Chelsea Page is a married cis-gender woman of doubtful fertility in her mid-30s who grew up in San Jose, CA.
Chelsea was raised Roman Catholic by a feminist mama, studied feminist theology and sexual ethics,
and is now a servant in the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church USA.
Chelsea has participated in and led numerous popular education groups.
Her spouse Marcus Page is a peace activist in the Catholic Worker movement.
If Chelsea were an animal, she would be Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web.
You can see some of Chelsea's writings here:
http://www.jesusradicals.com/blog/a-holy-queering-rewilding-civilized-sexualities-part-1
http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/stw/2013/03/29/bible-study-3-easter-c/
https://archive.org/details/CC2014_201410
Stuff I Love
The United Church of Christ is a non-creedal church; it's okay that not everyone believes the same. I wrote up a personal philosophy to let my students know my religious assumptions, and encourage them to reveal and reflect on their own.
Religious educator Thomas Groome defines a “creed” as “what you give your heart to.” According to Groome, the heart of any teaching endeavor is the heart of the teacher.[i] Because his teaching approach is one of shared reflection, I think he meant to include the hearts of the students, as well. What do you love?
About me
I began participating at mass at age 11, and as I grew into a socially-conscious young woman, I adopted a devotion to the suffering heart of Mary, the sorrowful mother. In a very early example of Catholic theology, Church father John of Damascus wrote, “This blessed one [Mary], who had been found worthy of gifts surpassing nature [aka a virgin and painless birth], did at the time of [Christ’s] passion suffer the pangs which she had escaped at childbirth. When she saw him put to death as a criminal—the man she knew to be God when she gave birth to him—her heart was torn from maternal compassion and she was rent by her thoughts as by a sword.” [ii] John of Damascus argued that this was the meaning of “a sword shall pierce through your own soul” in Luke 2:34-35, a prophecy that Mary received when she was a brand-new mother.
Eventually my piety yielded to typical feminist suspicion, as I wondered about the heaps of non-human characteristics that are ascribed to this role-model woman of faith. Through activism, I also learned that “suffering with” was not necessarily the most useful or practical form of solidarity for me to embody as a person of privilege. Somewhere on the journey, I learned to take the sword out of my heart, based on my belief that knives do not belong in people’s anatomy, whether physical or spiritual. I decided that compassion was less about pity and more about empathy, requiring a new metaphor for the heart: a love that is stretched, rather than broken or pierced, by tensions and disparity. The sword I was left with, then, was a sword of intellectual discernment that I could wield at voices (especially texts) which claim to offer good news (aka “gospel”). I like to think that this was the sword Mary gained at the end of her life, when she became one of the founders of the new post-resurrection Jesus movement (Acts 2).
So what’s my take on "good news," especially as it relates to learning and teaching?
About persons
Persons are beloved—body, mind and soul—and have a right to think for themselves and inhabit their own lives as creatures existing for their own glory, in all the shapes which they come in and create. The “create” part is where grace comes in, because everyday we are a slightly new creation, and the universe can’t resist helping us grow, while bathing us in ever-present forgiveness like sunlight.
Human animals are internally driven learners who do not need to be taught, but who do need community. Hence as a teacher I aim to “give students to each other” by facilitating opportunities to share stories. The human mind is vulnerable to trauma and resilient in its unique personal capacity to perceive and love.
About God
God is a loving parent who created the universe family and is still active in it. God is on the side of people who are oppressed. God never deliberately causes suffering; God wants people to live. God respects freedom, and God’s ultimate freedom is manifested by God’s voluntary passion for us. God has always been the God of all nations and has a long-standing relationship with every culture far beyond the ability of western European Christianity to even imagine. God is patiently waiting for the nations to flunk out of the “schools” we have set for ourselves, so that we can begin listening and dreaming God’s dream.
