Woven - Mennonite Women Together

Happy summer solstice from our garden! Photo taken at 9;30 pm facing east while enjoying one of our wrap around prairie sunsets.

What you see is what you get “When L’Arche comes, the lack of pretense, the joy, the enthusiasm, the simple faith and the light in Jesus, it was and is so refreshing,” says Ryan Dueck, pastor of Lethbridge Mennonite Church. He has thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between his congregation and L’Arche Lethbridge, which...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-mennonite-brethren-church-lgbtq-inclusion-1.6518470

Winnipeg pastor's reflections on LGBTQ+ inclusion removed from book highlighting female leaders | CBC News A book meant to give female pastors a voice within the Mennonite Brethren Church is being seen as silencing one of those voices after a contribution from one of its writers was censored.

Our Global Faith family has gathered in Indonesia! Woven supported the MCM initiative to send a group of young adults to this gathering! Andrew, Andrea, Claudia, Natasha and Valerie are there, along with a few others MCM young adults who travelled with them. They covet our prayers as they engage the many conversations that are alive within our community.

MWC assembly crosses barriers to gather in Indonesia | Anabaptist World A colorful display of Javanese music, dance and shadow puppetry kicked off the Mennonite World Conference assembly July 5 in Salatiga, Indonesia.

Good words to us.

On this day, National Indigenous Peoples Day, I want to be very clear …

We do not dance for you.

We are not puppets or children dancing for treats.

We are not performers in the Canadian stage play, being played out for an international audience.

We are not Canada’s and we do not dance for you.

Many of us dance to heal from what Canada has thrown and continues to throw at us.

Many of us dance because Canada made sure our ancestors couldn’t or worse, were made to believe they shouldn’t, eventually believing they didn’t want or need to.

We dance so our kids can see us dance because many of us didn’t get to see our parents dance when we were kids.

We dance because we always have, internally often, finally externally.

We dance for us.

So again, on this day, National Indigenous Peoples Day, I say again …

We do not dance for you.

Remember that if you are non-indigenous at one of the many gatherings today. Remember that when you are tempted to comment on how pretty our outfits are.

Realize you are not seeing a performance. You are seeing a resistance. You are seeing resilience.

Perhaps that should be appreciated in silence, like true strength often is.

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day.

I love you!
Hugsssssss
Sandi

Jayme and Val.. always worth listening to🤓
https://themennocast.com/episode-hub/e11

Episode 11 — The MennoCast In this episode, we’re talking with the coordinators of the Abuse Response and Prevention Program of Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba . Their names are Jaymie Friesen and Val Hiebert. We’re going to chat about abuse and the church. When, why, and how does abuse happen among Christians? How s...

Mennonite Women USA... celebrating a Love that goes deep and wide.

Happy Pride month from all of us here at Mennonite Women USA!

Dr. Melanie Kampen....continuing to do good work.

https://ctms.uwinnipeg.ca/events/reporting-on-s*xual-violence/

Reporting on Sexual Violence in Mennonite Newspapers - Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies Sixth Annual CTMS Lecture “The work at Osborne House destroyed the myth I had believed: ... Read More

Do you feel like it is still dark, even though Easter is supposed to usher in resurrection joy? Then maybe you'd like to join this online group, led by Kate Bowler, and look for signs of hope in the pain and darkness of life. I just signed up.
https://katebowler.com/life-together-apart/

Life Together Apart While It Was Yet Dark: A 7-Week Easter Practice Below you will find seven video teachings, daily journal pages, and discussion questions to be used by yourself or in a small group.  Download: START HERE In April 2020, we realized we needed something different to get us through the uncertainty ahead...

This FB live recording starts slow, but go to about the 5-minute mark and enjoy a very good, relevant and insightful conversation about Holy Week, especially if you are snowed in and can't get to church.

The Subversive Walk of Holy Week Christine Sine and Lilly Lewin talk about the injustice and subversiveness of Holy Week in this April 6th 2022 FB Live session

This meditation stood out for me and connected well with my reality. Perhaps it will do the same for you in this Holy Week. If not, feel free to comment with something that does.

The Fullness of Hospitality Lent is not just a time of emptying, but making space to be filled anew.

Yes! Thank you Anne Lammott, for putting our days into a realistic yet somewhat hope-filled context.

Woven, or knit together by our creator, to share each other's joys and sorrows?

Anja Rožen, a 13-year old elementary school student from Slovenia is the winner of the international contest Plakat MIRU. She was chosen among 600,000 children from all over the world. "My poster represents the earth that connects and unites us. People stick to each other. If one person let go, the rest will fall. We are all connected to our planet and to each other, but unfortunately we are little aware of it," said the young creator.

