A Body, Undone

by Christina Crosby

  I am, of course, being deliberately provocative. It’s simply true, however, that marriage is a contract enforced by the state that establishes the family as a private unit, within which women have always done the unremunerated work of reproduction, not only bearing children, but caring for them and their husbands, too. Gay marriage might have been an opportunity to rethink the institution, but I don’t see that happening—I see instead the same focus on “personal responsibility” and private life. Childrearing is the nucleus of the nuclear family, whether parents are straight or gay, and that’s been privatized, too, with the disappearance of subsidized, affordable day care and hollowing out of public education by private charter schools. This festival of normativity and so-called private life, and the narrative of “progress” that goes with it, suggests that there is no other way to organize sexual relations and social life than the nuclear family, no other way to love or to bring children into the world and help them grow up. I understand that for some couples, marriage is a sacrament, and that’s fine with me. If you think that getting married in the eyes of God will celebrate your love, help you stay married, and help you rear children well, go ahead. But let religious institutions do the marrying, and take the state out of it. Let marriage become a commitment sealed in a religious ceremony, rather than a contract notarized by the state. No more trips to the courthouse for a license, and no more puritanical, punctilious horror of licentiousness. No pressure to get married in order to have access to the good things in life. Under those conditions, even I might learn to love a wedding.

  Janet and I had driven to Lancaster to be with my family and to participate in this wedding, despite our reservations about the institution, and would sit in the front rows as a recognized couple among other members of the family. Now we were visiting with my dear brother as he lay in his hospital bed in the Moravian Manor. He didn’t want to give us any information about exactly what we were going to like about the wedding, and the conversation quickly hurried along to many details—we were to meet up at the church at such and such a time, be seated in the front pews by the ushers, the reception would be held in an art gallery in downtown Lancaster that rented out its space for such events, we could park both his van and mine in the back lot . . . the caterer . . . the guests . . . the tuxedos. . . . He was excited, happy, talkative, and a bit anxious. The pictures of the wedding party show him sitting in his chair, handsome in a dark blue suit.

  As it turned out, he was right—in a way. I did like what Kirsten and Matt had made of the wedding ceremony. In contrast to the outlandish elaborations created by the wedding industry and laid out in Kodachrome-color displays, their ceremony was simple and in important ways unexpected. Gerbera daisies, not orchids, were their flower of choice, and the flowers as they used them quietly undid conventional expectations of gender. As each bridesmaid came down the aisle, she held before her a daisy, which she gave to Matt, who was standing to the side of the chancel, waiting for the bride. When he saw Kirsten, attended by Beth, appear at the back of the sanctuary, he walked up the aisle and presented his bride with what had become a real handful of daisies. Matt—the groom!—walked the length of the aisle to the back of the church holding the flowers before him so as to give them to Kirsten, a transfer that transformed the daisies into the bride’s traditional bouquet. These tweakings of the profoundly heteronormative ceremony of marriage mattered to me, as did other small changes. There was no effort to divide the congregation down the middle, for example, between people “belonging” to the bride and people “belonging” to the groom, and no “giving away” of the bride, all metaphors of property that I find absurd and offensive.

  Once the bridesmaids were assembled behind the bride on one side of the chancel and the groomsmen lined up behind the groom on the other, however, the inventiveness of the processional evaporated. Kirsten stood before the congregation arrayed in a white satin, off-shoulder bridal gown with a vividly orange sash and a long, white satin train spread around her. Kirsten is a beautiful woman, and she looked simply gorgeous with her blonde hair swept up behind into a formal chignon, a style echoed by the bridesmaids. Their gowns were also strapless. Both the hairstyle and dress style Kirsten chose require saturation in femininity to look their best, which meant some of the party inevitably showed how hard they were trying. (By the time the reception rolled around, even Kirsten had tugged once or twice at the bodice. “A fatal error,” Janet observed, drawing on her own experience, “because you simply have to trust in the structure of the gown and whatever tape you have surreptitiously introduced to keep it in place. Once you start tugging, it’s all over.”) Looking to the right of the chancel, I considered that groomsmen are, in general, truly out of luck, since I’ve never seen a rented tuxedo that actually fits, although Matt did fill his out quite handsomely. By now the whole event was resolving into “a wedding,” and I thought, well, they tried.

