I used to love the Bible

I used to love the Bible.  It was always on my tongue, in my thoughts.  Its words surrounded me with their beauty and insight and images.  Its stories were my stories.  Stories about an old man and his wife starting a nation.  About Jesus finding a coin in a fish’s mouth.  About the blindness falling from Paul’s eyes like scales.  About the world starting in a garden with two people, two trees and a snake, then ending in tribulation and judgment, fire and brimstone.

Every morning for much of high school, I would sit down at my computer and carefully choose a verse—a string of words, precious like pearls, which delighted me that day—and send it out to encourage a long list of people. 

But at some point in college, what had been life-giving cool water to me, what had been my greatest treasure, well, it became sawdust and ashes and desert sand.  It’s hard to describe what made that happen because it was probably a lot of things and some of them were my fault.  I became over-exposed.  I took it for granted.  I learned the original languages and started looking always behind the words instead of at them. 

But I also began to feel my treasure snatched away from me specifically because I was a woman.  I approached the Holy of Holies, but my toe on the threshold I was told: come no further, you are not invited here.  I don’t think that anyone ever told me that the Bible was for men, but it was guarded like water in a tower and carefully measured out.  A few times when I was thirsty, people said “let the men drink first” and handed me only the sandy dregs at the bottom of the cup. When I wanted to share the water, they told me that wasn’t my business.

I wrote a sermon once for a high school theology class, fully knowing the whole time that I’d never be able to share it with my church.  Of course, I never asked.  I don’t even think I ever admitted my audacity to anyone at the church.  But I knew what their answer would have been.  It would have been honestly felt and kindly meant, it would have caused everyone pain, so I didn’t ask.

My sermon was about Jesus’ love for his disciples in John 13, when he stripped off his clothes, got down on his knees and washed their feet.  Oh, how that love broke my heart!

But my passion for the Word didn’t seem needed, or wanted.  It was unseemly.

So I let it go.  I watched it slowly blur with misinterpretation, forceful exegesis, rose-colored glasses.  Until it seemed so out of focus it was painful to look at.  I just had to turn my face away.

But at night, when I couldn’t sleep, words would still slip over my tongue… “I shall not want… You anoint my head… surely goodness and mercy…”  “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels… bears all things, believes all things… never fails… I see in a mirror dimly… these three remain…”

I became invisible in church.  I never quit, but I had nothing more to give.  The scriptures too bright for my aching eyes, too hot for my weary touch, too holy for my sinful body, I whispered the words in the dark, and kept my face turned away. 

I put the screens of the prayer book and academic study between me and the holiness.  To protect me from the burning.  They held me up when I would have fainted from thirst and they provided a slow, small trickle.

But still, I couldn’t look.

Until now.

Last spring our parish priest approached me.  He told me that he had been reading this blog.  I had sent him the link so hecould see my book reviews of Charles Williams.  But he had read on.  He said he thought I had an important voice.  And he asked me to preach.    To preach.    A sermon.   In church.   To remove the veil, look at the scriptures, let the brightness shine full on my face and reflect it to the people of our church.

It’s the moment when you’ve been stumbling along a hot, dusty road and finally turn in at the garden gate, into the welcoming cool and green.  And you know you are home.  It may or may not be the home you started from, but it is yours to rest in for a while.

While I sat in J.J. Bean, the hippest coffee shop on earth, writing a sermon, tears flowed freely down my face.

God’s love still breaks my heart.

[[[The (partial) audio of my sermon this summer can be found on the St. John’s Richmond website.]]]

Food and Me, #11: Back to Business

Two months ago I promised you a description of my first attempt at cooking a meal from Julia Child's cookbook.  The evening went a little bit like this:  Sadness and frustration and feelings of insecurity about what to cook.  Depression about the thawed whole organic, pastured chicken that I had to eat before it went bad, but didn't know what to do with.*  Forlorn glances at the clock to watch the time tick by, passing the normal time for dinner.

