Chili All Over the Kitchen

Tonight, Pam and I had the great fun of spending a couple hours with Kathy Escobar, co-Pastor of The Refuge in Bloomfield, Colorado. She has been in Portland this weekend with her husband José, visiting with the folks at The Bridge. She spoke at church this morning, and I do want to talk about some of what she said there...in another post. Right now I want to talk about our "girl time" this evening.

If you know any of the three of us, you can guess what subject we spent most of our evening on: Women (and girls) in the Church. Their roles in church leadership, marriage, and their relationships with each other. We even spoke for awhile about the issues facing young women who are growing up in the church today.

As the last year or so has gone on, I have found myself increasingly aware of something I am passionate about. I desperately want to see women set free from evangelical bondage...that of their roles as women, wives, daughters and mothers; for some of you, those statements reek of feminism. I won't apologize for it, but I will qualify it. I don't want women to become men, I want women to become themselves.

I have spent most of my adult life in the biblical womanhood role, and this is a dangerous thing, one which I liken to a pressure-cooker. While I have heard there being some disagreement as to whether or not an actual pressure-cooker will ever literally explode, this imagery in reference to a situation is widely accepted as meaning such, and so I choose to use it.

When a woman is subjected to years of traditional teachings about submission and subservience, when she is taught how to dress, how to behave, how to talk, how to think...which like it or not is what is happening in much of modern Christianity, even in progressive Christianity...eventually she will explode; meaning any turn of events which will release the pressure, and often it will be ugly.

Because the food my husband and I had been fed about biblical roles for husband and wife are so twisted and wrong, neither of us could ever completely swallow it. I tried, mind you. I read all the books, I did the good wife thing, I served every way I knew how. I choked it down, making every effort not to retch in the process. But in the end, not only did this pressure destroy my personality, my husband hated that I had gone from colorful to shades of gray.

When we met, I was windy and wild; all vivid, Technicolor me. That is the woman he fell in love with, he told me so. But over the years, decades, evangelicalism washed all the color right out of me...load after load of cheap detergent and hot water. Burning and washing, taking great care to strip from me every last bit of who I was as an individual, and raising up a monochrome stepford wife. Some of you might call this process transformation, I call it oppression, for nothing in my heart of hearts was ever transformed, it was simply controlled, pressurized.

You might feel I am speaking too strongly about my experiences; I assure you I am not. Words cannot convey the ways in which I compressed my true self, smaller and smaller, until it became the black hole of who I used to be. For years I strove to be that Better Christian Woman; it damn near killed me, that is not an exaggeration. Three years ago now, I struggled intensely not to kill myself, it was only facing the reality of my kids growing up without me that prevented it. I no longer had the strength to be Better Christian Woman, and I collapsed. There came a place of meltdown, a critical mass when my evangelical cooker failed and suddenly there was chili all over the kitchen. There is no Quicker-Picker-Upper in the world that could have handled it.

All those years of pent-up, pressurized, Technicolor Erin exploded all over the place. She was dying to get out. Yes, it was messy for awhile, but something strange happened. Jesus came along with His transcendental paper towels and began cleaning it up. It's taken three years to come this far, not to say I am healed, past-tense, but healing, Present Perfect Progressive. He's still cleaning, but I'm complete in Him, as I am, in who I am in this very moment. I don't need to be pressure-cooked, I'm already done.

Never again will there be chili all over my kitchen.

Pt 1: Chili all Over the Kitchen
Pt 2: Harlots, Heretics and Hussies
Pt 3: Liars and the Men who Love Them
pt 4: A Narrow Path, a Crooked Line, Fly