Two Women & a Song

Witness to a womb-ish authority

‘...and by Shaddai (שַׁדַּי) who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep (תְּהוֹם) that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts (שָׁדַיִם) and of the womb (וָרָחַם)’

וְאֵת שַׁדַּי וִיבָרְכֶךָּ, בִּרְכֹת שָׁמַיִם מֵעָל, בִּרְכֹת תְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת; בִּרְכֹת שָׁדַיִם, וָרָחַם.

Jacob’s blessing for Joseph, Genesis 49:25

I’m writing this piece on Imbolc, the Celtic festival that marks the first hint of Spring in the northern hemisphere. Imbolc (i-mbolg) means ‘in the womb’, or ‘in the mother’s belly’, which is lovely, because we’ll be encountering two mothers’ bellies - those of Mary and Elizabeth - in a moment.

And in honour of them, and this day, I am starting this post with one of my more womb-like journal images. One that feels both powerful and vulnerable. Powerful perhaps because it is vulnerable.

Like a womb.

John of the Cross starts his famous little mystery of a book, The Dark Night of the Soul, with a poem, which he then spends the rest of the book unfolding.

O night, that led me, guiding night,
O night far sweeter than the dawn;
O night, that did so then unite
The lover with his Beloved,
Transforming lover in Beloved.

Song of the Soul, verse 4

When I first read this poem in 2019, it made me feel angry. I had entered my own dark night kind of time and everything in and around me felt cracked. Like my life had been dropped on a stone floor.

This book had been waiting on my shelf for a long time. And, when I at last opened it, I expected to find, here at least - in the mouth of the saint of darkness himself - solace.

Instead I found a kind of horror.

‘This? This is meant to be ‘sweeter than the dawn’????! F**k you St John of the Cross'.

That’s what I felt.

It was only years later, once I’d let my insides be scraped by a ruthlessly loving knife...like scraping butter off a piece of toast rather than spreading it on¹...that I began to experience the truth of this.

This image marked that moment of change.²

All my journal images from those years painted themselves. When I needed insight I would find my watercolours and start making marks. Something would always emerge, and that image would somehow explain to me what was really going on.

And with this ‘flowering’ image, I learnt that, though the darkness that I experienced around me hadn’t changed, my deepest inner-life had. Womb-like, I had been gestating in the starkness of the dark, a warm wealth and depth and vitality of colour and presence that now sang of the truth of who I really was.

There were ways in which the darkness had indeed become ‘sweet’ to me.

I am now more able to live from a womb-ish authority that somewhat eluded me before. And I find ways to help others, men and women, to cultivate that same dark space of aliveness and beauty in their own lives and bodies. A deep source of strength that we will need to be drawing from in the years ahead. Hidden, internal, replenishing, generative, womb-like sources of energy and wisdom, conviction, courage and care.³

Which is why it is important for women’s voices to be heard. Especially when it comes to cultivating dark inner strength. And I feel the need, in particular, to be hearing women’s voices that have risen, or are struggling to rise, through the clefts in the rock of our historically patriarchal Jesus traditions.

Womb-ish-ness

The word for womb in the Hebrew Bible is ‘rechem’ (רֶחֶם), though various (womb-less) writers also use ‘beten’ (בֶּטֶן), belly, which always makes me smile. It certainly does look like that’s where the baby comes from.

Something that doesn’t get picked up in translation (perhaps because there weren’t many (any) wombs around those tables), is that ‘rechem’ has the same three-letter root, and is very close in sound, to the word ‘racham’ (רָחַם - you can see the vowel-indicators under the letters are a bit different), which means to have compassion, or mercy. You could say they are in the same family of words which, in Hebrew, means you are meant to appreciate the resonance.

Many of us will have heard at least part of Rev Mariann Budde’s sermon in Washington DC cathedral on the morning after Trump’s inauguration ceremony. The part that caught the media’s attention - the last five minutes when she directly addressed ‘Mr President’ - was a plea for such womb-ish mercy towards those in the US that are scared at the moment.

Throughout the Bible, we are repeatedly told to be merciful, or womb-ish. Particularly to those we feel are indebted to us in some way, or that we have little incentive to treat well:

And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Jesus, Luke 6: 34-36

The kind of mercy that Jesus tells His followers to practice is outrageous. It goes against the logic of any ‘good society’.⁴ It devastates our sensible practices of ‘law and order’. And womb-like mercy offers not just compassion, but also a sense of shelter and safety and held care.