Then, a lightbulb!  Mom just sent me this cookbook, why don't I put it to use?  Flip, flip through the pages to... Poultry...  hmm... I don't have a good casserole dish (or the time really) to roast, nor do I actually have a roasting chicken apparently... I have a fryer chicken...how about sautee, that sounds easy enough?  There's one recipe that calls for a white wine and mushroom sauce. Ok.  Then there are the eggplant and zucchini which are going to go bad if I don't cook them.  I had a different recipe for ratatouille, but I bet Julia's is twenty times better... flip, flip... or twenty times longer...  Well, here goes.

So the first thing I had to do was send Clint out to buy a pound of butter and a bottle of white wine.  The poor guy was hungry and probably relieved to do anything that would make my mood better (or get him out of the house where I stewed).  Then I got started.  There was a lot of chopping.  First I disjointed the chicken.  There is something peculiarly empowering about taking a chicken apart.   In a chapter on knives in his cookbook The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon addresses the woman who knows how to wield and sharpen her own knives saying, "you will be provided with an instant rejoinder to anyone who presumes to lecture you on housewifery as an abject capitulation to the feminine mystique.  Simply let him see you presiding over your kitchen with steel in one hand and butcher knife in the other.  Execute six well-drawn strokes, and his words will turn to ashes in his mouth.  He was ready only for a maladjusted prisoner of the pantry; you have showed him instead one of the priestly archetypes of the race."

On top of all that priestliness, I'm also taken over by a sense of curiosity when I buy a whole food and take it apart piece by piece.  A kind of "Aha!" moment washes over me when I see how the chicken breast is connected to the breast bone, when I learn the good order of how to cut the chicken apart.  First, sit the chicken on its neck and saw down either side of the backbone, then set it aside.  Then, carefully, so as not to lose too much meat, cut down the breast bone and separate the two halves.  Find the joint where the thigh meets the body of the chicken and cut it.  Then find the "knee" and separate the drumstick from the thigh.  Same with the wing (though there is often little meat on it, since meat chickens aren't generally allowed space to stretch their wings).  Then finally, as Julia puts it "So that the breasts will cook evenly, slip a knife under the ribs and remove them."  Goodness, if only it were that easy!  I kept sawing into the ribs or cutting  too far into the chicken breast.  This might be because I don't know how to sharpen my knives. ;)

Perhaps all that sounds tedious to you.  It's just a chicken.  But it fascinates me.  This chicken was once a live thing, unique and hopefully happy.  Now it's life is gone, but I go to all the trouble of carefully disjointing it, to give it a kind of new life as a fabulous dinner, then it will give me life via my belly.  Such an interesting thought.  This is why I delight in buying whole chickens.

One last note.  I mentioned that you should set aside the backbone and then there are those ribs that are littered with the breast meat I accidentally severed from the rest of the breast.  The other thing I love about buying the whole chicken is how nothing has to go to waste.  I put these things in my crockpot and let them stew with water and vegetables (the celery tops and rubbery carrots from the bottom of the produce drawer in the fridge) and herbs overnight.  Ta da!  Chicken stock.  I pick out the meat pieces for a chicken and rice soup or a chicken salad sandwich and only then throw away the bones when they're exhausted.

And it makes me wonder, when I buy chicken breasts at the grocery store, where do all the chicken ribs and necks go?  They don't seem to be for sale.  I think they remind us of death so we don't like them around.  Are they just thrown away?  Isn't that wasteful?  Think of all the stock that could be made instead...  You could feed a whole city with that stock!

Oh my.  I haven't even gotten to the part where Clint comes home from the grocery store yet.  I haven't told you about Julia's advice to pat the chicken dry, or how I've inaugurated a "raw meat" towel in her honor.  Too many things to say...

*It was a humorous conversation with the farmer at the market where I bought the chicken.  I sorted through to find the least expensive one in the freezer, then plopped it down without a word on the counter and pulled out my wallet.  "Have you ever bought one of our chickens before?"  The tall, gruff farmer asked.  "No, but I've bought organic before,"  I answered.  "Well, they're not like Safeway chickens," he warned me.  I tried to convince him I was aware of that fact, but he insisted on taking $5 off the price, "in case you aren't satisfied."

