A Time to Laugh

Friday the 13th is a sentimental and blessed day for me. Again. Thank you, Lord. For dragging me kicking and screaming toward your gift of freedom.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up — the harsh tide of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?

Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the (servants) of your sex; regard us then as being placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Abigail Adams to her husband, John Adams, 31 March 1776

So I’m a survivor who’s just now learning to make herself the subject of the sentence. A former ideological “battered wife” from a patriarchal Southern civil religion. A mom — the embodiment of all that is soft and nurturing and powerful and earthy and frightening. A writer-of-that-body who makes the myth-maker shake in his cuff links. A woman who’s taking an honest look at the facts.

The economic prospects for a mom in America aren’t great. But do you know where some researchers conclude she’s got a better chance of a loving life partner? You’ll never guess. . . .

Conservative Evangelicalism.

Studies of Christian women who actively embraced this ideal suggest that the ‘submission’ required of them was a minor concession for a divinely sanctioned domestication of their husbands. During its heyday in the early 1990s, the evangelical men’s organization Promise Keepers struck a bargain that may well have been the best offer for many women. By submitting, they were rewarded with ‘husbands and fathers who forswear drinking, drugs, smoking, and gambling, who lovingly support their families by steady work, and who even choose to go shopping with them as a form of Christian service.’

This was particularly attractive accord since ‘submission’ in practice boiled down to little more than a rhetorical gesture at the husband’s final say in major decisions. When asked how it played out in marriage, few conservative Christians seemed able to recall an example where husbands actually pulled rank in decision-making. Instead, the couples coded expressiveness — emotional labor — and family responsibilities — reproductive labor — as ‘leadership’ to make them newly palatable to men (113).

Abigail Adams said as much.

It’s sometimes called “soft patriarchy.” And it’s not just the ideology that offers a more mutual environment for mothers. It’s the devotion to the ideology. The men that attend such churches most regularly are the most attentive, the most appreciative, the most domesticated.

Through servant leadership, evangelical men made a measurable contribution to the ‘economy of gratitude.’ In this schema, the best predictor of domestic harmony was not an equal division of labor — that option has virtually never been on the table in American families — but rather husbands’ consistent expression of gratititude for the gift of domestic labor women made to them. Unlike their supposedly egalitarian male counterparts, conservative Christian men had at hand an ideology that allowed them to praise and acknowledge women’s work at home without thereby running the risk of being required to share it equally. In contrast, nonreligious men who paid lip service to formal sex-neutral rights had no alibi for their demonstrated failure to split the labor at home, and may have found it safer to ignore the work altogether. Between the two, many wives preferred the former — especially since they seemed to have little hope of achieving actual parity (115).

But if these “soft patriarchs” attend church sporadically, they are more likely to be abusive. In other words, if they are unlikely to submit themselves to a religious community, they are unlikely to (mutually) submit to their familial obligations.

That’s at least what the sociologists conclude from the statistics. Mind you, I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement or that this is perfection. But these are the facts.

Evangelical scholars offer a few more caveats. Soft patriarchy might domesticate muscular Christianity, but hard patriarchy is dangerous for women and children. And the lines between the two are too easily muddled.

Nearly all evangelical and fundamentalist leaders preach a hard patriarchy, but the nitty-gritty of daily life has permeated the evangelical culture and softened that hard edge. In other words, the evangelical marriage advice is often simply out of touch. But when fundamentalists emphasize separation and tout a life hermetically sealed from the culture at large, their patriarchy hardens and calcifies.

The scholars describe three family structures: 1) the wife/mother is on the same level with the children and the father is above all of them (hard patriarchy).

2) The children are below the wife/mother and the father is above her (soft patriarchy).

3) The woman is on an equal plane with her husband over the children (egalitarian).

The last option, researchers conclude, is the best because abuse is the least likely, and the second one is tolerable if the father does have regular external oversight.

But the first one is disastrous. It creates the greatest risk for incest since the wife/mother and the child are equals, so that either can be defined as a sexual “being” to the entitled patriarch.

The perpetrator of incest has been described as a man ‘who is devout, materialistic, and fundamentalist in his religious beliefs, coming from a background in which morality was preached in public and breached in private. In a large research study done on incarcerated sex offenders, more than half of all incest offenders were found to be devout in their religious practice (83).

In other words, while soft patriarchy might domesticate Evangelical men, hard patriarchy does nothing of the sort. Religion fixes nothing when there are no consequences for criminal behavior and when the woman and the children are not autonomous Image-Bearers.

And this isn’t just a theory. This is all too frequent and prevalent. And it’s happening right now.