God is never too busy to be personal, and is intimately concerned with each of our lives. However, God does appreciate a little distance and respect, not caring to be reduced to “best friend” or “national patron” or “warrior in battle.” God is irreducible mystery writ large, as each of us are irreducible mystery writ small. Seeking God is tender, personal, deep and scary, and thus both religious and nonreligious people joined together in spiritual seeking are on the same tender footing and deserve to be treated with maximum gentleness. In the classroom we can reflect divinity and resist idolatry in the way that we listen to one another without tokenization.
About Jesus
Some people love Jesus for his divinity, some for his humanity. I love him for his mind. Jesus facilitated community and taught through example and paradox. Jesus loved, hated, and healed. He took the side of those deemed criminals by human evil, and he rose again in his students. Jesus is the one I will always love and never understand, and therefore is an inexhaustible conversation partner for learning.
Jesus was a Jew, his mama Mary was a Jew, his homeland was Jewish, his followers were Jews with a few non-Jews thrown in for the joy of it, and he had a distinctly Jewish prophetic vision about the healing of the nations. I understand incarnation to be historical, and really appreciate reflections on the Bible that take the concrete realities of then and put them in critical conversation with the concrete realities of now.
About Spirit
The Holy Spirit is Jesus’s heart unbound and sent from his body and sensible to us. She is our “spider sense” that tingles with the presence of the sacred. She manifests the law of love that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. She is Jesus and God and Mary and the communion of saints, and obviously quite queer.
She is God showing up in the classroom and in cyberspace, and I delight in acknowledging her presence when students work together.
About Scripture
The Bible is a collection of ancient human documents that are mostly Jewish and which bear God’s power to speak to us in unexpected ways. The Bible must be interpreted in order to be read, but as a wounded text it bristles with undomesticated surprises and urges. In a shared Bible quest we listen for what the text says and does not say to each of us, and reel with it together. Discussion of the nature of the Bible’s influence and authority in students’ lives is a necessary step in making use of its stories.
About Church
Every church is an assembly of creatures organizing themselves for a big, hopeful purpose, which hopefully is not too evil. The Christian church was originally founded by Jesus’s Jewish disciples of all genders, including his mother Mary, as a social movement that had a clear view of social evil and an alternative way of life given to them by Jesus. With the help of Paul, another faithful Jew and brilliant seeker, the church found a way to embrace people of multiple ethnic cultures while deliberately confusing the empire’s racial categorization system.
Today quite a few assemblies of church, both inside and outside and in between visible Christian church, are continuing to promote the things that make for life. When I gather a group of students, we are church, regardless of the religious beliefs of each member. Church is a gathering where human evil operates but is neutralized by visibility and commitment to the most excellent purpose we can dream up together.
About Christian vision
Whatever all this is, it’s not where we’re going to end up. God is helping us to bring about a human presence in Earth that is spiritually fulfilling, physically sustainable, and socially just. God is present in suffering and failure but never complacent or satisfied. There is always more goodness to be fought for and won.
About myself as a teacher
The peace of Christ, which surpasses all understanding and is not as the world gives, enables me to overcome my social anxiety enough to gather people into an assembly to contemplate the sacred together.
As a teacher I have power over my students, and I commit to paying attention to how this power is perceived and how I use it, for example when I take up space, frame reality, or direct the focus of conversation. When I ask someone I trust and admire for feedback or revision, I always, always implement their suggestions, so that the work we do together is less limited by my particular vision and self-interest.
I do not consider myself “called” so much as “situated,” by privilege and providence, for this work, finding myself in a network of relationships and yearnings that have moved and resourced me. If God uses me, it’s not because I’m a particularly attractive serving woman (as Mary said about herself), but because it’s happening that way. I’m grateful for the great minds in my life and especially for the great hearts.
[i] From Thomas Groome’s book Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, The Way of Shared Praxis.
[ii] Orthodox Faith 4.14, quoted from FC 37:366 in The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume 3 on Luke, p. 50.