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Narrative Policy Reflections
on Our Wounded
Identities in Law
Holy Trouble To Make a Dragon Move To Rescue or Research Pornography: Subjectivity and Gender-Identity in Cyberspace GWU Resources
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re-narrating
her story When
I was a child, my great-grandmother Loyd lived with us.
My memories of her are jumbled in a three-year-old’s skewed
perspective, but sometimes I swear I can recall the smell of her embrace
and sense the peace of her countenance.
She was a devoutly Christian woman, her Southern grace constant
until the very end.
Grandma
Loyd developed bone cancer around the same time I was born, and her
convalescence put her at the mercy of my hyperactive toddler imagination.
I was an impossible child, far too opinionated and high-maintenance
to be endured for long periods of time.
But fortunately for my developing confidence, Grandma Loyd adored
me, and in my very earliest memories I can recall sitting with her in her
bedroom, telling her stories. Along
with the cancer that was paralyzing her, Grandma Loyd had also lost
virtually all vision, and could no longer read her precious family Bible.
I was so envious because my older sister would frequently read to her from
this Bible.
If I close my eyes, I can remember every detail of this book.
It was big and black with silver flecks all over it and elaborate
illustrations throughout: Daniel pacing confidently through the lion’s
den, the tower of Babel rising up to the sky, Bathsheba bathing on the
roof.
I remember I finally devised a solution to distract Grandma
Loyd’s attention away from my sister and back on to myself.
I
informed Grandma that I could read just as well as my sister could, and I
would sit down with her nightly and tell stories about the pictures in the
Bible.
Daniel became the father of a beautiful little girl, and the lions
were their pets.
Bathsheba became the queen of the city, so brave and bold that she
took her daily bath overlooking her land.
I invented countless stories before I ever really realized how
inferior this big black book had the potential to make me feel.
I had taken the names and pictures and made them my own, in a way. Looking
back, I am actually rather surprised that my Grandma allowed this little
game.
She was descended from strict Irish Catholic stock, herself a
Protestant, but very intent on literal interpretation of scripture.
That she allowed me to make up these stories and tell them to her
is really a testament to her kind and nurturing spirit, though I am sure
my own persistence in being the ultimate center of the universe played no
small part.
Inventing
my own parables, reading myself and my beautiful grandmother into this
family Bible that she so cherished, had an interesting effect on both of
us.
I like to think that, though she died when I was four, we had
forged a strong and extraordinary bond.
Something about her illness, my youth, and our closeness made these
moments all the more precious.
I had been constantly warned that Grandma Loyd would be going to
Heaven soon, and I wanted to be with her as much as possible.
I wanted to read to her from this book that she so loved.
I wanted to hurry and create a mythology for both of us. So
really, as long as I can remember, I have been inventing my own myths. The
impact this had on me was significant, I think.
Later on, when I learned the official
stories of the pictures in Grandma’s Bible, they never seemed as true as
the ones I had told to my Grandma Loyd as she lay dying. Why
do I tell you this story now?
Why do I struggle with whether or not it is something worthwhile
that really belongs in this peculiar academic endeavor I have set out
upon?
Because it is the beginning; it is as close as I can come to my
beginning.
I tell you my story because it is in my bones.
It is part of me, and my telling it has made it part of you. This
is the story that begins my thesis.
It creates the narrative tone that I sought to maintain throughout
the work.
This thesis was an attempt to synthesize feminist theology and
women’s religious experiences with what I see as being the most
important contemporary issue in women’s studies: the issue of realizing
the power and beauty of our own traditions at the same time we realize the
potential harm and pain they can foster.
Stories shape our lives.
They shape the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves as
fitting into the world.
As a child, telling these stories to my grandmother set me on a
path toward seeing how positively stories could affect my outlook.
Later, as I began to learn about how inferior these stories could
potentially make me feel, I continued to simply re-narrate them in my
head. Later on, as I began to read about early movements in Christianity,
I became fascinated with the idea of looking at all the stories.
In
this thesis, I have pulled in stories from a vast background of early
Christian sources.
I have compiled many Gnostic legends and practices, early Hebraic
legends and stories, studies of women’s roles in early Christianity, and
used them to create a new story.
As I worked, I followed along with the Gospel
of Luke, and in a very real way, what I have done is translated the
story into a wider traditional context.
I have used feminist theology and theory throughout to justify many
of the decisions I made in writing the story. Any
feminism that is only about women, I feel, is intrinsically contradictory.
In the story I have created, I have tried to maintain that
perspective.
