Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

5. Speaking Funk: Womanist Insights into the Lives of Syncletica and Macrina

71 5 SPEAKING FUNK Womanist Insights into the Lives of Syncletica and Macrina Kendra G. Hotz Now it is told of Abba Sisoes that when he had grown old “his disciple said to him, ‘Father, you are growing old. Let us now go back nearer to inhabited country.’ The old man said to him, ‘Let us go where there are no women.’ His disciple said to him, ‘Where is there a place where there are no women except the desert?’ So the old man said, ‘Take me to the desert.’”1 Abba Sisoes was one of the hordes of Christians who, beginning in the early fourth century, began to move out into the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to seek lives of simplicity and poverty. He had likely spent a long life as a monk, an ascetic, who struggled to overcome his “passions,” those distortions of reason that constantly distracted sinful humanity from complete devotion to God. He had disciplined his body with fasting and other renunciations in order to refine his soul so that he might live a life of virtue and grow into the purified image of God through Christ. Now at the end of his life he planned to escape to the desert where he could devote himself completely to contemplation and prayer. In the desert he would not be distracted by younger disciples constantly seeking counsel. In the desert he would not be tempted by a passing glance at a beautiful woman. The desert afforded protection from such temptations. 72 / Women, Writing, Theology Those who took up the ascetic life gave up everything they owned and devoted themselves to works of charity and to the disciplines of constant prayer and contemplation. They trained for purity and virtue as athletes train for competition. They left behind friends and families, abandoning all desire for social acceptance, and deliberately took on roles that placed them both geographically and spiritually on the fringes of society and civilization. In a world in which social security depended on familial relationships, they renounced the very marriage and sexual activity that could assure such security. In an age plagued by fear of famine, they lived in the places least likely to provide them with the food they needed and conquered their hunger through long fasts. In an age that feared civilization would be lost to invading barbarians as an empire came unraveled, they chose lives in the wild, untamed places beyond the reach of civilization. And in spite of all of this, they captured the imaginations of Christians of late antiquity and became the model for Christian life in that era. So many sought the solitude that Abba Sisoes yearned for that they “made the desert a city.”2 Abba Sisoes would have been most distressed, however, to learn that the desert was filled with women who had devoted themselves to the ascetic disciplines, who mentored disciples, and who wrestled with passions of their own. Male ascetics often found themselves frustrated by the presence of women in the desert. Amma Sarah once received as visitors “two old men,” abbas of the desert. It is told that “when they arrived one said to the other, ‘Let us humiliate this old woman.’ So they said to her, ‘Be careful not to become conceited thinking to yourself : “Look how anchorites are coming to see me, a mere woman.”’ But Amma Sarah said to them, ‘According to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts.’ She also said to the brothers, ‘It is I who am a man, you who are women.’”3 Amma Sarah met the frustrations of male ascetics with plucky resolve, but also with an unsettling selfloathing . She made herself acceptable by denying her sex and seeking to conform herself to an assumed male norm for redeemed humanity. Ascetic training aimed to renew and restore the image of God to sinful and corruptible humanity, and Amma Sarah affirmed emphatically that she bore the image of God—a decidedly male image. Speaking Funk / 73 Womanist Theology: Making Sense of Sarah and Finding Alternatives Womanist theology emerged in the twentieth century among AfricanAmerican women who experienced marginalization in multiple ways. They had been excluded from the public construction of theology and from the centers of social power not simply because of their race or gender or class, but even more so because of the ways that these three dimensions of their...