Are Men Really Human?

Some very incomplete thoughts on "Is God Masculine?"

2008-03-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

Just another pointer to Blue Christian, where I posted a few ruminations on Is God Masculine? and related issues. They are very "beta" (that is, "in transition" thinking vs. "finished and polished" thoughts). Would love some feminist feedback.

Also, use Blue Christian's subject links to find Christian feminist Mary Stewart VanLeeuwen. I have a number of posts up by her as well, with her permission. She's great, frankly.

Elaine Storkey Fired... and Her Lawsuit

2008-01-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

I won't repost it, but instead will point to my BlueChristian blog for a news item regarding Dr. Elaine Storkey, an evangelical feminist, who was fired from England's evangelical Anglican Wycliffe Hall college (Oxford).

Since more of my feminism stuff is going there -- and at this point in my life becoming, uh, obsessional with me, I'll drop in here with any more pointers there. I did so much blogging here on feminism I feel it best to leave this site live still.

Jon Trott

Interview with Patricia Gundry

2006-09-26T21:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted an interview I did with trailblazer Patricia Gundry, one of evangelicalism's first feminist voices, on my blue christian site. She offers two free books of hers there, and tells an interesting, if not very happy, story about her and her husband Stan Gundry's experience at Moody Bible Institute in the 1970s... drop in on it and leave a comment there.

Can a Man Really Be a Feminist?

2006-09-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Sigh... I'm asking this question quite seriously. One fellow male, also haunted by feminist concerns, suggested recently that "pro-feminist" is as close as we men can get. In light of recent revelations -- aided by an articulate female professor who read an edited version (published in Christians for Biblical Equality's Summer 2006 Mutuality magazine) of my article this site is named after -- I discovered another layer of self-ignorance that needed peeling off.

Sure, the original article discusses race at some length (the edited one less so). But when I mention being propositioned by a prostitute in my neighborhood, I also mention that she was African American. As the professor pointed out, among other things, I (1) didn't really know whether she was African American, African, or where she was from, (2) seemed to link her race with my repugnance for her proposition, (3) offered fodder for the old mythologies regarding black women's sexuality, and (4) showed my incipient vulnerability to thinking racially by mentioning her race at all, especially when the bulk of the article does not mention the race of women (or most of the men) I discuss there.

Of course, I would like to say "No, no, no!" And in fact, her second and third critiques, while understandable, did not ring true to me the writer. The truth of it is that if anything I find women of a darker persuasion more attractive than women of a pale persuasion. That such feelings themselves betray a certain racialist framework I do confess, with a sigh.

But the professor's first and fourth critiques rang very true, her fourth most of all. Why mention the woman's color? What purpose did it serve? What did it tell the reader about me and my own universe? As I told her in an email, the lesson I take from this experience is that I am more than ever a white male still in transit regarding issues of both race and gender equality.

Finally, the online article in its original version (quite a bit longer than the CBE Mutuality version) has been edited by me here to remove the mention of the prostitute's race. I am currently unable to change it on another site (Cornerstone Magazine) due to a foul technical glitch locking me out of the article database (sigh!). And as a historical note only, the article was originally given as a seminar at Cornerstone Festival's "Gender Revolution" tent (2005).

Divorce, Violence Linked to Non-Egalitarian "Hierarchical" Marriages

2006-07-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Gender hierarchalists often treat scholarship challenging their preconceptions as bogus. But note should be taken of Dennis Preato's "God's Word to Women" site, particularly the recent posting concerning "Support for Egalitarian Marriage."

In summary, the article (bolding and color highlights mine) notes:

Extensive studies and research have been performed by marriage and family professionals, sociologists, and demographers. Over the last 50 years these studies reveal that significant numbers of egalitarian marriages are happy in comparison to traditional hierarchical marriages. A recent study quantified these results revealing that over 80% of egalitarian marriages are happy while less than 20% of traditional marriages can say the same. That represents over a 4:1 ratio in favor of egalitarian marriages. Spousal abuse continues to be more than 300 percent higher in traditional marriages than in egalitarian marriages.

These research studies accomplish the following: First, they effectively discredit any traditionalists’ notion that dismantling hierarchy destabilizes marriage and that the root problem in marriage is the unwillingness of each spouse to accept the role for which he or she was designed. Second, they prove that hierarchy actually destabilizes and harms marriages. Third, they provide objective data that egalitarian marriages produce the healthiest, happiest, most intimate, and stable of all marriage relationships with the least amount of spousal abuse.

On top of this, particuarly arresting to me is the idea that, rather than blaming rampant secularism for the high divorce rate among Christians (significantly higher than atheists' divorce rates!), the blame may be directly connected to hierarchical teachings from the very Church communities that should be the source of strength for married couples.

Also of special note, Dr. Diana Garland finds:

Wives, in traditional marriages, suffered significantly more depression and other mental disorders than men, working married women and unmarried women (Bernard 1982).

In traditional marriages, wives had been beaten at "a rate of more than 300 percent higher than for egalitarian marriages (Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz 1980)."

Violence is more likely to occur in homes where the husband has all the power and makes all the decisions than in home where spouses share decision making (L. Walker 1979).

There is much more there. Also see Christians for Biblical Equality's CBE Scroll blog for other egalitarian reactions to Preato's posting.

I hope and believe more such data will be gathered to, along with the fine theological work being done by CBE-related persons, help our community become the support for Christian couples it was meant to be.

Where's the New Posts?!

2006-07-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

Truth is, I seem to be blogging more and more on my http://bluechristian.blogspot.com site. There are some women's issues postings there, including reports on this year's Cornerstone Festival (2006) Gender Revolution Tent. That seminar tent, co-sponsored by Jesus People USA (the community I've lived in for the past 29 years) and Christians for Biblical Equality, got some heat this year from folks I'd describe as sociological fundamentalists. According to them, we're all goddess worshippers. (Hmmm... my wife's a goddess....)

Anyway, check out bluechristian for that story. I won't bail on this site, however. I'm working on a book right now, a sort of biblical marital devotional bit celebrating Eros. We'll see what I can do here, though, as well. Pray for me!

In Him,
Jon

CBE (Christians for Biblical Equality) starts bloggin'

2006-03-28T13:18:00.000-08:00

[This post also on my bluechristian site.]

Just a quick thumbs-up to my good friends and compatriots at Christians for Biblical Equality. They've got their first "official" blog, The Scroll, and the issues of women's equality, mutuality in marriage and Church, and worldwide injustices against women are all dealt with there. As far as CBE itself, consider joining, or even getting your fellowship to join... they live a very frugal ministerial life, often staffed by college students and working out of one of the few offices even smaller than ours at Jesus People USA / Cornerstone Festival. Oh, and did I mention that CBE also has a Fest '06 page dedicated to the CBE / JPUSA sponsored "Gender Revolution" tent at the festival?

Co-humanity as intrinsic reality

2006-02-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

A friend sent me this, which fits:

To what degree will we not be able to divorce ourselves from our co-human, even when we shamefully offend against our co-humanity? To the degree, says Barth, that there is no such thing as the human in and for himself, but rather he always exists in the duality of male and female. This means that all the other distinctions between people are relativized by this "structural differentiation of human existence", which casts a new and helpful light on these distinctions. The fact that God created humanity as male and female is the "Magna Carta of humanity", for it shows that intrinsically, and not in consequence of an imperative, humanity is co-humanity, no matter whether we contradict or correspond to our nature.

Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion, p.196

Rape, Inc. - The International Contingent

2006-02-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

Rapists are businessmen. See this rending PBS Frontline feature on the sex slave industry, where a man loses his wife to the traffickers. A woman testifies of her rape, being "broken in" by the businessmen intent on creating profit from her flesh. Deeply disturbing, but a must see.

2005-11-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

Confronting the Fundamentalist Within

2005-11-14T09:46:00.000-08:00

Today, a dear friend unintentionally brought me face to face with my own anger. I had sent her links to an article blasting her ministry as unbiblical and "liberal." Indignant, I was sure she'd enjoy ranting with me about their many logical and theological shortcomings.

Instead, she said merely, "Yes, I knew about the article. Could you join us in praying for them?"

The finger of God reached through her words to convict me! Not once had I thought of this most obvious thing, nor of the ideas behind it: "Pray for those who persecute you..." "Love your enemies..." Wow. The very stuff that maddens me about fundamentalists suddenly appeared within (gulp!) myself!

I realized, to quote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, "There's a powerful smell of mendacity in this room!" It was time for me to confront myself with my own fundie reactions.

What are some of those reactions?

1. I believe I am right.

2. I believe those who disagree with me often do so despite the obvious correctness of my position. This is highly irritating.

3. I mistrust their integrity. That is, to me it seems apparent they have selfish motives for holding their position.

4. I mistrust their submission to the Word. They seem to be injecting it with all sorts of meanings it does not have, while also ignoring meanings it plainly does have. That seems dishonest at the best of times.

5. I mistrust their realization of having been influenced by culture bias, the self-awareness it takes to fearlessly examine one's own preconceptions.

6. I don't want to pray for these people; they seem little more than cartoon characatures, theologically equivalent to a southern sheriff with a firehose, his watery blasts of Scripture keeping women in their subservient place. No, I prefer being angry at these people. They deserve nothing more....

7. I stop short of, but barely, of wanting to de-christianize such people, wanting them in effect evicted from the ranks of the faithful.

Now, that is a nasty, unloving bit of thinking.

My friend's reaction is doubly convicting. She, after all, is a woman. I'm male, and must never forget that on one level I will never know the singular experience of exclusion all too common to womankind. Further, it is not my ministry which was attacked, but hers. Yet her example speaks of grace, while mine speaks of the very fundamentalist mindset I presume to confront!

There is, I suspect, a male flavor to fundamentalism, a need to exclude and create borders. I assume by saying so that some portions of what we consider to be biologically male are in actuality social constructions. I also assume via biology and biblical texts that God did indeed create humankind "male and female" and intended that difference to lead to bi-unities of husband/wife rather than wife/wife, husband/husband. (It pains me to even have to make such observations, but alas, the charge of androgyny seems to continually get leveled at biblical egalitarians.)

This male exclusion / border thing is definitely a part of my own make-up. And when borders seem threatened, I find myself becoming angry. Behind that anger, if I can play armchair psychologist, is anxiety. And anxiety, of course, is really a form of fear.

"Perfect love casts out fear." Which just goes to show how far I have to go before I dwell in love as I ought.

Cornerstone Festival's FORUMS Now Live

2005-11-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

Issues covered in this blog are being discussed on forums I moderate for Cornerstone Festival. For a number of threads and articles posted as threads on feminism, gender equality, and the strange nature of male oppression, see the Gender Revolution section.

