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Daniel Mcrae is the good product of Spelman College and Harvard Law School and Virginia Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School. And you can read about that, I want to say very briefly, how I know Daniel

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for the last three plus years, it has been my privilege to be part of a group of scholars and pastors that includes Danielle in myself and three others , talking about issues of race and church and society

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. When I say a group of scholars and pastors , you can probably imagine that we all fight to cram as many words per square inch into our conversation . Except for Danielle, Danielle is the one who

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measures words and measures time and keenly measures what we're talking about in its depth and breath. And then when she speaks, she is brilliantly insightful. She's in touch with the essential thing we need to talk

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about. And most importantly, she's invitationals, she changes the conversation, but in a way that invites us into a new and deeper and better conversation. Uh the other thing I'll say about Danielle is that

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impresses me every time I'm with her is she believes that the formation of proclamation in the church and really all depth and discipleship has to be rooted in a spirituality that is deep and wide and vulnerable and bold

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and courageous. She is a gift and I can't wait for us to hear from. Okay, thank you, Mark for your friendship and for that very warm introduction and thank you President Wardlaw for this invitation

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. Thank you to everyone who may be gathered in Macmillan to 10. Uh and thank you all of you. I feel like I've only been not even been here 24 hours and I have been showered with

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hospitality, um your kindness, it will never be forgotten. I'm really honored to be with the other wonderful presenters that we're hearing. I'm already learning so much. I'm also very grateful to be here and

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to be surrounded by so much loving energy during such a difficult moment in our nation's history. We live in very volatile times and I am drawing courage during this time from a holy risk taker from our church

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is passed. A woman who had what walter wink calls frontier spirituality. Her name was Pauli Murray as a cigarette, smoking, whiskey drinking queer black woman from Durham north Carolina, Pauli Murray is not a

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typical ST yet. She was recently included in the Episcopal Church's Book of Holy Women Holy Men July one was assigned as her fee state. Polly was not content with dwelling on any single aspect of her identity

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, but demanded that the world deal with all of who she was. She asserted that she was not just a woman but a woman of color, Who was also over age, 70 and short and left

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handed and hard of hearing. And she needed the world to reckon with all of those different dimensions of who she was. She was the type of person who would call public officials and share her concerns and

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then follow those calls with an open letter in the newspaper or a magazine to hold those public officials accountable for the conversation that had taken place. She once said that one person and a typewriter equal a movement

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. And in that sense, she foreshadowed what we see on twitter. She also believed in marches and would just as quickly pile a group of friends into her black Volkswagen, which she nicknamed Sojourner Truth.

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Mhm. And she would take her friends in sojourner truth to different marches and protests, um and picket lines to engage them. Polly is not very well known, but she led an extraordinary life. By

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all accounts. She became a poet and activist, an attorney, a memoirist and an Episcopal priest. But here's a brief biographical sketch. Born in Baltimore in 1910, she was orphaned in her youth and

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raised by her maternal aunt and grandparents During the 1940s . And well before the mainstream civil rights movement, she was a pioneer activist in the challenging jim Crow laws on interstate buses and in sit ins. She

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crafted a challenge to the doctrine of separate but equal uh in Plessy versus Ferguson and and her argument became a key resource for Thurgood, marshall and Spotswood Robinson and the Brown versus Board of Education case. In

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1956, she became the First Black Female Associate at Paul, Weiss Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, a major law firm in New York. She 1965 became the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from

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Yale Law School. She co authored jane Crow and the law, a foundational text for sex discrimination law and for theorists like Kimberly Crenshaw who study intersectionality, paulie served as one of the founders of the National

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Organization for Women. She served as vice president of Benedict College and later joined the faculty at BRANDEIS University , where she taught law and political science, discerning a call to ministry. In her sixties, she

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attended General Theological Seminary in new york and Virginia Theological Seminary in alexandria and became the first african american female ordained in the Episcopal Church as a priest. She was a prolific writer. She published a book of

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poetry, dark testament and other poems to legal text , states, laws on race and color and the constitution and government of Ghana. She published a family memoir, proud Shoes, the story of an american

