Sanctuary of Women: Blog

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus hears these words first from Martha, then from Mary. The sisters do not hesitate to say to Jesus the words that are on their minds and their hearts. In today’s reading, Martha and Mary challenge us to consider how we speak and what we are willing to say, in love, to those whose lives are threaded with our own.

“Anger and tenderness: my selves,” Adrienne Rich writes in the poem “Integrity,” from her book A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. She speaks of anger and tenderness as strands of the same web being spun and woven from the spider’s body, “even from a broken web.”

Mary and Martha know this web: the web of passionate feeling, of relationship, of creation from brokenness—the web that connects but does not entrap, that provides shelter but does not ensnare. Mary and Martha are websters, web-weavers. By their care and hospitality, they have established this web of relationship with Jesus.

This web enables each of them to speak out when Jesus finally arrives after Lazarus’s death. It enables them to voice their anger, or at least their sharp dismay, at his absence. In the face of Mary and Martha’s pain, Jesus realizes that he has put lessons ahead of relationship. Perhaps Jesus wonders if God’s glory can be displayed outside the context of care for his friends.

Martha and Mary’s words free Jesus to rediscover his compassion, to remember the depth of their relationship and the strength of their web. In the real, immediate presence of their tears, Jesus realizes the depth of his own loss, a loss that spills beyond the borders of his well-intentioned plan. And he does not merely cry; he weeps. Within the web, within his circle of friends, the holy one’s humanity runs down his face.

By their care and their words, Mary and Martha bear the strands of resurrection. With his compassion, with his tears, Jesus weaves them and fashions life anew.

Questions for reflection

How willing are you to speak what lies in your heart and your mind to those whose lives are bound together with yours? Do you have spaces and relationships of love and trust where you are able to name the more difficult emotions, such as anger? Has there been a time when acknowledging your anger led you to a place of new life or healing or freedom?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

In which we continue to reflect on the challenge and gift of anger as we contemplate the story of Mary and Martha in John 11 . . .

For both women and men, anger can be a complicated emotion to sort through, and the Christian tradition has not always made it easy to acknowledge and reckon with our anger. Anger has often been especially complex and difficult for women, who in many cultures are trained to be pleasant and placid and peacemakers. And so when this emotion begins to make its presence known, many of us ignore it or submerge it.

Anger, like water, always has to go somewhere. If, in order to keep the seeming peace within us or around us, we fail to recognize it and attend to it, anger will go underground and resurface in a different place. Or it will show up in a different form. It will appear as depression, sadness, fatigue, or some other manifestation. Because these manifestations mask what lies beneath them, they can prove destructive and costly to our soul. We may think it requires too much energy to grapple with our anger. We can be sure, however, that if we mask our anger or send it underground, the amount of energy it will ultimately drain from us is far greater than the energy involved in confronting it.

The amount of energy that anger carries in fact accounts for much of the difficulty we have in dealing with it. Yet this is where its power lies. When we ignore our anger, we disperse that energy; we fritter it away and expose ourselves to the insidious damage that unregarded anger can cause. When we pay attention to it, when we listen to it, when we contemplate it and pray with it, when we ask it—and God—what it has to say to us, anger can provide tremendous focus and energy for action that brings healing and wholeness to ourselves and to the world.

Questions for reflection

What have you learned about anger in your life? What messages and lessons have you received about this emotion and how you should deal with it? What have you learned from anger? Do you experience it as energy-giving or energy-draining?

This week, as we revisit the Lenten section in Sacred Journeys, the readings come from a chapter titled “Tender Anger: Mary and Martha.” In this chapter we reflect on the story of the raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus, with particular attention to the exchanges that Jesus has with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus.

It is impossible to know just what inflection Mary and Martha each have in their voice as they confront Jesus about the seeming tardiness of his arrival. One can imagine, though, that their voices may hold an edge of anger as they speak to him when he shows up after Lazarus has already died. These grieving sisters are Jesus’ friends, too, and they feel the freedom to express the rawness of their emotions to him.

The story of Mary and Martha, and how their interaction with Jesus intertwines with their brother’s raising and restoration, invites us to consider the place that anger has in our own lives. What does anger have to say to us, and how might it help lead us to new life?

