When a Symbol Becomes a Stop Sign
an open letter to the vestry and parish of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

Symbols and signs teach us on both fundamental and complex levels. Jesus, Plato, and the compositors of Hebrew scripture are some of the voices who tell us this. Sometimes it's a rainbow in the sky or a cave full of chained prisoners gazing at shadows or an empty tomb that provides the symbolic sign. Sometimes words are both symbol and sign: "Here am I"; "The unexamined life is not worth living"; "I am the bread of life."

But what happens when a symbol develops two meanings, two readings so at odds with each other that there's no chance for the people who see one to see the other? We've watched that happen in South Carolina this spring. The Stars and Bars, the Confederate flag, is to some the symbol of the recovery of the only part of American soil ever to be occupied by a conquering army; for others, it is the symbol of the rape of a civilization by kidnap, barter, and slavery; and for still others, it is the symbol of bigoted self-importance.

As a seventeenth-generation Southerner, I look at the Confederate flag and remember a childhood of seeing the foundations of buildings burned to the ground less than a century before as an invading army swept by (not to free the slaves, but to assert the power of a central government over any individual state), and I remember being told how we survived that destruction. I look at the pictures of my great-great-grandfathers who lost the right to vote when Lee surrendered and of that one great-great-grandmother who cut off her hair and fought along side her husband. I look at the Confederate flag and first see my pride in the history of my family and of a land rich in its own culture.

But what about those who look at the Confederate flag and first see slave ships and families torn apart and merciless work in sun-baked cotton fields, who see the red blood from a whipped back pooling on the red clay ground? What of those who see George Wallace standing beneath the shadow of that flag, denying smart and brave kids an equal education? What about those who saw it held high against them at Selma and in Birmingham? For them the flag is a symbol not only of suffering, but the celebration of the people who caused, benefited from, and tried to perpetuate that suffering.

And what of those who wave the flag as they march beneath their white hoods, who march against anyone who doesn't look or think as they do? What if the truck that dragged James Byrd down that dirt road to a painful, pointless, hateful death had the Stars and Bars on the front bumper? It well could have.

So the Confederate flag must go. The good it symbolizes for me is far, far out-weighed by the pain and anger that symbol generates for other Americans, and the intolerance it cloaks in still others. I don't need a vote or an opinion poll to realize that my comfort is less important than others' pain. I need only to look at how things have changed and to recognize the consequences of ignoring that change.

Signs and symbols help us grasp truth; but signs and symbols can change with the times, and we must be able to change our thinking to accommodate that truth, as well. The paradox of a nameless and invisible God troubles Abraham and his descendents all through Hebrew scripture. Small wonder then, that the children of Israel develop a language based on the patriarchal structure they could see. To call God "he" or "Father" or "King" was a natural way to symbolize the power of God five thousand years ago in a civilization that rarely recorded the deeds or the names of women. And to call those who lead people in the worship of God by some of the same names is only to extend logically that patriarchal symbolism.

But Jesus calls this into question, as he does so many givens in Jewish thinking of his time, as he treats women as equals, tells Martha to come out of the kitchen, and first reveals his identity both as the Messiah and as the Risen Lord to women. Yes, Jesus calls God "Abba," "Father," but that is the anthropomorphic relationship suggested by scripture. He teaches the disciples -- who have shown themselves extremely poor students of abstraction -- to pray to "Our father," but he does not tell those same men to call him by that title, nor does he expect his other followers to call the twelve apostles "Father." Even through the decades separating the life of Jesus from the writing of the gospels, we can see how very careful Christ was with symbolic language, and how often he changed and challenged it. The teachings of Jesus are fundamentally about changing the way we look at things - laws, social order, signs and symbols. Using traditional language, revised symbolism, and non-traditional actions, Jesus challenges people to get beyond the comforts of well-worn symbolic thinking and to consider those abstract truths behind the symbols.

Two thousand years later we may be ready to consider that God is God - unique, all-knowing, all-powerful - existing in no form we can picture, neither male nor female. Our society has changed. Women are no longer "wife of" or "daughter of" or "mother of," at least not as casually and relentlessly as they are in Hebrew scripture and in most of the first two Christian millennia. Women, we have come to realize, can also be ordained as God's priests. But even as we recognize this truth, we are trapped in the symbolism of old language. What can we call a woman priest? Not "Father." Some ordained women choose to be called "Mother," but "Mother" has never been an equal title; "Mother," moreover, merely feminizes the theological problem inherent in "Father." We need a title that includes all and excludes none. A woman, after all, is ordained as a priest, not a priestess. Why, then, should other formal language of the church set male priests apart from female priests? Language lags behind social change, and often changing the language is more painful to us than changing the social injustice. But we have had a quarter-century to catch up on this issue, and yet the problem remains largely unaddressed.

If we call a priest "Father," what are we saying about our symbolic relationship with God and with each other in God's church? What indeed? "Reverend" is technically inappropriate as a title; it is a description. (But our parish, St. Michael's, recently managed to live with that technical "wrongness" for the two and a half years we had a woman as our priest.) Many people feel that God's priest should be accorded a title. If not "Reverend" why not let "Pastor" be a starting place for us to search for a word to cause the least pain and open the most minds? That title, indeed, is consistent with biblical symbolism of shepherd and flock ("I am the good shepherd," Jesus said, not "I am the ram"). "Pastor" was thus chosen by early Protestants to get away from the restricting and problematic paradigm of "Father."

As most African-Americans cannot look at the Confederate flag without feeling pain and anger, I cannot hear a priest called "Father" without feeling pain and anger, my own and that of generations of women -- women who could not set their own goals, seek education, hold property, vote, teach in universities, serve God as priests. No, "Father" doesn't mean all of that to everyone who says or hears it, but it does mean that to many women and men in our church today. Is our pain the price to be paid for the comfort of those who want to cling to old symbols?

And what of the children in our church? Should they – those called James and Jonathan and Will and Peter no less than those named Rebecca and Katie and Emily and Mallory and Angela and Courtney - grow up hearing and becoming comfortable with God's male priests being called by a title that no woman could rightly hold?

In the 1300's, Julian of Norwich, an English mystic, wrote of "our Father/Mother God" and "our Father/Mother Christ." Julian was not suggesting that we re-gender our understanding of God and Jesus as women; she was only asking (more accurately, joyfully suggesting) that we make that understanding inclusive, not exclusive. And, nearly 700 years later, that's all I'm asking of those who read this letter.

Julia M. Walker
Professor of English
April 2000