Woman

Our community group this year will be listening to various podcasts and focusing on the meditation and reflection sparked by those podcasts.  If you’d like to follow along with us, you can check out my notes here on the blog each week.

December 6th

When I first selected this podcast for Cgroup, I wondered briefly if there would be pushback from any of the men in our group.  We have several new folks this year and I worried that there might be frustration for devoting a week to the discussion of women and their life experiences if I wasn’t also planning to devote a week to men.   Or maybe some would think that the conversation should be reserved for just the women of the group.  But I needn’t have worried.  It was a lively conversation and the men were every bit as involved as the women.

While most everyone listened to the entire podcast, we focused in on two sections.  Lisa Gungor’s spoken word piece at minute 32:00-42:00 and the interview with Austin Channing Brown from 49:40-107:00.

For discussion…

How do our lived experiences connect with the spoken word piece?  What parts resonated most?  The piece was both pain-filled and power-filled.  The word that stood out most to me from my second listen was “consume.”  So much about women in our culture is about consumption.  The male consumption of the female body.  How do we disrupt this cycle?  How does the Church disrupt this cycle?

At what intersections do we each sit?  Acknowledging other intersections and experiences requires intentionality and energy.  How do we press in day after day and empathize with those who have different experiences?

We had a good laugh about Science Mike (who we all love, don’t worry) man-splaining during the Austin Channing Brown interview.

One of the most sad, surprising-not-surprising things that was shared last night was by a woman who talked about her experiences at two previous jobs; one where she was the only female and then one at a church.  While there were occasional issues at the first job, it was her job at the church that was most fraught with micro-aggressions, outright aggressions, and sexism.

For meditation & reflection…

“It’s easy to boil things down to identity politics
when every part of your identity is celebrated.”
-Science Mike