Write. Let no one hold you back. Let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women — female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

I’ve rediscovered Hélène Cixous this week — that Jewish French feminist who encourages women to “write the body.” Since men have been writing their body into the logocentric language for millennia, the most assertive and powerful thing we women can do is write our own selves. The most assertive and powerful thing I can do is write my own self.

I read Cixous for the first time at IU and laughed out loud along with the rest of my female classmates. While the men just looked confused.

It’s nothing personal, gentlemen. While we adore you individually, we agree that as a group . . . well, there are some issues.

I always said that I would teach Cixous at BJU someday. With a class of all women — no men allowed. They have Preacher Boys class, right? Surely they’d let us do that, right?

Well, I never got that far, of course. Teaching Malcolm X as an exemplar rhetor at BJU still does give me some street cred, yes?

To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing . . . ) — tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.

It’s taken me this long to read the entirety of the documents leading to and following our forced resignations from our former employer. The three-year-old emails and letters from our pastor especially. I just read them for the first time.

And now I get it. The best explanation for my boot from our church comes from Cixous.

An act that will also be marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process. It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.

Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away — that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak — even just open her mouth — in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.

I’ll never forget that final meeting with our pastor. I insisted that I join them. Grant, of course, didn’t mind. He’s a thorough egalitarian. He respects me. Like my dad and brother too. And here lies one of my blindspots. Because I’ve been surrounded by strong, intelligent, respectful men my whole life, I assume the same about other men. But my men are rare. Very rare. I know that now.

We were in Starbucks, and during the discussion, Grant sat on his car’s key fob and his trunk popped open. So he went to fix it, and Danny and I sat there waiting.

And there it was. That face. That same face that the glad-handing politician had at my front door. That same face that the man had who stole my parking place when he saw my belly swollen with life. He was scared. Terrified. Of me.

That look has haunted me for three years. I took it personally. No more. Now I understand what he was afraid of and why he tried so desperately and so illogically to get me to stop writing. Cixous explained it.

She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, first two levels that cannot be separated.

God gives grace for the truth, not for myths

That thought has prompted me to take a good, hard look at myself.

Did you know that the gender gap in wages (21 cents) is not really a gender gap? It’s a gap between mothers and everyone else (Moreton 114).

Think about that for a second. Working mothers, not women, are paid the worst in the country.

Something happens when you become a mom. You vacillate between a soft body of squishiness holding a paper plate of Ants-on-a-Log and a powerful life-giver. You are the Every Snuggler and Every Protector. Chief Bottom-Wiper and She-Bear.

In your body, you are wholly both. You make milk. You speak out. You cook dumplins. You raise hell. You buy bandaids. You scratch predators. You read Suess. You pray for protection.

Shortly after Gavin was born, we were having one of those days. I hadn’t showered. The kids weren’t dressed. The house was a wreck. And the front door was open probably to welcome home the Love of my Life. As I was walking past the open storm door, who should walk up but some local politician glad-handing the working class neighborhood? His tie was loosened so he looked rugged and hard-working, but he was as neat as a pin otherwise. Not even a sweat stain. And he walked up my sidewalk to woo me – the worst paid, but his most-coveted voter.

I glared through the glass door. I think I might have actually growled. And shook my head as if to say, “Don’t you dare knock on my door.” And he actually raised both hands in surrender and backed his way down my sidewalk.

Heehee. “I’m so powerful.” I thought. “Scared him.”

I had that feeling, too, when some loser stole my parking place right in front of me at the local supermarket. He knew he had done it because he watched me get out of my car several spaces away — me in my 7-month-pregnant state. I saw the color drain from his face when he saw me. I saw him cower. And I saw him run scared from me too.

People don’t want to talk about that power. It makes ‘em sweat. And I’m actually wondering if that’s why we’re paid so badly. Because if we’re paid anywhere near the power we wield, we’d take over.

A certain expression of Christianity loves to talk about the squishy side of motherhood. If you heard Bob Jones, Sr. talk, his mom’s powder biscuits and gravy were the bread and wine of Reconstruction Alabama. And any one of the recent and profitable evangelical books “for women” are quick to place the articulation of women’s power in the “ungodly” column — the domain of those ugly “libbers.”

That’s a lie, you know. Or a myth. There’s no grace for lies. The truth is God made us to be wholly both. The God-fearing woman births humanity. She also judges a country. She dolls herself up to woo a pagan king. She is the first to tell the Good News. She warms milk.

And she nails the enemy’s temple to the ground.

As I try on this new identity of “survivor,” I search for a vocabulary to make sense of my experience. Why did they do this? How did it happen? How can I make sure it doesn’t happen again — to me or to anyone I love?

