7. IMAGINE A VIOLENCE-FREE FUTURE

Imagine living in a land that fosters a violence-free life for all its residents, decenters patriarchal privilege, and values equality between intimate partners. Because we lack a model for such a future, women must construct a new garment made from whole cloth that calls all women to resist the evil inherent in sexism and offers an alternative life. "This cloth has never existed as a garment before. It is something special, something wondrous ­ one's Sunday best ­ or better." (Rosen, Internet)

Women are called, as daughters of God, to wrap themselves in this cloak, constructed from the whole cloth imbued with the spirits of billions of women's lives over the ages, and proceed to imagine their own futures. Clues to what a violence-free future might entail are caught up in the intersecting strands that form the fabric of our woman's cloak. They become real through women's writing and scholarship that has existed for centuries, despite local customs that limited their aspirations beyond the kitchen and nursery.

Interestingly, both Christine de Pizan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton credit their fathers for instilling in them the value of education and for clearing the way to study when the majority of women of their respective times were denied. Decades before Columbus sailed to the New World, Christine de Pizan was recognized as France's first woman of letters. A professional writer and perhaps even the first feminist, de Pizan made her mark on French society beginning in the fourteenth century by speaking out for recognition of women's contributions to culture and appeals for peace.

Christine de Pizan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, born about 500 years apart, led the way in their own time for other women to use their education for the good of all women. They culled the best from their Christian tradition and sought to transform and cultivate it to be more woman friendly, partly by exposing the falseness of widely-held masculine myths. They characterized Christian marriage as the "highest form of moral commitment between a man and a woman, not an endorsement of institutionalized domination." (de Pizan 1405 (1982), xxvix)

Christine's metaphor for an egalitarian life was not a cloak but a city ­ a city of ladies wrought by her own hands with the assistance of the virtues Reason, Rectitude and Justice. Christine's title, The Book of the City of Ladies recalls Augustine's City of God. "By juxtaposing the two cities Christine did not intend that her City of Ladies rival the City of God, but that her political vision be understood as participating in a Christian tradition of political philosophy. Christine sought a more perfect realization of the ideals transmitted by the tradition which she had inherited, which she has cultivated, and which she hoped to transform." (Ibid.)

This book, ordered through an online bookseller that cost only $3 plus postage, perhaps illustrates the lack of value society places on women's writing. However, the wisdom it contains is worth its weight in gold.

Resurrecting Women

Though battered women have every reason to reject the violence inherent in Jesus' crucifixion, rethinking the story of Peter's betrayal and subsequent remorse may be helpful to some battered women in their process of resurrecting their broken lives.

Imagine Peter as a batterer

Jesus prophesied to Peter, his chosen one, that Peter would deny him three times before the morning of his execution. Despite Peter's continued pledge always to be true, he denied Jesus as was predicted. Jesus was crucified with no appeal from Peter.

Battered women, who believe they had chosen a loving partner, are often denied a peaceful life more than three times with no sign of true remorse from their batterer before they eventually leave. Other women's lives become a series of betrayals and spates of feigned remorse. Still others find their lives to be so deeply endangered that they kill their abuser.

A batterer who shows true remorse for his abusive behavior by adopting nonviolent ways to interact with his partner can save his marriage. But working through years of hurt and betrayal is difficult and fraught with pitfalls, especially for women victims. "The decision about that must rest with the woman he has harmed." (Adams 1994, 100)

Abuse survivors may also benefit from recasting the famed Power and Control Wheel and replacing it with an Equality Wheel. In the recast wheel, Equality replaces Power and Control. Coercive and Abusing Behaviors become Negotiation and Fairness; Nonthreatening Behavior; Respect; Trust and Support; Honesty and Accountability; Responsible Parenting; and Shared Responsibility. (DV Intervention Project, Duluth, Minn.)

Reframing Community Health Concerns

Who could have imagined four decades ago that smoking would shift from an issue of private behavior enjoyed by many almost everywhere to an all-out assault on Big Tobacco? U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop toppled the first domino when he joined the American Lung Association in publishing its first report on the negative health effects of smoking forty years ago on January 11, 1964. Warning labels on cigarette packages followed as smokers have been pushed farther and farther away from nonsmokers in virtually every public place in Maine, including most workplaces, restaurants, shopping centers, hospitals, bars and even bingo halls.

The damaging effects of smoking on the smoker herself are now recognized as damaging to the community at large, as evidenced by rising insurance and health care costs borne by all. Secondhand smoke is likened to toxic waste. Now even McDonald's is taking note of its health conscious customers. Move over Supersized fries and make way for low-carb Fruit Parfaits.

We must ask how the movement against domestic violence can replicate the success of these and other initiatives that have changed the way people see themselves as keepers of their own and the community's good physical and financial health.

