Anger and Grace

OK, I warned you that sidetracked-ness from the pet series could happen. Rachel Held Evans just posted about the conundrum of being a privileged person who is trying to learn to be more aware and sensitive and how to, either accidentally or on purpose, not use their privilege as a weapon against others.

And I had this lovely draft with some of my thoughts on that very subject just sitting there mostly ready to go.

These days, I find myself getting angry much more easily than I used to. Probably something to do with reading a lot more feminist media criticism and feminist perspectives of Christianity.

Feminism, it turns out, is one of those things where the more informed you are, the more you see how screwed up everything is. Figures.

So when people I love make comments about Halloween that propagate rape culture, or Steven Moffat writes another female character that has exactly the same personality, or rather lack thereof, as all his other female characters, or certain politicians imply that rape is part of God’s plan, or people from my denomination refuse to understand why purely masculine language about God is a problem, I get angry. I yell at my computer, wave my arms, say words and make gestures I wouldn’t if my parents were in the vicinity, rant to my husband with varying degrees of coherency. Some of my feminist friends and I discuss it over wine. Sometimes I journal or blog about it.

And of course it isn’t just anger; there is also pain: my pain, the pain of my friends and family. I hurt on behalf of us, and if I’m feeling generous I even hurt on behalf of those who said or did the hurtful thing, because they often don’t understand what it is they do. I don’t know whether it’s more of a good thing or a bad thing, but part of the human condition, at least as I experience it, is that pain and anger go hand in hand. It’s like they’re friends where Pain is the sensitive one and Anger is the protective and rather volatile one who will punch you in the face if you mess with Pain.

Anger is important. It signals that something is WRONG, and insists that something be done about it NOW. Anger channeled constructively can be the impetus for positive change to self and surroundings.

Unfortunately, as a Christian woman, I have to fight against two deeply ingrained social constructs just to have the right to unabashedly declare to the world, “Hey! I’m angry right now!” and still be taken seriously.

American culture at large is not kind to angry women. We tend to get branded as “shrill,” asked if maybe we are PMSing, as if emotion that comes to the surface during that time is less legitimate than emotions at other times. People will assume anything and everything about a woman’s anger other than the clearly ridiculous notion that something has happened at which the woman has a right to be upset. Because all women all the time are excessively emotional and take things too personally and the solution is to pat them on the head and give them chocolate and wine and chick flicks and send them on their irrational little way.

Then there is the particular Christian culture that I come from, evangelical Friends/Quakers. We’re not supposed to be angry either. Because we are into peace and silence and the movement of the Holy Spirit and Christ within, and they are all about love and grace and peace, and what does anger have to do with those things? It’s not like Jesus ever got angry or anything. Sheesh.

Honestly, I have a harder time with the second issue than the first, because there’s a lot of truth in the whole love and grace and peace not having a lot of room for anger, at least as we usually deal with it. Because remember when I said that anger channeled constructively could be the impetus for positive change? Well, I meant that, but if there’s one thing I know about the average human being, it’s that channeling natural but negative emotions constructively is not something we’re very good at. To put it mildly.

And then it gets even more complicated, because ingrained power structures often come into play. For example, our society is still saturated with male privilege, so there’s a lot of pressure on a woman who is angry at a man to find ways to just deal with it, or to be loving and gracious if it happens within Christianity. Christian men are allowed to be way more angry than Christian women about pretty much anything, but especially if a woman is angry at a man.

Now, as a woman who is also straight and white, I myself have a lot of privilege that I am doing my best to recognize. So when it comes to major power structures within society, I realize that I am part of the advantaged group, the group that is inclined to minimize and dismiss the anger of others, in the areas of both race and sexuality. I am sure I personally have been guilty of it in the past, and may well be again. All I can say is that I am sorry, and that I welcome being called out on it if it happens here on the blog.

Yet this is where it gets complicated, because though I understand the impulse, I don’t want to be yelled at. I have the best intentions, but I’m human, and my experience of the world is mostly limited to the smallish community in which I have spent all but a few months of my life. I want people who I may hurt to be free to say that they are angry, but to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to me when they do so.

And if that is the treatment I want, doesn’t that mean it’s the treatment I ought to give others? Even politicians whose ignorance of  the female bodies they wish to legislate is nauseating and astonishing? Even pastors whose constant refrain is that women belong in the home under the authority of their husbands, that everything is about sex, that the only demographic that should really matter to the church is young men? Even to a person in my life who can be counted on to make at least one ignorant, sexist comment and be oblivious to the needs of those around him nearly every time I see him, and who I can’t avoid seeing while still being a decent human being myself?

