Abuelita Faith

What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

Kat Armas

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781587435089
• eBook ISBN: 9781493431113
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity Today 2022 Book Award Finalist (Christian Living & Discipleship)

Outreach 2022 Recommended Resource (Christian Living)

"[A] powerful debut. . . . This persuasive testament will appeal to Christians interested in the lesser-known women of the Bible."--Publishers Weekly

"Armas expertly weaves her own abuelita's history of personal faith and resistance into each chapter and intersects it with biblical text, creating an approachable work."--Library Journal

What if some of our greatest theologians wouldn't be considered theologians at all?

Kat Armas, a second-generation Cuban American, grew up on the outskirts of Miami's famed Little Havana neighborhood. Her earliest theological formation came from her grandmother, her abuelita, who fled Cuba during the height of political unrest and raised three children alone after her husband passed away. Combining personal storytelling with biblical reflection, Armas shows us how voices on the margins--those often dismissed, isolated, and oppressed because of their gender, socioeconomic status, or lack of education--have more to teach us about following God than we realize.

Abuelita Faith tells the story of unnamed and overlooked theologians in society and in the Bible--mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters--whose survival, strength, resistance, and persistence teach us the true power of faith and love. The author's exploration of abuelita theology will help people of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds reflect on the abuelitas in their lives and ministries and on ways they can live out abuelita faith every day.

1
Research Grief

I sat in bed staring at my laptop, the dozens of Google tabs detailing the journey I’d been on. Books were buried in my comforter, creating a type of literary war zone. My ojeras (the bags under my eyes) decorated my face the color of day-old bruises. I kept opening the folder on my phone titled “Do Not Open,” robotically scrolling through each social media app to distract myself from the sharp, sucker-punch pain in my gut that had lingered for days. It wasn’t the first time I had felt the pangs that come when the past reveals itself to you, when an unknown history digs itself up from the grave. Colonizer or colonized, oppressor or oppressed—there’s a moment after the deep, dark, often lonely work of becoming our own archaeologists that the pangs hit. It’s a surprising pain that often comes when we dig up the skeletons from the ground, when we realize the dirt we stand on is tainted and the reality we’ve been fed is curated.

While this wasn’t the first time reality hit, it would be the first time it pulled a fast one on me while I was writing an academic paper—a process, I was told, that was supposed to be “objective,” a discipline solely of the mind. Up until this point, no one had warned me this would happen, that the work would feel this personal. The dominating culture taught me to separate myself from what I study, and consequently, to live with a fragmented identity. But when our musings about life and faith exist only in fragments, we live disembodied realities. God becomes disembodied too.

It’s easier when we’re fed what to think, what to believe about ourselves, our histories, and God. When our identities are programmed, we’re not taught to really engage or to bring our whole selves to the table. We’re taught our own thoughts and hearts cannot be trusted in any way, and thus we live in shame, a widened chasm. But something painful and terribly beautiful happens when that chasm begins to narrow. I think this narrowing, this shrinking space where theology, history, and our identities—hearts, minds, bodies, and souls—begin to blend together, is where the pangs are felt most sharply.

It may not feel like it in the moment, but this is also part of the journey toward liberation.

That day while in bed with my laptop and books open, that chasm narrowed again. Reality paid a painful visit. And it didn’t come alone. It brought grief along with it—that deep, gut-wrenching sense of grief. It was a sorrow from a time deep in the past, before I even existed—a grief that my antepasados, my ancestors, knew, one that hovered above time, spanning history.

What do you do with generational grief?

I sat in it for a while. And then I got to work.

Initially I called the angst that I felt that day “research grief”; it’s the grief that comes when getting deep into the thick of researching difficult topics. Surprisingly, this is a common thing in the academic world. I once heard of a woman who began losing sleep, her hair, and her sanity during her time as a doctoral student writing her dissertation on the Holocaust. Even trying to make sense of other people’s trauma can traumatize.

This notable pang of research grief surfaced early in my seminary career during a Women in Church History and Theology class. Though I was several courses into my master of divinity program, I was new to exploring the topics of women and people of color as they pertain to theology. The dominating culture had yet to invite me to see myself and my culture within God’s story.

