WomenEucharist

By Sheila Durkin Dierks

What in the name of God are thousands of Catholic women doing?

Nationwide, they're gathering in hundreds of small groups with bread and wine and celebrating Eucharist without a priest.

This is a unique collection of interviews with Catholic women who decided to wait no longer for patriarchal permission. They meet in each others' homes to bless and break bread and they find Jesus present.

What do women do who love the church, but hate the injustice?

Where do women go to celebrate joyfully with inclusive language and "equal access" to God?

How do women pray together to heal their relationships with a God who had only been known as Father?

What do women experience when they begin to celebrate Eucharist without a male mediator?

How can you do the same?

Here's what you'll be finding:

"You have only to go into most parish churches during liturgy to know that something is dreadfully wrong. . . Look at the faces of the people past the first ten rows. Bored, don't sing, they're reading the bulletin and waiting for the hour to pass so they can get on with their 'real' lives."

"I have been horrified when Mass was used to separate and divide people. . . it is within the church itself that women learn every Sunday, year after year, that they are somehow inferior."

"I came to WomenEucharist because of boring Masses, uninvolved crowds fulfilling an obligation, not being fed spiritually."

Does this sound like what you experience?

"I was fortunate enough to have a friend who was starting a group and invited me to participate. This became a turning point in my life."

"I started in the group and stayed in the group because of my friends. They have showed me the face of God in ways I never knew or expected."

Have you hated not being welcomed or involved in your parish?

"Every woman in our gathering has a gift to give in planning, even if she has never done it. We have women who have been very shy in the past about volunteering. They say, ' I've never done it before.' We always team up, so no one has to plan alone."

Are you wounded by language which doesn't include women?

"We always modify scripture for gender. "

"If Scripture is used we do our own 'de-sexing' of the text. We often use other readings: women's poetry, prose, material from women of other ethnic, racial, class backgrounds."

"The world is full of writing, music and art into which God has entered. We feel that much can be gathered in and used to show how God is here in the world and in our lives."

Are you saddened by the poor liturgies of your parish?

"We have great liturgies. We're Eucharistic, and that is a lovely form. . . We use big beautiful loaves of bread which are a mouthful, real sustaining, and good wine and we drink it, not just little sips. We honor the meal and the symbols of our lives and our world and we listen to the Word and the words of others. . . We laugh and sometimes we are sad, but mostly we know that Jesus is with us and so we are all right."

And what do women experience in small communities?

"Jesus is more present to me, and to our community here. . . This does not feel like empty ritual which makes no impact. This experience is changing the way I live. This signs for me that we have Jesus truly present with us."

"There is such power in our group, an adult, spirit-filled power, to invite, to welcome, to converse with Jesus, who is truly present here."