Women’s History Month – Peculiar Faith

Here’s Mud in Your Eye! Earth Healing for Lent

When the conditions on a racetrack are just right, and when one of the horses is clearly leading the others by at least a good body length or so, the hooves of that lead horse can kick up clumps of dirt and mud, which can land in the faces of the horses trailing behind.

That horse-racing image crept into American taverns in the late nineteenth century as a toast while clinking beer mugs and signaling victory for the speaker: “Here’s mud in your eye!”

Clouded or obscured vision tied to one’s standing in a race is one among many examples of physical sight as way to speak of knowledge or insight. “Oh, I see,” someone might say, referring to nothing in their physical line of sight but rather to their cognitive acuity.

This figure of speech and its many analogues are remarkably widespread, across nearly all cultures. Some have even suggested that eyesight—the physical act of seeing—is the primary way we gather information about the world around us.

(I have to say, I’m not entirely persuaded about the primacy of vision. American philosopher Richard Rorty was fond of pushing against such claims by wondering why seeing something should give us more knowledge about it than, say, rubbing up against it, or hearing it, or embracing it. The obsession with ranking lurks around these possibilities, too, as if we must always identify the best or the only way truly to know something for really real.)

The common contrast between dark and light, between shadow and illumination, likely plays a role here, too: what we truly know has come into the light of day. Nearly all of the world’s religious traditions embrace such contrasts to describe enlightenment and spiritual awareness, and the Lenten lectionary gave us a classic story about this just yesterday, the story from John’s account of the Gospel (9:1-41) about Jesus giving a man born blind the gift of sight.

“Healing of the Blind Man,” Anthony Falbo

Images of light paired with sight create the moment of divine encounter in this story when, as we like to say, “seeing is believing.” John notes directly the spiritual significance of this moment as it becomes entangled with religious regulations. While the gift Jesus offers surely counts as a reason to celebrate, the religious leaders of that man’s community are thoroughly skeptical and even resentful about it.

In fact, this long reading from John’s Gospel is mostly about religious resentment, about a near-comedic refusal of those first-century religious leaders to recognize a moment worthy of shared praise and celebration. John likewise uses images of sight for such religious folly with a reversal of fortune motif: the one born blind, now can see; the ones who should have seen, are now blind.

Full transparency: I’m a religious leader, too. I’m just as complicit in religious foolishness as those first-century figures. I know only too well how easy it is to get so caught up in the gears and gadgets of institutional religious life that we miss the very life-giving presence of God among us—we just can’t see it!

Religion can cloud our vision, but so can patriotism, and nationalism, and ethnicity, and money, and gender. Our social identities and strategies for navigating our relationships can act like blinders, rendering us oblivious to the wider world all around us.

“Wake up!” says the Pauline writer to the Ephesians—another great image for insight and awareness in yesterday’s lectionary texts (5:8-14). Waking up, of course, can happen in a number of ways, including opening one’s eyes and seeing, but also (as Rorty would remind us) touching, listening, showing up, paying attention, living bravely, forming communities of trust, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable, to name just a few of the many ways we can awaken to God’s presence.

Two weeks ago, the Lenten lectionary gave us Nicodemus at night, under the cover of darkness; last week, the woman at the well in the bright light of day; and now sight for the man born blind: throughout John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus is waking people up, and showing them the truth, and inviting them to walk the good road toward abundant life.

John is also clear about this: traveling that road is risky, and not everyone is happy to see the truth come to light, and seeing truly may well cost us nothing less than everything—this Lenten road leads to the Cross, after all. And let’s not fail to notice that the gift of sight to the man born blind cost him his religious community, his home, his friends, and family.

To “wake up” and begin seeing even hints of the truth can cause us to question where we really belong, and with whom, and for what purpose, and to reject even religion if it offers anything less than thriving, authentic life.

I love the First Nations Version of this story, an indigenous translation our parish enjoys during Lent. In that version, the man born blind asked Jesus to tell him who the Chosen One might be, and Jesus said “look at me”—to the one born blind, he said look at me and see the One chosen to live as the “True Human Being”—woke, compassionate, devoted to healing.

Yes, and, all of that said, why the mud? Seriously, why mud?

Jesus encounters this man born blind, and his first impulse is to spit in the dirt, make mud, and smear it on the man’s eyes? Really? I’m surely not the only one who is just a bit too germ-phobic to relish the idea of having muddy spit on my eyes.

Why would John—supposedly the highly sophisticated, intricately philosophical Gospel writer—why would John include this literally dirty detail? Doesn’t this seem, well, rather primitive and crude, especially by modern Western standards?