Read more: https://world360news.com/en/anja-ro%C5%BEen-wins-peace-poster-contest-sponsored-local-lions-clubs-600000-participants-worldwide

Good words of encouragement in our protracted season of winter and Lent.

www.facebook.com

In Lent we soak our souls in truths.

Don’t prioritise your looks my friend, as they won’t last the journey.
Your sense of humour though, will only get better with age.
Your intuition will grow and expand like a majestic cloak of wisdom.
Your ability to choose your battles, will be fine-tuned to perfection.
Your capacity for stillness, for living in the moment, will blossom.
Your desire to live each and every moment will transcend all other wants.
Your instinct for knowing what (and who) is worth your time, will grow and flourish like ivy on a castle wall.
Don’t prioritise your looks my friend,
they will change forevermore, that pursuit is one of much sadness and disappointment.
Prioritise the uniqueness that make you you, and the invisible magnet that draws in other like-minded souls to dance in your orbit.
These are the things which will only get better.

Donna Ashworth

Wendy K., Karen R....women of peace, powerful perspectives.
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/a-peacemaking-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine-576309152.html

A peacemaking response to the war in Ukraine The Russian invasion of Ukraine is hard on everyone here in Canada. Many feel so sad and powerless to do anything to end the suffering.

Good stories from Sojourners. - Elsie Rempel

10 Christian Women Shaping the Church in 2022 These women are leading the church to become a more inclusive, bold, accessible, creative, and action-oriented community of believers.

MCM Pastors: Karen, Lynell, Lisa, Judith, Erika,Valerie, Darlene, Andrea, Erin, Virginia, Kennedy, Lisa, Lizzie, Kristy, Janet, Heidi, Kathy (x3) Cheryl ,Marla,... who could have imagined ( besides God!) Thanks to all the Ingrids, Marys, Ruths, Annas and Helens who created the paths. Cheers to International Women’s Day🎉

March is Women's History Month

International Women’s Day Mar. 8... Today Manitoba Women’s Day🙅🏼‍♀️
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winkler-women-surgeons-cw-wiebe-boundary-trails-1.6373033

75% of surgeons at southern Manitoba hospital, clinic are women, bucking national trend | CBC News Ten of the 13 surgeons at C.W. Wiebe Medical Centre and Boundary Trails Health Centre in the Winkler, Man., area are women — almost three times the national average.

For this Sabbath Day..

March 8 is International Women’s Day.... I say let’s get this Party started and spend the Weekend celebrating on our page🎉. Post a name and/ or a picture...or even of few words about the woman/ women you celebrate.

motivationalspeakersagency.co.uk

From these I take my cues.

A woman on the Moscow subway. Sometimes Resistance can just be what you wear out in public.

Yesterday I wrote about Mennonite World Conference and the Anabaptist Women Theologians Workshop. I said that theology is just a fancy word for thinking and talking about how we understand God. How we think and understand God profoundly shapes how we "do" theology - that is, how we practice being like God.

The following piece I wrote is basically theology grounded in the lived reality of being a white/hetero/cis gender female growing up in a rural Evangelical/Mennonite denomination. It first appeared on my blog: https://mennomystic.blogspot.com/
And most recently in Woven's 2nd Newsletter - which you can sign up for by clicking on the "Email Signup" button.

A reflection by Tina Fehr Kehler

If God is everywhere then there are no profane places; all places and spaces are sacred and holy. Our work as Christ followers, Holy Spirit inhabitors, is to unveil the divine mystery hidden in all things, to uncover the sacredness of all of creation. This includes our very bodies.

As I write this, I realize that the discovering of ourselves as sacred spaces is not a one-off, it too is part of the human journey, a process requiring the re-ordering of our very own hearts to the true reality that always is, that we are sacred. And it is a process, a process of re-membering “who and whose we are.”[1] Too often, though, this development is arrested and stalled; often by the Church that claims to be the bearer of our salvation.

For many years… many, many years, I truly believed I was evil; inherently bad, cursed, flawed and irredeemable. This inner knowing persisted as a result of my fundamentalist evangelical Christian formation in the church, at home, at school and in the community. I remember being on a youth retreat one winter and the speaker talking about how “God doesn’t make junk..,” trying to help us experience ourselves as lovingly created by God. But if you are reminded the other 98% of the time that you are inherently sinful and in dire need of redemption and this message never changes, even though you’ve said the sinner’s prayer to fix the problem, your opinion of yourself as junk is unlikely to change.