Invocation
Sustain me, Fiery Power,
when I journey through fields of anger.
Make me wise to the lessons to be learned here
and strengthen me, that my voice
may be clear and life-giving.

Text

John 11:1-44

Monday

I approach this story with hesitation. I hesitate because I wonder if I am reading Mary and Martha’s anger into the text. I hesitate because I am still learning to recognize and honor Anger’s voice. I hesitate because women have much to be angry about—with our sisters as well as our brothers—and precious little safe space in which to let our anger dance.

But here it is. This story may not be so much about Mary and Martha’s anger as it is about mine and that of many women I know. And if Jesus’ inaction in the face of his friends’ pain doesn’t make them angry, it does me.

The pain and anger I hear in the words of Martha, which Mary repeats, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” echo the pain and anger I feel each time persons in power fail to respond to those who cry for help. Their words echo the pain and anger I feel when those who bear the power of life let suffering continue.

The question is never whether anger is right or wrong. Anger—like any other emotion—is, and it is always a sign of something deeper. Given appropriate expression, anger tells us about injustice, loss, grief, and damaged relationships. It tells us about ourselves. Given appropriate space, it opens a path toward change. And as Martha and Mary discovered, it can bring life from death.

Questions for reflection

What place does anger have in your life? Do you experience it? Do you pay attention to it when it surfaces? What prompts your anger? What do you do with it?

Adapted from Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

For an introduction to the Lenten journey we’re making here at Sanctuary of Women, visit A Season of Spiraling. Today’s artwork originally appeared here at The Painted Prayerbook.

Today we come to ending of this week’s story—and, as with last week’s tale of the daughter of Jephthah, to a beginning. How will we remember this woman, and where will our remembering lead us?

In Judges 19, we read that when the husband receives no response from his concubine whom he has found lying on the threshold, “he put her on the donkey; and the man set out for his home. When he had entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. Then he commanded the men whom he sent, saying, ‘Thus shall you say to all the Israelites, “Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.”‘”

In Pieces

Piece by piece
they brought her forth;
piece by piece
they had gathered her
from the farthest corners.
In every land
where they had asked for her,
she was known by a different name.

Piece by piece
as they laid her out
piece by piece
they whispered her names:

Felicitas
Christian slave who, along with Perpetua, was martyred by the
sword in Carthage, North Africa, in the third century.

Bridget Bishop
convicted as a witch and hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Kim Hak Sun
one of the 80,000–200,000 Korean “comfort women”
forced to be prostitutes for the Japanese Army
during World War II. Raped repeatedly for months,
Kim Hak Sun survived to speak out;
thousands of others died or were killed.

Anne Frank
young Dutch Jew killed in the Holocaust in 1945.

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
member of the American Indian Movement.
When her unidentified body was found in 1976
on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota,
the cause of death was listed as “exposure.”
The FBI agent present ordered her hands severed
and sent to Washington, D.C. for fingerprinting.
After her family reported her missing,
a second autopsy was performed.
This time the coroner attributed her death
to a bullet fired into the back of her head
at close range.

Jean Donovan
a Catholic lay missionary who, along with
two Maryknoll sisters and one Ursuline sister,
was raped and murdered by government soldiers
in El Salvador in 1980.

And all the unnamed sisters,
known only by the earth
in all the places
you were buried:

Woman of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
annihilated by manmade pillars of fire in 1945.

Woman of freedom
who lived and died with “Before I’ll be a slave,
I’ll be buried in my grave” on your lips.

Woman of South Africa
still bearing the wounds of apartheid.

Woman of Bosnia
on your body their war yet rages.

Woman of silence
your voice beaten out of you.

Woman of hope
with your hands upon the threshold.

Piece by piece
they touched her skin
piece by piece
re-membering
the broken body
into flesh
the ancient wounds
into new life.

—Jan Richardson

Questions for reflection

The word remember means to re-member: to put the pieces together again. The pieces never return precisely to their former shape, especially when they have been torn apart by violence. Yet we are called to the work of remembering and to the difficult grace found there. In this Lenten season and beyond, God beckons us to hold the broken pieces—to gather them, to speak of them, to not forget, and to open ourselves to how the Spirit might act through us to breathe life and wholeness into those shards. In your own life, what might it look like to do this? In the presence of widespread brokenness—especially as we remember the people of Japan this week, and the people of Libya, and every place torn apart by natural disaster or human destructiveness—where is one place that you could begin? What single piece could you pick up and journey with in the days ahead?

