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he Body Of Women: Recreating Christian Anthropology
Talk given by Sister Mary Aquin O’Neill RSM: Sponsored by the Brisbane College of
Theology and the Institute of Faith EducationBrisbane, QueenslandAustraliaMay 3, 1998
The title of this talk is purposely ambiguous, and doubly so. I hope by it to achieve, as Paul Ricoeur
says of poetry, a creative ambiguity. Read one way, I will be talking about woman's body--the body that makes it possible for us to say of someone "girl," "woman," "female,"
"sister," "daughter," "wife," "mother." Read another way, I will be talking about women in a body, women together, women acting in concert, women bonding. I am not
sure which reading we know less about at this stage of development. I am sure that what I say will not be universally accepted, for there are few assertions about the body of women on which there is consensus
today.
But I am not finished: there is a second ambiguity. Read one way, the body of women is re-creating theology, creating it anew, making something
over. Read another way, it is about recreating
theology, taking a break from worn out forms, learning to play a bit, to relax with what has become--in all too many instances--a very stuffy enterprise, namely, theology. I am reminded of the story about the grandmother who, on hearing that her granddaughter had become a doctor of philosophy said, "a doctor, great--but what kind of disease is philosophy?" The same could be said for theology.
If I have a thesis, it is that all these meanings--of body of women and recreating--are interconnected. What I have is more like a hunch, so this talk will come closer
to tracing out the lines of a lightening intuition than proving by logical argument a demonstrated thesis. In this arena, as in so many others, the medium is the message.
No matter. We must begin somewhere. It is my hope that by initiating the conversation here, I will say something that will be taken up into a larger perspective
so that our Christian Anthropology can, indeed, be recreated.
Christian Anthropology
A relatively new star in the
theological firmament, Christian anthropology is the sub-specialty that studies what the Christian faith has to say about being human. In the earliest years of its existence, Christian anthropology was written with the assumption that one could, in fact, deal only with that question: what it means to be human. Books and treatises considered freedom and nature, sin and grace, free will, eternal destiny. If the body was included at all, it was by contrast to the soul, never in light of the differently embodied human beings called male and female. Christian anthropology, then, covertly based all considerations of the anthropos,
that is the human being, on the andros, that is the male. (Though titles don’t tell the whole story, it might be of interest to list of few of the classics in this area: The Christian View of Man, Man in Nature and Grace, Man
in Transition, Man in God’s Purpose, and What is Man?)
For this reason, many women in the theological disciplines went to work on uncovering what Christianity has taught about the meaning of being a women. It is difficult to convey the shock that many of us felt when confronted by the difficult realization that our tradition is so forked on the question, in part because of an obsession with, fear of, and revulsion toward the female body.
Woman's Body: From Curse to Gift
This is what I want to
consider first: the ways Christian theology has taught the Christian community to think about what it means to have the body of a woman. Until very recently, the standard teaching was that a woman's body was inferior (if not defective), defiling, subject to regular periods of uncleanness that rendered this body unacceptable to enter sacred spaces or to touch sacred things. We know from documents of trials of witches that the genitals of women, regularly searched in these investigations for signs of the devil's mark, were referred to as "les parties honteuses," or "the shameful parts." We know that women have, in the course of Christian history, been forbidden to enter the sanctuary while the sacred mysteries were going on, forbidden the eucharist while menstruating; forbidden, by the way, to read the gospels at liturgy if menstruating--and this as late as 1972 in the United States. Women were also kept from the sacraments after childbirth, until such time as a "purification" could be performed. In these ways Christians were socialized to regard the most natural functions of a woman's body as unholy. Add to this the fact that the language of prayer, while celebrating male being through imagery and action borrowed from the lives of men, had little if anything to say about women. Even in the traditions of Christianity where Mary is revered and praised in liturgical prayer, her participation in the natural life of women had little effect on the overridingly negative appraisal of woman's body and the functions that specifically pertain to it. Rather than being identified with her kind, Mary was elevated as the marvelous exception among women, one whose sexuality was increasingly spiritualized until it had no connection with what women experience or with what men perceive in their experience of women.
