womenâs dedication to the church came up. âBut for all our dedication, weâve certainly gotten a rotten deal,â I said. It is the sort of thing waking women blurt almost without realizing it.
A man rolled his eyes at the ceiling. âOh no,â he said. âYouâre not one of those women, are you?â
âWhat women?â I asked.
âYou know, those screaming feminists who are always yelling about how bad women have been treated.â
âNo,â I told him fast as I could. âIâm not one of those.â And I dropped the subject as if it was toxic waste.
He had effectively dismissed my voice and experience. But then it hit me: Wasnât that what Iâd been doing to myselfâdismissing my own experience, the voice speaking deep inside?
Trivializing our experience is a very old and shrewd way of controlling ourselves. We do it by censoring our expressions of truth or viewing them as inconsequential. We learned the technique from a culture that has practiced it like an art form.
The trick works like this. An image is created of a âscreaming feministâ with an ax to grind. The image takes on enormous negative energy in the church and culture. Branding a woman with this image effectively belittles her opinion and discredits it. So rather than risk the image being attached to her, a woman will often back quickly away. I later realized thatâs what Iâd done when the man threatened to attach the label to me. It is a rare and strong woman who has enough inner substance to face the ridicule and pain that can come from expressing feminism.
The church itself has used this negative image as a way of controlling women and discouraging them from challenging the status quo. Once when I suggested to a woman that she stand up for women in a church situation, she said, âI really want to, but Iâd hate to look like one of those fanatical feminists our minister preaches about.â
Sometimes, though, othersâ attempts to control and trivialize donât work. Once when I led a discussion at a mixed-gender retreat, a couple of women began to express their pain as women within Christianity. A male clergyman, who I suspect was feeling uncomfortable, said, âOh, come on, the church is human, it makes mistakes. Why canât you just forgive and be done with it?â
Iâm not sure he realized what heâd doneâbrilliantly trivializing and dismissing their feelings. I mean, who could argue with what he said? Yes, the church is human. Yes, it makes mistakes. Yes, forgiveness is good.
There is a time to be gentle and a time to be fierce, and each of the two women managed to be both at the same time. Each spoke fierce things with a tone of gentleness. One said, âMust you focuson my need to forgive and let go? Iâm not yet at a place where I can do that. I really need to express whatâs inside me, and I need the church to listen. Why not go to the heart of it and focus on the churchâs need to repent and change?â
The other woman said, âThink a moment. If men were at the bottom and women were the ones in charge, if our theology tended to give us the power and excluded you, if it deified the feminine only, would you still be saying, âThe church is only human, why donât you just let it go?ââ
She brought to my mind the comment by Nelle Morton, one of the grandmothers of feminist spirituality, who said things are always different when you are looking âfrom the bottom up.â This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we
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