Patterns of Robbing Selfhood

It wasn't clear to me until late last night that I would actually have a sermon to deliver this morning. I'd relied on there being enough time at the end of the week to finish, so when we became one of the half-million people without power after the ice storm, it was a definite setback -- first, shivering seems to have a profound negative effect on my thinking; and then, of course I had no computer. Friday night, power still down, I was taking heart only in the assurance of knowing that if ever a sermon doesn't come together, we can always ring the bowl, and go into silence together for 20 minutes.

The power did return on Saturday morning, and the sun was shining warm and healing outside my window. I began to believe that I'd make it, riding on the strength of my new sense of gratitude for the everyday blessings of having a home, warmth, health, and companions to share times of adversity. So, thankfully, here I am.

My starting point for this sermon isn't either the week's lectionary scriptures, or the Epiphany liturgy, though I hope they're both indirectly reflected. Rather, the sermon is my response to this particular moment in the life of our community -- the Sunday of the men's retreat.

When I found that I had signed on to preach on this particular Sunday, my reaction was, "A great occasion for a women's sermon!" [Not because I don't feel free to speak of these issues just as freely before the whole congregation: I definitely do. But simply because it came to me to use the time this way.] But I have to confess my sense that I am not particularly well placed to speak about women's issues. There are Seekers who have committed themselves much, much more deeply than I have to both women's spirituality and women's political rights.

And in fact, I don't think I'll say anything that most Seekers haven't understood and already made a part of their lives. But I've chosen to go ahead and say it anyway. You may think of it as a long personal confession; or, maybe, you may think of it as a reminder of what Seekers knows and a part of what we Seekers are about. Maybe then, we can feel the energy of our knowledge and commitments anew.

I read a book late last year that has felt important to me, and that I want to share. The book is called "At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst." It is by Carol Lee Flinders, a comparative literature scholar, much of whose professional life has been spent studying women mystics, and especially Julian of Norwich. At the same time, she has pursued her own spiritual path as a resident of an ashram built on an old dairy farm in Northern California. The community's teacher is a Buddhist with a very eclectic approach, who teaches from texts across many religious traditions. Flinders' life seems remarkably like that in a Benedictine monastery: divided between communal prayer, individual study and manual labor.

It has been a very rich book for me, and I can't do it justice here, but I want to share some of her thinking. Flinders' writing is driven by her growing realization in the late 80's that her study and her life in the ashram, while distancing her from feminist political struggles, hadn't kept her from developing a deep feminist commitment. What motivates her commitment is her growing conviction that despite the tremendous political and social gains that American women have made, the systematic demeaning and devaluing of women and girls remains so pervasive that it still seems to pass for normal.

I've let this thought guide my seeing for the past couple of weeks. Somewhat like Peter's cataract surgery, it makes clear some things that in the normal course are more of a blur to me; and I've made note of some of what I've seen. From the fairly trivial to the horrific, the items I'm listing here seem to say something about how American culture values its women and girls, even after decades of politically active feminism.

First, somewhat trivial, I was driving in College Park on Monday, and on the bumpers of the little Nissan waiting at the light in front of me, I saw a pair of those apparently ubiquitous iridescent silver decals you see mostly on truck mud flaps. Abnormally buxom, presumably naked longhaired women, sitting back leaning on their arms behind them, back arched and one leg up. I've been trying to think of some parallel often-seen image that conveys this kind of devaluation of a group of people. The Confederate flag feels this way to many African Americans. There's something particularly disturbing about having the approximate shape of a body be used as such to devalue this way.

Or this: I was driving two little girls home with their mom. The girls are about 7 years old, and they began singing a song that was so suggestive and sexualized that to hear it in these seven-year-old voices seemed obscene. Taken aback, I looked into my rear-view mirror. In the back seat, the girls were doing sexy choreographed moves that matched the music. I presume it's something they saw on MTV. It didn't help to think that these little girls probably didn't know what they were saying.

