A Woman in a Woman's World

Yesterday I had, well, let's call it an interesting experience. You know how you can be going through life, facing forward, living in the present, dealing, coping, stretching, learning. Doing the little advances that successful day-to-day life is all about. Then suddenly something comes along that has you stopping and looking back, looking far around you at places you once traveled through. Small thickets of confusion that are familiar in a distant way. That's what I did yesterday.

But it wasn't just in my memory. It was a concrete thing in front of me, invading my present. 

My parish is running a women's Bible study this fall. 

Now here's the funny thing. Maybe a year ago I visited a parish across the river for confession, and I saw that it was offering the same women's Bible study. I shared it on my Facebook page, being ever the promoter of things. I'm all for it, in theory, and I think I even momentarily looked into what it would take to offer it in my town. 

And I was asked to take a leadership role, similar to what I had done in our parish ChristLife, which satisfied my inclusion needs (aka ego. I was sought out. Thank you.). But ultimately I passed on it. Because to be honest, just the idea of being part of a women's Bible study sends me into the small thickets of confusion.

And I spent a chunk of yesterday spinning this around in my mind and checking out some interesting emotions that it conjured. 

It is intended not only as a Bible study but also as a community building thing. And this is where I needed to admit to myself what, for me, makes for community building. That would be work. That's why I liked the feeling of being offered the logistics and communication job. I even asked if I could do that part without actually going to the Bible study, but no, that wasn't the vision. That's ok. 

Shared work is probably my primary "love language" if you buy that expression. This is something I like about choirs and music; it requires that everyone work together. This is why I tend to take on huge tasks with a lot of excitement -- like the year our Bishop gifted our parish (and every parish) with hundreds of copies of one of Matthew Kelley's books, and my daughter and I gift wrapped every single one. I questioned the size of that undertaking, but my (then 8 or so year old) daughter proclaimed it "a labor of love," and so there was no turning back for me then. When parishes were reopened after our short COVID shutdown, I was asked to buy some rope from Lowes to make the required social distancing thingies look somewhat dignified. Oh no. My daughter and I braided ropes out of white tshirts and figured out a way to keep them firmly on the pews but also made them easily adjustable. That felt so good to be able to do that, whatever your thoughts on social distancing. 

Yeah, so what I don't find a helpful way to give myself is to sit in a group of women chatting about how Scripture impacts my day-to-day life, or study guide questions. Spiritual direction; yes. Theological discussion; yes. Lexical study, historical study; yes, yes. Pretty tablecloths, conversations where words fly fast and emotions fly faster, or women connect emotions to sensible things in attempts to "feel comfortable sharing..." I don't even know how to do that. And generally it makes me feel the opposite of community-built. I tend to sit there with my mouth shut, trying to track (or tuning out, depending on how my day has gone) and mostly feeling a thousand miles away. These days, my thoughts just dash to other things I could be doing. In the past, I sat there wondering why I did not know how to be a woman. Because I figured A Woman's World was what I was looking at.

Yes, yesterday I felt again that jab of feeling like an unwomanly woman. Like maybe I should try harder. Like maybe I was being weak or selfish or inadequate or unholy or rebellious or (insert more) for not wanting to participate. Like I really should. I thought of, and even played, that song by Wendy Talbot from the 80s "Woman of the Word" where she asked questions popular of the day about what women "should" do. It dawns on me now: we think the question "What is a woman?" is newly controversial. (Some) Christians have been making it difficult to answer that question, on a non-biological level, for decades.

In the midst of questioning myself yesterday, I found it extremely difficult to do the work that was actually in front of me. Suddenly I wasn't sure I could do anything.

If you diligently read this blog (😂) you'll realize I've been sinking deeply into the Seven Sorrows rosary in the last few months. After all these years as a Catholic, I am *just starting to sink deeper into understanding the Blessed Virgin Mary as woman par excellence. And as I've been meditating on her sorrows, I realize she has a lot of strength, born of emotional and spiritual pain. She probably did enjoy beautiful objects and she probably did chat with women friends. But there was only one Blessed Mother. In a common way, there is also only one of each of us. I have never been given to conformity, but I haven't always been at peace with being myself, either. It has struck me with terror; it has confused me. But humility says, I am who God made me, no more, no less. I will be me, because it is God's will for me.

This morning, as happens to me occasionally after a day on mental frappe setting, I woke with everything clear in my mind. Following the Lord is not a path full of should. Or as one priest once quipped, "Stop should-ing all over me." One must not should oneself, either. Jesus says, "Follow me and live." He commands, he invites, he speaks to us about reality, but he doesn't guilt us into things, so we need to refrain from responding to that kind of motivation. Ok, I need to stop it. Respecting freedom is super important, and it is grossly counter-productive to Christian life to not respect freedom.