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family, as well as an autobiography entitled Song in a weary throat. She had some great friends. Her friends and creative partners included Langston Hughes Countee Cullen , Eleanor Roosevelt, a Philip, Randolph Betty friedan

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. While she was briefly married. While in her 20's, she had more meaningful romantic relationships with women and she had a long partnership with Irene Barlow, with whom she is buried. Polly died of pancreatic

00:08:03.490 - 00:08:26.110

cancer on July one, In view of her many accomplishments, Glenda Gilmore describes polly as a one woman civil rights movement. There's so much to laud in her life that it's easy to overlook her crushing failures

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and discount the psychological costs of her achievements. Polly's most important spiritual work. The work that makes her life exemplary does not emerge from charting her successes. It emerges from evaluating her risk taking. Paulie was

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a woman with an unusually high tolerance for risk. Some of her wrists now were born of sheer joy and adventure, like the decision to hitchhike, While passing as a boy with her friend peg in 1935

00:09:05.020 - 00:09:26.730

. She hitchhiked all across the country. At other times, though, her wrists were propelled by discontent as a queer black working class woman who was also brilliant and ambitious occasions for outrage abounded, repeatedly unjust

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circumstances were thrust upon her and demanded response. In these cases, she took risks while leaning on legacies of dissent, inventiveness and tenderness that she learned in the Black Church. So, drawing on her correspondence

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on archival materials and her lived theology. What I want to do is to examine the spiritual foundation for Polly's risk taking and focus on the practices of dissent , inventiveness and tenderness that she inherited from black religious

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traditions. So, first practicing descent. For many women of Polly's generation, the church functioned as more of a hindrance to becoming a risk taker than a place of formation, representations of leadership, displays of

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power dynamics and approaches to the biblical canon in preaching and teaching, urged women to be self conscious and deferential. To use a descriptor from M sean Copeland and aesthetics of submission ran through the central images,

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symbols, metaphors, narrative interpretations, traditions and rituals of christian practice. This aesthetic also colored paulie's experience at ST Titus Durham and Saint Simon and Crew Maryland . The two african american congregations in the Episcopal Church

00:11:01.210 - 00:11:16.560

that she spent a great deal of time in. But despite this aesthetic, the church also functioned as a community of dissent, and this too, was an important part of Polly's inheritance. L Kornegay junior

00:11:16.560 - 00:11:35.330

suggests that part of the birthright of blackness is an inherent lack of safety, Ambu itty, indeterminant C and a dangerous sense of tunis. As a result , one responsibility, one responsibility of black religious traditions

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is to account for what it means to be religious when one safety is theologically and sociologically in question. And when to attempt self actualization is certain to result in danger. Contentment with such a station grates against

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personhood itself. So forming a people who could resist injustice and still have room to delight in their power and their beauty and identity as God's beloved were critical tasks of the church, paulie's chutzpah and her high

00:12:15.620 - 00:12:35.260

regard for descent were nurtured in the church. Lessons in the art of dissent came in varying ways in sermons that lambasted racialized violence and urged racial uplift in music that through lyric and melody stirred her to act

00:12:35.640 - 00:12:54.360

in testimonies in which parishioners laid out their grievances and were met with support, descent did not always result in discernible change. But even in those cases she learned that consolation could be found in the community.

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The existence of unresolved cases, or lingering injustice only amplified her need to critique the social order. So when Paulie found herself being mistreated on a greyhound bus in the spring of 1940, she could draw on

00:13:11.510 - 00:13:26.130

a tradition of faith inspired resistance. Polly was taking her friend and possibly her lover, Adeline McBean, to north Carolina for an easter visit with her family . It was supposed to be a relaxing ride,

00:13:26.180 - 00:13:39.330

at least according to the ads on the greyhound buses . At that time, the first leg of their trip was relaxing. They went from new york to Washington, and then the next piece of their leg

00:13:39.330 - 00:13:52.150

was from Washington to Richmond, and that was fairly smooth because there was a new bus with very roomy seats, but they did have to see it sit rear of center on that leg. They ran into