I do not deny that individual women, moved by the resoundingly positive things that Christianity has taught about the human body as such, applied to
ourselves these notions.
That our bodies, too, are temples of the Holy Spirit, that we are created little less than the angels, that we are to glorify God in our bodies, that our bodies will rise--these saving images provided a counter force to the deathdealing image of woman's body as a curse to herself and others. But the general rule of Christian teaching has been as follows: positive valuation of the body in general and of the male body that appears to be the paradigm for human body; devaluation of the woman's body, conveyed through silence; exclusion from or restricted access to the things considered holy; warnings about dress, comportment, language; sometimes even expressions of disgust and revulsion at the very way a woman is made.
Some years ago in the United
States a group of Protestant women put on a conference called a Re-Visioning Conference. There, among other things, they devised prayer forms that used symbols drawn from woman’s bodily experience in ways comparable to what has long been true of men. The backlash that followed the press coverage of this event gave evidence that the attitudes catalogued above have come right down to our own day. It displayed as well how far away Christianity has kept its description of all things holy from any consideration of the female body as source of imagery. This separation is often an unconscious thing, and its effects lie deep in the psyche until a different religious imagery or conceptualization arouses them. For instance, we have in the chapel of our theological center for women a contemporary feminist icon of the trinity ( from Bridge Building Images). The depiction is of three women: a crone standing over a young girl who is giving birth to the world and a middle-aged woman in mid-wife position, waiting to receive what the young girl has borne. In all but one case, when I have shown this icon to men who visited the chapel, they instinctively turned their heads and closed their eyes upon taking it in, almost as one would at a scene of horror. Linguistic imagery can have a similar effect on any of us taught that the opening of a woman's body in birth is somehow shameful, not to be connected with the holy.
I maintain that one of the
central theological tasks before the Christian communities is to overcome this legacy of looking on the woman's body as a curse and to reclaim the body of women as gift. Many women have already begun this journey of reclamation. Phyllis Trible pioneered the way for those who have read and reread the creation story, until the notion of the inferiority of women in the created order could be driven from it and the gift of differentiated sexuality revealed.. Trible’s work on the Song of Songs in conjunction with Genesis has restored a vision of mutuality in which sexual differentiation is a source of delight not disgust and of mutual upbuilding not shame for one’s body or one’s loss of control.1
Others like Sandra Schneiders and Hisako Kinukawa have studied the
interactions of Jesus with women, searching for ways to argue that the defilement traditions inherited from Judaism and from the pagan world have been overturned by his teaching.2
Your own Kim Power has unveiled with painstaking care the effect of Augustine’s thinking on Church attitudes toward female sexuality.3
Women gathering to pray draw
their images more and more from experiences peculiar to the woman’s way of being embodied. Imaginative works like that of Carolyn Pearson's Mother Wove the Morning
retell the stories of ancient cultures with a stress on the distaff side. Women speak of spirituality in a new key, drawing on the life of the body in ways that liberate fresh possibilities for growth and change. Listen, for instance, to this exchange from a passage in The
Feminine Face of God, The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women:
Of all the fears we have heard from women about taking time and
space for themselves, the most common by far was the fear of being selfish. If there is a mantra that women repeat to themselves to deny their
longing for solitude, it is probably, "Selfish. Selfish. Am I being selfish?"
For two years following her separation from her husband, Lynette lived
alone in a tiny studio
apartment, studying massage therapy, and asking herself this question. She no longer led the young people's group at church, or planned and prepared festive parties for her friends and extended family. She didn't even read the newspaper much.
"So people call and as, 'What's happened to you, Lynette? You used to be outgoing and giving,' she told us. "Just yesterday one of
my favorite aunts telephoned and said right out, 'I love you, my dear, but it's clear to me that you're being very selfish....'
