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68 l APPROACHES TO THE HISTORY OF WOMEN AND RELIGION giving up on any effort to combat hurt, as if caught in flesh. The feminine mode shows us resurrection occurs in ordinary life when we feel the invasion of God’s grace to deliver us from the repetition of old solutions that do not solve. The whole basis of being changes; the images change. Now we feel flowing waters that bring alive dead places; we see that we are fed from a table set before us even in the shadow of death; all the humiliating hierarchies of talent and inferiority, of poise and ineptness, of status and homelessness are leveled. The whole context is changed, is new: Being loved for merit has ended. We are just loved. The feminine mode always places wisdom next to love, for example, in the figure of Sophia. What is astonishing about this route is the upending of the practicality, the earthiness of the feminine mode always locating in the concrete and particular over the abstract and universal. We would expect to be delivered into maxims or motives or practices that prove eminently useful, practical, expedient to make a difference here and now. Instead, we are escorted toward an imaginal realm or a psychic realm to dwell in its reality. To arrive there does make a huge difference, but not by translating into actions in the world we already know. Instead, we live in an additional world, a reality of presence that multiplies in varied and numerous ways, like a spice flavoring a whole dish or a lilt of music changing an entire film or a scent of perfume infiltrating all the atmosphere. That is the feminine mode—subtle, supple, forceful in its effects, but a surprise. In religious terms, it is the woman bathing Christ’s feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, or the woman who empties the whole jar of ointment to anoint Jesus’ feet for his death. Lavish, modest (she remains unnamed), she typi fies this feminine mode of being (which we find also in the love poems of St. John of the Cross) that leads us to the daring act of recognizing and touching the suffering of God. A last mark of the feminine approach concerns what grows out of living in this additional reality, this imaginal or psychic realm or, to use a more traditional term, the contemplative realm of being. Located in concrete, particular, embodied, and relational reality of our lives here and now, which this mode of being always accents, leads us to follow down to its roots to perceive that the creator God goes on creating now, a kind of continual creating from all time, forward into all time, and now. This perception convicts us of the reality of a living God to whom we are in relation now and to whom we make a difference in the created acts going on now; we have been a part of them all along, but only now do we see that, become conscious of our involvement. Our roots grow deeper than we thought. They touch something completely other than our ideas about roots. This is scary and calls on all the fierce aggression of the feminine mode to withstand and to enjoy. We see ourselves standing on a moving current, not on solid ground. The down-to-earthness of the feminine mode gives way to the eternal current—is it water? air? energy ?—of God’s love where matter and psyche are two aspects of the same reality. Embodied concreteness means knowingly participating in the ongoing moving current of God’s love, where solid moves and invisible energy takes on visible form. Opposites coinhere, and everything we know, we do not know. From this new place, this approach offers some clues (not definitive statements) about how the varied and multiple images for God and the divisiveness of religions might be reconciled. If we each go down far enough in our own traditions, we reach this same current, this same energy, this same self-communicating presence that invades every society and culture, and indeed every person if we become conscious of it. Meeting there gives us appreciation and compassion for all our efforts to frame this incomprehensible but ever near reality. From this depth, all our diversity can be integrated. SOURCES: Roberta C. Biondi, In Ordinary Time: Healing the Wounds of the Heart (1996). Caroline Walker Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender...

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