Reading this story in the First Nations Version prompted me to reflect a bit more than I usually do on Jesus firmly planted in the land itself—on Jesus, in other words, as indigenous to the land of the Mediterranean basin. He was not only an itinerant preacher and teacher, but also a traditional healer. (A number of insightful thinkers continue to help me bridge my Western Christian convictions and indigenous practices, including Randy Woodley.)

Indigenous healers of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds around the world are typically attuned to what we modern people often call (sometimes dismissively) “natural remedies.” In that light, of course Jesus is rooted in the Earth, the land, and yes, the dirt as he makes mud for a healing salve.

Reading such stories from a gilt-edged, leather-bound book extracts these earthy stories from their natural habitat. We have so sterilized and sanitized and intellectualized these ancient texts that we have all but forgotten their fleshy origins in the land, in the dirt itself, which it turns out has healing properties.

The Latin word for soil is humus; that’s also at the root (as it were) of the word “human.” Dirt is not inert; it brings forth life, and not only our life—the soil itself teems with all sorts of life.

“When the Light Breaks Through,” Catherine Picard Gibbs

The failure to thrive that leads to death happens quickly when we tear apart the bond between human and humus, between creatures of Earth and the soil. That certainly describes today’s ecological crisis, and the deadly consequences of removing ourselves from Earth herself, where—along with the air and water—God’s own Spirit of life resides. (Yet another example of religious blindness is my constant struggle to suppose God resides somewhere “out there,” way beyond the sky, the stars, the edge of the Universe itself; the Spirit of Life, the Source of all living things is instead everywhere around us and in us–and I’m convinced that this conviction alone would change the world.)

These traces of traditional healing practices—and regardless of whether the Johannine writer intended this—evokes the indigenous bonds to the land which we need so desperately to recover today, and suggests what a twenty-first century Lenten practice really ought to entail: repairing our relationship with Earth.

It just so happens that we’re reading this story not only in Lent but also Women’s History Month. So let’s be sure to note how patriarchal systems associate Earth-based traditions with women (and are thus easily dismissed), while text-based traditions belong to men (who hold the power of interpretation and thus authority to decide what is true). More pointedly, feminizing Earth makes her suitable for male control, for ravaging, and for plundering, and for extracting resources whenever we please. This is exactly and literally and not merely metaphorically what Jeffrey Epstein was doing with girls and women on his Island of Misfit Billionaires.

Repairing, it seems to me, likewise means this: refusing to choose between Earth and Text, between healing and knowledge, or indeed between female and male.

Either/or, binary choices are part and parcel of the problem that wounds us, and they are far too limiting in the wonders of a world God has created, not for division and separation but for communion. John’s Jesus is, in every Johannine story, perfectly attuned to the energies of Earth and also to the presence of Creator God; his ministry (and most of the so-called “miracles”) quote often consisted in revealing and disclosing that deep harmony between Earth and Creator for the sake of healing and abundant Life.

That harmony (and the communion it creates) is the precious circle of light into which we are invited to step—or really, urged to step. There’s no time to waste: Let’s step fully into that light and shine as beacons of the Gospel in a grim and violent society, inviting others to wake up with us, not only to see with the heart, but to feel with the soul, and to hear with ears tuned to the rhythms of God’s presence thrumming and vibrating in the loamy soils of Earth.

Jesus spit into the dirt and made mud; Jesus made mud pies, and then he spread them on a blind man’s eyes for the gift of sight: returning to Earth—repairing and healing our relationship with Earth—this will make us shine, just like Jesus, as light for the world.

(And by the way, among the many things such light would illumine—to recall where this blog post began—is hope for horses to live a life free of entertaining humans. Severe suffering often results from their coerced performances, and sometimes dying in horrible pain because of it. The efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City continue for that reason as Mayor Mamdani indicated his commitment to ending the practice, but opposition to the ban has been fierce. It’s time to invite other species with us into that circle of Gospel light—free of saddles, free of harnesses, free of human domination.)

“Spirit of the Horse,” Gordon Henry (known as a “ledger artist” who used pages from commercial ledgers as “canvas” to create images of vitality of the very natural world that had been reduced to commodities on that paper.)

Women’s Lib Comes to a Village in Samaria

A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.

It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.

A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.

So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.

Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.

That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.

John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.

I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.

The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.

It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.

To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.

Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!

But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)

Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.

Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.

John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.

I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.

Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.

John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.

Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.

Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.

As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.

That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.

The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.

As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).

Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.

Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.

Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.

Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.

