© Davidson Loehr
March 18, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
SERMON: The Return of Lilith
In the musical “My Fair Lady,” Professor Henry Higgins asks his famous question “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” In Western religions of the past 40 years, a lot of male priests and theologians have been asking the same question.
I want to review some of the reasons with you this morning, because they aren’t hard to find, and they’re too important to forget.
In the Hebrew scriptures, there are more cases than you want to count where Moses or another commander tells his soldiers, after another battle, to kill all the enemy men and children, but that they can keep all the virgins for themselves, as spoils of war. (Numbers 31:15-18, e.g.)
In the book of Leviticus (27:2-4) the worth of women was 3/5 that of a man. Two hundred years ago in the Constitution of our own country, slaves were also valued at 3/5 of a free man – using, I assume, the same biblical proof-text. And I don’t know the current figures, but a few years ago I read that a woman in this country was still being paid about 60%, or 3/5, of what a man was paid in our country for doing comparable work.
In the Bible, the penalty for adultery was death for both the woman and her lover, because of their insult to the husband and defilement of his property. The notion of adultery by men, however, does not appear, unless the woman involved is married (and the man wasn’t a king – remember that King David sent his field General Uriah into the front of a dangerous battle to be killed, because David lusted after Uriah’s wife Bathsheba). Women may not commit adultery because they are the property of men; men, as the property owners, can do pretty much as they like.
It didn’t get much better in Christianity where men, but not women, were still considered the spitting image of God. For example – in a writer almost no feminist ever quotes – Saint Paul wrote, “A man shouldn’t cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man was not born of the woman; but the woman born of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (I Corinthians 11:3-8, emphasis added) You may wonder where Paul learned about human birth. He learned it in the book of Genesis in the Bible.
Paul also wrote, “Women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they want to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” (I Corinthians 14:34-36)
-In the bible, as in soap operas, women’s concerns center almost exclusively on childbearing and on her relationships with men.- (Roslyn Lacks, Women and Judaism, Doubleday & Co., 1980, p. 88)
-Biblical women appear only when they enter men’s perception – as mothers, wives, or harlots. . . The birth and childhood of daughters [in the Bible] goes unrecorded.- (Lacks, 89)
Or, for some trivia you might not have known, compare the vows taken by Catholic nuns and priests. Did you know that they take different vows? The nuns take vows of chastity; the priests take vows of celibacy. You may think those words mean the same thing, but they do not. Vows of chastity mean the nuns will not have sex; vows of celibacy mean the priests will not marry.
This isn’t just about Judaism and Christianity, unfortunately. About a decade ago I attended annual three-day reports from a sexier study called The Fundamentalism Project, undertaken by the University of Chicago Divinity School through a huge Mac Arthur grant. Over 150 scholars wrote papers on fundamentalisms from all over the world, and presented abstracts of their work in these annual public reports. The sobering, depressing, revelatory (pick your adjective) news was that the social, political and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalists are almost identical, regardless of religion or culture. It is fundamentally about patriarchal rule, and the place of women.
Sometimes the bias comes out more brutally than others. In Islam, for example, the woman sells the unlimited right to her sexual services to her husband as part of the wedding ceremony. As an Islamic anthropologist from Harvard (Shahla Haeri) put it, the moment the woman agrees to a marriage she relinquishes all autonomy within the marriage. He gets her for sex, any time and any way he wishes. Technically, she may not even leave the house without her husband’s permission. An autonomous woman is seen as a threat to both religion and society, and a blasphemy against Allah; and there are, of course, many passages from scripture to support this.
At their most literal and militaristic level in the religions that grew out of the Bible – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – it is always about the rule of men, no matter how disingenuously it may be worded. Women’s rights to work and to be educated are eroded in all Western fundamentalist cultures. As a social anthropologist from Harvard (Andrea Rugh) put it, -religious piety can replace education for women, as a cheaper form of hope.- (Personal notes.)
This isn’t just about Western religions, either. The Buddha fought against allowing women into the religion. And when he was finally convinced to allow orders of nuns to begin, he made it clear that the most senior nun would always be inferior to the most junior monk. And some Hindu men still burn their wives alive because their dowry wasn’t big enough. You never hear of these things happening the other way around, do you?
Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Because most religions are primarily men’s clubs in which women are second-class humans. (Think about it. When you read a story in any religious scripture about a male God ordering women to be obedient, who do you think wrote that story?)
There are many sad corollaries to this. I’ve been using the old Hindu picture of the human condition as a bunch of blind people around an elephant, where each one can only know what they can touch. From women’s perspectives, this has made much of history seem like the elephant was mostly sharp tusks and stomping feet.