Jesus’s words above are translated from the Greek, but if we can allow his concept of mercy to have a Hebraic root, He could be kind of saying ‘be Motherly, just like your Father is Motherly’.⁵

And, sure enough, one of the main words that Father uses to describe Himself through the Hebrew Bible is this disorientatingly womb-ish word ‘merciful’, or ‘compassionate’.

When They⁶ reveal Themself to Moses on Mount Sinai, after Moses, the stuttering one, has pleaded to see their ‘glory’, the first characteristic They claim for Themself is ‘merciful’. So they do basically say ‘I am motherly...this is one of my primary characteristics’.⁷

I love that in preparation for this glorious moment of revelation, G_d tells Moses that They will ‘put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by’ because no-one can apparently see G_d’s face and live.

Cleft-ness...watching from the cracks...speaking from the gaps...from the hidden places...is often blessed in the Bible. Jesus is always excavating the clefts. Seeking out the hidden people. Welcoming their voices. Making space for their bodies. ‘Do you see this woman?’. Provoking them, particularly those women, to stand in their own authority.

I find the way Jesus encounters women profoundly moving. He draws out their strength. Their voice. Their confidence. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be kind of laughable that, within a century or so of his death, that subversive practice in his ministry - the restoring of women’s voices and agency...something that He seemed to really delight in - was being reversed by His church. And remains so in many parts of the Church today.

So, when it comes to the Bible, in the clefts we must search. And I’ll turn now towards some of the womb-ish treasure that we found a few years ago in one of those clefts - the three months that Mary, mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, spent together in their pregnancies.

Women Talking

My friend

Jonathan Rowson

wrote a lovely piece last year about the need for men to seek out opportunities to bear witness to women in conversation with other women. I think he meant in public, but I suspect that, having an incredible wife and so many fascinating women friends (😉), he will have been seeking that out in private too.

And...in my experience (and Jonathan’s too), men really, really, really, really, really enjoy hearing other men speak. Men want to be exploring ideas with other men.

And I don’t blame them. Not only are there a lot of very interesting, insightful, humble, wise, beautiful men in the world. But we are also, in the part of the world that has nurtured my social imagination at least, wired to pay them attention. To expect them to say something of value.

I don’t think we are wired in the same way to expect that value from women. Which means that often we miss what they are saying. Don’t pay it the same quality of attention. Are more skeptical. Distracted by their apparent faults. Their appearance. The tone of their voice.

(Though often that’s ok, because a man may say the same thing in a more polished way a few minutes later...so at least it is heard...!)

Anyway.

I love thoughtful men. And I love listening to thoughtful men. And spend a lot of time doing so.

But there is something that happens when thoughtful embodied women are in conversation with each other that, as Jonathan has (at last!) noticed, allows for something quite different to emerge in their midst.

And, though there is now a lot of backlash, it still seems an important moment for men...for all of us...to prioritise making space for that. Not just for women’s bodies. A woman’s body being included for the sake of it on a panel of men is not just not honouring. From my own experience, the odds are stacked against it even being of much value (my friend

Elizabeth Oldfield

writes candidly about this here).

How women host each other. How women host themselves when they are hosting each other. How they listen to each other. Disagree with each other. Learn from each other. Embolden each other. Take care of each other. Notice what’s emerging in their midst. In conversation with one another.

I agree with Jonathan. This is worth making space for. Moving aside for. Choosing silence for. Bearing witness to. Being changed by.

Not out of duty. I can appreciate something in the rise in resistance to that. But out of desire. Curiosity. Humility. Out of longing for more.

Mary & Elizabeth

Jesus’s life was full of cracks...or clefts. And, through one of those cracks, whilst He was probably still in embryonic form, if that, His mother Mary sang one of the most beautiful, womb-ish, politically devastating songs of all time.

That song is well known.

In various traditions it’s known as ‘The Magnificat’. Bringing down ‘rulers from their thrones’. Lifting ‘up the humble’. Filling ‘the hungry with good things’ but sending ‘the rich away empty’. This is Mary’s radical vision of what the mercy of G_d looks like in action.

Perhaps this song alone makes sense of why religious, theological and political authorities soon determined, and in many places still do determine, to keep women quiet.

But we don’t tend to give much attention to the context from which this shattering-of-worlds song emerged. And, as I read around it, I wanted to make space to witness the conversation between two women (and a silent man) that provokes it.