  Then Kirsten did something unexpected. She stepped behind the pulpit, came back to the middle of the chancel carrying a folding metal chair, opened it, and sat down. As she did so, Matt also turned to the side. He picked up a basin full of water, draped a towel over his arm, and then walked over and stood in front of Kirsten. She took off her white pumps. He put the basin in front of her and knelt down in his tuxedo to wash her feet. Then he dried them carefully, and she slipped her shoes back onto her feet. They changed places, with Kirsten kneeling in front of the basin, the satin of her gown and train spread all around her. Matt took off his lustrous black wingtips and his socks, and Kirsten gently washed and dried his feet. He had a bit of a struggle pulling his dress socks over his damp feet, but managed to get his shoes on before the organist’s music ended. Matt put away the chair and Kirsten put away the basin and towel. The service then unfolded in a more conventional way.

  This foot-washing ritual is familiar to all baptized Brethren, but I had never before seen or heard of it being incorporated into a wedding ceremony. By including foot washing, the bride and groom testified to their belief in the theological radicalism of the Brethren faith: that military service contravenes the will of God, that we are called to humility, simplicity, and service to others, that one who is rich in spirit is poor in nothing, and that we are called to share the Good News of salvation and reunion with God. Foot washing is the first act performed when a Brethren congregation assembles for Love Feast and Communion, in remembrance of the Passover meal the Gospels tell us that Jesus shared with his disciples on the eve of His crucifixion and resurrection. Before breaking bread, He knelt before His followers to wash the dust from their feet, and Kirsten and Matt reenacted this gesture of humility and service. In the Brethren tradition of my youth, however, there was a crucial difference in the ceremony—the congregation was segregated by gender, as you will soon see. I doubt that Kirsten and Matt intended a critical commentary on Brethren gender when they wrote foot washing into their wedding ceremony, but it’s the part of their event that I liked the best.

  I remember particular scenes of my time living in the Mission House quite vividly, as most children have distinct, if isolated, memories of their young lives. One is hanging upside down by my knees on a lower limb of a maple tree growing by the side of the house, showing off for Mother, who smilingly looked at me from a window. Another is of waiting for Mother and Dad to return home from church in the evening, where they had gone to celebrate the service of Love Feast and Communion. The service began with the men and the women dividing, each group going its separate way for the ceremony of foot washing. The sexes reconvene afterward for the ceremony of Communion, when purple grape juice in small Communion glasses and pieces of unleavened bread in a basket covered with a white napkin are passed around the table, followed by a simple meal invoking the last supper the disciples reportedly shared with Christ.

  As a child, I knew firsthand about the grape juice and unleavened bread, because the Communion ceremony was held twice yearly in the sanctuary as part of a regular Sunday’s service. But I wasn’t yet allowed
to take Communion. I couldn’t participate until I was baptized, and that wouldn’t happen for years, not until I was thirteen. So the breadbasket and the clinking tray of Communion glasses filled with grape juice passed me by. When Mother and Dad went to the evening service, it was a different matter, because I knew they would bring home one or two of the leftover ham salad sandwiches, food that had been prepared for the Love Feast by one of the Sunday school classes for grown-ups. These leftovers were a special treat for Jeff and me. I can still conjure up the particular flavor of that ham salad, though I haven’t tasted it for more than forty years.

