A Conversation with Adria Gulizia | Part 2
In Part 1 of my interview with Adria, we have a tender conversation about spiritual wounding and healing in faith communities. It continues here in the second half. It’s a topic that is close to my heart. Yet my favorite part of this second half is when she tells her story about male friendships. It’s why she does not want to let go of referring to God as “he.” We also talk about remorse, grace, and forgiveness.
Adria is a lawyer with a heart for mediation. She's on the Board of Advisors for the Earlham School of Religion and is a member of Friends of Jesus Fellowship founded by Micah Bales, Faith Kelley, and others. She's also a compassionate voice of prophecy within the Quaker movement.
Like all prophets, Adria will say things that will make us uncomfortable—and make us think. I offer the following interview as the beginning of a conversation, a reflection on significant issues to us as individuals and as a community of Friends.
I occasionally reveal my own opinions in the interview. They are my opinions only; they are not the opinions or statements of Sierra-Cascades Coordinating Committee, which I clerk. I love it when an opinion opens up a conversation—let's hear yours!
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length
The first half of the interview appeared in the January 13th issue. To refresh reader’s memories, I’m repeating a few questions and responses on a topic that continues into the second half, here.
I asked her what she said at a plenary panel at New England Yearly Meeting. She replied:
Adria Gulizia
The main thrust of it was like, We need a bigger table. If your good news only lets you talk to the women's rights activists and not the men's rights activists, then your gospel is too small. If your good news is only good news for Democrats and not Republicans, then it’s not the good news. So like, if we can only talk to, if we can only love, if we can only connect within spiritual communities, if we can only speak words of encouragement, and words of God's grace to the people who believe like we do, then we are preaching something that is NOT the Good News.
Judy Maurer
What for you is the good news?
Adria Gulizia
A kind of cookie cutter Evangelical response is “the good news is that God so loved the world so much that He sent His only begotten Son that all believed in Him would be saved and have everlasting life.” But I'm like, that's only one piece.
The good news is HUGE. It's way bigger than that. So the good news is that Christ has overcome sin, and that we can be liberated from it. That's one piece of good news.
One piece of good news is that Christ is a source of healing, and the Spirit is a source of healing, both physical and spiritual. That's another piece of good news. Another piece of good news is that for those of us who are laboring under the defilement of others, and the way that we are polluted spiritually, physically, all of those things— there's cleansing in Christ. And I feel like it's important to say another controversial thing. Because regardless of whether or not we feel like someone who's been a victim of sexual assault should feel dirty, it’s a reality that a lot of people experience.
Judy Maurer
Absolutely. I did. That's what you mean by defilement by others—that feeling of shame?
Adria Gulizia
That feeling of shame. Absolutely.
Judy Maurer
That is powerful.
Adria Gulizia
Another aspect of the good news is that creation will be reconciled with God, and that the different aspects of creation shall be reconciled with each other, that there is room for harmony with other people with all of creation with the natural world, that's also part of the good news. Part of that reconciliation is reconciliation across social boundaries. So the good news is so big that you can't drill it down into one statement, not because that statement is false, but because so many other things are also true.
It’s also that healing and wholeness are possible. A lot of people come to Friends after some kind of spiritual trauma.
Judy Maurer
Yes, I did.
Adria Gulizia
I don't know what your experience was. I would love to hear it.
A lot of people, at least with liberal Friends here (and I don't know if it's the same, if the case is the same among other Friends) but among liberal Friends here, a lot of people come with a lot of trauma, and they never get healed.
Because the trauma is instead reaffirmed. “Oh, you don't want to talk about Jesus? Then we won't talk about Jesus. Oh, you know, it hurt you to hear people exercising spiritual authority? We don't do that.” That's not actually what healing looks like.
[Note: In my own experience, before I was in recovery, trauma from adolescence and childhood nestled deep in my body. If certain topics came up, I could not be open and respond in the moment - the trauma was calling me back into my childhood wounds. This could blind me to the sense of what God was calling me to in the present moment. Now I generally can come to the issue with a more open mind, and with a deeper wisdom for the experience. I understood Adria to be speaking of this kind of human experience. - Judy
Judy Maurer
One of the things our pastor does at Camas Friends is reframe so that he is able to talk about Jesus and Bible verses among very wounded people who are yearning for something spiritual, by reframing it. And I think that's one of the exciting things that's happening in Sierra-Cascades, too, is we are learning, moving forward. It's not exactly new ways of talking about Jesus. But at least not using the old words that will be painful for some people, but still talking, if that makes any sense.
