Beyond the scrapes with Mara at college or the arrival of poison-pen letters, I was nineteen and Rachel Humsley’s words had caught up and sunk me. I had succumbed to her words as if falling prey to a curse: something whose magnitude I couldn’t understand at the time, until I found myself living within its confines.
15
Undoing
I used to think of the words God spoke to Eve and Adam as a curse too. The Curse. The literal Mother of all Curses that would crack down, overshadow and jolt in all relationships, all desires, all labouring mothers and jaded toilers evermore. Except it wasn’t. It turns out that for years I was just misreading it or being inattentive in Sunday school. Because when Adam and Eve are told to come out of their hiding-places in the bushes, where they had been cowering with shame and fright, it isn’t them who are cursed: it’s the serpent, the purveyor of illusions and author of their doubts.
When God eventually turns to Eve, it’s different. He just tells her how it is going to be now.
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.”
But even though it’s not an actual curse, I’ve still struggled with this passage. Because it’s so deliberate. It may not have strictly been a curse, but try telling that to a woman overdosing on gas and air as she pushes out a 10-pound baby.
And it won’t stop there. God goes on with something ambiguous about her still desiring her husband, and then something that isn’t hazy at all; He says that her husband will rule over her.
They feel so broken, unable to belong here any longer. They have to leave, and remove their trailing messes with them.
Only they are not broken, because that would have been the end. Instead this departure becomes the start of a different journey in which they will make their way, still bearing memories of beauty, of peace and trust, and learn to re-member love.
At first it doesn’t feel that hopeful for Eve. She is still puzzling over that line about desiring her husband and the clanging adjunct that he’s going to rule over her. Trying to figure out what this actually means.
I could tell her what it would mean, any woman could. Any one of us could find our own starting-point where we experience that inequality, even if we don’t actually name it.
Like the teenage girl who is afraid of boys, because they tell her she’s ugly. Who feels annoyed that she can’t shrug it off and not mind because they’re clearly not nice people. Who wishes she had the kind of self-possession not to care what anyone thinks of her looks, but all the time can’t help wishing that they didn’t feel like that about her so that she could dare to hope that one of them might one day like her and want to be with her. So it might not have been an actual curse, but being unpretty at nineteen felt hopeless.
That’s the first thing: seeing where we feel cursed or trapped. Then waking up and seeing the meaning we attach to our suffering. Watching how we let it persuade us that we will be left alone, that our longing for connection is futile or, perhaps, that we don’t deserve to hope for something really good. We might then begin to notice how we collude with these fearful conclusions and settle into uneven ways of relating to others. Or we might see how we try with all our might to disprove the calculations we’ve made about the world, and how we single-handedly try to rearrange reality with exhausting determination, doing all we can to avoid the future we fear.
Because inequality is a reality within which we find ourselves living, in one way or another. Sometimes it can seem to be a curse, but perhaps it’s also a reminder that we’re not yet Home, not yet whole, and that the fractures of the Fall aren’t for us alone to mend.
That’s the paradox: that God allows us to be tripped up so that we remember we were never made to be alone and that we are not expected to put things right by ourselves.
And so, having been tripped up by our efforts to put on a good show, we come to see that they’re not where freedom and redemption lie. Maybe we come to see the twisted truths about women and men as something more like an invitation; something that reminds us that, even though it’s not down to us to put things right, we’re welcome to join in with God’s re-membering of love, beauty, and truth in the world.
And we begin perhaps to feel the untangling of the fig leaves and branches behind which we’ve tried to hide, and to sense the presence of someone who says “It’s OK, you don’t need to pretend.” Who gently, leaf by leaf, helps us to let go of our disguises and our attempts at independence and instead clothes us warmly with Love.
Those words God spoke to Eve are heard by each of us in our own particular way. They are words that at first seem to convict and imprison. But somehow they can become the words that begin to set us free.
16
Hot Worship Leaders and Godly Wives
Out from behind the swollen weld of wired jaws and clamped mouth this new face slowly began to emerge. A sheet of paper arrived in the post from a fashion designer friend, Harris. Sketched across it were a series of portraits offering various possibilities for styling my wired face.
The Frankenstein bolt
The astronaut
The scaffold lips
The zoo cage
The crane mouth
The naughty brother version complete with electrodes attached to a plug …
Rosalind and I pored over it, laughing and, instinctively, my hand shot up to my mouth to cover it. Only something was different. The familiar bump of my palm against my teeth didn’t happen. My fingers pushed gently against my face to trace this new absence. But all I could feel was the almost-closed poise of my lips protecting my jaw from my searching fingers. It’s tucked away in here, they seemed to retort, you have no business doing our job for us now. That was it, I no longer needed to cover up my laughter and smiles and I began to resist the automatic dash of my hand up to my face.