This is why a feminist theologian writes that the character of Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” is a vivid illustration of the marriage of tenderness and violence woven together in the Biblical picture of God. (Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 16) And “if God is male,- as Catholic theologian Mary Daly put it, – then the male is God.” (Daly, p. 19) It may be the biggest single reason that few major feminists have much interest in institutional religion. (Daly, p. 18)
Some of the other sad corollaries to the political and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms open into the subject of women as scapegoats, the long history of the persecution of women as witches, which arose directly from the bible and with direct support from the churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
I won’t go into all of these bloody chapters this morning, except to remind us that in eight of the 13 original colonies witchcraft was a capital offense, and that poor or helpless women are still vulnerable to the charge. In 1976, for example, a woman named Elizabeth Hahn was assaulted in Germany. She was described as “a poor old spinster” who was suspected of being a witch and keeping familiars in the form of dogs. Her neighbors shunned her, threw rocks at her, threatened to beat her to death, and eventually set fire to her house, badly burning her and killing all of her pets because they thought she was casting hexes on them. And in 1981 a Mexican mob stoned a woman to death after her husband accused her of using witchcraft to incite the attack that took place on the life of Pope John Paul II. (Brian P. Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, [London: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987], p. 229) These are isolated examples of a deadly kind of scapegoating that has been present in Christianity for over 500 years.
I keep asking, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” because in Western religions the question is so obviously ridiculous. If the churches, synagogues and mosques had singled out men for the kind of mindless hatred it has vented on women, there would not be a single church, synagogue or mosque left standing today. The men would have destroyed them.
One of the most revealing ironies in the history of religions is that almost all of the great sages of our history have taught what are easy to recognize as feminine values:
— Confucius taught that social harmony comes through learning the art of living graciously and generously with others.
— Lao Tzu said The Way was one of an interlocking balance of the masculine and feminine forces of the universe.
— The Buddha taught people not to seek their comfort in the illusion of supernatural beliefs, but to wake up, trust life and relax into it.
— Socrates taught that honest ignorance is nobler than arrogant ignorance.
— Jesus said the kingdom of God doesn’t come with swords, but through loving your neighbor.
In any chart of masculine and feminine values, the values of the great sages of religion and philosophy have been decidedly on the “feminine” side. They are where we look when we need wisdom. They are the perspectives on life that define wisdom.
I can’t think of a government or an army that has ever taught these values. But most women have, from ancient Greeks like Sappho; medieval Christian nuns like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila to the symbols and rituals of inclusion in modern Wiccan ceremonies. They are also the values of virtually every peace movement and every environmental movement.
Of the different styles of women’s spirituality that have grown up in the past few decades, the Wiccan movement is probably the best known. The Wiccan group in Texas, known as the Tejas Web, is the second largest in the country, with over three thousand people involved. It is mostly women, though not only women.
The first Wiccan service I attended, nearly twenty years ago, reminded me of a Roman Catholic service, with the robes, candles and heavy use of rituals. And in the few Wiccan groups I’ve known or known of, the overwhelming majority of the women come from Roman Catholic backgrounds. In one small Unitarian church in Indiana, there were 31 women in the Wiccan group, and all 31 had been raised Roman Catholic, leaving the church because they couldn’t find a place for themselves in it.
Some have compared the women of the past century who have protested against the deep holes in Christianity as the “canaries in the coal mines” – the birds that reacted to poison in the air before the miners could sense it. I’m sure some women identify with that.
I think of the women who broke away from Christian, Jewish or Islamic orthodoxy more like the sailors of the 15th and 16th centuries who sailed off the maps of the known world because they thought there had to be more to the world than that. The women I’ve read or known who are actively involved in spiritual quests are searching for what Joseph Campbell once called “The Lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.” And orthodox Western religions have left out too many parts of life, too many of the dynamic and sacred forces, for us to find coordinated souls within the narrow boundaries of prescribed beliefs.
Imagine being a woman! Well ok, most of you don’t have to imagine being a woman! But some of us do. So men, imagine being a woman growing up in the dominant religions of Western civilization.
You grow up in a religion whose scriptures teach that women were born from the side of men, rather than everyone being born from, and only from, women, and you have to wonder what kind of world they are describing, and where on earth they learned their biology. You hear a pope say that women can’t be priests because Jesus had no women disciples, and you think, “Well, Jesus didn’t have any Polish disciples either!” Nor did he have any Italian disciples. For that matter, Jesus didn’t have any Christian disciples. He was a Jew, and so were all those who followed him around. But so far, we’ve never had a Jewish pope! What Jesus might have wanted is obviously irrelevant. Eventually you say to yourself that both life and religion have to make more sense than that, or it’s not worth your time.
So if you’re brave, or perhaps just terribly hungry for spiritual food, you set sail, in search of that Lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.
What the different women’s spirituality movements have found have a lot of family resemblances. They looked for sacred images that honored rather than dishonored women, and found them in the study of ancient nature religions, where the giver of all life was Mother Earth. They looked for a natural reality with cycles, and they found it all around us. I suspect that women are more aware of and sensitive to the cycles of the seasons than men are because they have lived the rhythm of monthly cycles most of their adult lives.
