December 2, 2016 New York City
I am speaking from my inside experience of the Christian faith. I am speaking about the trauma of silencing in our lives as women and in our religious traditions as well as learning to break that silence by speaking truth about our own stories and experiences. Finally, I am speaking as a white, well-educated, feminist elder who honors the indigenous wisdom.
This has not been an easy talk to prepare. My inner voice keeps asking questions, almost taunting me to remain silent. What can I safely say? Whose toes might I tread on? Whose ire might I stir up? What dare I say? And underneath is the question of fear: what will happen to me if I do speak what I have experienced and how my faith has evolved?
And my gratitude for this opportunity at this crone wisdom time of my life celebrates my determination to speak as deeply as I am able, to push the envelope for women everywhere. Actually the process turned out to be challenging and invigorating. I ended up with more questions than I have answers and I love questions which expand my understanding of the way the patriarchal institutions work to silence women—as well as their children and men of integrity. If you want to know more about my sources and my writings, you can go to my website, joymillspriest.com
My story of wearing the glass slipper is about the traumatic generational silencing of women in my mother line. I have discovered parallels in my story with the traumatic silencing of women in Biblical stories. Finally, my story seeks to encourage and empower us to break our silences so that our voices shatter the stained glass ceiling.
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My story begins when I am talking on the telephone with my mother. My brother called to tell me she was in the hospital. Talking with her I realized she was dying– but more than that happened. This is the part that I usually skip because it sounds peculiar, even uncanny. Our conversation seemed casual, even normal– except several times her voice turned away from the telephone as though she were talking to a roommate saying, “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” Then she returned to our conversation.
The next morning when I arrived at the hospital, there was no roommate. And she was bleeding out. Eventually, I would call her death a passive suicide. She had hidden the lump in her breast until the raw redness screamed cancer and my father insisted she see a doctor. The loss of her breast was the final insult to a life already broken. Given nerve damaging drugs as she struggled with profound depressions, over-medicated with estrogen for severe hot flashes, she developed grinding pain that reduced her teeth to little nubs which cut into her tongue until she could barely speak. Silenced as a child by the emotional pain of being born unwanted to competitive and cold immigrant German parents; as an adult self-medicating with alcohol against the traumas of her mother’s suicide followed by her father’s disinheriting her, she had given up on being able to live a productive life. As we three children left home, she gradually became wracked by inescapable physical and emotional pain, telling my younger brother, “The pain begins before I am awake.” Two weeks before she died, all the nubs of her teeth were taken out. We had our first lively conversation in years.
Now in the hospital bed, her blood draining through various tubes, she was peaceful and smiled easily as though she were saying to me, “This is my death. Don’t replay how things could have been different; this is my choice. I am letting you go so that you can live a fuller life.”
She did let me go AND she left me her legacy: “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” These words became my marching orders: to piece together the snippets of her story so that I could weave our mother-daughter stories together to find some meaning and break the silence, so that I can speak our reality. The place to begin was confronting my grandmother’s traumatic silencing, piecing together what I could of her narrative.
At the end of the 18th century, my grandmother’s Huguenot family fled horrific religious persecution in France for Mainz, Germany. A hundred years later, my grandmother, her mother, sister, and kid brother Jacob immigrated to the United States. Over the next 25 years the women created a flourishing seamstress shop in Philadelphia, earning enough to put Jacob—the brother and son– through Penn Law School.
My grandparents married when they were 36. An independent woman pressured marrying the successful, domineering, 36 year old German businessman. The oft-told tale is four years later my grandmother was preparing to go back to Europe to help WWI refugees– or was she actually leaving her marriage??– when she found out she was pregnant with their only child. Now and then my mother alluded to her miserable childhood. Her trunk would be packed for a summer at camp, away from her parents; then the night before my grandmother would say, “Oh, you will become homesick.” And the trunk would be unpack, my mother’s respite withheld. When my mother gave the valedictory speech at her Quaker high school graduation, her parents hid in the back of the auditorium, fearing she would falter and embarrass them.
In December 1940 my parents had been married six months and were living—blissfully, my father said– as newlyweds in New York City when they found out my grandmother had committed suicide. When she returned to Philadelphia, my grandfather told her, “If you come home and take care of my house [where her mother had hanged herself in the basement] for me, everything I have will be yours.” My mother kept her side of the promise. Born over the next three years, my two brothers and I were brought home to live in that house where our grandmother had hanged herself, where my grandfather sat in his gold chair wreathed in cigar smoke listening to news of Germany’s victories and then defeat. It took me until I was 50 to realize I was named Joy because my father hoped as a girl child I would bring Joy back into my mother’s life.
Then in April 1945—I was 2 ½, my younger brother born Aril 24th– as the concentration camps were being opened, my Quaker-educated mother fought uncompromisingly with my German, Nazi sympathizing? grandfather. I was two and half years old, I must have been frightened by the fighting, I must’ve sensed the danger as well as my mother’s courage. In September 10 days before my grandfather died, my grandfather used his last weapon to punish to mother; he wrote her out of his will; his lawyer told him, “I refuse to do disinherit your only child who has cared for you. You will have to find another lawyer.”