There's also a particular ad I've seen in the Washington Post Magazine several times that's struck me. It's an ad for facial cosmetic surgery, and it has before and after pictures: what is so striking to me is that the "before" picture to me seems a picture of an attractive woman, maybe just a bit older than I am. What's wrong with the way she looks that is supposed to be so scary that it would drive us to go under a surgeon's knife? I hear women with thighs like mine are choosing surgery because they think they are too big; women with breasts like mine go because they think they are too small. Our noses, or chins, or mouths, or eyes are wrong-- too big too small, shaped the wrong way, or softening with age. We may have unprecedented access to powerful places in society, but at the same time, the standard of what makes women physically acceptable seems to be getting tighter and tighter.

This Thursday morning, I read in the Post another of a seemingly unending set of recent stories; a husband had confessed to killing his estranged wife, the mother of his children, and burying her body in a shallow grave just off a commercial parking lot. The frequency of these stories, of men stalking and killing former wives and girlfriends, seems to do injury to something in my own spirit; and I know these stories of incomprehensible brutality and callousness represent just the end of a spectrum of violence against women by the men who are supposed to love them.

I am aware that this list belongs to a woman who is privileged, and lucky, in many ways: I am well-educated; I am economically secure; I can walk my street in relative safety; I am in a marriage in which I am not battered, physically or emotionally; and I have found a strong community of support. Still, if I let myself go further afield that just these weeks, I'd have a long list of other disturbing items, maybe more important ones. And when I stop to consider these things, get them in focus, I can see that, like breathing polluted air, the sum total of them likely is taking a larger emotional and spiritual toll than I usually think about.

We are American women: wealthy by the world's standards, enjoying a quality of health unprecedented for women, free to be universally educated and have rewarding careers, possessed of political rights. But Flinders believes that, despite our advantages, we nevertheless appear to be suffering from a sort of paralysis: why don't we raise our voices, she asks, collectively, against all these works of American society that hurt us and angers us? Not only against the injustices and insults against ourselves as women; but the injustice, greed, racism, and violence that affect others we care about, and infect the world we live in?

It's the answer she proposes that resonates so much with me. "What if," she asks, "the structures that have kept women silent and disempowered for so long are too deeply embedded in human consciousness--yours, mine, everyone's to be touched by anything like ordinary political activism? What if they are stored not in our minds, but in our bones and muscles?"

What if American women are still like some colonized nation, like India after 200 years of British colonial rule, for example, so that our sense of ourselves as social and political beings is impaired in ways it isn't easy to get hold of? What if the lingering effects of the hatred that has been openly expressed toward women through long ages of Western civilization still penetrate our thinking about ourselves as women?

If I consult my own heart, Flinders seems close to the mark. It seems to me that I've given over a rather large chunk of my life to doing right and being an achiever. And I think this was largely to assure others and myself that even though I was a girl, later a woman, I could overcome that "failure," and I could still make the grade. The problem with this strategy, for anyone, is that no matter how much external validation that you receive, internally you remain plagued by self-doubt. Meanwhile, spending so much time trying to meet others' expectations, you stop being able to determine what you most deeply desire for yourself.

I've known this to be true for myself, but I have consoled myself believing that with the coming of feminism, new generations of young women no longer have the same struggle simply to know what they want. I can see that this is true: there are many strong young women around me, and more ways to access images of women's strength.

But, still: Flinders tells a story about a foundation administrator who interviewed candidates for an important graduate fellowship. The women applying for the fellowships were very high achievers, but when asked in interviews what they wanted the fellowships for, many seemed remarkably unable to be very clear about what it was that they wanted. And the Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan finished a landmark study just a few years ago that found that our girls, up to the age of 10, were often highly intellectually curious, articulate and engaging. But by the age of 12 or 13, a high percentage of them had become significantly less focused, less articulate and less self-confident.