The need for a scissor-holding chaperone to accompany me in case of sudden vomiting and choking hazards came to an end when, after two months, Mr Harrison cut the wires and told me I could go forth and eat. The pizza I’d been dreaming of was still a milestone or two away but, tentatively experimenting with spoonfuls of mashed potato and baked beans, I felt my way around this new mouth. There was giddy disbelief at the ease with which I could now close my mouth and eat. The curve of my stomach and the etch of my ribcage against my bare back began to give way to soft, fleshy weight and, starting each day with a class of ballet, my weak, toneless body began to fill out once again. I’d felt little more than a shuffling skeleton, from which my clothes had gaped and hung all summer, but by the autumn I began to find my stride. The hair, reaching down towards my waist in a mousy tumble, brushed down to hide my embarrassing profile, was no longer needed. And as is so often the case with women marking the beginning of a new season of life, I let my hair tell the story, cutting it into a neat bob that curled back behind my ears. I was coming out of hiding.
It was time to find a new church too. I was living with my parents indefinitely and I didn’t want to return to the church I’d grown up in, so I looked for a congregation to become part of as my own person, not as John and Didi’s daughter. Whatever estrangement I felt from God, I was still at home with Christians; they were my family, my people whose language I spoke. The kindness and purpose with which people at Emmanuel Church made their way in the world had never stopped providing me with a place to belong and the belief that there was a task for me also. They had covered every minute of unconsciousness throughout those eleven hours of surgery with their prayers. They were my home base, the people with whom I’d grown and prayed and holidayed. So, without cutting any ties with my Emmanuel family, I sought to find my place among a new group of Christians.
I found a church in another town. My grandparents had taken me there once, and it seemed perfect. Always suspicious of a church full of only one age group, this one immediately appealed with its packed congregation spanning children to pensioners, and most crucially, its plentiful students and twe
nty-somethings. Throughout the opening blare of praise and worship people sang and danced, and I stood, studying the words of the unfamiliar songs, trying to memorize the words and tune so that I too could sing with my eyes shut and my arms uplifted in praise of God.
God. Of course it was all about God. Except God was the awkward factor in the midst of this new foray. For the first few weeks I didn’t notice the growing unease, the vague return of that churning worry as I left after coffee. There was too much to do. Morning church led into prayer ministry and coffee. Then there was an open house invitation to all the young adults where proper grown-ups welcomed us into their lovely homes and fed us and allowed us to sprawl all over their sitting rooms, chatting and eating, until we felt the need to walk it all off in the fresh air before heading back to the evening celebration service. Sundays were brilliant now. Especially the Sunday where, as the pastor stood welcoming us, my eyes dropped down to the guy in the band, perched behind him, and met his eyes and saw his slow, shy smile. I stared at him for a moment, unused to being gazed at without disdain or smirking derision. But there was no smirk, just a flittering tremor in my stomach.
He was one of the assistant pastors, the kind of promising young man that the elders were training to become a preacher man. Good looking, a cool, worship-band guitarist, mauled by adoring children during coffee time and more subtly surrounded by the adulation of the students during open home lunches, Rich was going places with God and every single girl wanted to go with him. Which made concentrating on God during worship pretty tricky, when you knew that your passion for God could be easily surveyed by Rich as he stood looking out at the congregation, leading us deeper into worship.
Would I be spiritual enough for him? I worried the next Sunday and I stretched up both arms, closed my uplifted eyes and sang a little more enthusiastically just to show him I was. It was part of the alternative mating ritual that belongs to a charismatic Christian subculture. Some rules were the same in or out of church: boys in the band definitely get the girls and he was a worship leader pin-up. So when Rich approached me over coffee a few Sundays later to see if I was coming on a walk later that afternoon I decided I definitely would.
Lunch that day was at the home of one of the elders, Cliff, and his wife, Janet, and rumour was it was going to be good. From my Sunday to Sunday views of Janet I suspected the rumours were right. Ruffled blouses articulating her buttoned modesty, three sons regularly turned out in matching home-made waistcoats, Cliff’s leadership duly supported by her organization of the women’s Bible study and prayer meeting, Janet seemed to have stepped straight out of Proverbs 31 and into the twentieth century with her version of wifely perfection; her cooking was bound to be a treat. Shuffling out of our shoes we padded into their wide, neat sitting room, immediately violating its magnolia hues with our mishmash of studenty attire. Rich grabbed a pile of cushions – home-made chintz covers to match the home-made curtains – and stacked them up behind his head and stretched out across the floor. It was too much of an invitation to the boys, the youngest of whom spotted the opportunity to launch off the back of the armchair in a dive aimed at Rich’s chest. “Aaron, would you come here please.” Janet recalled her son, diverting him firmly towards a suitably hospitable job taking drinks orders from us all.