Adria Gulizia
It does. And so one of the things that we talk about a lot in mediation is the multiplicity of truths. In a lot of conflicts, it's not that one person is right and another person is wrong. It's that one person is valuing holiness. And another person is valuing being welcoming. And those are actually both really important. And how do we come to a new place that's not where you were or where I was, but that incorporates both, and it's greater than what we could have come up with?
A friend of mine was trying to write something for a Quaker publication. And every time he would write it and submit it, it would come back marked up, “Well, this language has been used to hurt in the past. So can you change it?" "Well, this has been harmful in the past. Can you change it?" “Friends might misuse this to do that. Can you change it?"
The struggle that I have, that he was having, is that Friends with a trajectory that's echoed in the trajectory of Sierra-Cascades do have certain words that it's important to be tender of.
Judy Maurer
Yes.
Adria Gulizia
But Friends who are coming from New York or DC really need to hear that message. So how do I preach the thing that those Friends need to hear, and they may have never even heard it before, but that's wounding to others?
I don't have an answer to that. But one thing I think about...
Judy Maurer
This is a really important issue.
Adria Gulizia
Yes, yes. And it's more important in the age of the internet, right? Because once you could preach just to the people in front of you, if you're physically there with them. But once you publish something, it goes everywhere, it goes to everyone.
One of the things I think about is the atonement - I've been thinking about the atonement for a long time. But this image came to me about eight years ago about the atonement as a multifaceted jewel. Because there are people who will say “well, like, I don't get down with penal substitution.” And, you know, “I'm a Christus Victor type of person.”
[Note: Atonement generally refers to righting a past wrong; in this case, Jesus righting the wrongs of mankind by his death and resurrection. Christus Victor refers to the school of thought that emphasizes that Jesus’ resurrection was a victory over the powers of the world - the Romans and the religious leadership of his day. It’s also a victory over death and Satan.]
To me, looking at the atonement as a multifaceted jewel removes the obligation on me to judge between them. Because just because one face of the jewel is shinier for me doesn't mean that the other face of the jewel doesn't exist.
I am not a penal substitution person but I will tell you, I was ministering to a friend who had extreme guilt over hearing from a family member that someone that this friend of mine had brought into the family circle had abused them. Hearing that Christ had taken the weight of her sin was so healing for her. Because she had this incredible weight of guilt.
Judy Maurer
Yes, yes, I understand. I've had friends like that, too.
Adria Gulizia
And so it's so good, because it gets the burden off their shoulders. The penal substitution is strong medicine, and the dose makes the poison. You preach that same message to my six-year-old son, and he's gonna grow up with a completely distorted view of who God is.
Judy Maurer
That's right. Penal substitution is Christ died for our sins? We should have been the ones getting killed and God would have to really like to, so he killed his own son instead?
Adria Gulizia
That's right. God couldn't forgive us until somebody took it for us. So the blood was shed. Because blood needs to be answered with blood. And so, you know, we talked about this in law school about different theories of punishment. You know, the retributive theory gets a bad rap.
I think there's deeply human intuition that a world in which good people get better results than bad people do feels on a human level to be better than a world where the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Of course, as Gandalf from Lord of the Rings said, “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment." We can't actually give the good people good things most of the time. So the only tool in the toolkit is punishment. Thankfully, God is not so limited.
Judy Maurer
Yes. So what's the shiniest for you? What's the shiniest facet in the jewel of atonement? Or the shiney ones?
Adria Gulizia
Oh, thank you. That gets me off the hook a little bit. Mommy loves all her babies the same. I would say that for me it’s that Christ has redeemed us from sin. And that is sin in a very broad sense - like from compulsively seeking substitutes for wholeness, from dysfunctional ways of interacting with people, from addiction to power, from addiction to comfort, from addiction to the need to portray ourselves as better than we are. I think that's the best one for me.
There's so much possibility in it like, oh, what happens now that we no longer have to do all that? Play all those games - deadly games, serious games.
Judy Maurer
Jesus did challenge the power structure in pretty serious ways.
Adria Gulizia
100% But like, the way he challenged it! The thing is, if you're Zacchaeus in the tree, it's good news/bad news. The bad news is you’ve got to stop robbing people. Okay? And he was like, “I will pay you what, seven times or 10 times what I stole from you." He probably wasn't going to be impoverished, but he was not going to be getting a lot.
But the good news is what you get is so much better.
I'm trying to make my ministry financially sustainable. And somebody was like, “How can I donate to your ministry?" I was like, That's a great question. And I started a “Buy Me a Coffee" form. You know, Friends like to get things on the cheap. We use “We don't hire ministers" as an excuse to not support ministry and not be generous. But I took literally an 80% pay cut to do the job that I'm doing.
