A FEMINIST THINKS ABOUT HER ANGLICAN FUNERAL
I’m 80. For 10 years my cancer has been held in check by ongoing chemotherapy. Naturally I’m thinking about my funeral.
I turn to the Anglican funeral liturgy, and am forced to confront that it, like our Sunday morning liturgy, includes only traditional male images of God from our patriarchal roots: God as Father, Lord, Almighty, King, Ruler, Victor, Judge and Punisher.
Uh Oh. I have a big problem here.
My funeral will, I hope, be for my family and friends to come and be glad we were all connected, and glad for what we were for each other. I want my life, nurtured and supported by the Anglican Church and my congregation, and my identity as a passionate feminist and economic and social justice advocate, to be remembered. I don’t want to be winging up to heaven, look down and be embarrassed by the liturgy.
Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, in her book ‘Seeing Torah through a Feminist Lens’, wrestles with the apparent conflict between her deeply held commitments to both feminism and the Torah, even with its patriarchal heritage. She writes, “Feminism is the movement that seeks to realize the Torah’s dream of every human being in the image of God”. Could this also be the dream in the Anglican Church: of every human being in the image of God, not alone those of the male gender?
Surely Jesus was a feminist. The parables include examples from women’s lives as well as men’s. Jesus shattered tradition by talking to a Samaritan woman; he showed great compassion for widows (who in a patriarchal system could not inherit). He challenged the establishment of priests and large landowners who victimized the poor. There is hardly a more graphic way of showing commitment to women and their spiritual growth than the story of his support for Mary’s right to be learning with his disciples instead of helping her sister in the kitchen.
How did Jesus’ compassion and inclusiveness get lost? How did we get to the misogyny which has penetrated so deeply into the Christian Church? Misogyny: the distrust and hatred of women; the fear of female seduction; the fear that sensuality, music and dance, and the joy of sexual relations, will result in women getting out of control.
From Aristotle: women exist as natural deformities or imperfect males. From the Desert Father Tertullian, an influence on early Christian theology: a woman is not only a gateway of the devil, but also a temple built over a sewer.
I’m not judging those of a different time and culture by today’s standards. But I ask that we acknowledge that this contempt and underlying fear became imbedded and passed through generations. I ask that we acknowledge that these underlying attitudes affected the theology and practice of the church, until even in 2015 our funeral liturgy has only traditional male associated words to describe God.
Rabbi Goldstein has queried how the overriding masculinity of traditional images of God affects women’s (and men’s) spiritual journeys. It can be very uncomfortable to worship a God imaged by a gender of lower status. The result though, of excluding female images of God, is to reinforce a secondary status for women and is used to justify their abuse.
Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist, researcher and clinician, gathers scientific research in her books ‘The Female Brain’, and ‘The Male Brain’, to show that differences in brain structure and the impact of female and male hormones result in different effects on men’s and women’s perceptions and behaviours. Among the research findings: men’s brains are wired for hierarchy; women’s for connection.
God is Mystery. God is beyond gender, beyond our human capacity to comprehend and define, but our deep human need for security is very real: our need of protection for our lives and the resources essential to our survival. So we call on God to protect and to save us. We give this God warrior names and names associated with the hierarchy of power.
Just as deeply we need connection to be human. Our survival also depends on the bonding of humans in cooperative communities of mutual support; for bonds of care for the weaker among us. Christian and Jewish feminists look for words to express this, words to enrich and expand our images of God: words such as God the Mother of Wisdom, God our friend and lover, All-Embracing God, Transforming God, Comforting and Nurturing God, and God the Womb of the Universe.
All over the world women and men of great courage risk their lives to confront the cultural and religious traditions that subordinate women. In India they challenge corrupt and unresponsive police and justice systems that protect men committing gang rape and murder. In Afghanistan women, at great personal danger, run shelters to hide girls and women at risk of death from fathers and brothers in so called “honour killings.
What is our challenge In the Diocese of Toronto? I believe our call is to join this worldwide challenge by examining and confronting our own traditions, our religious culture, and our patriarchal and misogynous heritage. I believe our challenge is to understand how this heritage seeped into our Anglican beings, into unconscious assumptions in our services, preaching, writing and hymns until it is all invisible. If there is no remaining misogyny, how do we explain, in 2015, a funeral liturgy with only traditional male images of God?
Will our fears stop us: fear of change, fear of being too far outside the group consensus, fear of losing our place in the hierarchy?
The place to start is with adopting inclusive language. We have our people for leadership in our intelligent faithful congregations, people who want to be part of this dialogue; part of contemporary culture. We have our clergy, theological colleges, the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, our Bishops, our priests and deacons, and the writing of many Christian, Jewish and secular feminists all to enrich the search. We have the resources of science, music, art, literature and spiritual writings to understand more fully what we are as humans, as female and male mammals, as sexual beings, searching for the Divine. I believe this search will enrich our experience of the love God has for every human being, all of us created in the image of God; and so to love God, ourselves and our neighbours with greater depth and joy.
Perhaps I’ll put off my funeral and hang around until we do this!
Kim Malcolmson Toronto March 2015