  By the time I was thirteen, and enrolled in the class taught by our pastor to prepare us for baptism, I was beginning to feel that I was playing a part expected of me, and rather resented this extra obligation on top of Sunday school and worship every Sunday. I nonetheless went, sometimes wondering at my own disengagement from the upcoming ceremony at the heart of the Anabaptist tradition, “adult” baptism. I didn’t feel much like an adult, though I did feel special on that day I joined other girls my age in a Sunday school classroom where we put on our bathing suits, and then pulled on simple white cotton gowns. We lined up and went barefoot down a plastic runway that had been laid over the linoleum floor of the hallway, onto the dark red rug of the sanctuary, up the stairs of the chancel, right to the edge of a large tank filled with water. It was revealed, flush with the floor where it had always been, unseen. When not being used to baptize believers, it was empty beneath the chancel table and hidden underneath the rug. Four steps down, and I was waist high with my gown floating around me, facing the pastor who stood there in his thoroughly soaked white robe. I knelt, which brought my chin to water level. He put one hand under my chin and the other on the top of my head, and dunked my head under three times, “In the name of the Father—the Son—and the Holy Ghost.” I stepped out soaked and dripping, baptized into the Church of the Brethren.

  Admitted to the celebration of Love Feast and Communion on the verge of puberty, I found myself increasingly ill at ease, out of place, unhappy. But mostly I felt trapped, a feeling rendered more emphatic by virtue of segregation by gender, for I had to follow Mother. The congregation assembled in the Fellowship Hall, a large, linoleum-floored room in the basement of the church with a big kitchen adjacent and a small stage at one end. Long folding tables were covered with tablecloths and place settings, and fluorescent lights shone overhead. After the invocation and a hymn, the women and girls went into an adjacent room, leaving the men and boys . . . where? Perhaps in the Fellowship Hall. No matter—it was the ominous, unimaginative, unfair, and increasingly ubiquitous separation of girls from boys that oppressed me. I had my prayer covering pinned on, a small net cap like the one my grandmother wore every day over the bun of hair she gathered on the back of her head. All the Brethren women of her generation wore their hair so, and all wore prayer coverings the year round. Mother, who had bobbed her hair in college, wore hers only for Love Feast and Communion, when I was expected to do the same. The assembled women and girls busied themselves removing their shoes and hiking up their dresses and slips to release nylon stockings held up by garter belts. There were several rows of gray metal folding chairs, with a basin of water and towels at one end. Whoever sat at the end of the row was the first to wash her neighbor’s feet, who then did the same for her neighbor, and so on down the line until the last woman came up the line carrying the basin and towel, to wash the feet of the first. It’s really hard to roll nylons over damp feet and even harder to pull the delicate fabric far enough up your thigh to hook it into garter belt tabs. You hardly need reminding that I hated nylons and garter belts. I have a jumbled memory of dark dresses, sensible shoes, and varicose veins blooming purple. The whole event of the Love Feast, and especially the foot washing, felt coercive to me. I was obligated to go, no matter what I wished, and I resented it even as I could barely formulate what I was feeling. I knew we were to think of our Savior’s humility and service to others and feel inspired to humble ourselves in imitation of Him. I rebelled in my heart against any affective imperative, especially as it was reinforced by my mother. I think I was just sullen.

  The Love Feast afterward was less harrowing. Mostly it was boring. The ham salad sandwiches of my childhood were no longer served, replaced by food undistinguished enough that I have no memory of what we ate. I just know that there was none of the glorious abundance of a different sort of church event, a covered-dish dinner where you could eat all the chicken and meatloaf, creamed corn and mashed potatoes, Jell-O and chocolate cake that you wanted. No such luck with the Love Feast. A Sunday school class served the food, and there was neither Jell-O nor cake. So the food was boring, and the service was boring, and I was fast becoming a bored and alienated teenager.

  Decades later, I can nonetheless appreciate the foot washing in Kirsten and Matt’s wedding, because it dramatizes values I still honor. The rituals of Love Feast and Communion help to create a community of faith, set apart from the thoughtless materialism of “getting and spending [that] lay waste our powers” and in opposition to the militarized state.1 One time when I was in college, I returned home and came downstairs to find Mother at the kitchen table with tears in her eyes, reading the magazine Sojourners. It’s published by a group of believers who go by that name, an intentional, evangelical community in Washington, D.C., that lives simply and communally, works on behalf of the weak and the poor in the District of Columbia, and lobbies for the least of these on Capitol Hill. “I sometimes wish,” she said to me, “that I had dedicated my life to Christ as the Sojourners have. I sometimes think I have too much and have done too little.” Not until Mother died did I read an inscription in her Bible that she had written when eighteen years old:

  My Covenant

  Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes and accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all utterly to Thee to be Thine forever. Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit. Use me as Thou wilt, send me where Thou wilt, work out Thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.

