“Womanly Wisdom”                      Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: 

“To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth -- when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” 

READING                   Susan Cahill, Wise Women 

Perhaps because it has been a woman’s task throughout history “to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope,” in the words of Margaret Mead, women have sought and cultivated the goods of the spirit out of a practical need for meaning. The varieties of significance they have intuited amid vast fields of lived experience have illumined their understanding and shaped the strategies of the journey, making the hard going sometimes easier, sometimes blessed; more promising than opaque. And meaning, the traveler’s sustaining wisdom, is its own reward, a destination in the country of solidarities. 

SERMON 

I have for quite some time now wondered what this world would be like if women ran the planet, if women had been given the social capital to engineer society, if women had been placed in positions of authority. And no, this is not a campaign speech for Hillary. I haven’t a clue yet which candidate I will be voting for seventeen months from now. Besides, it matters little who is in the White House, since popular opinion and business interests primarily run this country and planet anyway. American and Global Corporations hold most of the social and political capital in this world, and men, with a few female exceptions, mostly run American and Global Corporations. Money still makes the world go ‘round, not wisdom, it seems. 

Yet somehow we all know that women have been subversively running this world for a long, long time. They have sewn together the social fabric that holds us together: children and families and communities. I have worked in the church now for 22 years. There is no doubt in my mind that if it were not for women most churches would have been vacant long ago. Our youth education in this church is largely led by women, again with a few exceptions, a few men who find value in participating in the education and care of their children and others. I have heard it said, “Behind every good man is a good woman.” I don’t know who originally said that, but it seems to come from that sexist notion that the woman must remain behind the man. So it is, that women have been the glue that has held social systems together for millennia. 

Throughout the book of Proverbs, and in other wisdom literature, both biblical and extra-biblical, wisdom is personified in the feminine. She was brought into existence at the beginning of Creation. It is almost as if God could not have made another thing without her assistance. She is God’s delightful partner. And she delights in humankind, the crowning achievement in God’s creative pantheon. In light of the fact that the God of the Bible is male, wisdom is, I suppose, the “good woman” that is behind “the good man.” One might even say that wisdom is the feminine version of a universal god. It’s just too bad that men don’t always listen to her. And when I say “men,” I mean my self, of course. 

Today we will spend a little time thinking about the value and importance of inviting the voice of the feminine into our lives. Our families, our schools, and our communities as a whole are directly affected by the extent to which we listen to this voice. We all know the sociological history of men and women; women have done the bulk of our child-care over the millennia, while men have been off hunting and gathering. Today this is beginning to change, and society will be the better for it as long as men allow the feminine into their lives in ways that men have historically avoided. 

Today, in the very infancy of the 21^st century, all former sociological models are beginning to fall apart. The clear sexual dualism of male and female has become a pluralism of gender across a broad spectrum.  Even children now are being recognized to have some gender variance. We can no longer keep our neatly packaged male and female constructs. Our male dominated culture is in just as much jeopardy as the globally warming planet, and the seemingly devolving political system that is tied to that very same male dominated, patriarchal culture. 

Ian Harris, a professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, writes the following: 

Patriarchy…promotes….a social order that benefits a few men, while it oppresses many others. Patriarchy, because it demands that men repress their emotions in order to carry out manly tasks, creates many…strains…Men who successfully conform to standards contained within classical male messages that sustain patriarchy are rewarded when they become heads of state, generals, movie stars, corporate executives, and athletic heroes, while men who rebel against this social order are ridiculed, jailed, ostracized, or killed. (Harris, Messages Men Hear). 

Let’s face it; men who exhibit feminine qualities are marked, tagged by other men as any number of negative stereotypes associated with men who do not fit the traditional model of manly man. They are, to use Hans and Franz’s lingo, girly men. They are not the real men who do not eat quiche, as we were so instructed by that book back in the 80s. In fact, the whole notion that men can do whatever they need to do in order to be fulfilled as human beings, and that women can also do the same, is a relatively new and novel concept. Our advertising industry still upholds old, traditional models, maintaining a constant stream of consciousness manipulating material for the masses. The idea, I suppose, is to keep us all in our respective places, male or female. 

