A Full Picture of God

A RULE OF LIFE

Sojourners: You have been at the forefront of issues dealing with women in the church, and you've seen the role of women in the church go through a lot of change through the years. But even though the understanding of ministry for women is changing and expanding, women in the Catholic Church are still denied ordination. How do you think this situation will be resolved?

Joan Chittister: You cannot have a changed understanding of the notion of ministry for women until you have a changed understanding of the notion of the personhood of women. The question is simply, what is a woman for?

And the answer is not from biology. It's from Shakespeare. It's Shylock's answer in The Merchant of Venice: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" The answer is, "I am fully human. Therefore, I am fully graced by God. Therefore, I am fully called by God."

When they baptize a woman they don't say, "Now we pour this slightly diluted water on this slightly diluted creature who will give us slightly diluted Christianity—or ministry or service—back." When they bring the girl up to confirm her, and she stands next to the little boy who is her peer and colleague in this great Christian moment, they don't tap him on the cheek and say, "You are confirmed to do battle for Christ our Lord and the spreading of the faith," and then look at her and say, "You are almost allowed to do battle for Christ our Lord in faith."

Someplace along the line, the effects of the sacraments are going to have to be able to be manifested in the ministries, as much for a woman as for a man. There's either something wrong with the present theology of ministry, or there is something wrong with the present theology of all the sacraments. If women qualify for baptism, confirmation, salvation, and redemption, how can they be denied the sacrament of ministry?

Could you talk about how women coming to that understanding of their personhood and their ministry are changing the way the church looks at spirituality?

The interesting thing about the church is that its spirituality is basically very feminine. Look at what psychiatrists and psychologists tell us are basic masculine traits or values or qualities, and what are basic feminine traits or values or qualities. Then look at the gospel—or look at any of the great church documents—and you'll find a very feminine spirituality.

It's a spirituality of compassion, suffering, love, self-sacrifice. Everything they say a woman should be about is what they say the church and the gospels should be about. Docility to the will of God, a sense of service to others, total commitment to the will of God—it's all there. It's very feminine—it's just not permitted for females to participate in it fully.

How did you come to that understanding?

It will come as a great surprise to you. I think I've probably known it, as maybe anybody knows it, down deep. But I came to an articulated position on it after the Roman Catholic bishops wrote their peace pastoral, "The Challenge of Peace."

Somebody asked me to do a feminist analysis of the peace pastoral. I decided I'd take the basic psychological categories of the feminine paradigm and see to what degree these qualities exist in the peace pastoral.

I said to myself, "Joan, don't do this. You will be so depressed if you find just one more male document among all those written by all of the males of the world." But I did it, and out of seven categories, five were clearly feminine.

The only place it isn't feminine by that criteria is that the bishops aren't asking for unilateral disarmament, which would have been a very feminine thing to do. To just say, "Well, I'm not going to be a part of this. This is wrong, and so I'm not going to do it.... Uncle." Because women know how to lose. They're used to losing. With such grace.

So, my last paragraph was more of a prayer than it was a generalizing device. I said, "And so here is this very feminine document. How amazing. And it is one of the most powerful documents that the bishops have written. How amazing, how wonderful, how strange."

And then I began to think, the gospel carries these same qualities, and the great social encyclicals carry these same qualities. And so here we have, as I see it, a church and a gospel with a high degree of feminine spirituality, denying females full inclusion and immersion in it.

Working my way through that analysis and looking back, I know I fit in the faith. Are the male overlay of structure, and the male overlay of language, and the male overlay of authority, and the male overlay of process, difficult, smothering sometimes, impassible often? Yes! But the structures and the authority models and the processes and the visible control aren't the spirituality, they're the institution.

So I hear the gospels. My feminine heart hears a deep, deep cry to my feminine self.

I always think that the chapter in the Benedictine Rule that is being lost to this period in history is chapter seven on humility. I see the Benedictine Rule as a very feminine thing.

It is calling men in the Roman Empire, men in any empire, men in any culture or century, who are trained from the cradle to be highly independent, highly individualistic, and highly self-seeking, to live in community. To live for the other. To pour themselves out without any reward. That's a very feminine thing.