  Jane Miller

  June 29, 1935

  Lest this suggest to you a woman who thought more of the next world than this one, I hasten to add that Jane delighted in sensual pleasures—the taste of food, the beauty of fabrics, the joy of music, and was frank about the fact that she and Ken enjoyed sex—though, thankfully, she shared no details with me. Yet she did all her life seek to serve others and serve the Lord.

  Seeking to witness for peace in a violent world, in her early sixties Mother founded with two others a Huntingdon chapter of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an organization begun in Philadelphia by Quaker activists in the eighteenth century. The state prison in Huntingdon is one of the oldest, with high brick walls, round watchtowers, and fencing topped with multiple rolls of razor wire. In my Huntingdon life, I had driven by it thousands of times without considering what it was, and now it became one of the most significant institutions in Mother’s life. She began to work on behalf of prisoners while Dad was still alive, and continued to for many years after his death. I think the relations she formed with imprisoned men and their loved ones were among the most important of her active older age. For fifteen years she visited prisoners, helped them communicate with the outer world, and sheltered in her home women who came out from the city with no money to pay for a motel room when visiting their imprisoned lovers, brothers, sons, and husbands. Together with her guest, she would put sheets and blankets on the foldout loveseat in Dad’s study, and show them the downstairs powder room. She developed a special relationship with men sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, and met frequently with their support group. She truly believed in penitence, believed that we all need forgiveness and that we are all God’s children. When asked by a journalist from the Huntingdon Daily News what motivated and sustained her years of activism, she said simply, “God’s love.”

  My father’s commitments were more unabashedly partisan
. He characterized himself as an “unreconstructed New Dealer,” ran for and was elected to the city council, wrote fully elaborated, multisyllabic letters to the editor of the newspaper, and talked with great animation about the issues of the day. Mother’s contribution was less explicitly political. She was the chairman (sic) of the Huntingdon League of Women Voters for years, attended their national conventions, advocated for equality for women, and encouraged open exchange of political points of view. They supported the civil rights movement, and opposed the war in Vietnam. On this evidence, some people in town said they were Communists. They were in fact registered Democrats—which was practically the same thing.

  How could I not be proud of my family and their values? My college friends said they wished their parents were like mine, and I could understand why. My Swarthmore lover’s family is Southern Baptist, and when she came out her mother cried to her, “Oh, I wish you had just told me you were a prostitute. That would be so much better.” My parents were by contrast practically saints. They suffered my rebellious teenage years, and embraced me when I came home from college a radical lesbian. In fact, they told me that they were pretty sure of my homosexuality before I made my formal announcement to them in my sophomore year, and in retrospect I can see that I declared myself evidently if not overtly when I tumbled into lustful love at age seventeen, while still living at home.

  I told my parents everything, almost. I reserved my conviction that patriarchy could be undone only by radical feminists, who were, in my experience, mostly white lesbians. I didn’t mention that I thought of myself as a radical scornful of bourgeois commitments and comforts. At Swarthmore, I helped to create a politicized community drenched in sexual desire and radical aspiration, talking the language of revolution. Swarthmore Women’s Liberation and Swarthmore Gay Liberation were committed to fighting a patriarchy that seemed so universally pervasive that it permeated the very air we breathed, and a normatively heterosexual world that was boring, oppressive, unimaginative, and unattractive. I’ve long since learned the hard lessons that my lesbian feminist politics were racist and blind to the structural divisions of class. But in that moment I was caught up in working toward an unknown future that was tremendously exciting to me and my white friends. My schoolwork was truly challenging and I thrived in Swarthmore’s college culture, which valued intellectual work above all else. What a relief! I was finally being rewarded for doing what came naturally, reading and writing about books, and kissing and caressing girls.