I work hard and I keep weird hours and I have my irons in the fire and all that, but I am so much happier, having taken the leap of faith that God would provide. And you know so far....I haven't lost my house. I've had family members be super generous. I've had friends from like the Friends of Jesus Fellowship be super generous. Once you let go, once Zacchaeus lets go of “but I gotta have this money," he's got so many different possibilities that he didn't have before.
But you can't hold on to something and have open hands to receive at the same time.
Judy Maurer
It's true. Yes, I need to contemplate that.
Adria Gulizia
Listen - I have to remind myself! I think part of the hard thing is like, we don't know what the next step is. Right? So when we're called to transformation in the Spirit, we know what we're sacrificing. But we don't know what we're going to get.
Judy Maurer
Oh, that's a very good point. Yes. We have to just have faith.
Adria Gulizia
Yeah, that's hard.
Judy Maurer
Yes, it is.
Adria Gulizia
And that's part of the problem: one of the temptations of a group of people who like to know is that it feels like foolishness.
Judy Maurer
Yes. That's true!
Adria Gulizia
Right? We were told that it would!
Judy Maurer
Yes, right. It's right there!
Adria Gulizia
But it feels irresponsible to take those leaps of faith. And again, it is important to be stewards of our resources. And it is important to be responsible. And also, why are we stewarding the resources? We're stewarding the resources to be faithful?
Judy Maurer
That's a very good point.
Adria Gulizia
Right. Why does the time matter? If the time matters so you can squeeze every last drop out of it before you toss its mangled husk out.... It's the Anglo American way, right? That's right. When I was 12, I taught myself how to knit in the dark, so that I would never waste car rides being unproductive. Isn't that crazy?
My mom walked in my bedroom, like, “Why are you... it's pitch black in here." "I'm practicing my knitting." She's like, "You are a crazy person." But I knew that she was thinking she had already told me I was gonna ruin my vision trying to read in a dark car. So I had to find something.
Why was I worried about wasting my time? I was like, 13 years old. What did I have to do that was so important? But that's one way of living. And listen, it's got its perks. There's a reason that capitalism has fed a lot of people and lifted a lot of people out of poverty.
Judy Maurer
Yes, it has.
Adria Gulizia
So there's something to be said for wanting to be productive, and not just doing the bare minimum subsistence.
Judy Maurer
Yes. When we lived in Russia, the economy was sort of awakening from communism. And as time went on it was easier to live there with more retail goods. It just was.
Adria Gulizia
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's before you get to the various failures of central planning that in Russia and China killed a lot of people in places. It's not a binary, but it's understanding, like the reason that time is so important is so that we can respond to the Spirit and be faithful with how we use time.
Judy Maurer
Now speaking of time, oh, it's actually 8:32. Just one question. Sierra-Cascades is a new yearly meeting, where we're wanting to be affirming, we're wanting to be Christ-centered, we're wanting to be Quaker. And we're having a little trouble figuring out what it means to be Christ-centered among us. And all of that, do you have any advice? Or do you have any as a community?
Adria Gulizia
Can you tell me about the trouble, when you say you're having trouble figuring it out? What does that mean to you?
Judy Maurer
Well, it means -- exactly what you were talking about -- that some people were wounded by Christ language, by Jesus language and get triggered by that. So in my mind, that's a big question. How do we remain Christ-centered and yet gentle and respecting the wounding that happened? How do we form a new sort of language? And, actually, this is one of the reasons why I have interviews about personal experiences. It's a way not to argue. People tell me their stories and we don't argue about it. So that's another reason I'm doing these interviews.
Adria Gulizia
Ok, a couple things. It's really nice to have different ways of talking about Jesus. And there are so many wonderful ways, underutilized ways of talking about the Spirit. And so it's really good to have that and I appreciate it when you were sharing about your pastor.... Is that your pastor?
Judy Maurer
Yes. Matt Boswell.
Adria Gulizia
Okay. When you're talking about your pastor in the way that he can reframe. That's a good thing. But if there's no on- ramp to return to the full vocabulary, and the full breadth of experience, then you're constantly in a process of subtraction. If you're constantly subtracting out the things that have hurt, exactly. You're heading towards lowest common denominator liberal Quakerism.
Judy Maurer
Yes, exactly.
Adria Gulizia
Right, It is not robust liberal Quakerism. It's a how-do-we-say-as-little-as-possible-that-might-offend liberal Quakerism. It's the liberal Quakerism where - and I got a letter when I did my thing on the peace testimony. I didn't get it. Friends Journal got it - but the lady said, “It was really interesting but I stopped reading when I noticed that Friend Adria was using exclusive language. (I refer to God as him.) I left my church, because I was tired of seeing women as less than and I was really hurt to see this language among Friends.”
