Foremothers
by Lisa Sowle Cahill, Ruth Langer, M. Shawn Copeland, Patricia DeLeeuw, Colleen Griffith
Five women theologians on the women who inspire them
From Boston College Magazine Spring,2008
It was Ash Wednesday, February 6, and at dusk the entrance to Lower Campus was jammed with drivers destined for St. Ignatius Church and the rush-hour meting out of ashes to foreheads. Many in the crowded Heights Room wore the day’s dark smudges, though the event on the schedule—“Foremothers in Faith: Historic Women for Our Time”—was more an informed celebration than an occasion for penance. Sponsors were BC’s Church in the 21st Century and Women’s Resource centers. Excerpts from the talks follow.
The apostle Daughters The politician
The shut-in The communicator
The apostle
by Lisa Sowle Cahill
Ask Catholics who the most important woman in the New Testament is, and the answer will probably be Mary, the mother of Jesus. And she is important, but not because she is the biological mother of Jesus so much as because she is a disciple. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell a story in which Jesus is preaching to a crowd and someone says to him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside.” Jesus replies, gesturing to his disciples, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” The message is that Jesus’s mother is important because she hears the will of God and obeys it. Yet the woman to whom Jesus gives the most attention in that regard is not his mother, but Mary Magdalene.
I’ve asked any number of undergraduate classes who Mary Magdalene was and have gotten, in the main, two answers. The first is that she was a prostitute who repented and whose sins Jesus forgave. The slightly more sophisticated answer, from people more familiar with the Bible, is that Mary Magdalene was the woman who, during dinner at a Pharisee’s house, poured a jar of perfume on Jesus’s feet, bathed them with her tears, and dried them with her hair. However, this woman was not Mary Magdalene. In Luke’s gospel, she is unnamed. John’s gospel says she was Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus.
Although in the New Testament Mary Magdalene is never described in sexual terms, a 17th-century oil painting, The Penitent Magdalene, by Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole, depicts her typically. She is seen gazing at a crucifix, representing Jesus suffering for our sins. From her dolorous expression, she appears mindful of her own sins, and as if to recall what these were, she is bare-breasted, with nothing but a cloth and her long flowing hair to cover her. The edge of one breast can be seen. She wears the halo of a saint, but what is most striking about her is the negative sexual role she conveys.
There have been several modern attempts to elevate the status of Mary Magdalene. In 2003, for instance, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code declared her to be Jesus’s wife and the mother of his children, a more positive role, to be sure, but one still stereotypically sexual. And, too, the fiction misses the New Testament’s point that a woman’s status depends not on family, wealth, or prestige, but, as for men, on faith and faithful action.
So, what do we really know about Mary Magdalene? Luke identifies her as a woman from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons. In the New Testament, demonic possession does not necessarily connote sin. There are accounts of Jesus casting demons out of people who seem clearly to have been mentally ill—for example, the man who lived and ran naked among the tombs; Jesus cast out his demons and restored him to normal behavior. We don’t know for sure what demons represent, but they should not be equated with prostitution.
Luke says that Mary Magdalene was one of several women who went around with Jesus and “the twelve” and who “provided for them out of their resources.” These were women, then, who had a little money and helped pay the apostles’ expenses. They were disciples and patrons of Jesus’s mission.
We also know that Mary Magdalene was one of the women near Jesus at the time of his death, who stayed at the foot of the cross after most of the male disciples fled, and who went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body. And that leads us to the most important fact about Mary Magdalene: All four gospels portray her as one of the first witnesses to the Resurrection. In at least two gospels—Matthew and John—she sees Jesus before the male disciples John and Peter do. Jesus says to her, “Go and tell my brothers.” In John’s gospel, the word “announced” is used: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’” In Greek, that word “announced” is special; it is used to refer to the apostles’ mission to preach the gospel.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval theologian, called Mary Magdalene the “apostle to the apostles.” John Paul II in his letter on the dignity and vocation of women, Mulieris Dignitatem, called her this, too. Mary Magdalene was an apostle for the same reasons and in the same way that St. Paul was. Neither was one of the original twelve, but both saw the risen Jesus and were sent by him to announce the gospel. What possibilities might that leave us with, in regard to the status of women in the Church today?
Lisa Sowle Cahill is the J. Donald Monan Professor of Theology at Boston College. Her books include Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change, which received the Catholic Press Association’s first place award for theology in 2005.
Daughters
by Rabbi Ruth Langer
It is profoundly challenging to be asked to find a Jewish woman who is a model for me in my life and in the values that I hold. It is not that such women haven’t existed. But the premodern literary culture that we depend upon for our knowledge about our models in the Jewish world was almost exclusively male, and didn’t bother to preserve women’s traditions or tell their stories. Contemporary scholarship is beginning to uncover a great deal about women in general, but there are not many individuals to whom we can attach a name, let alone a face.