Twilight and me, Part 2: The Trouble with Fearless, Shameless Sexuality

Well, my obsession continues. For some reason, I’m not done writing about Twilight yet and I hope that at least some of this is helpful for you. I guess after all these years of University Education (and so little to show for it all!) I’m trained to respond to reading with a reasoned argument. Perhaps this is only half about Twilight and half about Twilight inspiring me to write about other issues around feminism and Christianity. Either way, both the reading and the writing are addictive.

In my last post, I argued that The Twilight Saga books are empowering to feminine sexual identity because they reject fear and shame as valid reasons to abstain from sexual activity. In this post, however, I would like to explore the dangers of this newly uninhibited feminine sexuality.

You see, I feel a tension, something pulling me back from really being able to endorse the books. As my friend Jen commented, Bella and Edward are so obsessed with each other and that can’t be healthy. There also seems to be something unhealthy about the addictive nature of the books themselves. The story is written in a compelling way to keep you turning those pages. Then there is the odd media phenomenon. The screaming mob that follows Robert Pattinson wherever he goes. The women willing to take off their clothes for attention from Rob and Taylor Lautner. The merchandise which bizarrely includes Team Edward and Team Jacob panties (But maybe I’m being too harsh about panties with a seventeen year old boy’s face emblazoned on them. I suppose they’re as good as a chastity belt. Any man who saw them would probably run screaming). Have these women collectively lost their minds? Was it such a good idea to empower them in the first place, or have we only unleashed the Furies?

As I see it, there are a few dangers latent in the unqualified affirmation of feminine desire. The first is the danger of autonomous desire or fantasy. It is not healthy for single women to read the books and just smolder in their rooms, dreaming of their own Edward or Jacob. The books are most empowering when women use them as an opportunity to talk to other women at different life-stages about the issues raised: love, choice, desire, addiction, etc.

It’s important that young girls also learn that desire is not an end in itself. As Luce Irigaray puts it, desire is best seen as the interval between men and women, the line that connects the two points. In order to love, we must be in relationship with people other than ourselves. It is not sufficient to imagine a million conversations with someone in the comfort of your own private world. You have to actually take the risk of getting to know them, entering into relationship.

Bella gets a lot of flack in the media for being with someone as dangerous as Edward. Meyer is adamant that the feminist element of the books is Bella’s choice. The writing makes much of Bella’s walk in the woods, about 135 pages into the first book, when she makes a conscious choice to pursue a relationship with Edward, knowing that he is a vampire. She decides to take the risk. Her faith is not completely unfounded: despite Edward’s dangerous tendencies, he never eats her because he also has qualities like self-control and respect.

Perhaps this is a pitfall of translating the books onto the silver screen, making words into images. Images that are not connected with human relationships can be abused because there is no accountability. As Edward goes from a complex imaginative character in the books to the handsome face of RPattz in the movies, we are divorced from any ability to look him in the face. Rob is completely objectified as the object of desire, while girls can allow their desires to go wild outside of the accountability of actual relationship. I have a weird theory that this is why Edward is present in Bella’s room at night. It is a stretch, but perhaps on a subconscious level, it is Bella’s accountability even for her dreams. She doesn’t have to fantasize about Edward or idealize him by night, he is right there with her in all his… imperfection. (This does not mean I advocate this behavior in relationships. Human males would not be able to provide this sleepless accountability. This is where we acknowledge that Edward is described in inhuman terms to accomplish something in the story that takes us outside the “real world.”)

The second major danger in the unqualified affirmation of desire is obsession: the belief that a person or a love relationship can be the solution to the struggle with desire. On this point, Irigaray argues that mutual relationship is only possible in an environment where there is a remainder, a part of each of the individuals involved in the relationship which is not consumed by the other person. The tension of desire never disappears, but it is controlled by coming up against its limits. She speaks of God, children, and transcendent spiritual reality, like that of angels, as the limits to desire.