But I thank Creator for my stubbornness, for my combative spirit, which the dominating culture has deemed too much—muy fresca.

When I began this course, I was attending my second seminary. I had left the first one only months prior, after tussling with professors and pastors and experiencing firsthand the demons of sexism and racism. I admit, being raised in an immigrant Roman Catholic community and then transitioning to Protestantism as an adult left me unfamiliar with the ins and outs of evangelicalism. Not only was I blissfully ignorant of what I was stepping into spiritually, but as a Cuban American born and raised in a city predominantly made up of Cuban Americans, I had yet to wrestle with my cultural identity in a majority, non-Hispanic white context.

I was sitting in my hermeneutics class at the first seminary I attended when I realized I needed to leave—it was a difficult day. As the professor taught us how to engage interpretation week after week, it became clear that he wasn’t speaking to me. The lens from which he taught and from which he encouraged us to engage was his own, of course. He was born and raised on a small farm in the rural South, so the context from which he understood the world was such, and the way he taught us to engage Scripture reflected this reality too. I remember constantly feeling like nothing he taught about the world, life, or the Bible related to me. I grew up in a large Latine1 city where I danced salsa on the weekends and greeted strangers with a kiss on the cheek. I was conceived and born out of wedlock, and I lived the first part of my life in a small apartment with my single mother in La Sagüesera, the southwest portion of Miami, where I owned my first fake ID at sixteen. These details made me feel tainted, like I didn’t belong. Was I not domesticated or pure enough? Did the reality of my life, experiences, and worldview make me too much or position me too far from understanding and knowing God the way I was supposed to? Trying to learn how to do the work of interpretation within a rural Southern framework only made me feel further from God—and made me feel like my experiences, community, and culture were only getting in the way of my being able to understand the Bible. As a newer evangelical, I was told that shame was no longer mine to bear, but how could I not feel shame as a Latine woman trying to fit the mold of whiteness?

Activist Julia Serano once said, “A woman of color doesn’t face racism and sexism separately; the sexism she faces is often racialized, and the racism she faces is often sexualized.”2 This truth began to feel personal to me. One day this same professor went off on a tangent about how important it is for everyone to learn Greek and Hebrew, as it changes the way we read and teach Scripture. It seemed to me that he really was speaking only to the men in the class when he finished his speech with, “And ladies, your husbands will be really impressed if you can exegete Scripture alongside them.” My heart sank; I was stunned that he would imply I was going through the effort of learning the biblical languages simply to impress my spouse. I nearly fell off my chair when he ended by asking, “Right, Kat?” I was one of the outspoken students in class. The mujeres, the women, in my culture taught me to be that way—to be confident, to speak up, to work hard. I carried this with me in seminary. Not only did I debate theology, exegete Scripture, and have an educated opinion alongside my male peers, but I also spent just as much of my personal time studying as they did—and according to my professor, it was not to eventually lead the church but to impress my spouse.

At this point I had already begun my in-depth study of women in Scripture. I had already learned about the household codes, women leaders in the Bible, the context from which Paul spoke, and a myriad of other details that convinced me that God had uniquely called me and empowered me to lead, to use my gifts and my talents, and to do so from the strength of my abuela (my grandmother), my mom, and the cloud of antepasadas before them.

Through my study of Scripture, I had learned that God didn’t make a mistake in creating me a woman, and God surely didn’t make a mistake in creating me a Cuban woman. The shame that I felt for not fitting the mold of whiteness and patriarchy soon began to lift, and I was able to see the ways that the divine met me in the midst of my complex, multilayered identity, background, and experiences. I admit, this is an ongoing journey.

After class that day, I arrived at home still in a state of disbelief and pain, feeling as if my hard work, my calling, my dignity had been ripped from me. I walked through the door, looked at my brand-new spouse only weeks after our wedding, and muttered, “I think we need to get out of here.”

“OK,” he said. “Where should we go?”