00:13:52.150 - 00:14:11.390

serious problems on the leg from Richmond to Durham. Their bus had been oversold and they were put on a raggedy backup vehicle and assigned broken seats on that vehicle directly above the rear wheels. These seats were

00:14:11.390 - 00:14:31.650

tilted, shifting their center of gravity so whenever the bus turned or rolled over a rock, they would be jilted At 11 began to suffer from sharp pains and get sick. When paulie couldn't bear Adelina agony

00:14:31.650 - 00:14:46.920

anymore, she got up and asked the driver if they could move. The driver, a man named frank w. Morris um was not responsive to this request. He elbowed paulie and told her to get

00:14:46.930 - 00:15:00.790

out of his face and sit down. She asked the mother of two white Children if they might if she might ask her Children to move so that paulie and Adeline could move to another part of the bus

00:15:00.800 - 00:15:16.750

and be more comfortable. This mother said that her Children can sit wherever they wanted, referred her back to the driver, she went back to frank Morris told Morris that Adeline was really sick, I think

00:15:16.750 - 00:15:31.420

the her concern was that Adeline might actually vomit. Um but the driver said that he would not address that issue, sit down until they got to Petersburg , so they get to the little town of Petersburg

00:15:31.420 - 00:15:48.520

Virginia and Polly is thinking that they finally will get to move. But frank Morris gets off the bus helps all of the white passengers off of the bus , then begins to assist a long line of new

00:15:48.520 - 00:16:03.810

white passengers to get on the bus. He does not address their seating issue. Seeing this long line of new passengers getting on the bus, Polly got up, she and Adeline got up and tried to

00:16:03.810 - 00:16:30.060

change seats frank Morris went over to Polly and Adeline and said that if they did not go back to their seats, he would have them arrested. The tension just from from hearing this bus driver threaten arrest

00:16:30.140 - 00:16:47.850

Was enormous on that bus, not only for polly , but for all of the passengers, they were in electric tension for about 45 minutes. Polly and Adeline refused to get off of the bus or change

00:16:47.850 - 00:17:07.180

their seats. They insisted on humane treatment and ask for a refund frank Morris then leaves the bus entirely and goes to get two police officers who come armed who physically huddle around a to lean and paulie on

00:17:07.180 - 00:17:26.420

the seat and threatened them physically by their physicality, enclosing the space around them. The driver then adjusted the cushions and distributed customer incident cards to all of the white passengers on the bus. Um told paulie

00:17:26.420 - 00:17:42.470

and add a lean to not cause any more trouble or they would really be arrested. When paulie complained that she did not get a customer card, he immediately had her arrested. So she and Adeline were

00:17:42.470 - 00:17:59.620

arrested. They were charged with disorderly conduct and creating a public disturbance. Now it's important to note to remember that this is 1940 and this was the time when there was nothing fashionable about being arrested, not

00:17:59.620 - 00:18:15.370

even for social activism, being arrested, was so shameful that Adeline fainted upon arrest and had to be taken to the hospital. So this decision to descent did not end well. The two spent Easter in

00:18:15.370 - 00:18:36.460

the Petersburg jail and after a trial, paulie and Adeline were found guilty, Charged$21.70 and jailed for several days. Once their time was served, they found themselves on another segregated greyhound bus with the very

00:18:36.470 - 00:18:51.550

same driver, what they had, however, taken a stand against evil and they had not been silent in the face of the powers and Principalities, but they didn't see the kind of change that they had

00:18:51.550 - 00:19:10.150

hoped to see. Shortly after the greyhound bus ordeal , paulie met a woman named Anne Waller. Anne was the foster mother of 23 year old Odell Waller , a black sharecropper from Gretna Virginia. Now,

00:19:10.150 - 00:19:26.670

O'Dell's name is not as recognizable today, but at one time his name carried the moral outrage associated with names like Willie McGee or Emmett Till, or Renisha Mcbride or Trayvon martin. Odell was in prison facing

