On February 19, 1963, Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was published. It’s opening words and question ignited a revolution of awareness in American culture.
"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"
That question would spark a second wave of feminism in the United States, would permanently transform the American social fabric, and would come to be seen as a pioneering moment in American history. Friedan’s book is one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
I was a brand new mother in 1963, delighted and awed by my baby daughter, born Jan 13. I knew I didn’t favor my own mother’s hovering, smothering, mothering style, but I wasn’t quite sure what kind of mother I could be. Friedan’s question sat silently brooding in my heart but didn’t take shape until the 1970s when I sat alone, spiritually deadened and bereft in my kitchen over yet one more batch of chocolate chip cookies. Suddenly, our of nowhere I heard this question: “Why are you doing this?” That inner voice was deep and jolting. I understood it to be God's voice. It moved me to tears, and in time to ask myself another question:
“Can there be more than motherhood for me?”
Motherhood has much to do with love and child-bearing, if that’s a possibility of course. It also has to do with the capacity to love yourself enough to make personal life choices—NOT against any children but for yourself and your life.
Today, nearly sixty years post-Friedan's book and fifteen years after her own death, women of all colors and nations are still asking the same questions and embarking on the same quests for sexual equality in church and state. I would call this very long, groaning-in-travail, movement "societal transfiguration".
The New Testament records an experience of transfiguration—a solo event just for Jesus. The light shone all around him, and his disciples were afraid. They interpreted this as the light of God’s glory. All biblical narratives are exaggerated to make sure they are unforgettable, and yet we must still interpret their meaning in every generation. With every transfiguring advance there is cruel and vicious backlash, yet the movement does not, and will not, die.
In the beginning, Creator God made all things good and called it ALL good. ALL of it. ALL of us. Good doesn’t mean morally sound, although that helps I suppose. The word is of germanic origin, god in Old English. Goodness is not a performance word, or even a value word, a love word, or a justice word. It’s a Being word, a soul word, a spiritual word, a transfiguring word. It means authenticity of word and deed, through and through. You all know a good person when you meet them. It’s catching. Is this all?
NO. We do not yet know a good society—anywhere.
May we keep praying and working for global Societal Transfiguration.
Sunday, February 23, 2020
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