2019.10.13 Two Eves and Me

One of my mentors is Eve Ensler.  She is an American playwright, performer, feminist, and activist, known best for her play, "The Vagina Monologues.” I once had a starring role in that play. More humbly stated, I performed one of the monologues sitting atop a three-legged stool dressed in my clerical collar—and nothing else. Okay that’s a lie—fun, but a lie. I wore my professional uniform: black pants and shirt with a traditional stiff white band of plastic circling my neck. The collar, after which I’d lusted for some years, identified me as clergy, in my case an Episcopal priest. This collar gave me authority, authority it would take years for me to fully internalize, and even more years to relinquish so I could begin to rely on my own authority not the uniform’s.

Ensler’s play premiered in 1996 and was hailed by Charles Isherwood of the New York Times as “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” Ensler’s mission was to campaign globally against anti-female violence. She offers the script free of charge to local groups every February 14th. Ensler as a young woman.

The Gloucester Coalition for the Prevention of Domestic Abuse, of which I was a member ,got the script in 2006 and put out a call for auditions. My heart leaped and I signed my vagina up for an audition. We got in. There were no official costumes, so I decided, with some trepidation, to wear my collar for the performance. 

I spoke the part of a mature woman who had attended a vagina workshop. Honestly, there really were such things. They were designed to help woman connect, or reconnect, with their sexuality, specifically to get to know their “privates". No kidding, women lay on mats and pretended to have a relationship with their vaginas while a young twenty-something guided them along. All I had to do in my monologue was portray my vagina’s release from hidden shame to wondrous self-affirmation while sitting on a stool, wearing my clerical collar, and faking an orgasm on stage. I got a standing “o”—that’s ovation.

There were some older women from my parish in the front row. They looked stern I thought, but I saw one of them suddenly cover a giggle. They never said a word, a grace for which I adored them. But two young women joined the parish after they saw me in the play, and another friend in my yoga class told me her 80 year old mother had whispered to her: “Can we go to that church?” Well, there’s more than one way to evangelize. Call it V-evangelism.

Eve Ensler is sixty-six now and continues to write about big topics like God, death, and women. I write about the same topics. Her experience of being systematically beaten to bleeding by her father throughout her childhood was more traumatic, although comparisons are odious, than my experience of being sexually molested in a NYC movie theater when I was eight by an old man with a long white beard who looked just as I thought God would. I called him the old God-man.

I buried my own trauma in an abyss of shame—sure something was wrong with me that this happened.  It was not until I was in seminary seeking God, a way out of shame, and the fullness of my own sexuality, that I wrote about what happened to me in a journaling course that encouraged experiential theology. I’d thought just knowing what happened was enough, but knowledge was only the melody. When supported by the tones of my feelings and bodily sensations, the truth grew robust—and holy. I knew I had written the old “God-man” to death—myself and my body to new life. Perhaps this was my own vagina monologue.

Like Ensler, I found healing through writing, as well as through performing in her play.

Ensler has just published a second memoir called Apology in which she exhumes her father through her imagination and writes the apology she wished she’d had from him. She ends her book with: “Old man be gone.” I now that feeling. Old God-man be gone!  AMEN.

I wear my collar now when I’m officiating at a religious rite and when I feel proud of something I’ve done with God’s help, such as writing books in which the Holy Spirit takes the lead.

In the 5/26/19 NY Times Book Review Ensler quotes from her favorite book: "Letter to a Child Never Born," by Oriana Fallaci: "And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain what might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience.”

It remains a challenge for us women to find our voices, our bodies, and our dignity in this rootedly patriarchal world, still doggedly resistant to sharing power. But we are present. We speak. We write. We keep on disobeying the rules set for us by forces over which we had no control. We will simply BE. What grace there is in that simple declaration of Being itself—just as we are. Thanks be for the first woman Eve and for all her spiritual namesakes, like me and Ensler, and so many others. 

2013.02.14 V-Day Excerpts

I came down to breakfast today to see two large red envelopes on the table. Love and humor cards from my beloved husband. Oops!  I forgot it was Valentine’s Day, and immediately justified myself by saying love was every day all year round.

Then, I went to my email and there was a beautiful e-card from a friend in Estonia where it is “Friends Day.” 

Then, three heart-shaped cookies arrived from another friend, theologian and professor at Boston College, who also sent an email with an article he’d written in 2005 in defense of Eve Ensler’ s Vagina Monologues, which students perform yearly at this Catholic college. It is as an educational experience, he contended—and more, it is empowering, even if it offends.

My oldest daughter’s beautiful blog post humbly and eloquently extolled the merits and complexities of maternal love for her two daughters. An “unrhythmic jaunty dance” she called it.

