Serene Jones is Titus Street Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and the author of Feminist Theory and Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Cynthia L. Rigby is W. C. Brown Associate Professor of Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and co-editor of Blessed One: Protestant Perpectives on Mary. They delivered the 2004 Women in Church and Ministry lecture together in Miller Chapel on March 4, 2004.
A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping.
Rachel weeping for her children and
refusing to be comforted,
because her children are no more. (Jeremiah 31:15)
“Let it be unto me as you have said.Let us begin by saying how pleased we are to be here. It is a real honor to be invited to give Princeton's WICAM lecture, and it is particularly exciting that you asked the two of us to do it together. Although we are long-time friends and fellow scholars, until this evening, we have never before had the chance to collaborate on a public project like this. Over the years, we have discovered that as theologians, we share a great deal. We both work on Reformed theology, which means, among many things, that we both have a quirky desire to read people such as Calvin and Barth for fun! We are also both ordained ministers in Reformed traditions and are actively involved in our churches at a local and national level.
Behold, I am the Lord's handmaiden.” (Luke 2:38)
In addition to these professional commonalities, we are both moms who are constantly scrambling around trying to figure out how to hold down demanding work lives while also being good parents and staying healthy and whole as individuals. Both of us also struggle with creativity in our work lives and our home lives: we are writers and teachers and homemakers; and in all these settings, we see our labor as a form of art, as a craft that we carefully attend to, as an aesthetically formed enterprise.
Another dimension of our shared perspective as theologians is our common grounding as feminist theologians. What do we mean by this term “feminist”? It is a rather loaded word to use in a seminary setting these days because it means such dramatically different things to different people. For some, the term sounds quite radical and “out-there”; feminism looks to them like a movement that wants to destroy families and, even worse, reject the Trinity! For others, the word seems to signal just the opposite, something too old-fashioned and outdated to be relevant today—something women back in the seventies did, something no longer needed in our post-feminist age. Suffice it to say that we do not find ourselves reflected in either of these views. For us, feminism is an alive, pertinent, richly creative, and, in its own way, deeply traditional dimension of who we are as women of faith.
In this regard, we both have a distinctly theological (and Reformed) understanding of the task and nature of feminism. In our minds, to be feminists means that, emboldened by our faith in God, we are actively seeking to build a world where all people, women and men alike, flourish, where God's creation is nurtured, and where God's will for justice, beauty, and mercy prevails. We pursue this vision with a special eye on women and the challenges raised by their diverse lives. We ask what things presently (and in the past) hinder the flourishing of women; in this context, we are committed to looking at the causes of women's oppression. But this is not all of it. We are also interested in exploring what special gifts of practice and insight women might bring to our collective flourishing. We thus give a special place to women's wisdom and the faithful visions of the future embedded therein.
With respect to the activities of both identifying the conditions of women's oppression and articulating a vision of what their flourishing might consist of, we strongly suspect that most of what we regularly identify as feminine or masculine attributes are produced by our collective social conventions and our shared cultural imaginations and not by some inevitable force of nature or biological necessity. In the contemporary language of feminist theory, this means that we view
All this is to say that, in our experience, many of what Christians have named as natural features of our gendered differences (as men and women) simply are not natural; rather, they are stories we have dreamed up—often in our churches—and called natural, sometimes for good reasons, although at other times, for reasons not so positive. In this regard, gender is itself an artifact of the human process of creative production. Our gender myths are tales crafted by our cultural minds and passed down through the generations by the habits of our cultural bodies. As feminist theologians, we are actively engaged in an ongoing process of re-crafting these “stories” about gender in the hope that by bringing our faith to bear on them, we might create new stories that better reflect what it means to be God's beloved creatures in today's world.
It is an exciting time to be rethinking gender from a Christian feminist perspective. We live in an age when many of the most obvious structural walls surrounding gender roles have been broken down in the areas of family life, work life, church life, and intellectual life. Our concrete social forms have shifted dramatically. It is also clear to us, however, that while many of us living in the United States today may have adapted to these shifts in our material lives—such as women working in upper management and men taking on more parenting responsibilities—there is another level at which many of our deepest internal, psychic convictions about gender remain untouched. For example, at work, most people perceive men as being better bosses, and at home, most women still do a disproportionately large percentage of house cleaning, emotional supporting, and child rearing. Although our social worlds may have changed, our imaginations and the patterns of relating they engender have yet to catch up.
As theologians, we are well aware that the task of shaping imagination is, perhaps, the hardest work of all, particularly when it comes to those bone-deep truths that structure the most fundamental features of our overarching worldviews. As theologians, we also recognize that it matters enormously what people believe—what they imagine—about God and the nature of humanity. In the tradition, Christian communities have long acknowledged the important role of belief formation and the shaping of faith-imaginations, and we have addressed this through the ongoing creative activities of preaching, teaching, prayer, liturgy, and the many other complexly textured patterns of life that shape our daily interactions. Included among these activities is the enterprise we undertake here tonight, the work of systematic theological reflection.
Sin
In the history of the Christian tradition, one of the major themes that has structured Christian faith-imaginations is the theme of sin, our topic today, and one about which Reformed theologians such as Calvin and Barth had plenty to say. In fact, each of them engaged in dramatically rethinking the doctrine for their own age. This topic has also played a central role in the reflections of feminist theologians over the past fifty years. Indeed, Valerie Saiving's article on sin was one of the classic, groundbreaking works that began contemporary feminist theology. In it, she argues that Christians need to expand their imaginative categories for naming sin to include the experience of women.1 She suggests that the fruit of sin that many women produce does not derive from the classical Augustinian sin of excessive self-centeredness but rather from the sin of excessive self-loss. She presses us to imagine that sin is manifest not just in dispositions of robust pride but also in dispositions marked by self-disintegration.2 In response to her critical assessment of sin, a number of other feminist theologians took up the task of thinking about sin in similar ways, focusing on the question, What does sin look like when the sinner in question is socialized to be subservient rather than dominating?
In the years following the publication of that important article, feminist theology entered a period of reflection in which the task was not so much to internally redefine sin as Saiving had, but more to call into question Christianity's obsession with sin in the first place, particularly with respect to notions of sin associated with human embodiment, sexuality, and, most problematically, femininity. During this period, we were asked to imagine the body not as inherently bad or evil but as good and pleasurable, to see sex not as intrinsically sinful but as a gift of God, and to see women not just as progeny of the temptress Eve but as part of God's beloved, complex creation. It is important to note that in these theologies, the concept of sin—not the fruit of sin—was identified as the problem from which Christianity needed to be redeemed.3 We should also note that, in all these works, the doctrine of creation was the locus for their systematic theological reflections on sin.
