Maybe the Women at the Cross were Doulas
The evangelical church—and our nation—would be doing better if there were more women (way more) in leadership.
People with uteruses bring perspective that people without uteruses cannot fully appreciate. Women & trans men may trace their deconstruction back to a reproductive trauma: a miscarriage, an abortion, a traumatic delivery, a stillbirth, an infant death, infertility, postpartum depression.
We who gestate life often know grief more intimately than those who do not. This does make us superior, but it does give us a perspective that is generally unheard in conservative churches. No one escapes the pangs of death, but there is a particular agony when death happens INSIDE YOU, when death demands that you labor under immense physical pain to deliver the dead earth-side — with no respect for your already-tattered emotional state, when death was supposed to be birth, when an end was meant to be a beginning.
If those of us who carry life & death within were leading churches, I have to think there would be less spiritual bypassing. Fewer pat answers. Less “God has a plan” & more sitting shiva. 💔
We have a different experience of God. We have a different experience of “his goodness,” of “sovereignty,” of “provision,” of “victory over the grave.” Our bodies are graveyards. We know the underbelly of faith. We are the Lamentations & Ecclesiastes in a church that hypes Paul & Revelation.
Women know all about “How long, O Lord?” Those of us who bleed every month but do not die know all about “This is my body, broken for you. Take & eat.” People with uteruses literally embody communion via pregnancy, birth, & nursing. The giving of one’s body on behalf of another? 15,000 uteri expel new life into the world every single hour, but those same bodies can’t even serve communion in evangelical churches because they aren’t qualified to offer “the body & the blood.” 🤦🏻♀️
Sometimes I write about birth, not faith shifting. It bothered one pastor so much that he rescinded a job offer from my husband because of my “edgy” blog. It was unintentional then, but I was asserting a subversive theology — one in which women are powerful. One in which birth is powerful, & actually death is too.
We create life. We destroy life. We “go & prepare a place” for a new miracle every month...& we sacrifice our emotional well-being, our physical comfort, & a week’s worth of our life-force to refresh that place in our Mother’s house for the next hopeful capsule of possibility. When our Mother’s house becomes occupied, we intercede with “groanings too deep for words” to deliver our weak progeny into the Mother’s whole wide world.
Women are so much like God. Pastors & elders & fathers told us “God” says that man was not created for woman, but woman for man. They told us “God” demands that we not teach men. They insisted in “God’s” name that we were more easily deceived & therefore fragile.
They didn’t want us to figure out how similar to God we truly are.
A female spiritual guide, a person with a uterus who has divested patriarchy’s hold, she/he/they has likely borne death in their person. It’s said that Jesus’ male disciples fled from his crucifixion, & save John, only the women remained until the end. Well of course they did. They were Jesus’ doulas. They knew. They were thinking of burial spices. How many times had they each uttered, “it is finished” as they stared at their own blood? They knew all about feeling the trauma & death of others inside your own body, your own soul, the agony of being pierced & bleeding out.
I named her Zuzu. She was 11 weeks gestation & I bled her out into a random Walgreens toilet. I drove home alone covered in blood. 2 years prior my doula client had died in childbirth; her baby along with her. 2 years later I started asking faith questions.
Churches will not be safe until many more women are leading them. Many more queer & trans people. Many more BlPOC. Many more disabled people, neuroatypical people, those with chronic pain & mental health conditions. And as many holy intersections of these identities as possible.
The powerful are lions not lambs, and woe to us for electing a vicious lion to the presidency, a natural consequence of worshipping a lionized Christ. If Jesus is actually a lamb as we claim, then the people best equipped to tell his story are those also deeply acquainted with suffering, the victims of religion’s unflinching laws.