Rich leaned up on his elbows, seizing an audience as we settled into armchairs and sofas, and asked what we thought of Justin’s sermon that morning. Polite murmurs of “It was good” rippled among the group until Justin himself strode towards us and Rich tilted his chin towards him, “I’m just taking the temperature following your sermon, Jus!”
“So what were my three points then?”
Justin nudged Rich to move his legs and make room on the floor. I furiously scanned my mental notes on Titus Chapter 3 from the morning’s service but it was the previous week’s sermon on Titus Chapter 2 that was still playing on my mind.
Sara and Lois had a brave go at piecing together the first and second points while Justin smiled at them, almost hiding his weary frustration that his hours of sermon crafting had already dissipated in the melee of social distractions.
He turned to me, “Joanna! What was the third point?”
I could feel Rich’s eyes on me, and his wry smile as he bit gently on his lower lip, watching and waiting.
“Your final point was about living full of the Holy Spirit … so that we begin to put our focus and energy into things that God is about in the world.”
“And how do we stay in tune?”
“Well … by prayer, fellowship, reading the Bible, remembering that it’s not our own goodness so we keep returning to God’s goodness to work through us.”
“Good!” He was about to move on, but before he could I blurted my irritation.
“But then last week was all about behaving as good Christians. All the older women in the church teaching the younger women how to behave correctly … and basically be good housewives!”
The other girls on the sofa watched quietly to see where this was going to go.
“Yes, it also told the men to be self-controlled and sincere and gracious in their teaching.”
“I know, it’s just that on the one hand you’re teaching us to be filled with the Spirit which sounds full of possibility … being alive to God so that we can do his work in the world, but on the other hand we are just given a template of a good Christian girl – or man – to emulate. It seems a little …”
Janet swept into the room to invite the girls to go and get their food from the kitchen first.
“… contrived”, I finished, but the word didn’t reach far enough; it didn’t name the growing frustration I was feeling.
“Janet, Joanna was just commenting on last week’s sermon and the call to women to live a holy life.”
I stood up to follow the others out but Janet looked at me, waiting, “Yes, indeed!”, she nodded. I tried again, “It’s not the holy life thing that I’m on about … it’s the holy life of domesticity while men are almost automatically told to be leaders.”
“Well let me just get everyone sorted out and we can have a talk about that over lunch.”
I had been dismissed to the girls’ class, and suddenly the appetizing spread of Thai chicken curry felt as if it came at an uncomfortable price. It also meant that I wasn’t going to get to hang out with Rich during the lunch. I felt as though I needed to apologize to the other girls for getting their lunch hijacked by a seminar on wifeliness but they were more than happy to have Janet come and sit with them in the conservatory where the all-female gathering put off any male disturbance.
If I was worried I would have to give an account of my hesitation about gender roles in the Kingdom of God, Janet’s unflinching launch into an explanation of women’s civilizing nature soon disabused me. I kept my eyes on the plate of food in my hand while she seized this moment to be the older, wiser woman so applauded in St Paul’s letter to Titus.
“… and as women we are clearly called to complement our husbands by submitting to them, by supporting them in the Lord’s work and doing this with a gentle, beautiful spirit. That’s where people go so wrong in thinking beauty is all about outward appearance and good looks: it’s not! It’s the unfading beauty of our feminine spirit that we need to cultivate because that is the strength that we offer to our husbands.”
Lois leaned her head to the side, combining a smile with a gentle frown even St Paul couldn’t find fault with. “But we still need to attract a man in the first place and men like to be with beautiful-looking women … I mean, I know it’s not everything but I want my husband to find me beautiful.”
“And he will, the man God has for you will see your beauty shine through. You don’t need to worry about being beautiful because on your wedding night you will be the most glorious woman in the world to him.”
I looked up at Janet to see if this line had been delivered with any spark of jollity but she was unsmiling and unwilling to let even a brief hiatus divert the conversation
from her message.
“When Cliff and I were engaged we went to a friend’s house-party and our hosts put us in bedrooms next to each other. It was the most foolish thing. They should have put us in rooms at opposite ends of the house. Opposite ends!”
She swept her arm vigorously out to the side to indicate just how far apart they ought to have been housed.
“But it was my purity and strength that got us through that – I think Cliff would have been too tempted by opportunity and desire. We came through that weekend without sin because God showed me that I had to be strong for both of us.”
“So that’s how women complement men? By keeping them from being their own worst enemy?”
“Yeah, so don’t try and be too attractive; you’ll just lead men into sin!” Laura joked.
“It’s true!” Janet pounced. “If we are to enable men to be the leaders, the holy men of God that they are called to be, then we have a vital task in watching our own behaviour and maintaining the purity of our own hearts so that we don’t cause them to sin.”
A Lot Like Eve Page 10