Which is to say, the pattern repeats. So, Flinders asks, what if what's needed is something deeper than ordinary social and political solutions? And I'd also ask, digressing only a little, what if the same thing is true also of other social patterns that trouble us now? So that what might be true of sexism is true also of racism, and also of our economy's abuse of the environment, and our culture's capture by consumerism. In each case, there's a pattern of assumptions and practices that is repeated generation after generation, like some cultural DNA that codes characteristics which, in our hearts, we'd really like to be free of.

What they all seem to have in common is a shared grounding in the belief that each of us somehow can be more sure of our own worth and our own selfhood when there are others who we can be consider less important. Typically this has been done by physically overpowering others; or we can beat someone in some contest -- these days, the contest likely involves making more money or having more things; or whole groups can feel more worthy by defining others as inferior based on some inherent characteristic.

I check my heart again; this also feels true for me, both on the giving and receiving end. Over time, I've likely been able to let up using some of the more obvious methods of shoring myself up by "besting" others, but I know I have new sets of comparisons that work the same way, just with different criteria. Meanwhile, on the receiving end, there are times I feel myself judged or dismissed by others using their own scale of comparisons. The particular problem with sexism and racism, for the "losers," is that to the extent that we have internalized the dominant message, to that extent we feel that our "failure" to is something that nothing can finally completely make okay.

How can we free ourselves from having our sense of self being based on robbing selfhood from each other? Flinders suggests that it requires something like the soul-changing practices that Mahatma Gandhi used during India's struggle against colonialism. Something like Gandhi's practice of Satyagraha, Soul Force, based on committed and consistent spiritual practices, is needed to address the lingering effects of the past upon our hearts and minds.

Recently, in core members' meetings, a couple of questions have come up that have generated important discussion, and have left me wanting to do some more thinking. One was a challenge that David Lloyd posed to the members to find where the power of the Resurrection was operating in the actions of our mission groups. Another was a discussion of what kind of relationship ought to exist between the mission groups and the needs of Seekers as a whole. These discussions sent me looking through the Seekers' Church Member's Guide, and specifically to what we say in the guide about mission groups.

Here's part of our statement about mission groups: "For us, a mission group carries the seeds of the destiny of human kind. The future depends on what happens in the group and whether it is faithful to Christ. Without the living presence of Christ in the group, participants will not feel a sense of eternal significance."

What strikes me about this statement is the sense of urgency in it -- the same that I see reflected in Flinders' call for an American Satyagraha. Both point to the need for a spiritual practice, and the committed pursuit of an inner life in community with others who have a similar commitment. And both recognize that these spiritual practices in community isn't finally for either the spiritual betterment of the individual or of the community alone; but that somehow, they are connected to a larger work in the world. This understanding that we are working for the deliverance of many from bondage to freedom is stated explicitly in the call of Seekers' Church.

Both Seekers' understanding of mission groups and Flinders' understanding of Satyagraha start with the work that has to be done in one's own soul. That is the only place where the spells we're under can be broken. Both point us to the need to create circles of strength and caring enclosing spaces where we can bring the stories that trouble us; where others will hear them; and where eventually, we can learn to respond to them effectively. It is one of the glories of Seekers' that the coming together creates these circles of both women and men, who hear and teach each other.

Both Seekers and Satyagraha emphasize the importance of consistent spiritual disciplines: of prayer, of study, of times of silence, of self-reflection. What Flinders calls "the enclosure of consistent practices" leads us to understand that both our despairs and hopes for the world "are finally about oneself: one's own consciousness, one's own capacities and relationships, the depth of one's own desire to begin setting things right, and the opportunities that one's own situation affords." Knowing this about us is part of the process that Seekers might name Call.

It makes reassuring sense to me that there should be this kind of correspondence between two different descriptions of the link between personal spirituality and possible healing for the larger culture. To remember the connection seems energizing to me. I like the idea that our life in mission group is of "eternal significance," as the Members' Guide puts it-- it seems a good guide to help us stay the course. We can take this seriously: it's about us, but it isn't only about us. Our sisters need us; our brothers need us. Our children need us. The world needs us.

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