In the past decade, the interests of feminist theology have begun to shift yet again. No longer is the doctrine of creation considered the primary locus within which feminists might reflect on sin, theological anthropology, and the issue of gender broadly conceived. A new generation of feminist theologians has begun to explore what gender looks like when considered in the context of the doctrine of redemption. With this shift to redemption, we have also seen a resurgence of interest in the positive value of sin-talk as a feature of feminist theology. It is this conversation that we are part of this evening. Along with feminist theologians such as Kathryn Tanner, Joy McDougal, and Delores Williams, we understand sin-talk as an essential feature of a comprehensive Christian systematic theology. Not only do we believe that it is a crucial component in our understanding of human brokenness, but, perhaps even more importantly, we also believe that it is an absolutely invaluable part of our Christian comprehension of the reality of saving grace. In both instances, reflections on sin have significant impact on how we understand the nature of human creativity, in general, and the creativity of women, in particular.
During the rest of our lecture this evening, we are going to talk about sin in ways both traditional and new. In fact, at times you might not even realize how traditional and orthodox we actually are because the claims we articulate may sound, at least on first hearing, rather unconventional. That is one of the great things about dealing with a tradition that is as diverse and eccentric as Christianity: it is chock full of insights that still have the capacity to surprise and push us in ways that may seem extra-ordinary or just downright peculiar and even uncomfortable. Some of you may find this to be the case with three claims that are going to ground our reflections on sin, three very traditional Calvinist claims.
First, we believe that whatever we say about sin, we need to recognize that as a theological idea, our sin-talk should serve to strengthen Christian faith, not weaken it. In this regard, our concepts of sin should never be fashioned or deployed in a manner designed to harm people, to break their spirits, to marginalize them, to destroy their sense of belovedness, or to constrain the conditions of their flourishing. Unfortunately, in the history of the Christian tradition, sin-talk has at times been used to do this—to break down people and communities rather than to faithfully strengthen and build them up. This is so particularly with respect to women. The best way to ensure that this not happen is to constantly remember that, according to the Reformed tradition, there is no knowledge of sin apart from a prior knowledge of grace. To use a colloquial image, you do not know that you are sick until you receive the good news that you have been cured. You do not see how broken your world is until, in Christ, you are able to see, in its full splendor, the grace that God has already poured upon us all. This means that the gospel affirmation of women's essential goodness should always be the foundational truth upon which other statements about our brokenness are built. As we will discuss shortly, this is particularly true when it comes to women's creativity, itself a reality marked doubly by grace and sin.
Related to this is a second crucial theological claim about sin. In our contemporary culture, it is easy for people to think about sin as “those bad things that people do.” Sin, viewed in this way, names all the morally problematic behaviors we see around us or find within us. While this view does not entirely misidentify sin—sin surely includes within its scope a large spectrum of behavior and attitudes that seem to thwart human flourishing—the central characteristic of sin in the Reformed tradition is not equated with such bad acts but is identified, at its root, with a deeper state of being. To be in sin is to be alienated from God. “Sin” describes human life that is not oriented toward God, life that does not unfold in full knowledge of God's love and desire for the flourishing of creation. To be in sin, then, is first and foremost to be unaware of grace, to live without God, or—to use Calvin's favorite term—to live in a state of “unfaithfulness.” In this state, one could conceivably live a fully moral, upright life—avoiding many of the acts we call “sin”—and still be fundamentally in a state of sin because one has not accepted the fullness of grace that God has bestowed upon humanity. Our ignorance or denial of that grace might grow out of a worldview in which we think that we do not need God because we are grand masters of our own universe or, in quite a different way, out of a worldview in which we think we are finally alone and helplessly lost in a world where there is no God, a world where no one cares if we live or die. It is not difficult to see why either of these godless states would be a hellish reality for the person who, unaware of grace, wanders through life without the sustaining knowledge of God's unceasing love and nurture. Correlatively, it is not hard to imagine how one's fundamental orientation to God—be it faithful or alienated—affects one's experience of creativity.
The third insight guiding our reflections is this: when we think about how sin is concretely manifest in our everyday patterns of life, we must affirm a number of dialectical tensions. First, we need to identify sin both as something we do (we sin) and as something that happens to us (we are sinned against). Second, sin is something that we are consciously responsible for enacting (sin is willful) and yet is also part of a social reality that we do not will and cannot escape (sin is inescapably social). Third, sin is something that we experience as individuals (sin is personal) and yet is also a reality that is corporately enacted and lived (sin is collective). Holding on to these unresolvable tensions in our discussions of sin is not an easy thing in a world that wants simplistic accounts of the human condition. Even so, Christians strongly believe that these are essential features of our fallen humanity, a humanity marked simultaneously by both sin and grace. When viewed from the perspective of the God who creates, loves, and seeks to redeem us, we are—each of us apart and all of us together—both saints and sinners, both beloved and scorned, both freed and imprisoned. What ripe fields for feminist reflection!
Creativity, Beauty, and Imagination
To understand the relationship between sin and creativity, we thought it would be helpful not only to discuss what we think sin is, but to say more about how we are using the term “creativity” theologically. Our understanding of creativity goes something like this: As creatures made by the Creator God, we are called to participate actively in God's good creation. This participation of humanity in creation is what we refer to generally as “creativity.” The challenge of the Christian life, in this context, is to determine how this creativity might best be enacted. When we live faithfully, we seek to mirror God's own creative intentions for the world. This is faithful creativity, creativity in its truest form. If our creativity manifests forms of life that thwarts God's divine will for human flourishing, however, it is sinful. When this occurs, our creative actions are corrupted and distorted, and true creativity fails to be expressed and enacted. Yet by living in conformity with God's intentions, we act in ways that please God, that delight our Creator and hence delight and enrich the whole of creation, including ourselves. We then embody or image what the Reformed tradition has referred to as “the glory of God.” Women's creativity, at its best, entails embodying this glory.
But what exactly does it mean to “embody the glory of God”? In a well-known phrase, Calvin refers to creation as “the theater of God's glory.” In making this reference, he suggests that when we look at the beauty and complexity of the vast world around us, we should be awed by the breadth and depth of God's own beauty displayed within it. Glory is thus something that both God and the world share. God creates it, and we see it, participate in it, and hence “bear it.” The phrase conjures up images of the world shimmering and shining with marks of God's grace, a world handcrafted by a wondrous divine artisan, a world that shows forth the marvel of God's own blessed goodness. This glory, we should further note, not only describes the manifest brilliance of creation; in the Reformed tradition, we insist that it describes even more perfectly the beauty shown to us in Jesus Christ, the revealed embodiment of divine glory in its greatest splendor. Here, then, glory marks our understanding of both creation and redemption.