And Benedict of Nursia doesn't permit rank or status in the community. He wants a community of equals. Here is a person saying pour yourself out, give yourself away, trust the stranger, make yourself vulnerable—very feminine.

Vulnerability is not something most males think they aspire to. They're to be protectors. They're to be the ultimate strength. They're there to be on top of things.

Obedience is only a masculine ideal when it serves the macho system. But a man is trained to get on top, to be the one to give the orders. A woman is trained to listen, to hear, to be docile. The Rule says listen and hear and be docile.

And then there's this capstone chapter on humility. Humility! In the Roman Empire! Are you kidding? From the sons of nobles?—who are the people comprising these communities. Humility is a very feminine thing.

So all my life I have felt comfortable in the faith. I have never felt that I was being wrenched into something that was contrary to me. But I wonder if both the gospel and the Rule of Benedict aren't the strong countersign that they are because they are calling men away from the male values of every other institution. And is that why you don't have as many men comfortable either with monasteries or with the gospel?

And who are your holy men? Theyjust don't fit the image of the field commander. They're very gentle. They're the local monk, they're St. Francis of Assisi, and they're Jesus the Christ—all very gentle figures.

So here we have a gospel that's built, and a tradition that's built, on tremendous vulnerability, self-sacrifice, service to the other, love, and compassion, in a culture that is telling men that the real man is exactly the opposite. So inside my heart, I'm at home. Inside the structures, I'm not.

It's obvious that those kinds of concepts are questioned in the church. Why is that understanding so threatening to the structures?

I think that the people who are threatened by that are very sincerely concerned about what would happen to a church that doesn't have a very well-developed, hierarchical authority pattern. They fear the erosion of the deposit of faith. And they always talk about it as if there would be no recognized authority in the scriptures or in the church. I would simply argue that that authority wouldn't be eroded, it would be strengthened, because it would be shared.

This is not a question of whether or not church members accept authority. Of course they do. What is being questioned is whether or not the full revelation of the gospel can possibly be worked out in the structures in which we're attempting to live it.

You mentioned earlier the male overlay of language as one of the problems. Can you say more about that issue and how women's understanding of spirituality is changing our understanding of God and our use of language?

My professional background is in social psychology and communication theory. Ten years ago I wrote my first article on that subject and called it "Brotherly Love in the Roman Catholic Church." What I tried to point out in that article is the notion that language structures thought.

The basic principle is that what is not in the language is not in the mind. So if you are ignoring women in church language, or lumping women under a so-called generic term which is only generic half of the time, then what you have done is erase half the population of the earth. They can exist only when somebody else calls them into existence. So half of us are left to figure out when they mean us and when they don't.

That's why in the Hebrew tradition the idea of naming, of giving identity to, is a very important part of the theology. And we recognize it at that level. But we have failed to recognize it when we say, "Dearly beloved brethren, let us pray for the grace to recognize that we are all sons of God."

I never got that grace—that's how I'm sure that kind of intercession doesn't work. I remember from the time I was 5 years old, looking around the church, knowing that they had forgotten somebody; they'd forgotten me, and I was in the church. I was not a son of God. I was a daughter of God and very comfortable with that.

The whole notion that the language comes out of a woman's envy of men is ridiculous! It comes out of a woman's recognition of the greatness of the creation of womanhood. If God could afford to make us separately, then it seems somebody could talk to us separately.

As I read the tale, God addressed Adam and Eve separately. God didn't call up Abraham and say, "I just presume Sarah will get her part of the message." Throughout creation history there has been direct confirmation of the fact that God and a woman can have direct conversation and contact. We've lost that in our languages; and then we act as if it's not important.

Linguists can tell from a language what is important to a people. They may find archaeological elements they cannot account for in the language. They'll know that those elements were not important to the culture, and the people's way of thinking subsumed multiple things under other categories.

The Eskimos have 18 separate words for snow, because snow is central in Eskimo life. Americans have at least that many words for car. We call them hatchback and Taurus and Ford, Diplomat and Regal and Oldsmobile and Chevy. The language for car in this country is almost unlimited.

But when you ask for two pronouns for the human race, they tell you you're going too far! The only thing that a woman can conclude is that she is not as important as the multiple kinds of cars, and wood, and fishing poles in the world—let alone guns.

