Motherhood as Metaphor

Engendering Interreligious Dialogue

Jeannine Hill Fletcher

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823252190
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Who is my neighbor? As our world has increasingly become a single place, this question posed in the gospel story is heard as an interreligious inquiry. Yet studies of encounter across religious lines have largely been framed as the meeting of male leaders. What difference does it make when women's voices and experiences are the primary data for thinking about interfaith engagement?Motherhood as Metaphor draws on three historical encounters between women of different faiths: first, the archives of the Maryknoll Sisters working in China before World War II; second, the experiences of women in the feminist movement around the globe; and third, a contemporary interfaith dialogue group in Philadelphia. These sites provide fresh ways of thinking about our being human in the relational, dynamic messiness of our sacred, human lives.Each part features a chapter detailing the historical, archival, and ethnographic evidence of women's experience in interfaith contact through letters, diaries, speeches, and interviews of women in interfaith settings. A subsequent chapter considers the theological import of these experiences, placing them in conversation with modern theological anthropology, feminist theory, and theology. Women's experience of motherhood provides a guiding thread through the theological reflections recorded here. This investigation thus offers not only a comparative theology based on believers' experience rather than on texts alone but also new ways of conceptualizing our being human. The result is an interreligious theology, rooted in the Christian story but also learning across religious lines.

PART I

In Mission and Motherhood

1 Encounter in the Mission Fields

ENGENDERING DIALOGUE WITH WOMEN OF CHINA

The Mission Imagination

“Pagan Babies—Save Them for Christ Through Maryknoll.”¹ So, the caption reads on a promotional poster (circa 1929) that helped shape American Catholics in their imaginings of people of other faiths. With a pagoda in the background and the silhouette of two Chinese youngsters in the foreground, the idea of the religious other as ‘pagan’ all but erased their distinctive humanity. The specter of paganism cast long shadows over the people of China as the American Catholic public was urged to commit their concern through prayer and financial support. “Every Catholic student should know what the Church is doing in the Orient,” reads another poster from the same era: “How Christ’s soldiers are fighting the forces of paganism.”²

A small group of American women religious helped shape the Catholic perception of Chinese religious ‘others’ through their work with Maryknoll, a religious order established in 1911 as the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. In the order’s beginning, the Sisters played primarily a supporting role in the organization, often serving as stand-in cooks for the young seminarians and, more notably, helping to produce and distribute The Field Afar, a magazine styled after the popular magazine Life and designed to spread information and encourage the support of Maryknoll priests.³ Assembling the materials to be sent to press, the women of Maryknoll participated in the shaping of the religious imagination of the readers as the magazine encouraged donations with the advertisement “$5 will provide for the adoption of a Chinese baby, thereby rescuing it from paganism.”⁴ These efforts were promoted as desperately needed, as the publication page of The Field Afar announced that “in seven large areas of the Orient—in South China, Japan, Manchukuo, and Korea—Maryknollers are laboring among 20,000,000 pagan souls.”⁵ Indeed, the work of Christian missions in China was described in the magazine as being amid a “sea of paganism.”⁶

While the women of Maryknoll had a hand in shaping the American religious imagination as they passed along the information transmitted to them by the American priests in China, they in turn were shaped by these same currents of thought. Viewed as the ‘religious other’ from afar, Chinese persons of native faiths stood as anonymous shadows in need of the saving power of Christianity. When the Maryknoll women were finally enlisted to help convert ‘pagan’ women, the imaginations of these newly college-educated women were captured by the uplifting, expansive, and ultimate goal of doing God’s work of saving souls. As Mary Rose Leifels articulates it, “I felt we were there to get souls.”⁷ Sister Rosalia Kettl recalls that she entered the mission field “to save souls in heathen lands.” In her oral history (1981) she reflects, “I just hoped that I could win many souls for Christ in the terminology of that day.”⁸ The theological horizon of Christian inclusivism heralded by Vatican II was still many years off, and the concern for the souls of the unconverted continued to be driven by the idea “Outside the Church, no salvation.”⁹

But, when they came to know the Chinese women in their daily encounters with them, the Catholic women recognized more than isolated souls needing to be saved. No longer anonymous pagans, the Chinese women became their friends. While the endeavor to enlighten pagan peoples propelled Christian conversions in this era, the story of the Maryknoll Sisters is one of a different sort of conversion. Entering the field to rescue native women from their pagan practices, the American women saw their potential converts as empty slates on whose hearts the gospel was waiting to be written. Entering the homes of the Chinese women, they encountered persons with complex lives, whose hearts were already filled with hospitality and overflowed with relationship. The Christian women were even offered the opportunity to appreciate the religious practices of non-Christian forms. Becoming friends with the women of China, the Maryknoll Sisters in the first half of the twentieth century found their theological presuppositions challenged, and changed. The conversion was theirs.