I'm not guilty of being me; I'm responsible to be me, and to learn how to do it well. I need people in my life in order for me to be me well, but I also need space from people, and I can't expect that anyone is going to understand what I need unless I understand my own needs and make them known as necessary. I'm actually responsible to God to invest well the raw material of myself He's given me to work with, to try to gain a return. 

See -- it all boils down to shared work! 😉

*Everything in the spiritual life is always just beginning.

Submission Revisited

This morning, let's say it was by the time Mass ended, I realized I now have a refined understanding of submission. 

Sometimes spiritual insights just click, becn ause a grace God gives grabs hold of words that are spoken, and both goes to a place of past experiences, and then it all elevates, it changes key, and something new is perceptible. 

And this happened today regarding the reality of what it means to be in submission.

Fr. Mike Schmitz was addressing this in recent episodes of Catechism in a Year, because the topic has been the Sacrament of Matrimony. He was discussing the verses in Ephesians that tell wives to be submissive to their husbands, and husbands and wives to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Now, I've heard any number of takes on Christian submission, but how it landed in my mind was that submission means saying yes to what someone with valid authority tells you to do. I wrote a blogpost about this way back in 2007. Fr. Mike's definition of submission (CIAY, Day 224) is "to place yourself under the mission of the other person."

And I think those words just sunk in and hit a very deep part of my awareness today.

It's the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Now, Mary was totally submitted to the mission, the plan, of the Blessed Trinity. She was totally on-board with the salvation of the world, the sanctification of the world, and bringing total glory to God in and through her every breath. She was also totally submitted to the mission of Joseph, who was specifically made Guardian of the Redeemer. He, in turn was totally submitted to Mary's mission as Mother of the Redeemer. Their marriage was a partnership in the mission God had entrusted to each of them. They were submitted to one another out of reverence for Christ, literally. 

And so it has to be with us. Our lives are about the mission: the Great Commission, to call to bring all souls to life in God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. 

Ok, so even as I'm writing this, I'm coming up a sense of well, duh. 

The changed key, the newly perceptible truth stems from an interior shift. How can I struggle this out into words...

In the aforementioned blogpost, I gave the example of how I might respond to the Bishop saying he was closing my parish. I said it would hurt, but I'd go with it. And that was pretty much my take on submission. Responding to something that happened. But if I place myself under the mission of Jesus Christ, or more concretely if I place myself under the mission of a particular human being, then I am going to employ all of my energies, all of my creativity, all of my resources into furthering that mission, that aim, that goal. This is how the dynamic of my life has been leaning for some years now, but today it clicked. This employing of my energies -- that is submission. It is not passive. I don't sit and wait for orders. I'm not a harem member that waits to be summoned. To waste my energies -- to spend them all on myself or my entertainment, or to fret myself away in anxiety or nitpicking, instead of love -- that's not submission. To chase after financial security or a name or success -- that's not submission. 

I would posit that spouses submitting to each other is not about each other; ultimately, it is also about Christ. It is about serving God, the common good, and learning where each other fits within that (because God always makes space for us). And it definitely is not about simply saying, "Yes, dear" and doing what the other person selfishly says or wants. It might keep peace, but it is not a way to grow holiness. If there's no mutual discernment of a virtuous path and an active desire to seek the Lord's will and way, then trouble ensues.

Several years ago, I had the strange experience of being contacted by an acquaintance who was leaving society to join a monastery. He had a few months as he transitioned into his new life, and just during this time he challenged me to write a song every week. He asked if I'd be willing to take it as a formal challenge and submit the new songs to him every week, and then he'd give me a new tweak in the challenge for the next week. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had not written new music in a long time, but during that time I cranked out several new songs. I was very aware that I needed that piece of being called forth. Then he abruptly had to cut off communication, and that was that. I stopped writing, because I no longer had a mission to place myself under. That experience stayed with me a long time, and I didn't know what to call that powerful impetus. I think it is the power of submission. And I think one of my central life frustrations has been to rarely find a healthy person with a Christ-focused ability to say, I have this mission; join it. Well, I know now I am a Carmelite and I do have a mission there, but even there, we are still figuring out how to respond. Why are we so slow to live this reality in the Church? Why is it so unclear to engage the mission of Christ with our whole selves? Is it because we are not in possession of our whole selves?