voice

Love, decidedly not the exclusive property of church

Another video I've watched a couple of times recently is this one, in which Carol Gilligan and Terry Real talk about the socialization of kids into the patriarchy. Their theory is that children start whole and end up as unequal halves: by age 7, boys have learned to project invulnerability by suppressing their emotional intelligence; by 11, girls have learned protect the boys' vulnerability by suppressing their own voices. So we have men who don't know what they feel and women who don't say what they know. 

Meanwhile, in spiritually exercising news: in the week before Easter, the writers of the exercises (understandably, given the sheer volume of material during Holy Week) decided to skip both the crucifixion and Easter morning and chose instead Luke 7:36-50 as meditation material.

Jesus is having dinner in the house of a Pharisee and this woman-of-ill-repute comes in, wets his feet with her tears (!), dries them with her hair, and annoints them with oil. His host wonders to himself what kind of a prophet would let a "woman like that" touch him. Jesus reads his mind and teaches him, parable and all: this woman is more grateful than you because she's sinned more. Then he turns to her and says, "your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you, go in peace!" And, scene.

So to summarize: Jesus lets the woman debase herself at his feet without comment, then he has a conversation with the men around the table *about* her, then he dismisses her. She doesn't get a name or a voice or a story, and we don't learn what she made of Jesus's words. 

The intention for the week was "Please allow me to believe that Jesus also says to me: your sins are forgiven!" 

Just, ugh.

What if the woman didn't need Jesus's forgiveness? What if she had been allowed to say what she knew? What if she *did* say what she knew, not in words but in actions: that the men in the room and their entitled judgements and their theological debates were just petty noise, meaningless in the face of what he would suffer? What if she was falling to pieces and anointing him not because he was the Son of God, but simply because he was human, the son of Mary, a friend?

I don't know. Except I *do* know, and I know that I'm tired of the spaces where some people get to speak and others don't, where we studiously avoid the obvious questions in the room, where big emotions are treated as suspect, where rules are more important than people. And ironically maybe the realization that this struggle has been going on for centuries (milennia!) is helping me feel better about being so lost in it. I keep landing on the Glennon Doyle quote-slash-lyric from We Can Do Hard Things: "We've stopped asking directions to places they've never been." There's nothing new under the sun and/but we've never been in this exact place before, so let's see what we can do from here?