We glimpse a few powerful women in the Bible—women who are not defined solely by their infertility and subsequent motherhood. Deborah the Judge was perhaps the leader of her people in the battles with Sisera. But according to medieval rabbinic tradition, as a woman she could not possibly have functioned publicly as a judge; rather, she instructed others how to rule. Esther saved the Jews from slaughter, but by dint of her beauty and fortuitous place in the Persian king’s harem. She won’t do.
We know that Bruriah, the wife of the second-century sage Rabbi Meir, was learned, but we have at best one and a half traditions about what she taught. From the 18th century, we have the diary (finally) of a woman named Glückel of Hameln, but she ran a business empire. The same is true of the fabulously wealthy 16th-century Doña Gracia Nasi, who was born to a converso (new-Christian) family in Portugal but was able to live publicly as a Jew in Italy. Through strategic use of her family’s wealth, including the liberal bribing of kings and popes, Doña Gracia was instrumental in protecting conversos from the Inquisition and in developing institutions of public Jewish life (including synagogues, hospitals, and yeshivas), primarily in the Ottoman Empire. But neither of these two women, of whom we know a great deal, was prophetic as I would define the term—that is, religiously learned and powerful.
Either we focus on near contemporaries for our models, or we build imaginatively on the few clues that history has preserved. Some female novelists have opted for construction. Grounding their historical fictions in research about the worlds in which they set their stories, elaborating on a tiny handful of clues (or rumors), they have created narratives that are often more reflective of their own values and concerns than of history.
Maggie Anton’s trilogy, Rashi’s Daughters, of which two books have been published (Joheved, in 2005; Miriam, in 2007), is an intriguing example. Rashi is an acronym for a great man—the Jewish Aquinas, if you will—whose name was Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki. He was trained in the Rhineland academies that toward the end of his life were wiped out by the Crusaders. Luckily, economic circumstances forced him to return to northern France to run his family’s vineyards before the Crusades. His commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud serve as the repository of the Rhineland teachings and are the primary commentaries used to study these texts even today.
Of fascination to generations of feminists is the fact that Rashi had no sons. He had three daughters. Each married a learned man, and several of their sons became leading sages, whose voices continue to have weight.
Based on a few hints preserved in the writings of this family, and even more on imagination, it has become common thinking among women of our day that Rashi, lacking sons to educate, taught his daughters what had previously been exclusively male knowledge; he taught them Talmud.
From this speculation, Anton offers a remarkable story of Jewish women who, perhaps influenced by the religious revival going on in Christian France at the time, take on an active and public religious role. Borrowing from the historical record, she portrays these young women leading prayer in the women’s section of the synagogue (though what she depicts as happening among women in France is documented only in the Rhineland). Anton also develops what might have been the women’s private learning into a public, if still peripheral, role in their father’s academy, as they interact regularly with the male students and keep pace with the male group’s learning. More plausibly, she portrays them as their children’s primary teachers, and as influential interlocutors with their husbands over Talmudic matters.
In Miriam, Anton describes the second daughter’s struggles to be accepted as a mohelet, or ritual circumciser. Evidence suggests, however, that in 11th-century France this was not an unusual role for women, and that restrictions weren’t applied until the 14th century. A feminist, the author seems to have added the note of resistance from the community because she wanted that fight.
Nonetheless, Anton’s fiction is a good read. And I’m glad to be sharing it with my 16-year-old daughter, who herself must struggle with the possibilities for women’s learned leadership in a tradition still very much dominated by men.
Rabbi Ruth Langer is an associate professor of theology and associate director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. She is co-editor, with Steven Fine, of Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue: Studies in the History of Jewish Prayer (2005).
The politician
by M. Shawn Copeland
When I was 12, an adult friend of mine gave me a copy of Louis de Wohl’s Lay Siege to Heaven, the 1961 novel about Catherine of Siena. By contemporary aesthetic and critical standards, this book would not be considered noteworthy. But I was impressionable, on the verge of adolescence, thinking about high school choices, already concerned about college, and wondering whether law school would be the right path for me. This rather marginal book introduced me to a saint—a woman who became my companion, friend, and inspiration.
Catherine of Siena was born in 1347, the youngest daughter of Giacomo di Benincasa and Lapa Piacenti. Her father was a prosperous dyer and her childhood was relatively comfortable. Early on, she decided to give herself totally to Christ; and, although she wavered briefly in her resolve, she regained her spiritual poise, refusing an arranged marriage, dramatically cutting off her hair.