How do I convince myself that these and others who anger me really do mean well, even if I think they are almost entirely misguided? How do I both show that I am willing to listen to their side, but that what has been said and done has hurt and angered both myself and others, and that we have as much right to our feelings and opinions as they do to theirs?

How do I find the courage to keep learning and engaging and getting uncomfortable and growing more aware and compassionate in my interactions with the wide world when that means facing the anger of people of color and sexual minorities?

What is the proper balance of anger and grace?

I wish to God I knew.

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Who are we silencing?

So I read Rachel Held Evans‘ new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I won’t lie, I personally think her writing is much better on her blog than in her books, but I learned some cool things about Jewish practices and perspectives on the bible. I think my main thing was that Rachel didn’t go as far as I hoped she would, so I didn’t find any of her conclusions to be particularly earth-shattering.

The book I read before that was Alice Walker’s The Temple of my Familiar. Now that book, my friends, was earth-shattering, at least for me. And it had set a lot of thoughts and questions spinning through me, and those were very much still with me when I read Rachel’s book.

Which is why the part of her chapter on silence where she tackles that FRELLING verse in 1 Timothy (a woman must learn in quietness. . . I do not allow a woman to teach blah blah blah) actually got my dander up.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favor of using the historical and literary context of the epistles to demonstrate that those particular verses were in no way meant to be for all people for all time, and therefore should not be used to oppress women and LGBTQ people. Yes. Do that. We Quakers have been on board with the women teaching and preaching thing since the 17th century, and the more the merrier on this wagon, as far as we’re concerned.

However.

The way in which Rachel explains the situation 1 Timothy was addressing is completely dismissive of the women towards whom the “silence” command was originally given: “Of particular concern to Paul was a group of young widows who had infiltrated the church and developed a reputation for dressing promiscuously, sleeping around, gossiping, spreading unorthodox ideas, interrupting church services with questions, mooching off the church’s widow fund, and generally making common floozies of themselves” (261).

Seriously, Rachel? They “infiltrated” the church? You don’t think they might have been drawn to the radical message of God’s love and salvation being available to all people? And how the frell does a person dress promiscuously? Were their clothes having a lot of. . . nope, I am not going to finish that sentence. Anyway.

First, there is the problem of assumed Pauline authorship, when in fact, as Kendra Irons over at Ain’t I a Woman points out, scholars are pretty sure those epistles were not written by the Apostle Paul at all. Now, “[a]n admission of anonymous authorship does not mean that we do not need to take these texts seriously, but it does enable us to see how the developing nature of the early church in adapting to its culture and to its need for self-preservation willingly seceded the radical visions of Jesus and Paul as it moved away from egalitarian practices embracing instead a patriarchal hierarchy evident in the household codes of Roman society.”

Then there’s the stuff that connects with Temple of My Familiar, which is a novel about, among other things, the ways that women and the sacred feminine have been pushed out of religion and religious practice in a process that began millennia ago and continues today.

So while Rachel was just as dismissive of those young widows as the author of 1 Timothy, I found myself wondering what they were saying and doing that was really so bad. According to Rachel, “Scholars believe these women may have been influenced by the popular Roman fertility cults of Artemis that encouraged women to flaunt their sexuality and freedom to a degree that scandalized even the Roman establishment, hardly known for its prudish morals” (261). In other words, these women were probably used to what we nowadays call sex-positive thinking, which sees sex and sexuality as something beautiful and empowering and nothing to be ashamed of, as opposed to the repression of sexuality within Judaism and Christianity. They were used to a connection to the sacred feminine, used to being integral parts of humanity’s connection with God. Is it so much of a leap to think that the women’s disruptive questions and unorthodox ideas were related to trying to bring some of these things into the early church, which was already getting patriarchal? Is it so much of a leap to think that maybe they were silenced for the same reasons that Christian feminists are silenced today? And as for Artemis’ fertility cults being scandalous to the Romans, might not that have been because they empowered women in a patriarchal culture, rather than because of the explicitness of the sexuality?

We can’t know for sure, of course, and it may be that these women really were disruptive in all the negative ways that the standard interpretation suggests. But knowing Christianity’s (ongoing) horrific track record with women, I’m inclined to think that the silencing of these women was every bit as unjust as the silencing of women today. Friends, in our eagerness to show why 1 Timothy 2 should not prohibit women today from speaking and teaching, let’s not make the mistake of perpetuating the silencing of our sisters from the early church.

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