A few weeks after my novel, Widow's Walk, was released I was visiting with my neighbor, Cecile. She was curious about one of my first published books, WomanChrist, and asked if I had a copy. I did. It was a second-hand
Amazon.com copy, rather battered, with a sticky-note inside the cover that read:
“Cheryl--yes,
this book is Really weird! (I
had no idea when I bought it 😊) But bear
with it—she has a lot of good ideas about being a woman today while also being
Religious. Hope you enjoy it— (it’s not just to skip around and browse
through)!!”
Cecile might get a laugh out of that, I thought. Her
reaction after reading the book was, “This is your best book! It’s so current. How could you have
written this all those years ago? It’s actually prophetic.” She was the first one
who told me to republish it.
It had been written on my very first computer, more like a glorified typewriter and neither DOS-based nor Windows-based. I had only the published book; if I intended to publish a new edition, I would need to retype the entire thing. Okay. I started typing. After weeks of typing, I reached Part Two, and breathed a sigh of relief. That weekend Microsoft downloaded a massive update which collided with my virus program and wiped out my entire project. Must be a sign, I thought, and gave up. The next weekend, at Art Presence, a gallery where I've done readings, I was talking with Hannah West, a web designer in Jacksonville, Oregon, who listened to my woes and suggested that she might be able to scan the entire published book into an MS Word format. I was back in business.
(The following is from the Introduction in the new edition)
M
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ore than thirty-five years have passed since I began
writing WomanChrist, and it has been
out of print for many of those years. From time to time, though, people have
reminded me of the power it exercised and not just in its early years. When
Harper, San Francisco offered me a contract for it, I confess that I was quite
overwhelmed. Somehow during the excitement of acknowledgment by a major
publisher, plus my conviction that this vision was one needing to be shared, I
failed to consider how controversial it would be.
The book was not yet released when I took
galley proofs with me to a retreat for professional women ministers in
Grailville, Kentucky. The participants represented a variety of Christian
denominations from Catholic through both liberal and conservative Protestants.
Those of a more Fundamentalist belief system tolerated me—for a while. Then a
group of them took me aside for my first real dressing down. Listening to these women who were devoted
to their own Christian faith as I was to my own, I realized what a gulf existed
between basic conclusions we had drawn about the meaning our differences
presented for the world in which we, as women, lived. I had upset them in a
radical way even just by the word, WomanChrist. It was heresy in their eyes.
They said I was more Pagan than Christian, and I really
should not be leading the retreat.
They
weren’t the last. After the book was published I was invited to give the
keynote lecture to the pastoral ministers in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St.
Paul. All went well at the talk, but not long afterwards a conservative
Catholic organization brought their concerns to an auxiliary bishop there who
condemned me and the book in the diocesan newspaper. I countered with an op-ed
of my own. The bishop relented just a bit by admitting he hadn’t read the book
himself! Something about this book really rankled some folks.
Other
people saw it as profoundly significant. Deep in the winter of 1988 I was asked
because of my authorship of WomanChrist
to participate in an international seminar on Catholic feminist theology and
social justice. We met in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the College of St. Catherine,
to engage in study and discussion of women’s issues based on our research,
theological study, personal experience, and professional ministry. Two bishops
from the United States joined us as listeners. The participants came mostly
from the Americas (North, Central, South and Canada). Africa also was
represented. At last, I mused, we are making an impact—we’re on the edge of
deep and lasting change.
It
was a beginning, I think now, wondering what each of those talented and active
women took back to their communities from our discussions, even sometimes our
inability to reconcile our differences. The world is vast, and change takes
more time than I imagined.
In
1998 I was writing my first novel, Altar
Music, and belonged to one of the first Internet lists discussing the role
of women in the churches. Suddenly it seemed I was someone they knew. These women had read WomanChrist which had been in print by
then for over ten years. They were women in the trenches, most of them hiding
there, keeping silent about their church’s treatment of them over the years.
“That book saved my life,” one woman wrote. Another woman, hoping that women’s ordination
would arrive soon in the Roman Catholic tradition as it had for the
Episcopalian women, graduated from seminary at the head of her class, but had
to be satisfied with carrying the cross at the head of a procession of her
classmates, then step aside as they entered the sanctuary to be ordained.
Just
as at the seminar, there were women from around the world on that list, and for
most of us it was our first experience of the Internet and being able to share
our frustrations as well as our wisdom beyond the boundaries of home, church,
and neighborhood. They critiqued my novel, and I shared in discussions about WomanChrist.
After
the book went out of print, and then was available only in the second-hand
market, I continued in other ways to live and share the vision I’d written so
many years before. I began to make distance between myself and the church as an
institution which still blocked our gifts from being shared. In 2010, though, I
was asked to give a retreat on Spirituality and Beauty. I agreed.
Just
a few days before the retreat a priest, the other half of the retreat team,
came to me with a question: “Are you a believer in Jesus Christ?”
“What?”
Why in the world would he ask me such a thing? We’d worked together on the
content of this retreat, and he had to know the answer to that question so well
he should not have needed to ask it.
He
told me, somewhat apologetically, that a group of women had come to him,
complaining about my qualifications for leadership. They had looked me up on
the Internet and found WomanChrist
along with all Google’s references to the book and to various people’s
interpretations and judgments about it. It seemed to appeal to groups these
women considered not only “not Catholic,” but heretical. Might it be dangerous
for them to read what I’d written or listen to lectures I might give? I was pretty sure that, like the bishop back
in the 1980s, these frightened and angry people hadn’t read the book, nor
considered the reliability of their Internet source. The priest shrugged,
saying he’d picked up a used copy and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
It seemed orthodox enough to him. Together we gave the retreat, and I’m pretty
sure none of the dissenters attended.
WomanChrist remains controversial.
The paperback is now available at Amazon.com and at CreateSpace.com.
Click on WomanChrist
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