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The roles women played in the evangelical church of my youth were very clear. They could be pastor’s wives, translators1, sometimes Sunday School teachers, fellow missionaries and sort of sad if they were single.2 I have a particularly distinct memory of the very idea of an ordained woman being scorned and mocked which made a profound impression on my pre-teen self. Which is why I was moved to tears when I had the privilege to witness a women being ordained3 in 2018 by a Episcopal/Lutheran church I used to attend in Seattle.4 It was a jarring, fantastic, welcome experience that was one of the early stops on my ‘slippery slope’5 to re-evaluate my religious upbringing.
Today I’m many steps later, with innumerable more to go, on this journey following my curiosity and un-learning false teachings. Probably in direct rebellion to my upbringing, my interest is often ignited by women — how their roles, stories, perspectives and experiences in the past inform and influence the present and potential possibilities for the future. Though I’m no longer a church-goer, I still find myself pulled into stories about the experiences, leadership and history of women in the christian church. My search has lead me to some fascinating people, compelling arguments, maddening points of view and long buried history that I’d love to see explored more in mainstream environments. If you’re also intrigued by this topic, especially in the context of our world today, watch the below talk on Women in Leadership. It was in this talk that I learned about Dr. Prathia Hall, who in 1977 became one of the first women ordained by the American Baptist Church and apparently coined the “I Have a Dream” phrase that we know from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech. 6
Today’s books are all non-fiction and explore different aspects of women in the church7 from their ordination (or lack thereof) to explorations into the wholeness of divinity to celebrating female mystics. While assembling today’s shelf I realized that I consumed all three of these as audiobooks instead of reading physical copies. Interesting. I guess these types of topics speak best to me while on a walk. Probably to get out all that angsty energy…
Light some incense and a candle as you examine women’s experiences with the divine inside and outside the church with one of these.
THE DANCE OF THE DISSIDENT DAUGHTER by Sue Monk Kidd
This memoir by well-known novelist Sue Monk Kidd was originally published in 1996. A Baptist pastor’s wife who was active in the church, Kidd explains the specific experience in a drugstore that woke her out of the mundane and ushered her into something more mystical. She shares the questions and doubts she had growing up female in the christian tradition and why they came roaring back when her own daughter was a teen. She takes us along the ups and downs of her own explorations into myth, tradition, symbology, ritual and dreams as she searches for meaning, understanding and a path to respect one’s inner authority as a woman.
I felt a deep affinity for Kidd’s confusion and frustration and was so thankful she shared her journey in this book. While I wasn’t a fan of the oft-repeated phrase ‘feminine wound’8, I got what she meant and was angry and motivated alongside her at the compounding danger of the trivialization, belittling and discrediting of women in church environments. I was bewitched by all the places she explored as she went “through the gate with what Zen Buddhists call ‘a beginner’s mind’, the attitude of approaching something with a mind empty and free, ready for anything, open to everything.”
Reading about her ‘quest’, I especially enjoyed the inclusion of mythology and how excluded women have been from symbol and myth making for centuries and what that cost has been. She goes into some Jungian dream analysis, asks why we use the tired ‘slippery slope’ analogy when people begin to deconstruct instead of a ‘world is flat, what continents are beyond the horizon?9” kind of understanding. I was struck by her questioning all the ‘bother’ around gendering the Divine, how vital symbol and image are in how we understand things and appreciated her exercise to discover why it was important for her to find a ‘feminine form for the formless’.
McFague points out that when only one image is allowed to serve as the grid from speaking about God, it becomes idolatrous. It comes to be viewed not as symbol, but as fact, as an actual description.
Kidd goes outside christianity on her quest but explains that it still continues to draw her in, so a good portion of the book wrestles with that though it goes to some delightfully unorthodox places too. I was particularly interested in her comments about the wholeness of divinity, that the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus “as the Word or Logos corresponds in dramatic and pointed ways with descriptions of Sophia or Wisdom in the Old Testament” and that El Shaddai, though ‘traditionally translated as the ‘almighty’ could just as well be translated as ‘The Breasted One’.10 Her scholarship and research is all very approachable and accompanies her personal story so, though there are many sources and quotations, it is still very much a memoir. Her storytelling is consistently compelling though I felt the very end was a tad meandering, and her dreams felt a bit too convenient for her particular quandaries but! I’m a cynic and working on it!11
… I tried to unravel, solidify, understand all the tangled reasons why I was doing what I was doing…
First I noted that the lack of a divine female image supported an imbalance in our consciousness that diminished our wholeness as persons. The feminine goes underground in our psyches just as it does in our God. When this happens we exclude, overlook, and undervalue the feminine within ourselves and in the world around us. Not only that, but as long as we have a divine Father who is able to create without a divine Mother, women's creative acts are viewed as superfluous or secondary. And as long as the feminine is missing in the Divine, men would continue to experience entitlement and women would be prey to self-doubt and disempowerment. It was that simple.