And the best vocabulary — the one that nails it every time — is domestic. Lundy Bancroft dispels the myths of domestic abuse, fraught with empathizing with the bully and avoiding responsibility. We often say, with pity in our voice, that an abuser abuses because:

And research just doesn’t bear that out. That’s not why abuse happens. Bancroft gives ten proven reasons why abusers abuse:

• He is controlling.
• He feels entitled.
• He twists things into their opposites.
• He disrespects you and thinks he’s superior.
• He confuses love and abuse.
• He is manipulative.
• He wants to have a good public image.
• He feels justified.
• He denies and minimizes the abuse.
• He’s possessive.

How does the abuser do this? He:

• Changes his moods abruptly and frequently, so that you find it difficult to tell who he is or how he feels, keeping you constantly off balance. His feelings toward you are especially changeable.
• Denying the obvious about what he is doing or feeling. He’ll speak to you with his voice trembling in anger, or he’ll blame a difficulty on you, or he’ll sulk for two hours, and then deny it to your face. You know what he did — and so does he — but he refuses to admit it, which can drive you crazy with frustration. Then he may call you irrational for getting so upset by his denial.
• Convincing you that what he wants you to do is what is best for you. This way the abuser can make his selfishness look like generosity, which is a neat trick. A long time may pass before you realize what his real motives were.
• Getting you to feel sorry for him, so that you will be reluctant too push forward with your complaints about what he does.
• Using confusion tactics in arguments, subtly or overtly changing the subject, insisting that you are thinking and feeling things that you aren’t, twisting your words, and many other tactics that serve as glue to pour into your brain. You may leave arguments with him feeling like you are losing your mind.
• Lying or misleading you about his actions, his desires, or his reasons for doing certain things, in order to guide you into doing what he wants you to do. One of the most frequent complaints I get from abused women is that their partners lie repeatedly, a form of psychological abuse that in itself can be highly destructive over time.
• Getting you and the people you care about turned against each other by betraying confidences, being rude to your friends, telling people lies about what you supposedly said about them, charming your friends and then telling them bad things about you, and many other divisive tactics.

Being held hostage to his feelings, gaslighting, creating pseudo-good will, demanding pity for the powerful, outright lying, and shunning — that’s the tactical list. Plain as day. We all recognize it.

Bancroft summarizes research on abuse to further knock those myths out of the conversation (75):

• Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.
• Abuse and respect are opposites. Abusers cannot change unless they overcome their core of disrespect toward their partners.
• Abusers are far more conscious of what they are doing than they appear to be. However, even their less-conscious behaviors are driven by core attitudes.
• Abusers are unwilling to be nonabusive, not unable. They do not want to give up power and control.
• You are not crazy. Trust your perceptions of how your abusive partner treats you and thinks about you.

I re-read that last one over and over. Because time and documentation have proven that my perceptions were right. Even while it was happening, I knew.

Finally, to those of us who have survived abuse, he advises:

When I work with an abused woman, my first goal is to help her to regain trust in herself; to get her to rely on her own perceptions, to listen to her own internal voices. You don’t really need an ‘expert’ on abuse to explain your life to you; what you do need above all is some support and encouragement to hold on to your own truth. Your abusive partner wants to deny your experience. He wants to pluck your view of reality out of your head and replace it with his. When someone has invaded your identity in this way enough times, you naturally start to lose your balance.

That fits. Replace “partner” with “employer” and/or “pastor” and that really fits. That scarily fits with my theory of sectarian romance. That fits with my other theory of fundamentalism as patriarchy.

So now what? If my role in my previous life was a kind of ideological “battered wife” to an masculine administration hell-bent on preserving the hierarchy, where do I go from here?

Healing from intense and pervasive trauma — whether from cancer or rape or earthquake or war — comes as you learn to call yourself a “survivor.” It’s a rhetorical move away from “victim.” When a victim can describe herself as a “survivor,” she:

no longer feels possessed by her traumatic past; she is in possession of herself. She has some understanding of the person she used to be and of the damage done to that person by the traumatic event. Her task now is to become the person she used to be and of the damage done to that person she wants to be. In the process she draws upon those aspects of herself that she most values from the time before the trauma, from the experience of the trauma itself, and from the period of recovery. Integrating all of those elements, she creates a new self, both ideally and in actuality (202).

Judith Herman

“Survivor” identifies autonomy. Personhood. It fully acknowledges the past trauma as trauma. It highlights strength. Rather than things happening to you (scene/victim), you are an agent. You act. You have power. You do stuff.