My mother could live in the house where my grandmother had hanged herself but my parents would have to pay each month exactly what my father was earning each week: $35. If she divorced my father or he died, she could live there rent free.
My mother kept up her fiery resistance; she sued his estate all the way to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania– and lost. Inexorably silenced by her father’s will.
She never told my brothers and me a coherent story about her mother’s suicide or her father’s betrayal; only the occasional sentence or two when she was drinking. Without a story, I too was silenced. I could not understand what had happened, only experiencing my mother’s agony. Putting her sentences together into a narrative with some continuity became my mission. I was determined to break the spell of my heritage: my grandmother’s suicide and my mother’s passive suicide. Late in his life in response to my insistent questioning, my father reluctantly said, “Yes, your grandfather was a misanthrope.” A people hater.
I imagine my hearing my mother’s resisting my grandfather’s misogyny; then when the concentration camps were liberated, her outrage by his either defending the Nazis or denying the truth about the concentration camps. I am certain this is when I learned to want to seek and to speak the truth as my mother had. After my grandfather died, I also learned I would be punished, abandoned and disinherited if I challenged those with authority over me. My lifetime dilemma with which I struggle even today.
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So what? What does this story of my mother’s and my trauma and silencing have to do with biblical stories of women and with you? Biblical women’s stories are most often told in snippets, sentences here and there, regularly ignored except in reference to the overriding narrative of powerful and revered men. Overwhelmingly, men have shaped the way we here Biblical narratives over the millennia. Now it is time for women and understanding men to do the same with women’s narratives—Biblical and personal. Overarching narratives are shaped from snippets with the imagination bridging and enhancing the snippets to create larger meaning. If we do not shape our stories, someone else will—or the stories will remain snippets with no profound effect on others.
In my own life, I read back from the way I react to threatening—whether real or not– authority and recognize my fearful reaction silences me, often in order to not shame myself by misspeaking. Other times fearful of negative reactions meant to dismiss or belittle my meaning. In writing this talk, I chose to begin with my mother’s words, “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” I will never have the opportunity to know how my mother wrestle with understanding of the suffering of the Jews; however, by writing these words I have encountered the depth of my mother’s integrity in the face first of her father as adversary, then through her lawyers fighting for justice over my grandfather’s will, and finally in the unremitting agony of her living day-by-day. Now let us encounter stories of Biblical women with the same determination to reveal their presence, whether life-giving or death-dealing.
Christianity began as a movement within the Jewish faith, incorporating the Hebrew Bible into its liturgies and stories—bending the Jewish stories to fit Christian theology. In Eucharistic services—the Mass, Communion, the Lord’s Table—the Episcopal Church has always traced its history back to Abraham. One of these prayers begins: God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…
In 1977 the woman priest celebrating the Eucharist she said this prayer differently. She said, “God of our fathers and mothers, God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel….”
“God of our mothers, Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel.” For the first time I heard myself named! Passionate energy surged through me, body, mind and spirit. What had been flattened out by excluding women’s name, in an instant came alive for me. I had never experienced myself as excluded by the Church; in that moment, I knew I had never been fully included.
In church services I began experimenting, calling God “God” instead of “Father”, “Lord”, “He”, or “Him”. Instead of singing “God of our fathers,” I sang “God of our mothers,” making my mother’s faith visible, our names heard. Trying to decide whether to study psychology or theology, it dawned on me that I had to study both. I asked myself, “How can I dedicate myself to helping people heal if God is imaged as a man? Women cannot become whole if wholeness is imaged as male, if there is a stained glass ceiling. Neither can men become whole if they have to be like god in order to be worthy.”
My subsequent calling to the priesthood became to work for change in the language and, consequently, the theology of the church. I created a course which focused our thoughts on the characteristics and actions of women in the Bible, uncovering how focused the church’s teachings and liturgies are on the actions of men deemed important, on a male God. And that is how I came to pay attention to the complicated relationship between Sarah and Hagar, mothers of Judaism and Islam.
In the seminal story of Genesis, traditionally told as the story of Abraham, the voices and traumas of Sarah, married to Abraham, and Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian slave, have been diminished and even silenced. Their twice-told story (Genesis 16:1-14 and 21:8-21) sets the women against one another on the basis of race, age, class, marital, and childbearing status. The worth of each woman is measured by her body’s ability to conceive and bear a male child. Because Sarah has not been able to conceive and bear a son for Abraham, she chooses the younger Hagar to conceive a child by him. As Egyptian and as slave, Hagar is helpless to defend herself against Sarah’s command. She is subject to Abraham and Sarah’s whims. Hagar’s more youthful body becomes her advantage over Sarah—she is able to bear Abraham a child when Sarah is long past childbearing age. This woman against woman, horizontal as well as vertical violence of Sarah against Hagar is worsened when Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar’s pregnancy, even though under Hebrew law the child will legally Sarah’s and Abraham’s. Hagar is sent into the desert by Abraham to die until God’s messenger appears to her and sends her back into the whirlwind of Abraham’s family. With Ishmael’s birth, Sarah’s position in the hierarchy becomes more tenuous.