Blessing

Blessed are you
who re-member the ancient wounds,
for through your remembering,
broken bodies and broken stories
will receive new life.

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

As we approach the end of this week of reflections on the woman of Judges 19, today’s reading invites us to consider doorways and dreams . . .

In Anne Michele Tapp’s article “Virgin Daughter Sacrifice” in the book Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women’s Lives in the Hebrew Bible, she notes that in this story and that of Jephthah’s daughter, doorways serve as a boundary between the “safety” of the home and the danger that lies beyond.

Only the male head of the household can pass through the doorway safely, and the well-being of his guests depends primarily on him. In these stories, the host protects the men in his home. The women are allowed, or pushed, through the doorway to deal by themselves with the dangers that await immediately outside. The doorway does not belong to the woman, yet it determines her fate.

The symbolism of the doorway reminded me of a letter I received from a friend in which she described a dream about a doorway of her own. My friend, who still deals with the wounds of childhood abuse, wrote,

I had a dream that I was building a door. It was a beautiful wooden door. It was partially open as I was working on it and the frame. Friends came by to help but it was my door—I was in charge and competent enough to build a door. And it wasn’t a “keeping out” door, but it was a “going through” door. I think that’s just where I am in my life. I need to claim me, my doors, and my ability to make them with the intention of going through them.

My friend’s dream and her life speak to me of claiming our doorways, our passages—turning them from other-owned openings to death into self-owned, self-fashioned passages to life, passages through which others may find safe space. Honest doorways that open into ourselves, into God.

Questions for reflection

What kind of door are you creating in your own life right now? Is it a “keeping out” door, a “going through” door, a door of some other name? What are you allowing or inviting into your life, and what amount of intention are you bringing to this? Is there a threshold you need to cross, a passage you feel drawn to enter?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

We continue the story of the woman of Judges 19. In the scriptural account, we read that on the morning after the attack, the woman’s husband “opened the doors of the house, and when he went out to go on his way, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. ‘Get up,’ he said to her, ‘we are going.’ But there was no answer.”

Friday

“Where am I? Oh, I hurt! I can’t walk—what did they do to me? Am I safe now? . . . Where can I go? The house where he is—the one who gave me over to these men—it’s over there . . . if I can just make it to the door. . . . It’s not all that far—I had no idea we were so close to the house. That means he must have heard what was going on! . . . Just give me the strength to get to the door—I want him to see me. . . . Just a bit farther. . . . Just a few more feet. . . . Let them hear me knocking! . . . my body—how it aches! I’m feeling strange—God, are you here? God, if you can, take care of me! O God . . . ” (From Dorri Sherrill)

She died with her hands on the threshold. This image is the most haunting of all for me. In a strange town, in an unfamiliar place, she goes to the only place she knows, this place of uncertain security. And with her hands on the threshold—of hope, of a touch, perhaps of revenge, perhaps of a final mercy, perhaps of a sister (what did happen to that virgin daughter whom the host offered?)—she dies.

I imagine her with her hands on the threshold, her fingers pointing west. I imagine her with her hands empty, having flung her spirit toward the house of the dying sun, toward the land of no-turning-back, toward the hills of the last light. I imagine her hands splayed in supplication to the guardians of the gates of night, may they draw her safely through. I imagine her pointing the way toward the Great Sea, the Mediterranean; toward salt, toward land’s edge, toward water’s birth, toward moon’s rising, toward the place where they wait for her, toward the home of safe return.

—Jan Richardson

Questions for reflection

To what does this woman point in her own life, and in yours?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

In many cultures, including the one in which this story from Judges 19 is set, hospitality is a sacred act. When one welcomes a guest, one ensures their safety and well-being. When the men of the town come to the house with violence on their minds, the host defends the husband of the concubine, yet this protection does not extend to the woman herself; the host, and then the husband, offers her up to the crowd. In this scene we catch also a glimpse of the host’s virgin daughter. In a chilling echo of last week’s tale, he offers her, along with the concubine, as an unholy sacrifice to the men. This is the only mention of the daughter; there is no indication of whether she was forced outside along with the other woman, or if she managed to escape.