If we create a culture where it is acceptable to only listen to the people whose language is comfortable for us, then what does it mean to say there's that of God and every person, but I don't have to look at it unless it looks comfortable, unless it appears to me in a way that's suitable?
So that's part of it. Part of it is if Christ is at the center, it is fairly easy in a Quaker context to make room for people for whom Christ is not at the center. But if Christ is corporately at the center, you can do that. If Christ is not corporately at the center, eventually he'll be shown the door.
That's my experience. Yes, or he will be acceptable only as your personal guru and not as in the way that the church has traditionally understood Christ. So those are the very flinty kind of things that come up for me as you talk, as you raise that question. But there is... And I'm sorry, I feel a push. So I'm not as gracious or whatever...
Judy Maurer
A push is good. A push is very good.
Adria Gulizia
Okay, okay. Phew! Okay, good. There's another side, which is a much softer side. And that is that transformation - this is from my narrative coaching background. Part of how transformation happens is by understanding the stories, our internal stories, and how they structure our experience. It's not the story we feel like we should be telling ourselves but the actual story we're telling ourselves and its understanding where some of those pieces are malleable, so that we can create a new story that's still true.
This is why you can't give other people advice, a lot of time, because your advice is grounded in your story. But if it doesn't resonate with their experience, they can't take it, even if intellectually, they're like, Oh, that's good advice. But I can't take it if it requires somebody to be assertive, and I see myself as more collaborative. It has to resonate with people's experience.
So I think your instinct - let's welcome the stories - is so valuable, because it is in working with the stories that is healing - that's one way for healing and transformation to take place. It's a slow process, but like people who can actually - whether they're therapists, coaches, people with pastoral counseling skills - who can actually work with those people who have been so wounded.
If I break my ankle, we don't need to put everybody on crutches. But it is really important for me to get the physical therapy that I need and the surgeries that I need, so that I'm not walking with a limp for the rest of my life. On the other hand, to just tell the person, “Sorry about your ankle, but we're all running a 300 meter, so you know..." It's not right.
Judy Maurer
That's really interesting.
Adria Gulizia
But to put everybody on crutches isn't right, either. And so creating that space where there are different ways to access, where there is a path to healing, where that trauma is honored and not downplayed, I think is really important.
Maybe creating that space would be referrals or even helping to make things cost affordable for therapists who specialize in spiritual trauma. Because that's part of it, too. But I think that engaging only in that process of subtraction will take you places you don't want to go.
Judy Maurer
Yeah, that's right. I totally agree.
Adria Gulizia
I'm so glad. Loving people, meeting people where they are, and just sitting and hearing the stories and creating low-pressure environments would be creating that space. If somebody has been spiritually traumatized, hearing certain sermons, might be like you said. They can't hear it, it's triggering. Are there a variety of worship modalities? So like, for example, could you do a 40 minute waiting worship before the programmed worship? Might that create a different kind of space?
Judy Maurer
Yes, yes. One of our meetings has a Refiners Fire, where people just gather around the fire in the evening. It's wonderful. It's very informal, casual. Yeah, it's great.
Adria Gulizia
Are there different types of affinity groups where people can find community? Are there meetings for healing? What's the somatic aspect? How do we acknowledge and recognize how our trauma affects us in our bodies, and do that somatic work? Are there people who do healing prayer, laying on of hands? Those are all kinds of things that might be part of the picture.
Judy Maurer
Healing Prayer - that's something close to my heart.
Adria Gulizia
Really? Oh, my gosh, I'll squeeze one or two nuggets out of you yet!
Judy Maurer
I can't explain it. I mean, I don't know why. Why don't we talk about it? I don't talk about it enough, actually. I did work for a time with a lot of evangelicals in a nonprofit that addressed domestic abuse and violence within the Christian community. We did a lot of prayers for healing and it wasn't for the wisdom of the doctors or whatever. It was out just healing - Jesus heal this person. And they fully trusted and fully believed. It was amazing what happened. It blew me away. So I started praying that way.
Adria Gulizia
Oh my gosh. Well, yeah. One of the first things that I read as a baby Quaker in St. Louis, just mining the meeting library, was Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline.
Judy Maurer
Oh, yes.
Adria Gulizia
I just put a link in the chat because Windy Cooler is just launching this thing on Quaker discernment on abuse. And it occurs to me just based on what you just said, like, you guys should really connect.
Judy Maurer
Yes. Oh, she's on my list. I was reading about Testimonies of Mercy. Oh, my - this is really good!
Adria Gulizia
She got started in that work because she's a survivor of domestic violence. She's very public about it. She found that when she went to her meeting about it, her spouse was also in the meeting.
