The truth shall set you free...

The truth shall set you free…

 

But first it will piss you off.

 

That’s not my quote. I wish it was. It’s Gloria Steinem’s.

I sometimes start a semester off with that quote on the board. My students chuckle when I write the second phrase and I suspect they’re not quite sure what it means. That comes later. I never understood it when the Bible was quoted, but I understand it when Gloria Steinem is.

 

It is true that I have already lived a lifetime and have been through many cycles and phases of a woman’s life; little girl, adolescent, maiden and mother. And now I enter the stage in life that would mythically be referred to as the crone (still reluctant to admit I have already arrived).

 

It has been a while since I have been so sure about truth. But I remember when and how the arrogance began to lift. It began with books. I read three books that changed my life. Never again will I underestimate the power of an idea. The books were Beyond god the Father by Mary Daly, Women’s Spirituality edited by Joann Wolski Conn and Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals by Marilyn French. And there was no turning back. The first is a critique of patriarchal religion and theology in the biblical tradition. The second is an anthology of essays dealing with everything from psychology to mysticism. The third is simply a history of patriarchy and an examination of the rise of the pervasive, global assumption that women are inferior and require restraint. These books opened the door to understanding a history, a theology and an ethical world view that explained who I was and how I was shaped and how I understood my place in the world. And all of it, my history, my theology, my ethical world view were all based on a biased untruth; the untruth that I am an inferior being.

 

Reading these books explained for me the reason why I always seemed to feel as if I had to walk around apologizing for my existence. As if everything I said and did had to be prefaced with, “I’m sorry but may I say something?” “I’m sorry but I have a thought.” “I’m sorry but I have a desire.” “I’m sorry but I have a need.” “I’m sorry that I breathe.”

 

My students often ask, “Why have women been so complicit in their own silencing? In their own oppression?” The indoctrination begins before one can even think. It begins because every single adult that one loves and trusts has also accepted the lie. They are not malicious. They are not evil. They do not intend to make you feel as if you are simply not enough, but it begins when one is 7 years old and asks, “Why can’t I be an altar boy like my brothers?” “Why can’t I be a priest?” And the all-encompassing and totally defeating response is given, “Because you are a girl.”  And somehow that response is supposed to be the necessary and sufficient cause. It’s supposed to explain it all. I am a girl, so I can’t. “I am a girl,” made me understand that there was something inherently wrong or defective or lacking in the fact of being a girl. So wrong and defective in fact, that not even God found me worthy of approaching Him. 

 

Not all the messages are so overt. Most are quite subtle; sermons that glorify passivity and obedience in Jesus’ mother and that find in you not a reflection of God but a reflection of the mythical Eve whose actions stand as the most grievous and sinful of all time. There are the social and institutionalized barriers that leave you with four options for a future; secretary, teacher, nurse, wife and mother (yes, counted as one). And you put on the sex role expectations of your adult models and of your culture like a tightly buttoned coat. But you find that the coat won’t let you breathe, it won’t let you think, it won’t let you even discover who you would be if allowed to explore.

 

And you live this way for 20, 30 years.

And then some blessed, blessed woman writes a book. And you pick it up.

And the world explodes and presents before you a truth that lay hidden for centuries and you think that the very earth itself will open up to swallow you if you deny all that has been your former truth, your former life, your former self.

 

It is an epistemological leap of epic proportions and you don’t know if you have the courage. It is a crevasse. It is an earthquake crack. It is a mile wide. But already there is no turning back. Because the truth has already set you free and you are pissed off. But it is a life-affirming, creative, sweet and pregnant anger.

 

But still, it took me five years to take the baby steps that would become a leap.

I turned the old truths over and over again in my hand, reluctant to let go and I wondered if somehow I could fit them into this new me, this new world. I remember the exact moment when I knew I couldn’t. I made one last ditched attempt to make the two truths into one; one last time in which I would try to go to Church as an equal; as a God-reflecting human being. I brought my twelve year old daughter with me. When the second reading for the day began, “Wives, be submissive to your husbands,” I leaned over to her and whispered, “When everyone stands for the Gospel, we’re leaving.” And that’s what we did, though I made sure to grab her hand in the event that she hadn’t followed and I’d have to go back to get her. I realized then that I would not allow my daughter to hear one more time the message that would make her feel the way that I had, “women shall be silent in the churches,” “let a woman learn in silence,” for “she is saved through childbearing.” Woman was created for the sake of man (not for their own sakes); and man is the head of his wife like Christ is the head of the Church; it was the woman who was deceived because she was the weaker of the two; and God said to the woman, “Yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.” I didn’t have the Divinity School education to understand the political and historical and cultural contexts of the biblical passages when I was 12, and neither did she. When one is 7 or 10 or 12 and the priest reads “women shall be silent in the churches,” one does not understand the bias of Paul of Tarsus, a first century Jewish-Christian whose baptism could not even yet dismiss the gendered assumptions of his time. A child only understands that God tells her to be silent.

 

There are those who don’t want you to find your voice and they resist it in you. It is threatening because if you change, it means that they must. And they don’t want to. But there are others, the ones who love you, who are like cheerleaders. They rejoice in your self-discovery; they egg you on; they wouldn’tdream of silencing you or of squelching such enthusiasm; there are some who say, “you MUST go to divinity school,” even if there is no money. There are others who watch and listen and learn from your transformation even when you don’t think they are paying attention.

 

They know that this is truth you have found for yourself and it is setting you free. So they don’t mind so much, if sometimes you are a little pissed off.