Internalizing the Divine Feminine provides women with the healing affirmation that they are persons in their own right, that they can make choices, that they are worthy and entitled and do not need permission. The internalization of the Sacred Feminine tells us our gender is a valuable and marvelous thing to be. It suggests the "goodness of female sexuality and the equal authority of the experience of women." Exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women.
THE MYSTICS WOULD LIKE A WORD by Shannon K. Evans
I can remember 0.0 times I was taught about female Christian mystics when I was growing up in the church. A light smattering of early Christian patriarchs here and there, but matriarchs? Nope. And you don’t need me to tell you that it was not because there were none12. I think the broad evangelical church is pretty fearful of anything mysterious or weird— they like their Jesus like John Wayne and they like their worship to be banal, simplistic and predictable with a heaping dose of cognitive dissonance.13 Anything too liturgical, ancient14 or nonliteral seems to scare them15. And how sad, boring and bland is that experience of divinity!? No icons, no incense, no meditation, no paths of curiosity, no study of different modes of being and understanding.16 Which is why I’ve recently been curious about female mystics as I divest myself from the religion of my youth.17
This book is a very short18 and very broad introduction to six Christian mystics19: Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux. Evans shares a bit of their biography, the legends that surround them, their mystical experiences and writings and how they influence her own life. I would have preferred a more scholarly voice here as it felt a bit Sunday School-esque with Questions for Prayer/Reflection at the end of each chapter and a few instances of fairly juvenile20 humor and a few personal anecdotes that didn’t feel compelling in contrast to the topic at hand. But! Each of these women are fantastical and strange and this book is just a small taster to pique your interest for deeper exploration so be sure to take a look at the bibliography.21
I took many notes while listening to this, often stopping on my walks to furiously type. I learned that the concept of original sin wasn’t even in the original Jewish scriptures— it was originated by St. Augustine. I was fascinated by Teresa’s ecstatic mystical experiences and her defense of self interrogation as vital to one’s spiritual journey. After all, rejecting one’s inner knowing in favor of only respecting (male) authority breeds authoritarianism and helps to usher in tyranny. Teresa integrated the physical with the spiritual, rejected false binaries and had some intriguing and racy views on non-erotic sensory experiences, sexual ethics and union with the divine. Margery sounds pretty difficult to be around but incredibly brave and resilient. Hildegard painted, preached, led a religious order, wrote plays and musical compositions and was also a scientist dedicated to the preservation of the natural world. Julian of Norwich22 lived in isolation almost her whole life and wrote about her mystical visions in Revelations of Divine Love which included feminine descriptions of God and she ‘approached gender binaries playfully, with a refreshing absence of precision’.23 I was struck by the nursing mother imagery for the Eucharist: “This is my body, broken for you. Take Eat.” Catherine of Siena made some intense choices while serving the oppressed and Thérèse of Lisieux was ‘the patron saint of women’s ordination’.24
I ended this book enthralled and motivated to learn more about these mystics who were wild, weird, distinct and difficult. Women I want to be inspired by instead of ignorant or fearful of. There are lovely icon-like illustrations of each of the mystics dividing the chapters which was an artistic touch I appreciated and Evans ends the book recounting her own brush with mystical experience.25
"As truly as God is our Father, just as truly is God our Mother."
"This beautiful word 'mother' is so sweet and kind in itself that it cannot be attributed to anyone but God. Only he who is our true Mother and source of all life may rightfully be called by this name."
"I realized that the Second Person [of the Trinity] is really our Mother. This beloved being works with us as a parent here on earth. We were created with a twofold soul, sensual and spiritual. Our spiritual essence is with God-the-Father. Our sensual nature lies with the Second Person of the Trinity, God-the-Mother, in whom we are rooted by virtue of our creation. In taking on our flesh, the Second Person became our Mother of Mercy."
BECOMING THE PASTOR’S WIFE by Beth Allison Barr
Barr is the author of the excellent ‘The Making of Biblical Womanhood’26 and continues her research into women’s roles in the church with this new book. Barr is a pastor’s wife herself so draws on her own experience and research as she posits that as women were denied ordained positions in the church, they were granted another role— Pastor’s Wife. A Pastor’s Wife is often part of a ‘two for one’ deal when a church hires a pastor. They don’t pay her and she has no authority but is expected to support her husband’s ministry with her service and by laying aside her own career aspirations. Barr explores this maddening and baffling phenomenon with research from medieval times and recent history mainly in the Southern Baptist Convention27 denomination. She shows how it was only in the last few decades that the conservatives took over the SBC and declared women couldn’t be ordained, though they had been previously, usually with the reasoning that “women were second in creation and first in the Edenic fall”. This statement is used over and over again and never made sense28 and also never failed to make by blood boil. What else boiled my blood? The very existence of a “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” 29and it having any authority whatsoever on people’s beliefs. And! When the male leaders simply turned off the mics during a recent debate over women’s ordination at their conference.30 -_-
Barr discusses how women were lauded missionaries, teachers and leaders throughout the history of the church and asks what the definition of our modern ‘pastor’ is, who gets to decide and of course, what about Mary Magdalene? I appreciated the work on this topic and I think it’s a very worthy read/listen for anyone with a similar background to mine. I also appreciated Barr’s acknowledgement of the differences for Black women preachers and their position in Black congregations. The book had a fairly narrow view and could have gone wider and deeper but I think, as an evangelical historian, Barr is writing for a specific audience and this is well put together for those readers. If you’re curious about the topic but not into a book version31, listen to the 5 part All The Buried Women podcast series that serves as a sort of accompaniment.32
extra credit: “The Women Who Want to Be Priests” New Yorker article
The worst part wasn’t the realization that my last ditch effort would fail, which it did. The worst part wasn’t my growing concern with a theology and ecclesiology that concentrated church governance on a very small group of men. The worst part wasn’t understanding, perhaps for the first time in my experience as a pastor’s wife, how contingent my role was. That all the influence I had wielded, authority in ministry I had carried, had come only as an extension of my husband’s job. I didn’t understand the worst part until later, when I had time to reflect. And even then I didn’t fully know the worst of it. I do now.