The Cornerstone Festival forums went live November 1 2005, and require joining (free and quick). Be one of the first to hook up.

Who Loved Michal? (Sermon, September 24, 2005)

2005-10-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

Who Loved Michal?

This is a story about a girl who loved a boy. The girl’s name was Michal. The boy’s name – we all know him – was David.

David began as a shepherd boy, then a musician in Saul’s home there to soothe the King with his harp playing. Maybe the girl noticed him even then, we can’t be sure. But more recently, David has become famous for killing the terrible warrior and scourge of Israel, Goliath. From that moment of mythic fame, where he kills giant Goliath with only a sling and a stone, our hero leads Israel's army in victory after victory. He is admired by King Saul, and becomes lifelong friend to the King's son, Jonathan.

Michal is used to privilege as the younger daughter of King Saul. She has four siblings, three brothers and one older sister. Though the biblical telling of her story doesn't mention her appearance, Jewish tradition says that she was uncommonly beautiful. But she is no more immune to David's charm than the rest of the nation, and soon she will fall in love with this Shepherd boy turned national hero. Who wouldn’t?

But even as Michal takes note of David, King Saul becomes jealous of David. Why? Because of a stupid little song he overhears some laughing women singing: "Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands." Underlying that growing jealousy is the knowledge that all of Israel is following David's career with great delight. The Scriptures even say that "all of Judah and Israel loved David."

But there's an even deeper thread to this story. Saul knows that David is blessed by God even as Saul himself has been warned that he is under God's curse for disobeying God. Saul is the first to realize that David’s rise is a part of that prophecy, and from here on it will be a power struggle between David and Saul, David's house and Saul's house. This struggle is not ultimately decided for years, and in the process, nearly everyone in Saul's family, as well as Saul himself, will reap destruction.

The great tragedy is that Saul never sees one glaring truth: David loves Saul, respects Saul, and though much later on is given repeated opportunities to kill Saul, refuses to do so. Saul's own jealousy blinds him to the humility that is David's most winsome characteristic.

So as the King ponders those words the women sang, "Saul has killed his thousands, David his ten thousands," Saul begins to wish for David's death. And at this early stage, Saul decides to let others do the dirty work for him. He figures the Philistines, Israel's enemies, will soon kill off this young upstart. So he does the politically expedient thing, and offers David his older daughter, Merab, an offer David with his characteristic humility seems to accept but only under pressure. After all, when still menaced by Goliath, Saul had promised great rewards to anyone who would kill the giant warrior. Those rewards apparently included, along with wealth and no taxes for his entire family, a daughter of King Saul in marriage. When it actually comes time, though, for Saul to give Merab to David, he hands her off to another man.

When Saul hears that his younger daughter Michal loves David, he sees an opportunity to set David up for almost certain failure and death. Scripture records the birth of this in Saul's mind: "Let me give her to him that she may be a snare for him and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him." How will Saul accomplish this? Saul sends messengers to David, telling him that Saul wants David to become his son in law. David protests that he is a poor man, and has no dowry to give Saul for Michal. The messengers return to Saul, and get further instructions from him: "Thus shall you say to David, 'The king desires no marriage present except a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, that he may be avenged on the king's enemies.'"

Perhaps Saul hoped the mutilation of Philistine warriors – certainly circumcision of their dead warriors would have been viewed by them as an insult to their collective manhood – might cause them to rise up in rage and crush David.

David, never one to be bothered much by unequal odds, immediately accepts Saul's bizarre request for a wedding dowry. He has no idea Saul dislikes him, much less wants him dead. And off he goes to kill a hundred men and gather the bloody gift required to wed Saul's daughter.

When David presents the 100 foreskins to Saul, Saul is shaken to the core. He also increases in his enmity toward David. First Samuel says: "But when Saul realized that the LORD was with David, and that Saul's daughter Michal loved him, Saul was still more afraid of David. So Saul was David's enemy from that time forward." Saul realizes God is on David's side, but instead of placing himself in the hands of God, he trusts in his own wily cleverness.

But Michal's love for David has some sort of additional dark meaning for Saul. What is it? Saul's fear is that he is losing his kingdom and his power. Michal is part of that power, not just a girl but a political asset. We know all through history that princesses were often given by their King fathers to those the Kings feared, or wanted to make an alliance with. But Michal actually loved David. And by loving him, she was unconsciously doing what Saul should have done. Yet I suspect – the text is silent here – that Saul is most troubled by Michal's love for David because it means she is no asset to him. Perhaps he could have hoped that she'd be a secret ally within David's house. But instead her heart has gone to David, and Saul by losing her is losing more power. From this point on, Scripture says, Saul's heart sees David as his enemy.

Saul sets in motion things that damage and destroy relationships all around him. And he does it all because he refuses to submit to God, to trust and love God no matter what happens, to receive whatever God brings even if it is losing the kingdom. Saul is us, of course. How often our hearts choose the proud road, choose to say "no!" to God, choose to manipulate others around us even if it means we will hurt them in life-altering, terrible ways. Saul's way is a giant sized warning sign: destroy your family, destroy your hopes and dreams and desires, destroy love itself… choose against God, and you can destroy it all… destroy them.

Saul turns to his son Jonathan as he begins to plot against David in earnest. But Jonathan is a singularly bad choice; David and Jonathan, Scripture says, felt their souls had been knit together as one. They had made a covenant with each other. Theirs was a friendship between two great hearts nearly equal in humility and in wisdom. And so Jonathan warns David—the first of a few such warnings from Jonathan that save David’s life—and David successfully avoids Saul for a time.

Saul next involves Michal in a plot to put David's home under surveillance at night, then murder him in the morning. It seems Saul forgot what he'd known clearly so recently. Michal loves David. And she warns David, then helps her new husband in an elaborate escape. First, she helps David escape by lowering him from a window – perhaps their bedroom was in an upper portion of the house they occupied. Second, Michal takes a household idol, likely a human-sized so-called Terraphim, and dresses it up. She places it in the bed where David was supposed to be, and adds a finishing touch with some goat’s hair for the head. She then tells Saul's messengers that David is sick. Maybe smelling a rat, Saul sends them back to get David bed and all so Saul can personally kill David.

When Saul finds out Michal lied, and that David is gone, he's beside himself. "Why have you let my enemy go like this?" Note how Saul forgets the plain reality of marriage, that a man leaves his mother and father, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. Saul's political mind sees in terms of power, not in terms of love. He can't fathom a girl loving her young man. All he can see is the threat to his earthly kingdom. Michal, of course, comes up with a pretty good fib, that David threatened to kill her if she made a fuss about his escape. One wonders if Saul believed her.

About that idol. How did an idol of some other god end up in a story involving the Jews, who were after all people supposedly who had only one God? Unfortunately, idols never quite go away in Israel all through the Old Testament. These Terraphim, as they were called, were rumored to be good for fertility – that is, getting pregnant – and some of you may remember that Jacob's wife Rachel swiped a Terraphim from her father as she and her husband fled him back in Genesis. The fact such idols were supposedly good for fertility does make one wonder if Michal is the one who had such a thing in their house. If so, it wasn't unusual, unfortunately. This idol problem, putting trust in things other than the One True God, is one that we never quite get away from. Of course, none of us today have idols…

David has to flee Jerusalem after Jonathan comes and warns him that Saul is out to kill him once and for all. David ends up with a rag-tag army running around out in the mountains. Saul comes to chase David around at times, but inevitably ends up going back to Jerusalem unsuccessful. Meanwhile, David ends up with two more wives. Michal is absent from him, not knowing from day to day if he's alive or dead.

Saul now does something that once and for all lets us know what he thinks of Michal, how he sees his youngest daughter. Though she is married to David, Saul gives her away to another man named Paltiel, also called Palti. This goes directly against Judaic law – David was still alive, and therefore remained her husband. Saul’s personal corruption is underscored by his disdain both for Michal and for God in giving her to another man.

This is where, quite a while ago, I first took real notice of Michal, of her pain, of her increasingly tragic life in this larger story of David and Saul. Michal, that young princess and lover of the shepherd boy hero, is now a pawn on a chessboard. Did Saul imagine he was weakening David by doing this, or that David would come rushing to attempt a rescue of his wife? The text is silent. I can't help but wonder if Saul knew all along Michal had lied about David's escape, and also knew that Michal had helped David rather than Saul. In short, I wonder if first and foremost Saul giving Michal to another man was an act of revenge against her for daring to choose David over her father.

Time again passes. Saul's kingdom continues to weaken. Finally, Saul himself, along with Jonathan and another of Saul's sons, dies in battle with the Philistines. David mourns Saul's death, and the death of Jonathan, his dear friend. And still more time passes, around seven years if I figure right from the different passages on this, as the last son of Saul, named Ish-Bosheth, attempts to hold onto the kingdom. Finally Ish-Bosheth tries to appease David. But David says, ""Give me my wife Michal, to whom I became engaged at the price of one hundred foreskins of the Philistines."

Consider Michal. Here is a woman who's father used her as a political bargaining chip, then tried to involve her in assassinating her own husband. When that didn't work, she was given away to another man. But in a strange twist that lends realism to this story, the man named Paltiel, whom Saul had given Michal to as wife, is heartbroken; obviously he truly loved Michal. He walks, weeping, along side Michal as she is taken back to David. Finally, warned to go home, he turns back. But what of Michal? Did she love him? Did she still love David? How confusing, how broken and twisted up, were her feelings? And how did she perceive herself?

We cannot know. The text is silent. It is so tempting to inject our own feelings, our own way of seeing in this 21st century, into a story that happened thousands of years ago and to a people who lived in a far different world. I'm tempted to become all therapeutic about this, to have Michal feeling things that a woman from our century would feel. Certainly this culture was male-dominant, with women often little more than property to be passed around. Michal was certainly treated that way. But what we're looking for is what God wants us to hear, and not a message that however true it might be, isn't really the central core of the story. I say that as more of a feminist than many Christians I know, by the way.

I must confess that as I read this story, I also wonder about David's motives. Was getting Michal back once again about power, the need to consolidate his own claim to the throne by restoring Saul's daughter to himself? Was there any real feeling left in him for Michal? Even if there was, could it be shared with all those other women? I’m left suspecting that David primarily wants to strengthen his claim to the throne by having Michal publically at his side.

Again, the text is silent.

We don't hear about Michal again until one last incident, the one incident most of us remember her for. And it isn't her best day.