Bella and Edward are often accused of unhealthy obsession with one another. They do spend a lot of time together, especially at first, but they also spend a considerable amount of time with other people: with Bella’s friends at school (thought it’s hard on many levels for vampires to have human friends and this is not as obvious in the movies), with Bella’s parents, with Edward’s family, and eventually, with their child. Perhaps even more significant, Bella does not cut off her relationship with Jacob after Edward returns—she is even willing to fight with Edward for it. Their other relationships form the limits of their relationship, as do their spiritual beliefs, like Edward’s somewhat vague belief in “preserving his virtue” through abstinence and through his protection of Bella.

Here, it is interesting how their close relationship goes profoundly against the cultural ideal of the emotionally detached “hook up.” The whole point of a romantic relationship is that it is exclusive. It ought to be between two people who experience a strong connection and a strong desire to spend time together. But I think that many people in today’s culture find even this simple idea puzzling and “obsessive.” It is also difficult for couples to maintain other relationships in today’s “dating” culture, especially relationships with singles. The “double date” is cool, the “third (or fourth, or fifth) wheel” is not.

In conclusion, my major concern for women who read the Twilight novels is that unqualified affirmation of desires is not healthy. We need the limits in our lives: limits of being accountable to the person we love and holding the relationship itself accountable to other relationships. The ultimate limit for Christians is our relationship with God. This is what I want to deal with in the last post. But in the mean time, an exhortation from one of the wise voices of feminine desire in the Scriptures:

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the gazelles or the does of the field,
that you do not stir up or awaken love
until it pleases.

and later:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm,
for love is as strong as death,
jealousy is fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
the very flame of the LORD.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
all the wealth of his house,
he would be utterly despised.
~Song of Songs 2:5, 8:6-7

Twilight and Me, Part 1: A Slightly Off-beat Feminist Critique of the Twilight Saga

 **Warning:  this post contains Twilight plot spoilers, frank talk about sexuality and it's more like a book than a post, but enjoy!**

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I’m sorry. A lot of my time and energy has been absorbed in the past four months or so with the discovery that I’m allergic to corn. ::sigh:: Corn is in everything, from store-bought bread, to anything with baking powder or powdered sugar, to just about anything that comes from a can. This has made life… well, a little hard. But it’s not that I’ve forgotten the blog. Not at all.

Over my reading break last week, I got a bad case of Twilight fever. My sister Katie is addicted to the books and bought advance tickets to the midnight showing of the movie. She showed me the first movie last Christmas when I visited, and I found it to be unbearably cheesy, if somewhat embarrassingly sexy. I flipped through the last book, which she happened to have sitting out, and heard her synopsis of the general story line. I was intrigued, but I dismissed it all as a bit crazy.

Until last week, that is, when I couldn’t get it out of my head. Along with millions of other women around the world, I was hooked. On Saturday night, I caught myself obsessively googling Twilight: New Moon, just to hear the latest news about this peculiar vampire tale. I decided that if I was spending so much time looking at silly Robsten pictures online and if I was a little too poor to go see the movie right away, I may as well see if Vancouver Public Library had the books available. I needed a break from academia anyway. I checked their online catalogue (several times) over the weekend, just to make sure. When the library finally opened on Tuesday, I was there within an hour to check out the first two books.

After running errands and taking care of responsibilities, I settled in. I lit a candle, curled up on my bed with the window open to the chilly gray air, the sound of rain on the eaves and the view of Pacific Northwestern evergreens out the window, and I devoured the first book within about twenty-four hours. The second was done in another 12 hours. I had resolved that I was only going to read two. I had other work to do, I am trying to plan and write a book for crying out loud and I was on the brink of “figuring out” what the book should be about. But I loved the first two books so much that I quickly snatched up the third and finished it over the weekend. Then, since the fourth book wasn’t on the shelf at the library, I read the author’s partial manuscript of Edward’s re-telling of the first book from his perspective, which is available online here. I was completely addicted.