While the study of Christian missions is only rarely identified through the category of ‘interreligious dialogue’, it is one of the few places where we have records of women’s interfaith engagement. Surely, the framework held by the Christian Maryknoll Sisters was not the neutral arena of comparative discourse on religious matters that many envision of interreligious dialogue today. Nonetheless, in order to share their Christian faith, the women of Maryknoll needed to undertake processes similar to those necessary for interfaith dialogue today. They needed to get to know their dialogue partners in all their complex humanity; they needed to understand the social location of their ‘dialogue partners’, and they needed to articulate clearly, in language their partners could understand, the basics of their faith. In the process, the Christian Sisters ‘wrote the faith forward’, allowing their inherited tradition to be shaped by the encounter. The investigation of women’s interfaith engagement through the experience of Maryknoll Sisters in China provides resources also for thinking about our interfaith engagements today; and their commitment to fostering relationships provides a resource for thinking anew about the Christian interfaith encounter. We also gain access to the most fundamental aspects of our human condition, as interfaith dialogue reveals as much about our humanity as it does about our faiths.

Maryknoll Women in Mission

As Penny Lernoux writes:

As the [Maryknoll] seminary grew, so too, the women’s work. Wanting his small group to be self-sustaining, [Father James Edward] Walsh established a farm with livestock and fruits and vegetables planted by the seminarians. In addition to office work, sewing for the seminary, and making its bread, the women fed the animals, drew water from their rain-filled well, did the laundry, cared for the gardens, and picked and canned so many vegetables and fruits that they came to hate the sight of beans and berries.¹⁰

Although at least two of the four original women-helpers had successfully completed their college studies at Wellesley and Smith, the initial experience replicated the gendered expectations of society as the women were responsible for the home-care of male priests who would enter the public realm. Or as Margaret Shea (Sister Gemma of Maryknoll) recalls, in the family of Maryknoll, “the woman’s part was quite naturally ours.”¹¹ While the women were integral to the life of the organization, the structure of Maryknoll separated men and women to distinct roles and separate lives.

The same pattern of gendered separation structured the work of the male priests who entered Maryknoll’s mission field in China. Although the women’s movement in China is recognizable as early as 1914, traditional segregation of women and men continued to shape the settings in which the Maryknoll priests undertook their mission.¹² It would be the mark of impropriety for a woman in China to be conversing with an unknown man, and to be willing to do so publicly with foreign male missioners was incredibly unlikely. While gendered expectations were not the only reason why conversions would come slowly, the segregation of women and men was identified as a key obstacle in the success of Maryknoll missions. It wasn’t long before it became clear that a greater degree of participation by these women as full members in mission was essential to the organization’s success. Sister Mary Imelda Sheridan writes:

Bishop [Francis] Ford realized on his own mission journeys that any plan for the conversion of souls would be incomplete if it did not provide women Apostles for the evangelization of women. He was convinced back as far as 1919 that owing to social conditions in China where there was at that time such a distinct line of separation between the sexes, that the training of Sisters for the direct apostolate was indispensable…. However, it was not until 1934 that his plan was effected…. And He sent them two and two into every town and village teaching the Word of God.¹³

The Catholic Sisters were to serve as representatives to Chinese women in places where Catholic priests could not go.

Under the initiative of Bishop Ford, the women of Maryknoll were empowered to encounter Chinese women. But Ford also continued to shape their imagination regarding just what sort of women they would meet. For example, he served as mentor to the Sisters and led retreats where he engaged their work in China. In one such retreat, Ford considered Jesus’ words from the New Testament, “This is my new commandment, that you love one another.” From the retreat diary, we see Ford’s view of the religious-other in his own words:

[This] is the Christian Commandment. You notice that very strongly in a pagan country. In China there is no conception of the idea of love for one another. Mothers sell their daughters; if they have any love for them at all,—they sell their daughters. If they are very practical, they simply destroy them. Fathers will bargain over the price of a child as if it were a pound of meat. Wives are cast out and others taken in on a whim. They haven’t what we are accustomed to, love.¹⁴

From Ford’s reflections we see that the religious other was not merely painted as an unknown shadow but even portrayed as a known evil. To argue that the Chinese have no conception of love could not help but inform the negative expectations of the Sisters. Given the way the Maryknoll women were shaped by the theological currents they encountered, it is not surprising that one of the first Maryknoll women in Chinese mission wrote home to her family: “Please pray that we learn the language soon, for indeed there are countless opportunities here for planting the seeds of Faith in many hearts that now have such hard and loveless lives. Christian charity needs to shed its light into this pagan darkness.”¹⁵

“Hard and loveless lives,” women living in “pagan darkness” and needing the salvation that could only be offered by Christian women—this was the portrait of Chinese women held in the religious imagination of Maryknoll Sisters, shaped by sermons, promotional posters, and glossy magazine pages. Shaped by these sources and sharing in this outlook, the American women of Maryknoll stepped into this portrait only to find a very different Chinese woman.¹⁶ The Chinese women the Maryknoll Sisters came to know were multi-relational, keepers of promises, and complex companions. While the shadow of paganism proved difficult to shake, the women of Maryknoll nevertheless were provided the opportunity to get to know some of the women of China and to call them friends.

