"No, no, they can't
take that away from me.
They can't take that
away from me..."
I woke up this morning with Judy Garland's "They Can't Take that Away from Me" bubbling around in my head. This particular video makes me happy -- her exchanging the female models for male dancers makes me smile and seemed an appropriate keynote for this post. The song -- well, only the title is relevant.
I thought I'd written about this experience years ago, but a deep dive into the more than 700 posts on this blog didn't turn it up. So, in light of Women's History Month I thought I might revisit it.
Our daughter was just a tiny infant. It was my first week in south Africa and after a challenging start to our adoption journey together, we were peacefully settled on a friend's game farm near the Botswana border. We'd arrived during a hunting party and one morning after the men and boys left on safari, our host and I settled in to read the Bible Lesson together.
I sat with my new daughter in my lap, listening to my new friend read from Scripture, and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. It was a deeply peaceful moment for me. At one point her middle school age son came in to explain that he had decided not to join his dad, brothers, and their guests but would be heading down to the watering hole to spend time birding. He was sad that his older brothers had teased him about not being "man enough" to go hunting.
I could tell that this was sad for him -- and for his mom. After he left the room, we resumed our reading of the Bible Lesson. The very next verses from Scripture were from the story of Adam and Eve -- an allegory in the Book of Genesis that as Mary Baker Eddy explains in Science and Health is:
"a statement which is the exact opposite
of of the scientific truth as before recorded...
a false history in contradistinction to the true."
The true that Eddy is referring to is the First Chapter of Genesis account of creation where God makes man in His imagine and likeness -- male and female. An account which closes with the benediction:
"And God saw everything that He had made
and behold it was very good.
Thus the heavens and the earth
were finished, and all the host of them."
Then my friend read this passage from the Second Chapter account of Adam and Eve -- the false story:
"And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man."
I think my breath stopped rising in my chest for just a moment. Everything became very, very still. I will never forget hearing - as clear as a bell: "Man's womanhood was never taken out of him. This is a lie." I shared this with my friend and we sat there for a very long time talking about this remarkable truth.
As I looked down at my sleeping baby, I could see -- and feel -- her wholeness. She was not just a beautiful baby girl -- she was everything in the universe. She was the very expression of God's completeness. And I was not her "mother" I was her parent. I was the expression of that Father-Mother wholeness -- and so was her dad.
We are all whole. We are not male or female, but male and female. We are each complete. This wholeness is the key to our health -- a word whose etymological root is in the word "whole." An etymology which it shares with the words well, wealth, wellness, holy. We are all whole, wholly intact and holy. Each of us. We are not parts of one another, or portions of the divine. We reflect that All-in-allness of God's being.
Later that day my friend's young son came in happy and eager to share that his brothers had spontaneously offered to stay back from the afternoon shoot, and help him work on his birding stand near the watering hole.
There is rarely a day that goes by, that I do not think of that moment in a colonial South African kitchen when I saw with absolute clarity the imposition on man -- men and women -- of that false account of creation in which man has his womanhood removed from him. What a lie. Claiming the wholeness of man, is every woman's divine right.
We are not defined physiologically, but spiritually. We are the direct -- pixel-for-pixel -- image and likeness of God who is Father-Mother, Love. There is nothing missing from any one of us. Just because I have white hair, and my sister has brown hair, doesn't make us different "kinds" of humans. Physiology has no bearing on our wholeness as children of God. God is All-in-all, we are each that likeness -- All-in-all of us.
As we celebrate National Women's History Month, I hope we can begin to recognize and celebrate the spiritual wholeness of man, woman, child. Son, daughters, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles,he, she, child, parent, them, they... We are all whole -- we are not parts, we are not defined by our parts. We are defined by Love, reflected in love.
offered with Love,
Kate
Lovely!
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