At the beginning of this project, I was interested in exploring the
medieval dialogue about the plausibility of a female Christ.
I wanted at first to write a story that placed women’s
experiences above men’s.
I soon realized I could not tell a story that vilified men and
heroicized women, though, and still be true to my own theology and
philosophy.
Some
of the early parts of my story come from the Gnostic Infancy gospel of
James.
The Tripartite Tractate, the Gospels of Mary, Thomas, and Phillip
were also influential.
Much of the content is influenced by other Gnostic legends that
appear in the Nag Hammadi.
The legend of Sophia is a dominant theme in my own theology and in
the story I have crated. Many Gnostic tales identify Sophia, the divine
feminine principle and personification of wisdom, as being the original
creator.
Several texts in the Nag Hammadi refer to the legend—described in
the Gnostic text On the Origin of
the World, among other places—of Sophia being the original creator.
Sophia, in the Greek, was the spirit of female wisdom.
She was symbolized by the dove of Aphrodite, and in some Gnostic
traditions, she was seen as the third entity in the Trinity, the Holy
Spirit.
Her legend can be traced through Jewish theology into Christian
theology (Torjeson 263).
The Trattato Gnostico
identifies Sophia as being the Chaos from which Yahweh was born.
One legend suggests that Sophia sent Christ, her son, to the Earth
in the form of a dove (her totem) to enter into the man Jesus at his
baptism in Jordan.
She was the Holy Spirit that entered Mary’s body and caused her
to conceive, and also who entered Elizabeth’s body and caused her to
conceive John the Baptist (Walker 952).
Many of the cults that sprang up following the death of Christ
recognized him not as the son of Yahweh, but as the prophet of Sophia. My
story is of an ambiguous salvation.
Whether grace was given to us by Christ or John or Mary or Sophia
or Yahweh or all of them together, it seemed really important to maintain
that it could have been any or all. They were of a force that, together,
saved humankind. It also seemed important that there was a multi-layered
character named Mary, and whether she was the Mother of Jesus, the
historical Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, or some other Mary, I wanted
to leave ambiguous.
I wanted to create a very modern story that a woman might be
telling her child today.
I chose to use Latinized versions of all the names—Jesus instead
of Yeshua, Mary instead of Miriam, etc.
I tried to maintain a simple folklorish cadence.
Instead of making a new story, I have worked with what actually
exists.
I have written a story that could really have happened.
It could have been the Gospel according to Martha or Elizabeth.
A gospel that acknowledges nuance.
A gospel that, for me, was a kind of prayer. I
want to tell you a small section of the story.
In working on this, I re-read the story of the final Passover
dinner in my grandmother’s old Bible—the very one I mentioned earlier,
and I was stricken by how surreal and strange the story sounded.
I was reminded of the vision quest tradition in Native American
traditions.
Jesus fed his followers of his body and his blood—a very
archetypal feminine act—and in the King Lames version, what seems to
follow is a strange metaphysical journey.
I would like to tell you this section of my story now. *************************** He
sat for the final Passover dinner with his followers in the ancient
tradition of the vision quest.
He fed them of his body and blood, and together they saw the Truth.
Each of them assimilated it and remembered it in his or her own
way.
Later on, lost without Jesus, and too frightened to follow Mary,
several of the disciples would lose the greater vision they all shared
that night.
Caught up in ego issues like which gender is superior and who
ascended bodily into heaven, the crux of the Vision would be lost.
But the wonder remained.
It is still here today, and like a Pandora’s Box of infinite
Wisdom, we can call upon it at any moment.
Quiet and listen for a moment; you will feel its gentle pulse.
The power of her body and blood tore away the veil to allow open
access to the flow that pulses beneath everything.
Immediately,
Jesus realized the extent of what was to happen to him this night and of
how it would change his disciples.
The blood of Wisdom would show them the truth, but the truth is not
always beautiful and peaceful.
As John could attest, truth can possess the most horrific and
excruciating faces.
“Behold,” he said, “the hand of him that betrayeth me is with
me on the table.”
The evening had a strange dreamscape rhythm.
The disciple Peter was terrified by the fluttering of the universe.
He clung to what he knew, insisting on his loyalty—but no!
“The cock shall not crow this day, before thou shalt thrice deny
that thou knowst me,” Jesus told him.
The voice was more than a voice, though.
It was an endless bell tolling and an excruciating thundering, the
thundering of angels, demons, and spirits in a frenzy of activity.
Blood,
sweat, and body were wound up with prayer and angelic visits.
Lost in the realm of Her blood, Judas’ soul screamed with agony.