Now Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, to a city of Judah, and entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth. And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfilment of those things which were told her from the Lord.”

And Mary sang...

In Luke 1, we read that a young Jewish woman, Mary, possibly in her early or mid-teens, having just received some significant news, decides to leave her home town of Nazareth and visit her elderly cousin, Elizabeth, in the hill country of Judea.

Assuming she walked there, the journey would probably take between 3-5 days. Not your average jaunt. And we are not told whether she went alone or was accompanied.

All we know from Luke’s story is that Mary, who was betrothed to a local man called Joseph and was, in all likelihood, a virgin, had just been encountered by an angel, Gabriel. We are told that said angel had been sent by G_d to greet Mary, tell her she had found favour with G_d, and ask if she would be willing to carry a great redemptive secret in her heart, and in her womb. If she was willing, she would be ‘overshadowed’ by the Highest and would conceive a son, to be called Jesus, who would be the Son of God whose kingdom would have no end.

Quite some announcement.

Before waiting for the young woman’s response, the angel informs her that her cousin Elizabeth has, quite improbably, for she was considered barren, conceived a son and is in her sixth month of pregnancy. Such news seems designed to communicate both a sense of companionship, and the idea that ‘with G_d nothing will be impossible’.

As we know from many a Christmas re-telling, this extraordinary, considerate, adventurous young woman said ‘yes’ to this ghastly-glorious gift of a burden.

But the thing I want to focus on here is the haste with which she apparently ‘arose’ and left her home town in search of such womb-ish company. Did she tell anyone she was leaving? Did Joseph hear about the angel? Did her parents notice anything? What was her excuse for such a trip? Did she know how long she’d be gone for? Was it a way to hide the news of her pregnancy for a while? Did she pass a message to Elizabeth that she was on her way?

I tend to dwell on decisions for a long time. Feeling all the feelings. But Mary says ‘yes’ to the angel, then gets up and leaves. Which makes me smile, because one thing Jesus repeatedly does as an adult, when something significant happens in one town, is to get up and leave for another.

When she arrives at the house of her elderly cousin and her priest husband Zacharias, presumably exhausted and a bit stinky if she has rushed there, she greets a possibly startled Elizabeth. And we learn that as soon as Elizabeth hears that greeting, ‘the babe leaped in her womb’.

That ‘babe’ is John the Baptist, whose wilderness-vocation will be to go before his cousin, Jesus, and make people ready to receive his message of salvation, guiding their ‘feet into the way of peace’. He is a fore-runner, who, we are told, is already filled with the Spirit in his mother’s womb. And his leaping recognition at the voice of Jesus’s mother, Mary, opens his own mother, Elizabeth, to being filled with that same Spirit.

This, in turn, provokes Elizabeth to speak out, ‘with a loud voice’ and proclaim how blessed Mary and the fruit of her womb are. She somehow instinctively knows that Mary is carrying her ‘Lord’, wonders why she should be honoured with such a visit, and blesses her brave young cousin, declaring that there will be ‘a fulfilment for those things which were told her from the Lord’.

A woman affirming - confirming - another woman.

I remember being pretty stunned, with the arrival of Covid and our sense of normality being torn apart, at the speed, and the confidence, with which many male writers began to explain to us the time we had entered. Some, who hadn’t previously taken much interest in theology, quickly began to draw on a Biblical imagination to help us make sense of what was going on... eschatology... apocalypse... the Book of Revelation.

There were ways in which it was helpful. We needed some orientation and there was much wisdom and insight. But I also found it a little disturbing. The speed and the confidence, yes, but more the lack of women’s voices. Including mine.

In wrestling that out with a wiser woman friend some months later, she drew me to Simone de Beauvoir’s insight, that, whilst men tend to inherit a cultural expectation to name reality, women do not. They have to learn it - if they even believe they have a right to do it, which the much of the Church, through history, has told them they do not.

So the relief of hearing a woman here, in a book which is assumed to be oppressively patriarchal, naming reality, and ‘with a loud voice’, is a great gift. Like taking gasps of clean sea air when you get out of the car after a long and confined trip.

And this woman, who has felt the reproach of society for most of her adult life because of her apparent barrenness, doesn’t wait for permission from that society to speak. No. She is filled with the Spirit and speaks out, WITH A LOUD VOICE.

And, in response to such a bold, declarative, Spirit-inspired, womb-ish naming of reality, Mary SINGS.