00:19:26.670 - 00:19:41.090

the electric chair for killing Oscar Davis, his white landlord, over a dispute about a wheat crop. And as a member of the Workers Defense League, Polly went on tours to lecture about Odell's case and

00:19:41.090 - 00:19:56.480

raise money for his defense. The goal was to appeal his conviction conviction because he had a two day trial and was convicted by an all white jury which included 10 people who themselves hired sharecroppers. They deliberated

00:19:56.480 - 00:20:11.200

for 52 minutes before finding odell guilty. Police advocacy in this case took her from Virginia to California, speaking in civic clubs, in churches, in lecture halls, community centers, wherever she could to find

00:20:11.200 - 00:20:27.700

listeners. One journalist heard her and said frankly, I thought of joan of Arc when she spoke and I wondered if it's some fortuitous time she might become something of a deliverer for her people. Yet despite

00:20:27.700 - 00:20:48.270

police efforts in this case, the Workers Defense League lost their fight. Odell was executed at 8:30 a.m. On july 2nd 1942 and unwilling to stop dissenting. Even after O'Dell's execution, pauley wrote an open letter

00:20:48.270 - 00:21:03.570

to President Roosevelt, denouncing the poll tax and lamenting O'Dell's execution. It's at this time that a Philip Randolph, a premier Labor and Civil rights Act activist with the brotherhood of Sleeping car porters encourage policy to

00:21:03.570 - 00:21:22.590

take a grander step by organizing a national march, a silent parade to mourn the death of Odell Waller and challenge the poll tax. So on July 25 , she organized between 400 and 500 people. Mostly

00:21:22.590 - 00:21:41.350

laundress is dressmakers and housewives to march in what would be the predecessor to the March on Washington in 1963 . Polly off The Voice dissent through poetry. About a year after O'Dell's death, race riots broke out

00:21:41.350 - 00:21:56.760

in Detroit due to segregation and housing shortages, And over the course of three days, 34 people were killed, 25 of whom were African American and some 400 people were wounded. Many of these victims died

00:21:56.760 - 00:22:15.300

as a result of police brutality and franklin Roosevelt read about these riots in the paper and issued a statement . I will read it for you. He says , I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of

00:22:15.300 - 00:22:37.050

violence and widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true american regrets this After hearing Roosevelt's response , polyp in the following poem entitled Mr Roosevelt regrets

00:22:37.840 - 00:22:56.430

. Mhm. Would you get Black boy when they knocked you down in the gutter? When they kicked your teeth out and they broke your skull with clubs and they bashed your stomach in what you get when

00:22:56.430 - 00:23:11.490

the police shot you in the back and they changed you to the beds while they wiped the blood off . What do you get when you cried out to the top man? When you called on? The

00:23:11.490 - 00:23:32.070

man next to God! So you thought and asked him to speak out to save you? Would the top man say? Black boy? Mr Roosevelt regrets descent. Poetry was a favorite form of prayer for

00:23:32.070 - 00:23:45.350

Polly. She liked to write poems outside, surrounded by trees, ideally with a dog by her side . Her poems would comment on the major news stories of the day, and often drew on the Book

00:23:45.350 - 00:24:03.080

of Common Prayer. In May of 1959, after Matt Parker was lunched in Poplarville, Mississippi Polyp in College. For Poplarville. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee! O Lord! Teach us no longer

00:24:03.080 - 00:24:22.900

to dread hounds, yelping in the distance. The footfall at the door, the rifle, but on the windowpane and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Give us

00:24:22.910 - 00:24:42.690

fearlessness to face the bomb thrown from the darkness, the gloved hand on the pistol, the savage intention give us courage to stand firm against our tormentors without rancor, teach us that most difficult of tasks to

00:24:42.690 - 00:25:02.610

pray for them to follow and not burn thy cross . In addition to activism and poetry, descent also took the form of excellence. This mode of dissent is also reflected in in her formation in black congregations

