Sermon in honour of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2013
Henriette Thompson, March 7, 2013, Chapel of the Holy Apostles, General Synod office, Toronto. Henriette is Public Witness Coordinator for Social Justice for the Anglican Church of Canada and a member of the Board of KAIROS.
Today we have an opportunity to join our chapel reflections with those of people around the world in the lead up to International Women’s Day tomorrow, March 8. While we gather here in this chapel, hundreds of women from around the world are meeting at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, including a delegation of about 20 Canadian Anglican women, and indeed, Anglican women from all Provinces in the Communion.
The focus of UN gathering is: eliminating and preventing all forms of violence against women and girls.
I would like to weave a reflection on violence and women as persons made in the image of God; to better understand how violence is experienced daily and in the body; and to celebrate reasons for hope.
My theological reflections on violence and women have been shaped greatly by Brasilian theologian, Ivone Gebara, whose writing presents women voicing their personal sufferings from their own contexts and lifts up their redemptive experiences of God and salvation.
To speak of experience that others have had of God is a difficult task. It is difficult enough for anyone to speak adequately of one’s own experience, acknowledges Ivone Gebara*.
In our lives, we first experience God with our gender. To speak of God and gender is to make two affirmations: first, what we say of God is tied to our life experience. Our very idea of God, as well as our relationship with God, is determined by our understanding of what it is to be female and to be male in our contexts – the homes we grew up in, the streets or playgrounds we played in, the churches that shaped our faith, the workplaces where we interact with others.
Theology that abstracts the realities of women’s suffering contradicts the realities of daily life. It is my hope that focusing on the daily and the bodily experience of violence and suffering will bring the “real” to the forefront.
The hiddenness of violence affects many more women than men, more blacks or Indigenous people than whites, more poor than rich…. So, we have to ask: “What women are we talking about? Where is this particular kind of evil likely to appear? What does evil and violence experienced by women mean? ”
We are talking about “the evil without fanfare.” It accompanies life’s most vital physical needs. And the physical – the body –is the location of the destruction of women – the female fetus never brought to life, or the baby girl left to die as an infant; the body consumed by hunger and dying of thirst, the body homeless, the body wasted by sickness, the body beaten, the body undergoing violence, the body lacking salvation (or deliverance).
We are talking about the Indigenous missing and murdered women in Canada like Georgina Faith Papin. Georgina was 34 years old at the time of her disappearance in 1999. Her remains were found three years later on Robert Pickton’s Port Coquitlam farm. Georgina carried the trauma of being removed from her home as an infant; of growing up in foster care, group homes and the streets. Of giving birth to seven beautiful children and losing them, too.
We are talking about Perpetua, commemorated on this day for her martyrdom in the year 202 in Carthage, Tunisia. Her infant son was not yet weaned when she and her four companions first survived death by wild animals in the arena in Carthage, and then were executed.
We are talking about women in the favelas of Brasil who, on any given day, have soap but no water, or water but no soap. Of finding the energy to wait in long lines for bread or endure a sixth pregnancy on inadequate food and physically demanding labour.
“The daily violence experienced and articulated by women — in literature, song, art, or other forms of expression — is a work of memory past and present. It reveals the continuous existence of suffering. Through memory speech is freed; the dead are permitted to speak, and anguish can be relived in order to denounce whatever it is that keeps us from living with dignity,” writes Ivone Gebara.
Murdered and missing women speak through the stories gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada and the women’s families. And so we learn that Georgina Papin was celebrated in October 2002 by her siblings at a memorial and a feast on the Enoch First Nation. Her sister, Bonnie, wrote: “I remember Georgina’s voice like she was here and it was so warm and friendly. She made me feel loved and that I belonged somewhere. It was the best feeling ever.”
Perpetua, from ancient times, speaks to us today through the detailed account of her final days by a member of the church in Carthage. This narrative by an unnamed person included a journal that Perpetua herself composed while she was in prison awaiting execution. Perpetua – she was strong in spirit and vibrant in faith; she renounced all other loves for the sake of the love of Christ.
Our Scriptures tell us that evil and violence do not have the last word. Today’s reading from Hebrews speaks to us of God’s promise that endurance leads to deliverance – “For yet in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay.” Under this overarching story of redemption, women’s daily crosses are met by daily resurrections.
Sometimes salvation comes in the form of what Ivone Gebara calls “poor little salvations” – today there is rice and beans and fried eggs. Or, today, I can buy transit fare and buy milk. In daily life women call upon God to find food, to cure a baby, to get out of trouble.
Yet, sometimes the crosses of poverty, despair and violence produce a call for salvation, but a call that has no answer. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me…?” asks the Psalmist in Psalm 22, echoed by Jesus on the cross, and often inaudibly, by many who have lost hope.
This defenseless and vulnerable God on the cross – with whom many people without power strongly identify — is also radically different from them because he is someone who has power, but power which is marked by a special form of love. To say that God is in women’s image means that women’s experience of God is the image of our world, our culture, our questions. This power of God seems over and above all known powers – it is the power to live. It is the hope that Someone or Something wants the world to be other than it is.
“The end of the world as we know it” – the end of power and domination – shapes a hopeful vision for those who are oppressed. Former Filipina political prisoner, Angelina Ipong, endured six years in prison. She visited Canada last year, hosted by KAIROS, and declared: “Prison walls, iron bars & barbed wire can only imprison the body but not our minds, our thoughts, and what we stand for.”
Remember that on the cross Jesus was surrounded by women as his friends, caring for his lifeless body so that life would not be further violated. This gesture is rich and symbolic because it leads to life. There are followers, men and women, who declare by their solidarity that unjust death does not have the last word.
We, who are gathered in this chapel – what can we say about what has been written in a time (Perpetua’s) and context (Georgina’s) far removed from our own? Can we more deeply recognize the places of our power and powerlessness, places of privilege and of need? Can we expect to understand women’s profound experiences of the violence?
Love provides a window to understanding. To love the other as oneself requires each of us to place ourselves within the skin of the other. Can we imagine the silent crying to God in the midst of struggle for life? When God seems absent, can we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, in loving and daily sacrifice for each other…? Maybe we can — not first through reason, but in response to the Mystery that is the God who calls us to life.
Today, let us remember that we are part of a great cloud of witnesses. Let us pray at the invitation of Presbyterian sisters at the UN CSW that God will “give ear to our prayers as we utter them in a thousand languages and in the silence of words unspoken, and walk with us as we sojourn this pathway to justice and righteousness for all women and girls.”
Amen.
* Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation. Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis, 2002.
