Sex and God (RLE Women and Religion)

Some Varieties of Women's Religious Experience

Linda Hurcombe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138813182
• eBook ISBN: 9781317590286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

These stories, essays and poems by women examine the connections feminists are making between sex and God. The women write from very different perspectives, cutting across the spectrum of feminist writing about sexuality and spirituality within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some writers, though critical, are determined to retain their radicality in the very teeth of patriarchy by remaining within the traditional forms of faith. Others – impatient, suggests the editor, with the 'great inseminator in the sky' – have moved on to what might be described as a post-patriarchal spirituality. Contributions indicate the exciting spiritual journeys women are currently making and focus on the following areas: monogamy and promiscuity; sex, politics and spirituality; childbirth; sex and healing in dying; feminist sexual psychology; lesbian identity; and feminist 'embodied' theology. The recent and continuing debate about women priests in the Anglican church uneasily echoes the rumblings of change at a fundamental level in the relationship between women and religion. This book, with its reflections on both the politics of Christian feminism and the more widespread expression of women's spirituality, makes an important contribution to that change.

First published in 1987.

V

FEMINIST THEOLOGY

20

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FROM CASTING A NEW CIRCLE

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(jesus

you are in my bones and dreams and memories

i prayed to you when i learned to pray

i learned what god was like by your life

i felt your presence as the presence of god in my life

i touched god in you

jesus …

i do not think we are called to elevate him

but to be like him

not to be what he was

but to be what we are

to be like him in that we manifest

the unique sacrament of god/ess that we are

and we are all related …

Mykel Johnson

21

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A JEALOUS GOD?

Towards a Feminist Model of Monogamy

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Susan Dowell

Marriage and monogamy begin inauspiciously in myth and history, in the overthrow of the Mother and anger of the gods. In the Classic Greek Paradise Lost, Zeus creates the treacherous, beautiful Pandora to punish (male) humanity for receiving the stolen goods of fire – technology and power. Because they would be as gods. A custom-built version of the Mother-goddess, Allgiver and allgiven, Pandora is made over as wife to Epimetheus. Chaos, evil and finitude are loosed on the world through her power and her demotion.

Only after the Fall is Eve acknowledged as powerful and primal in the Judeo-Christian account. She is named ‘mother-of-all-that-lives’ in that conscious time before she tastes her First Curse and brings forth her children of sorrow out of her desire for Adam and of his rule over her. Here too, it is in her appearance as wife that woman is first the curser and the accursed of man.

Engels’s version tells us that the ‘origin of monogamy as far as we can trace it among the most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity … was not in any way the fruit of individual sex love, with which it had nothing in common. On the contrary it appears as the subjection of one sex by another, as the proclamation of a conflict entirely unknown in pre-historic times.’¹

Speaking here of marriage and fidelity in biblical terms I am not choosing the story I ‘agree with’ or even prefer intellectually as the truest reflection of our origins. Only an expanding understanding of women’s experience can illuminate these or any other patriarchal texts. ‘The past provides us only with a dark mirror on which to throw our images but (Prehistory) yields no developed texts by which to verify our imagination. Better then to claim that imagination as our own.’² My preference for the Bible is relative and, of course, culturally conditioned. I can wander here in some ease. But there’s something else – emotional, instinctive.

The Hebrew Testament elects to speak our prehistory in human rather than epic language. I like this stubborn particularity. Adam and Eve, watched over by God, share and tend the garden before the Fall, or, in Engels’s version, until patriarchy and property rights arise to bring about the descent of Eve and the brutalization of Adam. Eve brings Adam no gifts but her womb, her desire and her thirst for knowledge.

I can, as they say, relate to that. And her desire was with God, from the beginning with the knowing. I need a religion that takes this early me seriously, as well as the sullen, confused woman. I want the promised, impossible happy ending, the Quest, armed only with a protective handful of magic apple seeds. The elegant stories of classical mythology don’t give me that. Only the men get that, the heroes (they do in Judeo-Christianity too but they aren’t supposed to. There’s a bluff to call somewhere).

Monogamy, the foundational precept of Christian sexual morality, is based in one central explicit teaching of Jesus; that the redeemed order reflects God’s original plan in Eden. Woman and man are restored to one another and to God. The two become one flesh and cannot be put asunder. While the church has enthusiastically promoted this teaching it has done so within a totally androcentric anthropology. The influential teachers of the church, seeing men’s rule over women as ‘natural’, have projected it backwards in time to an establishment in the original order of creation. So long as Eve is anchored to the old order by this one thread, all the others – the desire, the sorrow and her children – twist and tangle around it, binding with briars her joys and desires, taking them farther and farther from God. In this tangle of curse and promise lies the grievous confusions and blindness of western model traditions. And so I urge a re-evaluation of monogamy as crucial to a feminist reconstruction of Christianity. Until the unprecedented multidimensional critiques of this century’s feminism, it has been impossible to declare a full-blooded feminist interest in monogamy.

Historically, it has been part and parcel of the best deal we can wrest from men. I want in this essay to look at some of the ways in which Christian tradition has misused the biblical concept of ‘one flesh’ fidelity: betrayed its promise of reconciling men and women and its mystery as a sign of God’s covenant with humankind.