If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome; you can pick up the thread of this week’s reflections at Monday’s post.

Thursday

“There is some kind of commotion outside. I hear voices, lots of men’s voices. What is it that these men want? What . . . —O God, he’s coming for me! My husband, he has my arm, he’s dragging me out—out to these men! I hear the man of the house say, ‘Ravish her, do with her what seems good to you.’ What is happening? Why are you doing this, my husband? I don’t like being your property, but even so—protect me—I am your property! Oh, my God . . . it hurts! . . . O God, where are you? . . . ” (From Dorri Sherrill)

Driving through town this evening, I turn on the radio to NPR. It’s a report on domestic violence. They play an excerpt from a tape, a woman’s call to a police station. She’s screaming for help, screaming about her husband—then, no, “I just had a temper tantrum. It’s okay. Don’t come.”

“Ma’am, do you need help?”

“No, really. No.”

I can hear a man’s loud voice in the background.

“Ma’am, if you don’t need help, tell me a number between one and five.”

A pause.

“Six.”

And I wonder if behind that door in Gibeah where stood the husband, the host, the servant, and the virgin daughter, any counting went on as their companion called for help. Whether they were counting seconds between screams, counting the laughs of the crowd outside, counting their own blessings, counting sheep in order to fall asleep that night behind the door.

I wonder what they counted, and I wonder if somewhere, anywhere, someone heard the screams and cried out for the woman beyond the door—the woman who, in the eyes of that crowd, simply didn’t count.

—Jan L. Richardson

Questions for reflection

How is it for you to journey with the woman of Judges 19 in these Lenten days? As you reflect on her story, what do you notice? What are the questions that surface for you, and what will you do with them?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

As we journey through this week with the woman of Judges 19, her ancient story seems all too contemporary. Even as the church across centuries has overlooked or hidden or forgotten her tale, we often ignore or fail to see those in our own day who bear the wounds that come in being treated as though their bodies are not their own. Abuse and human trafficking continue to be two of the primary forms of violence in our world, with most of the recipients of these forms of violence being women and children. Our healing, for men as well as for women, is bound together. In the face of statistics whose magnitude can overwhelm us, how might listening to one story inspire us to take one step that will lead us beyond our feelings of powerlessness?

Wednesday

“My God, no! He’s here—and my father is delighted! He came today, and Father and he are sharing the best of our food and wine. I thought I was free from him and his arrogance and disrespect and abusiveness. But he has come for me. And I don’t want to go! I know my father, though, and he won’t even ask me what I want. He will give me back and not think twice about it. Why did I think I could get away? O God, why did I think it would get better? And where are you? Why does my life continue to be so unfair? I’m afraid. Don’t abandon me . . . ” (From Dorri Sherrill)

I Wonder

Did she have a sister,
I wonder,
who brought the news when he broke the horizon
who held her hand when he trespassed the door
who met his gaze, unflinching
who cried out to her father
who would not share their table
who held her every night
who offered to go in her place
who placed her only ring on her sister’s finger
who packed her bag with bread
who breathed an ancient blessing into her ear
who watched her to the horizon
who remembered her after she left?

—Jan Richardson

Questions for reflection

What do you wonder about this woman, this story? Where might your wondering lead you?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

In this second week of Lent, we are traveling with the woman of Judges 19, whom the text identifies only as a concubine. For the beginning of our journey with her, scroll down to yesterday’s reading or click Monday.

Tuesday

“My life at home with my father certainly wasn’t great, but it will be better there than here with one who ignores me. I will return home to my father, for there the pain and shame of being ignored is so familiar that maybe I won’t even feel it.” (Excerpt from Dorri Sherrill)

This time is the most dangerous, they say. When I worked at the Atlanta Council on Battered Women, they told me that when a woman is in the act of leaving an abusive situation, she faces the greatest threat of violence, even death. Because of this, you cannot tell a woman to leave. Because she may have no money, you cannot tell a woman to leave. Because she may have no emotional support or family or other resources, you cannot tell a woman to leave. Because children may be at risk, you cannot tell a woman to leave. Because, finally, a woman’s life must be a woman’s choice, you cannot tell her to leave.