Judy Maurer
Oh, yes.
Adria Gulizia
There was like a whole thing about how she was not supported as a victim of abuse.
Judy Maurer
Yes. We had a talk about abuse. And we'd go to different churches. I always got assigned the mainstream to liberal ones, and my boss, who was evangelical, did the evangelical churches, because we're kind of tribal in the Protestant church. I could always pick out the abusive men, even in the most liberal churches.
Adria Gulizia
It’s people! They're everywhere.
Judy Maurer
They are everywhere. People would say beforehand, “Oh, not not in my church.” I mean, almost all the time. they would say, “not in my church. I know my people." And yet I could pick the abusers out - by the questions they asked, by the protests they made. It was scary. Then afterwards I would overhear conversations that confirmed it. It was pretty unnerving.
Adria Gulizia
This was like the last paragraph or whatever, my article on atonement. If you think that people are basically good, you are always going to be taken by surprise by sin. You’re always going to be like, “It's a mistake.” “It's an aberration.” You're not going to think in a forward thinking way about the frailty of man, and putting in safeguards. Because you believe people are basically good. “Not in my church! We're good."
The flipside is, if you think that people are not basically good, but that the function of the Atonement was to forgive us our sins - but not to free us from sin - then you're going to say, “well, in a fallen world, it's inevitable.” Again, you're not going to take those proactive steps, because at the end of the day, it's almost like the cost of doing business.
Judy Maurer
The most disturbing thing I discovered in doing those talks is that the women who were in abusive relationships, all were considered very, very needy - too needy. They got a little bit pushed out, including the church I had been attending. It was so deeply painful to realize that I had done that as well. When I went to the church that I attended and gave the presentation, I figured out who the women were, and I thought, oh, no, they were the ones who I thought were too needy to deal with!
Because these women were in ongoing abusive situations. Of course they were needy.
Adria Gulizia
It's a never ending crisis.
Judy Maurer
Exactly. It's a permanent crisis. And so the women were needy and perceived as just a black hole of neediness, and I had, too. When it's a past wound, you can see a person growing out of that, and so it doesn't feel like quite such a black hole. But when it's current, then it's much harder to respond. And that was a very painful recognition.
Adria Gulizia
And I'm sure that when you were doing that you didn't have any idea.
Judy Maurer
No, I had no idea.
Adria Gulizia
So one, ouch!
Judy Maurer
Yes, exactly.
Adria Gulizia
I am so sorry. For them and also for you. It's a hard thing when you've done something and there's no way to fix it. It’s already done.
Judy Maurer
That's right.
Adria Gulizia
But I think that's the importance of understanding abuse. There's this film discussion that Windy Cooler is doing, you'll see on that website. The movie clips are like 30 minutes, but there's time for worship and reflections. It was good.
I want to know more about dynamics of abuse, and how to think about them and how to help victims and how to help perpetrators.
Judy Maurer
Oh, excellent. If you're in mediation, you would see it.
Adria Gulizia
We usually screen out those cases, although I did just mediate a case where they had already broken up and they had lived separately for a year - they had a house together. Everybody felt safe. But you always have to ask the questions.
Judy Maurer
It would be really hard to have confidence that the victim would be able to choose.
Adria Gulizia
And even if they choose in the room, are they going to then be assaulted once they leave? We can't keep them safe once they're not with us. But I started getting interested in reading about domestic violence because I was required to take freshman English Composition in college. I was so angry about it, because I did well on my SAT in writing.
Everyone had to do it. I will say it was such a good thing. I was glad that I had to do it. Because we had to do different types of writing, and I just had fun. We had to write about a piece of art. I did this extremely florid description of a statue I had seen, which I just thought was so beautiful. I just wrote whatever I wanted to write, I was like, you've got my body, but you'll never have my soul. We had to do a long kind of research paper. And I wrote about masculinity, and the images of masculinity. And as I was researching that, I was really struck by how a lot of times, people will bring up male victims of domestic violence as a way of shutting down the conversation about women. Oh, you don't care about the men. You don't care about the men. But that was actually where my interest kind of started. I was doing reading about abusers - male abusers and some really interesting stuff that was going on in Australia as they were trying to help men break the dynamics of abuse - because these were men who didn't want to leave their wives and whose wives didn't want to leave them, but it wasn't safe. And they're like, “I want ways to be angry, or not be angry, in a way that's safe.” That was really interesting. The other thing that was really interesting was finding out that men with disabilities are victims of domestic, of intimate partner - violence, at the same rate as able-bodied women.
Judy Maurer
Yes, it is a power thing.