I must admit that this went against all my better judgment as a lover of carefully crafted English prose and as a feminist. On the surface, the stories seemed to be such… well, brain candy. Titillating, but ultimately worthless from a literary perspective (the prose is very purple) and perhaps even misogynistic. But there was something compelling about them that pushed deeper than just their, um, weirdnesses. I took comfort, at very least, that I was only one of a huge number of women of many ages who were also addicted.

The basic plotline of the first book is that seventeen-year-old Bella Swan moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her dad, after living most of her life with her mother. She’s pretty sure that she’s going to be miserable. On her first day of school, she meets Edward Cullen, a strange boy who is exquisitely handsome but who appears to hate her for no reason. She’s a little hurt, since she’s shy and sensitive, but she moves on with life. One morning he saves her from a car accident with supernatural quickness and strength. Then, he ignores her for weeks, despite the fact they’re supposed to be Biology lab partners. She’s pretty sure he wishes she was dead. Suddenly, though, he starts talking to her again, offering to take her out. She’s suspicious, but curious about this weird guy with lots of secrets. As they start hanging out, it comes out that he’s a mind-reading vampire who has sworn off human blood but the scent of her blood is enough to make him want to break his vow. She decides that it doesn’t really scare her, and they fall in love. He’s a little old-fashioned (since he’s been undead since 1918) and afraid he’ll kill her if he loses control, so sex is out of the question, but they spend just about every waking hour together, and because of his handy vampire breaking and entering skillz, he also spends nights cuddling with her and watching her sleep. The complication comes when a non-“vegetarian” vampire decides he wants Bella’s blood and Edward has to save her life again. It’s a lot more tortured than that in novel form, but this is the gist. And that’s just the first book…

Having read Dracula in college, I was a little weirded out by the blatant eroticism of the storyline, especially in a book that claims to be about abstinence. Vampires are traditionally a symbol of sexual desire and transgression. Caitlin Brown provides a good feminist literary comparison of the two books here. To boil it down, she states that,

The vampire novel is suffused with desire…. The act of biting a victim, of transforming a human to a vampire, is inevitably linked to sex. […] The ability to turn someone into a vampire is usually the prerogative of the male, and so sexual power in the vampire novel tends to reside with men. The female heroine is often represented as yearning for the vampire to exercise his sexual power over her.

About Twilight she concludes,

whatever intentions Meyer may have had with regards to the abstinence storyline, desire in the context of the vamp novel is a means by which the female heroine can explore power and fantasy, and so the abstinence within Twilight signifies a denial of the power that comes with the fulfilment of sexual fantasy. Authority over both the sexual experience and access to power remain with Edward.

The odd thing about Twilight, though, is the nature of the desire that Edward has for Bella: he doesn’t want to eat her. Fighting against all his instincts, he protects her and falls in love with her.

Brown is not the only feminist to struggle with the books. Film critic Manola Darghis of the NYTimes critiques the movies harshly for gender stereotyping. Other feminist writers (here, here, and here) talk about the somewhat disturbing undertones of Edward’s violent strength, his patriarchal ideas of chivalry, his determination to protect the “fragile” Bella, his inexplicable presence in Bella’s bedroom at night (As in: how exactly is cuddling all night encouraging abstinence? Or even worse: STALKER), and Bella’s characterization as weak and clumsy, obsessed with a bad boy and always fainting and being carried around. I’m with them that generally, real human girls ought not seek out real human boyfriends who do these things. Bella is a far cry from the sassy, in control, Buffy. (Did you look at the hilarious video embedded in Brown’s article?)

But the truth is I’ve never really been a conventional feminist. There’s something missing from conventional feminism. It’s mostly, um, real men, who sometimes have less than desirable characteristics. And romantic struggle in general, which always comes with risk.

Whether it’s a stereotype or not, sex is, well, scary and shameful for most girls. Chalk it up to our nature, our nurture, whatever you want: sex is kinda dangerous. I’ll never forget the first time I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and found out that sex, at least the first time, is actually physically painful. That blood is involved in losing your virginity. That the woman though traditionally smaller is traditionally on the bottom. It was pretty scary.