The Apostolate of Friendliness: In the Fields and among Families

To meet with these women they would come to call friends, the Maryknoll Sisters undertook a unique form of mission practice, which, as one historian notes, “revolutionized the role of religious women in the work of evangelization.”¹⁷ As Lernoux describes it: “In the early 1930s, the Sisters expanded to the northeastern section of Kwantung province, where the Hakka people lived. In contrast to earlier missions where the Maryknollers were engaged in traditional institutional work, such as schools and orphanages, they pioneered a new approach by going out to the people, often living for weeks at a time in the homes of the villagers.”¹⁸

They would walk through Chinese villages in full habit, dressed from head to toe in a long dress and head covering, their primary aim being to meet other women and talk about their faith. Their main objective was to weave themselves into the lives of ordinary women in order to share with them the gospel message they so dearly loved.¹⁹ In the mid-1930s this was still a bold thing for American women to do—to be so far away from home, independent of family responsibilities, engaging in the work of faith. But it also was not an easy project. Under Ford’s direction, the Sisters recognized that there was much they needed to do in order to be in a position to share their theological witness with the women of China. As Sister Paulita Hoffmann recalls:

[Ford] said, “Learn their language and learn the way they do things. Find out what they’re doing—then you’ve got an in with them. Then you understand what they’re talking about! You understand what their life is all about. Then you can relate … what Christ is telling them in their daily life to what it is. You can tie up the gospel with what their lives are if you know them.”²⁰

The Sisters took to heart the method of encounter outlined by their mentor. Indeed, going out into village and countryside required a process of inculturation that first necessitated a textured understanding of the lived experience of those they would meet. As Hoffmann further explains, “We [had] to be the ones to put ourselves into the rhythm of their lives, to understand their lives and then work, be with [them,] and in the midst of [their lives, bring] the word of God.”²¹

In her description of mission work, Sister M. Marcelline describes the Kaying mission of 1938, writing that “we have dedicated ourselves in a special way to the women of Hakka China.” As part of a “triple apostolate” that included also teaching and visiting, the primary contact of Maryknoll women in this interfaith encounter came to be known as “the apostolate of friendliness.” Sister M. Marcelline describes it in this way:

First, there is the apostolate of friendliness, through which [we] hope to radiate Christ’s love, that powerful magnet that draws souls to Him, provided we, ourselves, put no obstacle in the way of its action. It is oft en just a smile—a smile imbued with the Message, or a friendly hand, sensibly conveying our yearning spiritual interest, that has been the means of getting a soul engaged in the search after the true God. Or again, it was a friendly word, perhaps answering the question so often put to us, “Why did you come to China?” … Having heard us, some have gone away untouched; others have listened, and rejoicing have answered the call, while we went on, believing in the apostolate of friendliness, as the best first contact that we know.²²

Prior to engaging in any theological conversation, the Sisters first offered friendship and friendliness. They had to open themselves to relationship and the many complex dimensions of the women’s lives in order to be in a place to engage theologically. And, while the Maryknoll women were empowered by their roles as missionaries and encouraged by Ford as their mentor to meet Chinese women in their daily lives, they were also empowered by the warm reception they received from the women of China. In entry after entry of the Sisters’ diaries, there seems a natural air of encounter such that the apostolate of friendliness reflects the extending of friendship by the Chinese women as well. In a letter home, Anna Mary Moss recalls, “At a pagan home last week the woman showed two of us all around her Chinese cottage and then through the garden and ended by sending the Sisters home with the biggest turnips in the garden, enough for our dinner.”²³ And as is recounted in the Sisters’ Kaying diaries:

And so when Sister Rosalia and A Yn Tsi found themselves off on a wild goose chase into a village which had never heard of ‘so and so’,—they were inclined to feel rather helpless, and so decided to sit down on the side of the road and see what would happen. And happen it did for along came two little maids carrying their heavy bundles of firewood from the hills, and going into their village they spread the news far and wide of the strange sight they had seen on the hillside. And soon after an old lady waved at us from her ancestral home at the foot of the hill, and then the family appeared from everywhere, and we were their welcome guests. And an hour later, we left with reluctance, our hearts warmed by their friendliness and our two little maids running to give us their gift of berries they had picked on the hillside….

September 9, 1936

In one house, we discovered a little boy of five, who had been baptized ‘in foreign,’ although his parents still remain pagan, for some strange reason. The little girl-mother, a sweet little lass of no more than nineteen, seemed quite taken with the Sisters, and promiced [sic] to come and visit us soon—and so we left with hearts warmed by the simple hospitality and with a feeling that we were their friends.

November 6, 1936²⁴

The apostolate of friendliness clearly relied on the friendliness of Chinese women.

Because women in the Chinese countryside were responsible for much of the farmwork that supported their families, this meant that the American Sisters often went to the fields as the first point of contact. In the writings of Maryknoll Sister Mary Rosalia Kettl—whose memoir One Inch of Splendor is announced for sale in The Field Afar for $1.00—Chinese women emerge from out of the shadows and into the sunshine of fieldwork and friendliness.²⁵ Kettl captures the apostolate of friendliness: “‘And how is the field work today?’ we called across the watery embankment, while our rubbers slipped perilously over the ...