"You know," Lynette
told us thoughtfully, "doing something for yourself is like being pregnant. From the outside, being pregnant can look
selfish. You take in all this extra food. You sleep more than usual. You are not as interested as you used to be in other people's lives, including the lives of your own family. but inside another life is growing. It needs quiet, nourishment, and rest. At first, no one can see this life, but that has absolutely no bearing on the matter. The inner life is growing and it demands your attention.
"But," she continued, "being pregnant is easier than this other birthing.
Because in our material society, we trust the process that gives us something we can see and touch and hear--a live baby. This other birthing--well, who can be sure? So much trust is needed to turn down or tune out the internal critic and focus on what is happening inside you instead of always serving others."4
I give you this quote in its entirety because there are so many layers of wisdom built up in
it.
Grieving as birthing a new life; a disconnect aimed at fuller being; the power to resist the age-old accusation of selfishness leveled against women by recourse to a primal experience of women; the recognition that works of the spirit are not valued in a materialistic society and we who dedicate ourselves to those works cannot expect an easy time of it.
In an through this kind of
wisdom tradition there is developing a new Christian Anthropology that reflects on sin, grace, salvation, virtue, understandings God in ways that include the insights of women--that bring the body of women right into the heart of Christianity. A major problem is that so few men of the church are willing to read or listen or attend to this growing body of scholarship and piety.
That is not the only problem, however. Accomplishing a truly inclusive Christian Anthropology
will necessitate direct confrontation with a new legacy: the legacy of a feminist tradition that appears all too often bent on remaking the body of women in the image of man. What do I mean, you may wonder. Let me be clear.
As a teacher, I have had a
great deal of experience with the daughters of feminism. They are determined to escape the lot of those who went before. They seek to prove that they can do whatever a boy can do, a man can do; they work out for hard bodies and hard minds, accepting as they go that "soft" is a put-down whether it applies to one's thinking, writing or musculature. Many of them take pride in having reduced the percentage of body fat and react with astonishment when told that the woman is made that with a higher body fat ratio so that she can sustain a life within her. In fact, I have found most of my students woefully ignorant of most things related to childbearing and childrearing. Clearly, preparation for that prospect has not been high on the agenda of their parents or their teachers. Students on the birthcontrol pill since high school often do not know that they should not be smoking, do not know that the pill can cause infertility. Young men in my classes reacted with great upset when they realized the risk to general health they may have caused by insisting that the woman they got involved with go on the pill. And this is to say nothing of the traumas surrounding the experiences of abortion among our young students.
This whole area of
reproductive control is for me paradigmatic of the ways that women have abdicated the wisdom of our own bodies. Bodies made to experience ebb and flow, welcome what is foreign into one's own being, to shelter incipient life and to change as that newness changes; bodies that can teach us, as Kathleen Norris puts it, "to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience."5
These very bodies are now not subjects of wisdom at all but dealt with as objects to be controlled, manipulated, corrected, improved.
As I see it, the vast
majority of the schemes devised for regulating reproduction have resulted in precisely this: controlling, manipulating, correcting
and improving the woman's body by making it approximate the male's. We have taught fertile women to seek a state of infertility and to call it good. That way, whenever men are capable of initiating intercourse, women are available. And to do this, healthy women have been willing to forego the rhythms of nature, suffer foreign objects in vulnerable parts of the female body, and--most recently--submit to implantations of hormones under the skin at the risk of damage to an otherwise well functioning body.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not advocating an unthinking obedience to nature such that one could never intervene in natural processes. I do contend,
however, that the dominant practice today aims not at occasional interventions but at
achieving an altered state whereby the female body is made more like unto the male's. So pervasive is the control model, that most of these young women fully expect that, once they want to have a family, all they will have to do is discontinue the pill and they will conceive.
