“Dr. Schüssler Fiorenza at Harvard says the intention of Jesus was feminist,” I said to Sandy one evening.
“Mine, too,” he said. He’s a smart man, my husband.
I believe Sandy’s intention was that, derived from a concept he held in his mind of equality and justice. But like me, like so many of us, he lived with an unconscious gap between concept and practice. Most “feminism” doesn’t filter down into ways of relating, the way faith is practiced or votes are cast. I’ve seen churches give honest lip service to women’s equality as a concept, while life and worship there go on in the same old patriarchal ways.
But Sandy was embracing the ideal, and I was glad at least for that.
After that night I began to mention other ideas from books I was reading. Sandy listened, nodded. When I began to weave in more personal fragments about the awakening I was experiencing, he listened then, too. But he didn’t nod so much anymore.
One rain-soaked weekend when the children were off with friends and Sandy was away for a conference, I read practically nonstop, making a breathtaking discovery. I found that within early Christian history there had been two traditions regarding women. The first we could call the revolutionary tradition, which included Jesus’ “feminist” and egalitarian intent and practice. This tradition, preaching a gospel of liberation and mutuality, treated women as equals. Evidence exists that Christian women carried out priestly functions—teaching, baptizing, and blessing the Eucharist—on a par with men.
But soon another tradition asserted itself, the patriarchal tradition with its antifemale, body-negating spirituality, insisting on the dominant cultural taboos and sanctions concerning women. This tradition, which had started long before Christianity, viewed women as naturally inferior and as the property of men, associating women with matter, flesh, evil, and sin.
For a while these two traditions—the revolutionary and the patriarchal—clashed, but soon the revolutionary tradition was stamped out, sealing an interpretation of women as inferior that has continued to this day. For a brief moment in history, a window of opportunity to reverse patriarchy opened, and then it was slammed shut. I can still remember the sense of loss that washed over me when I read Elaine Pagels’s words:
Despite the previous activity of Christian women, by the year 200, the majority of Christian communities had endorsed as canonical the pseudo-Pauline letter of Timothy which stresses (and exaggerates) the anti-feminist element in Paul’s views: “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men: she is to keep silent.” . . . By the end of the second century women’s participation in worship was explicitly condemned.51
After this Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (in 312 C.E.), taking on even more patriarchal attitudes. The pattern of keeping women from full participation became set, uniform, and institutionalized in Christianity.
Because of women’s so-called inherent sinfulness and the belief by church leaders that women did not even have souls to save, two methods were devised by which women could find salvation. One was submission in marriage and in child bearing; the other was virginity. “Both [models] involved roles of silence and subordination in which the stigma of being female could be overcome,” writes Anne E. Carr.52
That same weekend I reread the parts of the Bible related specifically to women. If you do this all at once, it can be a shock. A number of years later I would come upon an article in the Atlantic Monthly on women and the Bible that summarized the kind of awareness I gained that weekend as I read through the scripture. The article said:
The Bible is no stranger to patriarchy. It was written mostly if not entirely by men. It was edited by men. It describes a succession of societies over a period of roughly 1200 years whose public life was dominated by men. . . . It talks almost only about men. In the Hebrew Bible as a whole, only 111 of the 1426 people who are given names are women. The proportion of women in the New Testament is about twice as great, but still leaves them a tiny minority.
As a prescriptive text, moreover, the Bible has been interpreted as justifying the subordination of women to men: “In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.” “wives, be subject to your husband as you are to the Lord.” “Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman but woman for the sake of man.” As a text that has been presumed by hundreds of millions of people to speak with authority, moreover, the Bible has helped enforce what it prescribes.53
As I moved through the biblical material, I flipped over to Galatians 3:28, where Paul put forth a luminous statement, that in Christ there is no male or female. I thought, How unfortunate that this did not become the centerpiece for Christian tradition! What took hold more firmly were other statements attributed to Paul upholding male dominance and female subordinance, forbidding women from prophesying, demanding they cover their heads when they prayed in public (an outward sign they were under the authority of men).
At times I put the books down and paced in agitation. Other times I sat staring at sheets of water slide down the windows, too sad to turn the page. But I formed my consciousness by turning pages that weekend and for months to come. I found shocking statements about women by church fathers and leaders I’d once looked to for guidance—Jerome, Clement, Aquinas, Luther, Bonhoeffer, Teilhard de Chardin.
But perhaps no church father had such a profound and encompassing impact on shaping the foundations of Christian interpretation as Augustine, whose thinking, I discovered, was patriarchal in the extreme. How odd, I kept thinking, that the same man who wrote “Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in Thee,” also wrote, “Man but not woman is made in the image and likeness of God.” In 1140, this actually became an official decree of the church.