David has been on a roller-coaster of emotions. From fugitive to King and now after a victorious battle against an enemy of Israel, he goes before the Ark of the Covenant walking and leaping and praising God, dressed only in a linen garment called an ephod. He isn't naked by our standards, but it might have been a bit like the President of the United States dancing and leaping and yelling hallelujiah while dressed only in a pair of long-johns. So as they came into town, Michal saw him dancing, and as the Scripture records it, "she despised him in her heart."

Oh, in her heart! In that secret place where only we and God dwell, where the real hopes and dreams, good and evil intentions, are birthed. And sometimes where love dwells unrequited until it dies, or is transformed into hatred and contempt.

Can love coexist with contempt? Can we love someone and hold no respect whatever for them? Humanly, I would say that happens more often than we like to admit. It is wrong. It is also reality. So I don't know if Michal loved David any more or not, after all she'd been through. Maybe she loved him, but as a warrior and King and hero rather than as the same man who once sang psalms to God while alone with the sheep in the fields. Maybe she loved him for the wrong reasons? Perhaps there was even agonizing self-doubt in her heart regarding the terrible way the rest of her family had ended up, and her own part in that end by saving David's life. I don't know. The text again is silent here. She might have had none of these thoughts.

What happens next one sees coming. As David comes up to the doors, Michal comes out to meet him. It isn't certain how public this meeting was, but it did take place outdoors, and possibly before a large number of people. David had come, the text says, to bless his household. But Michal speaks first. "How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants' maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!"

David, who is riding the crest of waves of joy and exaltation, probably feels this verbal assault from Michal like a blow to the gut. And he responds this way: "It was before the LORD, who chose me in place of your father and all his household, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the LORD, that I have danced before the LORD. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor."

When I first read this story, I did not realize this conversation had taken place in public. Because it most likely did, I understand more fully why David responded as he did. But that first sentence is so harsh, so much pointing to the fact that Michal's family was removed from power and that David's throne was established in Saul's place by God. Yes, it was absolutely the truth. But was it the truth told in love? Was David, at that moment, being loving to Michal? The boy and the girl are now a man and a woman, haunted by the specter of her father’s mistreatement of them both.

I think what David said had to be said because of the public nature of Michal's attack on him; whether she understood it or not, she was attacking his Kingship, and she was doing so not merely as his wife but also as one of the very few surviving members of Saul's lineage. There is a strange mix of humility, truth, and unyielding single-mindedness in David's response that hurts but could have also healed. How? If Michal could have let go of her pride, the wrongful pride that unfortunately reminds us a little of her father's pride that destroyed him, she might have understood what David seemed to. As he writes in Psalm 18:1: "I love you, O LORD, my strength."

This humility about oneself, a humility rooted in the reality that all trappings of power and prestige are mere additions to a mortal who will soon be dust, is David’s saving grace. Michal is not portrayed as having understanding of that side of David, the part of David that causes Scripture to record that he was a man after God’s own heart.

Michal's response to David's rebuke is not recorded. What is recorded is that she had no children until the day of her death. We don't, however, know why. Did David never again sleep with her as husband with wife? Or did David continue to love her, but her womb was barren? The text doesn't say.

It is important when we read many stories in the Old Testament to note that they are often descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, they record something that happened, they describe names, dates, and places. Many times they do not clearly draw morals or conclusions or offer teachings from what happened. They don’t always spell things out for us. The stories themselves ARE the teaching. We have to prayerfully read them and try to understand how the story of another human being in another time and place applies to our own story in this time, this place.

Michal’s part in the larger story of David and Saul is a small part, almost a bit role. But that role is very important for us to ponder. She is a victim, yes. A poster-child for insuring women are empowered in our own society, and more importantly empowered in our own churches. Otherwise, how can a woman love God when she’s not equipped to love herself?

Michal was a princess but she was nothing at the same moment, just a tool to be used by her father. Michal was a queen but she was nothing at the same moment, just a political link to legitimize her husband’s throne.

We’re to love one another as we love ourselves. I’m no therapist, and I’m not trying to offend anyone, but that really does imply we have to love ourselves. But we have to love ourselves truly, that is, for the right reasons. Michal was loved by God because God is love, and because she was made in the image of God. No one is forgotten by God. As Mahalia Jackson sings, "His eye is on the sparrow" and on you and me.

Why do we suffer? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. But I do know this. Jesus suffered. Jesus, who by being both God and man bridged this gap for me, for you, also answers the question “Why?” the best it can be answered. That is, He is the only answer we are going to get.

Virtually everyone here today knows to one degree or another what it is like to become a victim. Maybe only on a very small scale; someone being cruel to us in school or at work, an incident that doesn’t change our lives for the worse but does hurt and is remembered. Or, maybe on a very large scale. Some have been molested as children. Others were abused physically. Others were victims of neglect by parents strung out on drugs or alcohol. Others were victims of rape.

I have no easy platitudes to wipe away such pain. But I wonder if Michal’s story is a warning to us. We cannot control what evil is done to us through the hands of other human beings. People of color in our nation have been enslaved and or murdered at the hands of my own race. Michal suffered terrible things, but I think some of you here in this room have probably suffered even worse things. Yet some of those very same people have chosen to love God rather than fear him as someone harsh and cruel.

Who loved Michal? Maybe David did. Paltiel, that poor man who was briefly her husband, did. Her father did not. But I believe God did. And where I look for the evidence to back that claim is to the cross of Christ. Christ was a man of sorrows, aquainted with grief. He was loved by few while on earth, and murdered by so called righteous men both Jew and Gentile. Yet he remained love. He told us to love one another, as He loves us.

You see, the text is silent about Michal’s later life. It is silent about her, yet speaks about us, about our pain and pride and inability to forgive one another, our terrible failures to love one another. That is what the story is about. That, and it is about God’s love. God’s grace, that runs down over our misery and shame and sense of living lives without meaning, God’s hope that calls us upward toward him on the hard path of obedience, the path where as Tina said last week, joy and suffering walk together.

Like Michal, we may look back through our lives and discover key moments where anger and hurt turned to bitterness, even despair. We, too, can easily find people in our lives to blame. Our parents, our friends, and as Michal did, our spouses. We can even blame God, beginning to question whether or not He is a loving God or a harsh taskmaster. And we can choose to dwell in that bitter place, where we find ourselves trapped. Or we can face the pain of our lives, face the destruction others have brought to us, face injuries large and small, and slowly step by step learn to dwell with God as David did.

Like Michal, we cannot choose always what comes to us because of circumstances or because of other human beings controlled by evil desires who did terrible things to us in our past. But our freedom to choose is NOW. We can choose love of God. We can choose loving our neighbor. We can choose to live in pursuit of holiness and purity, even if someone once treated us as though we were impure garbage.

Or we can choose to do a most curious, tragic thing. We can choose to revenge ourselves on someone else by being bitter, angry, and unforgiving. But this is no different than someone using a razor blade to mutilate themselves. The comfort is short-lived, the blood we draw is our own, and the scars always increasing.

It may even turn out that our bitterness has hidden hard truths from us. I’m not speaking to victims of rape, or incest, or violence here. But maybe in some other cases those we blame aren’t the evil monsters we thought they were. Maybe they, too, were simply human and carried their own wounds. And in a few cases, maybe it will even turn out that we, not they, were the victimizers.

Grace is a scarey place. We don’t get to wear white hats and black hats, be good guys and bad guys, hold on to our hurts and bitterness like they are treasure instead of poison. Let it all go, and fall into your Father’s arms. Dare to be innocent again, to be a child and admit that all you really want is what God has.

"Threads of Compassion": Outreach to Rape Victims and Other Victims of Sexual Violence

2005-09-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

Most of my posts here are when I'm wearing my melancholy "downer" hat. But this one is a post that urges involvement and action instead. A dear friend of mine has started an outreach to sexually abused women that is so simple, yet so brilliant, I feel compelled to offer her description of it in toto below. Please do get involved. Imagine a woman, isolated in her confusion, misplaced shame and guilt, rage and pain. Then imagine her being given a gift from another woman who has also suffered these things, a gift thats very nature speaks of comfort, mutuality, and protection.... Read on. And consider, please, getting involved.

Jon

--- ** ---

Threads of Compassion is a loosely connected group of survivors of sexual violence who desire to offer comfort and support to recent victims. The idea is simple. Anyone whose life has been affected by sexual assault or abuse is welcome to knit or crochet a scarf which in turn will be given to a victim of sexual violence when they enter the hospital for emergency treatment.

Having been through similar experiences ourselves, our hope is to offer support at a time when a person is feeling forsaken, fearful, and extremely vulnerable, and in a simple way let them know they are not alone. So many people are lost in how to respond to friends and family members that have been victims of sexual abuse or assault, so they opt to do nothing. Their fear of adding more pain by saying or doing the wrong thing results in silence. This silence is heartbreaking to the victim...a silence that offers no validation to the pain they are going through and that adds to their feeling of isolation.

The silence produces shame.

One of the main goals behind Threads of Compassion is to break through this silence by acknowledging the pain. The gift of a scarf not only shows the knitters/crocheters concern for the victim, but also expresses their sorrow for what has happened. Each scarf is made by someone who wishes to provide a small amount of comfort against the pain being faced, and by doing so, lets the victim know they are not alone. The scarves are tangible objects that can be held, wrapped around the neck or shoulders, with the deeper meaning known only by the wearer. As each victim touches the threads of the scarves they receive, they are connecting with someone who cares about what has happened to them. A huge message given through a few threads of yarn.

The added beauty of the scarves is that the gift is actually two-fold. Through making the scarves, survivors are provided an opportunity to help other victims (in a very non-threatening way). Everyone remains anonymous. Those who knit the scarves never meet the specific people who receive their scarves. That is all handled through the local rape crisis center. Most hospitals now contact victim advocates when sexual violence victims come into the ER, and it is through this staff that the scarves will be presented to the victims. Each scarf will have a small card attached to it that explains the idea behind Threads of Compassion and information on how to contact their local crisis center if they need further help or support.

If you would like to contribute a scarf, please do. We would be honored to receive them. Anyone whose life has been affected by sexual assault or abuse is welcome to make and send a scarf. Whether scarves are done by survivors, or friends and family members of survivors, it does not matter, (scarves can also be made in honor of friends who were raped, family members who suffered sexual abuse, etc.).

The scarves do not have to be any specific length, color, or masterpiece. We do ask that you try to make the scarves out of very soft yarn that can be held close without feeling rough to the skin. There are numerous scarf patterns that are very easy to knit or crochet, and can be made by any beginner. To the left is a list of links to various web sites that offer free scarf patterns, and a one site that offer instructions in how to knit with free on-line knitting videos.

