Women hear the call of their bodies, not only on a monthly
basis, but several times a day for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Women are
profoundly changed by the children they bear and their immediate and intimate
needs. Their attention stretches across generations. The home they
make for their family is real, friends are real and the ceremonies they create
to celebrate life are real, each demanding time and thought.
Language is, of course, an abstraction, which may be one of
the reasons we have heard less from women down through the ages. Claudine
Herrmann writes in The Tongue Snatchers, originally published in French
in 1976, that a “virile” culture pervades the public intellectual and artistic
sphere, that women must use a language they have not developed and learn to restrict
themselves in using. But all of us have experiences which are difficult to put
into words.
Herrmann makes the point that “women’s vision could serve to
shed light on the most varied of questions.” As a lover of language, I agree.
Without the harmonic that women’s voices provide, abstraction becomes a thin
veneer on the rich, inchoate life of culture. In addition, speaking or writing
is one of the ways we seize our humanity, a way we “actualize the sheer passive
givenness of our being,” as Hannah Arendt says.
I know of no better example of women shedding light on
varied questions than the books the scholars Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong and
Lesley Hazleton have recently produced. Having absorbed the manuscripts found
at Nag Hammadi and other early texts, Elaine Pagels describes in Beyond
Belief how the early church codified beliefs for the sake of unity. She
insists however that suppressed gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, actually
enrich and extend our understanding of Christ’s teachings and the early church,
helping us get past rigid belief structures.
In The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our
Religious Traditions, Karen Armstrong studies the ways four cultures
contributed to the Axial Age, the name Karl Jaspers gave to the period between
900 B.C. and 200 B.C. Armstrong uses current archaeological, historical and
textual scholarship to show the shift in the ways people thought of themselves,
how the needs for liberation and redemption were awakened. Lesley Hazleton’s
book entitled The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad tells the dramatic
story of how Muhammad, a young camel
driver at the edges of society, received divine inspiration, came to power as a
political leader and worked toward social justice. Helped greatly by his first
wife, Khadija, I might add.
All three of these women write to help heal the
fragmentation and divisiveness our closely-held religious beliefs have led to,
the sticking points of abstract language. Karen Armstrong believes that at the heart
of all religions, spiritual traditions and ethics lies compassion: Do unto
others as you would have them do to you. Having recently read the three
astonishing books noted, I am thrilled to find mainstream, accessible work
being done in this area. By women!
Since we live in an information age, I am free to write in
this casual way, pointing to what has moved me. And you are free to copy any of
these cues into your favorite search engine and learn more about them.
