Dismantling the Castle (and the Cathedral)

I haven’t written in a while, perhaps because I feared that if I started, I wouldn’t stop. My students and I have just completed the second week of a four week summer course and I am having the professorial time of my life. It is a course that has never before been offered at the college so as such it appears (now) as a Religious Studies “Special Topics Course.” Two offerings of the course and the department can petition the curriculum committee to make it a permanent addition to our regular course offerings. The course? Religion and Feminism. When my department chair and I began to talk about my offering such a course, he said to me, “You can do as much feminist theology as you like and it can be as Christocentric as you want.” I knew exactly, from the moment of that conversation, what I would do. I have distributed the four weeks into four themes. In the first week, we did a very basic treatment of the feminist critique of patriarchal religion; week two, feminist theology; week three, feminist Biblical interpretation and the fourth week will deal with religion and feminist ethics.

 

I am having a blast.

 

We have been reading many of the classic and seminal (I LOVE using that word in reference to feminist theologians) thinkers in the field, the mothers of feminist theology; Mary Daly, whose Beyond God the Father, published almost 35 years ago still seems radical and “edgy” to my students; the methodical and logical argumentation of Rosemary Radford-Ruether; the brilliantly articulated analyses of Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza; the passion of Carol Christ; the thealogy of Nelle Morton, the creative outrage of Judith Plaskow. We are also reading a few essays that describe personal accounts of the transformation of women, who have been re-awakened through feminist awareness to the betrayal and misogyny of the Biblical traditions, my own story included. As I lecture and as we discuss the issues of feminist theology I am captivated once again by the implications of this discipline, which propelled me to divinity school to begin with. I went to divinity school to study feminist theology because it was my own salvation, my truth and my hope. The other day in the classroom, as my students and I sat in a circle and discussed yet another profound implication of the analysis I blurted out to them with absolute delight, “Thanks for being here with me, Man!” Nothing impassions me more, nothing resonates more deeply and nothing brings me more intellectual excitement. 

 

This week’s theme of feminist theology had to begin with Mary Daly and the fundamental critique of a tradition which has elevated male imagery for God to the exclusion of all others, a practice which merits the charge of idolatry. The awareness that exclusive male imagery for God operates on spiritual, psychological and political levels was made imminently conscious in me once more and the affirmation was stunning. On the psychological level, exclusive male images for God communicate messages (to women) that make clear and superimpose a dualistic ideology that by virtue of being female one is an inferior creature, so inferior in fact, that the divine being cannot by any means be imaged in female form. Go ahead. Just try it. Simply suggest in familial or casual company a female referent for God and one will either be met with laughter (surely this is a joke), or with breathtaking hostility. I have already suggested elsewhere in this blog that this hostility conveys nothing of theology; it expresses nothing really of what people believe about God, but rather it demonstrates how people really feel about femaleness. How dare one suggest that the Almighty, the Wondrous, the Powerful be rendered through the image of so weak and inferior a creature as woman? It is unthinkable. Add to this the historical reality that with the exception of very early Christianity and very recent Christianity, women have been judged as unfit to mediate between the human and the divine, unfit even to enter sacred space, unfit by virtue of their bodies to enact the blessings and rituals of the community of faith and one has in place a religious construct that creates within women what Mary Daly calls a condition of “non-being.” 

 

In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly quotes a passage from Gregory Baum’s Man Becoming:

 

To believe that God is Father is to become aware of oneself not as a stranger, not as an outsider or an alienated person, but as a son who belongs or a person appointed to a marvelous destiny, which he shares with the whole community. To believe that God is Father means to be able to say “we” in regard to all men. (emphasis mine).

 

Mary Daly comments: “A woman whose consciousness has been aroused can say that such language makes her aware of herself as a stranger, as an outsider, as an alienated person, not as a daughter who belongs or who is appointed to a marvelous destiny. She cannot belong to this without assenting to her own lobotomy.” (bold emphasis mine).

 

How to articulate this condition of non-being to young men and women who (hopefully) have been affirmed as persons with independence and agency and strong senses of self? I stumbled in the attempt. A young man in class was filled with disbelief at the idea that a human being could be so lacking of a sense of being. I share no such disbelief, for I have lived it.

 

As I tried to respond to that student, I looked at the floor and took myself back to when I was 22 years old and stood in that four room tenement apartment kitchen with nothing to look forward to tomorrow but more diapers and home made baby food. And I tried to describe the emptiness and the despair of having been taught all my life that THIS was supposed to make me happy. But it didn't. I described a young woman whose thoughts, truths, and LIFE had been defined for her; a young woman who had been taught that her acceptance of these “truths” for her life determined whether or not she was going to be loved or accepted, sinful or good. I looked into the being of my 22 year-old self and discovered fear and emptiness. Motherhood is taught as the culminating event in a woman’s life; the event that fulfills her destiny; her opportunity for self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice always implies a death of some kind but in order for sacrifice to truly be characterized as enacted by a self, one must make it a choice, one must first BE a self. To define a person’s worth and dignity only insofar as they are in relation to another person is to place the other at the center of one’s meaning. I loved my son more than life itself, but caring for him was not an act of self-development. It was an act of other-development. An empty self, no matter the love, cannot engage in other-development happily. I was starving for intellectual, creative and spiritual stimulation.  So empty was I that in an attempt to fill myself with anything that felt like comfort, or satisfaction or agency I ate my way to a whopping 215 pounds. This was no one’s fault, not even my own. I learned my societal and cultural lessons well. But I delight in my own history too, because I unlearned them. And I unlearned them well. And somehow, despite myself and even in the midst of those years of non-being and in the years of unlearning, I (and their father) managed to raise two incredible human beings

 

And those who don’t? Those who define themselves forever in terms of mother or wife? Those whose sense of self-worth is defined only in terms of their relation to others (or more exactly, in terms of other’s relation to them) and not in a sense of their own personhood? You know them. They are the women who become bitter and nasty and envious or play the martyr. I asked my students that day, when I so clumsily attempted to describe non-being, if they had read Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Have you read it? Then I told them that the end of that story is about non-being. The character has come to the realization that she is a non-being and the despair she feels is only matched by the inability to even begin to know how to create one.

 

I fear that I have just risked being enormously misunderstood. How DARE I debunk the myth and mystique of motherhood by suggesting that it alone is not enough for any woman? How dare I demythologize the fabled “happily ever after” that is promised with the kiss of the Prince? I do so only in the firmest conviction, grounded in experience, that no one; no child and/or no man can “make” another happy or fulfilled. These are only to be found within a free human being who seeks after them for herself.

 

(Is it any wonder then, that in the Age of Patriarchy the wise old woman of ancient times has been morphed into the witch or wicked stepmother? Ha! And WHY is the mother always dead? Is it any wonder that the wise woman's   knowledge has been rendered evil (as in a poison apple)? Is it any wonder that the wisdom of the crone has been rendered threatening to the maiden lest she destroy the maiden’s blind desire for the Castle?)

 

To be continued….