As my first semester in seminary came to a close, I found myself in the midst of an unexpected avalanche of tears. It wasn’t the relief of having completed my last theology exam or the sudden revelation of the mysteries of the Hebrew language. Nor was it a moment of identity crisis, which many seminarians experience when they find their concept of God has been drastically dismantled.
Instead, I sat among a circle of twenty other female students at Louisville Seminary, when a wave of emotion took root in ground that I didn’t think was mine.
We gathered in the carpeted living room of the Women’s Center, a cinder-block apartment that mirrors other campus housing. That is except for the floor-to-ceiling canvas outline of a female body, a series of portraits of each of the seminary’s female professors, a framed magazine cover honoring Rev. Katie Geneva Cannon and of course, a luxurious vagina quilt, complete with a light switch embedded in the fleshy pink fabric.
If we were in the 1970’s maybe our meeting would have been deemed a feminist consciousness raising effort. In fact, that is precisely what made the presence of women a reality at this seminary, as both faculty and students.
This particular gathering did not only serve the purpose of such consciousness raising, but also healing, laughter and advocacy, all based on the seminary’s production of the Vagina Monologues. We had gathered to read through this year’s script, each of the participants having been assigned a monologue, echoes of another woman’s voice and whose experience became filtered through our own.
When it came time for my reading, my heart began to accelerate. It wasn’t out of anxiety or insecurity. I had done this before, to a crowd of several hundred students at the University of Michigan. This, however, was entirely different.
Eight years later, I find myself more deeply aware of the painful realities of women, from Peru to Schenectady. Rape is no longer disguised by statistics or made impersonal by buried legislation. Access to birth control is not simply a glossy advertisement in a fashion magazine. Domestic violence is no longer the distant reality of a friend of a friend of a friend.
As I quietly embark on my second semester in seminary, I know there is a raging world out there. It consists of unheard screams and digging nails, glimpses of the persisting violence that continues to target women. Yes, women.
This unkempt anger and sadness, urgency and awareness is what crashed through me when I read aloud in front of my classmates. I read a monologue based on the testimony of a woman raped and mutilated by the brutal tactics of the Bosnian War. Her words are poetic and nostalgic of a youthful exuberance and sexuality, her “vagina, a live wet water village.” Her memories alternate with graphic descriptions of what they did to her “six of them, monstrous doctors with black masks…”
Reading aloud among a circle of strong, unique and passionate women, I felt safe. I felt protected to the point of utter transparency. As I read each word, my eyes welled up with a reserve of tears, more than I can remember in a long time. And I realized what the difference was.
Only now, only at this time my life, could these words be so charged, magnetized against my skin and engrained in my mind. Only now, after having sat beside adolescent girls impregnated by incest or assigning a bed in a homeless shelter to a woman with a freshly bruised eye socket.
In all of this, strangely, I do not ask “Where is God?" Instead, I ask myself, how am I positioned to change it. More importantly, how might each of us contribute to that change?
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