Once Sarah bears her own son, Isaac, her jealousy takes an ugly twist into envy that wants to destroy the threat embodied by Hagar and Ishmael. Out of her fear that Ishmael, Abraham’s first born son, might displace Isaac in the line of inheritance, Sarah demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael into the desert where they are certain to die. Abraham’s willingness to abandon his own child is echoed through centuries of men willing to deny their progeny when it is convenient for them to do so.
However, the narrative changes in an unexpected way. In the desert for a second time, just as Hagar and Ishmael are facing death, God’s messenger again appears to Hagar and promises that her son will be the progenitor of a race of people, just as God has promised Abraham and Sarah that Isaac will be. These direct appearances of the Holy to Hagar, a woman, an outsider, a slave, is the first biblically reported epiphany or appearance of God to a human being. We confronted by an evocative, inescapable paradox which haunts through history: Ishmael, the son abandoned by his father Abraham, is to become the mythic progenitor of the Arab race while Isaac fathers the Hebrew people, a clear premonition of Israelis set against Arabs.
Then I must ask: How could this story be told differently? My friend Ilene told me about a play in which seven imaginative alternative scenarios are imagined. “What if Abraham had not been so solution-oriented and instead had said, “Sarah, look how well Ishmael is playing with Isaac. They are laughing together.” I ask, What if Sarah had trusted there would be enough to share? Of course, we also have to deal with a male God who encourages the story to evolve as it does. A formidable conundrum for us to wrestle with our eyes open, and listen to with suspicious ears, wondering how to proclaim this contradictory God.
As one small step for womenkind—humankind–I piece together the snippets of women’s stories by saying that Eucharistic prayer remembering, not only women identified by their marriage to men, instead remembering a changing variety of women with a variety of roles, “God of our Fathers and Mothers, God of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar-, Deborah, Ruth and Naomi, Jacob, Rachel and Leah.” There are complex, enriched stories and a complex, multi-dimensional God hidden within flattened patriarchal and male-centered interpretations of these narratives. May the questions raised encourage us to wonder what other voices might have been silenced, traumatized by having been made invisible in the stories the traditions raise up, what else we have not been told.
As you read or hear Biblical stories, I invite you to focus on the women, take the bits and pieces and interpret them through your eyes, bring them out of the shadows of the traditions into the light of new revelation, out of silence into proclamation.
Ask questions. What are this woman’s characteristics? What is her importance to this story? How is her story told in my faith tradition? Does she have a voice? If so, what does she say? If not, what do I imagine she wants to say? How could her story be told differently?
I invite you to begin with the Book of Ruth, a six chapter short story of women in the midst of male-centered Biblical accounts. In the Christian tradition the love and faithfulness of two extraordinary women are erased when read out-of-context at Christian traditional weddings: I shall go where you go…Your people shall be my people…. (Ruth 1:16-17). I invite you to consider the characteristics of these two women, to recognize the power of the elder Naomi’s radical crone wisdom when it is joined with the adventurous and risk-taking spiritedness of the young foreigner Ruth. Together they use their energies and resources to devise a plan for survival in a patriarchal culture which does not look kindly on women without male protectors. By the end of the Book, they not only have survived but are thriving. A child has been born to Ruth, a child whom Naomi cares for. Women of their chosen community name the child. Women helping women, a younger woman and an older woman teaming—and scheming– together, for the welfare of all, surrounded by a community of women welcoming the child of the foreigner and celebrating new life.
~~~~~~An Addendum to Consider~~~~~~
I also encourage you to try imagining God explicitly as a woman. How might she be imaged creatively? How might your naming God as female empower you to work to change your faith tradition? Expand your worldview?? Shatter the ultimate, the stained glass ceiling? What feelings arise in you as you question and imagine?
As women have released energy repressed and blocked by abused, oppressed, and ignored Biblical women, space has been created for well-known as well as unknown narratives and images to evolve into greater fullness. These discoveries invite other women and men to play along with them by re-imagining their own faith images, narrative and journeys. Within this space, created by an attitude of rage and outrage held in tension with delight and celebration, the ancient Hebrew figure of Divine Wisdom has again arisen. In Hebrew and Christian testaments she is Divine Wisdom, Sophia in Greek. She who was present in creation calls us to revel in that Creation. She calls all who will listen to come to her and eat at her groaning table filled with food for body, mind and spirit. She is ready to impart her wisdom to those who yearn to exchange their heavy and unbearable burdens for a yoke which is substantial and meaning-full, yet paradoxically easy and light. In this image of the Divine Feminine who was present with God in creation, we re-member the image of God in which we, women and men, were created: male and female God created them. Through this ongoing work, wo-men continue to reclaim authority and voices both to interpret the scriptures and to name the Holy and themselves, moving from rejection of their bodies, minds and spirits toward self-love, self-acceptance, using our imaginations to connect the snippets of our heritage for greater fullness of life.