I want also to suggest that monogamy has fallen by the wayside of feminist sexual politics. Western feminism has, rightly and determinedly, investigated monogamy as a social construct of patriarchy but paid insufficient attention to its potential as an expression of a universal human need. I say this in fear and trembling. I have been horrified and discouraged, while gathering my thoughts for this chapter, at the plethora of pro-monogamy writings that have appeared in the Rightist press and glossies. Monogamy can be fun, fashionable and you don’t get AIDS! Followed by unsavoury tips to spice up a jaded sexual palate. Inseparable, I feel, from other retrenchments, moral and economic, of a dying consumer culture.

Judeo-Christian tradition, and the later secular moral traditions which arose from it, have promoted monogamous marriage as the stable base of a civilized society. While few of the world’s people have the time or energy left over from the struggle for existence to make abstract virtue of social necessity, monogamy continues to be upheld in the ‘first world’ as meeting two essential human needs: that of children for stability and continuity of care, and individuals’ primary need for emotional security. As imposed by the church, monogamy claims the threefold authority of scripture, tradition and their combined grace of enriching social values with spiritual meaning. An accumulation of human wisdom. As a feminist I see wisdom and tradition as hijacked by patriarchy. We need to start the journey again, back in the myth with both on board and our own radar controls switched on.

It is often said that the church pays disproportionate attention to sex. I think this criticism is too sweepingly applied. It pays not too much but the wrong kind of attention. Stung, perhaps, by accusations of a prurient obsession with private parts, the dear old church has been cowed into abandoning its central sexual symbolism – and the task of expanding and transforming the symbols – and adopted the infinitely less enlightening idiom of sociology. Unhistorically, therefore dangerously. The sexual and political oppressiveness of the Born-Again Right claims the authority of scripture in its efforts to make the family ‘strong again’,³ as if there were a biblical pedigree for the shrunken privatized unit that passes for ‘family’ today. Neither am I reassured by ernest, liberal ecclesiastical analyses of the changing patterns-of-marriage-today variety. These too are often shallow and shaky, as evidenced by the near universal and totally inaccurate claim that the church has somehow always been ‘on the side’ of marriage and upheld a single standard of fidelity throughout. The ordering of human sexuality has been the church’s most powerful and pervasive means of social control, but it has also shown a contradictory tendency to subvert this ‘conformed to the world’-ness. Herein lies its sexual salvation.

Traditional scholarship acknowledges the biblical adoption of stories and symbols from the surrounding Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, but does not always do justice to the changing sexual perceptions underlying these belief systems. The transition in the first millennium BC from maternal to male-dominated symbol systems is a universal (if mysterious) phenomenon, and one vital to our understanding of the struggles the Hebrew people had with their conquered and conquering neighbours.

Yahwist faith was one which both challenged and reinforced the surrounding cultures. The God of Israel was reputedly the first among his Near Eastern contemporaries to impose monogamy on his chosen people, and we see monogamous marriage, with its attendant double standard, arising in a particular way in Jewish thought, nevertheless on broadly similar sexist lines to the wider pattern.

Woman’s journey from ‘unfallen’ primacy and sexual complementarity, whether seen in terms of a biblical Eden, a Marxist primitive communism or a romantic matricentrism, is one we know only in fragments. But let us imagine a feminist critic today, coming across the Old Testament for the first time. She would no doubt read in that aggressively phallocentric language glimpses of an even earlier male consciousness: one that had newly stumbled on the part played by His seed in the creation of life. In early Old Testament stories, Yahweh himself opens the ‘barren’ wombs of the patriarchs’ long-suffering wives, acting on behalf of their mostly unfaithful husbands. No tricks, no disguises, no furtive visits in showers of gold. Droit de Seigneur.

Glimpses of a subversive plurality intrude briefly in Genesis. As pretext and prelude to the Flood, a catastrophe story of Babylonian origins, we hear of the birth of giants from a rape of the ‘daughters of men’ by the ‘sons of God’. Patristic tradition was to change the rape to seduction, thus marking these fair, unfettered daughters as dangerous temptresses. Meanwhile, Yahweh, finding himself on the set of the wrong disaster movie, rages primadonna-ishly at his bit part in these quasi-Olympian antics and calls CUT!

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.⁴

The ‘real life’ wives, daughters of the demoted Eve and unnamed in the mythic genealogies, are not promoted to extras. Mrs Noah and her ‘sons’ wives’ are loaded with the beasts and baggage onto the Ark. Mrs N. didn’t want to go, say the playwrights, preferring the perilous surge and the singing of her siren sisters. Drowned voices, sea changes. But there was no turning back for her. (Or later, for Mrs Lot!)

The watery chaos recedes and a sharper, clearer image slowly surfaces, as photographers’ images do when lifted from their developing fluid.

Now we have real places on a real map – Ararat, Mamre, Jabbok. The first sign of God’s covenant is visited on the male body of his people. With Abraham’s circumcision God promises the Land of Canaan to Abraham’s seed, promises to be on their side forever. No turning back, from the desert patriarch, wrestling man to man with angels and historic destiny, while She waits with more flocks, children and baggage on the riverbanks or eavesdrops at tent doors.

The Lord God of Israel is, on his own admission, a jealous God. He will have no others before him or on the side. He writes these laws in their hearts and on tablets of stone. Thou shalt have no other Gods; thou shalt not commit adultery. Keep taking the tablets. He is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Excerpts
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Heresies
• II First Person Plural
• III Body Theology
• IV The Language of Feeling
• V Feminist Theology
• Index