What Is Ours to Do? Holy Defiance and Divine Solidarity With Women
Homily for FutureChurch’s 2025 Lenten Series: What Is Mine To Do? Session 5 — Eucharistic Liturgy Praying With and For Women.
Readings: Gen 2:18–23, 25, trans: Robert Alter, 2019 | Luke 1:46–55, trans: Wilda Gafney, 2021 | 2 Cor 6:16,18, trans: Wilda Gafney, 2021 | Matt 26:36–46, trans: Wilda Gafney, 2021
What is ours to do? As we pray together as, with, and for women, this question meets us in the heart of today’s readings and calls us inward and outward, into deep reflection and courageous action. It invites us to examine how our hearts have been shaped by — and can yet reshape — the narratives of power that define our lives.
We are living in a tender and tumultuous time. So much of what should sustain life is under threat: immigration protections, gender-affirming care, environmental stewardship, bodily autonomy…. In such a moment, to gather and pray with and for women is not only a spiritual act — it is a radical act of hope and holy defiance.
To pray with women is to pray with all of humanity. To hear, feel, validate, and respond to the collective experience of women is to engage in radical healing. Because when we begin to heal our relationship with power — the kind that has relegated women and girls to the bottom of social, economic, and ecclesial hierarchies — we begin to dismantle the systems that cause suffering at every level of human life.
Angela Davis recently said: “You hear the term ‘glass-ceiling feminism.’ It’s grounded from the outset in hierarchies. How else does the metaphor work? Those who are already high enough to reach the ceiling are probably white, and if they are not white, they are already affluent because they are at the top.”
The very act of climbing implies leaving others behind. Proximity to power brings proximity to comfort. Many of us have spent our lives chasing that nearness. Raised in a hyper-individualist society, we were handed a map: move from less to more. Rise to the top of the class, the company, the church. Break the stained-glass ceiling.
The map said everyone can succeed if they work hard. If someone doesn’t, it must be their fault. This logic encourages charity — but not solidarity. It applauds success — but not justice. It forgets the top is a narrow place where few are welcome.
But the problem has never been our ability to read the map. The map itself is a lie. There is nothing gospel about rising above our neighbors. Gospel is not about escaping the base; it is about transforming it. Gospel is feeding, healing, housing, clothing, teaching, showing up. Gospel is solidarity at the ground level — where we, the people, are.
Praying with women — Black, white, Asian, Arab, Indigenous, Latina, immigrant, disabled, trans, lesbian, bi, queer, young, old, mothers, daughters, sisters — helps redeem that lie. Our stories have too long been ignored or scandalized.
Women called to priesthood are often accused of seeking power. But most women priests I know do not long for institutional control. We’ve seen its corruption. What we long for is the ability to serve our beloved communities with the gifts God has placed within us — to offer sacrament, care, and companionship.
Still, I believe it’s time to reclaim the word “power.” It is not a dirty word.
Power concentrated in the hands of a few becomes domination. But power shared — equitably, communally — is the path of liberation. It’s the kind of power Eve represents in Genesis.
Men of our tradition named Eve a subordinate and a sinner. But Genesis says otherwise. Eve is not condemned — she is honored. She is named “Mother of All That Lives.” Have you ever noticed that line before?
God created Eve not as a “helpmeet” but as ezer kenegdo — a sustainer beside the human. This Hebrew phrase, used elsewhere in scripture only to describe God’s sustaining help, reveals something radical. This isn’t a minor translation detail — it is a theological breakthrough. It tells us that women’s power is divine. Essential. Sustaining.
This is our truth. And reclaiming it is part of the healing we are called to do.
Mary’s Magnificat echoes this truth. She proclaims that God brings down the powerful and lifts the lowly. Her words are not meek — they are a holy manifesto. Power shared. Justice fulfilled.
I carry these truths in my bones. I’ve held the stories of over 2,000 women through my work in a safety-net NICU. I’ve walked with them through trauma and joy, illness and resilience — diverse women coping with fragile infants in NICU compounded by life-threatening pregnancy complications, evictions, incarceration, cancer, violence, immigration traumas, and poverty. What I’ve learned is this: their suffering was never inevitable. It is manufactured by systems of inequity.
When my son was a newborn, I wept nearly every night. Not only from exhaustion or the miracle of his life after years of loss — but from the grief of knowing how many children do not have what he had: safety and nurturing love. I still cannot bear that injustice. But I carry it. And I act because of it.
This homily is for them. For every woman who has loved her child fiercely in the face of the unthinkable. For every woman whose story has been ignored or distorted. For every woman told to climb alone, or not to climb at all.
We all hold such stories. The question, beloved community, is what is ours to do?
It is ours to remember that we are temples of the living God. That we are equally loved, equally called, equally capable of shaping a just and compassionate world.
It is ours to stop chasing a false promise. To stop rising away from one another. To stand instead in love — at the base — where Jesus always stood. Jesus, son of Mary.
It is ours to reclaim power — not for dominance, but for healing. Not for status, but for service. Power that feeds, liberates, sustains.
And as we near the end of Lent, we turn to the Gospel and find ourselves with Jesus in the garden. This passage has always been heavy with sorrow, but in this season, it carries new resonance. In Wilda Gafney’s translation, Jesus is not called the Son of Man — but the Son of Woman. And that simple shift breaks something open.
The Son of Woman. The one betrayed — not by women, but by empire. The one denied — not by women, but by the powerful. In this moment of agony and grief, Jesus asks his companions to stay awake with him, to pray with him, to hold vigil. And they fall asleep. But it is not the women who sleep. It is not the women who betray. It is not the women who deny.
Throughout the Gospels, women attend to Jesus’ humanity while honoring his divinity. They feed him, anoint him, walk beside him, believe him, love him. This is not women’s work, it is human work. Again and again, they are his ezer kenegdo — his sustainer, his companion.
Jesus — the Son of a woman — is not only savior, but partner in transformation. He does not cling to power. He kneels. He weeps. He loves. He invites. And in doing so, he models the radical redistribution of power that defines the Gospel: not dictated from on high, but shared among the people. Not enforced through fear, but lived through love.
This is the invitation: to become companions of the Son of Woman. To keep watch. To stay awake. To pray and act and love in the most difficult hours.
In doing so, we realign our hearts with the life-giving love of our Mothering God. And we take one faithful, powerful step toward the world we are meant to co-create.
In my home community, we practice shared homilies. That means we make space for one another’s reflections, hearing the Spirit move through all our voices. Tonight, in that same spirit, I invite you into a moment of quiet reflection.
Rather than open sharing aloud, let’s honor this sacred space by adding our responses in the comments. You don’t have to offer everything — none of us can. But each of us can do something, and when we do even the smallest things with great love, they ripple outward in powerful ways.
So I invite you to complete this sentence:
I can…
I can… hold healing space for my friends, my sisters, my daughters.
I can… learn more about topics that challenge me.
I can… seek out books, podcasts, and media authored by diverse women.
I can… support women and minority-owned businesses.
I can… be gentle with myself.
I can…
What can you do? Share in the comments.