After you have made your scarf feel free to mail it to us.
Send it to Threads of Compassion / 920 W. Wilson Ave. / Chicago, IL 60640.

Another option is for you to set up your own chapter of Threads of Compassion. Simply contact your local rape crisis center and see if they would be willing to be involved in handing out your scarves. The only request we have is that you let us know if you are able to do this, (that way we can refer others in your area to your group).

If you have any questions or comments feel free to email us at: threads_of_compassion@yahoo.com

Pathetic Phallic Gawds

2005-08-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

We men are relentless in framing both sex and religion in male-centric terms. Sadly, we often have little or no realization that we're doing so. This depressing and rather explicit in spots riff on Eric Gill, the artist, picks up where my "Are Men Really Human?" essay left off, as it only offered Gill a paragraph or two.

Here is an expanded version of those concerns/observations.

Below is a drawing that artist Eric Gill did of himself, either slyly or despairingly entitling it "The Artist and the Mirror." It seems to indicate that women were always on Gill's mind. Yet in spite of his own verbal and artistic allegiance to Christianity (Catholicism in particular), I believe Gill's real allegiance was to his own penis. As someone who loves the sensual and sexual myself, I offer this overview of Gill as a sort of warning to both myself and others who love Eros and also Agape.

Eric Gill (1882-1940) was an artist, Christian, philospher, communitarian, and celebrator of sexuality. As I have noted before in passing, when I first discovered Gill's legacy, I was sure I'd encountered a like-minded soul, a man who wanted to balance a celebratory sexuality with a fervent trust in Christ. Gill's communal roots also seemed initially a parallel to my own 28 year sojourn in community (Jesus People USA). But as I continued reading on Gill, I discovered that his life had been filled not with celebration of marital sexuality, but rather the adoration of his own genitals.

Gill saw Jesus as a phallic gawd who (excuse me) penetrated Christians and the Church. As he himself said (and excuse the 'f' word),

“I wish I could get you to see the point about Christianity – e.g. when we ‘Marry’ we don’t say to a girl: Madam you realize what we are the embodiment of an idea (or do you?). We say: darling, we two persons are now one flesh – or words to that effect. It’s a love affair first and last. Joining the Church is not like joining the I.L.P. or the 3rd International. It’s like getting married and, speaking analogically, we are f *** ed by Christ, and bear children to him – or we don’t. The Church is the whole body of Christians – the bride. Economic implications follow and are very numerous, but they follow. They are implications not explications” (Letter from Eric Gill to Reyner Heppenstall, September 12, 1934, Eric Gill, MacCarthy, p.162).

Gill makes a few errors here. He draws a parallel between marriage and conversion which initially is good (Paul, for instance, also draws that analogy in Ephesians 5). But Obviously Gill's allegiance to the phallus greatly influenced this idea, to its detriment. We are not sexually joined to Christ. We are joined to Christ in a mystical "oneness" that parallels what happens in marriage sexually (the two become one flesh). But Gill makes the terrible error of putting Eros over Agape, and sexualizing God. This same error is made by others, including the rather infamous Children of God/Family of Love group. By doing this, I would note that God truly becomes patriarchal in a way never hinted at in Scripture; Gill's gawd is indeed a phallic deity, illustrated at one point in Gill's trilogy of works "Earth Waiting," "Heaven Descending," and "Earth Receiving." Earth is a woman, Heaven is Christ, descending with an erection to penetrate Earth/the Church/the feminine.

While I am not in the school that says all his artwork ought to be trashed as the results of McCarthy's expose of his sexually abusing women, neither am I able to divorce that art from his personal phallus-worship. For instance, a beautiful drawing Gill did of a naked woman taking a bath could, I believe, be viewed with purity by some Christians. But when one discovers that the woman is, in fact, his own daughter Petra, and that he committed incest upon her, all charm the drawing had is lost. Context, for this viewer at least, is everything.

As a male trying to learn what it is to be a feminist, I must object to the idea that artists are allowed freedoms no one else is. For instance, the Woody Allen seduction of Mia Farrow's adopted daughter was to me a monstrous crime; he seems just another reactionary jerk with artistic talents and the gift of being darkly funny. Likewise, Gill seems nothing more to me than a man who idolized himself, and as he did so was exposed as being incredibly immature and selfish.

He went to absurd degrees in this. Gill often wore a loose-fitting robe, a monk-like cassock, with nothing on underneath. This allowed him to sit and stand in ways that would expose his penis to any or all near him. It would seem obvious to any half-impartial observer that the sudden, unasked-for exposure of one's male genitals to women is the act of someone incredibly self-absorbed. It is also the act of a man unable to understand the effect such a thing would have on the woman / girl victimized by it, and frankly uncaring about any destructive outcome. As Fiona McCarthy notes in her biography of Gill,

“There is also the suggestion that Gill’s once-so-shocking sexiness – the ‘penis treatment’ visitors to Pigotts came to call it – was by this time verging on the boring, the banal. Indeed the sight of Gill’s male member, all too obviously visible to his young niece seeing him from floor level as he sprawled in his chair in the sitting room at Pigotts, put her off the whole idea of marriage” (Eric Gill, MacCarthy, p.271).

Gill experimented with both his sisters, his daughters, group sex, and homosexuality, not to mention experiments with a dog. There is, McCarthy says, some sign that Gill knew all this was gaining mastery over him, and that he was deeply conflicted about it. Yet there is also little evidence that he ever repented -- that is, turned away from the abuse of women sexually -- and attempted to make his inner life a reflection of the faith he claimed to hold.

What are the lessons one can learn from Eric Gill? I can only speak for myself, but here is a short list:

1. All my flowery language about God and sexuality must always give way to God's own Words about sexuality's limits and even dangers. Sex divorced from God is intrinsically going to become abusive.

2. Sexuality is not the point of marriage; even in marriage, Agape and not Eros is Lord. Otherwise, one partner (far too often, the male partner!) will treat his spouse with contempt, as an object upon which to work his desires and then call them "love."

3. Prudery is not the answer to an Eric Gill. Rather, the Song of Songs' attitude, rooted in relational sexuality which is about the entire person and not merely (or even primarily) about the penis, is the proper and effective antidote.

4. On this planet, artists get away with everything because they are viewed as "gifted," and therefore exempt from moral law. In the Coming Kingdom, artists will be judged with greater severity than the rest of us, because like it or not, they are teaching and preaching. We should never excuse an artist's rape, incest, or adultery on the grounds that they are, as artists, prone to such things. What nonsense! They're no more prone to such things than the rest of us with big libidoes and selfish inclinations.

5. Christians like Gill who replace the Agape God with a phallic gawd ought to be treated as unbelievers. Women the world over suffered through history at the hands of this phallic, occultic group. Men who love Jesus Christ should learn to love their own bodies as God loves them, to rejoice in their genitals without deifying them.

Well, I still don't know that I've finished with Eric Gill. Sometimes, one's disappointment and shock requires repeated expression before being able to move on.

With that, I do hope one day to find a truly mature believer as talented as Gill was, but who loves his God first, his wife second, and the wonder of sexuality third. Only then will I feel as though I've found a Christian hedonist worth looking up to. Maybe it will have to be a woman, come to think of it.

---

Added: I found a post, "Pornography and the Desire for Beauty," on "Jolly Blogger" that seemed to me to have some applicability to the above riff on Gill's approach to art and beauty. No idea if the folks at JB would appreciate my feminist leanings or not, but at any rate, their observations here are worthwhile IMO...

A Friend Offers More on Who Was with Jesus at the Cross

2005-08-17T17:08:00.000-07:00

A good friend of Carol's and mine, Chelsea DeArmond works with Christians for Biblical Equality editing and writing.

Here was an email offering she sent only to us, which I then hijacked for this blog (with her somewhat embarrassed permission!).

--- ** ---

This strange configuration of absence and presence at the cross is quite a puzzle, especially when viewed through the lens of gender. Perhaps the most striking absence is that of God, depending on how you interpret Jesus’ cry, “Why have you forsaken me?” Here’s a riff on suffering and absence at the cross (and the cradle) from Mary’s perspective.

Pieta

You were bloody
when I first brought you to my breast
and you’re bloody now
above me
blood
flowing as freely
as wine at a wedding.
our cries mingle
once more
for now
no comfort comes
and your father isn't here to stop
the bleeding.

(c) 2005 Chelsea DeArmond, all rights reserved

Cranky with Focus on the Family

2005-08-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry I'm such a crank when it comes to James Dobson and Focus on the Family. Really. Dobson did author one book, Love Must Be Tough, that helped me when my first wife left me. And I've read other helpful things he and others at Focus have written and/or said.

But here we go again. When it comes to gender, I'm so pained by what Focus has to offer. And I would note that Focus' positions tend to mirror the majority opinion among evangelicals.

Rob Jackson, writing on Focus' Pure Intimacy site, refers to Ephesians 5 (one of my favorite chapters in all Scripture, yet also one misused regularly by non-egalitarians):

This truly is a mystery and you might be having a hard time comprehending what it means. For starters, Paul’s analogy is a means of teaching men how to be a type of Christ and women how to be a type of the Church. Husbands are taught by the Greatest Lover how to live sacrificially toward their wives. Wives are inspired by God’s love to yield themselves in safety, treasured by both the One they await and the one who holds them in this life.

Oh, my. That's a dangerous half-truth. Yes, indeed. Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, laying his life down for us. And wives are encouraged to obey their husbands as we obey Christ. Yet there are two points left out here that make me wanna howl.

The first is this: There is no indication by Jackson/Focus that the reverse is also true. That is, that husbands ought to obey their wives as we obey Christ, and that wives ought to love their husbands as Christ loved the church. Think about it. Is that not true? How, in fact, could it NOT be true? Should wives not love their husbands as Christ loved the church? Sigh. My one exception in both cases has to do with the totality of what is meant by either "obey" or "love" in contexts where abuse, rampant adultery, or other issues involving blatant sin by one partner are at play; a wife (or husband) is not required to submit to physical abuse as an act of Christian love, for instance. But that exception applies equally to both genders. Apart from it, I can see no logical or biblical reason why the command given specifically to husbands (to love) and to wives (to obey) in this passage would not also apply to the other gender in each case.

Second is this: The verse leading into this entire section regarding husbands and wives says very bluntly, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph. 5:21). Thus, before we even enter into what is actually an analogy Paul is drawing, he short-circuits any non-egalitarian interpretation of that analogy.

Yet Focus on the Family, along with many, many others, continues to promote these misreadings.

