The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (13 page)

So I gripped, pushed, squeezed, turned, grunted. But I couldn't budge it either. “What's wrong with this thing?” I said.

“It's doing its job,” she replied. “Only it's doing it a little too well.”

Later I couldn't help but compare that bottle to Christianity's rigid tradition concerning women.

The words
tamper-proof
and
tradition
have similar intents.

Tradition
comes from the Latin
traditio
, which means a delivery. The Christian tradition is a
delivery
of opinions, dogmas, rites, practices, and customs from one generation to the next. That delivery is its job. The essential intent within tradition is its need to perpetuate itself, to keep delivering, to remain untampered with. I thought to myself, When it comes to tradition, the church is certainly doing its job, but perhaps it's doing it a little too well.

Viewing tradition in this way, we can easily see why restricting women to narrowly defined and subordinate places reproduces itself, why change comes slowly or not at all or on the margins and not at the core.

Years earlier I'd taken a seminary course on church history, but nothing had been mentioned about its patriarchal underpinnings. Now I wanted to explore the tamper-proof traditions concerning women. Why hadn't the church accepted women as equal participants? How had all of this come to be?

Searching for answers, I turned to theologians Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Phyllis Trible, Elaine Pagels, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, and other women who were voicing truths that had once been unsayable. In the evenings I sometimes read a paragraph to my husband, just to test his response.

“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