Catherine was determined to live as a mantellate. These were laywomen who led lives of prayer and service from their homes and who were associated with religious orders. Catherine affiliated with the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans.
Gradually, through her example of intense prayer and service to the poor and abject, Catherine gained wide influence as a woman of love and joy, of compassion and peacemaking, of prophetic authority and personal integrity. Eventually she attracted her own famiglia, a family of friends and followers.
Every age has its characteristic features. The 14th century was marked, much like our own, by a desire for truth, by cultural and social conflict, by suspicion of authority. Moreover, the Church was torn by bitter dispute. For nearly 70 years, a succession of French popes and the Roman curia had resided in Avignon. The Church was growing corrupt—pursuing money and civil power, disregarding the poor and infirm, tolerating war, and failing to provide moral leadership.
Catherine put herself in the midst of these tensions: She worked to broker peace between the warring city-states of Italy and persuaded Pope Gregory XI, over vigorous opposition from powerful cardinals and the king of France, to leave Avignon and return to Rome. Gregory’s death in 1378 was followed by a contentious conclave during which Urban VI, a Neapolitan, was elected pope. The French cardinals sought to void the election. Soon two rival groups of cardinals elected two rival popes. This sad and unseemly period of bickering over the papacy is referred to as the Great Schism of the Western Church. Catherine threw her authority and reputation behind Urban VI, strengthening his resolve and urging him to convince dissenting clerics and laity of his legitimacy with love and gentleness.
Catherine was unschooled and unlettered. She received the gift of writing when she was 30, three years before her death, but chose to dictate accounts of her mystical visions and dialogues with Christ to a secretary. In one such dialogue, Christ says to her, “You will give proofs of the Spirit that is in you, before small and great, before lay-folk and clergy and religious, for I will give you a mouth and a wisdom which none shall be able to resist. I will bring you before pontiffs and the rulers of churches and of the Christian people, in order that I may do as is my way and use what is weak to put to shame the pride of the strong.” In her response to this prophetic charge, Catherine acted and spoke by divine authority, even as she transgressed social and ecclesiastical conventions by preaching and teaching in public.
Across more than six centuries, Catherine speaks to us in the midst of our cultural, social, and ecclesial tensions: “Open wide your eye of self-knowledge [which] will cause to spring up in you a stream of holy justice.” And again: “Tear out every root of selfish love and self-pampering, so that you may come to know God’s truth.” She urges each of us to embrace and love our neighbors—near and far—for in doing so we demonstrate concretely our love of God. Her advice to the king of Hungary remains relevant: “Give everyone justice, do the right thing for everyone. . . . keep the scales steady.”
At 12, I was impressed and challenged by a woman on fire with love for God and all humanity. Catherine of Siena changed the face of her world and our Church, and she made me want to do the same.
M. Shawn Copeland is an associate professor of theology at Boston College. She teaches courses on theological anthropology and political theology.
The shut-in
by Patricia DeLeeuw
Mother Julian, Julian of Norwich, was an anchoress, a peculiar sort of hermit of the late 14th century in England. Anchorites, the male version, and anchoresses were recluses who lived not in the wilderness as the first monks and nuns did, but enclosed within small houses often attached to a church or built in a churchyard. They led religious lives outside of religious orders. There was a special liturgy of enclosure for when the anchoress was sealed into her bungalow. “Sealed,” however, should not imply a lack of contact between the anchoress and the outside world. While the anchoress could not leave, the world could come to her.
In an age before counseling was a doctoral program, people from all walks of life would sit outside the hut of the anchoress and commune with her. Many traveled long distances to do so. Anchoresses like Julian were the local holy women.
The little we know about Julian’s life comes from the great work that she dictated, the Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love. The revelations are the result of some 20 years of meditation by Julian on the meaning of a series of visions of Christ’s passion that she had while she was gravely ill. She probably wasn’t enclosed when she had the visions, but two decades of enclosure and communion with others led to the dictating of the book.
The revelations bear a key mark of late medieval piety—that is, they focus on the suffering humanity of Jesus. (Crucifixes and pieta statuary are products of late medieval piety that arise from the same impulse.) In her revelations, Julian sees Jesus’s red blood trickling down from under the crown of thorns, hot, fresh, and plentiful, as she says. When she watches Jesus die, she sees the color of his skin pass from rosy to pallid to blue and then brown in death.
In a meditation on heaven, the vision she shares is equally detailed, of “the Lord as head of his own house, who had invited all his dear servants and friends to a great feast”: Says Julian, “The Lord, I saw, occupied no one place in particular in his house, but presided regally over it all, suffusing it with joy and cheer. Utterly at home and with perfect courtesy, he was the eternal happiness and comfort of his beloved friends, the marvelous music of his unending love showing in the beauty of his blessed face.” Julian’s God is always homey, always courteous, and heaven is the sort of place where we’d all like to go. One can almost hear the crackle of the fire in the fireplace and smell the roast in the oven.