I have, of course, regressed from my original topic. My apologies. It is the absence of Lady Wisdom, I suppose, that creates a vacuum for my harangue. We may agree, to differing degrees, that the social order and structure based on traditional male and female dualism is in a state of flux, even if we are particularly unsupportive of that flux. I can honestly say, however, that I am excited about the possibility that whatever we thought we knew about male and female is no different than whatever we thought we knew about God or Jesus or the Planet Earth. It is all up for re-examination, all of it evolving and changing right along with us and with creation itself. Lady Wisdom is still at work alongside of, and in equal partnership with, the Creator of the Universe, the God who is all, and is in all. 

The idea that women would have no need of earthly men, but would rather be directly attached to the divine is probably most commonly known from the lives and service of women who take vows as nuns in the Catholic Church. But there are others. Rabi’a, who was an eighth century Sufi Mystic, wrote: 

O my Lord, the stars are shining and the eyes of men are

closed, and kings have shut their doors

and every lover is alone with his beloved,

and here am I alone with Thee.

With a more fiery tone the twelfth century bhakti poet Mahadeviyakka, who left her husband to wander naked, covered only by her long hair, wrote: 

People,

male and female,

blush when a cloth covering their shame

comes loose.

When the lord lives

lives drowned without a face

in the world, how can you be modest?

When all the world is the eye of the lord,

onlooking everywhere, what can you

cover and conceal?

I love the Beautiful One

with no bond nor fear

no clan no land

no landmarks

for his beauty.

So my lord, white as jasmine, is my husband.

Take these husbands who die,

decay, and feed them

to your kitchen fires! 

Now don’t get me wrong, ladies. By quoting this Hindu poet I am not suggesting that you all dump your husbands. Rather what I am suggesting by reading that inflammatory piece is that all of us, male and female, would come to understand that it is our communion with, and devotion to, the divine that is tantamount even to our human attachments. At the end of the day, any social fabric is strongest when it uses threads of divine origin, both the divine within and the divine without. 

Another woman from the twelfth century, Marguerite Porete believed that one could annihilate one’s soul in a complete union with God, thus eliminating the need for any clerical mediation. She was, of course, subsequently burned at the stake during the Inquisition, along with copies of her book The Mirror of Simple Souls, from which I will quote a section of the prologue: 

Theologians and other clerks,

you won’t understand this book

– however bright your wits –

if you do not meet it humbly,

and in this way Love and Faith

make you surmount Reason:

they are the mistresses of Reason’s house.

Reason herself proclaims to us

in the thirteenth chapter

of this book, unashamed,

that Love and Faith make her live:

she never frees herself from them –

they have sovereignty over her,

and she must do obeisance.

So bring low your sciences

which are founded by Reason,

and put all your trust

in the sciences conferred by Love,

that are lit up by Faith –

and then you’ll understand this book,

which by Love makes the soul live. 

All of this sermon today points us to one simple truth…we do not know our way in the world. There is a greater wisdom at work, waiting to be tapped by us, waiting to be given access to our choice making. Whenever we stand at the edge of a decision, divine wisdom is best consulted before we plunge headlong into the ways we have always thought it should be, or what we have been taught about how it should be, or even the manner in which we currently reason it should be. 

God is always patiently waiting for us, together with Lady Wisdom; waiting for us to turn and enter at her gate, to travel by her light, and to find the path that God most desires for us all. She is ever-present, embedded in the voices of women and men alike, no matter where they find themselves on the sexual gradation scale. We are the conduits for God’s creative work in the world. We do that work best when we listen first to the womanly wisdom that is present at every turn, if we will but pay attention to her. That’s all she wants…for us to pay attention to her. Men, have we heard that before?