And thanks to Leila Ahmed’s seminal work, The Discourse on the Veil, I am a feminist who trusts that each woman has her own criterion of what it means to be free. I don’t think freedom is uniform and looks the same for everyone. Freedom is personal.
Ahmed explains in the Veil that Western feminists were trying to “free” Muslim women from wearing a veil without realizing that actually, for many Muslim women, it provided a freedom that “feminist” women in the West couldn’t appreciate. True freedom means having the power to define what being free means in our own lives.
The brilliant sociologist Patricia Hill Collins coined the term intersectionality as the reality that all women are not oppressed equally. There are intersecting factors that increase or decrease the amount of privilege and power a woman experiences depending on, for example, her race, class, economic status, sexuality, education level, and nationality.
Unless my spirituality is intersectional, it’s just oppression dressed in light.
A feminist theologian then, for me, means I believe that every human being is equal parts ego and soul (and therefore worthy of the same rights). I believe it would do as much harm to call god mother as it has to call god father for countless centuries. It perpetuates this misunderstanding that any one of us could be greater or less than the other. It feels important to keep expanding our hermeneutics, our vision of what’s good, or god, of what’s holy, and sacred. Because only then, as the mystic William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell explains, “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, Infinite.”
The Secret Ministry of Currer Bell
The mystery which unites two beings is great; without it, the world would not exist.
— THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP
Every year. At least once. I read the whole book, all 400 pages of it, to get to the end. The part in Jane Eyre when Jane hears Mr. Rochester’s voice as if in the wind, as if from within her. At 13, the first year I read it, it was the most electrifying and magical idea. That love somehow gives us access to superhuman powers that defy the laws of space and time.
Jane Eyre was published in 1847 by Currer Bell, a pseudonym Charlotte Brontë used to obscure the fact she was a female author. Brontë’s father, Patrick, was an Irish priest and clergyman. As a woman, of course, she couldn’t follow in his footsteps. Or, at least, not exactly. The spiritual overtones and commentaries about Christianity are threaded throughout the novel and entirely unveiled. Charlotte seems to have found her way to preach: through her pen.
She helped me realize that not all ministers have a church, and that maybe, women have never really been missing from the pulpit; they just found other mediums and means.
There are so many women who were never ordained or acknowledged as a spiritual authority. Yet there seems to be a higher law that ordains their voices as among the most holy. Listen to the love-drenched words of Sojourner Truth, who stood up at a women’s rights convention in 1863 and immortalized her voice because of the truth she dared to share:
“Then that little man in black there [pointing to a priest], he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
Jane Eyre was the first book, among many, that I read like scripture. (Because my body, with its hives, couldn’t handle the bible.) I realized the would-be female ministers and priests and bishops had been spread out all over, in all genres, and in all places, both sacred and secular. Our spiritual voices were hidden in plain daylight. In print. And in places where our ideas of religion, of Christ, and Mary Magdalene were accepted because we passed them off as fiction.
Let me set the scene. Jane has suffered greatly from the absence of love in her life, for her whole life. Her love, Mr. Rochester, she realizes too late, has a first wife, who lives in the attic as “a madwoman.” I believe she suffered far greater. (But that’s the subject of another masterpiece, titled, Wide Sargasso Sea.)
Jane’s parents die of typhus when she’s a little girl. So, Jane is raised by her aunt, Mrs. Sarah Reed, who torments Jane by treating her like a burden, and by loving her own three children in front of Jane, yet refusing to extend that love to her as well. Jane’s only consolation is in her love for books.
The day arrives, however, when Jane is fed up. Her cousin John has hit her and belittled her to the point of humiliation one too many times. He strikes her hard enough that she is thrown to the ground. Jane snaps and sets on John like a wild, feral monkey. Bloody nosed, and crying, John tells Mrs. Reed. And with disgust, Mrs. Reed orders that Jane be locked in the Red Room. This is the room where her uncle had died. Jane bangs her fists against the door and begs to be released.
The Red Room is where she finally expresses all her rage and anger for being so mistreated and so misunderstood. She screams, and cries, and eventually becomes so upset she passes out.
Her aunt sends her off to Lowood, a harsh boarding school for orphans run by the sinister Mr. Brocklehurst, who humiliates Jane on her first day by forcing her to stand on her chair with a sign around her neck that reads, “Liar.” The only little girl to offer her a smile, and later, a piece of bread, is the redheaded Helen Burns. This one gesture is their communion. It seems small, but for Jane it’s a feast, to finally have a real friend. Helen teaches Jane that there is “an invisible world,” “a kingdom of spirits,” all around them. And when Helen finds herself at the mercy of Mr. Brocklehurst’s “Christian” ethics of shame and mortification, by demanding that Helen’s gorgeous red hair be sheared off, Jane is there to offer her the same true love and companionship. She cuts her hair off in solidarity with her.
Fast forward to Jane hired as a governess at Thornfield Hall, and for the first time in her life she knows love. She has met her match in Mr. Rochester, the one who treats her as his equal. They fall madly in love. And then comes the separation. The fire. The “madwoman in the attic” is revealed dramatically at the wedding as Mr. Rochester’s wife.