Sometimes, the more subtle this gender exclusion is, the more irritating I find it. For instance, consider this snip, again written by Rob Jackson, and concerning marriages where one or both partners are suffering the effects of previous abuse and/or injury. He attempts to address the means by which God brings healing through each partner to the other:

One of the most delightful ways God does this job of restoration is by utilizing each spouse as a “type” or model of what the other one was hurt by and now needs. For example, the Christian husband can be a picture of God: Father, Brother, Husband, and be used to restore the wounds others (and, perhaps, he himself) have inflicted upon his wife. The godly wife, reaching out to her hurting husband, can help him to plumb the depths of his pain that have locked him up.

I find this well-meant, but deficient. The first half of the paragraph I have no problem with... a Christian husband can in fact be a picture of God in restoring his wife and healing her wounds. But here's the maddening part: I was waiting to hear the wife could be a picture of God for the husband! And of course, she cannot be. Because to be a picture of God implies (a) that God has a feminine as well as masculine side, (b) that woman, like man, is made in the image of God, and (c) that a marriage is non-hierarchical in nature. Sigh.

Then there's the issue of being a "picture" vs. actually becoming God's hands. I'm a Protestant, but deeply resonate with Catholic ideas on incarnating Jesus. So, let me offer an admittedly clunky rephrasing of the paragraph that would, to me, more adequately mirror God's heart toward both genders:

One of the more delightful ways God works restoration within marriage is through each spouse as a conduit of His Spirit, the actual embodying of God for the other. For example, the Christian husband can visibly act as God: Father-God, Brother-Christ, Mother-Spirit, restoring wounds others and perhaps he himself inflicted upon his wife. The Christian wife, reaching out to her hurting husband, also becomes God's hands and heart: Parent-God, Sister-Spirit, Brother-Christ, helping him plumb the depths of pain that have him jailed.

I claim no literary or theological perfection to the above. But I do think evangelicals can best honor Scripture by discovering its heart.

A final note: despite the abysmal lack of understanding on gender issues often displayed by Focus on the Family, I am not suggesting their ministries are without value. Far from it. Their anti-pornography materials are worthwhile, for instance, as is some of the familial / marital counsel they offer. But even there, this imbalanced view of humankind is reflected. And that, alas, is unlikely to change any time soon.

2005-08-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

"Rusted Twists and Turns"

Hero Games

2005-08-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

Hero Games

Self-delusion is a universally-exercised rite of humanity. No amount of sincerity, compassion, or skepticism can wholly protect from its seductive dangers. Sincerity, in fact, reeks of self-delusion. Hitler was sincere.

When I consider the narratives offered by Christians against feminism, self-delusion seems self-evident. There is nothing as effective as religion to justify oppression and deafen the ear of the hearer to the screams and death-rattles of the victim. Thus a religion unique in its emphasis on God as Love, singular in its definition of love, intent on erasing social boundaries in the creation of a new Community of Love, is turned on its head to become a society not unlike Orwell's Animal Farm, where "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

But frankly, dialogue with the theologians of patriarchy is rarely possible or profitable. They exist in such delusion, which seems only reinforced by any attempt to free them from it. Their elaborate theological bulwarks rise up like sacred phalluses over the flocks who, in pathetic fear, huddle around the aging white males from whom such erections emanate. Entire denominations march bravely backward, removing women from preaching, teaching, and even the mission fields. Evangelism takes a back seat to sexism, and all levers of power are concentrated into the hands of the women-haters.

They are blissfully sure of themselves and their interpretation of Scripture, an interpretation which unfortunately many in the world believe is the only one available. Andrea Dworkin, that poet of feminine pain, herself a rape victim, rarely spoke of God at all except as a celestial Misogynist. And considering what Christians offered her, that seems a logical conclusion to draw. Radical feminists may have their own delusions, but many of those delusions are rooted in the distortion caused by almost unendurable pain, the pain many Christians refuse to admit exists.

Pain does tend to distort what is seen. Yet pain is also one potential antidote to self-delusion. It is the comfortable and privileged most in need of self-blinding narratives that explain reality in ways confirming their rights to maintain privilege. The oppressed, on the other hand, are shocked into awareness over and over again by their systematic exclusion, abuse, and ultimately dehumanization at the hands of the privileged.

Jesus on that cross was the most self-actualized Person of all time, literally having become Love. Yet few of us would trade places with him, despite the fact that he told his followers to "Take up your cross and follow me."

No, when I consider self-delusion, I am forced to a mirror. How many layers of delusion do I have? How far down does this elaborate game I play with myself go? I'm filled with such cow poop. So often, what I do is merely posture!

See Jon. See Jon fight. See Jon fight for justice. See Jon fight for women. Brave Jon! Good Jon!

Yet what have I sacrificed? My reputation? My well-being? My very life?

Hardly.

And what have I suffered? It is so hard for a white American male to truly suffer. The whining done on various "men's movement" pages makes that abundantly clear. We, as a sex, have very little idea what it means to suffer.

The radical feminists cause us great pain; they aren't interested in grace but in justice. (Truth be told, I suspect they'd be far more interested in grace if white evangelicals were more interested in justice.) I have to laugh, angrily, when I read Christian discussions on pornography that quote Andrea Dworkin's work, then attempt to selectively take only that portion of her work out of the context of the rest of what she said. Dworkin's power and rage against pornography was part and parcel of her critique of patriarchy overall, and it is a pathetic thing to victimize her once again on a Procrustean bed of reductionism.

All of us men are playing Hero Games. No matter what side of the feminist divide we choose. We choose! The women do not choose, not as freely and almost casually as we do. And there is the difference. The whole thing costs us... nothing.

My personal solution to this dilemma does not exist. All I can do is keep slapping myself awake by reading the writings and listening to the voices of women who are awake. And, with the most extreme attempts at a humility frankly beyond me, attempt to pursue the one man who loved women truly.

The men failed Jesus -- literally falling asleep -- in the Garden of Gethsemane. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." Yet the men could not. "Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is betrayed..."

At the cross, his terrible suffering drew his fellow sufferers to him: His mother, to whom it had ben promised that because of Jesus, "a sword will pierce your own soul"; his mother's sister, also named Mary; Mary Magdalene, whose pain had been so great it had required casting out seven spirits, and whom tradition says had known the pain of being used by men as a prostitute. These three women were drawn to Jesus' pain by their own. They, unlike the male disciples, were fully awake.

And it was they whose open eyes saw Jesus raised, saw the revolution of the Coming Kingdom truly begin.

The women were awake to pain; the men could not endure it. John, however, did stand at the cross next to the women. And perhaps he is a sign of hope for men; I take him as one for me.

As a man, then, I am no hero. Not here, not now, not in this place. Perhaps one day, without warning, I might truly be called to be a hero. But for now, it is more than I can do merely to be awake enough to continue the journey toward becoming fully human.

I dare believe that journey begins in Christ and ends in Christ. But the road between is a road that requires me to surrender my privileges, my social status, my male prerogatives. And sometimes, staring up into Jesus' sweat and blood covered face, I turn over and go back to sleep. It is so deadly easy to do. His grace -- the real grace and not the stuff sold off many evangelical shelves -- shakes me awake again. I'm given another chance.

That's more than I deserve.

Three Way Conversation: Me, My Wife, And Andrea Dworkin

2005-08-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

I listen to the woman, my wife. So rooted in that which I cannot be rooted, the mundane realities I carelessly leave to her. She is best suited to deal with those realities, unlike me, who even my friends say has a poetic, artistic unconcern for such things. Even she smiles when I leave a shirt on the floor, though a snake sheds its skin with more concern. Her smile seems tired...

She is less suited... yes, less in a man's suit, less dressed to deal with the world of ideas. Even she believes this. That annoying Andrea Dworkin says, "For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover." And my masculinity is expansive, ever so. I need bigger minutes and hours for my thoughts as they grow. I need more time for my work, a man's work.

My wife comes from the shelter where she helps women abused by men and drugs and themselves. Sometimes something good happened; often bad things happened. I try to listen to her stories, but then, I myself have many larger thoughts that are important. There may not be much room to listen... unless one of her stories is usable by me for something I'm doing, being, or wanting.

My mind is a party. My dancing takes place in the ballroom where cleverness and presentation win the eyes of others, and of course I feel the pain of starving Sudanese so deeply that my eyes well with tears. My voice, used with great skill but also great conviction, brings others (including a cute young blond) to tears as well...

Someone mentions a terrible rape and murder they heard about on the news. Again my eyes well up, except the ghost of that obnoxiously loud and ugly Jewish woman leans in and whispers -- "Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us." For gawdsake, Dworkin, shut up. She's dead, after all, why can't her words be silenced?

And I turn from my mind's eye back to my wife's eyes, where I find only a resigned peace. And her gentle face melds with Dworkin's iron words, which fall and keep on falling upon my resistance.

It would be so easy to take shelter in misused biblical passages. It would be so easy to duck into self-constructed male bomb shelters built from verses of Scripture and years of increasing male anger. Anger with even deeper anxiety behind it... Dworkin's voice now, again, singing this time: "Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating."

My wife bends down, and picks up the shirt. And in that act of love I am exposed utterly.

"Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are." The ghost says this without one flicker of rage, cleverness, or arrogance. It is as though Dworkin just said, "Two plus two equals four" and it is absolutely true.

My wife -- I have not used her name, and now am afraid to name her as the monstrous hypocrisy wells up within me -- says something.

"What?" My voice sounds strained, a squeak.

"Can you help me put away the laundry?"

She has to ask. She can't assume I will do it. Damn stupid male dominated--

"Can you?"

I take a long breath, waiting to hear that other woman's voice. Instead, I hear a male voice.

"Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more."

Wordless, I reach for a sock. It smells clean, and is still warm to the touch.

I'm alone in my mind, the litter of bottles and papers and crumpled half-thoughts everywhere. Andrea stands across the room near the blond, who is ignoring her. I find the courage to half-wave to Dworkin, but she merely looks calmly through me as if I am not there. Nonetheless, I whisper. "Thank you."

To Christ, I whisper. "Thank you for another chance."

To Carol, I whisper... against the resistance rising within me and with fear that this will be one more act of hypocrisy, of meaning well at a moment but not meaning well until the task is accomplished. "Will... will you let me put the laundry away?"

So pathetic this step of faith. So very small. But at this moment, it seems all I'm able to authentically do.

Are Men Really Human?

2005-08-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

[This is the paper that led to this blog...]

