from the principal's desk. . .
Making space
Although I didn’t get up extra early on Saturday to watch the royal wedding, there were parts of it (like the fashions!) that definitely caught my eye over the long weekend. It was wonderful to hear people talking about Rev. Curry’s sermon!
One of the things that caught my eye was a mention of which charities the Duke and Duchess of Sussex promoted for donations in lieu of wedding gifts. One is a charity in Mumbai that educates girls and women on menstruation and distributes supplies, hoping to reduce absenteeism at school and work.
It reminds me of a dramatic mural I saw last year in a church in Magdala, right on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The church (Duc in Altum) is filled with murals and mosaics focused on women in scriptural stories, including the women in the crowd who reached out for healing.
Another discussion I saw online seemed to fit right into this theme: an acknowledgement of how painful IUD insertion/removal can be, and an encouragement to ask for pain relief. Nicole Cliffe tweeted “GENERALLY speaking, if you find a medical procedure for which the majority of patients are women really painful, bad/mediocre providers will say something dismissive like "I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you" and then when you poll your friends you discover it's a lie.”
Two thousand years after a woman reached out for healing; menstrual bleeding, birth control and health care for people with wombs and uteruses still can be a crisis that is painful, diminishing and costly – all around the world.
At the Centre for Christian Studies we continue to practice theological reflection in the places where scripture and personal and political connect. Rooted in our history - when graduates worked overseas as medical missionaries providing women’s reproductive health care – we continue to name the times when pain cries out to be relieved. And if we are not the ones reaching out – maybe we can be the ones in the crowd making space for someone else’s hand to connect to Christ.
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