Role Bending
Bob Wickizer
Genesis 18:1-10
A few years before 1400, English woman Margery Kempe married and gave birth to her first child that same year. She had daily mystical visions and was tormented with her own sinfulness. She would wail and cry in public to the embarrassment of clergy and town officials. Her incessant tears were claimed by some to be a fraud and eventually friars and church officials would confirm her tears and religious expressions to be evidence of the Holy Spirit. After seventeen years of marriage and over fourteen childbirths, she wanted to devote herself to God and negotiated a chaste marriage with her husband. His initial response by the way was to say ''OK but only in two more years'' which yielded two more children.
Although she never joined a religious order, Margery spent several days visiting a contemporary mystic, Julian of Norwich, who confirmed that Margary's spiritual experiences were authentic. Margary dictated her life's journey in what would become the world's first autobiography. It is a landmark in English literature. The fact that she taught other women that they could have authentic spiritual experiences without the mediation of the priests or the church was an early challenge to the authority of the church. She was two centuries ahead of the Protestant Reformation.
We may find her behavior odd and certainly not in keeping with our image of the traditional Medieval woman, but that is a universal reaction in any age or time to those who cross the accepted social boundaries bending roles and expectations. Perhaps the problem is not with those who bend roles but with the rest of us who feel too trapped in our self-made prisons of how we think things should be.
The story of Mary and Martha is so familiar to us that we even name church groups (almost always women) for them. The story is so familiar that it is the constant subject of really bad sermons about the greater importance of listening to Jesus teach ve ...
Bob Wickizer
Genesis 18:1-10
A few years before 1400, English woman Margery Kempe married and gave birth to her first child that same year. She had daily mystical visions and was tormented with her own sinfulness. She would wail and cry in public to the embarrassment of clergy and town officials. Her incessant tears were claimed by some to be a fraud and eventually friars and church officials would confirm her tears and religious expressions to be evidence of the Holy Spirit. After seventeen years of marriage and over fourteen childbirths, she wanted to devote herself to God and negotiated a chaste marriage with her husband. His initial response by the way was to say ''OK but only in two more years'' which yielded two more children.
Although she never joined a religious order, Margery spent several days visiting a contemporary mystic, Julian of Norwich, who confirmed that Margary's spiritual experiences were authentic. Margary dictated her life's journey in what would become the world's first autobiography. It is a landmark in English literature. The fact that she taught other women that they could have authentic spiritual experiences without the mediation of the priests or the church was an early challenge to the authority of the church. She was two centuries ahead of the Protestant Reformation.
We may find her behavior odd and certainly not in keeping with our image of the traditional Medieval woman, but that is a universal reaction in any age or time to those who cross the accepted social boundaries bending roles and expectations. Perhaps the problem is not with those who bend roles but with the rest of us who feel too trapped in our self-made prisons of how we think things should be.
The story of Mary and Martha is so familiar to us that we even name church groups (almost always women) for them. The story is so familiar that it is the constant subject of really bad sermons about the greater importance of listening to Jesus teach ve ...
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