At the heart of these descriptions is the claim that glory is something that we apprehend not just intellectually but through the full range of our senses; it is imaged and embodied. We can taste, touch, see, feel, smell, and hear it. This implies that glory has to do with form, shape, and substance. When something in our created world bears a resemblance, at the level of material form, to God's own blessed intentions for the world, it is “glorious.” The term thus highlights the distinctly aesthetic dimensions of God's creative work. When the world shimmers and shines with God's glory, we experience it as aesthetically pleasing or beautiful. When we embody God's glory (God's creative intentions) in our acts of creativity, we too participate in making our lives and our world more beautiful places, places that radiate with graced possibility. Hence, it is fair to say that when we are faithfully creative, our acts are beautiful reflections of God's glory—be they the work of cleaning the house, grading papers, or hiking through the park. Even more vivid are those explicit forms of artistic production—painting, writing, weaving, dancing, and so forth—that we undertake as expressions of our ongoing engagement in God's intention for creation. In other words, when we are creative—faithfully creative—the glory of God is made concretely present in the beauty we see and feel.
Let us explain in more detail why we think this understanding of graced creativity is important and why comprehending its obverse is equally crucial. When we exercise creativity without imagining God's creative intentions, we risk constructing a “hyperreality” that has no relationship to God's desire for the restoration of the world. Creativity divorced from imagining what God desires produces fantasy worlds that serve as escapes from reality. Creativity grounded in imagining the glory of God leads us to participate, as people of faith, in creating a world that we believe is possible (despite appearances to the contrary).
Because history has proven that creativity has been used to construct fantasy worlds rather than to imagine a world that embodies God's glory, people of faith have sometimes understood creativity as antithetical to the good. To be good, to be religious, to be faithful is precisely not to be creative, in this understanding. Here, we might understand ourselves to be responsible for “signing on to God's agenda,” but certainly not in any way to imagine what this might entail or to think of ourselves as integral to it, embodying God's glory. Unfortunately, this separation of the good from the beautiful, of faithfulness from creativity, has led to the misconception that the good is boring. According to the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, “…'the good' has lost its attraction because it is cut off from beauty.”4 By contrast to this, we suggest, an incarnational faith insists on pursuing the beautiful, or “imagining embodying the glory of God” by realizing our identity as creative agents. Again, as von Balthasar puts it: “Though beauty and being have become separated in the modern imagination, their integration was accomplished in Christ, the true Word and image of God, who was not only believed, but seen.”5
When thus conceived, creativity as imagining embodying the glory of God leads to the transformation of sinful structures that rob us of life. As Belden Lane puts it, citing Tolkein, “In a world [that is the product of the imagination], one encounters the unexpected breaking in of joy beyond the walls of a world bound by fear and despair.”6 Creativity propelled by imagining embodying the glory of God leads us to embrace the work that brings God's Kin-dom to earth as it is in heaven.
Creativity, understood this way, raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of the Christian life and its goal of embodying God's glory. How do we, as human beings, act creatively in ways that are both faithful and beautiful? Moreover, how does our creativity unfold in ways that are not only in principle good for the world and ourselves but are also very concretely pleasurable to us, ways that delight us and bring us joy, ways that truly make us happy? Similarly, how do we respond to situations where our creativity is misdirected or distorted, situations where either we create in ways destructive of human flourishing or we are so harmed by others that we cannot create at all? How does sin affect our creativity, and how might we create in the midst of sin, our own as well as others'? Even more particularly, how might we construe the effects of sin on the creativity of women? What features of their lives can our discussion of sin and beauty illumine?
To explore questions like these, particularly as they pertain to the lives of women, we have identified five theological features of “the self” that we believe are crucial to our creativity: (1) agency: our God-given capacity to act and hence to be creative; (2) time: our God-created capacity to imagine the future and to remember the past and—within the space of these—to compose our lives; (3) voice: our created ability to articulate and embrace our particularity, our call to be individuals with unique gifts to offer in the context of community; (4) permission: God's divine gift of forgiveness that allows us not to be perfect but to live nonetheless in grace as we creatively act and express our particularity; and (5) call: the gift of Christian vocation, the reality that we are each called to live in faithful relation to God and others in this graceful dance of creation and creativity.
We now turn to a consideration of how Reformed understandings of sin might help us think in new ways about these features of creativity in women's lives. In good Reformed fashion, our argument is fundamentally dialogical; it requires thinking in two ways simultaneously without reducing one line of thought to the other. First, we will explore the ways in which experiences of traumatic violence in our lives can disable our capacity to create in manners that enhance our lives and the lives of others. In other words, we will explore how certain forms of sin can diminish creativity and then, correlatively, what saving grace might look like in such a context. Second, we will suggest how understanding ourselves as “sinners” can, in some instances, enable us more faithfully to create with joy and beauty, particularly in contexts where lived experience of harm seems to have stunted our abilities to craft our world in meaningful ways. Looking at Reformed notions of original sin, we will show why the doctrine of sin might be a useful aid in the Christian call to glory in the Divine. The reality of violence and sin that destroys our creativity and the reality of a form of sin-talk that can enable creativity—these two perspectives on sin, when brought together, form a productive site for a complex feminist appreciation of the character of sinful, graced humanity.
Our Scriptural Companions
In the course of our conversations about this lecture, we realized that we kept coming back to two women from scripture who, we imagined, may have struggled with issues similar to our own. Following the insight of John Calvin, who described scripture as the “lens of faith,” we decided to introduce you to these women who served as our “lens” and to explain to you how their stories helped us think theologically about the topics at hand. As you will see, the tales of their lives are very different from each other and in many ways from our own, and yet the insights that emerge from each, we believe, illuminate starkly different but interrelated features of both sin and creativity as they are played out in Christian existence as we understand it today.
Imagine with us, if you will, the unexpected meeting of two women on a dusty road on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem. They are the same age and, in their youth, could well have been mistaken for sisters. Their encounter is brief. They are not even aware of the other as they draw near: each is too lost in her own world of grief and memory to take in the presence of a stranger.
The taller of the two women is not crying; she is standing on the side of the road, staring off toward the hill's horizon where three bodies hang nailed to roughly constructed crosses. Her face bears a blankness that bespeaks feelings too enormous to name. Her frame is etched, still, unmoving, frozen against the hot afternoon sky. The smaller woman is walking away from the hill, her back turned to the crosses. A friend walks close by, helping her take steps; she stumbles frequently, her face streaked with muddied tears, her eyes closed.