Are Men Really Human?
A Melancholy but Not Without Hope
Personal Reflection on Male Sexuality

By Jon Trott

Paper Presented at the “Gender Revolution” Tent
July 1, 2005, at Cornerstone Festival

I was born into privilege thrice over. I am white; I am male; I am American. And all that privilege provides me with the easier way, the shortened route, the front row seat, the illusion of my own sufficiency. Add the fact that even for a man, I’m on the tall side, imposing, and with a voice that more than occasionally draws complements for how masculine and deep it is. Yet, I am not imposing to myself. I am not self-sufficient. I am wounded. I need assistance, and need it terribly. How terribly? Let me tell you a little about it.

In 1957, I was born; it was also the year President Eisenhower pushed through the first civil rights act since the civil war. The New York Times called the 1957 Civil Rights Act "incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress this century." But 1957 was also the year that nine black high school students went through hellish abuse in their attempt to integrate a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school. Only national exposure via the new medium of television forced Eisenhower to act by sending troops to protect the children. I knew nothing of such things; my childhood was filled with an innocent light.

I lived on a Montana farm during summertime, but during the school year we had a home in the small, almost completely white town of Fort Benton. What I remember about that time was how safe everything felt, how solid and reassuring. My parents knew everything that was important, and I relied happily on them for information. Memorial Day was a somber yet almost joyful day to celebrate the deeds of brave Americans; Viet Nam's darkness was already filling the skyline, but we didn't see it. The flag, like God, was a given. God approved of us, supported us, was on our side, and had the good sense to appear only when asked for.

Women were loyal wives, or wives in training, good homemakers, moms, and supporters of their man's work outside the home. Men were strong, self-reliant, and self-contained. Growing up in Montana one got a double-dose of this male image; the rugged individualist, the cowboy who hated fences and domesticity and rode alone. Why is the latter a problem? I’ll paraphrase feminist Jessica Benjamin: “A self that defines itself mainly through being separate, and not through sharing a common life and vision with others, is often unable to recognize others at all.” When you define yourself as someone separate from everyone else, you become blind to other persons' wants, needs, or even existence.

No wonder, then, that when I was young, I identified closely with my mother. I liked her attributes. Tenderness. Nurturing. The enjoyment of being together with others, what we call now "community." As one of five boys in our family, the second to the youngest, I felt insecure and overwhelmed by some of my siblings' maleness. They were so intense in their teenage hormone-driven toughness; I felt vulnerable and afraid.

I still remember hearing the little ditty, "Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails." I hated that lyric! I didn't want to be made of snips and snails… I wanted to be made of honey and cinnamon and all things most admirable in a human being… if that was femininity, and the other masculinity, then I opted for the first.

I even tried a little gender bending. At the age of five or six, maybe a little earlier, I began trying on some of my sisters' dresses and wearing them around the house. Now, maybe a lot of little boys – and maybe little girls – try this. Looking back, I don't think it was necessarily a bad thing, especially as my parents and siblings treated it with a fairly balanced mix of teasing and permissiveness that gave me needed space to sort myself out. The phase didn't last for much more than a few months, but signaled my unrest with the masculine as classically defined.

I did draw a line not to be crossed, however. When my mother enrolled me in ballet class – imagine that if you can! – I came home after the second or third installment, threw my dance slippers on the floor, and said "I'm not doing that any more!" When she asked why, I recall having said something like, "That's for GIRLS!" Two grade school classmates had mocked me, and made me suddenly conscious of my "proper" gender role. And so ended my brief career in ballet.

The feminine and being black are tangled in my experience. The first encounter with blackness that I consciously recall was a warm April Day in 1968. I am eleven and playing in our front yard. Kitty-corner from us, I see motion and hear someone yell. "They got him!" Our neighbor, Mr. Anger, danced a weird jig that gave him the look, if I'd known it at the time, of a Pentecostal Church revivalist. "They got him!" he repeated. "They shot and killed that commie nigger Martin Luther King!"

I remember feeling not revulsion, but rather a most intense interest. Why would a man be happy about another man's death? It was a puzzle to be riddled over. I was so pathetically innocent, it nearly brings tears to my eyes to remember that feeling now. I went to my mother. "Why is Mr. Anger happy that someone shot Martin Luther King?" She tried to explain Dr. King, but her own ambivalence about his mission was evident; how could it not have been? This woman knew only what I knew, that America was good, that we were good, that we would be even better if we worked hard at it, that Dr. King for all his sincerety was a bit of a troublemaker. This was the woman who specifically taught us NOT to use the 'n' word, but replace it with "tiger," when reciting "Eenie Meenie Miney Moe."

Can you pity me, just a little? Can you see how sadly distant I was, my family was, my town, state, and nation was, from understanding the horrible state of false innocence that ate away at our collective heart?

As I entered puberty, and began “noticing” girls in that new way, I liked very much being male. I liked my body; we were friends. Thankfully, perhaps thanks to my parents' very close love for each other, I couldn’t think of sexuality except as relationship. That is, to me, sexuality was interpersonal, a form of ecstatic communication. Even my most erotic fantasies usually centered on lovemaking as part of a larger relationship rather than the impersonal sex portrayed by hard-core porn.

Where does a young male hedonist begin? Hugh Hefner. I had a friend whose pile of Playboys was stashed behind the grill of an air duct in his house. Strangely, I was more affected by the coolness of having such an air vent – which seemed right out of some movie – than I was with the magazines. Their impersonal bosoms sticking out at me, legs arranged to almost but not quite reveal everything, failed to deeply thrill. A picture with no narrative failed to touch me. Yet the seeds were sown; I objectified women, since no other options seemed available. It did not occur to me that I was, in a very real sense, raping the woman's image with my eyes and heart. “For as he thinks within himself, so he is,” the Bible says. I had, by consuming the pornography, become party to its violence. And I became male in a more standard American sense.

When one friend gave me a magazine of hardcore porn, however, I was shocked and repulsed by it. The women looked like frogs on a biology lab table, and feeling disgusted I quickly handed it back to him. That experience was so disturbing, in fact, that I actively avoided photographic pornography from that point on. So-called "erotica," however, especially in novels, did feed a view of women that demeaned them by reducing male-female relationships to being either romantic/sexual or non-existent. The photography took place in my own imagination instead of on a glossy page.

The reality of pornography as violence did not come home to me until years later, when working on an article for Cornerstone magazine. Andrea Dworkin, who died just months ago, wrote a book called Men Possessing Women. It is a confusing, terrifying, violent-in-its-own-right ride for a man of my level of ignorance to read. My doors were, as the old saying goes, blown off. Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape seemed almost tame in comparison, but helped further my realization that the male identity I thought I had was in fact very flawed and not in keeping with a human identity.

But I get ahead of myself. There was more reading I did as a teenager. During my thirteenth and fourteenth year I read Eldridge Cleaver and Dee Brown and Claude Brown and Franz Kafka and Anne Frank – ah! A woman's voice at last – and it was along with all those oppressed, human voices I experienced my sexual awakening. There was something amazingly sexy about blackness, the oppressed, and the nobility of the oppressed… and in my mind I imagined myself the rescuer and lover of many oppressed women! This patronizing liberal fantasyland of mine was not one easily left, and for many years I would not even know it as a fantasy. (And an aside here: to this day, I remind myself that all the words I write about gender equality are laced with a desire of mine to be admired by women, to be looked up to, yes, to be a patriarchal figure who “rescues” women! I am so pathetic!!)

With the teenage sexual awakening came the realization that all I'd been told was untrue; or, if any of it was true, I had no idea how to find that truth again.

But one other element did come into play. I discovered that though I didn't believe in the America I'd known as a child, I did struggle with God. Was He there? Did he care? Did he love me? Or was the world I could encounter with my senses the only world there was? I couldn't abide 1950s American morality; I needed either hedonism or Christianity. I needed love. And love, to be blunt, was about either God or sex. If sex, then like a D. H. Lawrence character, I would worship my phallus and ignore the poor and oppressed of the world. If God—well, if God, then he had to justify himself to me. He had to explain how such a wicked, unjust world that preyed on the weak and that had by pure chance made me one of the so-called "elect" could exist.

I met Him, that God of love that is both ultimate masculine and ultimate feminine, in whose image male and female are created. I demanded He do as I wished, and instead he hid from me. Only when I became truly aware of my absolute lack did he reveal himself. He was, in what some might think a heretical analogy, a bit like a seductress. God has more so-called feminine wiles than any woman I’ve ever heard tell of!

But my struggle with maleness wasn’t solved once and for all by loving God. I endured a marriage of eight years before being abandoned by my wife and made a single father of two children. I discovered that the passive male role I’d adopted during that time was a fake form of mutuality. I had to become active, especially near the marriage’s end when my children seemed to me endangered. Was I being macho? No. I was being parental in the most elementary sense.

After that marriage ended, I met a woman who had also been abandoned by her spouse. She had two boys, and we began the difficult and slow process of learning how to submit mutually to one another. I was very macho at the beginning, though much of it was rooted in my fear of what had happened in that first marriage. I had to unlearn, let go, realize that my voice wasn’t right just because it was louder, or more articulate, or more authoritative-sounding. I had to hear Carol’s voice, and as I learned to hear her, I found incredible healing in our mutual love and respect.

Sixteen years have passed since we married. I am in pain daily as I hear the news. Just in the past month, the best friend of someone dear to us witnessed the killing of her mother by her father. He then, just to be fair, killed himself, leaving her an orphan. My wife works with homeless women and children in our second stage housing project, the Leland House. She comes home in tears with the horrors visited upon these women by the men they love, horrors so graphic I cannot share them in a setting such as this, where a child's ears might accidentally hear.

There is our friend who long ago made the "mistake" of going camping with two other young women. These three women became the victims of a gang of rapists. The look in her haunted eyes as she haltingly tells this story – and she does not tell it very often – reminds me of an interview I did with a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. It was the same look. The verbs in the sentences of these victims are often present tense: not "he did this" or "they did that" but "then he holds me down" – "I scream and they laugh."

Many of my male friends find it astonishing that I feel a link between my own maleness, my own gender identity, and that of the men capable of rape, spousal abuse, child abuse, verbal and physical abuse, rage. How can I, who have never raised a hand against a woman, feel guilt over the actions of some insane and/or demonized man that I don't even know?

It is much like that with skin color. Ten years ago, I stood in a restaurant in Chicago while a customer began screaming racial obscenities at the people behind the counter. I was shocked, and stood still like a deer in headlights while the man went on, then stomped angrily out the door. I felt a double shame, one that I had not spoken against him, and two that he, like me, was white. The shame of his racism contaminated me. Or so it seemed. My skin, the offending skin, burned.

