A Woman's View of a Woman

is different from a man’s.

But we theologians often confuse abstraction with insight. 

I had a chance to spend an hour with the Bertha Morisot exhibit at the DMA. She was a pioneering impressionist, indeed a creator of the movement, who died far too young. Particularly when you see how she was pushing boundaries in her use of the canvas as a space. Her later works, all from the late 19th century, have a remarkably contemporary feel. More than a Monet. 

But what I noticed most is how she painted women, and how in almost every case we see something in the faces that draws us toward a deep sense of interiority. These women are alive, but inside and not for show, however showily they are dressed. They are someone in themselves. Going further, I would say she allows them, grants them, or maybe just depicts a selfhood it is hard to imagine one of her male contemporaries even seeing, much less conveying so directly to the viewer. Indeed only her genius makes them accessible to us. 

This is hardly surprising if you think about it. For all the pretense of Enlightenment objectivity there is surely nothing so conducive to revelation as shared experience, and no experience so difficult for a man to share in a gendered society than the experience of being a woman. Indeed the curators note that her subject matter was in part determined by her inability to see and explore the experiences of public life available to her male peers. 

This was particularly on my mind because on Wednesday I was asked to speak to hospice workers on how culture influences the experience of dying. 

Of course I cannot pretend to have shared in multiple cultural experiences of dying, or indeed in even one (though I’ve been rather close.) But I have studied enough of the religions and cultures of the world, and have attended to the dying and the dead of different cultures, to be confident that there are differences. They arise from the different ways in which people understand what it means to be a human in society and the larger world, from our different understandings of what it means to be embodied in the first place. 

The person whose final conscious hours are spent draped in brightly colored cloth at the edge of the Bagmati river, soon to be washed in its waters and cremated in the great Shivite temple at its edge, is experiencing dying differently from an American Christian, anxiety stilled and pain quieted by medications, surrounded by family in a airy room in a hospice center. Only at the barest physiological level will their deaths be similar. Their experience of these physiological changes will be entirely dictated by their different cultures, not to mention personalities and experiences. 

As it will be different from the sin-wracked penitent in mid 16th century Mexico City hoping that the excruciating pain from a gangrenous wound and the final rites from a dubious priest will save him centuries in Purgatory. Or his enlightened descendent two centuries later who, having cast out the Inquisition, will hope for a speedy and painless death before his life goes on trial in the Court of Reason, the only admirable attribute of such a God as might exist.

We theologians all too easily forget that there is no generic human. Theological anthropology is a farce if it believes it can construct such a thing apart from knowing the mind of God. But claiming such knowledge is farce enough and in any case, surely God as revealed in Christ is God of the particular rather than the generic. The new Adam like the old bears in his loins not only male and female but all the million tribes that would emerge in his image but looking nothing like him. He knows each of us individually not because we are all like him, a first century Palestinian Jew, but because he has chosen to be like all of us in all our incredible variety.

From a scientific standpoint there may be some common biological basis that justifies distinctions between sexes, or sexualities, or even races. But science show us that it is not simple, and is dwarfed by culture when it comes to the experience of being a person: a self within society and the world. Surely my grown daughter, as educated and cultured as Borisot, but out on the town in just those dives and cabarets Borisot could never see will sense not only kinship, but alienation from her languid, pastel fin-de-siecle Parisian woman’s world. 

We will never find the human whom God loves by a process of removal; trying to pick off the grains of dust from which we were made. When all the dirt is gone there will be nothing left but the gnostic fantasy underlying so much contemporary theology. There is no human without the dust, and if this dust doesn’t suit you (and St. Paul found it as frustrating as any of us who find its integrity dissolving before our eyes) you’ll have to wait for another body from your maker. 

But will it be human as we know ourselves to be human? You will not dwell in your Parent’s garden, nor know the pleasure of their flesh. Freed from dust you will also be freed from the only self you’ve ever known. The scripture teaches that humans will be transformed into celestial creatures fitted for the New Jerusalem and God’s reign. But their attention will be fully and only fixed on God, not on one another. Thus they will lack what completed Adam. Unless. 

Unless the myths of visitant angels and the intercessions of the saints are true, and over-clothed with Christ we retain in eternity the dust and division from which we were made as He retains in eternity the nail-holes in his hands and feet. 

Or perhaps we will be only memories, for a time among our familiars on earth and forever in the Mind of God; a coherent swirl of dust molded and purified by currents of Divine Love. Still dust.

But until we know God even as we are known by God, we were made to know one another, and a woman’s view of a woman will be unique. And far more worthy of our attention than a theological anthropology that has not looked for a moment on what Morisot saw.