The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (12 page)

The anecdote reminded me of a story a woman told about the time she tried to introduce a novel idea to a church committee where she was the only female member. She insisted the idea would save the church money. “It's unreasonable,” she was told. “You just don't understand the way the real world works.”

After she rotated off the committee, a new male member came on and presented the identical idea. It was resoundingly adopted. One wonders if perhaps it was not what was said but who said it.

HEAD OVER HEART
I also began to notice that the imbalance of valuing was not confined to actual men and women. People also placed a greater value on men's experience or things associated with the masculine than on women's experience or things associated with the feminine.

A large amount of women's experience has been concentrated in nurturing roles, in matters of relationship. As we evolved these skills, we even came to carry or reflect relational, nurturing values for the culture at large. Likewise, men's traditional focus of experience in the public arena has conditioned them toward the values prized in that sphere—autonomy, reason, individuality, and competitiveness.

That women are connected with matters of “heart” and men with matters of “head” are distinctions entrenched in our culture, psyches, myths, and symbols. In fact, psychologists Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and others have documented that certain differences do exist in the way men and women relate, know, and make moral choices. Gilligan found, for instance, that girls tend to relate from a web model, preferring interconnections and the centrality of relationships. Boys tend to relate from a hierarchal model that prefers autonomy, individualism, and competition.
⁴⁶

Some of these differences may be due to biology,
⁴⁷
but much of it has come through historical conditioning. My personal belief is that while differences exist, women and men both have an innate and equal ability to engage in the full range of human experiences. (Men can nurture and women can quest for autonomy.) Neither men nor women should be limited to a narrow category of what's considered feminine if you're female or masculine if you're male. I also believe that men and women contain both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and that the goal is to
balance, blend, and honor both
within the individual and the culture.

The point, however, is that women have been socialized toward certain choices and experiences, and these experiences need to be
valued in a way that is not inferior
to men's experiences. Indeed, as I made my critique, the problem seemed to me not that there are differences but rather how we value these differences.

It seemed clear that patriarchy has valued rationality, independence, competitiveness, efficiency, stoicism, mechanical forms, and militarism—things traditionally associated with the “masculine.” Less valued are beingness, feeling, art, listening, intuition, nurturing, and attachment—things traditionally associated with the “feminine.”

As a patriarchal institution, Christianity has tended to value “masculine” attributes more than those connected with the “feminine.” Author Margaret Starbird put it succinctly: “Institutional Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine—a theological ‘San Andreas Fault': the denial of the feminine.”
⁴⁸

Often competitiveness, logic, objectivity, and matters of the head have found preeminence over concerns with inclusiveness, relatedness, or matters of the heart. I recognized the imbalance in the way dogma, theological rightness, triumph of the “Christian way,” oratorical sermons, church business, nationalism, individual pursuit, conversion figures, and breaking scripture down into its various hermeneutics have frequently been valued over feelings, tears, peace, gentleness, group consciousness, and gathering humanity together as a family.

I tried to picture a culture where the valuing was equal. In my wilder moments I imagined a society that paid child care workers, teachers, homeless advocates, poets, and bird-watchers as much as it paid professional football players, generals, and corporate
CEO
s. I tried to imagine a church where it mattered less what your beliefs and practices were and more how relationships were nurtured and healed. I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives.

One day I spotted an elderly, white-haired woman wearing a T-shirt that read, “What if the military had to have bake sales to raise money and the
PTA
got the Pentagon budget?” I walked over and told her how wonderful it was, her wearing a shirt like that. She laughed and said, “Some people have called me subversive for wearing it. But I don't care. One day we may owe our survival to subversive women.”

I decided maybe it was a good thing to be subversive when it comes to the heart.

One night as Ann and I watched a video of
The Wizard of Oz
, I realized that the Tin Man character, at least in the early part of the movie, seemed an apt symbol of patriarchal consciousness. He is a frozen figure, standing with his ax, his blade of power, in the air.

The story tells us he's lost his heart. He's lost the “juices” of life. Even his tears are frozen on his face. His ability to feel and relate at a deep empathetic level is gone.

Have you ever wondered how the Tin Man got into such a deplorable, frozen state? The book says the Tin Man was a woodsman whose ax became cursed, causing him to cut away his own body, piece by piece, including his heart, until he was no longer covered in warm flesh but encased in an armor of tin.

Through our lopsided valuing, we have come to labor under a “cursed ax,” under a patriarchal system that has cut away the body, including the heart, replacing it with technological tin. And like the Tin Man we find ourselves trapped in our own heartlessness.

SPIRIT OVER NATURE
I also began to recognize another imbalance in the values that women and men carry for society. For thousands of years the “feminine” has been deeply associated with the body, flesh, sensuality, earth, and nature, while the “masculine” has been associated with spirit, heaven, and transcendence over nature. Actually men are no more connected to spirit than women, and women no more connected to nature than men. The perception may have arisen from women's closeness to fertility, procreation, and the rhythms of nature. Women are tied to these cycles in a
way men are not. Women go through the monthly cycle of menstruation, just as the moon goes through a monthly cycle of waxing and waning. Through pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing we grow life inside our bodies, deliver life through our bodies, and feed life from our bodies. It has also been left to women to care for other bodies, tending the young, sick, and dying.