New creation

We are told that Mary stayed with Elizabeth and Zacharias for three months. Presumably, if she arrived in Elizabeth’s sixth month, up until the time their baby was due.

Can you imagine the conversations they had? One improbable pregnancy, due to age and apparent barrenness. One impossible pregnancy, because she has never ‘known a man’. And yet they bear witness to each other’s bodies expanding.

Three months.

Where did they go? What did they share? What wisdom was imparted from older to younger. Younger to older. What kind of comfort and courage did they find in each other’s company? Two miraculous beings. How much did they talk about G_d? How much did they talk about society? Justice? If Mary was provoked to sing of the fall of the ‘mighty from their thrones’ then presumably a lot? What sense did they have of the beings in their wombs? Were they in on the conversations too? This could be understood as their formative experience of the world. Cradled in the sounds of loving, convivial, courageous women’s voices.

And why had I never before been invited, or invited others, to dwell in these questions? An oh so rare moment in the Bible - not quite as rare as in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings but rare none the less - of two women talking to each other. Being in each other’s company. And I’d barely even considered that it might be important.

A theologian whose work I’m growing to love, Willie Jennings, speaks of this moment being THE beginning. When attempting to offer a ‘doctrine of creation’,⁸ he starts here - somewhere between the ‘improbable’ (Elizabeth’s apparent barrenness) and the impossible (Mary’s virginity) - somewhere between John and Jesus - this is where he locates a new beginning... a new creation.

How hopeful that is for these days. Improbability. Impossibility. Women’s bodies. Three core elements of new creation.

And this...’THIS’...cried my friend Liz, as she encountered the story as if for the first time in one of our fortnightly online bible studies...’what if it all turned on THIS...on these women being together...carrying Jesus and John inside of them...and if it turns on this’ - this experience of a kind of conviviality, care, intimacy, warmth, hospitality, adventure, domesticity...this oikonomia of mutuality and deep sharing that essentially births the ‘new’ and cultivates a radical social and political imagination - ‘why were we not told of it?’

New creation begins here. In a crack in the text. A mere comma of a moment amidst the action. Improbability. Impossibility. Women’s bodies.

Witness to a womb-ish authority

I want to begin to draw this to a close, even as I feel it’s only just opening. But before I do, I want to pay attention to a silent witness.

Through those three months of conviviality and conversation, there was a third person present. A silent presence.

Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, was, like Mary, visited by the angel Gabriel. Whilst he was going about his priestly duty, lighting incense in the Temple, an angel appeared beside the altar and told him that his barren wife would conceive and bear a son, who should be called John. The angel tells him about the role his son will play, then strikes poor Zacharias mute until the arrival of John, because he dares to question the angel’s words.

So, in the background, perhaps even foreground, of those womb-ish three months, is a silent man, bearing witness, just as Jonathan recommends, to women in conversation with women.

When the group of us that meet fortnightly were encountered by this story something very beautiful happened. We were three women and three men. Half the group didn’t really know this bit of the story. The other half had never dwelt with any intention in it. So, as ever, we didn’t know what to expect.

And it quickly became evident that the women in the group were themselves arising, with Mary, to walk to greet Elizabeth in the hills of Judea. We were stunned. This window of womanliness and conviviality. On which the rest of the story suddenly seemed to turn. It was so...central.

And, as we began to unpack that and share our experiences, letting our relief and grief and amazement at the authority of these women expand, our male friends, instinctively, began to lean back, out of the space, bearing beautiful witness, in silence.

It was respectful. Delightful. Unusual. Honouring.

Men really taking time to listen to women’s collective experience.

To learn. To care.

It was magical.

For all of us I think. I hope.

At the end of it, Lydia suggested we share this little hint of a passage at an event we would part of a few months later...’put them through it too’. So we did. With friends from the smaller group putting their bodies in to the roles of Mary, Elizabeth and Zacharias, in the middle of a room of 120 people.

Together we paid attention, for a 90 whole minutes, to this tiny whisp of a passage, witnessing two women in conversation, in the presence of a silent man. Interrogating the characters. Sharing what we noticed. What questions were arising. What feelings were provoked.

I remember a friend saying to me afterwards that, when he saw the passage I was planning to draw people’s attention to, he feared I had gone mad. There was nothing there. Just a woman walking to another woman’s house and greeting her. He felt terrible for me. It was going to be a disaster!