Now if you tell me that all of this has been done in the name of self-protection, to prevent a pregnancy that might be forced on a woman in a society unable
to protect her from the ravages of men, I will understand it. But that has not certainly not been the rhetoric of reproductive freedom. The rhetoric has been about liberation--and I say
that the model of liberation here is preeminently male.
I bring this before you because I think a second item on the theological agenda of the body of women
must be an effort to speak honestly about our beliefs about sex
and our experience of the so called sexual revolution. Has it really resulted in a sexual life that is consonant with the bodies we have been given by God? Do we even know what the sexuality of women is, having so long seen it through the lens of the male gaze, the male expectation, the male desires? Catherine MacKinnon contends that we do not: "sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism; that which is most one's own, yet most taken away."6
The recovery of an understanding and practice of sexuality informed by the realities of a woman's body will require honest and open discussion, the courage to examine uncritically held assumptions, and resistance to the ways in which questions of sexuality have been politicized in church as well as in society. The new argument from authority--that is, claiming that one's position is the "feminist" one--will not do; as Janice Raymond says, "the authority that anyone asserts in defining a position that is for or against or somewhere on the so-called more nuanced spectrum should come from an informed and reflective assessment, as well as her belief in the rightness of what she is saying. We must all take responsibility for our positions and argue the issues."7
It seems to me that the only
way for women to have an impact on the mainstream Christian traditions is to act on these questions in a body. Clearly, the work of individual women is not enough, for it can be consistently ignored with no discernible consequences. Only when women learn to develop our own consensus, our own language, our own traditions--perhaps for a time our own churches--and learn to support them in the ways we have traditionally supported all the works of Christianity, only then, I think, do we stand a chance of recreating the theology that is taught in the academies and preached from the pulpit, that influences those in power, that shapes church life and teaching. Here, of course, we run into one of the thorniest of theological problems: can a body of women be the body of Christ?
The Body of Women: From Threat to Promise
If one reviews the history of Christianity
with this question in mind, one of the points most clearly
visible on the horizon is that the Christian churches have answered a resounding "no" to that question. The furor over the Christa statue, in which a body of a woman was represented on a cross, indicates that the general Christian imagination recoils at the idea of associating the Christ with a female body. And there is little difference when we consider women as a body, or in a group.
The standard response has been to see women in groups as a body without a head. Anytiwomen have gathered in associations, determined to construct our
own Christian lives according to our interpretation of a vocation believed to be from
God, male church officials have stepped in to remind women that we must in some way be under the “headship” of men. No history is more instructive in this regard than the history of religious orders for women in the Roman Catholic Church. Time and time again, women of genius gathered others of spiritual depth and apostolic fervor to undertake in new forms the traditional works of mercy, only to have the hierarchy insist on forms of protection (such as the cloister) and forms of governance (such as submitting a rule for approval) that changed the initial impetus and brought the group of women under the headship of men. There were, of course, those glorious times in the Middle Ages when Abbesses were heads of double monasteries, exercising powers akin to the bishops themselves, but that time was short lived and I see no signs that the hierarchs are longing to bring them back! In fact, the reasons adduced in the contemporary debates in the Roman Catholic Church over the ordination of women have made it quite clear that women in a body cannot constitute the Body of Christ because no woman can represent Christ as head. This position makes possible a situation in the church where men can separate themselves from women, being sacramentally dependent on women for nothing, whereas women cannot, being sacramentally dependent on men for everything.
The reforms initiated by
groups of women religious in the wake of Vatican II (and the theological revolution now taking place among us) should be followed with great care by those interested in this matter of concerted action on the part of women. Through our chapters, in which the community acts as a body, women religious have developed very sophisticated ways of reaching consensus, of corporate action, of developing traditions, of initiating works of mercy in new forms.
Protestant women, too, have found ways to keep a modicum of self-governance within their
denominations. This fall, when I joined the new round of the United Methodist/Roman Catholic Dialogue, I was astonished to find that the group is almost evenly divided between men and women. When I mentioned my delight over this to one of the Methodist women, she assured me that the United Methodist Women's Organization had indicated that it would not help cover the expenses of the dialogue if women were not fairly represented. I say, Brava to that!