00:25:02.610 - 00:25:21.840

at ST Titus and Saint Simon, where parishioners excellence in academics, sports music business. Um These were celebrated as means of undermining racist rhetoric about black inferiority . It was also hoped that the resulting recognition of

00:25:21.850 - 00:25:41.390

excellence would lead to material success and increased access that people would gain some semblance of citizenship by excelling in Polly's case. These results were mixed. On the one hand, she excelled as a poet, author

00:25:41.390 - 00:25:59.450

, and attorney and academic. She published a sizeable body of work and gained considerable demand as a public speaker financially, she moved from being essentially destitute to having a stable if modest income. Yet in some

00:25:59.450 - 00:26:18.590

ways her dissatisfaction increased with success. White, masculine ist norms of excellence left her feeling caged and isolated . Zora Neale hurston taps into this feeling when she said, I feel most coloured when I am thrown

00:26:18.590 - 00:26:36.820

against a sharp white background. For Polly. The pressure to assimilate was relentless and sadly, this was especially the case for her while in seminary. She was in seminary during the early 19 seventies. She

00:26:36.820 - 00:26:52.140

spent her junior and middle years at General Theological Seminary , then transferred to Virginia Theological Seminary. But the transfer uh emerged out of a Midler review gone bad in keeping with her notion of excellence as a form

00:26:52.140 - 00:27:10.500

of dissent. She had done stellar work academically, but two of her professors wrote in an evaluation describing her as quote, overly argumentative, at least one person in her inner circle thought this description could pose

00:27:10.500 - 00:27:30.620

a hurdle in her ordination process. The Episcopal Church valued kindness, subtlety. It did not have a reputation for accommodating strong personalities very well compounding. This issue was the fact that at that time the Episcopal

00:27:30.620 - 00:27:48.810

Church had yet to ordain a woman. A brassy , overly argumentative woman was out of the question. The harsh Midler review hurt Polly because while she could acknowledge that she did argue points, she felt she

00:27:48.810 - 00:28:06.270

was doing so in order to discern truth. Um she she didn't think it was a serious problem that she argued. She had longstanding decades long arguments with people and found them actually helpful in drawing closer to

00:28:06.270 - 00:28:21.440

other people. It was meaningful. Um It was it was a sign of a meaningful relationship to be able to disagree and continue ones engagement argument was a way to gain insight away, to throw into relief

00:28:21.450 - 00:28:37.370

ideas that one might evade or overlook. Argument was a way to increase her command and understanding of the faith. She was convinced that this label of overly argumentative would not have been applied had she been a

00:28:37.370 - 00:28:59.080

man receiving this blow from the church that she hoped to serve was just devastating. So she transferred to Virginia Theological Seminary and regrouped. The second feature of Polly's risk taking was inventiveness. In this context.

00:28:59.090 - 00:29:18.150

Inventiveness. Inventiveness is not merely imagination, but creativity that is born of willful resilience. Often inventiveness grows out of what Toni Morrison calls discredited knowledge, um knowledge that is stigmatized because it grows out of an

00:29:18.150 - 00:29:36.320

epistemology rooted in black communal life. For example, black preachers modeled inventiveness by taking on the role of trickster in sermons. Um they might mimic someone or ba foon someone who um was harassing members of the

00:29:36.320 - 00:29:55.950

black community and the resulting laughter affirmed the humanity and agencies of the listeners, and pointed to the fallibility of the powers that be play announced the freedom to invent new possibilities. In the midst of difficult circumstances

00:29:56.540 - 00:30:14.960

In keeping with this tradition, Poli's inventiveness came to the forefront in a very public fight with the Harvard Corporation in 1944, as valedictorian of her class at Howard Law School, Polly earned the coveted Rosenwald fellowship

00:30:15.340 - 00:30:29.090

, which provided a scholarship for graduate study in law , and Harvard had already established a practice of omitting the Howard Law School valedictorian, and Polly just hope to follow suit. She made her desire to attend

00:30:29.090 - 00:30:47.010

Harvard public in a number of newspaper articles and was eager to attend. So when she learned that Harvard did not admit women, she was unnerved. Um , she began an extended round of letters and appeals