And fundamentalists hate it. They would say that using “survivor” is a petulant, ungrateful response to the lousy things God has done to/for you. They would say that you shouldn’t just “survive” but “rejoice.” Which means, as usual, “shut up and get back to work.” In fundamentalism, you should only “move” in deference to the whole. You can only “be” in the group. That’s how the ideology becomes god.

Fundamentalists don’t like autonomy. When they say we must “deny the self,” they mean it. But not like Jesus meant it. They mean that we must erase the individual in lieu of the whole. There are no boundaries between persons, just recalcitrant boundaries between sects. We must deny that the self even exists. We can never put ourselves as the agent. “I” should never be the subject of the sentence.

Don’t get mixed up and think that’s the appropriate “grammar” of all Calvinism. I think that’s where this new breed of “Young, Restless, and Reformed” are just finding new duds for an old, mean fundamentalism. A hipster Kesiedispiecostalism. Even Jonathan Edwards in his “Resolutions” talks about what he does. How he acts. How we join God’s ongoing work. We work because He works.

I work because He works.

How does Steve Brown put it? “I’m a Calvinist, so I know it’s all about God. But it’s about me too.”

That’s salvation. God doesn’t save us to be nothing. We weren’t once alive and now we’re dead. We were dead in our trespasses and sins, and He lifted us up and made us His children. The Church Universal isn’t a Borg ship. It’s a city! A Kingdom. A bustling, colorful, dappled, productive, noisy community.

And for now, until the Bridegroom arrives, we persevere. We “keep on keeping on.” It’s a race. We’re running!

I’m running. So let me try this. . . . I have earned a Ph.D. from a Research 1 university with two unaccredited degrees putting a permanent black smudge on my record. I have buried four children — one I carried past term — and have birthed two screamers. I have breastfed those two children — one until he was nearly four and one until he was well past two — and yes, that means I did tandem-nursing. I co-slept, nursed, and wore my babies right through their toddlerhood. Despite ongoing disciplinary action from my employer, I chose gentle discipline for my sons. I am a published author and scholar. I have endured shunning, betrayal, threats, job loss, and emotional, mental, and spiritual abuse from people I considered my dearest friends. And I persevered. God has begun this work in me, and He will perform it until He calls me home. And I join Him.

And if you want to take out your cyber-red-pen and correct the “grammar” on the above paragraph, you’re probably a fundamentalist.

I bought myself that necklace several months ago — right around the time I took my blog “sabbath.” I am wearing it until I believe it. Until I believe that I’m a survivor.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton

I have recently published on Scribd many of the official documents that led to our exodus from fundamentalism, including our resignation and other correspondence from the aftermath. If I mentioned them in my Ebenezer account, I linked to them there. I haven’t even had the guts to read one of them in its entirely yet — that’s just how painful this all is.

Be sure to read my valiant knight‘s theological tomes: specifically here to Stephen Jones and here to Gary Weier. It will do you good — for your heart, mind, and soul. John Milton would be very proud!

My blog-Sabbath continues with my soul-crush on Robert Farrar Capon. This time with his commentary on the parables, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus. Starting with the Parable of the Sower — the “watershed” of the parables.

Consider the imagery of seed. First of all, seeds are disproportionately small compared with what they eventually produce. In the case of herbs — which, for some reason, Jesus took special delight in — they are in fact almost ridiculously small. Anyone who has planted thyme or savory knows the strange sensation of practically losing sight of the seed after it has dropped into the furrow: you might as well have sown nothing, for all you can observe. And what does that say about the Word of God that the Sower sows? Well, it certainly does not say what we would have said. Left to our own devices we would probably have likened the Word’s advent to a thunderclap, or to a fireworks display, or to something else we judged sufficiently unmistakable to stand in for our notion of a pushy, totally right-handed God. Instead, this parable says that the true coming of the Word of God, even if you don’t see it, doesn’t look like very much — and that when it does finally get around to doing its real work, it is so mysterious that it can’t even be found at all (67).

I was never satisfied with the way this parable was used in my former life — dirt striving to be less rocky or straining to be more fertile. Interestingly enough, the Mormons interpret the parable similarly. But it doesn’t work that way. Dirt is made. It doesn’t make itself. It doesn’t till itself. It doesn’t improve itself.

I made dirt this last year. Yes, I did. We have the lousiest soil in our backyard — red clay so hard that it surprised the contractors who built our retaining wall. I don’t understand this clay. It’s ugly, stinky, impossible. I sigh at the Midwestern black dirt we pass on our way to Missouri. It’s gorgeous.

