the pain of empowerment

Studying the silencing of biblical women sounds like empowerment but feels like heartbreak.

Tonight I’m trying to focus, trying to finish the next section of my thesis before the day is out, when my research lands me in an article that tells me women speak for just 1.1% of the Bible. I stop. My academic focus-mode is gone. I feel a pain in my gut and a pounding in my chest and a welling in my eyes that both surprises me and doesn’t. I am angry. Angry that in 25 years of my life no church called this injustice. Angry that for 2,000 years only half the story has been told, and it wasn’t my half. Angry that I will never know what all those sisters thought and felt and said and did, never know who their God was. Angry that the story was handed to us as “complete” when we were only given 1% and apparently no one even noticed.

Objectivity would be more productive tonight, but I am no object, not anymore. I am turning the women into the subject of the story, finally, and it is requiring all my subjective experience and emotion. I thought those emotions would be excitement, triumph, and pride, but instead I find myself researching through waves of anger, grief, and pain. I am celebrated for uncovering voices long unheard, but who will grieve with me the two millennia they were absent? I am the face of empowerment in a game of catch-up that we should never have been forced to play. At the end of this the Bible will still be the Bible, there is no way to equalize 1% with 99. Christian history has not wanted their voices, why would they want mine now?

I struggle to focus again, struggle to believe my writing will make any difference, struggle to understand why our womanness has made us less. Every sentence I write is one I wish never needed to be written, every book on my cramped shelves is helping me make a point that should already be known. I stare at my research, wishing I was more determined and less gutted. Maybe there is a way forward, new voices and new ways of hearing them. But it will require the work and heartache of generations of women who speak and men who choose to silence, like we have always done without choice. Is it possible? I don’t know. What I do know is still the pain in my gut and pounding in my chest and welling in my eyes.

Yes, I am taking us one step further. But it wasn’t until I took the step that I realized the severity of my limp.