At the point on the road where their paths cross, the weeping woman stops to rest. Suddenly overcome by waves of grief, she begins to cry into the shoulder of her accompanying friend. She sobs out words that sound something like “My son, my son.” The other woman, momentarily startled out of her numbed reverie, looks in the wailing woman's direction and knows who she is immediately. Without moving, she mouths the same words, as if speaking a mantra worn thin through years of repetition, “My son, my son.” Their eyes meet for a brief moment, and we wait to see if they will speak.
Who are these two women? If we had met them in their younger years, we would have seen them alive with creative energy, young mothers exhausted but hopeful about the future stretching before them. We step into their worlds, and we imagine what it is like for them to imagine embodying the glory of God, what sin looks like from the context of their space.
The smaller of the two is Mary, the one we now know as the mother of Jesus. In scripture, when we first meet her, she is presented to us as a meek but powerful woman who is called to bear Divinity within her, the quintessential model of creativity. We imagine walking with Mary, the peasant woman whom the church later came to identify as “the Mother of God.” We remember that God called upon Mary to act as a creative agent in the world, to look toward the future of God's reign and to participate in it. Mary visits Elizabeth, giving voice to the Magnificat, boldly embracing her calling. Truly this peasant, virgin woman is able against all odds to imagine embodying the glory of God.
The other woman is less known to us. Some of you may have glimpsed her in your reading of the Gospel of Matthew; for others, she may have never appeared in the theater of your scriptural imagination at all. She is an elusive figure; some biblical scholars tell us her story is fictional. But in our minds, she is a vivid presence; and in the landscape of Jesus' own world, a woman's life much like hers most surely existed, perhaps in numbers to large for us even to imagine. As she watches the man called Jesus crucified on the cross, it is hard for us to know by her expression whether she is relieved or grieved by his execution. She has a scar running across her face that she received from a soldier's sword almost thirty years before, the day they came to her village and in a brutal act of state-ordered terror executed her two-year-old son, her only baby, her beloved offspring. She is a survivor of Roman imperial violence, the victim of genocidal war crimes, a mother who never saw her son grow into his thirties. As she stands on that road, we imagine that perhaps she sees Mary weeping and feels envy that this woman at least saw her child grow up. Perhaps she even feels his execution is justified, if she realizes this is the one for whom her son died. Who is this haunting figure? We have given her the name Rachel. She is a woman whose own crucifixion began long before Jesus even set his eyes toward Jerusalem. She is a woman who has been undone by traumatic violence; her spirit fractured by that mythic event the Christian tradition has named “the Slaughter of the Innocents.”
How do we think about sin, creativity, and the Christian life together? For us, one answer lies in thinking about Rachel's and Mary's stories both separately and together, the stories of two women whose parallel lives brought them, that afternoon, to the cross of Jesus—and to each other; two “creative” souls whose youthful voices give us both the verdant poetry of Luke's Magnificat and the tragic lament of Jeremiah's wailing woman; two women whose pasts tell us much about their future.
Rachel's Story: Trauma and Creativity
Let us begin with Rachel. How does this woman's imagined story frame our thinking about creativity and sin? What can our construal of her experience allow us to see about the place of brokenness and grace in our own lives? When we think about sin in contemporary theology, there are two major images that come to mind. As suggested earlier, we think about individual sin as morally bad acts that people commit; if we are broad minded, we couple this with an understanding of social sin as the reality of larger structures of oppression that diminish the flourishing of humanity. We want to suggest that what Rachel gives us is a third picture of sin, one that stands in the gap between individual agential sin and structural social evil. She allows us to see, in painful detail, what a particular form of social sin called “traumatic violence” does to individuals when it inhabits their reality. She gives a picture of the self unraveled by the sinful destructiveness of our world, the self upon whom terror has fallen, someone to whom sin has happened and within whom the consequences of this sin are embodied in profoundly intimate ways. In other words, she gives us a view of sin that is simultaneously collective and individual, both structural and personal, both political and private. She gives us a view of sin that allows us to see the complex ways it affects her capacity to be creative and to embody the glory of God.
In our efforts to understand this dimension of our human experience of sin, we have found the insights of recent work in trauma theory to be enormously helpful. The word “trauma,” in fact, literally means “wound.” Trauma theory, then, describes the aftereffects suffered by persons who have experienced events of overwhelming violence which they perceived to threaten their very lives and which they were powerless to resist. According to the work of psychologists, after such events, persons can suffer a disintegration of capacities that many of us consider to be inherent features of personhood and creativity. A sense of agency, time, memory, embodiment, hope, voice, a capacity for relationship, the ability to experience pleasure—all of these features of the self are challenged at a psychic level.
Today, we call it by a more clinical name: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Research has shown that this undoing can happen to individuals as well as whole collectives, to children as well as adults, to persons as different as housewives and military personnel, and survivors of a car accident or nuclear disaster. Although traumatic events never happen in exactly the same way and the people who experience them never feel their effects with identical force, the literature on trauma tells us there are remarkably similar features that seem to cut across the large spectrum of violence that can produce it. They include such things as a disabled sense of agency, a constant reliving of the violence in dreams or flashbacks, an inability to remember the original event and hence a disconnected relation to memory itself, feelings of physical dissociation from one's body or present place in time, and a loss of voice or the sense that one's views and actions can positively affect one's surrounding environment.
Although there is much more to be said about these features of trauma as they live in people's souls, today we want to explore how these traumatic symptoms impact our capacity to be faithfully creative. If we interpret the damage that traumatic violence does to people as a form of sin that “happens to them” and that they are then compelled to “live,” then how might we construe the connection between this form of sin and the Christian call to be creative?
To answer this question, return with us to Rachel.
In our imagination, we see her standing there on that hilltop wrapped in an old, worn red silk cloth. It covers her from head to toe, shielding her from the world around her. It seems to be holding her together, albeit in a ragged, tattered sort of way. Thirty years ago, Rachel wove this cloth on a loom in her home near Bethlehem. In her youth, she was widely known as one of the finest weavers in the area, celebrated for the intricate designs of her fabrics. But since that day, a day she cannot remember, her hands have been unable to touch the loom. It sits dusty and still in the corner of her room, the child's tunic she was making rotting between its braces.
Today, she twists this remnant of her former brilliance in her hands, wringing its ragged edges tightly. The cloth that holds her is wearing thin. She has begun to think she is too old to create again, having lost the most beautiful creation of her life, her child, to a calculated act of state-sanctioned violence, a military sword, in the deserts of the Middle East. She is the fractured creative spirit of many: wounded, unable to bear forth the glory of God that is in her.
What has befallen Rachel?
