Stepping Out With the Sacred: Human Attempts to Engage the Divine
Original Price: $29.95
This is a masterful and engaging account of how humans through centuries and cultures have engaged and experienced the divine. Our doctor is Muslim, our lawyer Jewish our best friend Buddhist, a plurality multiplied by global travel and politics. In “Like Catching Water in a Net”, Webb discussed how humans have described the Divine. This companion book looks at how humans have engaged the Divine across religions and centuries, through ritual, art, sacred places, language and song. Here, Webb includes her own experiences, both personal and observed from travel in fifty countries, as well as centuries of theology, literature and travel writing. She meanders along winding trails, talk over the fence and drink wine with a stranger, literally and figuratively. To engage the larger-than-description Sacred, we need all the stories we can find, even if only to remind us the distance still to go and the limitless (sometimes unsuccessful) journey. As a teacher of world religions and art, and an artist, this will not be a string of anecdotes, but a woven together, reader-friendly, vividly painted, theologically reflective whole.
Val Webb is one of the most exciting Christian voices in the 21st Century. Brilliantly she penetrates beneath the surface of traditional religious formulations and discovers the power and purpose of words as having the ability to point to a realm of truth that words cannot finally capture.
Bishop John Shelby Spong
Something More—the sacred, the divine, mystery, the numinous, GOD! How do we connect? Where do we connect? When do we connect? Val Webb takes us on an exciting journey through the many ways that people of many faiths have tried to connect with the Sacred, playing hide and seek with the Divine. A challenging journey for those still seeking to connect! A fascinating journey for those who like to ‘count the ways’! An exploration that is exciting, brilliant and accessible to all—but haunted by the ultimate question: Do we really connect?
Norman Habel, Professorial Fellow, Flinders University, South Australia
Years ago the author of Honest to God, and The Human Face of God, Bishop John T Robinson, challenged the Christian world to let scholarship lead the way to a new understanding of the faith. Now Val Webb has convincingly shown that the vast knowledge of world religions can lead us to a new more inclusive appreciation of God, which can deepen our spiritual experience as well as forge bridges of understanding between faiths.
Dr. Rachael Kohn, The New Believers: Re-imagining God. Producer and Presenter of The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National.
About the Author
Val (Skerman) Webb’s professional career spans microbiology, business, public relations, writing, art and theology. She grew up in Brisbane, Australia, attending Ironsides State School, Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School and the University of Queensland. She began her professional life with a graduate degree in Microbiology and a research position at the University of Queensland, later working in the Microbiology department of the Royal Brisbane Hospital. After an 18 month stint in England, Val and husband Maurice, with their two small children, Helen and Paul, moved to Rochester, Minnesota where their third child, Karen, was born. The family spent almost thirty years in Rochester where Maurice was a surgeon and head of the Department of Gynecologic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic. During the 1970’s, Val owned and operated an Art Gallery in Rochester, Val Webb Galleries, which featured the work of some eighty national and international artists, including Val’s sketches, etchings, prints and hand-painted scarves. She had two books published on the art and history of Minnesota, Rochester Sketchbook and Twin Cities Sketchbook.
During seven years back in Brisbane in the 1980’s, Val was Superintendent of Communications and Public Relations for The Wesley Hospital, a large private hospital in a city of over one million people. Through that role, she was also National Secretary of the Hospital Public Relations Officers Association of Australia (1986-8) and on the Executive of the Queensland Chapter of the Australasian Institute of Fund-Raisers (1985-8). For her work at The Wesley Hospital, she has been named an Emeritus Fellow. Val also held various leadership positions in the Uniting Church of Australia, including the inaugural Chair of Queensland’s Commission of Education and Communication, responsible for theological and lay education and Synod publications and communication.
Val began religious studies part time at the University of Queensland in 1982, in response to her personal faith questions, completing her Ph. D. in Theology at Luther Seminary, St Paul, Minnesota in 1996 after the family returned to Rochester, Minnesota in 1988. Since then, Val has taught religious studies at the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College in the United States and, in Australia, at Whitley College, Melbourne, Murdoch University, Perth and United Theological College, Sydney. She has written eight books including In Defense of Doubt: an Invitation to Adventure (Chalice Press, 1995), Why We’re Equal: Introducing Feminist Theology (Chalice Press, 1999), John’s Message: Good News for the New Millennium (Abingdon Press, 1999) and Florence Nightingale: the Making of a Radical Theologian (Chalice Press, 2002). Her latest book Like Catching Water in a Net: Human Attempts to Describe the Divine (Continuum New York & London, 2007) won the “general religion” category of the USA Best books 2007 Awards. Her next book Stepping out with the Sacred: Human Attempts to engage the Divine comes out in October, 2010.
Val and her husband returned to Australia in 2003 when Maurice retired from the Mayo Clinic. They now live in Mudgee, New South Wales, where their youngest daughter Karen and husband Sean own the award winning Mudgee Homestead Guesthouse (www.mudgeehomestead.com.au). From there, Val continues to write, teach and lead workshops.
Why tackle a subject as old as the human race, one that has been talked about, written about, and thrashed over by thousands of persons? Is there some new discovery that reveals more than has ever been known? Has modern science and cosmology opened up previously unknown regions of the universe? However you might answer the questions, it is very likely that, like our ancestors and Val Webb, our descendents will go on thinking about, writing, arguing and even fighting over the questions that arise around that which she calls the “Sacred” and that many refer to as “God”.
I was not far into the second book before it seemed logical to review it along with the first, as it is a continuation of the subjects covered in the first.
