Reading
Laura Swan’s The Forgotten Desert Mothers
as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and the like-minded #TimesUp movement (that
also includes equal opportunity for women and minorities) were getting underway, I couldn’t help but notice
the parallels with the women who, alongside the Desert Fathers, went out into
the desert to pray, only to be overlooked and overshadowed by a patriarchal version
of church history.
I
am re-reading Swan’s book in preparation for co-leading a contemplative retreat
with Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program director Debra Weir, which
I referenced in last week’s post. It is one of two texts we selected for the
course, the other being Thomas Merton’s Contemplative
Prayer.
It does not in any way
diminish their genuine religious devotion to be struck by how many of the women
evaded sexual abuse, forced or arranged marriages, and culturally-expected
duties of women in the fourth and fifth centuries by pursuing their
callings/vocations. And though, like MeToo and TimesUp, it was often women of
privilege and wealth and education who initiated the exodus from mistreatment and
exploitation, the monastic communities they founded became refuges for the
poor, the sick, the marginalized, orphaned, abandoned, mistreated, and
homeless.
Meeting
recently with Debra for planning our retreat, I told her I was in awe how much
the women sacrificed to follow the Christian way of giving up their
possessions, land, and financial resources to the poor, denying themselves even
the simplest luxuries like beds, food, and other-than-simple clothing for the
sake of their spirituality and their sense of justice.
Some
of them cross-dressed to escape and avoid detection, joining male monastic
communities as supposed eunuchs, or traveling to distant and unfamiliar places
where they were unknown. Others simply resisted their family’s wishes and practiced
their asceticism in the family home or on family-owned property. Many led their
family members into Christian faith and practices themselves.
Unlike their male
counterparts, fewer of their sayings have been preserved in the church’s memory,
but what is preserved is their benevolence, their service to others, saintly
attributes, and sincere devotion.
Quoting
Joan M. Petersen, “Their delight was in self-control; their glory was to be
unknown; their wealth was to possess nothing… Their work…consisted only of
attention to the things of God, prayer without ceasing, and the uninterrupted
chanting of the Psalms.” The “things of God” included the upbuilding of the
Christian community and its ministry to the world in the name of Jesus, serving
“the least of these.”
Decades
ago John Boswell taught me that LGBT people of earlier times were drawn to
monastic communities for similar reasons. These were places where they were not
expected to marry, and where they could find opportunities to serve the greater
good. Though Boswell recognized the church had a patriarchal bias in terms of its
leadership and teachings and history, he questioned the impression that it was
only men who shaped the church and its theology. Men who dominated the culture
and religion, he observed, were reared by women, taught by women, related to
women, influenced by women, sometimes married to women, and served in spiritual
communities alongside women.
One
of multiple examples of this was how Gregory of Nyssa, considered one of the early
Christian theologians, was absolutely influenced and inspired by Macrina the
Younger, his elder sister, who encouraged his baptism and his memorialization
of her community’s monastic way of life in the Short and Long Rules. Macrina was following in her grandmother’s
footsteps, Macrina the Elder, who worked closely with the local bishop.
According to Swan, he and his brother Basil “acknowledged [Macrina the Younger]
as the primary influence in their theological education, and each finally
embraced ascetic and monastic observance.”
When the church became
entwined, sometimes strangled, by the culture of the Roman empire, the Desert
Mothers and Fathers sought to “re-member” the Christian community’s
countercultural roots. After all, its teacher, Jesus, was executed by Rome; it
faced accusations of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6); its acts of
compassion contradicted a worldview of self-interest; and it suffered
persecution for refusing to bow to the gods of Rome, including the emperor,
considered a god. Christians then were considered “atheistic” because they
believed in only one God!
#MeToo
and #TimesUp are countercultural movements that resist a world in which women
are demeaned and exploited. In a church that has often followed the culture’s
lead in the treatment of women, these movements should remind us of our own
countercultural roots in which we are “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male and female…for all of you are one… (Galatians 3:28).”
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