00:30:47.020 - 00:30:57.950

to see if they might change their position, even getting a letter from um, franklin Roosevelt recommendation from franklin franklin Roosevelt, even though she had kind of bashed him in a poem. Okay. Uh huh

00:30:59.440 - 00:31:17.930

. Yeah. Uh but Harvard sends a reply saying your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School. Typical legal challenges were

00:31:17.930 - 00:31:32.270

closed to her to do to Harvard status as a private institution. In a final attempt to find a way forward, she wrote a letter to the Harvard Law School faculty, which read in part, gentlemen

00:31:33.840 - 00:31:48.060

, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements. But since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on

00:31:48.060 - 00:32:09.690

this subject. Okay, Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other? Her playful question was an attempt to help the gentleman be reasonable and still assert her own agency. And while

00:32:09.690 - 00:32:23.720

Harvard did not remove this barrier in 1940, for her witty and persistent appeal earned the respect of legal scholars at other institutions, including the Bolt Hall of Law at the University of California, which she ultimately

00:32:23.720 - 00:32:45.310

attended. Struggles like the one with the Harvard Corporation underscored paulie's need for divine assistance, but the idea of God as king, shepherd and father brought little solace. It was not that she saw these images

00:32:45.320 - 00:33:02.920

of God as invalid as a lifelong Episcopalian. These images of God grounded the literature gee which she loved and knew at a pre verbal level. The problem was that she get these images just did not stir

00:33:02.920 - 00:33:25.250

inventiveness in her. She experienced these images as fostering passivity, imagining God as king shepherd and father put her in the position of a loyal subject, a docile sheep or an obedient child. When her life

00:33:25.260 - 00:33:45.740

was demanding that she practiced disruption and disobedience repeatedly, she understood God to be calling her to make a scene, not sit quietly. Polly did not experience God as ruling or controlling human history in a robotic

00:33:45.740 - 00:34:02.490

way. She experienced God as churning with compassion. God's sovereignty was expressed in the continual flow of compassion in the world. And she knew God by being lost in the fold of God and being. She

00:34:02.490 - 00:34:19.130

knew God by being lost in the folds of God's compassion, in um being immersed in love and having a sense of how wide and long and high and deep that love is. By working to enact that

00:34:19.130 - 00:34:37.620

love in the world. Her soul was fed by the image of God as a woman in labor who moans and house without propriety and clings to human beings in urgency. Isaiah 42 14 played a foundational role

00:34:37.620 - 00:34:54.090

in her spiritual life because here God says for a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself. Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp

00:34:54.100 - 00:35:13.850

and pant. This gasping panting. God gave Polly the energy and urgency. She needed to take risks . Polly drew similar encouragement from images of God as midwife, but the idea of God coaching and soothing

00:35:13.850 - 00:35:25.110

human beings as they use their agency to bring life into the world. Um She also liked the image of God is a nursing mother. Um God is the scorned woman, but the midwife and woman and

00:35:25.110 - 00:35:43.390

labour images really stand apart for her. These feminine images helped Polly envision divine action, breaking through in new and surprising ways. She did not believe it was enough to be a herald for God or a

00:35:43.390 - 00:35:59.020

mouthpiece for God. She believed God wanted mutuality with human beings and Abraham Joshua. Heschel gets at this idea when he describes the profit is not a mere mouthpiece, but one who has fellowship with the feelings

00:35:59.030 - 00:36:20.990

of God, a sympathy with divine pathos. A communion with divine consciousness. This kind of mutuality fuels inventiveness. Policy sense of mutuality with God provided creativity for risk taking and strength for the inevitable disappointment that

00:36:20.990 - 00:36:45.750

came with risking. Third practicing tenderness notwithstanding its sexism . Church was a place where Polly was consistently treated tenderly and even affectionately. Saint Titus, Her family's church in Durham had a weekly Eucharist that included the

00:36:45.750 - 00:37:01.250

passing of the peace, and they took that passing of the piece very seriously. Instead of nodding and shaking hands with other parishioners. Each person shook both hands of the person in front of them and they