The temptation that faces a woman in regard to her personal body recurs on the corporate level,
however. As the Director of a brand new work of women, I am acutely aware of how prevalent is the tendency for a body of women to make itself over in the only image we have of corporate bodies: the male image. Many of the things said earlier in this paper about the wisdom of the woman's body must come into play institutionally: trust in a process that takes time, willingness to listen to interior voices, resistance to inherited patterns of dominance, attention to the needs of embodied beings. I am also aware of how difficult it is for this society to accept women in groups as agents. Repeatedly, I have had to correct those who, upon hearing of the Mount Saint Agnes Theological Center for Women, assumed and passed it on that it was a shelter for battered women! This is the tightrope we are walking: in a world where women together are perceived as a threat to be contained or as victims to be given shelter, some of us must hold onto the promise: we, too, can constitute an extension of the incarnation in time, can shine forth as a light to the nations.
Rosemary Radford Ruether's
statement on this matter is apt: "It is almost impossible for an individual alone to dissent from this culture," she says. "Alternative cultures and communities must be built up to support the dissenting consciousness."8
Recreating: A Different Image of Theology
Poet and essayist Audre Lorde has a
wonderful passage in which she teaches us what women need to do in order to accomplish this all important work of recreating:
We have been taught to suspect what is deepest in ourselves, and that is the way we learn
to
testify against ourselves, against our feelings. The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don't even need to stamp it out.9
That is what we must reverse
in order to unleash the creative powers of women to seek an understanding of the faith we have inherited. We must teach women to trust feelings, intuitions, creative upsurges of wonder--even when they have not been sanctioned by the theological establishment. Such a movement, of course, needs pioneers--women who dare to think and say and write what has not been sanctioned by the prevailing powers. And we need places to shelter them from the storms that inevitably come. It is essential, I think, that Christian theology be given back to the people. Everyone who believes is capable of seeking understanding in her own way, but we have allowed theology to become the sole province of the professional. In addition, the professionals are speaking for and to a smaller and smaller audience as the language of theology becomes so specialized that only a few can understand it in each field. Read what is filling the journals as theology, too, succumbs to the publish or perish mania that forces scholars to write before they are ready and to communicate in a mode that makes obfuscation an art form.
One of the most difficult things for us to accomplish at our new theological center for women has
been to convince women that we have a right to think about what we have been taught. Women thrill to the works of Sallie McFague, Elizabeth Johnson, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and others. But they think these women have a right to speculate because they are professionals. Properly persuaded, however, women find that bringing our own experience to the stories and rituals of the faith can yield original insights that are of meaning to others. "Innovation and imagination need not damage a living tradition but can actually enhance it," says one Irish writer. 10
Nowhere is this innovation
and imagination more needed, I think, than in the interpretation of the central figures of womanhood whose memory is preserved in sacred texts and whose meaning has been forged by the preaching and teaching primarily of men. Once released from the shackles of the sanctioned, believers can come to see Mary of Nazareth as a woman who stood against the social and religious trends of her time; the Syro-Phoenician woman as an outsider who dared correct Jesus with native wit and, as one scripture scholar writes, "frees Jesus to be fully himself."11
Mary Magdalen, Mary and Martha, the hemorrhaging woman, the Samaritan woman--all undergo a transformation when women interpret their meaning with a liberated imagination.
God herself begins to take
new forms. Just last week at the Center, during an afternoon seminar on Facing Death, Natalie Barringer, a 72 year old widow who has been studying with us for three years and who had just assisted a 91 year old man in his dying, said: "When someone is dying, I picture God with a feather duster, chasing away the cobwebs, plumping up pillows, opening windows--all to make ready for this new arrival--just as one would when company is coming to stay." Why not? What makes royal imagery (horns playing, streets of gold, pearly gates, gate-keeper waiting, king on his throne) acceptable and this not? Only that the latter makes God less directly involved in the welcome. Is that what we want to believe?