Jane is saved by St. John, and his two sisters, who are the opposite of the brother and sisters she was tormented by while growing up. They nurse her back to health after she arrives at their doorstep soaking wet and wordless from a broken heart and a nervous breakdown.
And whereas her cousin John beat her and never showed her kindness, her redemptive “brother” St. John, a minister, wants to provide her with a new life, a life of service. After some time together, he asks her to go to India with him on a Christian mission. He wants to marry her. Jane considers the mission but refuses to marry. And this is when it happens.
Jane hears Mr. Rochester. And I’ve always considered it significant that it starts with her heart. It all starts with her attention being drawn to it.
It begins to beat quickly, to the point that she can suddenly hear it throbbing, loudly. Then Jane says her heart went still, as if expecting something thrilling to pass through it, like an electric shock. Jane describes, “Eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones.”
“Jane, Jane, Jane.” This is what she hears, but she doesn’t know where the voice came from. She only knows that this voice is the one and only voice she has longed to hear most.
She calls out to Mr. Rochester to wait for her. And she immediately goes to her room to pray. Not in the way that St. John prays, Charlotte Brontë, or Currer Bell, relates, but in a way that’s all her own and just as effective.
And because of this moment, this mystical connection they share, Jane returns to Mr. Rochester. He confirms for her that he had called out her name, three times, just as she had heard.
When the Gospel of Philip says, “The mystery which unites two beings is great,” this is the scene I think of from Jane Eyre. It’s a mystery how Jane hears him, at such a distance, from seemingly within her. How can she be so far from him and at the same time never have left him at all?
And it makes me think of Christ and Mary. That
we’ve underestimated the mystery that unites them. That we’ve been witnessing it in ourselves and others all along. That we’ve slowly been acquiring a vision that can perceive just how sacred human love is, and how world saving it can become. Maybe this was the secret ministry of Currer Bell.
Leviticus in Bunny Slippers
Jesus said, “When you make the two into one, you will become children of humanity, and when you say, ‘Mountain, move from here!’ it will move.”
— THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
Mrs. Van Klompenburg shuffled around the house in a muumuu and pink bunny slippers. She spoke in a whisper as she pointed out the kitchen and the backyard with its odd rock gardens, and then our bedrooms. My friend Shana was given her son’s old room. It smelled faintly of gym socks, and it had dark blue walls with a tiny, sad single bed. I got the immediate creeps. And from the look on Shana’s face, she did too.
I was given her daughter’s old room, which was all the way down the beige, shag-carpeted hall. It had a big window that faced the red rock mesas in the distance and a soft pink comforter on a large double bed. I tried to control my sigh of relief at the sight of it and just smiled back at Mrs. Van Klompenburg, who was already smiling, with an ominous zeal, back at me.
Shana and I were high school seniors taking part in an internship through a nonprofit that allowed us to volunteer on the Navajo Reservation in Gallup, New Mexico. The Van Klompenburgs were our hosts for the summer. We had never lived outside of our secular homes, so the bible reading before dinner completely freaked us out.
Mr. Van Klompenburg had asked his wife to read a passage from Leviticus for us. She stood up on her seat and read with such fervor and excitement about the 76 things that are banned for Christians to do and what the penalty is if they’re done. For example, bringing an “unauthorized fire” before God (Leviticus 10:1). God in this case will “smite you.” Or Leviticus 18:22, “Having sex with a man ‘as one does with a woman.’” This merits death.
As Mrs. Van Klompenburg stood on her dining room chair in her muumuu and bunny slippers announcing the list of all the do-not-ever-do’s for the truly faithful, Shana and I only needed one glance at each other from across the table and we knew Shana was moving into my room.
Every morning, without fail, I would wake to the sound of a small pamphlet being shoved under the door and sliding across the wood floor. The first morning, Shana got out of bed, took one look at it and said, “Jesus Christ.”
We were both from an area of East Cleveland with a large Jewish population, so neither of us had been exposed to a “come to Jesus” intervention like this one. The pamphlet was titled, “The Bridge to Jesus.” It had a picture on the cover of a woman with her arms up, her face clearly in excruciating pain, apparently from the raging flames all around her. And on the inside of the little missive, it declared that we were sinners; but, rejoice, because we only needed to ask for salvation in claiming Jesus Christ as our Lord; and then we would be saved. Otherwise, it’s eternal damnation. It’s screaming, and full-on flames.
Message received.
Gordon House was our guide around the Navajo reservation. We were told that he was awaiting a trial for drunk driving and vehicular homicide. We had no idea that Gordon House was a household name at this point in New Mexico. His DUI case would eventually be taken to the Supreme Court. And we had no idea that we would be watching a Dateline episode about him when we returned home that next fall. The summer we were with him was the last one Gordon House had on the reservation before being sentenced to 22 years in jail.