00:37:01.260 - 00:37:21.490

kissed both cheeks and embraced. Touch, functioned as the main way to express appreciation and affirm one another's humanity. Tenderness like this made Polly feel like a valued member of the congregation. Even as a younger

00:37:21.490 - 00:37:37.080

person reflecting back on her formation, she remembers the kindly eyes of Bishop Henry B. Delaney and how gracious he was, how tenderly he let her sit on his lap and answered her questions. The gentleness

00:37:37.080 - 00:37:52.380

Polly experienced at ST titus, and later at three other congregations led her to describe the church as an extension of her home and a haven for her. The significance of being surrounded by tenderness should not be

00:37:52.380 - 00:38:13.330

underestimated. The cocoon in offered helped her develop a sense of beloved nous that was foundational to seeing herself as a child of God. In adulthood, this identity provided a moral basis for challenging oppression and justified

00:38:13.330 - 00:38:31.730

the emotionally expensive work that came along with resistance costs that she paid in anger, sorrow and mental exhaustion in more complicated ways. Identity as a child of God and the expectation of tenderness propelled Polly's search for

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a lasting romantic partnership. This search spanned almost 30 years and was accompanied by considerable psychological distress. Few very few people were privy to the depth of her struggle. In her application to Virginia Theological Seminary,

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Polly was asked if she had ever seen a doctor for a psychological condition and her tongue in cheek response was, hasn't everyone? Mhm. When asked if she'd been hospitalized for a psychiatric issue, she answered

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yes, but says it was for writer's block and states that the issue was resolved in truth. Polly was hospitalized at least three times and the underlying issues for her were sexuality and gender identity. One of

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these hospitalizations took place during her third year at Howard Law school. After a romantic relationship with a woman ended and became public, She was worried that she would lose all that she had worked to achieve and

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was sobbing for hours, had minimal appetite and had to be sedated. Her hospital records suggest that she bore most of this agony alone. Years, even years before this week long stay at Howard University Hospital

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paulie struggled with being at home in her body and with the social stigma associated with her attraction to women , photographs of Polly as a child dressed in frilly dresses and cute little shoes. Give white of photos

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of Polly as a young adult dressed as a man calling herself the dude the vagabond or the sailor In captions attached to those photos, her spirits would soar whenever a woman acknowledged a mutual attraction, but then

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they would plummet when that woman refused to risk a deeper commitment, such as the instance of that Howard University Hospital. So social respectability was a key part in her struggle. She finds herself pulled by the

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desire for freedom of expression and integrity on the one hand and the hope for social acceptance on the other . And due to her faith formation, she's not willing to claim an identity that will label her as

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depraved or deviant. In an anonymous love letter penned during the 1930s, a former partner asserts that there are three types of people, true men, true women and homosexuals. She presses polly to accept herself

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as part of the 3rd group. If their relationship is to continue, it does not. The relationship ends largely on the basis of available literature. Polly surmised that her attraction to women was either a biological

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condition or a psychiatric one. On December 17, During another hospitalization. This time at the Long Island rest home in Amityville, New York, Polly compiled a battery of questions for her psychiatrists in the hopes

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of getting clarity. The list reads in part, where do you think is the seat of the conflict in the brain, the body, the glands, or where where could I get an answer? What

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fields are doing experimentation and have the equipment? Why this nervous condition all my life and the very natural falling in love with the female sex? Terrific breakdowns after each love affair that has become unsuccessful? Why

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the willingness to fight instead of running away in this instance? Why is it that I believe that psychiatry does not have the answer to true homosexuality, but that experimental science does. Why do I desire monogamous

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married life as a completion? Why do I prefer experimentation on the male side instead of attempted adjustment as a normal woman? Why do I tend to believe so firmly in myself in spite of the accepted rules

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of science and why the inverted sex instinct wearing pants , wanting to be one of the men, doing things that fellows do hating to be dominated by women unless I like them. Why have I made an