First, let's look at her sense of agency in light of what we know about the long-term aftereffects of traumatic violence. The clinical literature tells us that it often leads to feelings of utter powerlessness, feelings that reflect the experience of powerlessness experienced in the original event. We imagine Rachel on that fated afternoon this way. When the young soldiers came to take her son from her arms, she tried to hold on to him but could not. She tried to stop them but could not. She struggled against them but failed, and, in the days that followed, she slowly lost the capacity to imagine herself as an actor in the world at all. She lost the sense she had always had before that she could intend an action—one as simple as feeding her child—and then do it, see its effects, and take responsibility for its consequences. No longer! Now she lives in the prison of a victim's imagination. Not only are intentions and actions severed in her mind, but action itself has become a burdened possibility, one enjoyed by others but, alas, not by those who, like her, are dead of soul.
Second, what of Rachel's sense of time, her capacity to envision a future and remember a past and, out of this, craft a present? The literature on trauma tells us that these events of violence often lead to memory loss. To not remember is, in fact, to remember an event that was too overwhelming to comprehend even in its occurrence. In Rachel's case, imagine with us that she has only fragmented memories of that day. When she hears a barking dog, she often flashes back to a horrified blankness. When she smells fish cooking, as if it were that morning, she feels nauseous. Having lost the past and her will, the future becomes for her not a place of expectation, but just further space into which she is forced to move, to trod out her years in depressed aloneness. To be able to weave, to create beauty on her loom, she not only needs to imagine that her actions matter; she also needs to imagine that her creative work has a future. She cannot.
Third, to be creative, a person needs to have at least a minimal sense of having a personal voice. This can take the form of knowing that one has a substantial body or a bounded identity. It involves knowing that you are “somebody” with something to say, something to create. In contrast to this, trauma survivors often dissociate; they psychically disconnect from their experiences of embodiment. They become numb and often lose a sense of the boundaries that mark the edge of self; they become unable to distinguish where they end and others begin. In Rachel's case, this unboundedness is symbolized by her inability to weave new clothes to cover her body. She cannot craft a shawl capable of enveloping her, warming her, protecting her from rain and cold and the pitying stares of others. She has only a worn rag to adorn her, a rag left over from the day her hell began. She has been, it seems, strewn into the world.
Fourth, when Rachel was learning to weave, she grew to see that imperfection was inevitable and that she had permission, as an artist, to fail or to not “get it right” as she worked her craft. Sometimes the loom would drop a stitch, sometimes the silk would tear or a wool thread bundle into knots; and because the color of the dye was never even, she learned to find beauty in its shifting hues and not an imagined evenness. Accepting these flaws was key not only to Rachel's ability to find pleasure in the movement of her loom but also, and even more importantly, to her having the courage to keep working when the material she created was not exactly to her design. But thirty years ago, this all changed. When we see her standing on Golgotha, we see a Rachel who has replaced that forgiving discipline of heart and mind with another, unforgiving habit of thought that keeps her hands still, her heart frozen. As with many trauma survivors, she finds herself constantly replaying the events of that day in her imagination—the fractured parts she remembers—and trying to get the ending right, trying to fantasize her way to a different future in which her son lives. It is called “the compulsion to repeat,” and it haunts her sleeping as well as her waking. In her anxious search for a perfect ending to a story she cannot undo, she remains perpetually caught in its mimetic replay of horror. For her, imperfection has terrifying consequences, its cost so high that she cannot embrace even its possibility. And in her refusal of that possibility lies her prison.
Finally, what of call and of the Christian notion of vocation? What of the theological claim that faithful creativity will have as its telos the glorifying of God and the flourishing of community? What of Rachel's capacity for understanding her life as having a direction and her ability to see that direction intentionally unfolding in the context of community? To answer this, recall that we see her standing alone on the roadside; Mary is the one with a companion. The literature on trauma tells us that survivors have a hard time forming relationships with others because their fundamental trust in the world has been violated. Could it be that when Rachel looks over at Mary and the followers of Jesus who surround her, she is puzzled by what she knows of their devotion to him and the deep friendships among them? She cannot trust enough to join a group of any sort, much less concentrate long enough to have listened to and understood one of Jesus' sermons. As for her faith, yes, she is Jewish. But what does that mean? She was born and will die in a land marked by imperial domination, and it is because of her Hebrew ancestry that her son was slaughtered. Had she been Roman, he might have lived. Or even more painfully, had she been Mary, Yahweh's angels might have helped her escape. Who could believe in the God who had not come to her but had saved others instead?
And so here we have Rachel, a woman cut deeply by the ravages of sin. Tighter and tighter she wrings the cloth between her hands as she stands on the roadside, her eyes moving between the hilltop's dead and the fallen, weeping woman near her. She twists the cloth she once created, unable to even imagine a new creation. A new life? A new scarf that she might wrap around her for comfort and warmth? For beauty? She is unable to fathom the mere possibility of what it is she no longer has. Caught in sin, she cannot see sin. Broken by violence, she does not know the depths of the evil that still inhabits her body and soul.
Mary's Story: Blessing and Creativity
The story of Rachel illustrates how sin undoes us as creative beings who embody the glory of God. The story of Mary offers us the reminder and the hope that sin does not have the last word. As with Rachel, Mary's relationship to sin is complex. Though we know more about Mary than we know about Rachel, there is a great deal about Mary that we do not know and are forced to surmise. Since she was born into poverty, we traditionally imagine her as little more than a slave—a young girl who (being female) spends her hours and her days on menial tasks. Like Rachel, then, she is affected by the systemic sin that marginalizes her due to her gender and class. And this sin that is social is also private—as Rachel embodies the wounds inflicted by trauma, so Mary's person, life, and actions are shaped by the sinful social structures in which she is caught. She has not suffered the trauma that Rachel has suffered. But she has, no doubt, been socialized not to think very highly of herself. She averts her eyes, leaves the speaking to others, and endeavors to serve the men. Certainly she would never think of herself as a prophetess, the bearer of the One who would save.
And yet somehow she comes to understand herself differently. Mary—a peasant girl—is called “blessed” by God. Even more incredibly, she eventually recognizes and lives into the reality of her blessedness, contributing to the very work of God. Mary's story gives us the hope that while social sin has a detrimental impact on our embodied existence as creative agents, it need not, finally, determine who we are, how we understand ourselves, or what we do with our lives. Mary demonstrates that recognizing our identity as sinners can, in fact, simultaneously precipitate our acting in creative and transformative ways.