But as if the pain isn’t enough, there’s also the shame that we’ve been educated into. Men have it easy. Their sex is on the outside, their arousal is easily visible. Ours is hidden, mysterious. And what is invisible is of questionable existence and validity in Western culture, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The Roman doctor Galen believed that emotional hysteria was caused by a wandering uterus that got loose inside the body. Where visual evidence was lacking, myth abounded. Women are made to feel shameful about their invisible sexuality.

What is striking to me about Bella in this context is that she is basically sexually fearless and shameless (And I mean that in a good way. Did you notice what negative connotations that word has for a woman?). Regarding fears, not only does Bella have to worry about regular male strength, but supernatural strength, strength that could not only hurt her, but crush her in an instant. Oh yeah, and he has a nearly uncontrollable urge to drink her blood either killing her or stealing her soul. And, as we find out in Breaking Dawn once chaste, married sex comes into the picture, bearing his half –vampire child is life-threatening as well. But for whatever reason, none of these things hold the power of fear over her. She is serenely confident that Edward’s love for her will protect her from his more dangerous side.

Bella’s character actually has an uncanny ability to cancel out Edward’s powers. Because of his love for her and sincere desire for the best for her, his physical strength and his power as a vampire (to grant death or eternal un-death) repulse him. They are curses to him because they hold him back from being close to her. His special power as a vampire is mind-reading, but he can’t read her mind. Ultimately, Bella holds enormous emotional power over Edward (even the power to choose to allow him to end his life, as we see in New Moon). Conventional feminism often ignores the idea that emotional power, while “invisible,” is significant, in Bella and Edward’s case, a matter of life and death. Their love relationship binds them together not because they hold the same powers over against one another, but because they hold opposite and equal powers.

It is also striking that their physical relationship throughout the books is basically in terms of feminine desire, focused on touch. They caress one another’s faces and hair, they kiss, they hold hands. But they basically have no bodies from the shoulders down, and absolutely never from the waist down. For all that cuddling in Edward’s cold, hard-as-marble embrace in bed at night, there is no telltale sign of male arousal to assault Bella (or the grateful readers). It is a vision of sexuality seen in completely feminine terms, without the phallic as the focal point of definition. Bella’s desire is evident in her blushes, her passionate kisses, her heavy breathing, her thumping heart. It is Edward’s sexual desire, his “thirst,” that is invisible and in question. The message is one of normalizing feminine sexual experience, removing it from the position of shame.

So here we have a male protagonist who is written entirely in feminine terms, and whose strengths have been subverted by this fragile, wide-eyed girl. It’s a subtly empowering picture. It turns the books into an affirmation of feminine desire, a sort of feminine re-education against the fear and shame that have previously been used to motivate feminine abstinence. The ultimate motivation for abstaining in the books, which Bella realizes for herself toward the end of Eclipse when Edward’s self-control grows weak, is respect: for her own sexuality, for his and for what she knows will protect him emotionally and even spiritually.

I don’t know if Meyer really thought all this through when she was writing the books, but I don’t really think she had to. It’s implicit in the story itself. But let me warn you, it’s one hell of a compelling story. You probably won’t be able to put it down either.

Yet to come (as if you still wanted to hear more!):  Twilight and Christianity

The deep, inarticulate reasons...

I was reading for a class that I started today called "The Moral Fit: A Fresh Look at the Relationship of the Sexes" -- the reading was Stanley Hauerwas, "Sex in Church: How Adventurous Christians are Doing It" -- when all of the sudden one of the deep, inarticulate reasons that I came to Regent washed over me again. I want to read my Bible again without being angry. That's why I'm here. Every act of interpretation in the presence of the Holy Spirit is an act of rebellion to reclaim the promises of each verse, rebellion against the Enemy who battles against the Church of God, trapping our minds in lies about their meaning. Well-thought-out, rational, reasonable lies.

