A WEEK WITH... ROBERTA BONDI day 4

Roberta Bondi on "her own encounters with The Early Church":

"I do remember clearly coming across a sixth-century homily which said that we ought to go easy on one another, and not judge one another, because God regards us so much more mercifully than we regard one another, and more mercifully than we regard ourselves. This was a mind-boggling, revolutionary idea for me. It struck me that if this is true, then God isn't a terrifying person I need to stay away from.

It rang so true that it completely undid me. It didn't even occur to me that it might be wrong. I really regard that as the moment when I became Christian. What I couldn't do for several years was assimilate this truth. Because if this were true, many other things that I believed couldn't be true. And I had to work through those other things --which had to do with being female, and leaming that I really am made in the image of God, that God really does have a preference for the oppressed and the outcast.

This was before the advent of the women's movement. I had all these parts of myself that did not go with being feminine in the early '60s and mid-'60s, and I was doing everything I could to discard those parts of myself. These were good things about myself that I was trying to get rid of. It took me a while to recognize that God didn't see me in the same way I saw myself, but saw me through much gentler eyes."