Conservatives often call that sense of guilt I feel "liberal guilt." They point out, perhaps properly, that there is no direct connection between my skin color and the skin color of a racist bigot who makes a fool of himself in public. Likewise, they would say there is no connection between the fact that the equipment between my legs is male and that the equipment wielded by a rapist is male.

I'd like to believe them. I really would, because it would free me from having to consider the societal implications of that skin color, or that equipment I bear.

You see, I like my skin color, not because it is white, but rather because it is specifically mine. I like my body, my hair and arms and legs and genitals. I think this is a profoundly Christian thing, by the way. I'm told by Scripture to cherish my wife as I cherish my own body, and so cherishing my body is no sin. Yet each time I hear of a man using his body as a weapon to violate – the exact right word for what happens – to violate another human being, I feel my own body shrivel. This is not maleness, this is not human. That is what I want to say.

But I don't believe it, and cannot say it. Rape is too common, not just today, but throughout history. Rape is a male thing, and violently violating another is a human thing. We're good at it. And when I consider my two daughters, my wife, and all the women I know as friends walking through a city and a world where such violence is fairly commonplace, I writhe inside with helpless fury and sorrow.

Rape, to me, is the centerpiece of any discussion on men and women in the world. Perhaps that shows the debt I owe Andrea Dworkin, despite my harsh disagreements with her – to me – extreme views on men.

A few stories. In this first little story, I am barely seventeen years old. I meet a dark-haired girl who lives in a small Montana town some seventy or eighty miles from mine. She’s cute, and apparently finds me intriguing. I ask her to my school prom. She accepts, and we have a good time; later, I take her back to my parents’ house, where she will sleep in my sister’s room. My sister is away at college, and when my prom date enters the room, I follow her in and attempt some awkward kissing. She rather passively allows it, but discourages me when I start moving toward second base. I politely disengage, say goodnight and head to my bedroom. The next day, I take her home and we part on, I think anyway, friendly terms.

A week passes, and I meet for weekly piano lessons with an older woman, a music teacher who is a mutual acquaintance of the girl and myself. The older woman bluntly reproves me for my attempt at overpowering my prom date. I’m left with the distinct feeling that the girl believed I was attempting to rape her. I’m so horrified and simultaneously humiliated and angry, I barely can speak to the teacher but manage to grate out a denial. What to me had seemed a mutual interchange between two trusting people – and one that she had forbidden to go farther than it ought to have – to the girl had seemed a frightening one-way street where a boy she hardly knew was cornering her in his sister’s bedroom to do as he pleased. She simply misread me, beginning and end.

Gradually, despite my angry initial reaction to my music teacher, I began to rethink what had happened there. That incident was one of the first times that I saw myself as someone physically powerful, someone who could frighten someone else just with my size and gender. And I hated that. I hated it like anything. I had no plans or desire to overpower her, yet how could she have known that? Only slowly did I understand the fact that my walking into that bedroom was indeed a major error of judgment on my part. More than bad manners, it was in effect a threatening move whether or not I understood it as that.

So we men learn, if we learn at all.

Another story. My wife Carol educates me on many things, and one of them recently was the issue of rape. Now note: I called rape an "issue." Already, there is a distance put between me and that subject which my wife does not feel. She tells of being so afraid of being raped when she lived alone years ago, especially after an incident when, while she innocently sat in a Minneapolis park, a man exposed himself to her. That was her point, pretty quick into our discussion. "As a young single woman, being raped was probably my single greatest fear," she said to me. As we continued talking, it turned out Carol had nearly been raped twice, once having to literally leap from a car and run away down the street from a man intent on date-raping her.

Maybe somewhere a man has had such an experience, almost being raped by his female date. I don't know any such men. What I do know, both from statistics and from hearing many people’s stories over the years, is that rape and other violent crimes involving sexual aggression are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.

The discussion between Carol and I had been triggered by a number of rapes in our immediate neighborhood, and by a violent murder of another woman in the Chicago apartment building where our youngest daughter lives.

As we talked, my wife and I, it became apparent that I, too, carry a sort of pain regarding rape. I told her how, each time I hear the local newsperson soberly discussing a rape, my genitals shrivel. This is no exaggeration, but the plain exact truth. In a terrible way, this assault upon a woman by a man armed with rage and an erection leaves me feeling violated. "That isn't what a man's body is designed for," I rage against the unknown attacker.

My wife's attitude toward the male body, even my body, cannot help but be touched by the potentiality of rape by the male against the female. Andrea Dworkin went farther, believing that any penetrative sex by a man with a woman was in effect rape. I don’t agree, but I do find myself needing to escape categories such as male = sun while female = earth, or man = bee while woman = flower. Note the roles being defined here: "male as initiator/penetrator/actor" vs. "female as receiver/penetrated/acted upon"?

I believe radical feminists have furthered me toward becoming a mature Christian man. This may not be what some would like me to say, but I'm not going to lie. The one thing they don't often offer is grace – but since I can get that elsewhere, I found their unflinching dissection of my maleness terribly painful but not unendurable. Of course I didn't accept everything. Dworkin's horror of the male body, for instance, would have meant that I had to hate my own physical being. Why not hate instead the misuse of that body, rather than the body itself?

I love sex. I love it more as a Christian than I ever did as a non-believer, and more as a married man than I ever imagined possible when single. And as a Christian, I’m always on the lookout for other believers who also have a biblically-rooted hedonistic streak.

Eric Gill, for instance, was a Catholic artist of great renown, and companion of G. K. Chesterton (Gill designed Chesterton's headstone and worked with the latter in the "distributionist" movement). I was excited when I discovered Gill for myself, because Gill (along with his wonderful religious art) also did quite a bit of artwork with erotic themes. A few of the pieces are a bit over the top even for me, but many of them celebrate the feminine body. Or seem to. It turns out, I belatedly discovered, that Gill's art community was also a hotbed of sexual license, led by Gill himself. Worse, Gill had sex with both his daughters. I use the term "had sex" – but that is wrong. What he did was rape. Gill's etching entitled "earth receiving," in which a Christ-figure descends from heaven to penetrate a passively waiting woman / church, takes on sinister significance. A patriarchal God for a patriarchal rapist incestuous artist.

Am I hopeless, wanting to find fellow believers who believe sexuality is indeed a wonderful shadow of the spiritual, and that woman and man interpenetrate one another in a shadow of what Christ does with the Church (and with individuals within the Church)? Those who see the Song of Solomon as such a shadowing -- being both a straightforward erotic account of love and a spiritual allegory of sorts -- are my fellow travelers in this regard. But I reject this phallic God of Gill's, just as I reject the pseduo-feminism of writers such as D. H. Lawrence, who in Lady Chatterly's Lover paints a woman who requires clitoral stimulation as being aggressive and "beakish" and therefore unfeminine; when the woman finally yields totally to the man, being “perfect” in her passivity (and having a vaginal orgasm to prove it) she finally becomes whole to Lawrence. Never mind what a woman's own body tells her; she's not part of this male-only narrative, in which the man tells her, acts upon her, his will! Only a yielding response to the penetrating male seems adequate for either Gill or Lawrence. Gill, it now appears, took this to its logical conclusions: since it is a woman’s place to yield, it is man’s place to take what he wants from her. Even if she is his own daughter.

Implicit in the female as receiver only paradigm is the idea that she ultimately can't help enjoying being overcome by the heaven-sent male, the phallic gawd, if you will. What a lie. And how pervasive this lie still is! I think those who are baffled by feminism’s angry side need only ponder these images, which are still so much with us today.

As a Christian, I am not stupid enough to think a world can exist, here, where my own daughters and sons are safe from these perverse ideas of maleness and femaleness. Violence is not sex, because true sex is the outcome of mutual love. Violence is rage, and when the male sex becomes the tool of rage, not only women are raped. Men who love are victimized as well. Every time we look into our beloved's eyes and see that split-second flicker at the moment we become one—no matter how gently that moment is brought about—every time we hear another newscaster announce a series of rapes on the north side of Chicago where we live, every time a pornographer's unsolicited email invites us to view women, even children, being degraded violently... we, too, become victims.

In all of this, I fear I've not yet really hit the right combination of words and emotion to convey how sad, how unutterably sad, I feel when confronted with rape. But my wife looks at me with such tenderness, even as I'm left feeling she can't help but blame me a little. She's never said it, but I dimly sense the thought floating there. "All men are potential rapists.... even you. The penis, unlike the vagina, is capable of violence." No, she's never said it. She would deny it if asked. So I don't ask her. But when I hold her, or sense her looking at my nakedness, I wonder what she sees. Could there be the faintest tenseness in her, the tiniest tincture of fear? Of me? Of my body? Why, I want to ask her, why can’t you be rather awed by my body, as I am by yours, desiring it as I desire yours, curious about it as I am perpetually curious about yours?

But you see, she is right; the male body itself has become a symbol of hurt, of fear, of oppression. I am raging against history itself to try to change that.

Then one day, I get just a taste. Just a moment, a window that flicks open and closed. But I discover something.

I am parking a car near our Jesus People USA headquarters, talking quietly aloud to God. Our Uptown neighborhood this summer afternoon is full of people, an urban landscape of rich, poor, black, brown, and white. I am happy, carefree. I pull onto a side street and find a place, but just as I turn the ignition off, I hear a voice. A female voice. She is leaning into my passenger-side window, which is open due to the heat. And she is suggesting that for five dollars she will do this and that and thus and such. Except what she says is descriptive. Far, far more descriptive. Her words fall on me, and on my sex, like a truckload of filth.

There is no temptation in this for me, no momentary flicker of desire. The woman is old beyond her years, emaciated looking, quite possibly ill with AIDS or some other disease. But her words, her words themselves are like death to me. It is painfully obvious that what she wants is drugs, and her offer to me is one driven by the logic of money and of maleness. Every man is nothing more than his penis. For me, who only moments before had been thinking of what a beautiful day it was, I felt as though I had been vomited on. It was a disgusting, diminished feeling I had. “Why me? Why did you say all that to me? What is there about me that would make you think I would respond to you? Is there something wrong with me, do I put off some kind of vibe?”

And then it hit me.

This is how women feel. This is how it is to be a woman – a sex object – in a man’s world. This is how it is not just once, not just this one abnormal time, but continually. The cool male eyes running up and down your body like they own it, like they possess you by right. The casual comment, the wolf-whistle, the wink. Open yourself to this feeling. Drink it in. Then look at your sisters, both the ones in Christ and the ones who do not yet know Him. Remember this feeling when you look at your sisters, when you talk to your sisters, when you talk about your sisters with other men.