But it was the opposite. In feedback from the weekend, most people mentioned that session as a highlight, stating how rare it was to have a chance to collectively witness the power of a woman in conversation with another woman in such a way. Particularly when it comes to the Bible. And how struck they were by the silence of the man.

As I drew that session to a close, I remember asking the group to pause and sense in their bodies what was going on and whether there was anything they needed to share.

Two beautiful women, who hadn’t yet shared anything, put their hands up. And here was the real treasure. Two womb-ish women sharing their experience of witnessing a room full of people pay full attention to two other women practicing their own womb-ish authority, witnessed by a silent man. And they both voiced similar things.

Deep grief. And deep relief.

There is an awesome moment at the end of this story, which I’ll write more about another time. Elizabeth, emboldened by her time with Mary, says ‘NO’ to the community, when they try to continue the familiar pattern of naming her son Zacharias.

NO! No to the status quo. No to familial ways. No to civic religion. She has heard from God. ‘He shall be called John.’

She names reality again, but this time in public.

The silence of her husband makes space for her to practice her own authority. And Zacharias only gets his voice back when he affirms, in writing, his wife’s declaration, ‘his name is John’.⁹

And all of this is written, plain as day, in the Bible.

Newness breaks in, through the womb-ish authority of a woman, backed by the divinely sanctioned silence of a man.

May we women learn to rise up, learn to speak up, learn to sing out, learn to bless. May we learn to name reality. From the dark of the womb. In the tremulous Spirit. Tender darkness over the face of the Deep.

If you know people that would find this post helpful, please do share it with them.

An endnote: I know that some readers’ experience of wombs will not be easy. Mine isn’t either. But the complexity held in the darkness of the womb, even in the absence of the womb, becomes part of the strength, and the wisdom. Look at this stunning embroidered Bleeding Vessel, for example, created as a medically exact image of the artist’s womb, with all of its pain and beauty and dis-ease recorded in precise detail. What a powerful work of art and what a stunning, redemptive way to honour ones own strength and wisdom and experience.

Womb-ish writing: Whilst writing this, I read Em Strang’s beautiful reflection on darkness and nothingness (it may be for her paid subscribers, but in her writing you’ll find much on these womb-ish themes). I fell in to Sharon Blackie’s piece on reclaiming women’s stories (‘so that women from these islands might remember who we are’). And I returned to my beloved, wildly womb-ish friend Julie Dunstan’s reflection on Mary’s Song, and her friendship with her cousin Elizabeth. If you would like to start engaging meditatively with scripture in an accessible, embodied way, I recommend her publication, Streams in the Desert.

And finally, I don’t even know who this rather remarkable man was, but, at the end of

Perspectiva

’s 2022 event, where I was invited to share alongside other ‘wise-women’ about what Christmas meant to me, he asked about Mary’s song and then began (with the help of whizz pianist

Michael Bready

) to sing it…

1. A gentler image can be found in my piece Shibboleth, where I use the metaphor of being washed in a ‘glad stream’ to convey a similar sense of being scraped clean.

2. John of the Cross does inform the reader that such ‘sweetness’ is the fruit of the dark night - and that his poem is therefore written with hindsight - but I still felt angry.

3. On reading this, my friend

Rebekah Berndt

sent me this carved out poem, Mother Wisdom Speaks.

4. I wonder what JD Vance makes of this passage - or any other vice president for that matter.

5. I attended my first Orthodox service last year, and reflected afterwards that it was an experience of a deeply feminine kind of patriarchy.

6. I’m aware that the ways I reference G_d may be baffling for some, and infuriating for others. G_d is beyond ‘He’ or ‘She’. ‘They’ takes account of the plurality of the ‘Elohim’ in the Hebrew Bible, and of the Trinity, and includes masculine and feminine. To be honest I use a mix of pronouns. And I write G_d to be close to the Jewish practice of writing G-d, but, for now, it helps me to underscore the absence/not-knownness. That may annoy you, but that’s ok. Things about you would probably annoy me too. :-)

7. This doesn’t mean He isn’t also straight out Fatherly.

8. I’ll write about this soon and share relevant links etc.

9. We don’t know how Elizabeth knew to call her son John. Perhaps she had her own vision...felt it in her womb. Or perhaps she heard it from John, in which case this passage speaks of a beautiful mutual submission and surrender...a making space for each others authority.

It is often the case that women name reality in private, and men name that reality in public. It is lovely to imagine this reversed here. Zacharias shares in private that their son will be called John. Elizabeth announces it in public.