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adjustment to all other conflicts? Except this one? If this is merely the result of a number of subconscious conflicts, why do I expect so much of science and yet have a deep religious nature? The

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list also includes a request for hormone tests and a physical examination to determine whether she has pseudo hermaphrodite is um, Paulie's notes reveal desperation, but they do not reveal self loathing. Despite her many questions,

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she seems clear about her own worthiness and is willing to take the risk of experimental surgery or male hormones . If doing so, will lead to the tender loving union she desires. And while her religious formation

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surely contributed to the difficulties she faced concerning sexuality and gender identity, police sense of herself as a child of God, also provided fortitude to persist in the struggle. Faith was useful in helping her to be

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tender with herself and in content and and to continue in context that were hostile and at times actually annihilating faith was helping her be tender and to look for tenderness outside of herself. Despite these devouring contact she

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was living in. Although Paulie sought tenderness in the form of a romantic relationship for roughly 30 years, her understanding of tenderness was not limited to the realm of the sexual. In her 70s, she saw

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tenderness as a vital part of her pastoral identity and devoted herself to caring for the dying. This ministry involved visits to homes and hospitals, to pray for people, anoint them or share the Eucharist. Caring

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for fragile bodies was a very important part of her ministry companion Ng people in distress was central to her work. Her experiences as a patient had taught her the importance of pastoral care and as a priest,

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she delighted in bearing tenderness to people and saw that as an essential part of her priesthood. So what are we to take away from reflecting on Pauli Murray's life here? I want to make explicit something that

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has been implicit all along, christian theology does not consist solely of a set of propositions about the faith . The performative element is essential. Okay, the most compelling arguments about who God is, how God

00:46:37.710 - 00:46:54.510

is known and the tell us of human life are in fleshed arguments. They are written in human living . Christian preaching has its own intrinsic goods, but its greatest power issues. From helping listeners enact the

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gospel and be compelling arguments for the faith. Pauli Murray's life urges us to consider our models of faith . Her life leads us to ask what makes someone an effective witness, and how do are exemplars reflect

00:47:16.610 - 00:47:37.900

the diversity of life experiences and personalities in the church . Polly's life also suggests that the capacity for risk should be nurtured in the church. She leads us to ask, how can faithful risk taking, be

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cultivated through our liturgies and our interpretations of scripture and in our conceptions of human flourishing. One of paulie's most cherished memories was a trip to see Bishop Henry B Delaney as he lay dying during the visit,

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Bishop Delaney placed his trembling hands on her head and blessed her and named her a child of destiny. He called her Child of destiny and this moment of blessing and naming served as a core memory for paulie

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. It was a memory that she went to, went back to over and over again and by the time polly is 70 years old, this experience of being blessed and named a child of destiny was the

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frame that she used to make sense of her life . All the bliss and horror of her life seemed to fit within this frame. As a child of destiny. She had been called to live on the

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frontier and accept faithful risk taking as a commission and as an essential dimension of her identity. She did not believe that she had been called to succeed. She had been called to risk looking back on her

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life. She said if anyone should ask a negro woman, what is her greatest achievement? Her honest answer would be I survived not I succeeded I wrist and I survived. Christianity made that survival possible for

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her. When I was seven or eight years old , my by so drawing in my own life. Now when I was seven or eight years old, my friend Tim johnson and I decided that it would

00:49:42.460 - 00:49:57.030

be fun to jump off of the roof of my parents house. And we did and it was fun in a kind of terrifying way, but fun. But there is this moment when we were suspended in

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the air and we did not know what the landing would hold. Pauli Murray was a woman who was willing to be in the air. She had a tremendous tolerance for being suspended in air. She was

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to quote, Philip Weinstein, nourished more by tension than by resolution. The church contributed to her spiritual thriving, by rooting her in traditions of dissent, inventiveness and tenderness. She became a woman willing to

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improvise to act without any guarantee of success, willing to read the demands of the moment, willing to leap, knowing that she was wrapped in the love and power of God, and that kind of pioneering

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spirit is desperately needed in the church today. And I look forward to talking with you more about the