Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

13. Postscript: Wounded Writing, Healing Writing

253 13 POSTSCRIPT Wounded Writing, Healing Writing Wendy Farley It is a gratifying privilege to conclude these papers with my own reflections on what has been accomplished. I have been inspired by the recovery of so many theologians whose ideas, lives, and eloquent writing deepen our understanding of what the Christian tradition has been and can be. In the ancient desert, in convent and beguinage, in academic communities, and in homes surrounded by children, women reconstruct Christian thought and practice so that the radical vision of the gospel is continually vivified. One of the themes that is simmering in these papers is the way in which women’s writing is prohibited, conscribed, and even impossible within a patriarchal context. Levinas reminds us that the supreme violence is the supreme gentleness: repression that no longer requires the instruments of force because we have become the secret police inside our own heads. As we read Mechthild of Magdeburg, Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson, or Mother Dabney, we ask how much of this writing is contorted by the “gentle” policing not only of writing but of thought and desire. What tortured songs bleed through self-effacing prose? What bolder expressions of the divine beauty of God-bearing women remain unthought, unthinkable? It is impossible not to grieve over the 254 / Women, Writing, Theology holocaust of women’s wisdom that is part of the collateral damage of Christianity. Like women who need only be knocked around once in order to learn the art of repression, women writers learned well the lessons of Marguerite Porete. This “false woman” bore tenacious witness to the nondual love of divinity and was burned in a Paris square in 1310 for her trouble. As we consider our own writing, we might continue to wonder how much of this gentle violence continues to shape our thought. Even if the civility of tenure review and the impossible compromises of maternity have replaced the pyre, the contortion of word and desire continues to mutilate our writing. This maiming is represented in this volume by the stories the contributors tell, but also by the absence of women who had been part of this project from the beginning. It would be disingenuous to conclude this volume without acknowledging the voices that had not found their way back to speech in time to be included here. Their loss is silent witness to absence. I am sad that the wisdom of these women has not found its way into this volume. I am inconsolable at the absence of women’s wisdom in the shaping of Christian thought. My own writing has been mutilated by the efficiencies of gentle and less gentle violence. It entered a tomb—or perhaps it was a womb— when I found myself unable to read for several years, a symptom of traumatic stress disorder. It was demoralizing—a weak word!—it was devastating to think that my life as a scholar was over and that writing had become impossible for me. I was accustomed to a style familiar to readers of this volume: going to the library, checking out as many books as I could carry, reading them, and then exchanging them for another pile of books. My footnotes were more copious than my text. But this writing is impossible for someone who cannot read. Without other scholars, without the props and insights of male writing to underwrite my own, it seemed absurd to write. It was excruciating to give up my understanding of myself as a scholar, to give up the authorizing methods that permitted me some small place at the table. I had to proceed with no real hope that I would be able to return to scholarly writing. I had to rely only on what was already in my head, as if I had journeyed into the wilderness and there was no resource beyond what I could Wounded Writing, Healing Writing / 255 carry with me. “Only what was in my head.” I read my own writing and wonder if it sounds familiar. As if decades of study and teaching, of living and praying were nothing, as if no amount of training could ever be adequate to justify my writing. But I did write. I wrote as my selfunderstanding , my resources, my intellectual home—as essential to me as my own breath—were burned to ash. I wrote without the approval of my authorizing voices, without even my own...