Adria Gulizia
It is a power thing. Does the name Eddie Kidd mean anything to you? Eddie Kidd was a stunt driver motorcyclist who had all this money from something, but he had a devastating crash, severe brain injury. He was doing pretty well for a while, getting a lot of therapy and stuff like that. Money started to run out, and so he started to regress. But in any event, his wife was convicted and I believe imprisoned. She was abusing him. And so, my question is, where is the space to be the former motorcycle stunt performer who's five-foot-five wife is putting you in a chokehold after you've been injured? What does that do to a man's sense of himself as a man? And where's the space? There are no abuse resources for men, really.
Judy Maurer
Yes. It’s a smaller percentage but I did have a contact with a man who I am convinced was a male victim. But he sounded like the female victims. He said, “It's all my fault. I did it. I'm doing something wrong to make her so angry.” So it's very hard to spot. It's not the man who says “I'm the real victim here.” And we had nothing for him. It was really hard.
Adria Gulizia
And you know, a lot of my good friends are men and stuff like that. I think a good man is an amazing thing. There’s also that concern about, where's the space for protecting the dignity of men who are wounded or vulnerable? This is another part of the reason that the lamb’s war is so important.
I was in meeting for worship with a concern for business several years ago, and a white guy stands up. He's giving some kind of financial report on endowments. He says something along the lines of, The Endowment for Saving the Heathens in Africa or something like that. And I just was like, Ooh, how long is it gonna take for that one to erupt? But at the time I was in a property class. We had to look at all these endowments from 200 years ago. The endowment he was talking about was literally called, “to teach Christianity to African children so you don't have African pagans” or something like that. That was the official language of the trust. So I'm hearing that with my lawyer brain. Of course, many people were hurt and deeply offended. I was less offended, because I was literally taking the class where we had to deal with the issue of what do you do with these?
It was a different time. But we still have to deal with that money today. But somebody was calling. And she was kind of checking in with different Friends of color - Black Friends in particular, saying “How are you doing after that meeting? She was a White Friend. I appreciated the call, but at one point in the conversation she said, “I've never much cared for tall white men anyway.” - that's how she put it. I told her, “Hang on there.” Because if our yearly meeting doesn't have a place for white men - it's not a place I want to be.
And then it was really interesting, because then she shared that her son, who was like a boy's boy, had basically cut all his ties with Quakerism. Because there, he never felt like there was a space for a boy who liked to play football and do “boy things" because it was so anti-toxic-masculinity, that it marginalized a good portion of mainstream masculinity.
But I don't want to talk too much about gender essentialism. I don't think that's helpful language.
Judy Maurer
Gender essentialism? I'm not familiar with that term.
Adria Gulizia
Oh, the idea that there's a boy way of doing things and a girl way. You know, “men are like this, women are like that." But there are ways of being that are friendlier to the majority of women versus men.
If our solution to the problem of the patriarchy is by throwing away men, or marginalizing men, then that is not the kingdom effect.
Judy Maurer
That's right.
Adria Gulizia
And so you know what? The solution to the problem is integration - not marginalization as much. The solution is not to put men on the bottom. I know the men who do well my Quaker world are like technocrats. Technocrats do very well - highly educated, professorial types who can like channel like class privilege and to do well. There's some margin of acceptance for men of color, to be a little bit more colorful. My experience observationally is that I know a couple of white guys with prophetic gifts - not always exercised with the most diplomacy intact - but I feel pretty confident that like, the reason that I can say a lot of the same stuff that they say is because they're getting perceived differently. And it's like, “Shut up, white man.” “Oh, this is a strong black woman, we gotta have a space for her.”
Judy Maurer
Exactly.
Adria Gulizia
That's not actually a solution. Don't they have that of God in them as well?
Judy Maurer
Yep. In fact, I was just telling a friend of mine that I was going to interview you and I was so excited. And part of it was because I'm an old white church lady. I have no credibility in these things.
Adria Gulizia
Yeah. So that's the thing. So what does it look like to create the space where you can recognize when you can have that prophetic truth telling and say, "this is wrong."
You can have the prophetic imagination to say, “here's something that's different.” And you can have that tender, invitational love that says, “The way to fix this isn't by casting out the wrongdoers, but by bringing them in to the hug and creating a space where they too can be healed from the weight of their own fear.” A lot of is driven by fear. What happens? You know? I've heard a lot of people say like a lot of the fear that you know, men have is like, well, what if women treat us the way we've treated them? Or that white people have is like, what if they treat us the way that we've treated them? Well, perfect love casts out fear. So what does it mean to create a space for that love to flourish? And I think hearing the stories and creating a space where we know each other deeply enough to be safe to feel safe with each other.
Judy Maurer
Yes, yes.