There’s been a great deal of scholarship on Julian in the past generation, including two recent dissertations in Boston College’s department of theology. The consensus is that Julian, despite her claim to be unlettered—whatever that would have meant in the late 14th century in England—was a sophisticated theologian, who knew a great deal of the Christian tradition and contemporary spiritual writing.
Julian’s revelations are about the economy of salvation. She understands Adam’s sin to be the greatest wrong ever done, but holds the reparation—Jesus’s suffering and death—as much more pleasing and honoring to God than the sin was harmful. For Julian, the lesson is that God shall make good all wrongs of whatever degree. Or, as Jesus says it to her, “Sin is inevitable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian’s conclusion is that our story, the only story, is about love: “Before ever he made us, God loved us; and . . . his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love, all his works have been done, and in this love, he has made everything serve us, and in this love, our life is everlasting.”
Elsewhere in Revelations she writes, “A mother’s is the most intimate, willing, and dependable of all services, because it is the truest of all. None has been able to fulfill it properly but Christ, and he alone can. We know that our own mother’s bearing of us was a bearing to pain, and death. But what does Jesus, our true mother do? Why he, All-love, bears us to joy and eternal life. Blessings on him. Thus he carries us within himself in love.”
Julian did not invent the language of God as mother, but she perfected it.
Patricia DeLeeuw is the vice provost for faculties at Boston College. She joined the University’s theology department in 1979 with a specialty in the history of medieval religion.
The communicator
by Colleen Griffith
Evelyn Underhill was born in 1875 in Wolverhampton, England, and died in 1941. She was the first woman asked to give a theological lecture series at Oxford University, and the first woman invited to lead clergy retreats in the Anglican Church. That says a lot for her theology and also for her practicality.
Underhill was the author of the classic text Mysticism (1911), a comprehensive study of religious experience that two years after its initial publication was already in its fifth edition. In all, she wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of articles on the spiritual life.
Texts by mystics in the Christian tradition were largely out of print in the early 20th century. People were suspicious of the term. Underhill demythologized mysticism and carved out intelligible space for it. She delivered the passion of historical Christian mystics and invited a heightened consciousness of God, which she held to be integral to spiritual life. She called God the Real, and Givingness, and Wholeness, and Creative Spirit, propounding a heart-brimming, full-bodied knowing that she said was more exactly described by the language “of touch and taste.” Exercising our mystical faculty, she wrote, takes attentiveness and work and discipline: “if not the renunciation of the cloister, than at least the virtues of the golf course.”
Underhill saw the need for a contemplative element in early 20th-century life, a need that so far seems all the more pressing in the 21st century. The goal, in her words, is not to become a contemplative by career, but to “transfuse our present lives of action and service with a spirit of contemplation.” Prayer is required, and Underhill had lots to say about that. She likened prayer to a garden in which one finds everything, from alpines to potatoes. She said, too, that it is like a giant ocean, in which elephants can swim and lambs can paddle. No saint will ever exhaust prayer’s possibilities, and everybody can participate.
Underhill’s writings urge us to choose ways of prayer that leave us supple before God—prayer that energizes, that supports us in trying times, and that challenges us to be more inclusive. Any authentic deepening in spiritual life should signal a widening of the heart, she said, and more inclusive ways of thinking and being and loving.
Perhaps her most enticing and challenging idea was that of “practical mysticism.” For Underhill, who was always less interested in defining mysticism than in practicing it, mysticism implied a life linked to social concerns. It was the art of union with reality. As our union with God grows, so does our identification with humanity and the Earth. “The riches and beauty of the spiritual landscape,” Underhill said, “are not disclosed to us in order that we might sit in the sun parlor, be grateful for the excellent hospitality, and contemplate the glorious view. . . . Our place is not the auditorium, but the stage . . . the field, workshop, study, laboratory. . . . We are the agents of the Creative Spirit, in this world.” Becoming a practical mystic, to her, meant simplifying one’s tangled and cluttered character and training one’s attention. Regular meditation and recollection would help.
Not many people today aspire to become practical mystics, thinking, perhaps, that mysticism remains the realm of the few, the proud, and the brave. But through Underhill, we catch sight of a spirituality of ordinary life, and the possibility of an increased capacity for union with God, the Real. This doesn’t require the abstentions of the cloister, just the virtues of the golf course.
Colleen Griffith serves as the faculty director of spirituality studies at Boston College’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry and is an adjunct associate professor of theology.
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