When you look at that from a broader theological construct, you begin to look at language about God. You cannot understand the problem about God language unless you are willing to realize that it is not that we are just discovering a feminine dimension of God; it is that the recognition of the feminine dimension of God, a cosmic dimension of God, has been suppressed.

It isn't that we shouldn't call God "Father." It is that we shouldn't call God only Father. It isn't that Jesus wasn't male. It is that Jesus was a great deal more than male.

The oldest, most basic, most traditional theologies I know do not claim that Jesus came to become male. Jesus came to be flesh. And when you subsume all of theological language, all God talk, in male terms, then you have lost a sense not only of who and what woman is, but who and what God is.

Sophia
We are in a state of great linguistic, and therefore great theological, paucity. We have reduced God to one of the tiniest elements of creation. And we say that's everything God is. That is heresy raised to a fine art.

The new calf in the desert is maleness. While Moses ascends to do dialogue with the transcendent spiritual God, the people in the desert below turn God into a golden calf. And while we claim great spiritual insight and full revelation in the churches, and sophisticated understanding for our creative God, we have turned God into a male.

The scriptures don't do that. The oldest litanies of the church don't do it. Right up until the last century, God was multiple images. God was rock, God was mother, God was hen, God was creator, God was mighty, God was love, God was all of the divine praises.

I can remember having to stretch my little mind when we said great litanies in the Catholic school. I can remember being a third grader just unable to take in this God. I knew God was ineffable. Because when Sister prayed with us, she told us God was all these things.

Now if you dare to assume that "Sophia Wisdom," the feminine side of God, is still with us, you touch the raw edge of an insecure male church. And that's a shame, it's a great disservice to God.

Prior to the Babylonian captivity, we see many more images for God in scripture than we do afterward. Because apparently—and this is speculation by some of the historians—there was a great concern not to have Judaism confused with the pagan ritual and worship of the Canaanites.

Nevertheless, the notion of wisdom in the scripture was clearly recognized as the feminine side of God. In Proverbs, wisdom is always a female figure. For example, from Proverbs 4: "Get wisdom, get understanding, do not forget or turn aside from the words I utter. Forsake her not, and she will preserve you. Love her, and she will safeguard you. Get wisdom at the cost of all you have. Get understanding, extol her and she will exalt you. She will bring you honors if you will embrace her."

Isaiah also uses feminine references for God. Jeremiah uses feminine references. Jesus uses feminine references. And the church in its early litanies used cosmic references, or non-gendered references, always.

It's in our own time, in the attempt to keep women in their place, to make sure that the full creation does not break out in a woman, that language is used to keep reminding her that she is not as normative of God as a man is—because God is Father, therefore God is male, therefore males are closer to God. Language is a key function in bringing women to the fullness of creation.

What is happening to women as they're rediscovering their closeness to God and the part of God within them, and as the language and women's understanding of their place in the church are changing?

I think a great new sense of grace is coming into women. I know people want to attach a secular language to it—that it is aggressive, or at least assertive, or it is uppity or out of line. But I think it's what happens to a person who comes face to face with the grace of God in life.

I think it's what happened to Mary the mother of God. I think you become capable of anything. And no system, no matter how sincere, can ever again convince you that your relationship to God must be mediated by a man, or that God doesn't want to deal directly with you. Or that God certainly doesn't want you to have the fullness of grace. Somehow you begin to know that what is going on inside you is of God. It's both a center and channel of grace. And that's extremely important.

And with that happening to women, there's also a wholeness that's coming to the church that hasn't been there in a long time.

I really believe that. I haven't seen anything yet that walks well on one leg. And I honestly believe that we're going to be a truer church when we recognize in one another, in every other, the call of God to total fullness.

It just has to happen, because we complement one another. But you and I complement one another as much as you and any male minister complement one another. We are all small pieces of the mind and face of God. And as long as we are erasing half of us, we're never going to get a full picture of God.

Joan Chittister, OSB, was prioress of the Mount Saint Benedict priory in Erie, Pennsylvania, president of the Conference of American Benedictine prioresses, and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared. Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.