And if I wasn’t quite sure of my evilness, being female ensured that I would always be reminded of just how evil and profane I was. It was this body, this configuration of female parts that was one of the biggest problems. This body, this thing I was born into, was shameful and thoroughly irreligious.

Sitting in church one Sunday as a young teenager, I remember the pastor speaking about a passage in the Bible that said, “Our sins,” he quoted, “are like filthy rags.” And the look on his face and tone of his voice spoke with as much volume as his words. These filthy rags referred to menstrual cloths. They were dirty, ergo, I was dirty because I was the source of their filth. Of course, I had no one to talk to about this because I understood menstruation to be shameful. It was a curse after all, the pain I had to suffer for my part in the “fall of humankind.” That’s right. I deserved the monthly bleeding, cramping, sore body parts, hormonal fluctuations because my predecessor, Eve, brought it upon us all. How in anyone’s right mind could this female body, this thing, be holy, let alone not be junk?

People say I take things too personally. I say that about myself, too. They and I say, that I am overly sensitive. However, I am trying to see myself more like the canary in the proverbial coal mine. I am intuitive. I sense when things are not right. I have come to understand that this is because of my inherent goodness. What was I supposed to do with this intuition? I didn’t know that I didn’t have to feel this way, that there were other ways of thinking about menstruation, the female body and the female experience. I was too embarrassed and ashamed of my own physical self to speak about such intimate disgraceful things.

I bore the shame of my being a female alone, within myself. How could believing that Jesus loved me and “took my sins away” ever solve the problem of my own female existence? Just because I “asked Jesus into my heart” didn’t stop me from being a sinful female. I never had enough “faith,” I could never “believe” enough to stop me from being female.

For the rest of my life, I have been trying to re-align the feminine and the sacred. I have always had a keen sense of the incongruous, whether I was able to articulate it or not. My life has been a journey of figuring out how to put the idea of the profaneness of the female body back together with the sacredness of being created in the image of God. Throughout my life I have been learning and testing ideas and living into modes of being that empower the female circumstance and acknowledge the holiness God has given it from the beginning.

Throughout this journey of faith-life, I have experienced healings from the pain of the past born in my body. One of those moments came unexpectedly during a reflexology treatment. This was a time in my life where I had gone through burn out and was rebuilding myself. I was in the process of excavating all types of baggage that didn’t serve me anymore. I don’t remember exactly what she said or did but it was something about feeling that something was “stuck.” And the floodgates poured open. I started weeping and through the tears managed to sob out that I believed that I was inherently evil. She took my hands and said, “No you’re not. You are created good.” I don’t know what or how or why, but that moment was transforming. The reflexology room became a sacred place. I was being healed by holy sacred hands as I felt the weight and burden that had been torturing me for years fall away. I was free, free at last.

I tested it out in the following weeks and months, to see if that feeling of being evil had returned even a bit. I would probe my heart every so often…nothing. When I did something wrong, hurt someone, felt bad feelings or had bad thoughts towards others I would wait for the feeling to return. But it didn’t. Even when I did something which hurt a bunch of people and over which I felt overwhelming shame and remorse for quite some time, the, I am evil feeling, wasn’t there.

Looking back, I can now see that it was at this point in my healing from burn out that I grew exponentially in accepting myself as feminine. It’s been in these last several years, now that my female body is morphing into middle age, becoming softly flaccid (a more body-friendly way of saying fat and saggy), that I am more comfortable than ever with my female form. Go figure (pun intended).

This body is sacred.

If God is everywhere, then God is in all things, though never wholly contained in any one thing. I am one of those things in which God dwells, that is God’s temple. I have always been sacred; having been “knit together in my mother’s womb” and having “been made in the image and likeness of God.” There has never been a time in my life that my body has not been sacred: when I, my embodied soul-self, was menstruating, or when I, Holy Spirit filled me, grew breasts, or when I, beloved of God enjoyed the pleasure of s*x, or when I, in concert with divine mystery, inside my very body grew lives, or when I in pain, and joy gave birth to those lives, and from my physical body nourished them,… all of it… all of it was and continues to be sacred. What else could it be?

Ukrainian illustrator Viktoriia Protsiv
Lullaby

Watch For...
MWC workshop by Anabaptist Women Theologians together
July 2022

Many of us will not be able to attend Mennonite World Conference (MWC) this summer in Indonesia. At Woven, we are hoping to virtually attend and support a workshop hosted by Anabaptist Women Theologians. Don't let the word "theologian" scare you off! All of us seekers "do" theology every day whether we know it or not. We're always living out what we believe...theology is just the fancy term for talking about what we're thinking about God, i.e., how we understand God. We have so much to learn from other Mennonite women the world over about how they think about God.

