Women

I've been coming across current expressions of old religious debates about the role women.

They amaze me. Women having authority over men in the context of some secular employment is seen as a problem....what it means for a husband to have "final decision making authority" is discussed at length....

I could enter the arguments & debates: theological, semantic, social, logical etc. (I hate not to, because as a woman saying this I tend to feel I have to prove myself.) But what I think is more relevant and important for me to say just now, is from my experience.

The positions I read about the role and nature of women don't amaze me because I've never heard them before. They amaze me because of how familiar some of them have been, how much I've experienced them and how far from them I've come.

I hope it's not patronizing (or matronizing) to feel this way, but I feel bad for the many women who continue to live within these systems of belief. And of course I want to protect my daughter from as much of the sexism that pervades our culture as I can. At the same time I realize that in many ways I still live within it too. Years of personal experience in patriarchy and centuries of cultural experience in patriarchy don't go away just because one awakens to it a bit and starts to see things differently.

When I primarily identified with conservative Christian groups with predictably conservative views regarding women, I could never really come to terms with those views. It's not that it was always a burning issue. From time to time the issue would emerge, then dutifully get explained and swept back under the rug of rationalization and unawareness to be ignored awhile longer. At the time there wasn't much else I could do. But sometimes it would get noticed enough to be painful. As much as it might be presented otherwise, when I got in touch with it, I couldn't get around the deeply painful sense that in spite of explanation that said otherwise, in reality this position portrayed that women were inherently inferior to men and because of this women were by definition denied certain roles. In other words, as a woman, I was inherently and deeply inferior to that part of humanity that was male, and had to live in an accordingly limited way. I don't think all the explanations in the world, even ones that might be rationally and logically plausible; or the best experience possible in living out relationships with men who might live out this model in the most godly and gracious ways possible, could get me to truly accept this or feel alright about it, then or now.

I want to say to women: you do not have to rationalize this so you can keep yourself within a sexist definition of absolute truth, faithfulness to God and the way "He" made you. You can be honest with yourself and honest with God. You are not a 2nd class citizen because of your gender. You should fight those things from our religion and our culture, and those things within and around you; that say, imply, or make you feel that you are. You are not offending God by doing so.

I don't mean to say men and women, boys and girls are all the same. If nothing else, I've been a wife and mother too long to think that. But don't let your gender put you down or limit you. Trust yourself and trust God enough to be honest about the dynamics of your life, including those related to gender. Then do your best, with God's help, to live true to yourself, the relationships you have and the callings God has given you.

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