For these reasons, perhaps, women have represented flesh and embodied the earthly, and in doing so we've come to be identified with nature. Conversely, nature is thought of as feminine. We speak of Mother Earth and virgin forests. The connection is even entwined in the roots of our language. The word
mother
comes from the Latin word
mater
, which means matter. Mother and matter are both the stuff out of which everything is composed.

As I contemplated this profound connection, once again it became apparent to me which of the two polarities—nature/earth or spirit/heaven—was more valued. Both women and earth have been abused, raped, and disregarded.

The man's comment about my daughter in the drugstore—“That's how I like to see a woman, on her knees”—is not fundamentally different from a comment I've heard attributed to Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the age of reason. Purportedly he said that the earth was a harlot and must be controlled. In other words, “That's how I like to see Mother Earth, on her knees.”

In its flight from and fear of the “feminine,” the church has failed to waken to its “ecological self”—a term author Joanna Macy uses to describe one who has conquered the personal ego and knows that she or he is not separate from anything else.

An awakened ecological self is someone like John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Center, who says, “I try to remember that it's not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I am part of the rainforest protecting myself.”
⁴⁹

This awakened self has been largely absent from the Christian tradition. In Christianity there is a deeply embedded separation between spirit and nature, a split apparent in this verse from Galatians 5:17: “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the
desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other . . .” (
RSV
).

Patriarchy has viewed the earth as a fallen creation and matter as inherently evil, and Christians have used and misused scriptures to drive the wedge deeper into the human psyche. “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world . . . is not of the Father but is of the world” (1 John 2:15,
RSV
).

Consequently, in Christianity nature is not a primary revelation of the divine. Rivers, trees, and stones are not perceived as alive and permeated with spirit but rather as dead matter. The earth, then, becomes something to be conquered, subdued, observed, and studied. It becomes a big science project.

Because of all this, we began to think of ourselves as separate from and innately superior to the rest of the planet. We lost the ability to identify with it at deep empathetic levels.

In Christianity this is even further undermined by a sacred intent to transcend the material earth and the flesh of our bodies, as is suggested in a verse from James 1:27: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: . . . to keep oneself unstained from the world” (
RSV
).

Often the earth seems to function like a mere way station where we can grapple with our redemption before going “up there” to the realm of the Father, who is viewed as totally other than the earth and high above it.

Christianity's unfortunate denial of matter (mother) also includes centuries of denial and hatred for the body with its cravings, instincts, and sexuality. In my early twenties, while at college in Texas, I went to church one Sunday and sat in the back row beside a woman who was holding a newborn baby in a pink bonnet. Halfway through the sermon, the baby got hungry. Babies do that. So the woman discreetly unbuttoned her dress and nursed the child beneath the bill of the pink bonnet. An usher noticed this, came over, and asked the woman to please leave. He was the picture of quiet indignance. He told her she could find a restroom
down the hall. I can still remember the shame that spread over her face and the outraged scream the baby girl let out when the mother pulled her breast away.

Women with their incessant menstruation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation have been too visceral for patriarchal religion. In the Bible, women involved in these womanly conditions were considered unclean and were separated from men. They had to go through purifications before being allowed near men or things religious. And since birth and menses were considered dirty, women were in constant need of being spiritualized and sanitized.

According to the attitude that sprang up, women could not be both holy
and
sexual. And as celibacy became a spiritual ideal in Christianity, men were more and more cast as spiritual and women as sexual. Woman's role was seen as the temptress, the
femme fatale
, who lured “good” men into the evils of flesh.

Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether sums it up when she says that Christianity became “a body-fleeing, world-negating spirituality” that “projects upon the female all its abhorrence, hostility and fear of the bodily powers from which it has arisen and from which it wishes to be independent.”
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Despair and Compassion

One day I was driving through town, my head full of the ideas and awareness I'd been gathering, when I saw a woman sitting on the steps of a business, her head in her hands. She wore a navy dress and brown coat, and she was crying. As I drove past her I, too, started to cry.

At first it made no sense that I was crying. I didn't know this woman. Then I realized I was not crying for her or for myself. I was crying for
women.
I was crying for the vast imbalance, the heart that had been lost, the rejection of the earth and body, the oppression and diminishment of things considered feminine. It was a suffering with, a despair I felt on behalf of something much larger than myself.

I don't know what it was about the woman that triggered my despair, but for weeks after that I went through a period of grief. This is the grief that comes when you leave the city limits of your own wound and step into the vastness of the
whole
feminine wound, which is ultimately a human wound.

Forming an honest feminist critique of our own faith tradition is not an easy thing to do. Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep. It deposits a powerful energy inside.

Eventually that energy will flow out as either hostility or love. The energy must and will find a form, a shape, in our lives. It is now, as we wade into the secret distress of the feminine and encounter the largeness of the wound, that we need to be very conscious and keep the despair we might feel from becoming channeled into bitterness. We have to work very hard to keep it flowing toward compassion.

The Tamper-Proof Bottle

During those months when I was forming my feminist critique, I watched a friend struggle to open a tamper-proof bottle of medication. She gripped, pushed down, squeezed, and turned it many times without results. “You try,” she said.