Informing our reflections on Mary, in these regards, are feminist studies on the subject of “feminine sin” (a term first coined by Saiving). Historically and sociologically speaking, “feminine sin” is the sin that women are most apt to be guilty of in the context of being marginalized by sinful power structures. Given the message that they are second-rate citizens who do not have the capacity to shape or influence culture as agents, women too often “buy into” the message conveyed to them by way of these sinful systems, making these false assumptions their own. Women, then, are often not assertive enough precisely because they have become the passive creatures they were taught to be. They might not act enough, or forcefully enough, because they have accepted that they are incapable and weak. They are frequently too hard on themselves, do not think highly enough of themselves, or are unable to perceive themselves in relation to the events that surround them.
How is it that women can move from being trapped not only by the sinful structures themselves but by their own “buying into” these sinful structures by way of their feminine sin? How can “living into their identity as sinners”—that is, recognizing the role they play in these systems—actually propel creativity on the part of women? To address these questions, we return to the story of Mary.
We imagine Mary, going out to scrub the laundry in a nearby stream, being visited by an angel who tells her that she is “favored” and that the Lord is with her. Mary is immediately “perplexed, and for good reason.”7 What could an angel want with her, a poor girl with nothing to offer? And so she “wonders what kind of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29). With women who, through the ages, have not recognized their value, Mary is looking over her shoulder to see who else Gabriel must be talking to. But the message, and the fact that it is being addressed to her, becomes only more difficult to fathom. Mary will bear a son, and he will be named Jesus. “Of his kingdom there will be no end,” Gabriel declares to Mary.
“How can this be,” Mary naturally asks, “since I am a virgin?” Gabriel doesn't argue with her. He doesn't try to convince her of her capabilities and potentials. Instead, he reminds her that “nothing is impossible with God.”
“Let it be unto me as you have said,” Mary responds. “Behold, I am the Lord's handmaiden.”
We imagine that Mary emerges from that encounter a changed woman. She is pregnant with new life; she begins making traveling plans; she begins, with great fury, to write poetry about how God has liberated her, fed her, included her. She envisions a new world in which sinful power structures have been overturned. And she who was voiceless lifts high her eyes, fills her lungs tight with air, and opens her mouth to proclaim this great, redeeming reversal.
What has gotten into Mary?
First, let's look at her sense of agency. What is it that moves Mary from a posture of self-effacement to the position of an agent, creatively participating in and proclaiming the coming of God's reign? Our first response to this question might be the visit of the angel. It would be easy to assume that anyone who has an emissary of God pay them a visit and assign them an important mission would have great incentive to act. And yet Gabriel's first words to Mary do not provoke action but a profound sense of inadequacy. “How can this be?” Mary asks. In and of herself, she knows she is incapable of bearing God.
Interestingly, at this point we do not know whether Mary's declaration of her incapacity is a manifestation of feminine sin or an exercise of self-awareness. Is Mary buying into the systemic presumption that a young woman has nothing to contribute? Or is she accurately assessing her abilities and resources in the face of the news set before her? We suggest that both of these might be in play. There is a sense in which, ironically, Mary's position as a marginalized figure in the social system makes her more open to acknowledging the incapacities that come with being a virgin.
We propose that it is precisely Mary's recognition of her incapacity to create, in and of herself, which positions her to do the impossible. Mary's response reminds us, at this point, of the Reformed doctrine of “total depravity”—a doctrine that, too often, has been used to impede agency rather than to foster it. The story of Mary illustrates what happens when we understand this doctrine not as disparaging human beings but as recognizing the condition they find themselves in. As Paul Lehmann put it, the doctrine of total depravity “simply expresses the fact that whatever it takes to overcome the ethical predicament of humanity does not lie within the powers of humanity.” Rather, Lehmann insists, “Human renewal … comes to humanity as a gift.”8 Mary seems to understand this. Whatever it takes to bear the child she is called to bear does not lie within her power. She knows her virginity, her depravity. And this recognition—this recognition of her sinful condition—prepares her for receipt of the gift of renewal.
One mark of Mary's renewal as an agent is her changing sense of time. Understanding her depravity, Mary is reminded by Gabriel that, though engaging this creative work of bearing Jesus is impossible, God has made what is impossible possible. Things are not as they seem, for God is at work in history, subverting and reversing that which is right before our eyes. As Mary will soon articulate, the impossible things God does are done for us and with us, creatively replacing those paradigms that we have presumed are the only possibilities. “God has filled the hungry with good things,” Mary will proclaim. “The rich God has sent away empty.” Knowing her depravity, being reminded of the power of God, Mary is suddenly not stuck indefinitely in the present, having no reason to believe that there is anything beyond the tasks she does today, which she will repeat tomorrow. Mary can now see a future, a future that lays claim to her in the present, a future that includes her as an agent of transformation. Mary's belief in a transcendent God, far from entrenching her in her own sense of depravity and incapacitation, frees her to remember the past, envision the future, and act in the present.
As a creative agent in relation to the incarnational event, Mary claims permission to be someone she has not been socialized to be; someone who is not a victim in relationship to the systems that claim her but who, rather, contributes integrally to the shaping of a new world. This permission that she takes hold of, we like to imagine, lies at the interface of her recognition that she is incapable of this creative task, in and of herself, and her recognition that she can do the impossible, for God has made it possible. Luther famously told Christian believers that they should “sin boldly” and “love God more boldly still.” Mary—a sinner in love—claims permission for behavior that is otherwise impermissible.9 To give birth as a virgin? To go on a journey on her own? To speak prophetically? Freed from the pressure to be perfect, Mary steps forward and engages in these audacious, creative acts. She does what she can not do and is simultaneously called to do.
As an emerging agent who sees the future moving into the present, Mary claims permission to have a voice in a culture that understands her as (and no doubt trained her to be) voiceless.10 The sins of sexism and classism do not, ultimately, keep Mary from being “somebody with something to say.” Importantly, Mary's finding of voice does not entail a sheer overpowering of everything that stands in her way. Rather, Mary's voice emerges in the context of what feminist theologians call naming, or what traditional Christian theology calls confession. In short, Mary identifies the situation for what it is, in all its complexity. She teaches us the power of confessing not only our personal sin but also sin perpetrated against us.11 She herself is sinful, she has been victimized by sin, and she has been blessed by God. Mary finds her voice as she faces up to and celebrates who she is in relation to the events and circumstances of her life. Because she owns up to who she is, she is able not only to imagine a different future, but to envision her place in it. “Many generations will call me blessed,” she insists, recognizing the role she is playing, in the present moment, as a creative agent.
Mary's story reminds us, finally, of what it looks like to live into our vocation as creatures created and being recreated by our Creator God to be creative ourselves. She knows that her contribution to the divine enterprise is not contingent on how much energy she can muster, despite the obstacles she faces due to personal and social sin. Rather, Mary's creative engagement in the incarnational event is founded in God's claim on her as an integral participant in the divine artistry.12 She is, to speak in the terms of Dorothee Sölle, an “irreplaceable” agent whose work is valued not because it has been assessed and deemed worthy of inclusion, but because Mary herself is claimed and included for who she is.13 As one who is blessed and lives in recognition of her blessedness, Mary embodies the glory of the God whom she also bears to the world. Imagining the shape of God's Kingdom, she steps forward and speaks poetic, prophetic words that are absolutely—also—hers.