Here's the link to the MWC page.

https://www.facebook.com/MennoniteWorldConference/

Mennonite World Conference - MWC CMM Mennonite World Conference (MWC) is a communion of Anabaptist-related churches linked to one another in a worldwide community of faith for fellowship, worship, service and witness

This is Tina Fehr Kehler, Woven Committee Member, writing. I have been out of the social media loop for nearly 2 months. I had intended to take a Sabbath rest from it for the month of January and get back to posting in February. I found I couldn't get back on. There was this internal resistance that I was just not ready to deal with.
I know from past experience that when I stop doing something or when I've left something on a "to do" list for too long...the starting again feels like a heavy burden. There are all these layers of having to figure out where you left off, dealing with the outfall of having "missed" something, facing potentially difficult challenges that I haven't had to deal with for the hiatus etc.
As I'm writing this I'm thinking this is probably how it's going to feel for a lot of us trying to adjust to a different kind of "normal" in re-entering society around us with the loosening of restrictions. It's probably going to feel a bit like a burden, like work. And we're all tired...and it's been a long winter.
What am I going to do about it? The only thing I can think of is to have grace for myself. Some of "getting back out there" is going to feel hard. I know "I can do hard things." But I will also try to remember that I don't have to do them all at once and that's OK. That's grace.

And speaking of feeling weary and needing rest...check out the attached poster for information on a Sabbath Retreat with Spiritual Mentor Laura Funk. Now THIS I could get "out" for!

Here is the link to register:
https://gmail.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=783ad224166eebbf7efe7dc5d&id=f03cdbaaef&e=35e1893f68

Weaving Women's Words Newsletter - The Second Edition
FEBRUARY 23, 2022
We are using this newsletter to provide a format to connect with Mennonite Women in Manitoba. Sharing some of the following:
Upcoming events (When there are events coming up)
Words that challenge, reflect and/or inspire
Some insights into living faithfully in today's world

Happy February...
As we move through this cold and snowy month we invite you to do some reflection. This month is often thought of as a month of love. We encourage each of you to look into yourself and your lives and celebrate the love within and throughout your life. We are Woven together through living relationship and living Spirit.

This issue you will include a time of reflecting on our sacred places as well as getting to know some of the Woven Committee a bit better.

Click on "Email Signup" to receive our Newsletter in your Email Inbox!

I appreciate the Altona Bergthaler Church calling people to gather for prayer today. Wherever we are today, let us pray without ceasing.

Part of a congregation care team? Wondering about how to care for families with full schedules or young adults with full lives? Take a peek at the Line Up of Break Out Room presentations and conversations 😎
Saturday March 5th 2-4pm.

https://mennochurch.mb.ca/event/9954-2022-03-05-afternoon-of-equipping-2022

2022-03-05 - Afternoon of Equipping 2022 Congregational Care: possibilities and pragmatics Online. Register here....

So many beautiful stories.. never make the Pages.

As rabbi was held hostage, his interfaith clergy colleagues gathered to help end the standoff (RNS) — The congregation’s rabbi is particularly well connected to the larger interfaith community and on good terms with many Muslim leaders.

Mary Oliver...lovely any day.

A Mary Oliver poem to revisit this weekend. 💛
"I Worried" from "Swan: Poems and Prose Poems" by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press (2010)

Looking to expand your 2022 Playlist. Give a listen to my friend Raine.
https://youtu.be/TuTL8UPLJzo

Love Has Come for Me, Raine Hamilton An anthem of radical self love. A q***r love song I wrote to myself. A song for all the forgotten parts, whatever they are for each of us. Spotify: https://o...

If you have been on the look out for a new Devotional....take a peek at this one.

New from Herald Press!

On Love and Mercy is a 60-day devotional that invites readers to expand their vision of both personal faith in God and the redemptive and saving work of social action. Breaking down the premise that Christians must choose between being either socially conscious or theologically sound, author Stephen Mattson offers the hopeful message that Jesus—and Christianity—is both. Each day’s entry offers Christians who long to see justice and equity within society with a much-needed source of affirmation, solidarity, and encouragement.

Buy or borrow today by visiting commonword.ca/go/2630.

An interesting and helpful perspective.

FIRST PERSON | I survived a war as a child, but life doesn't owe me anything I survived a war as a child and now I face this pandemic. Here is how I'm learning to better narrate my life through catastrophe, writes Nadja Halilbegovich.