So I made dirt this last year. Or rather — compost. I collected carrot shavings and strawberry tops, used kleenexes and coffee grounds, egg shells and dead heads, and I just let it sit. And rot. ::drumming fingers::

And this Spring there it was — black dirt. I included a hand-trowel-full with every seedling and transplant. I sprinkled it on the old plants. I brought a shovel’s worth to Grant’s trees. We’ll see if it works. Ask me in a few months.

But compost is like grace for garbage — turning my forgotten failures and castoffs into the best fertilizer for flowers. That’s what Capon is getting at too — at the mysterious left-handed power of the Gardener rather than the forthright right-handed power we humans crave. We want ex nihilo. We want lightning strikes and fireworks. We want pushy and unmistakable. We want a pre-made Miracle Gro that we can sprinkle on the red pan to POOF! make it soft and fertile.

We want a commodified garden. We want to shove blue “silk” flowers bunches in our azaleas to force them to look like May. We want control.

Every one of us would rather choose the right-handed logicalities of theology over the left-handed mystery of faith. Any day of the week — and twice on Sundays, often enough — we will labor with might and main to take the only thing that can save anyone and reduce it to a set of theological club rules designed to exclude almost everyone (25).

It just doesn’t work like that. God as Gardener doesn’t work like that. The process is slow. It’s indirect. Intuitive. Imaginative.

But Capon is talking mostly about the Seed — the Word. And contrary to the interpretation from my previous life, he insists that in this parable the Word is not the Bible per se. It’s Jesus, a la John 1. The Word who disappears in the earth, sleeps and rises only to grow His Kingdom-Plant grander and stronger than we could imagine.

I found a pumpkin seedling growing in the compost pile. I didn’t see the seed there when I combed through my black dirt, and it’s gone now. The plant is growing stronger and bigger than the ones I deliberately planted in a tidy circle in the clay-amended-with-compost. And I may just get the pumpkin I’ve been struggling to grow for years . . . all in a very left-handed way.

From The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon.

Let me begin without ceremony.

Lamb For Eight Persons Four Times

In addition to one iron pot, two sharp knives, and four heads of lettuce, you will need the following:

For the Whole

1 leg of lamb (The largest the market will provide. If you are no good with a kitchen saw, have the chops and the shank cut through. Do not, however, let the butcher cut it up. If he does, you will lose eight servings and half the fun.)

For the Parts

I (A)
Olive oil (olive oil)
Garlic (fresh)
Onions, carrots, mushrooms, and parsley
Salt, Pepper (freshly ground), bay leaf, marjoram
Stock (any kind but ham; water only in desperation)
Wine (dry red — domestic or imported — as decent as possible)
Broad noodles (or staetzle, potatoes, rice, or toast)

I (B)
Olive oil (again)
Garlic
Onions
Salt, pepper (keep the mill handy), and thyme (judiciously)
Oregano is also possible, but it is a little too emphatic when you get to III.
Wine (dry white–even French Vermouth–but not Sherry. Save that. Or drink it while you cook.)

II
Spinach (a lot)
Cheese (grated: Parmesan or Cheddar; or perhaps Feta–anything with a little sharpness and snap)
Mayonnaise (not dietetic and not sweet)
Sherry (only a drop, but Spanish)
Bread (homemade; two loaves) and butter (or margarine, if you must)

III
Oil (peanut oil, if you have any; otherwise olive)
3 eggs
Onions
Shredded cabbage (bean sprouts, if you have money to burn)
Sherry (if you have any left)
Stock (as before, but only a little)
Rice (cooked, but not precooked)
Soy sauce (domestic only in desperation)

IV
Onions, carrots, celery, turnip
Oil, fat, or butter
Barley (or chick-peas or dried beans–or all three)
Water
Salt, pepper, and parsley (rosemary?)
(Macaroni and shredded cabbage are all possible. A couple of tomatoes give a nice color.)

Recipes fascinate me. In fact, the book series that started this recipe obsession with Perfection Salad is the series that is republishing Capon’s book. Recipes are a gustatory snapshot into another life. Like driving past homes at dusk and peeking into their yet-to-be-shaded windows. You see quirks, taste (or lack there of), humor. You see humanity.

I can honestly say that part of me likes reading the recipes more than preparing and eating the menus they describe. But I am the one who learned to swim from a book, ectomorph that I am, hidden in this endomorphic-looking costume. I fool no one into thinking that I’m a mesomorph, that’s for sure.

But this recipe — Capon’s “Lamb for Eight Persons” — this is a poem. There are no measurements, only instincts. There are no brand names, only small jabs at modern movie-sets-of-flavor like dietetic mayo and oleo. ::shudder:: There are not even any instructions, only a gathering of good things.

This is the way Babette cooks, I think. And Jesus. I really think that Jesus would cook like Capon.