The Ideal Woman

The Wednesday Men’s Bible Study has been reading the book of Proverbs this fall.  It is a fascinating book in numerous ways.  Among them, Proverbs sets up a dichotomy between a “bad woman,” who embodies vice and a “good woman” who is described by a man to his son in the passage we heard read today.  While the lector was reading it, I tried to peek through the latticework of the pulpit to see the reactions on women’s faces.

Chapter 31 is the culmination of Proverbs.  The wife it describes can be read as the anthropomorphized embodiment of wisdom or as the actual, literal spouse a wise man should seek.  There is much in the description of this wife that can alternately affirm or madden, depending upon one’s point of view.

On the one hand, Proverbs’ ideal wife supports her husband.  Proverbs says, “She does [her husband] good, and not harm, all the days of her life.”

This ideal woman is also a consummate homemaker.  Proverbs adds, “She rises while it is still night and provides food for her household…She looks well to the ways of her household…her children rise up and call her happy.”

 On the other hand, Proverbs acknowledges the ideal woman as a person of business and commerce.  The writer says, “She considers a field and buys it…She perceives that her merchandise is profitable…She makes linen garments and sells them; she supplies the merchant with sashes.”

Beyond her vocation, whatever it may be, Proverbs says that, for the ideal woman, “Strength and dignity are her clothing…She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.”

In all, Proverbs offers a comprehensive depiction of a womanly ideal.  It praises women highly and in many varied ways.  And yet, there’s something about this last chapter of Proverbs that irritates.  Similarly, I daresay that, for some, hearing me talk about it has been irritating.  The source of that dual irritation is this: Whether or not Proverbs’ description of the ideal woman is well-rounded; whether or not it’s true; it is a description written from a man’s perspective.  Remember, both the speaker and the hearer in Proverbs are men.  It is irritating, because a man has dictated the ideal of, and for, a woman.  A man has defined what a woman should be.

Women in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is in the news.  I will leave any comment on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to those far more knowledgeable than me.  That is for the policymakers and politicians, not the preacher.  But I daresay we all agree that the reversion of Afghanistan to Taliban rule and the resulting plight of Afghan women is a horrifying tragedy.  Life for women under the Taliban is the radical extent of men defining what women can and cannot be, of circumscribing women’s existence by a man’s imagined ideal. 

The extreme example can illuminate, but it can also obscure all the more subtle ways that men continue to define women, that men create boxes of all kinds into which they attempt to neatly categorize and control women.  One need not look halfway across the world to see such attempts. 

It is a hallmark of postmodernity that we each create our own story, that rather than a metanarrative into which we are trapped, we can write our own script.  This realization is, with fits and starts, liberating people of all categories, in part, by blowing up the categories.  Women, perhaps most of all, are discarding the ideals men have for eons set for them and instead determining their own.  Despite vestigial attempts by men to define women, women are writing their own stories.  This is a good and Gospel thing.

My daughter dancing

Of course, for Christians of any kind, the writing of the story never merely asks and answers, “Who do I want to be?” but rather “Who does the God of grace and love want me to be?”  Blessedly for that, the very book of Proverbs with which we began offers a different, and contrasting, image of womanhood.  It is so radically different that some scholars over the centuries have mused whether it might have been written by a woman.  It is found way back in chapter eight, where wisdom is once again personified as a woman, but here, unbound by men’s preconceptions, she is free.  Halfway through that chapter, Lady Wisdom begins to speak in the first person, owning her own ideal.  Lady Wisdom says:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
   the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
   at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
   when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
   before the hills, I was brought forth—
when God had not yet made earth and fields,
   or the world’s first bits of soil.
When God established the heavens, I was there,
   when God drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when God made firm the skies above,
   when God established the fountains of the deep,
when God assigned to the sea its limit,
   so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when God marked out the foundations of the earth,
   then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily God’s delight,
   rejoicing before God always,
rejoicing in God’s inhabited world
   and delighting in the human race.

Lady Wisdom here is so exalted that some theologians even equate her with the Holy Spirt, broadening our previously-limited conception of God to include the feminine.  Lady Wisdom is sheer freedom.  She is power.  She is co-creator.  She is, in God’s eyes and in her own, sheer delight.  And she is woman. 