On today’s Writers’ Almanac, I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poem to Robert Browning that begins,” How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and ends “ If God choose, I shall love thee better after death.”

Now ..........I’m out the door to get a card—or three for my at-home Valentine.
                                                    *******

Walking home with my cards in my pocket and love in my heart for my family, friends, God and my own self, I remembered my own V-experience. 

Of course, not everyone will think the Monologues is education or art, but most agree it is politics with a punch and a large dose of chutzpah.  

I performed a script in the V-Monologues when I was in Gloucester. It was to benefit the Coalition for the Prevention of Domestic Violence on which I then served.  My monologue was about a mid-life woman who went to a vagina workshop—in secret, in trepidation, and in hope. In the workshop, the woman discovered and explored her own wowser secrets while lying on her mat with a group of other women, all being instructed by a slim young chippy who probably had at least three vaginas, or clitorae:)  Anyway, I wore my clerical collar in the play, and added a line about the institutional Church and its need to discover its own vaginal power. Well, I didn’t say it quite that way, but it was clear that religion needed women and it mustn't dry up.

The parish I served got two new young women parishioners out of that show.  They sheepishly admitted that they came to the parish because they'd seen me in the Monologues. I was identified as an Episcopal priest in the playbill.  Also, a lesbian friend in my Yoga class brought her 90-year old mother to see the play, and after it the mother said to her daughter,  "Can we go to that church?" This is called V-evangelism. 

May I add that six women from the traditionally more conservative 8 a.m. liturgy sat in the front row!  Never heard a word from them,  but I saw a grin or two.  

Life is love, and there’s plenty of both left in all of us. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

2012.05.09 Debulking

I read (NY Times May 6 Book Review) the review of recent book, “Memoir of a Debulked Woman” by Susan Gubar, because the title fascinated my curious mind.

The word debulking is daunting. BIG!  At first I thought the author had been on a weight loss intensive program. I wish I’d been right. 

Debulking is the standard treatment for ovarian cancer.  My computer kept typing debunking!

Debulking is an operation of 6-8 hours in which surgeons attempt to remove as much cancerous tissue as possible where cancer cells are detected, and organs where malignancy has spread. The body is sliced open from navel to pubic bone.

Gabar is quoted: "Think of debulking as evisceration or vivisection or disemboweling, but performed on a live human being."  Pretty heroic and draconian.  In less formal words YUK!  and EEUWWW! But I admire the author’s candor and her willingness to inform us all, sparing no details.

This massive procedure extends life but rarely cures. Gabar’s treatment was "suboptimal."  Most debulkings are. Optimal would be rare I suppose.

Gubar writes to make people aware of ovarian cancer which gets little public attention, is lethal and doesn't get a lot of research money thrown its way. Warning signs are bloat, fatigue, feeling of satiety ie. bulked up!

I know about ovarian cancer. I have blood tests and ovarian ultrasounds yearly to make sure my ovaries are OK.  My mom had ovarian and was lucky that the tumor they removed was all there was of it.  She lived for 15+ more years and didn't die of it. So rare my gynecologist didn’t believe me that she had it until I showed him her medical records.

Few women live to write about ovarian cancer.  I guess it's not as sexy as breast cancer.  (BTW, there's another book called "Breasts" exploring breasts as the basic anatomy of suckle rather than the sexualized anatomical appendages to fondle, expose, and show off that breasts have become. Hooters no less.) Woman as sex objects again. 

OK, whatever helps to get the public and medical attention women’s health requires. But I don’t see any bill boards or porn pulp for cows tits.

Debulking, however can be a metaphor for what many women in American culture try to do to their bodies with frantic diets and extreme weight-loss procedures like feeding tubes.

Need I say, not all diseases look the same in a woman’s body as they do in the male body, although medical treatments have often been based on how men respond and what men need to heal. Women need to be equivalent (of equal value)  not equal, as in the same. Trust me we’re not there yet.

Women don’t experience the Holy the same as men do either; nor do they talk about divinity or pray in the same way.  As a Spiritual Director I’ve found that women, with a little encouragement, pray in intimacy and freedom, their words and images less forumulaic, less encumbered by patriarchal institutional norms.

In God they trust. And God listens. Shame is not of Godde.   If you hear negative words inside you about yourself when you pray it’s NOT from God.

I am grateful to Susan Gubar who is doing a lot for us all by going public with such a painful and vulnerable topic. It’s hard to make yourself a political issue. But it’s necessary at times. I pray she will have a long remission.

Men and women alike, bless and love all your body inside and out, and dare to mention the unmentionables.

Hey,  how do you think I dared to read a script in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues WITH my clerical collar on?  Our parish acquired two new young women parishioners from that little unorthodox act of evangelism. Ya never know.