Adria Gulizia
Bryan Stevenson is a law professor at NYU Law. I never took a class with him. But I did go to a talk. He does a lot of work with men on death row - Innocence Project stuff for exoneration. But you know, a lot of the people that he's worked with - they're guilty of something. It might not be that, but they're guilty of some pretty ugly stuff. I really appreciate what he said in that talk, and he says it often. He says, “We're more than the worst thing we've ever done.” That's so important to remember when we're dealing with white supremacy or anything else that can be really bad. Someone can do something that's really, really bad - in a human sense even unforgivable, but that's not ALL they are.
Judy Maurer
One concept of Christianity that I dearly love that we haven't talked about is grace.
Adria Gulizia
Yes, yes. I think that that's so important. Windy Cooler actually brought this up, and I really appreciated it, is that there's a question that can be asked, “Did you forgive the person who abused you?” Sometimes people ask that, and it's like, “I still have the bruise.” It's a little premature. So I think part of the reason that currently it's hard to talk about grace in some circles is that it's almost been weaponized.
Judy Maurer
Like, “I have forgiven and you are the bad person for not having forgiven.”
Adria Gulizia
Exactly. Shamelessly cribbing from Windy Cooler on this one - to create the condition where forgiveness can happen is very different from using forgiveness.
Judy Maurer
That is true.
Adria Gulizia
But I think the conditions where forgiveness can happen are oftentimes the conditions where repentance can happen.
Judy Maurer
That is a good point. I love the conversation between Jesus and the thief. I mean, there he is. He's presumably guilty and it's just about at the end. He's not gonna be able to do anything. And yet Jesus forgives. I mean, he's headed to heaven - this thief!
Adria Gulizia
Yeah. And that's the miracle. I actually realize it wasn't Windy who said that last part. It’s another friend of mine, Abby, who's amazing, who does healing prayer and Reiki and stuff like that.
Judy Maurer
Oh, she does Reiki? I need to be looking into that.
Adria Gulizia
We have it at New York Yearly Meeting summer sessions. There's a healing center. But yes, they do like - they lay on hands. They do. They do a lot. I want to know about your Charismatic healing. Friend of mine once said that Quakers are slow-motion Pentecostals. And there’s something to that!
Judy Maurer
There is! That's right. My husband calls me a liberal charismatic.
Adria Gulizia
Yes. There you go. Oh, see, I can get down with that. But about creating that space for forgiveness, a space for repentance. When I left my law firm, I was in a bad way emotionally. I was overstretched. I had probably been there two years longer than I should have been, because it's the kind of job where you really have to love it. Or it wears on you. Because the hours are hard and your plans get interrupted and stuff like that. And so you have to love it, or it becomes like a really hard thing.
I remember at that time, I made a friend at the firm. We would have these really good conversations. Micah Bales, my friend Brandon Zicha, who I podcast with, who's a political scientist, and this friend of mine, Andy, and another friend of mine who passed away, Jim.
They were the friends who helped me do a lot of healing, internal reconciliation on my own complicated relationship with my father, my complicated relationship with my own identity as a woman, my own femininity. You know, I was never transgender, but I was one of those people who is like, “Oh, I could never wear pink because oh, too girly.”
And I realized that, for me, that was the fruit of a lot of wounding and seeing a lot of women being wounded by men. And, you know, if you associate femininity with vulnerability, to being taken advantage of, it's not something you're going to want to embrace. I did a lot of combat boots, and olive green army T-shirts, and black turtlenecks and stuff. And even when I was dressed in a feminine way, it was like dark colors and stuff like that.
It was in connecting on a deep way with men who cared about me, and who were helping me strategize when my husband left, because when he left, he had my son. He had our son in Romania when he when he told me he was leaving our marriage.
Judy Maurer
Oh, my!
Adria Gulizia
And remember, I had quit my job. We had a joint account and they were like, “Okay, so he's gonna come back. He's got a return plane ticket, so he's gonna bring him. So here's what you need to do. Don't rock the boat while he's got your son in another country. Wait till he comes back." All this planning, you know: “When you get your bonus, you take some money, Adria. It feels like an underhanded thing to do but you need to take that money out of that account. So I took half, which I'm glad I did, because he drained it.
And then, "You know he's gonna be back, and he's gonna be in the house, what's the plan? " My friend at the firm was helping me strategize. He's like “Call me, stay in touch. If you need me to come to take you to a hotel, whatever.”
That kind of care is not care that men extend to each other, generally. And it was not a type of care I had ever experienced from a man, including my husband. And so for me it was extremely healing. Because it gave me that visceral experience of relationship. Like I said, I've been dating my boyfriend since my husband sent me separation papers from Italy. I was like, “Okay, I'm going to take off my wedding ring.”