O God, deliver our minds from all the lies that our culture tells us about what it means to be human persons. Deliver all the teachings of Your Church from our captivity to culture and its systems. Raise up men and women of wisdom to combat heresies, to speak Your Truth in an age that does not want to hear Truth, to speak it loudly and with heart-rending love in the very temples of Empire. Give them the gift of interpretation of dreams, give them the gift of advising the kings of the earth, give them discernment to re-tell the stories that give meaning to our lives so that we can see You more clearly. Give them the courage to walk through fire and pray in the midst of lions. May their blood unjustly spilt be the seed of new growth. Give us rest from the oppression of the Evil One. Give us faith to press more into You every day.

"Be present, merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night: that we, who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, may rest on your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN."
(Evening Collect, Australian BCP)

Revisiting Julian

Well, after those beautiful pictures in my last post, I've found myself at a loss for words. This summer so far has been a long road trip, two wonderful courses (Systematic C--on the Holy Spirit, Church, and Eschaton--and T.S. Eliot) and other escapades with Clint and Laura. For example, I learned when we visited Yellowstone National Park that Clint's colorblindness makes it impossible for him to see that I have a sunburn (or warn me that I'm getting one). Odd. Right now my to do list is a reading list...


As a part of that endeavor (and for my upcoming Spiritual Autobiography course) I've been making my way through Julian of Norwich's long text again. Every time I read it I have a very hard time with the initial chapters, which are a beautiful, but bleak description of the crucifixion. But if you can press through, these are a stark contrast to the joyful vision of God's delight in Christ's sacrifice and Christ's deep love for us which she describes toward the middle of the book.

Reading it again has reminded me how important her message has been to my own spiritual journey; her gospel of love and acceptance and her deep desire to explain sin and suffering were the first glimpse I have ever had of a theory of the atonement other than Substitutionary Atonement. Imagine my delight this year when I found out that her ideas are similar to Irenaeus of Lyons' explanation of the Recapitulation of humanity to God, one of the most ancient explanations of atonement. The most fundamental attitude of God toward man that Julian emphasizes is Love (and it is a capital-L Love she's talking about), and she specifically lashes out against those who state that his fundamental attitude is wrath. She describes that our sin does not change that basic attitude of God toward us, but that it changes our basic attitude toward God, coming between us and preventing us from loving Him as we were made to do.

Listen as she talks of God's love: "And with this our good Lord said most joyfully: See how I love you, as if he had said, my darling, behold and see your Lord, your God, who is your Creator and your endless joy; see your own brother, your saviour; my child, behold and see what delight and bliss I have in your salvation and for my love rejoice with me." (Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Love, long text, Chapter 24)

One common reason stated to explain why Christian women thinkers are not included in the History of Theology is that they are not a part of the idolized traditional "development of thought." Yet Julian's work is clearly connected to those great minds of the Church who went before her, and she adds her own beautiful flair. Perhaps one of the reasons that we ought to reintegrate women's texts into our courses on theology as we discover them in dusty, forgotten corners, is that they are a part of a whole new "development of thought." History is not yet completed; the Tradition must be taken seriously, but it is still living and growing. They rediscovered Aristotle in the Middle Ages and it changed the course of thought... It is time.

Where are all the women?

As we've been studying the interrelationship between Christian thought and culture this year at Regent, the most pressing question on my mind is: where are all the women? We started with the ancient Roman world, then moved on to study the Church Fathers, the changes the Christendom brought to the European West, and the effects of the Reformation. It's not that there haven't been any women, it's just that women's thoughts and observations aren't typically included in what academics like to summarize as "Systematic Theology."

Part of the cold, hard truth for me to confront as a feminist as I reflect back on this material is that in the ancient world a woman's daily life did not usually include an intellectual education, and even if it did, very few women wrote. But if we are historically honest, it was Christianity that began to break down the cultural barriers of the ancient world like gender roles. Many strong women have risen up in the history of Christianity: from Mary and Martha, to Lydia and Priscilla, from the desert mothers and early martyrs, to the women like St. Macrina who worked and taught alongside the Church Fathers, from the mystics of the Middle Ages like Julian of Norwich and St. Cathrine of Sienna, to the women of the early evangelical and pietist movements. Women are everywhere present in the history of Christianity.