Praying with Palimpsests

In the ancient Mediterranean world and also in many parts of Medieval Europe, finding suitable writing materials—animal skins, tree bark, and parchment—was often challenging. When none were readily at hand, writers would sometimes scrape or scrub the writing off old manuscripts and write on top of those newly scrubbed spaces. Traces of the old writing sometimes remained under the new, and a document like this with multiple layers of writing and images is called a “palimpsest” (from two Greek words meaning “rubbed smooth again”).

One notable example of such a document is the so-called “Archimedes Palimpsest” (a detail of which is pictured below, courtesy of the John Hopkins University). The history of this document sounds like a sequel to Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Archimedes lived a few centuries before Jesus and is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. A copy of one of his scrolls was used centuries later by a Greek monk, in the thirteenth century, who wrote Christian prayers on top of those ancient essays about mathematics.

The monastery prayed with this palimpsest for many years before it was stored away in the vault of a large church in Constantinople and then bought by a French antique dealer in the 1930s. Scholars later realized the ancient history of the parchment when it was taken for appraisal, and since the late 1990s it has been undergoing careful computer-assisted analysis to decipher as much of the underlying text by Archimedes as possible.

One of my theological mentors in graduate school was fond of thinking about the history of Christian traditions like a palimpsest, a long history of multiple layers, not all of which are clearly visible or fully distinguishable from the later additions. Rather than supposing that the earliest layers are somehow “better” (truer or more meaningful) than the later ones, the richness of Christian history instead appears in their complex intermingling. We might even think of our own lives as an extended palimpsest with many centuries of genetic mixing and cultural layering and ethnic intermingling to create who each of us is today.

I was reminded of all this after reading the lectionary texts for this coming Sunday, the fourth in Lent; the collection of texts, together with Eucharistic liturgies, strike me as a kind of biblical and doctrinal “palimpsest.”

We will hear John’s Jesus refer to his own death by recalling an ancient story from the Hebrew Bible about Moses in the desert lifting up a serpent on a pole; that story in turn evokes the potent image of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (which we won’t hear but I, for one, can’t help but think of it), and a number of commentators have suggested that John’s account of the Gospel could be read as ancient Christian commentary on Genesis, which we are now reading today after many centuries of Christian reflection on the meaning of crucifixion. That’s quite a complex textual and theological history for interpreting the Cross of Christ!

As we approach not only the texts and images for this coming Sunday but also as the complexities of Holy Week and Easter rapidly approach later this month, I find it helpful to realize and also appreciate that we are praying with palimpsests.

I know that sounds rather arcane and a bit religiously nerdy, but perhaps both helpful and vital when put in conversation with Black History Month (just concluded) and now Women’s History Month. These occasions bring to mind some of the troubling aspects of what we might call “cultural palimpsests.” Some state legislatures, for example, are actively trying to erase Black history, scrub it clean from our history books, and “whitewash” it—which is at least one very good reason to make sure that churches and also public spaces in the United States include images of Jesus that are Black and Brown and not merely white and terribly European.

More than this, and as I was searching for an image of the Archimedes Palimpsest, I stumbled upon an artist who inspired me to think about how one palimpsest might overwrite another. Perhaps that’s more complex than it needs to be—or at least that’s what I thought until I saw the images from Coral Woodbury.

Woodbury has paid careful attention to the erasure of women in patriarchal societies, or the way the significance of women is “overwritten” by the contributions of men. She is especially committed to reinterpreting Western art history from a feminist perspective, especially for the recognition of women artists who have been “scrubbed” from that history.

One of her recent exhibits is (appropriately enough) called “Palimpsest” (one of the pieces in that exhibit is reproduced at right, the image of a woman superimposed over the text from a history book about ancient Babylon). Books are a recurring theme in her work, a way to “connect humans across time,” which is exactly what a palimpsest does or can do. For Woodbury, books function as a kind of metaphor for human lives and communities: the spine of the book holds the pages together just as our own spines hold our skeletons together.

Multi-layered texts and bound books—I can’t help but think about one of the sources of our word “religion,” from the Latin verb religare, to “bind together,” like ligaments manage to do for our bones.

In a world that feels fragile, as if unraveling, perhaps falling apart in slow motion (or rapidly in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention the Antarctic), something about the dense complexity of human societies, how they are held together over time, gives an odd sense of comfort.

There have been times when I have wished for a bit less complexity in my life and a few more clearer edges, but the “thickness” of the Lenten lectionary invites me to reflect a bit differently this week. After all, palimpsests can evince both a layered richness and an occluding varnish at the very same time. I might even cling more fervently to the “old rugged cross” this Sunday. We’ll be singing that classic as our closing hymn, and in palimpsest-like fashion, I might relish how early Christians imagined that cross as a budding tree, planted perhaps on our Lenten road toward Easter.