But it’s clear to me that a woman can’t be more like a man because most women I know see both life and religion differently than most men I know do. As women have been entering the ministry during the past thirty years, they have brought very different metaphors than men do. I think men tend to see things logically or functionally, where women tend to see them organically and in relationship.
I have attended a few Wiccan services. They acknowledge the four directions, cast an invisible circle to mark our sacred space. They notice and rejoice in the rhythms of the seasons. The equinoxes and the solstices are celebrated. And when I am there, I know I am at a worship service that came from a different kind of consciousness than mine. It came from a spiritual awareness far more sensitive to nature and our place in it, to the rhythms of nature and the corresponding rhythms of our own lives, and to the never-ending cycles of birth and death of which we are all parts. In many ways, the styles of women’s spirituality are the mirror images, or shadow sides, of most of Western religion. Women theologians, Wiccan leaders like Margot Adler or Starhawk look for and find images of inclusion rather than exclusion. They teach inclusive rituals rather than exclusive creeds, and feature dancing rather than orthodoxies. And when they use arms, they don’t mean weapons. It’s hard for a lot of guys to relate to.
A few months ago I attended a Winter Solstice celebration at this church. It’s an annual event, very popular; it felt like there were 150 people sitting in a great circle in our social hall. People of all ages were there. I saw some very old women dressed up with lights in their hair, evergreens dangling from them. You never see that in church on Sunday. It was fun, but it didn’t feel like a show. It felt like what it was: people participating in a sacred rite of passage, as people have done it for uncounted thousands of years, to move to the slow rhythm of the earth’s changing seasons. We were gathered on the longest night of the year by some women, who led us through the gentle and power filled cycle of death and rebirth. We were mirroring Nature’s death and rebirth at the winter solstice, knowing the sun will return again as it has always returned.
It was one of the loveliest and most genuine religious services I have attended. And as I sat with others in the darkness and silence, dwelling in the death before the gradual return of the light, one of the things I realized was that I could not have led that service. It wouldn’t have worked; I couldn’t have done it. It took a different kind of sensitivity than I have, a different kind of rhythm.
Young girls who were coming of age were recognized and honored. Old women were honored as “Crones” – an old term of respect for the wisdom of the aged – something we have virtually forgotten today. There wasn’t any theology. Just a gentle bringing us all together as children of life, children of the earth, gathered as though we were around an ancient campfire to hear the old story told again, then to stand together, hold hands, and move together – in circles, around and through each other, into the center then back out again, then through another ritual of rebirth, in which we took turns being born and giving birth, being born and giving birth.
This isn’t wisdom that comes from a man’s way of understanding the world. It’s a different, and a feminine, style of spirituality. It’s something both women and men have been missing for a very long time.
Long ago there was a Jewish myth that Eve wasn’t really the first woman. The first woman created for Adam, this story said, was Lilith. She was created as Adam’s equal, and she took it seriously. She wouldn’t defer to him, wouldn’t let him be on top, and when God tried to play marriage counselor, Lilith wouldn’t listen to him either. So she was banished to the footnotes of mythic history, and a slightly more obedient mythic wife was created.
Now Lilith is back. This time, she and Adam have the chance to write the story together, both their parts and the part assigned to God. May we pray that this time we will have both love and luck on our side, so that we may wholeheartedly finish what was once halfheartedly begun.
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Endnotes
First and most importantly, they agree that there must be only one law for all life, both public and private, and that individual rights or the separation of church and state cannot be used to let people stray from the one true religion which, coincidentally, happens to be theirs.
Second, all fundamentalisms are ruled by men, and the roles of women are narrowly defined and strictly controlled. The basic structure of patriarchal authority is paramount, and the dissolution of traditional patriarchal structures is the most important factor in mobilizing fundamentalist movements.
Third, there is a strong family resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. As one scholar pointed out, the phrase “the overcoming of the modern” was a popular fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941, and which is now resurfacing in most of the fundamentalist movements.
Fourth, history is denied in a radical way. While they are all aware that the modern world, its writings, and its ideals, are strongly influenced by the biases of our culture, they deny that the same was true when their own sacred scriptures were written, and deny any deep historical conditioning of those scriptures at all. Their scriptures are the word of God, pure and uncompromised.
Fifth, fundamentalists want to control the education of children and adults, to insure that the next generation grows up with their view of the world, of religion, and of what is expected of them. They are doing this through setting up their own schools, through influencing textbook publishers and state legislatures to mirror their own agendas, and through some other methods of influencing not only their own educational programs but the general public educational platforms of the general culture.
For copious detail and over a hundred essays on fundamentalisms from all over the world, see The Fundamentalism Project published in five or six large volumes by the University of Chicago Press in the mid-1990s.
