writer. Both children are damaged by their childhood with a distant mother and father who used them in various nefarious ways.

Klara decides to create a garden. Milo does not support her idea, and worse, he distrusts the gardener she has hired who seems to use his charms to manipulate women clients. Milo is convinced that Henri is mimicking one of his father\’s murderous creations.

With many twists and turns, the plot resolves without just deserts, the wily villain mastering all.

Michael Barsa grew up in a German-speaking household in New Jersey and spoke no English until he went to school. He\’s worked as an award-winning grant writer, an English teacher, and an environmental lawyer. He now teaches environmental and natural resources law. His scholarly articles have appeared in several major law reviews, and his writing on environmental policy has appeared in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times. His short fiction has appeared in Sequoia. The Garden of Blue Roses is his first novel.

*****

Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty was a book club read, suggested by my hubby who had enjoyed the book.

Our club members mostly said the same thing: the book was easy to read, the author knew how to keep us flipping pages, but the book was pure entertainment without a message to take away. One lady wanted to edit 100 pages out of the book. Another loved, loved, loved it and said it was her favorite we had read in a while.

Then we discussed the novel for another 45 minutes. Which is interesting, since it had been decided the book had nothing really to say!

It turned out that we had a lot of strong feelings about the characters and their actions. And we talked about good and bad parenting and who was truly guilty. And how the author had perfected a style that pulled the reader along.

My hubby loved the book because it was a close study of three couples and he loves books about interpersonal relationships. I also enjoyed the book as a character study.

In the end, everyone agreed it was a nice summer read.

*****

After I read The Marsh King\’s Daughter on First Look Book Club, and did not win a copy of the book, I requested the galley but did not get one. It has garnered rave reviews. It is set in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan and mentions places I have seen on vacation: Tahquamenon Falls, Seney, and Newberry. Karen Dionne is a Metro Detroit author.

Last spring, I put my name on the waiting list to borrow the ebook from the library through Libby. It finally came to me this week!

I read it in two evenings, staying up late to finish it.

Helena has kept her past a secret from her husband. She needed to escape the public eye so she changed her name and created another past. Her carefully constructed world come toppling down when the police come to her door because her father has escaped from prison. Helena\’s husband learns she is the daughter of the infamous Marsh King who had kidnapped her teenaged mother. and held her, and their child, hostage for years.

Helena grew up in the marshes, admiring her father who taught her to hunt and survive on the land. He had a brutal side and dealt out harsh punishments.  She did not know anything else until she saw a happy family at Tahquamenon Falls–the first outsiders she had ever seen. When Helena was fourteen her mother tells her the truth, and Helena orchestrates their escape.

Helena knows she is the only person who can find her father. While she tracks her father through the territory she explored at his side we learn of her childhood and understand her turmoil. Helena knows too well her father is a narcissistic psychopath, but she also recalls how she loved him and the wilderness survival skills he taught her.

The novel is informed by Hans Christian Anderson\’s fairy tale The Marsh King\’s Daughter.

Michigan is beautifully portrayed in Dionne\’s descriptions. The wildness, the flora and fauna, the tourist traps, and the brutal deforestation are all encountered.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is in development as a feature film.

Book Club Kit can be found at https://randomhouse.app.box.com/s/4wcjrvzj3f869qucg8gi6wxaee2rihs9