Meeting Grace, Graced Meetings
What dramatically different stories we have of these two women, both of whom struggle with what it means to embody the glory of God through their creative activity. For Rachel, a woman undone by sins that befell her, the possibility of creativity seems a distant dream, a promise beyond her reach. For Mary, a woman with intimate certainty that she is blessed, the possibility of embodying the glory of God seems already an accomplished fact (though one that will soon be sharply challenged by the grief she experiences in relation to the suffering of her son). The first gives us sobering pause, the second, honest optimism. The first speaks to those places in all of us where harm has banished hope, the second, those sites where sparks of creativity continue to ignite and inspire even in the midst of pain and loss—two very different worlds of imagination, two very different spirits of possibility.
In closing, we want to return to that roadside on Golgotha and explore what might have happened had the women met. If words had passed between them, what would they have said, speaking out of their different grief? If speech had not come, what might their glances have expressed about their hopes and fears as they stood in the shadow of the cross? What might the sheer presence of the one have offered to the other, wanted or not?
Rachel to Mary
What does Mary learn from Rachel? What can a person who has been so blessed possibly learn from one who has never glimpsed the reality in which sin does not have the final word? Mary has spent thirty years pondering her inclusion in the work of God; Rachel barely has the resources to recognize her violation. Perhaps Mary resists identifying with this broken woman she meets on Golgotha. Perhaps on some level she is petrified that the fraction of joy she has managed to salvage will be rendered obsolete by the dull gaze of the woman. Surely, the two cannot have much in common. One's son has died a boy; the other will die a man, and this makes a difference. Mary has known, with her son, the joining of souls as well as the sharing of her breast. Together they have pondered the story of his birth and the mystery of his powers. True, the distance between them has grown during three years of ministry. But on the rare occasions when their eyes meet, she still knows that she has done the work of God in bearing him, raising him, and directing him to be—like her—a servant.
In her better moments, Mary still believes that somehow, in some way, God will use her son to save her people from their sins. Embracing Rachel as a fellow sufferer would surely jeopardize all this. To acknowledge the penetrating impact of sin, especially in relationship to this one who came to save, would be to cast unbearable doubt on the promise of salvation. To know the insidious connection between the death of one and the life of the other—that Rachel's son was killed in a search for Mary's son, who was spared—would surely join the two women (or drive them apart) in ways too intimate to be risked. Better to stay silent, to nod politely, and to continue traveling the long, endless road alone. Better to keep one's hopes intact, however small.
But perhaps Mary is still strong enough to risk learning from Rachel, to be reminded, again, that not all the hungry have yet been filled with good things. That those who abuse their power are, still, all too present—killing myriads of children, indiscriminately, for the sake of their advancing themselves. Rachel's story teaches Mary that the reversal to which the Magnificat bears witness is not the reality of everyday existence in a fallen, sinful world. Though Mary's prophecy that sin is not enduring may be true, so is Rachel's observation, made by way of her persistent presence that sin endures.
The fact is that the hope to which Mary clings is far more endangered by Mary's resistance to what Rachel has to teach her than by her wary embrace of it. If Mary does not learn from Rachel, her creative engagement as an agent who can imagine a different future runs the risk of being mere fantasy. If Mary does not listen to Rachel, her bold proclamation that sin is not the end of the story becomes mere denial rather than relevant hope. Her creative words would, then, be antithetical to the good, for their goal would be to escape reality rather than to recognize what is beautiful in real-life creaturely existence. Rachel reminds Mary that the power of embodying the glory of God lies not in simply transcending circumstances or surviving grief. As Mary has known, periodically, in her life, but as Rachel teaches her again: God's glory is known incarnationally, in the depths of the womb, at the point of connection with the most unlikely of all.
In embracing Rachel, Mary learns that one cannot have great hope without simultaneously bearing great grief. If one is a true poet, one will not be content with simply imagining more beautiful worlds. One will yearn for these worlds to become actualities. As poet and prophetess, Mary must, then, learn again from Rachel about the brokenness of the created order that can, from the perspective of the Magnificat, only be named and mourned. From the context of this imagined world, a prophetic word of condemnation is uttered: two-year-old children should never be killed. This brokenness—this sin that surrounds us and lures us into complacency—will never do. It is only as we confess it that healing becomes a possibility. Creative imaginings then become vehicles of this healing rather than perpetuators of pain.
In our grief as well as in our hope we embody the glory of God, for our grief bears witness to what should not be and therefore to what actually is and should be, according to God's creative and redemptive intentions. This is what Rachel teaches Mary, as we imagine their encounter. And we believe Mary is then able to claim her own grief as a symbol of hope, a defiance of sin, an impetus for acting creatively toward the imagined future that has laid claim to her. With the help of Rachel, Mary moves toward the cross with no neutrality in relation to her circumstances. She is a mother, about to watch her son suffer and die. And this should not be.
Mary to Rachel
What does Rachel learn from Mary? What gift of insight might the mother of Jesus have given to this broken soul? Alas, the answer to this question is difficult to fathom, given that the most realistic response is more tragic than inspiring. It may be that although Mary has gifts of wisdom abounding, Rachel cannot receive them. The harsh truth of our world is that many, many of the traumas we suffer are never healed or even identified. Perhaps Rachel never returns to her loom, perhaps the events of that afternoon on Golgotha will disappear from her mind like so many other memories … and her shawl will simply wear thin and finally shred into nothing. It is a likely scenario.
But perhaps it is different. Maybe something new happens there. Maybe, standing there, Rachel is able to catch a glimpse of grace, a fleeting hint of redemption, a sense of the hope that long ago faded. If this is what happens, let us ask, what might it look like to her, this grace that saves, this knowledge of sin that reconciles and opens up creativity, this love that might allow God's glory to shine in her? What kind of grace is capable of meeting her loss?
In the Reformed tradition, we often refer to two features of God's grace. First, grace comes to us as a free gift; we cannot earn or even imagine its reality before it descends upon us in the fullness of mercy. Described as prevenient grace, this grace breaks upon us from the outside, disrupting our expected habits of thought and our most accepted forms of heart. Second, grace comes to us in a manner that does not violate our form but rather cooperates with our capacities, enlarging our imaginations, and expanding the borders of our usual actions. Described as enhancing grace, it is a power that moves deep within our being, sharing our plight, conforming to our reality, and, in that identification, opening up new avenues of experience and hope. In both ways, grace bears the double mark of being at once a new, freely bestowed, externally composed gift and a deeply familiar, intimately known presence—a grace both foreign and indigenous to us.
