I REMEMBER ABOUT A YEAR AGO, while I was in Canada for a directed retreat, coming face to face with a newspaper vending machine which displayed the headline "United States Bombs Libya." Above a picture of the devastation in Libya caused by the bombing was another headline: "Women and Children Killed in Bombing Raid."
I realized again that day that the many forms of violence which destroy life in one way or another will continue to occur over and over again as long as typically masculine understandings of power prevail and the feminine continues to be suppressed in the church and the world. This suppression of the feminine effects not only the oppression of women but also the oppression of God. I believe the greatest evil of sexism in the church is a denial of the fullness of the revelation of God.
Later, when I reflected on the thoughts generated by the hews of the bombing of Libya, this prayer came to me:
Enlighten your church, 0 God, with the light of your Word, that all of us, male and female, are in your image capable of imaging your son. Free it from the violence which keeps you oppressed, 0 God. Release your femininity on the world, O Mother God, because your glory demands it; because the fullness of the revelation of who you are demands it; because the peace of the world demands it.
HOW ARE WE TO DEAL with the evil of sexism in the church and society? I believe Elizabeth Cady Stanton's insight that there is no way of eradicating sexism from society unless it is eradicated from the church first is still valid, for the institutional church has a powerful influence in shaping society's perception of reality. If it is perceived in the language, teaching, and behavior of the institutional churches that God prioritized male over female in the creation, and that God is imaged only as male, then society has received religion's example and approval of its oppression of women.
As I ponder this question, I am reminded of the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi in India and of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States. A scene from the movie Gandhi is particularly meaningful to me. It is the scene in which all day long waves and waves of Indians marched toward the salt mines and were brutally beaten back by the British soldiers. The Indians offered no physical resistance and were carried away to be cared for by their wives and children. At the end of the day, a U.S. newspaper reporter rushes to a telephone to report the story of the nonviolent resistance. He begins it by saying, "Today England lost India. Today England lost its moral credibility in India."
What was going on beneath the surface of the scene in the conscience, heart, and soul of India? Similarly, what was going on beneath the surface in the deep South when the black people of this nation endured much the same treatment at the hands of Southern policemen and national guardsmen?
It seems to me that what was going on is at the heart of nonviolent resistance, that is, the naming of the unholy, the exposing of evil. Prior to the Gandhian and King movements of nonviolent resistance, the system that oppressed Indians and blacks was perceived by the general population as morally credible. What nonviolent resistance does is reveal the immorality of an oppressive system.
Naming the unholy includes "absorbing" the evil by exposing oneself to it as Jesus did, as the Indians and blacks did through their nonviolent resistance. Faced with nonviolent resistance, the oppressive system, in attempting to preserve itself, projects its own evil outward onto others by responding with unbridled brutality. When it does so, the truth of its evil is fully unveiled.
The great majority of people viewing such events, as in India and the United States and today in South Africa, can no longer believe that any system which unleashes such violence can be morally credible. No longer can they quote the scripture to persuade others that the oppressive system is morally acceptable, because their hearts are converted through the suffering patiently endured by those who nonviolently resist. The liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressors begins to occur.
I believe the only approach that will be effective in dealing with the hidden and brutal violence of sexism in our church and society is nonviolent resistance. Like so many other oppressive systems, sexism has not yet lost its moral respectability. It is still sanctioned as morally acceptable by the church in its language, teaching, discipline, and behavior. Furthermore, the church not only gives to the world an example of sexism but also lends to it the force of its moral suasion by quoting the scripture to support the evil of sexism.
We need to proceed quietly and continually to make several practical responses in order to resist sexism in the church. We must tell and retell, whenever and wherever effective, the stories of our own personal oppression by the church, and we must with vigilance oppose the sexist language, teaching, discipline, and behavior in the church. We must do these things with a willingness to accept whatever suffering comes as a result.
As we go about our resistance in the practice of the spirituality of nonviolence, it will be necessary for us to adapt a certain interior attitude: We must be willing to name and to have named our own demons and to struggle to overcome them. Jesus died on the cross to free us from that evil by absorbing our own personal evil into himself. We are called to do likewise for others.
Johnette Putnam, O.S.B., is a Benedictine Sister at St. Scholastica Priory in Covington, Louisiana.
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