The fatal crash had happened on Christmas Eve. He testified that he drank seven beers that night but that his confusion was from a migraine, not the alcohol. He had a documented history of migraines and was treated with traditional Navajo medicine; he was on his way to the medicine men. He thought he was on the access road, which runs parallel to and in the opposite direction of the interstate. He wasn’t, though, and he hit a car carrying a family of Christian missionaries head on. The impact killed a mother and her three young daughters.
Gordon House was the first in his family to have a master’s degree. He was an Air Force veteran and had been a social worker for the Navajo Nation. At the time of the accident, he was the director of The House of Hope, which offered substance abuse counseling to Navajo teenagers. He was deeply respected in his community. And his pride in the Navajo people was palpable.
Our days in Gallup, New Mexico, looked something like this: in the mornings, Shana and I would be reminded of the eternal life or eternal damnation that awaited us, and that all hinged on our choice to either repent and come to Jesus, or continue to live our lives in sin.
A little eggs and bacon on the side.
And then, we would volunteer at the adolescent shelter for Navajo children whose parents or caregivers were in rehab for substance abuse. The kids called us “bilagaana.” It sounded like it would translate into English as something like “pretty girl.” Gordon informed me, with a slight smile, that my translation was incorrect. We were being called “white girl.” Shana and I as volunteers would mostly just listen to the children tell stories. Their imaginations were so vibrant. When I mentioned this to Gordon, he explained, “There is no word for imagination in Navajo.” A dream, or what we can imagine, holds equal weight to what happens in “real life.”
After work, Gordon would pick us up at the Van Klompenburgs’ and immerse us in Navajo culture. He took us to places that the Navajo consider sacred, and to the sites of horrific battles where the Navajo lost their fight to save their land from the American people. And he told us about the stolen generations of Navajo children taken from their families to go to government-funded Christian boarding schools where they weren’t allowed to speak their own language, where they were abused and taught to be ashamed of who they are.
Gordon let us participate in a ceremonial sweat lodge and a traditional rain dance. And there was something about being in a sacred circle that taught me the most essential spiritual truth.
There is no hierarchy in the spiritual world.
The people I sat in a circle with in the sweat lodge, chanted with, lit sage with, cried with, and sweated for hours and hours with, and the people I danced in a circle with in the rain dance, called out to the ancestors with, and praised the earth together with the soles of our feet, were all strangers, and different from me. Yet they were strangers that moved me to tears, strangers I loved as I stole glances at them in the heat of the sweat lodge, in the sobering cold of the rain dance, because they reminded me of what I had forgotten: we’re all connected.
There is no hierarchy in the spiritual world. There’s just this circle where the first becomes the last, and the last becomes the first.
“When you make the two into one”—that line from the Gospel of Thomas means to me that when you’re no longer separating yourself from anyone else, when you’re not making yourself (in the constant ticker tape of ideas that stream through the mind) out to be better or, more often, worse than anyone else, then you’re able to see the ultimate connection that exists between us.
“When you make the two into one” to me describes an internal state that affects every external relationship. When you make the ego and soul into one, you can no longer divide yourself from others. And this is what moves “mountains,” or deeply held, almost immovable beliefs: we unify ourselves with love.
The Van Klompenburgs drove us to the airport in Albuquerque at the end of our stay. It was the longest two hours of my young life. I can still see the ardent look of anxiety and fear on Mrs. Van Klompenburg’s face as she begged us from the front seat to repent. Her typical fervor for Jesus was even more amped up because of her mistaken idea that Shana and I were sleeping together for romantic reasons rather than the fact that we were just terrified of her.
I wanted to tell her what I felt burning inside me to say since that first pamphlet was shoved under our bedroom door. I felt a raw, terrifying anger in witnessing the hypocrisy of a religio
n that sees itself so far above and set apart from others, it can justify genocide. But it felt like I might morph into a dragon if I opened my mouth, and I wasn’t sure when or if I’d morph back. It was a rage that I didn’t know how to express yet without feeling like I’d be consumed by it.
I never said a word to her. But it felt like this tiny, truest part of me was yelling at Mrs. Van Klompenburg and her Jesus from the back seat. It felt like I could hear this hot molten lava core of what I ardently believed with an evangelical fervor equal to hers. It felt like I matched her level of crazy with my own. And it sounded something like this:
I feel sorry for you. That your god is so small. That your god has such a fragile ego, he’ll send us all to hell if we don’t believe in him. And that your Jesus only loves his own followers, people who have surrendered over everything to him, like some power-hungry, twisted cult leader. I think you’ve missed the whole point. You’ve mistaken god for power. I think whoever the hell Jesus was, he was about love. I think Jesus was about a love that’s the opposite of power.
THE SECOND POWER: CRAVING
The Girl Who Baptized Herself
In the tumultuous time immediately after Christ’s crucifixion, Christianity is seen as a forbidden religion. It’s illegal to be Christian. Yet, this crazy, devoted man named Paul is traveling, from village to village, telling stories about his experience of Christ. He happens to stop in a small village where a 17-year-old named Thecla lives. She can hear Paul from her bedroom window. And she’s riveted. She remains at her window for three days and three nights as Paul recounts his misadventures with Christ.
Mary Magdalene Revealed Page 4