This is an expansive ideal, an unlimited ideal, an ideal that finds it source not in man’s opinion but in God’s enlivening and overflowing love.  When I read it, as a man, it startles me; it admittedly discomfits me; it amazes me what God has in store for women.  And it also strikes me as just right.  I happen to be married to a woman smarter and better than I am, and I am blessed with a daughter who is brilliant, good, and fierce.  My daughter is also a dancer, and when she dances, it is like seeing wisdom in motion.  I am reminded daily (and sometimes pointedly by them!) that no one—and especially no man—is to tell them who they are, what they can do, or who they will be. 

Mary Magdalene proclaiming the Resurrection

Of course, elsewhere Holy Scripture puts actual human form on Lady Wisdom, when Eve discerns knowledge of good and evil while Adam dithers, when Esther saves her people from blindly bloodthirsty men, when Mary Magdalene proclaims the Resurrection to those eleven cowering male disciples.

So it is today.  So long as there are men and a broken world, I suppose men will seek to define and control women.  But just as there is no controlling God’s Holy Spirit, there is no controlling those who stand beside God as God’s master workers, who are daily God’s delight.  I, for one, would not begin to try.

The Lines We Draw

I love satellite photos of the earth.  I love to see them in daylight and dark, and to attempt to identify points on the earth that I recognize and have visited.  It’s not easy, because from orbit the land masses flow together.  Mountains and river are discernible, but what is not present in satellite photos—unlike on the maps we draw—are lines. 

The world map is covered and crisscrossed with lines, arbitrarily dividing that which, from a bird’s-eye point of view, is one whole. Sometimes the line-drawing on the map is the result of conquest, of one people encroaching upon and overwhelming the living space of another.  Other times, as in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, line-drawing is the result of a few men behind closed doors creating new nation states and making often arbitrary but always seismically life-altering decisions for millions of people.  The blithe arrogance of those decisions made in 1919 at Versailles is mind-blowing, and the world is still reeling with the consequences today, both in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.

The map is not the only place in which we draw lines.  We also draw lines in the proverbial sand, akin to the legendary line William Travis drew at the Alamo.  Lines in the sand are artificial, fabricated “Rubicons,” that declare “No retreat, no surrender.” Perhaps there are rare, actual battles in which such lines are unavoidable, but most often in life such lines create unnecessary division that is sometimes impossible to repair.

Irish author Kerri ní Dochartaigh writes, “We are a race that has long sought to break things up, to divide, to separate, to draw lines between things that otherwise have remained as one.”  Dochartaigh was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and she knows of what she speaks.  Dochartaigh was raised in the midst of “the Troubles,” with one Catholic parent and one Protestant parent, and her formative years were marked by national, religious, ideological, and family division.  She carries in her body and in her psyche the wounds and scars of all those lines. 

Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s writing is a cautionary tale for our own lives, in our own day.  In our society, the lines that divide are drawn in increasingly bold strokes.  Our tone is increasingly unnuanced, binary, strident, and mutually incriminating.  Our tribal identifiers are wielded as barriers to distinguish “us” from “them.”  In her Celtic way, Dochartaigh muses an antidote: “I think so much in these troubled days, about what it might mean to live as the birds do, as the moths and butterflies, as we once did ourselves maybe: free from border and barrier—in a place where the veil is so thin that we are reminded what it means to really be here—in this glorious world.”

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Dochartaigh’s words read almost like a Gospel saying of Jesus, and Jesus would surely agree with her sentiment.  Living in God’s “glorious world” is a gift, and we are called to be stewards of the earth and our relationships with one another.  From God’s vantage point, there are no lines.  The human impulse immediately to circumscribe what is ours and of us—drawing all those lines—may be the sin from which we need the most redemption. 

As witnesses to the world, what might it look like for us to “live as the birds do,” to cross over the lines of suspicion and resentment that seem so indelible in our world but that are, in fact, illusions?  What would it mean for us to step through—boldly and in faith—the thresholds that claim to separate us, and through our movement declare God’s truth that we are one people, one world, that flows forth from the One God who creates in love?  If we have the courage to do so, then, with God’s help, the lines will begin to blur, and we will begin to see the world as God does: as one blessed creation.