When Rachel looks up the hill to the cross that afternoon, what if this enhancing, prevenient grace is somehow communicated to her? In his gaze, returning hers, he beholds her and she is beheld. Let us begin with the enhancing character of grace. Perhaps she is able to see in Jesus a form similar to hers. Cruciformed, he embodies the fractured, tortured shape of her traumatic existence. When she sees herself in him, there is an identification of being that makes communication possible. There is a familiarity of form that allows him to be as close to her as she is to herself. He wears not only her ragged cloth but also her confused mind and lost memory. Her invisibility is invisible in him. Invisible, that is, until he gives public testimony to her private wounds. “Who is my mother?” he mouths. “My son, my son,” she echoes into the blankness of her past.
But the form he shares with her is different from hers in his particular embodiment of it—and herein lies the expanding quality of its enhancement. Not only does she see herself in him; something more unfolds as her gaze falls upon him. Imagine with us that, if only for a brief moment, there in the midst of his dying, his gaze, in return, falls on her, and as their eyes meet, she sees him seeing her. She is seen by him. He witnesses her; he receives her unraveled testimony-of-a-life as an offering of truth, and in that exchange, he articulates her unspoken history, her invisibility made visible in his eyes. In this play of visions, the reality of enhancing grace opens before us. He assumes her reality, speaks the unspeakable in his own loss of speech, and then returns all of this to her as he witnesses to what she believed would be forever unknown. Perhaps, in that moment, she remembers. Perhaps she does not but instead is able, for the first time, to accept the blank of history as her truth.
And still there is more, a plentitude of exchanges in this unfolding meeting of grace. Not only is there perfect unity of form between them, but in the space of their shared trauma, he offers her something new—an advent, of sorts. Here, prevenient grace breaks upon her. Wherein lies the difference that marks his prevenient offering as more than a comforting solidarity and a conformation of knowing, enhancing presence? In some unfathomable motion of form, he shows forth glory in the very moment—his dying—that the loss of divine beauty seems most complete. He bears the image and presence of grace—he somehow shines—in ways that Rachel, in her ragged cloth, seems incapable of consciously embodying in herself.
Wherein lies his glory? Is it in his awareness of God's presence to him in the midst of his suffering? Does his glory lie in his knowledge of its reality? Perhaps, but for Rachel this seems insufficient, for it is precisely her own capacity to know that has been so profoundly ruptured by sin. If his salvation of her rests in his knowledge, then he can only save her because he knows so differently from the way she does. Where would the solidarity and identity be here? If this is not the source of his glory, could it then be in the singular unity of his will with the Divine, his obedience unto death? There is also a problem here—for Rachel, at least. Her own agential identity has come undone. If he saves through his will, then again, he redeems her only in that moment where in his assertion of agential humanity, he is distinguished from and not identified with her. If this is the case, then the mirroring ceases, and it appears that to bear the glory of God, he must leave behind her traumatic world. Where, then, do we find that dimension of grace that conforms without violating and that embraces without threatening? Where do we find Jesus' glory if not in knowledge or in action?
Perhaps it is somehow in the form itself, its beauty, the material embodiment of God in his crucifixion; perhaps this is, to her, the shape of salvation. Not just any beauty: It is the beauty of love, the form of beatitude that she sees in him. The traumatic violence he undergoes does not annihilate the form of his loving, although he bears within himself the full weight of the terror she knows. What is the form of love? It has no corollary, no mimetic twin. It simply is the truth of that moment, in all its inexhaustible particularity. And the good news it reveals to her and, yes, to us is that even if she never knows or acts as the creative, glorifying woman she was created to be, her glory shines nonetheless. It shines in the inexhaustible and brilliant particularity of her existence, in all its horrifying, lost details. That glory is simply the truth of her life. What could be more unexpected, more unmerited, than the sturdy reality that in God, she is loved; she is glorified and glorifies. Her hands need not weave rich cloth, her future need not depend on past memories she will never reclaim; her acceptance by God—God's trust in her—transcends and thus renders impotent her nonexistent trust in others.
It may seem an unsatisfactory answer to the challenge of her sin, the sin that haunts her every breath. Is it sufficient for us to live in the space of a grace that loves in the fullness of form and not in some contorted notion of our agency and our noetic strengths of mind? Maybe not. But maybe.
Imagine with us, if you will, that in the moment when Jesus' form bears such glory, and she glories in his glory, between her fingers she pulls on the threads of her former craft and feels again the possibility of unburdened creativity, a creativity upon which nothing hangs but her pleasure, and his. As she pulls the strand more tightly, she moves toward Mary, the Magnificat now humming in the whisper of air that blows through her ragged shawl, not through Mary's youthful heart. The poetic genre of Mary's words becomes in its shape the genre that best annunciates Rachel's emerging voice—a broken form holding a hallowed truth, the aesthetics of grace. This fractured speech from Ramah is now what the grieving mother of Golgotha awaits to hear. And in this strange communication, there in the heat of the afternoon sun, glory shines.
1…Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960): 100-112.
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2…For a broader discussion of sin and its history in Reformed thought and feminism, see Serene Jones, “Sin,” in Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).
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3…Feminist theologians who have developed this understanding of sin include Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Parker, Catherine Keller, and Rosemary Radford Ruether.
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4…Cited in William A. Dyrness, Visual Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 90.
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6…Belden Lane, “Fantasy and the Geography of Faith,” Theology Today 50, no. 3 (October 1993): 400. We are indebted to Reno Lauro for directing our attention to von Balthasar and Lane.
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7…“Perplexed” is the word given in the New Revised Standard translation of Luke 1:29.
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8…Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 322.
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9…Another example of a biblical figure who does this is that of the unnamed woman who anoints Jesus with expensive perfume (see Mark 14:3-9, Matthew 26:6-13).
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10…For more on the social position of women in New Testament times, see Joachim Jeremias, “The Social Position of Women,” in Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 359-76.
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11…Examples of this abound in scripture, particularly in the Psalms. Consider how the psalmist in Psalm 51, for example, is freed to creatively exercise his agency by way of his confession of personal sin. In Psalm 22, the psalmist is literally freed from being a victim in relationship to her circumstances by naming them before God.
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12…For more on this point, see Cynthia L. Rigby's “Mary and the Artistry of God,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 145-58.
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13…For more on this point, see Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the “Death of God” (London: SCM Press, 1967).
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© 2004 THEOLOGY TODAY ISSN 0040-5736.