The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free PDF

picking up where I’d left off, trying to make sense of things. I wrote about how odd it was that at the same time I wasmaking these retreats in monasteries, going to Eucharist, and meditating on the words of Merton and St. Francis, I was going to a Baptist church—not just on Sunday mornings, but also on Sunday and Wednesday evenings—where the emphasis was not on symbol and silence and God in the soul but on evangelizing and preaching and God in the word. I was a contemplative in an evangelical church, which is sort of like trying to squeeze a round soul into a square slot. It was all I could do to hold the tension between them. I had one foot on shore and the other in a boat that had started to drift.
    But despite the inner tension, I kept trying to adapt. The Southern Baptist Church had been the fabric of my religious existence since childhood. And if that wasn’t enough, I was married to a Southern Baptist minister who was a religion teacher and chaplain on a Baptist college campus. That alone was enough to keep me securely tethered to the flock. So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.
    I filled pages about my life as a Baptist.
    I recorded the time Ann, then eight, tugged on my dress during a church service while the minister was ordaining a new set of deacons. “When are they going to do the women?” she asked.
    â€œThe women?” I echoed.
    She nodded. Her assumption of equality was earnest and endearing. These days you will find a few female deacons in the more moderate Southern Baptist churches, but not so much then. I’d felt like a harbinger of cruel truth when I told her, “They don’t ordain women, honey. Only men.”
    She had frowned, truly puzzled.
    That day in church, the words only men, only men, only men went on echoing in my head for a good five minutes, but it soon passed. With a little more ripeness, I might have conceived a new female life that long-ago day, but then I was too consumed with staying in line and being a good and proper woman, something that renders you fairly sterile as far as feminine journeys go.
    Writing down that memory reminded me of the time I was eight and had my own first encounter with “cruel truth.” I was in the church yard during Vacation Bible School. It was hot. Georgia hot. The girls sat under a tree, making tissue paper corsages, while the boys climbed the limbs above us. I could not remember how it started, only that a quarrel broke out—one of those heated boys-are-better-than-girls or girls-are-better-than-boys arguments that eight year olds have with such verve. Finally one of the boys told us to shut up, and, of course, we wanted to know who’d made him our boss. “God!” he said. “God made us the boss.”
    So we girls marched inside to the teacher and asked her point-blank if this was so. We asked her with the same earnest and endearing assumption of equality with which Ann had posed her question to me. And, like me, the teacher was slow to answer. “Well . . . actually . . . technically, I guess I have to say the Bible does make men the head.”
    â€œThe head?” we asked.
    â€œThat means in charge,” she said and looked at us as if to say, I know, I know, it’s a blow, but that’s the way it is.
    I stared at her, amazed. I had never heard anything like this before, and I was sure it had to be a mistake. A big mistake. I mean, if this were true, then women, girls, me—we were not at all what I thought. At eight I couldn’t have expressed it fully, but on some level I knew what this meant. That we were less than males and that we were going to spend the rest of our lives obeying and asking permission or worrying if we didn’t. That event and others like it would eventually limit everything I ever thought about freedom and dreams and