I have a hard time with men characterizing the church as female and talking about her in terms of her redemption.
It's the ultimate Madonna/whore complex.
I understand why we use the language. The Bride of Christ, and all that. I get it. I'm not saying it's wrong. I know it wouldn't really matter if I did consider it "wrong." And no, not all men, and yes, some women, too, and yes, I get it. Promise.
But I still don't like it.
I don't like the times I've sat in groups among wide-eyed and wide-smiled women eager to claim a place at a glass tabletop spread open with pink-covered Bibles, working so hard, so alone, to believe "wholeness" and "purity" and "joy in the travails of women" for themselves, on their own behalves - attending a bride so maligned, frantically self-talking against the current in which they were swept along without ever asking themselves why it was so hard to believe these things for themselves in this context. Because why ask? What answers would they expect? and what would those answers, if they ever came, demand of them? What did they stand to lose?
I never really had thoughts to share with them; never notes to add to the pile; never did much more than observe. Never swept up in the rapture of telling myself this Church, this Mother of this Father, affirms me, Lisa, girl, woman, female, half-dead wounded, questioner, skeptic, believer, dying for room to move. Never a bride. Never blushing, timid, virginally hopeful; never virtuously, breathlessly, femininely devoted, and so, a defector of this game: helpless, speaking or silent, against the discomfort in these women's eyes, which saw me as the outsider I was.
I don't like it - the way patriarchy steers discussions of the Church's shortcomings toward degradation and, specifically, feminine (dare I say sexual?) degradation.
I don't like how patriarchy subjugates this feminine Church, It's all very telling, to me.
It's telling, the way that patriarchy makes no room to speak of these things in masculine terms.
It's telling, that I always read things like they shamed, maligned, underestimated her, but one day they'll stand in awe of her. It's telling that I never read things like he played the arrogant puff-chest and the predator; now he stands as one with the victimized, humbled by the weight of their pain and his own dearth of ability in its wake, his inability to do anything other than breathe Jesus over their wounds and listen to the Spirit as she weeps through him.
That I always read things like she played the hellion and the whore; now she stands new, washed, adorned, breathtaking; that I never read things like once, the skulls of the broken crunched under his feet as he marched toward ideas of entitled glory; now, he is low to the ground awash in the grief-spirit of Mother God which swells among the broken, so that Her searing glory might rush forth from his brokenness in rivers.
That I always read things like once, she stood disgraced and dirty; now she walks without spot or wrinkle; that I never read about how he stumbled to the ground, disrespected, devalued, demeaned, but he found God was there, too, and always had been, and always will be, and that this stumbling block is, perhaps, the rock upon which God would build him, that this shadowed company of brokenness is, perhaps, where the glory of Christ's bride imbues its very essence to those who live and move among her, who drink living water from this rock, who seek after the light in the dark.
So much more, that I don't even have words for, and I need to go to bed, but I just keep thinking: oh, the irony, that in order to discuss these things in masculine terms we might have to know them in feminine terms first.
I wish we were willing to do this.
I wish we were less eager to feminize the church's shortcomings.
I wish men* were as quick to defend actual women in their actual subjugation as they are quick to defend the ways in which they subjugate the Gospel in order to justify it.
I wish.
*again: no, not all men, and I'm really tired of having to say that. If you get really pissed about reading that, it probably applies to you, so deal with it; if it doesn't, don't get pissed.
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