In my mid-thirties, so much was good:
I had my two children and my two parents--the loves of my life. I had a bachelor's degree (funny now, that we called our first degrees by male words) and a master's degree (same kind of funny). I was teaching at UTSA, teaching eighteen-year-old students how to make sentences and public-speak. I had great friends.
But one Easter morning, I was playing the organ at the Helotes Methodist Church when I realized that I had been married for exactly half my life. Something had happened the day before that had made me add up the years and admit that marriage wasn't quite what I'd had in mind. In fact, it was nothing like I'd had in mind.
So there I was playing resurrection songs, and I realized that that particular story had lost its juice for me. God and Jesus were male; all the pronouns in all the hymns were male--and I felt invisible in that story, just as I felt invisible in my marriage. I could hear something clicking in the back of my mind and I knew it was the sound of unhooking from that particular story.
I could play, and sing, every hymn in the Baptist hymnbook--but as a female, even if I'd wanted to, I could never have been ordained to tell that story--just as females in the Catholic church could never be priests. We could sing "This is my Father's World"--but we left out Mother Earth entirely. We talked about "brotherhood"--but what about sisterhood?
In that Easter moment, I knew that the very songs I'd played for a lifetime were songs of a story that I would always treasure and keep parts of, but that I also needed some girl stories, some women stories, to build a female spirituality.
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