According to "Re-Imagining" Conference participants, critics have got it all wrong. The gathering was not theologically aberrant, they insist, nor did goddess worship take place there. many women protest that the prayers they offered to Sophia were holy and honorable and were merely intended to revere the female aspect of the Christian God.
I was present at "Re-imagining," and I cannot understand how women who attended the conference can make such claims. These women, I suspect, were misled by their leaders' perfunctory attempts to link Sophia’s "spirit of Re-Imagining"—with Christian Scripture and tradition. Indeed, "Re-Imagining" organizers devoted all of five paragraphs in their daily conference newsletter to what should have been a critical issue—Sophia's ostensible Christian roots.
"Re-Imagining" was, in fact, an exercise in theological sleight of hand. Biblical Wisdom is an abstract attribute of Christianity's triune God-like justice, love or mercy. But when conference leaders pulled this wisdom, out of their theological black hat, they produced "Sophia," a personified Wisdom conjured up out of thin air and worshipped for her own sake. The "Re-Imagining' newsletter offered this rationale for the transformation: ,"While one could legitimately use either term, use of the name 'Sophia' rather than the more abstract, 'Wisdom' reminds us that the Scriptures portray this Wisdom as a someone who walks, talks, plays, cries, eats, creates, and loves." Presto, changeo! One goddess coming up!
Whatever they chose to call her, at "Re-Imagining" Sophia occupied the place that Christian churches have reserved for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Leaders welcomed participants in her name, and urged them to "dream wildly" about "who we intend to be through the power and guidance of the spirit of wisdom whom we name Sophia." As each speaker took the podium, she received a chanted blessing from the entire assembly: "Bless Sophia, dream the vision, share the wisdom dwelling deep within." Sophia's voice, the program declared, "has been silenced too long. Let her speak and bless us throughout these days."
Sophia was in her full glory at Sunday's grand finale: a communal "blessing of milk and honey" reminiscent of the Eucharist meal of bread and wine. As the "gifts" were blessed, leaders intoned a lengthy prayer: "Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image Sophia Creator God, let your milk and honey flow shower us with your love Our mother Sophia Our sweet Sophia Our guide, Sophia,...we celebrate your life-giving energy...,we celebrate the sensual life you give us We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water."
One wonders where the women were who deny that Sophia was worshipped as a goddess during these goings-on. One wonders, too, about the women who claim that they felt no pressure to join in the festivities. The "Re-Imagining" organizers clearly intended to exert such pressure.
Throughout the conference, 50 monitors stood guard around the room, admonishing and exhorting attendees whose participation seemed less than heartfelt. Though participants had initially been told that joining in was voluntary, the conference newsletter advised that hanging back in Sophia worship would not be tolerated: "[P]articipation is intended for ALL in the gathering-rituals are not spectator events We thank you all for your fall, active, conscious participation. May Sophia continue to bless your pilgrimage."
As I watched 2000 United Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, and Presbyterian women clink glasses filled with milk and honey, I was struck by a paradox. These women flocked happily to Sophia's altar, yet few seemed to have a clear idea of who she was, or to exhibit curiosity about how she might be associated with the creeds and confessions of their home churches. Even speakers such as the Rev. Barbara Lundblad, pastor of Our Savior's Atonement Lutheran Church in New York City, seemed to raise few eyebrows. Lundblad declared that she "did not need Jesus" as long as she had Sophia. To cheers, she noted that "we have done nothing in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." She suggested that Jesus "appear[ed] as the child and the envoy of Sophia .... In all [his] compassionate, liberating words and deeds are the works of Sophia."
When I asked participants, "Who is Sophia?", they seemed surprised and uncertain how to respond. One woman volunteered that "Sophia is the divine energy in women being unlocked by the goddess rituals." Another said, "She is the god who has been ignored too long-she is liberating the energy of all women for the good of the community." One man told me that Sophia "is the incarnation of wisdom in the women I have known." But one young woman's response seemed particularly illuminating: "Sophia is the wisdom within me."
This woman helped me understand why the excitement at "Re-Imagining" seemed so infectious, and why those caught up in it seemed loathe to question its source. The "Re-Imagining" participants were happily engaged in that most modem of enterprises: worshipping themselves, right down to the "bodily fluids" that figure so prominently in their prayers. They wanted to believe the conference program's heady words: "Sophia is the place in you where the entire universe resides."
They wanted what human beings have always craved-a goddess we can find by simply looking in the mirror.
Clearly, as the deity of "Re-Imagining," Sophia is the answer to the prayers of a multi-cultural, therapeutic world. She is "tolerant"-she does not judge, nor does she recognize any sin but the corporate transgressions of racism, sexism, and classism. Sophia has only one commandment-"Freely bless your own experience.”
At first blush, it seems strange that those who contemptuously reject Christianity's most fundamental tenets should persist in calling themselves Christians, and wish to locate pow-wows such as "Re-Imagining" within Christian history. In fact, their behavior is easy to understand. Those who claim to be re-imagining Christianity get headlines about a "second reformation." They get endowed chairs at seminaries, money, power, legitimacy, and a captive audience that must be the envy of the self-declared followers of Wicca. "Sophia" serves "reformers" of this ilk as an invaluable tabula rasa. Their adherents' ignorance of Sophia-far from being an obstacle-is essential to their project of fashioning a new religion while retaining tenuous and self-interested links to the Christian faith.
Katherine Kersten, an attorney, attended “Re-Imagining” as a press representative of Religion and Democracy and the Lutheran Commentator. She is a member of the board of directors of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and Lutherans for Religious and Political Freedom.