For ten years I regularly saw a family at the bagel shop I frequented many mornings; a mother, two daughters, and a son, the son being in the middle child with an older and younger sister. I assumed the mother was home-schooling her children given the time of day I saw them and the fact that they often drilled academic subjects together. By the long dresses, lack of makeup or jewelry, and uncut hair of the mother and girls, I also assumed they are a part of a holiness tradition.
I admired this family. They were happy and had fun together, sometimes too much fun for the pastor dosing on caffeine in the next booth. I had at times wanted to pull out my hair on hearing another Latin verb congregated with enthusiasm! They behaved lovingly to each other and polite to everyone in the bagel shop. And they were devout, often discussing biblical subjects and always praying over their bagels.
I also admire their holiness tradition. Courageous willingness to live out radical distinctiveness (to be holy, separate) based on biblical convictions provides an important critique of society’s values that we all should note carefully. Holiness tradition invites all Christian traditions to consider the dynamic balance of being, “in the world but not of the world.”
There came a day, however, when this family changed in a way that saddened me profoundly and still weighs heavy on my heart when I recall the moment I realized what had happened. I had watched two older children reach adolescence. The oldest left behind her childish look and took on the striking appearance of a young teen-aged woman. The middle child, the son, began having a hard time determining what octave would come out when he opened his mouth. But these physical changes were not what caused my sadness. It was this. One morning as I was listening to the son’s awkward falsetto-basso warble I realized he was praying over their bagels. The mother had always led the children in prayer; often times having the children recite some blessing along with her. The son praying alone was a change. After a few mornings of confirming that this was the new pattern I knew that the son had reached some milestone in their religious tradition that required his mother and his sisters to be spiritually subordinate to him. Now he prayed and the three women with him, two of them older, sat in silence. Three female voices were muted before God because a teenaged boy was now over them in their spiritual hierarchy.
This family did get points for consistency. If Paul’s letters are interpreted to demand that a woman be silent and have no authority over a man, even to the point of a mother not praying in front of her son, then one should also interpret those same scriptures as forbidding the women jewelry and haircuts which this family did as well. They faithfully expressed their conviction of how to be separate from an unholy world and for that, even in my sadness, I continued to respect them for their devotion, sincerity, and commitment to live out faithfully their understanding of God’s will for their lives.
But what is the nature of the world that I want to be holier than and to separate from if I want to be faithful in my devotion to God? For me, “worldliness” would include perpetuating by participating in our patriarchal, sexist, society where men hold a vast majority of the power, and in which women are too often victims of that power; where women are more likely than men to be poor and to be kept poor by receiving less pay for the same work; where roles in family and church are assigned according to gender instead of ability, giftedness, or calling. Would not a holy, distinctive, in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world, position be to follow the example of Jesus? Our Lord ignored the gender-determined rules of his patriarchal culture. Jesus drew men and women into his circle of believers, defying the sexist norms of his society. Jesus treated everyone with the same dignity and love. Should not we do the same? I think so. I want the church to be holy, different from this world, by living out the equanimity of the gospel. That is the critique of the unjust, unholy, sexism that I want us to provide by our holiness.
Quiet Faith 