Here she is portrayed with the red cord she used to save the spies and save her own life.

She was the first person the spies visited when they went to check out the lay of the land. She was so vulnerable. She lived on the outskirts of her city, her lack of status, the fact she was a woman and her profession making her an outsider. Not respected. No rights. Of course she was the first person the spies sought out. She would have been a mine of information and unlikely to be loyal to a city that doesn't offer her any protection or see her as of any value.

I love Rahab. Its so tragic that she recognises her predicament and feels like she has to use it all to her advantage. She knows these invaders are going to win... she knows if she is not on their side she and her family will die. So in fear for her life, she does what she needs to in order to keep herself and her family safe.

Imagine living with the knowledge that your treachery to your own people meant all their deaths. She must have felt so trapped. If she wanted to live she had to help the occupying enemy.

A woman who has probably had very little choice in life... and who has probably grown to fear and resent men... and most probably grown used to having to protect herself, acting in desperation, under pressure from occupying forces, to save her own life and that of her family.

[FOR CONTEXT]

During my second year of graduate school I served as president of the LGBTQ graduate group at the Divinity School (aptly named DivOut - yes, all the LGBTQ groups had pun names). One of my favorite things about that role was that every week I sent everyone on this private list an email that contained: a quote from a different queer figure, a power anthem, a pep talk, and their schedule for the week.

I'm no longer in grad school, but given this year generally and last night particularly, I felt compelled to write something to those folks, and I thought perhaps it might speak to other folks as well.

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Power Anthems (Courtesy of Resistance Revival Chorus)

Joy in Resistance

This Joy That I Have

All You Fascists Bound to Lose

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Dearest Divoutees,

It is clearly the case that I am no longer the DivOut president, nor - sometimes to my chagrin - a graduate student at all. To say I miss you all would be an understatement, as being in class and on campus with you all was one of the great privileges of my life.

And yet when news broke last night of the inevitable Supreme Court confirmation, I found myself compelled to write you all. If I'm honest, it was one of my first impulses.  And I've spent the morning reading interviews with Angela Davis and pondering what it is exactly that I want to say. This has, I'll admit, also been complicated by the reality that so many of us harbor religious trauma deep in our bones, and so in deference to that, I always tried to speak in the broadest possible terms.

But in this moment I find that such an approach does not serve me, as it does not adequately express the thing I most want you to know. Which is my utter conviction that the hope of the Christian faith lies in the life and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that hope is, I believe, worth clinging to as the bottom continuously seems to drop out from under us, tempting us to despair.

As I said, I've been reading interviews with Angela Davis, and so to the point of life - and moreover the living of it - as hope, I share this insight from the National United Committee to free Angela Davis:

In these times, when the fight to uphold one's humanity is a revolutionary act, the false difference between 'personality' and 'politics' can no longer be maintained. It is in this light that we must understand the life of Angela Davis, for, as she said, the struggle of a true revolutionary is 'to merge the personal with the political to the point where they can no longer be separate.' In the profoundest of ways, it is one when 'you don't see your life, your individual life, as being so important'  that it begins to become important, politically, for others in the common fight for freedom. -  The National United Committee to free Angela Davis, 1970    excerpt from "A Political Biography," If They Come In The Morning: Voices of                                                                   Resistance

We, together with our comrades and allies, friends and lovers, classmates and neighbors, make up that fight. You are, even now,  part of the coalescing "us" that rises in the "common fight for freedom." In my tradition, that is also the highest aspiration of the church, but you might call it community, coalition, or chosen family. Regardless, it is this commitment to the other, that full embodiment of all that we are for the purposes of the freedom of the person next to us-  even as we work to see more clearly how our self-understandings of our own embodiment are disciplined by powers of imperialism, racism, ableism, sexism, colonialism - that forms the foundations necessary for revolution, for freedom.  And it is in these foundations, I believe, that we also see the weaknesses of those disciplining forces. We are shown, as we reflect the desires for freedom of those around us, the limits of all those powers and principalities that would seek to establish our meaning for us.

This is what we see too in the life and works of Christ - a vision and a way of moving through the world that stays fixed on freedom, with a vision broader for that reality than simply the freedom of oneself.

So too then we come to resurrection. Many of you know this story, but in my first year at YDS I struggled deeply as the things I was learning and being exposed to shook foundational assumptions I had about who I was and what I had to offer the world. These things came to a head early in the Spring semester, and I found myself one cold Sunday night leaning against the stone wall outside Betts House sobbing and heartbroken. How could I go on? I wondered earnestly. What was the point of completing this program, or trying to preach, of doing anything when so much power and weight stood against me.

And then, to my utter surprise, came a thought - unbidden and more clearly than I had ever experienced in my life.

But the resurrection.

It rang out in my mind with a clarity I could not place, expanding and warming and settling in my soul.

But the resurrection.

It was so solid, so tangible, so present - this moment in time, this eternal moment, where God dismissed death out of hand. There in the lowest moment, the one most filled with doubt and despair, was this promise that it does not win. And more than a promise, a reality. A definitive statement. A grounding deeper than the roots of oppression and violence and hopelessness and governments.

It did not make everything better all at once. It did not absolve me of struggle and doubt. But I clung to its solidity. I placed my faith in it. And it carried me through. The resurrection is the fertile soil from which the seeds of hope sprout, racing upward, insinuating their tendrils and shoots into the places in the walls of despair where the mortar is weak. Slowly hope grows, and slowly the structures of injustice are destabilized, and in all of it we are offered the possibility of seeing life where before death seemed to have reigned supreme.

And so I offer you these words of hope, of life and resurrection, not because things are easy, but because things are hard. Because the shadows are building and the powers are coalescing and the message being blared at us is about domination and control.

These things are heavy. They are designed to crush us. And it is okay if right now it feels like they're succeeding. You are not always required to be strong.

But this is why you are part of an "us" - so that I can do the work on the days your hands are tired, and describe hope when you cannot see a way toward it. And you do the same for me, for zir, for them, for her, for him, for us.

There is life. There is resurrection. And you are DEEPLY loved.

in glitter and solidarity,

My depiction of Womankind - emerging from behind the tree in the garden. This tree, because she has been shamed and forced behind it to hide since the dawn of time. Woman, living constantly in the shadow of a deeply patriarchal misreading of the fall narrative.

It is her time. It is time for womankind to emerge from her shame and embrace her place as the completion of God's creative process and also her God given agency and power.

I painted Doubting Thomas because I can't help feeling that he has been dealt a really bad hand by Christianity over the years. We even attach his failing in his name. I mean we don't call Peter, Stupid Weak Peter or John, needs to be the centre of attention John. It just all seems a bit unfair.

Firstly, he isn't the only disciple that doubted Jesus. Peter also doubted Jesus... he doubted him so much it caused him to deny him THREE whole times. All the male disciples doubted Jesus had Risen from the dead because when Mary Magdalene ran to tell them, their egos meant they could not believe they were not involved in something so significant and they told her she was mistaken.

Many times while Jesus was alive they doubted him. Look at the feeding of the five thousand... none of them thought he could feed that many people. And Peter again, Doubting Jesus and sinking when he walked out to him on the sea.

I guess what I am saying is that Doubting is inherently human and therefore we should not judge someone for doing something that is part if their humanity. We are not God. We are not divine. Jesus loves our humanity. He doesn't condemn it. So let us not do that either.

And let's cut Thomas some slack. I feel like renaming him... something like... Honest Thomas. Or brave Thomas. He definitly had no problem speaking his mind. He did not hide his emotions. He spoke his truth even if it meant he would get judged for it.