And yet I longed to tell each one, leave. Leave, and come home with me. Leave, and I’ll draw a hot bath for you and very gently wash your wounds, and you can stay in as long as you like. Leave, and I’ll watch the door while you sleep through the night for the first time in years. Leave, and your children can gobble my food and jump on my bed and unlearn their fear. Leave, and I’ll remind you each day of how talented you are, and how lovely. Leave, and you’ll never have to wonder again, I swear, whether you could live without him, you now so fine and free.

—Jan Richardson

Questions for reflection

Have you had an occasion when it seemed clear to you that someone you knew needed to leave a relationship, a place, a situation? How do you support and walk with them in such a time? Have you had your own experience of choosing whether to stay or to leave a person or a place that was causing you harm? How did you—how do you—discern your way through choices about whether to go or to remain?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

Into the Wound © Jan L. Richardson

During this season we are revisiting the women who appear in the Lenten portion of my first book, Sacred Journeys. The title of the Lenten section is “Remembering Our Wounds.” The readings for Lent explore stories that can take us to difficult or painful places; these are stories we have often neglected or forgotten or hidden away in the Christian tradition. Yet these are tales that need to come to light; we need to tell them and talk about them and see where they might take us. We do this not simply to recall or revisit the wounds that women have borne across the ages; though it is a beginning, returning to the wounds is not enough. The act of remembering is not complete until we have responded—until we have discerned what we can offer for the healing of these wounds, and have begun to do so.

Nearly half a lifetime since I first began working on the book, I find myself struck by what I see as I spiral back around these women at this point in my journey. From where you are in your own path, what do you see as you travel with these women? What wounds within you or around you do the wounds of these women touch? How might their stories draw you through the wounds into a place of healing, not just for yourself but for the life of the world?

This week, with a chapter titled “Her Body Broken for Many: The Unnamed Concubine,” we return to the book of Judges. Shortly after the story of Jephthah’s daughter, we find another “text of terror,” as Phyllis Trible describes it. As we attend to the story of this woman—whose name, as with so many women in scripture, has not been left to us—we may find the way daunting. Yet we do not go it alone. Thank you for your company on this path, and blessings to you along the way.

Invocation

Abiding Spirit, accompany me in uncertain journeys. When I find the way filled with fear, may I know you as a faithful companion.

Text

Judges 19

Context

In the story of the rape and murder of the unnamed concubine, we find a lesson in the cycle of domestic violence between spouses or partners. Those who have studied and/or lived with such violence have identified three phases that abusive relationships tend to follow: the stage of escalation, when tensions mount; the stage when an actual abusive episode occurs; and the “honeymoon” stage, when the abusive partner attempts to win the other partner back. This final stage may continue for a little or a long while, but in an ongoing abusive relationship, it rarely lasts.

The writer of the book of Judges relates this story with a significant amount of detail, but we never hear the woman’s voice. We never even know her name. We do not know why she left her husband. But as the text unfolds, we witness the story of a bold, decisive woman who, by the end of the story, has been bartered to secure the life and the safety of her husband and his host.

In an unpublished paper entitled “Imaging a Christian Feminist Theodicy,” my friend Dorri Sherrill retells this story from the perspective of the unnamed concubine. To a woman who has no voice in the text, Dorri gives a voice through her own imagination. The readings for Monday through Friday will begin with an excerpt from Dorri’s paper, so that we may hear words the unnamed woman might have said or thought.

Monday

“You, O Yahweh, know how painful my life has been. I was bought—purchased, I was purchased—as a concubine, and the man who ‘owns’ me does not honor me. At best, I am as any other of his possessions.” (Excerpt from Dorri Sherrill)

A Woman Possessed

She is
a woman possessed
by pain
by despair
by aloneness
by desert
by wind
by dryness
by sorrow
by loss
by shame
by trouble
by him
by emptiness
by secrets
by silence
by choked breath
by fear-full hands
by hopelessness
by hesitation
by law
by unknowing
by stories
by possibilities
by the cusp
by the threshold
by the edge
by the verge
by flight.

—Jan Richardson

Question for reflection

What possesses you?

From Sacred Journeys © Jan Richardson

If you have just joined us, I invite you to visit A Season of Spiraling to learn more about what we’re up to here at the Sanctuary of Women during Lent. Today’s artwork originally appeared here at The Painted Prayerbook.