One who chooses to tackle such a material had better have a background of education and experience that gives them the kind of wisdom required. Val Webb is one of those few who qualify. She has written on such topics as “Abstracts on Microbiological Methods”, “Development of Staff Training at the Wesley Hospital”, “A New Theology for Bolivia”, and “Florence Nightingale, The Making of a Radical Theologian”.
She was born and grew up in Australia, where she earned two Bachelor of Science degrees in Microbiology. After an eighteen month stint in England, she and her husband, Maurice moved to Rochester Minnesota with their first two children, where he took a position as a surgeon and head of the Department of Gynecologic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic. There they had their third child and spent almost the next thirty years in the U.S. They have since moved back to their homeland of Australia.
She has two Bachelor of Science degrees in Microbiology, a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. While in Rochester she founded and directed the Val Webb Gallerie, where she practiced her skills in sketching, etching and water color.
As much as conservative Christians would like to able to quit all this fussing and settle the issue of GOD, that is not in the cards. Instead, what Val Webb refers to as “the Sacred” and “the Divine” continues to intrude into human life, world wide. We are presently in a time where more people in the U.S. are classifying themselves as “spiritual”, rather than “religious”, but that does not lessen our need to reach out beyond ourselves to make contact with the great “out there”.
Karen Armstrong gave us an epic work in her “A History of God”, tracing the God concept back through Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Webb reaches out still further, giving us many beautiful gems from the major world religions, plus the more recently unearthed treasures of the Native Americans and Aboriginal Australian people.
One thing which became still more evident to me from Webb’s book is that in this realm of human thought, perhaps more than in any other, we encounter the limits of human language. If we are discussing such things as “desks”, or “chairs”, or “cars, trucks and highways”, or even the more abstract ideas such as “speed”, “volume”, “depth”, we will not have a great degree of confusion nor miscommunication. But when we go off into the realm of “Tao”, “Brahman”, “I am what I am”, “God”, “Yahweh”, “El”, “Allah”, “Redeemer”, “Creator”, and on and on, language becomes a very feeble tool for clear communication.
Whereas for some the question “Is there a ‘God’?” seems crucial, for many the question has changed more toward “What Is there?, “Who are we?” and simply, “Why?”
While her book is full of memorable quotations from throughout the world, plus those from herself, I will choose one paragraph that represents this wisdom:
The ability of Formlessness to remain formless or take any form gives rise to contradictions in GOD-talk—known yet unknown, present, yet hidden, closer than our breath yet not contained by the highest heavens, goodness yet wrathful, unchanging yet changing, Three-in-One yet One-in-three, within us yet transcendent, speaking yet staying silent, and so on. The formless “I am” can be whatever form is needed, and the Formless “I will become” is poised on the brink of millions of predicates willing to give it form. This adaptable, evolving GOD is so unlike the unchanging Greek Deity Christianity first inherited.. According to Catholic theologican Edward Schillebeeckx, “GOD is new each day, He is a constant source of new possibilities. . . GOD is absolute freedom. And that means that, as long as human history has not been completed, as long as the totality of history has not yet been given, we cannot know GOD’’s being—there is always something more and so there is always openness. And even the totality of history does not coincide with GOD’s activity.” ( Pg 67)
Some, on first introduction to such a book, will say “Why bother with such esoteric gobbledy-gook; what difference does it matter?” Val answers that question with evidences from both history and the present, that what we think about such questions does very much matter. How we behave both as individuals and as cultures and nations comes from our beliefs about the nature of reality, sometimes permitting or even demanding our being violent against persons or groups, as our God orders, or, on the contrary, fostering support, kindness and compassion toward them. Put more simply, our God tells us who are “we” and who are “they”. The consequences are vast.
After leading us on a path that traversed both human history and all parts of our planet, Webb concludes the first of her two books with a chapter “What is Truth” which offers up her own present thinking on this perpetual human challenge. Because she, like I, began our early church life within conservative Christianity and eventually traversed toward Process Theology and panentheism, I found her conclusions very comfortable.
The second book is a valuable continuation of the theme of the Sacred within human life as she addresses the question of the many ways in which we connect the amorphous Sacred to specific and ongoing areas of our lives. The first chapter heading is indicative of her intent: “Pinning Down the Sacred”. She includes such subjects as “Sacred Places”, “Sacred Things and Symbols”, “Sacred Texts and Holy Books”, “Rituals as Religious Action”, These, plus still other relevant chapters, provide a very good over-all coverage of how the “Sacred” plays a powerful, universal and ongoing daily role in the lives of all who inhabit our planet earth.
Who will appreciate and want to read her books and who will not? While I found the volume of offerings from the world’s religious literature to be an abundant treasure of stirring and inspiring gems, I believe there will be those who will find the first of the two books unsettling and disturbing. The book will not be a “treasure” to those seeking a straight path to “the Truth”. She tells of a 1999 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., in which a prayer guide asked members to pray that the world’s nine hundred million Hindus might be convicted of sin and see Jesus as the light of the World. Many other fundamentalist Christians, including the growing group in third world countries, would be highly incensed at Val Webb’s failure to give us a simple, clear picture of God. Well, such is the world we inhabit. One man’s treasure is another mans trash.
The second of the two books will probably be less unsettling to the conservative readers, as it presents more “information”, but fewer challenges to belief systems.
Fortunately, those who seek the wisdom and inspiration that Val Webb offers is growing. Readers from other world religions will be inspired by her work, as will some who consider themselves atheists.