Over the months the most amazing picture unfolded before me, a picture women have rarely glimpsed. Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson sums it up:
For most of [the church’s] history women have been subordinated in theological theory and ecclesial practice at every turn. Until very recently they have been consistently defined as mentally, morally and physically inferior to men, created only partially in the image of God, even a degrading symbol of evil. Women’s sexuality has been derided as unclean and its use governed by norms laid down by men. Conversely, they have been depersonalized as a romantic, unsexed ideal whose fulfillment lies mainly in motherhood. . . . They are called to honor a male savior sent by a male God whose legitimate representatives can only be male, all of which places their persons precisely as female in a peripheral role. Their femaleness is judged to be not suitable as metaphor for speech about God. In a word, women occupy a marginal place in the official life of the church.54
It was all a sobering indicator of the kind of soil in which Christianity grew. Even more sobering was the realization that after two thousand years so much was still being harvested from it.
Eden as Wounded Geography
On a day in early November while thumbing through a book, I came upon a picture of Eve being tempted by the serpent. I gazed at it a long time—the snake whispering in Eve’s ear, her hand outstretched to receive the apple.
It brought to mind the classic interpretation that Adam, the symbolic man, was the superior one, the agent of God, while Eve, the symbolic woman, succumbed to evil because of her association with the snake. Woman was blamed for bringing evil into the world. Her punishment, we’re told, was women’s pain in childbirth and submission to man.
During my reading I’d come across a number of references concerning the symbolic history of the serpent. To my surprise, I’d learned that in ancient times the snake was not maligned or seen as evil but rather symbolized female wisdom, power, and regeneration. It was associated with the ancient Goddess and was portrayed as her companion. The snake was perhaps the central symbol of sacred feminine energy.
Frankly,
at the time this made for uneasy reading. I glossed over those references. I think it was the word Goddess.
It’s hard to describe the sort of anxiety the word created in me, as if the word itself were contraband. It seemed to violate a taboo so deep and ingrained, I felt stabs of irrational fear just reading about it, as if any minute which burners from the sixteenth century might appear and carry me off.
An uneasy reaction to the word Goddess is common among women. Thousands of years of repression, hostility, and conditioning against a Divine Mother have made a deep impression on us. We’ve been conditioned to shrink back from the Sacred Feminine, to fear it, to think of it as sinful, even to revile it. And it would take a while for me to deprogram that reaction, to unpack the word and realize that in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form.
That day as I gazed at the picture of Eve and the serpent, I remembered Goddess and her connection to the snake, and inside I heard a resounding click. I remembered how Nelle Morton once described a moment of awareness in her feminist journey: “My whole life just fell open, and I began to see why things have happened as they have happened.”55 I began to understand what she meant.
Questions followed one another in rapid-fire succession: How had the snake, of all creatures—an animal no better or worse than other wild beings—come to embody the full projection of evil within the Jewish and Christian traditions? Why was the snake selected to represent Satan in the origin myth? Could it be that the patriarchal force chose the snake in hopes of diminishing women’s connection to feminine wisdom, power, and regeneration? Was it a way of discrediting the Feminine Divine?
In the context of that time and history, the idea made gut-wrenching sense. In fact, later I would read many such theories by scholars, theologians, and historians.
To understand why the Eden story is so important we have to remember the extraordinary way origin myths operate in our psyches. In a way humans are not made of skin and bone as much as we’re made of stories. The Eden myth perhaps more than any other floats in our cells, informing our vision of ourselves and the world.
Back when a battle for passage of the ERA was being waged in state legislatures, a man said to me, “You know what ERA stands for?”
“Equal Rights Amendment,” I said.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “It stands for Eve Ruined Adam.” Interesting, isn’t it, how Eden and women’s struggle for rights get tangled?
Yet the impact the myth has on people today was brought home to me even more when I visited the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1994 to see an exhibition on the Civil Rights movement. The works portrayed the injustice and inhumanity inflicted on African Americans during the summer of 1964.
At the conclusion of the exhibit visitors were invited to pin their thoughts on a bulletin board. I was astonished to see one sheet of paper that said, “It’s all women’s fault, they brought evil into the world and continue to do so.” Whether joke or serious statement, that worldview had come right out of Eden.
Holding the picture of Eve and the serpent that day, I realized how significant and sad it is that in the story Yahweh forever placed enmity between Eve and the snake. Taking symbolic history into account, we might say Yahweh placed enmity between Eve and her deep Feminine Source, her wisdom and power.
What did it mean spiritually and psychologically for a woman to be at odds with that source? Wasn’t this another way of portraying women’s severed connection with their feminine souls?
