A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [14]
There were perhaps only two dozen obvious males in a gathering of some 350, and of the ones near me, three looked distinctly uncomfortable, two were laughing nervously, one was scribbling furiously in a reporter’s notebook, and one alone looked pleased. However, on closer examination I decided that this last was probably not male.
The laughter trickled off, and she waited, totally at ease, for silence before starting again.
“I was grateful to that large and noisy man, however. Not immediately,” she added, inviting us to chuckle at her youthful passion, and many obliged, “but when I’d had a chance to think about it, I was grateful, because it made me wonder, Why does he want me to keep silent in church? What would be so terrible in letting me, a woman, talk? What does he imagine I might say?” She paused for two seconds. “What is this man afraid of?”
Absolute silence, and then: “Why, why is this man afraid of me? Here am I, I thought to myself, barely five feet tall in my stockinged feet, where he’s over six feet and weighs twice what I do; he has a university degree, and I left school at fifteen; he’s a grown man with a family and a big house, and I’m not even twenty and live in a cold-water flat. So, can this man be afraid of me? Can he imagine I’m going to say something that might make him look a fool? Or… is he afraid that I might say something to make his God look a fool? Oh, yes, I thought about that for quite some time, I tell you. Quite some time. And do you know what I decided? I decided that, Oh my, yes, this big man with his big voice and his big God in the big church, he was afraid, of little, old, me.”
Her eyes flared wide and laughter came again at her mock glee. She held up a hand to cut it short and leant forward confidentially.
“And do you know something? He was right to be afraid.”
A second storm of laughter burst through the room, led by the woman herself, laughing at herself, laughing at the absurdity of it, collapsing over a good joke with some friends. After some minutes, she wiped her eyes along with half the room and stood shaking her head slowly as the room settled into silence. When she raised her face, the humour had died in it.
“I didn’t really mean it—you know that. Part of me wanted to stand right up and ask him a lot of uncomfortable questions and make him look foolish, but I didn’t because, truly, it was too sad. Here this man is working with God, thinking about God, living with God, every day, and still he does not trust God. Deep down, he doesn’t feel one hundred percent certain that his God can stand up to criticism, can deal with this uppity woman and her uncomfortable questions; he does not know that his God is big enough to welcome in and put His arms around every person, big and small, believers or seekers, men or women.”
She walked over to a small podium and took a couple of thoughtful swallows from a water glass, then resumed stage centre.
“In the book of Genesis, we see two ways of looking at the creation of human beings. In the first chapter, God ‘says,’ and the power of the word alone is so great, it becomes. The word becomes light and dark, sun and moon, mountains, trees, and animals as soon as it leaves the mouth of God.
“Then in the second chapter, we see God in another guise, as a potter, working with this sticky red clay and shaping a human being.” Her tinted nails caught the light as her child-sized hands shaped a figurine out of the air, then brushed it away. “Same God, just different ways of talking about His creation. But in either of them—just think about this now—does it say in either of them that God made man better than woman? The first account certainly doesn’t: ‘So God created man— humankind—in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them.’ Humankind, male and female together, is in the image of God, not just male humans. The verse nails