A week later, while I was still at that same seminary, another professor taught about how different Bible translations altered the paragraph formations in Ephesians 5, which affects how we read it and thus how we translate it. In some translations, a new paragraph begins with verse 22 (and oftentimes with its own heading), signaling that submission belongs primarily to wives. But the original Greek doesn’t have headings or verse numbers. So this command, my professor taught us, is supposed to flow from the verse before it, which teaches about mutual submission. Realizing what he may have been trying to imply, I nearly jumped out of my seat.

After class, I confessed to the professor that I was thinking of transferring to a different seminary. He encouraged me to go, reminding me of the potential I had and the little opportunity there was for me to grow in a context that doesn’t affirm women in all aspects of ministry.

A few weeks later my spouse and I had our entire lives packed inside my Kia. But at that moment, I didn’t know where we’d end up, just like I didn’t know where the decolonizing journey would take me: to a new state, a new city, and a new seminary, where I would study the history of my isla, my island, and how it intersects with my faith. I also didn’t know how much more I would learn, what I would reject or embrace. It was a scary and uncertain space, but a sacred one nonetheless. I realize now how dangerous it is to think we’ve arrived at enlightenment, at certainty, about ourselves, about God. I’m still figuring it all out day by day. Some days I’m confident and hopeful. And others? Well, other days I just get by.

There was one thing I did know for certain that day I learned about Ephesians 5. I learned that God really does work in mysterious ways and places—and through unexpected people. This detail alone makes the journey exhilarating.

It wasn’t until I made that first painful exodus that I felt the freedom to begin inviting every aspect of who I am into my study and work as a theologian. It was in the second seminary, in that Women in Church History and Theology class, I was encouraged to explore how my past has shaped my present, and it proved to be another turning point in my life and ministry.

After ten weeks of diving deep into the lives of overlooked women in Christianity’s past—women like Perpetua, Felicitas, Julian of Norwich, and Katharina Schütz Zell—I began to see how their work, though often unrecognized, changed history. I know we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for the sacrifice of these women who dreamed about God and wrote about God and were often silenced, labeled heretics, or worse, simply ignored because they did so. However, this discovery left me hungry to learn more. What about las mujeres, the women whose lives directly influenced mine? The border crossers, those who inhabited multiple in-between worlds?

As a daughter of immigrants who was raised in a city of immigrants, I always had a deep connection to mi isla, my island, Cuba. However, before this time, my antepasadas—the women whose shoulders I now stand on, whose experiences live inside my body, and whose sacrifices paved the way for my present reality—had never been a part of the theological narrative in any “formal” sense.

When beginning my research, I didn’t know how far the rabbit trail of digging into the history of mi gente, my people, would take me. While I knew our past was painful, I was naive and eager to take on the task of learning more about it. Back at home, we didn’t talk too much about our history. Sure, we were—are—proud and unapologetically Cuban, but because the details of my family’s past are tender and complicated, they are oftentimes uncomfortable to talk about. There was so much I wanted to learn, however, so I looked forward to understanding the way Christianity intersects with the country that birthed my abuelita3 and my mother—the two strong and courageous women who raised me.

The first book I picked up was Miguel De La Torre’s The Quest for the Cuban Christ. I left the library that day looking forward to reading about Jesus and my foremothers and forefathers. But needless to say, my excitement quickly dissipated when I read the first page: “Women were raped. Children were disemboweled. Men fell prey to the invaders’ swords.”4

I immediately knew this journey would be dark, heavy, and difficult. And the worst part? This was only the beginning of the written history of my people. This information would redirect the course of my ministry and how I understood theology, who I am, and the ways the two intersect.

The story of mi gente involves the story of the native Cubans—the Taínos—being invaded and tortured by Spain. Worse, it tells how Spain would use their imported “Christ” to justify the greed for gold and glory.5 Spain would exploit and oppress the so-called heathe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Research Grief
• 2. Abuelita Theology
• 3. A Sabiduría That Heals
• 4. Mujeres of Exodus
• 5. Telling La Verdad
• 6. Cosiendo and Creating
• 7. Sobreviviendo
• 8. Protesta and Persistence
• 9. Desesperación
• 10. A Divine Baile
• 11. Madre of Exile
• 12. Resolviendo in La Lucha
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover