Enfleshing Witness: Winnie Varghese
The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Reverend Winnie Varghese’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering. Winnie preaches because God has given her a love for words and images and a heart that is changed by the words of others. Winnie preaches to American Episcopalians because she has found her home there. And because she believes the word held in the context of communal prayer creates a space for her to encounter profound truths, personal clarity, hope, and community. Winnie preaches among people who seek to walk with Jesus on the way of liberation.
Hi, my name is Winnie and I'm an Episcopal priest, and I've just moved back to Atlanta, Georgia.
When my dad was on the phone with his sister (my aunt) he told her that I was moving to Georgia, she replied, “Winnie's moving to Russia?”
My aunt lives in India, but when I was a child, that family lived in Tripoli, in Libya. There's a picture of her in our photo album. By herself, with her hair in a high, loose, very glamorous bun, early 1970s, with a Ghazi sari on, on the beach, on the Mediterranean, on the Africa side, in Tripoli. From my perspective, in Garland, Texas, just impossibly glamorous.
How amazing that she would assume that I was equally cool and international. I mean, I guess I am her brother's daughter, but... My Georgia is in blue and red America, and of course, it is perfect for me to be here again. I came here for the first time as a 17-year-old and among the first generation in my community of immigrants from India to have their college education in the United States.
So, “be not conformed to this world,” the Bible says, “but be transformed by the renewing of your hearts.” Or, “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” What are those conforming things that we should be watching out for? What keeps us from freedom?
My pursuit of freedom, of vocation, of purpose, and my own curiosity about what my life should be like or could be like, took me far from my family and community at the same time that racialized identity started to act, and starts to act in most of our lives. All the forms with race start to appear right around college. The clubs that you have to join, the organizing, the potlucks around identity. What does it mean to be Asian American or Indian or Malayali if you have no place in those communities?
The Bible reads to me as a story of people who migrate and move and wonder about identity. People that move away from the place and people they know. Sometimes they say it’s because God calls them, which I think means that whoever was writing it down couldn't figure out why they had left that great home. Or that the writers are a generation that experiences themselves as interlopers in a strange land, still, and who needed to tell a story of their own legitimacy. Or because of empire, or war, or political upheaval, or violence, or famine. The things that cause migrations of people today. At the mercy of powers greater than our own little families, we are seeking a way through for this generation and maybe stability for the future.
To people who know these stories well and live in the midst of occupation, Jesus and Paul say: Live in freedom now.
I've tried to take that very seriously in my life and I've noticed a few things along the way.
1. The systems that restrict freedom are sophisticated and can confuse us into believing that freedom lies within those systems.
Climbing a ladder or sitting on the panel, admission to the college, a seat at the table, acquiring some of the access to voice or decision-making that people in power seem to have.
Equality and representation matter a lot, but they have nothing or very little to do with actual freedom. With your freedom. It might make the world appear to be more equitable, but it won't ultimately feed your heart.
2. I feel most at home in communities, I've found, that are multiracial and multicultural.
That's the kind of church and neighborhood where I feel most like myself. I don't feel at home in monocultural church or community of any kind, including the churches of my origin and my family's origins.
Now, I love those communities. I like to hear their language and their music. It brings me to tears often. It is my personal history in some ways, but I literally don't speak that language, and I think that's fine. And more importantly for me, my parents never probably felt fully at home there either. They chose to wander out. Our story is not an ideal, and probably no one's is, right? They too look for other communities, and I inherit those choices of exploring and questioning.
3. No one gets to tell us, me or you, what home is, who to love, what is authentically you.
The Bible actually seems to say you will struggle and journey in that space your entire life. Have integrity there. Communities of origin or identity are very important for political organizing, for solidarity based on experience. No one is going to fight for our rights, but us, we're all told. That is probably a practical reality. And in that context, yes, I am Asian American. I am Indian. I am Malayali. But let's not confuse that kind of identity marker with freedom, or even with embodiment. Whether my mind can seek knowledge and wisdom freely within that community, whether I can be myself, as my body tells me to be, in that community I come from, where so many men claim that their need for authority within the community is essential to community identity.
I know none of you know what I'm talking about. There's now a robust new round of patriarchy among young adults in my community, as they embrace a more evangelical Christianity, or root themselves in a nationalist lane of orthodox Christianity, or just plain old secular patriarchy, which also we call tradition, culture, and to our shame, faith.
Paul calls that the ‘powers and principalities,’ and ‘the ways of the world.’ Sin that is disguised as tradition and culture, as a racialized excuse to subjugate women, base culture on the unpaid domestic labor of women, to physically and emotionally abuse women and LGBTQIA persons in our communities, to define our community as caste. Sin becomes the ultimate separation from and demonizing of the flesh of our bodies.
So this return to Georgia for me, the U. S. one, has taken me back in my mind to when I was 17 and wondering what it meant to be an adult American from India. Trying on Asian American for the first time, realizing I was a queer person, walking around self-consciously in dark brown skin in George Bush's America that was about to go to war with the parts of the planet that my family is from. That aunt and her family left Libya, not long before the U. S. bombed a neighborhood they used to live in. We are told here that those were precision bombings, targeted, which it makes it sound like it was a military installation or something, far from babies and mothers.
But this one was catty-cornered to my aunt's house, like when the U. S. invaded Kuwait and our relatives fled, leaving everything they owned behind, never compensated, some missing for months. In that good war. ‘We won that war,’ they said on TV. ‘No one was harmed. We were invited in,’ they said.
For those of us with families impacted by U. S. foreign policy and the shifts in the 1990s, there is a new solidarity of otherness and outsider. Those were the years I started to get stopped in airport security lines for the extra long checks with guns and dogs sometimes. ‘For your own protection,’ I was told over and over again. And I'm one of the super lucky ones that was actually never hurt or detained.
But I remember all the people who walked by and looked away. That multiracial America. Everyone, right? No one stopped. Some people shouted, people stopped. And sometimes in Spanish, to each other, assuming that I could not understand.
The powers and principalities are everywhere. The ways of the world, we read in the Bible. Take care of your own, we are told today.
I believe our freedom in Christ is far more than that, and offers us so much more than that. Entangling human connection through the boundaries of identities, generating wild possibilities, for beautifully connected living that we discern in these bodies, in these contexts, over and over and over again.
Now I don't know that there will be anyone to look at a faded photo in a family album of me in 20 years, but if there were, I hope they would see a woman whose image says that there are many ways to be in this world. This beautiful world of seashores and continents stretching the limits of our imaginations.
A photo of someone enough like your own flesh and blood. To know she could love you and already imagines for you much more than you might think to ask or imagine.
We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.
Rev. Winnie Varghese
The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta. She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-William and is on the leadership team for Church Anew’s Enfleshing Witness movement.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