I came to realize that Eden is a wounded geography within women’s lives, that part of my journey would be returning to this painful inner ground and redeeming the snake in my own psyche.
Recognizing Anger
Throughout this period of looking at Christian patriarchy for the first time, I felt deeply betrayed by a tradition I had served. I also became more aware of my anger.
In the beginning I’d felt the anger like a current, deep and distant, something molten and moving inexorably toward the surface. As it rose, I gave it few outlets. Except for a pen thrown across the room, an outburst in the taxicab, and a few other passing flashes, I’d kept a lid on it.
The church has been afraid of the power of anger. It has seemed to equate anger with sin. But was anger really sinful? What if the sin lies not in feeling the anger but in what one does with the feeling?
Most of my life I’d run from anger as something that good daughters and gracious ladies did not exhibit. Perhaps the thing most denied to women is anger. “Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which publicly to complain; they took refuge in depression,” writes Carolyn Heilbrun.56 Her words came true for me. Without the ability to allow or the means to adequately express the anger, I began to slide into periods of depression.
There were days that autumn when I had little energy to write or paint or even read. On days like that I felt like somebody had switched off the lights inside. Part of the darkness was the grief that happens when you realize what’s been done to women and what we’ve allowed to be done to us. Part of it was because I didn’t know where this journey was taking me and I was scared, and part of it was due to the loss I was starting to feel inside, the loss of feminine soul. But certainly a lot of it came because betrayal and anger sat in me like boulders and I couldn’t move them.
I desperately needed to give myself full permission to get angry. The permission finally happened in a most unexpected way. I was having lunch with a young woman who’d recently been ordained as a minister and was on the staff of a large church. When I asked about her work, she told me about one of the first Sundays she had been allowed to conduct the worship. Before the service she had met the senior minister in his study. She was wearing a pair of medium-sized gold earrings along with her clerical robe. Noticing the earrings, the minister asked her to remove them.
“I don’t think he wanted to call attention to my being a woman,” she said.
As she reported the event, my anger suddenly issued forth in a stream of fury. Feelings of outrage and insult. Pure, unblemished wrath. I wasn’t responding to that one incident, I realized later, but to all of the injustice done to women. I’d given myself permission to get mad as hell.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause you to get so angry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “It’s about time we all got angry at this stuff!”
The violation of women is an outrage, and anger is a clear and justifiable response to it.
As I released my anger more often and more consciously, the cycle of depression ended. I began to express the anger when my friend Betty and I got together and talked (she is good about letting me rant without interrupting). I pounded pillows. I poured the anger into my journals. I let it come.
Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger’s enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our ability to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love.
TRUSTING YOUR OWN FEMININE SOURCE
Going through the process of unnaming myself, forming a feminist critique, and questioning old certainties left me feeling unhinged. But it also created a space for my own feminine wisdom to break through.
Little by little, I began to contact a feminine source within that didn’t come from patriarchy or need to be validated by it. The source was a deep, ancient-feeling place inside me, a place I hadn’t known existed.
This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep F
eminine Source. Inside I carried the poem that says:
oh woman
remember who you are woman
woman
it is the whole earth57
Signs of Exit
My remembering began that same autumn when an old woman came to me in a dream. In the dream I was standing in front of my Baptist church when suddenly she appeared at my side. I did not know it then, but this same figure would come to me often in dreams and meditations throughout my journey as a personification of feminine wisdom. And whenever she appeared, I learned to brace myself. Some grace and havoc were about to be set loose.
In dreams the wise old woman often symbolizes the Feminine Self or the voice of the feminine soul, and her coming can mark a turning point for women. This dream was my turning point:
The old woman has shining white hair and a face that hangs in folds and furrows down to her shoulders. Her lips are apple red, and she carries a walking stick with a snake wound around it. I notice strange flashes in the air about her as if someone is shaking out gold glitter.
She points to the church steeple. As she does, it changes from a steeple to a rocket ship aimed at the sky. The old woman shakes her head and says, “You think this will take you where you need to go. Think again.”
Crazy dream, crazy old woman, I told myself when I woke. But there was no denying she was a numinous figure with enormous energy and power. She lingered in my thoughts for days.
Then one morning in late November, I sat by myself in the church balcony during Sunday service. My two children were sitting with friends. I don’t recall why Sandy wasn’t there.
The minister was preaching. He was holding up a Bible. It was open, perched atop his raised hand as if a blackbird had landed there. He was saying that the Bible was the sole and ultimate authority of the Christian’s life. The sole and ultimate authority.
I remember a feeling rising up from a place about two inches below my navel. It was a passionate, determined feeling, and it spread out from the core of me like a current so that my skin vibrated with it. If feelings could be translated into English, this feeling would have roughly been the word no!