Judas came to him, to the child of the World, Wisdom made flesh on
earth.
Time hovered as blood covered moon and sky and vision.
Their rough sun-streaked faces were lost in the patterns of the
night and the Blood.
Their eyes locked.
An eternity passed as their faces came together.
Judas’ lips met the lips of Jesus.
“Judas, thou betrayest me with a kiss.”
And
then came the priests, and they took him.
And Peter denied him thrice as foretold.
“I know him not.”
And the cock crowed.
And Peter wept.
“Are you the Son of God?” the priests demanded of him.
I am the son of all the universe now, he thought.
“Ye say that I AM,”
he told them.
It was enough.
************************************************************************ In
their mocking and misery, Pilate and Herod found common ground.
Herod demanded miracles of Jesus as he had of John, but the time
for that had passed.
Swayed by the insistence of the priests, Pilate agreed to the
crucifixion.
The women followed and stayed with Jesus, though the men fled.
You have heard this story.
I shall not follow along with the crude scene.
The darkness did come, though, and the veil of the temple was rent
forever.
The power that was centered in the moment of the tearing down of
the veil would travel through the world, through all time.
The boundaries and laws and rules and thin veneer of order that
Yahweh had attempted to impose on this matter was torn away and re-woven
with Love instead of Law.
Sophia’s compassion would be married to Yahweh’s creation.
Jesus
cried out.
The scream of the infinite.
Jesus cried out with all of John’s passion and misery, with all
of Mary’s power and presence, with the blood of all women and the sweat
of all men and the tears of all who knew loneliness and bitterness.
The veil fell, and all the oneness of chaos, wisdom, order, and
love flowed through him.
His scream hung in the air for an eternity.
Jesus of Nazareth, Child of Man, Prophet of Yahweh, Son of Mary,
gave up the ghost. The
body was laid in the sepulchre by Joseph of Arimathea.
Mary returned with the others to prepare the body.
She tasted the blood of the last night and felt the shift as she
reached the empty tomb.
The stone was rolled away.
No one was within.
Mary turned her face up to the sky and then down to the earth.
She grasped Salome’s hand, and together they walked to where the
others were lodging.
******************************************************* What
of the prophets, of the Old Law, and of the New One?
It is for you to discover.
I tell you this story not as Law, but as Truth.
I tell this story to remind you to be silent sometimes and listen
to the Blood.
I remind you to always continue the search.
And to keep the stories alive. Becoming
involved in the women’s movement means moving from isolation as a woman
to community.
Through the telling of my story, I reach out to other women.
Through their hearing, which both affirms my story and makes it
possible, they reach out to me.
I am able to move, gradually, from defensiveness to openness, from
fear of questioning, to a deep and radical questioning of the premises
from which I have lived my life.
I experience relief; my anger has been heard, and I am not alone.
But I am also frightened; I am undermining my own foundations.
The walls come tumbling down.
(Judith Plaskow, “Coming of Lillith”) I
have to address this point before I can close.
It can be scary questioning our traditions.
It should be, as a matter of fact.
In this quote, Plaskow identifies the feelings of anxiety and fear
that come from trying to remain in one’s religious tradition; at the
same time she criticizes and even rejects those aspects of it that she
simply cannot reconcile.
The place of the feminist theologian in a tradition is tenuous at
best and can cause great anxiety.
Fear becomes the fear of what will happen, of the consequences our
traditions have taught us our questions can bring down on us.
Anxiety comes from not knowing.
In a way, it is that same existential anxiety that Sartre speaks
of.
We are vitally choosing our theology, revising a tradition that
makes up our very linguistic construct, but it is not an activity to be
taken lightly. As
a little girl telling stories to my great-grandmother, I was unconsciously
setting the tone for my future spiritual search.
I have always shook my head in confusion at people who get hung up
on details of stories and fail
to find the truth in them.
Looking at the picture in the big black book, I could tell that
Daniel was brave and true and that God loved him.
The stories I made up about him only brought his story closer to
me. I
do not mean to say that all should be relative and that there is no truth.
I do not mean to say we should no longer pass on the same stories
from generation to generation.
In the oral tradition, though, stories can and must change
continuously.
Each teller changes the story, sometimes a little and sometimes a
lot, to make it his or her own.
Similarly, I loved listening to my other grandmother tell me
stories from her Bible.
I loved listening to the way her soft Arkansas language would lapse
into King James English when she told me about the Sermon on the Mount.
I find my tradition beautiful, and I want it to be carried on.
But I want it to be able to grow.
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