Yes Lord, I will try to remember. Truly. This is how women feel.

* * *

In concluding, I would like to shift perspectives from a personal narrative to an equally non-authoritative, perhaps misguided, attempt to speak to my sisters in Christ for most of your brothers in Christ. Many of these things will seem trite. Maybe that only goes to show you how far I have to go.

Please, my sisters, try to love us as Christ loves the church. But let that love be a tough love. Do not let us saddle you with sole responsibility in rearing children. Children need fathers who change diapers, cuddle, play ball or have a tea party. But children also need dads who include mom in on what is going on. Little eyes watch closely what we do, not what we say, and gender roles are learned more from dad and mom interacting than anything else. I was blessed to have parents that in many ways modeled this for me. Someone once said, “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

Please, my sisters who are not yet married, do not let your brothers in Christ put the burden of sexual purity solely on you. This is such a huge lie, that men cannot control themselves sexually; they may not want to, but let them know they have to, are expected to. Having a penis does not mean he is incapable of controlling desire. Nor does having a vagina mean you necessarily are better at saying “No!” than he is, or that you feel desire less keenly than he does. Yes, our genitals are external, more easily stimulated. But the mind, not the penis, is the primary sexual organ. Purity must be the business of both of you. That means if he does touch you inappropriately, you move his hand. But you also remind him that you expect him to control his own desires, just as you are to control your desires. Explain to him that if you cannot work together at mutually remaining pure until your marriage, perhaps getting married is not such a good idea.

Please, sisters, remind one another as well as your brothers that single women and men do not need to be married before they’re fully human. They may be called to delay marriage for years, or never to marry. Affirm single women and men; too few of their fellow believers remember to do so.

Please, my sisters, do not allow the legalists and woman-haters to tell you that your ministry is limited because of your gender. As far as I have to go today to be a mature believer, I promise you that most of the best and deepest things I do know have come through the hands of women; women preachers, women elders, women teachers, women disciplers. The gifts of the Holy Spirit do not come to us according to gender. And I will not be a part of a fellowship or denomination that refuses to recognize gifted women alongside gifted men. Make room for the gifts!

Please, my sisters, do not give in to anger and rejection toward men. Jesus did die for us, too. We can be annoyingly thick and insensitive. But try to see us as singular people, just as you would like to be seen by us, rather than a collective gender that is beyond hope. Some of us are jerks. Some of us are liars. Some are even perverts, and if you sense something is wrong with a man who is around your children, pay attention to that feeling! It isn’t your job to be nice like some 1950s housewife; it is your job to be like Jesus, to love like He loves and to do his will, no matter what anyone tells you. Passivity is no less sinful for a woman than it is for a man, and passivity is not love.

Please, my sisters, help us to learn compassion. We evangelical males seem peculiarly hard-hearted when it comes to loving the least of these. We need to learn some of the attributes often called “feminine,” attributes like nurturing, encouraging, empathizing, helping. We need to learn the art of togetherness rather than individualism.

Please, my sisters, don’t allow yourselves to become trapped in the superficial world many church women are being forced to live in despite women moving forward elsewhere. When the men gather in the living room to talk politics and the women go to the kitchen to talk about recipes or the new next door neighbor’s pregnant daughter, that is bad, bad, bad. We’re being patriarchal, lazy, and insensitive. You’re being passive, gossipy, and bad stewards of your god-given minds. And, if I can say this, you’re being a bad witness to us by letting us get away with condescending, patriarchal behavior. Gently, lovingly, confront us on it. If we don’t respond just come on in and plop down next to the guys and toss your ideas right into our little male-only mix!

Please, my sisters, don’t allow material comfort to paper over your duty to Christ. Don’t let a house, a nest egg, and so on become your excuse for not being involved in the world outside your home. Have you watched the news lately? Have you seen the gender of the people running most of the world? And do you think they’re doing a good job? Please, get out of that comfort zone – and if your husband or brother in Christ is there, get him out of there, too! Stop playing it safe by human standards! Please.

Please, sisters… don’t let us let you take care of household chores. We’re big, we’re strong, and we can swing a broom or wield a dishcloth with the best women out there.

Please, married sisters, don’t let sex be the man’s business. Read the Song of Solomon together, and notice who does most of the erotic talking. You got it, the woman. This is one area where many if not most men will respond very positively to their wives’ move toward equality. Let us know what you want, how you want it, and initiate love more often than even feels comfortable for you at first. You might be surprised how this will change other aspects of your relationship, as he begins to see you as someone unafraid to venture past standardized roles.

Finally, please sisters, don’t forget that our gender does not define our humanity. We are all sinners. And we are all saved by grace, the unmerited favor of a wholly loving God who made us, male and female, in his image. Our relationships are not about power, but about love. And we are to outdo one another in acts of love for his sake. That is where we can truly confound the world, who always makes it about power. Christ surrendered his power, laid it down, so that his hands and heart were free to pick us up. Can you love your brothers that way, not passively, not permissively, but still charitably and with grace? Pray for us, that we someday might learn to love our sisters in that way, and to listen when the Spirit speaks, no matter the gender of the one through whom that Spirit speaks.

God, the Feminine

2005-06-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

It is a constant battle, this assault on the feminine by the masculine. Not even C. S. Lewis, that cheerful hedonistic Christian who helped husband discover Christ, is immune from doing it. Compared to God, he says at one point, all else is feminine. That is, God is out to overwhelm, take over, all else.

Husband shakes his head, almost dizzy with the image. Is that the God he knows? No. Is that a God that a rape victim could understand? No. Is that the God a broken heart such as feminist Andrea Dworkin would hate? Yes.

He ponders, and ponders quite a while, since he's saddled with a second-rate intellect that has far more questions than answers, and with a personality overtly siding with the existential rather than the abstract logic favored by other pseudo-intellectuals he knows.

God and his wife. God and her heart. God and the heart of other women husband knows.

Why does God hide? Why doesn't God just plunge down on creation like a tidal wave, like a giant muscled arm with a fist on the end of it? Why doesn't he force us to love him?

God is coy. God flirts with us, showing a little leg, then vanishing just as we're getting really interested. God falls back at the least resistance. God doesn't like guys that flex their muscles, act arrogant, and strut around like they know everything. He loves those who come to him and honestly talk about all their hopes, desires, failures.

God nurtures us like a mother nurses a newborn. God births us a second time. God continually offers hospitality, a bounty-filled dinner table for any who would allow him entrance.

No, God hides because God made not only male in his image but female in his image as well. He is more masculine than any male human will ever be... yet he is more feminine than any woman. He is not sexed; he has no genitals. (Husband's lip wrinkles in faint disgust at the thought.) But he does know the human body, male and female, through creation. He knows what humanity feels like as well, having been fully human in Christ.

So, wasn't Christ male? Doesn't that mean God is masculine? Husband smiles almost bitterly, remembering Fredrich Neitszche's words about Christ and Christianity: a woman's religion, a religion of slaves and women, founded by a God who weakened himself by becoming man, then weakened himself and his followers by cultivating a sense of pity. No, Jesus was not masculine in any modern western / American version of masculinity. Yet he was masculine beyond any other man, filled with the perfect strength and power of divine love. He was feminine beyond even the women around him, filled with an empathy and compassion so deep that even as he went to resurrect the dead Lazarus, he wept. Pity? Oh, yes.

He reads daily news, an article cleverly titled for Father's Day: "Our Father is no 'It' or Gal God." He sighs. Yes, God is called "Father" in the Scriptures, and as someone with a high view of those writings, he doesn't argue with the designation. But this writer is anything but convincing, laying out argument after argument than only underscore the usual disconnect for most Christian men regarding their own blindness. Husband found himself almost wanting to spit it out. "I don't need your crappy phallic deity with his love of the rigid rule and complete disconnect from the poor and oppressed!" Husband trembles inwardly at the force of these feelings.

He thinks back to before he was a believer, how God pursued him, but how gentle, how feminine, God was in that pursuit. At the time he was angry with God, daring God to appear, trying to force God into revealing himself, blaspheming God in attempts to draw God's wrath down on him. "Let's see the male deity, at least I'll know before he kills me that he exists."

But God, the God of the Universe, shrank back like a shy girl at a dance. Alluring, inviting, just out of reach. And when his rebel heart at last smashed itself against the end of itself, the end of meaning that he felt as surely as one might feel a wall, then God revealed Himself. First as masculine, as other, as holy and wholly demanding. Yet not even then forcing, except to force the decision. And the young man ran, literally, away to hide under his blankets.

God the feminine / masculine came to him at last on a farmhouse floor as he knelt in quiet, hopeless desperation. First the emptiness, the passively open heart he held upward. Then the downward sweep that penetrated him to the quick, altered all in an instant. And his astonished, overwhelmed response, thrusting hands upward toward the feminine to in turn penetrate God. The two of them, interpenetrated, intimate.

Oh, yes. Say the masculine God penetrates, and the feminine human heart is penetrated. But that is not the whole truth. The human heart needs to penetrate God, and God welcomes that penetration. He is all strength, power, and might. Yet he wants to be known just as the bride wants her body known by her groom. Does not the groom want to be penetrated? I don't speak of genitals here, but of hearts. Doesn't he want to feel his wife's tenderness actively embrace, surround, and possess him? Isn't this the core of mutual love, the one giving to the other the embrace, the gift? And who is to say where "masculine" and "feminine" begin and end in such matters?

Husband sighs, wondering not for the first time why he is so beset by all this. But he thinks of his wife's body, her heart, her desire for him, and her tears as she worships Christ. She acts. Is that masculine? Is to be feminine always to be the acted upon? If so, then Christ was the ultimate feminine.

He was penetrated by nails, by a spear, and by all the sins of the world. As God, he allowed this penetration to take place. It was the rape of God.

That suffering, and overcoming God, is the God I worship, husband says to himself. There can be no other God than that God. He revealed himself after his resurrection to the women first. Before that gladness, when the hopes of all Jesus' disciples were darkened, the women were more masculine (that is "brave" and "active") than were the male disciples. It was they who came to Golgotha to be with him in his suffering. And looking at his mother, he gave his last command before dying to the lone man among them who also seemed feminine, John, the beloved disciple (the one not afraid to lay his head upon Jesus' breast). "Here is your mother."

God yields to us. He lets us have our way. He suffers indignity and persecution because of us, for us, in spite of our deadly apathy.

God is masculine, yes. And God is feminine.

[This posting originally appeared on my Highromance blog, and you may want to go there to see comments made, and to add your own, though here is okay if you desire.]