And yet we dance on, basking in God’s loving gaze
Nimmi Candappa has a deep interest in faith matters and working in research. She enjoys the challenge of living out her faith in a strongly evidence-based environment.[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]
‘Woman is a temple built over a sewer… You are the devil’s gateway’ (Tertullian, early Christian theologian); ‘As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten’ (Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church); ‘Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his.’ (Saint Albert the Great, Dominican theologian); ‘[For women] the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.’ (Saint Clement of Alexandria, Christian theologian); ‘She is not the image of God but as far as man is concerned, he is by himself the image of God.’ (Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius, Father and Doctor of the Church).[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)][/s2If]
As women, we have had to do it tough in our journey of faith. Historically, we have been immersed and undefended from such verbal clouts of intense criticism by prominent and lauded fathers of the faith; we have been viewed only through the male lens, misunderstood and distrusted, kept under strict control through clever interpretations of Scripture, crushed into submission and branded witches if dissonant, persecuted and excommunicated. Currently, we are physically and visually absent from the altar (some priests even opting for male-only altar servers), we are verbally excluded from liturgical wording, and we are, for the main, excluded from leadership and influence on the faith. It is little wonder a Mother Superior of a Carmelite convent, an order renowned for its orthodoxy and loyalty to the Church, said to me once, ‘sometimes as women we need to look outside of the Church for our sense of worth’.
As women of faith then, in order to keep our eyes on God, to trust in His promises, to live within His love, to expand the heart to its full and glorious potential, we need to be the Ginger Rogers of the spiritual world: ‘do everything Fred Astaire does but backwards and in high heels’. We need to work harder to hear for ourselves the relevance of the Gospel, amidst the overwhelmingly-male voice and interpretations. We are called to forgive more often – when unintentional yet hurtful interpretations of the woman, and remnants of the Roman and Jewish patriarchal voice, insist on minimising women into preconceived, limited roles, or when the lives of strong, passionate, God-adoring women saints are summarised simply as ‘virgins’. We are challenged to not be drawn into bitterness – when women in the Church outnumber men from congregational numbers to volunteers, yet we are explicitly excluded from key decision-making involving our faith.
We are called to continue to trust wholeheartedly in the Spirit’s movement in the Church, even when a disproportionately high number of male saints (80%) coming from a disproportionately high female congregation, might otherwise have raised an eyebrow. We are called to surrender completely – when well-intentioned desires to influence the faith of those around us are met with little encouragement and few opportunities. For when we are met with bias, rigidity, control, fear, we are called to redouble our focus on love, and compassion, and humble surrender.
For at the centre of it all is God, and His immense and intense love for each one of us. And what a love it is! As with the idiomatic two lovers locking eyes across a crowded room, a truly-felt glance from God, and all perceived and real injustices, conscious and unconscious bias, misunderstandings, recede into the periphery. We are then simply, heart interacting with God’s delightful heart – with very little else more important than that. [/s2If]