The worst part is knowing, historically, how I had come to be in that atrium. Knowing how women like me had become ministry leaders without ministerial authority. Knowing how the disappearance of women’s independent leadership and the rise of a dependent ministry role tied to marriage had little to do with the Bible.
if the rolling ladder is a weekly ritual that brings you amusement or adds a new book to your nightstand then
heart - share - comment - or even buy me a ‘coffee’
The Mary We Forgot from the mary shelf also belongs here.
are you a church lady?
do you have any interest in the mystics or the subordination of women in the church?
DISCUSS!
this was in hungary so hungarian translators were often needed for the sermon
spinster!!
hi KG!
or, as my father calls it ‘La La Liberal Land.’
this is a phrase used as a warning anytime one veers the slightest bit away from church dogma. where this slippery slope leads is never stated. i asked once and was ignored.
i’m usually referring the white american evangelical tradition when i talk about ‘church’ as that is what i grew up in.
i wonder if my irked attitude came from listening to it instead of reading. its just a sort of icky phrase with a murky meaning. i (mostly) got over it so you can too if you feel similarly
do not take this literally. the world is not flat.
“shad is also a Hebrew word for breast. The ending ai is an old feminine ending…”
our current state of the world is not helping
it was because of patriarchy. i can hear my mom saying ‘over the edge’ right now
the truth of this line from Stephanie Jo Warren walloped me: “There is no cognitive dissonance when your entire worldview is built on confirmation bias masquerading as divine discernment.”
though they claim conservatism, which always confused me. like conservative to what time period? not as far back as the early or medieval church obviously.
i’ve noticed so often anything even mildly offbeat is labeled ‘demonic’ or ‘evil’ or ‘satanic’ and i don’t get it. like why isn’t it the opposite if your god is omni-powerful/present/loving etc?
what about being ‘transformed by the renewing of your minds’ though??
what a rebel
just over 200 pages
i appreciated the author’s acknowledgment in her intro about why she choice these six white women and how, though often laudable, some of their views are complicated and problematic.
I was surprised when it was revealed the author was over 40 as it read like she was much younger, in a more early searching phase of life.
I wish a Further Reading section would have been included but I suppose we have algorithms
not really her name as its unknown; she lived in St Julian’s church in Norwich
saying things like “Jesus births” or “he mothers” or “Jesus as both Son and Mother” because why would the divine ‘conform to gender binaries established by human society”?
marking oct 1 in my calendar for her feast day
On the feast day of Doctor of the Church, St Thérèse of Lisieux, Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW) celebrates the priestly vocations of women throughout the ages and calls on Church leaders to dialogue fearlessly with women called to serve and lead as priests.
which I think could have used more detail
from the f*ck the patriarchy shelf
you may know the SBC from the six part exposé released in 2019 “20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms”
the story of adam and eve is not meant to be prescriptive or taken literally. it. is. a. creation. myth.
as if this random group of people have any sort of exclusive claim of authority on this topic. madness
remember: ‘power doesn’t panic’
weird
i like this show but i did not like its music
The full title of the last book was enough to give me flashbacks to my ragey church-working days. Ugh.
This is such poignant timing for me, because Corey and I are in the process of reevaluating where we will go to church as our much-beloved Father is moving has moved to a different state. I was explaining how vastly important it was for me that women were in every way equal wherever we end up due to my upbringing causing me to hold an unhinged, internalized misogyny in my youth that I never want our daughter to experience. I thought anyone that pushed against the evangelical mold for a woman was trying too much and being a “pick me” when in reality they were closer to understanding God’s will than most of those in leadership.
Reading Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Sienna in college were such turning points in my Christian life to opening my eyes to these injustices and prejudices towards women. That and meeting so many idiot men that I outsmarted in every aspect somehow become pastors while I wasn’t allowed 🫠
Excited to give these a try (though may still need more time to cool off for the third one). I’m interested in seeing if I prefer the audio or the book after your comments!