[My boyfriend is] very much like a traditional man, in a sense of like, you know, “Call me when you get home.” Like, “I'm going to open the door, like, what are you doing?” And, “What are you doing offering to pay? We're not going to do that.” He loves cars and stuff like that. Italian and Greek extraction. But when I'm looking at these different issues around who do we exclude when we over-correct? Who are the men whose masculinity is not acceptable?
I experience that through the lens of all of the men that I mentioned - Brandon, Micah, Andy, Jim, and John, my boyfriend. We like to fish, we like fast cars, Brandon likes to ski. Andy doesn't have a beard, but the rest of them have beards, and I love that about them. I don't want to erase the fact that they're men. Not to say that there aren't 100 valid ways of being a man. But what does it mean to say, THAT way of being a man is not valid? Every way is valid, except the hunting, fishing, fast cars?
It hit me close to home - that letter went to Friends Journal and the person talks about exclusive language when I refer to God as him. As someone who has a complicated relationship with my father, who came to understand the covering of a man's love through these very like traditional men in friendship relationships- and then later with my boyfriend - the image of God as like a good father is not one that I'm prepared to relinquish at all.
Judy Maurer
Oh, really?
Adria Gulizia
Yeah. It's emotional for me because the emotional experience of receiving care from my female friends and from the type of men that I tend to gravitate towards is different; it feels different. There's a different dynamic. Obviously I'm not somebody whose like, “Oh, men and women can't be friends," but it feels different. The friendship between women has a different chemistry than the friendship between a woman and a man, in my experience. And so like the idea of like, well, if I had referred to God as she, I wouldn't have gotten that.
The relationship to God that's not acceptable is calling God “he" is to me another example of over-correction. If all experiences and all voices are welcome, why isn't my experience welcome?
The reason that it's not welcome is because she's got her own spiritual trauma that's unhealed.
Judy Maurer
That's right.
Adria Gulizia
Thank you, Judy.
Judy Maurer
This has been terrific!
Adria Gulizia
I wasn't expecting the last 40 minutes, but you know, I appreciate you're leaving space for a good ramble.
Judy Maurer
Oh, absolutely. It feels like a ramble, but it's not.
Adria Gulizia
Would you mind sending it to me? Because I'm like, man, they're probably like 15 blog posts in here.
Judy Maurer
That's right. You should really plumb this.
Adria Gulizia
Yeah, I will. I'm always sitting there, like, what do I write? It's hard. I know writing is a discipline. This is my problem, because I'm like, I want Holy Spirit download. It's so much easier when God just tells me what to say! So, [Holy Spirit!] chop, chop!
Judy Maurer
That's right! Isn't it awfully late there?
Adria Gulizia
Awfully late. It is all okay. I thought I was going to need a cup of coffee or something to keep me moving. I had my macadamia nuts, but this has been so incredibly stimulating.
Judy Maurer
Oh, good. It's been terrific for me. It's just been terrific.
Adria Gulizia
Yeah?
Judy Maurer
Absolutely. Yes.
[Note: Here Adria speaks briefly of a topic she is not ready to be public about, so I have deleted it. Then the conversation continues about why she requested it not be included]
I've never written about this stuff. Because it's very close to my heart, but also because I worry that it's a minefield, and I haven't been called to lean into it.
Judy Maurer
Oh, interesting. Yes, I understand. There's this really interesting part that few people notice in John, where, after Jesus heals Lazarus, the chief priests decide that they need to kill both Lazarus and Jesus. And then Jesus just goes to a different country. That's all he does. That's his response. He is not called to be killed at that point, so he leaves.
So it's very important whether or not you feel called.
Adria Gulizia
Yeah. I had forgotten about that. But I have been saying for a long time, “Look, we're not called to die on every cross.”
Judy Maurer
exactly. Just a few!
Adria Gulizia
Thank you very much. You're a great listener.
Judy Maurer
This is just what I do. To me, this is effortless. This is just following down my own curiosity.
Adria Gulizia
Oh, my gosh. That's how you know that you're doing what you're called to do.
Judy Maurer
Yes, I think so.
Adria Gulizia
Thank you! Take care, Judy.
Judy Maurer
You, too! Have a good rest, a good sleep. Bye.
Biography
Adria Gulizia is the director of court and community programs at a mediation nonprofit in Staten Island, New York. She oversees court-referred mediations as well as some of our school partnerships, when there is funding for them, as well as community disputes, such as disputes between neighbors. She is also a certified narrative coach. Read her blog In the Shadow of Babylon.
You may contribute to her ministry among Friends here.