Recreating: Taking a Break From Old Forms
One of the greatest stumbling blocks to the
recreation I have just talked about is the very form that
theology has come to take. Not only has it been professionalized (that is, limited to those who have degrees and professional preparation to do it); the way of doing theology has been reduced to the method of scientific objectivity and the passage toward proving worthiness to engage in it takes the form of tests of manhood (sic). I remember a long conversation with a scripture scholar in Jerusalem, a Dominican, in which--to my horror--he expounded on his philosophy of education. "You must inflict scars on them," he said, "you must be sure that you injure them in battle. Otherwise, when they sit around the campfire at night, they will have nothing to talk about, no scars to show." "But that makes your students your enemies," I cried. "Exactly," this professor said; "and you must never forget it." Never mind that I had taught more years and at more levels than he had. I was to be instructed in the manly art of teaching--and nothing that I had to say on the subject was of interest to him. You may think that my interlocutor is an exaggeration, an exceptional case. Think again. Walter J. Ong has written a whole book on the subject, a book widely read and discussed. It is entitled, Fighting
for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. In it he maintains that
masculine discourse is the language of opposites, a binary mode of structuring the world that is, as Ong says, "agonistic." He reminds us that ludus, the Latin word for school, also
means war games. (Anyone who has defended a thesis or a dissertation on
the fields where this attitude holds sway needs no convincing.) This is the mode that has come to dominate theological discourse. It is the mode of thrust and parry, defeat the thesis of the other, argue the reader into submission, and on the way, show that you have read everything there is to read on the subject. It is a deadly serious business.
There is, however, another way. The French feminists are the
ones articulating it most widely, though we have in the United States an excellent interpreter of this developing tradition in Nancy Mairs. Not only is Mairs expert on the literature of what has come to be known as "writing the body," she is also playful and witty in her presentation of it. In a collection of essays called, Voice Lessons, Mairs details her journey through graduate school and her eventual liberation from the power games one is taught to play there. She writes
I was able to use the ideas
I found there...to lead myself out and to transform my life as a writer. I took on the dichotomies, in particular the one that has proved most vexatious to my work, the one between "creative" and "critical" writing. It is rooted, like most binary distinctions, in a very complicated struggle....The distinctions are not useful, except to people who want to engender an other with whom they can struggle and over whom they can gain power. And because they are useful in that way, they are dangerous. I prefer not to dwell in their shade. 12
Mairs accounts for the development of her own voice as a writer and attributes much of it to coming to terms with her body, a body
that is systematically excluded by the masculine discourse termed "phallogocentric."
Patriarchy, she writes, is a fundamentally binary structure, predicated upon separation, not relation. This language and thought world is not the one women naturally inhabit. Mairs maintains that women "live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place.... 13
Mairs claims that what
emerges in this difference between male and female is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse; that discourse, as Julia Kristeva has shown, reduces 'woman to man's opposite, his
other, the negative of the positive" ("Women's Time"). Rather, Mairs writes, the difference is
an absolute and radical
alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman's immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: "Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, the signify what is going on" (Kristeva, "Motherhood According to Bellini"). Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. 14
In a recent interview with America magazine, another essayist I much admire, Richard Rodriguez,
said something very similar to this about the feminine:
There may be a feminine impulse within colonial history that we
do not understand. It's not as simple as two males butting heads--one wins, the other loses. Perhaps there is such a things as seduction. Conversion. Perhaps cultures absorb one another. If it is true that the Franciscan padre forced the Eucharist down the Indian's throat, maybe she forgot to close her mouth. Maybe she swallowed the Franciscan priest. After all, the churches of Latin America are crowded with Indians today. It is Europe that has lost its faith. The great churches of Europe are empty tombs, art treasures for humanists--tourist attractions. Anglicans charge tourists 4 pounds to enter St. Paul's Cathedral. 15
Theology as conversion; theology as gestation, theology as erotic babble, full of attachment and empathy. This is the new form
that
I think the people are hungry for. Those of us who currently do theology have all learned to do the agonistic thing--men and women alike. It is time for some of us to have enough confidence in the wisdom of the woman's body to attempt another way, the mysterious way of invitation and embrace.