But what about its thought? Systematic theology is too often thought of as a line of Western European men who refer to the (mostly) Western European men who came before them. I don't mean to diminish the work they have done, so many of them committed their whole lives to puzzling about what it means to be a Christian. But maybe it's not about tracing an absolute line of Christian doctrines through history, maybe it's about a few people in every generation puzzling it out again, using whatever resources they have (I heard a statistic this week that the average medieval scholastic had only 400 books to work from in his entire library, and didn't even read all of them in his lifetime. No wonder I feel overwhelmed in the library!).

The delightful thing for our generation is that we have a lot of resources that nobody had before. A girl sitting in a library in Vancouver, British Columbia can read books written 1700 years ago in Alexandria and Cappadocia. Conveniently translated into her language, even conveniently selected to reference the particular topic she is interested in, say, women in Ancient Greece and Rome, or women in Late Antiquity. She can begin to gather the women's texts that do exist and make sense out of them.

But all of this can be very distracting. If there are so many books, how do we tell which ones to prioritize, which ones are the "most important?" Are they merely the ones that most influenced Christians through the ages? What about the ones that have only recently been "rediscovered" or dug out of forgotten corners of very old libraries? Why were those considered unimportant for so many years and now considered of great importance? Should we reinterpret the tradition of "Christian Thought" to take a woman like Julian of Norwich seriously, or was she merely a woman trying to figure out her weird near-death experience? Did she herself ever expect for her text to be included and studied alongside men of the church like Aquinas or was she writing for a completely different devotional purpose? What is the ideal for theology--one of Augustine's sermons to new church members or a City of God? The Institutes of Christian Religion were a labor of love for Calvin, but have they also led some astray in their hunger to systematize "the answers?"

There are no easy answers to these questions. But to take a stab at the opening question: women were here in the Church all along, contributing to its life however culture would let them, and often seeking, in small ways, to make life better for their daughters. Because if it hadn't been for all those faithful women, I don't think we would have ever imagined a cultural moment where a girl like me could puzzle about these things as she plods toward a second master's degree.

My life in a Bibliography

It has been a really busy week. One of those coming-to-the-end-of-term weeks that I had kinda forgotten about. It has been a strange transition for Clint and I to come out of "real world" work and into the mental work required of grad school.

Let me recommend a few books, since that's my area of expertise right now.

First, let me recommend to you that you should remember to read a good children's picture book every once in a while. My personal favorite is a book called Miss Suzy about a squirrel. I've been surprised to remember how much children's lit deals with the real kind of pain we experience daily.

On that note, take some time to read a Young Adult fiction book that you haven't read since you were a child. I read Little House in the Big Woods and found it richly rewarding. Can I also recommend two books that I didn't read as a child but enjoyed dedicating an afternoon to now? They are Holes by Louis Sachar and The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin.

If you are a feminist who struggles how to deal with "patriarchy" in the Biblical texts without denying inherency I have two books to recommend: Discovering Eve by Carol Meyers and Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion by Margaret Y. MacDonald. They were very helpful to me recently in defining what my own biblical feminism is without devolving into polemical arguments about "women in ministry" or "women and authority." (My paper this week was on women in the early Church context, esp. regarding "reproductive rights")

Oh, and if you ever wondered if there were any women recorded in the first, hmm 1300 years of Christian thought, one great book to check out is The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan.

Hmm... what else. I'm beginning to sound like a librarian for women and children.

Can I give a hearty recommendation to read Julian of Norwich's long text Revelation of Divine Love if you haven't before? I know, I know, I'm biased, but I was looking at it again recently. SO rich.

Needless to say, after such a heady life, Clint was beginning to get hungry (since our agreement is that I cook dinner for him) and our apartment was a big mess. So this weekend brought to life a domestic urge. We are relatively tidy now and ready to face another week of reading.

Blessings in the many and diverse undertakings you might face this week!