Toward a Woman-Centered Theology of Resistance

Embracing Mother God

The image of God the father may bring more pain than comfort to women who have been abused by a man. That man may be her father, boyfriend, or husband. A woman-centered ethic leads women to embrace a different image of God that delights in revolutionary disobedience and spirited protest. (Brock and Parker 2001, 31) A woman who has embraced a new model of God can liberate herself. She comes to believe that her God wants her to cherish and safeguard her life. Christian women, who were brought up believing in the Big (Male) Three, may feel alienated from religion. It is no wonder that women and mothers who have lived their lives under the yoke of Christianity "feel a little crazy when their babies are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." (1996 Heyward, 169)

How has that 2,000-year-old story survived with such a woman-less cast of characters? What about all those daughters of God? Women may stop going to a church where Sunday after Sunday they are reminded of their duty to submit to their husbands and stay silent. She may tire of being pushed outside the church hierarchy with no voice on policy-making.

Once the rising tide of misogynistic language and symbols constructed by men threaten to drown her, she may cut loose the mooring lines and opt to swim for her life. Naming herself a daughter of God may enable a battered woman to reclaim her place in God's creation ­ "Male and female God created them." (Genesis 1:27). To balance the powers that for centuries have benefitted affluent, heterosexual males in both secular and religious circles in the West, women need to conjure their imaginations and consider what difference relating to God as Mother would make for their lives.

Women who name ourselves daughters of God begin a long journey of reclaiming ourselves and resisting the pull to continue defining ourselves according to men's misunderstanding and misbeliefs about us. "Somehow we must get clear, get our hearts and heads uncluttered, break the bonds of the historically cultivated misogyny we have internalized so thoroughly that we are unable to know or love ourselves apart from men's definitions, opinions, and approval of who we are." (Heyward 1984, 169)

This effort to "decenter the patriarchal model and to provide an alternative to it" gives rise to some risks. McFague cautions against proposing a "new hierarchal dualism with a matriarchal model of God." (McFague 1996, 324-325) Instead, this worthy endeavor is best understood as an investigation of a "rich, and neglected, if not repressed relationship in our time, most specifically, the interdependence and mutuality of all life. The model of God as mother of the earth and all its creatures encourages a sensibility that could well support modern realities." (Ibid., 325)
Since women are not born as mothers but become mothers, any attempt to sentimentalize motherhood and a maternal God must not assume that women are biologically programmed to be loving, self-less mothers. The use of maternal language also can be oppressive to women and all humans in relation to God.

"It poses problems for women because it suggests that women who are not mothers are not true or fulfilled women; it gives power to the one role that has probably oppressed women more than any other over the centuries; it can appear to be pro-life or anti-abortion at a time when population problems loom large." (Ibid.)

As one of God's beloved daughters, a woman should beware of not falling into another trap where she believes that as a child, her parent (God) will always be there to intervene in her crises, and, therefore she does not need to accept responsibility for herself and the world. At the same time, the maternal metaphor for God is one model that speaks well in our time where all of God's creatures must beware of how precious and vulnerable our existence is, particularly in this ecological and nuclear-threatened age.

The Myth of Enki and Ninmah aptly illustrates this theme from the perspective of the ancient Sumerian religion that transcends history. The fable focuses on the relative importance of the mother and the father, the creator-goddess and creator-god in the creation of human lives. (Frymer-Kensky 1992, 16-18)

In the story, Ninmah boasts that she is the one who determines whether her offspring will have a good life. Enki counters with his own assertion that he can affect the newborn's destiny. Ninmah's first attempt at independent creation falls short. Enki then steps forward and attempts the same feat. His creation is of no use. The very uselessness of Enki's creation stands as acknowledgement of how indispensable Ninmah is to the creation of full-formed humans. "Ninmah's reaction conforms to the social belief that the ability to procreate is essential to a woman's self-esteem, and her appreciation of reproduction as 'woman's power' greatly increases her self-worth." (Ibid., 18)
I carefully considered the appropriateness of invoking this goddess/god myth and its naming of female/male relations and roles in procreation.

Eleanor Haney and Tikva Frymer Kensky, both female scholars and theologians, help us to consider how and even whether a study of goddess traditions can fit into a discussion of women in biblical times and today. "We desperately need to recover these traditions and learn from them, as we should learn from womanist and other traditions. Immersion in such a woman-centered universe offers a concrete opportunity to experience our bodies, to experience a construction of reality that is female. It challenges us to affirm our bodies and to become more aware of just how gendered our understanding of the deity is." (Haney 1998, 50-51)

"The Goddess is an alternative to aspects of monotheism that are now perceived as painful to women and dangerous to the earth. Once we realize that the goddesses of ancient pagan religion were not vestigial remnants of a romantic female past, that they had real functions within their religious systems, then we must ask what happens to those functions when the goddesses are no more?" (Frymer-Kensky 1992, viii)

Ancient stories such as this one stand as a message of hope for the future of women and men who must find a way to survive in a world that is becoming ever-more dangerous, corrupted, and polluted. When we peel the onion that is our world, we must seek a core that recognizes that the grace of God is available to all of God's creation ­ women and men alike. A once-battered woman's remarkable survival against all odds can help her to rediscover the "ordinary" in her life to the end of healing her trauma, even to be fed by the hand of God. "A theology that sees God as the parent who feeds the young and by extension, the weak and the vulnerable, understands God as caring about the most basic needs of life in its struggle to continue." (McFague 1996, 327)

Once fed, a battered woman can join her sense of loss and subsequent resurrection with those of other women in the world who envision a new future, free of violence.