Conclusions
Once Christian Anthropology moves from a generic consideration of what it means to
be human to a
consideration of what it means to be created, redeemed and sanctified male and female, it becomes impossible to ignore the deformations of theology that ennobles the male way of being and devalues the female, in large measure because of inherited attitudes toward the body of women. Women theologians are in fact doing the hard work necessary to correct such deformation, recreating a Christian Anthropology that honors scriptural revelation and the fullness of Christian tradition. But there is no question that our work has also uncovered some contamination of sources that are disturbing and challenging. It is hard to build a case when some stories have been suppressed or changed.
So ingrained is this denial of the feminine that the suggestion to image the divine in women or women in the divine appalls some, inflames
others. We must begin to reclaim resources in our tradition that appreciate womanhood as a gift and as created in the image of God.
Sometimes, women
ourselves
have become infected by the legacy that degraded us. Instead of measuring our human value against a male norm, women are called to discover and live our calling as women. Instead of thinking of themselves as all inclusive, men are called to discover and live the limitations that are theirs, no less than women. We need a theology that will inspire all Christians to a fuller understanding of the total human picture.
The Christian communities need also to face the ready assumptions that women organized in a body
are either victims or, if not, cannot function without a male authority to guide the way. The prevailing theology of headship results in a vision of subordination that has implications not only for the women of the church, but for other areas of theology. It is increasingly difficult to make sense of a baptismal theology based on the radical equality of men and women with the sacramental theology and the ecclesiology that clings to this subordinationist viewpoint.
Theology itself needs women to be women. We need a complementarity of method that will allow room for a non-adversarial approach to seeking
truth. Women will
only contribute to a reversal of the trends that have choked us if we can learn to trust what is deep in our nature. Theology and theologians need to listen to faithful women whose experience of family and church has not been shaped primarily by reading the tradition but by attempting to pass it on to the next generation. In this way, the warlike way of waging theology might be tempered by a theology that gestates new life. The faithful who seek God need connections as well as distinctions; perhaps that very God wants embrace as well as defense.
I said at the beginning that
these are hunches, intuitions that result from years of teaching in the academy and a few years, now, of creating an alternative institution; years of learning to debate and defend, and a few years of struggling, like Mairs, to find a voice that better suits my way of being. It is far from a finished project--this paper or this life. I offer these thoughts to shape our conversation, our "whispering sweet nothings back and forth" as Nancy Mairs terms it. 16
Mary Aquin O’Neill, RSM, Ph.D.
Mount Saint Agnes Theological Center for Women
Copyright 1998
(click on the  to go back to the document)
1 See “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed,” in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Fortress, 1978, pp. 144-165. 
2 Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991; and Hisako
Kinukawa, Women and Jesus in Mark: A Japanese Feminist Perspective. Orbis, 1994. 
3 Kim Power, Veiled Desire, Augustine on Women. Continuum, 1996. 
4 Sherry Ruth Anderson & Patricia Hopkins, The Feminine Face of God, The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women. (Bantam, 1991), p. 204. 
5 Kathleen Norris, Dakota, A Spiritual Biography. (Ticknor & Field, 1993) p. 145.
6 See her "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State."
7 See Women as Wombs, Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women’s Freedom, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993) p. 93. 
8Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian, 128. 
9Sister Outsider, 102.
10Riverdance program, p. 17. 
11Women and Jesus in Mark, p. 60. 
12 Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming A (Woman) Writer. (Beacon, 1994) pp. 44-45.
13 p. 42.
14 Ibid.
15 September 23, 1995: 9.
16Voice Lessons, p. 11.
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