Quote from The Upside Down World – A Book of Wisdom in Progress copyright R. Trotter 2011
Don’t feel this way yet? Read this: You are a Beautiful Woman.
Tag Archives: women
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The Book of Job: The Happy Ending
As the dozen or so people who read my blog know, this past week I’ve been looking at the last chapters of the Book of Job. As I said before, these passages have always bothered me because they don’t make sense. Why would a loving and compassionate God show up and affirm that Job did not bring his suffering on himself and then tell him to sit down and get in line because he’s just a little peon? And why would Job respond with satisfaction at God’s answer? So, I went back and re-read these chapters this past summer and realized how much I had been missing.The earlier installments are here:
Book of Job Chapter 38: Guessing
Book of Job Chapter 39: Our animal friends
Book of Job Chapters 40-41: Defense!
So today, we reach the end of the Book of Job. Chapter 42:
Then Job replied to the LORD:
2 “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”This is usually read as Job saying, “yes God, you are right. I am a peon and have no cause to complain no matter how much I am suffering.” But if we look back at what God has actually said, a slightly different picture begins to emerge.
I believe that God’s message was basically this: “Job, you are right that you do not deserve this and I am here to do for you what you cannot do for yourself: bring down the wicked and foolish who see your destruction as reasons to be proud and contemptuous. But I did not make you defenseless. Look at who I made you to be; when you do not understand you imagine things that are sometimes beautiful and true. You have taken the wild animals I created and found those suitable to your own purposes and made them serve you. But do not behave like a domesticated animal. Look at the behemoth who I made along with you – it fights. You know how – you have imagined for yourself creatures more fierce and untameable than any that walks the earth. Fight!”
And Job understood enough of what God was saying to see that sitting in the dirt listening to his friend’s theories and defending himself wasn’t the answer to his problems. He was in a spiritual fight and he now understood that he needed to fight back.
Next:
After the LORD had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has. 8 So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.” 9 So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad theShuhite and Zophar the Naamathite did what the LORD told them; and the LORD accepted Job’s prayer.
This is not only a matter of God reprimanding Job’s friends. He is actually asking Job to do for his friends what he used to do for his own children. (See Chapter 1) God is actually entrusting Job with his friend’s spiritual well being just the way was in the habit of caring for his children’s spiritual well being.
Next:
After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before. 11 All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the LORD had brought on him, and each one gave him a piece of silver[a]and a gold ring.
12 The LORD blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. 13 And he also had seven sons and three daughters. 14 The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch. 15 Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers.
16 After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. 17 And so Job died, an old man and full of years.
There are a couple of things that I want to point out here. First, God’s primary restoration is spiritual. When God gave Job twice what he had before, it wasn’t just a physical thing. Secondly, we can see from Job’s behavior that he continues to go above and beyond in following God spiritually. In her lovely book Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament, Hebrew scholar Ellen Davis points out several significant things about the ending passage of the Book of Job. First of all, the names of his daughters and not his sons are listed. This is never the way it works in scriptures. Not only are the names listed, but the names are outrageous. Jemimah is a reference to a beautiful queen of arab folklore. Keziah is the name of a spice tree used for perfume. Keren-Happuch is a type of make-up. It’s like naming your daughters Cinderella, Passion and L’Oreal. And they were beautiful. And Job gave them an inheritance along with their brothers which was just as extravagant a gesture as the outrageous names. Why this particular reaction? I would guess because its a particularly potent way of fighting back the enemy. Job is a devout man who knows God. His is a deliberate rejection of a commonly accepted lie of the enemy: that women are less than, worth less and not to be valued as highly as men. And I love that Job could of no better way to fight back against the enemy with so much force that he will never forget the battle than to honor his girl children. No wonder God blessed him so greatly!
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You are a beautiful woman . . .
Ok Gentlemen, if you could leave us alone for a moment, I have something I’d like to share with the ladies real quick. Well, I guess if you want to pass this along to your wife or daughter, you can stay and eavesdrop.Now, ladies I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that as a culture we have not only fetishized flawless female beauty, we have made feeling bad about our bodies and beauty a virtue. Hopefully you are as lucky as I am and you have a husband who has managed to convince you that you really are beautiful and that the odd lumps of your figure are sexy rather than repulsive. However, I suspect that many women go through their whole lives not feeling entirely comfortable with themselves. Which is a shame.
I have heard that once upon a time it was generally accepted that 1 in 5 women would be classically beautiful. The other 4 could be comfortable in their plainness, or dowdiness or oddness and rely on the power of their personalities and femaleness to be attractive to the 4 out of 5 men who were likewise not going to win beauty contests. Today it seems that we all feel obligated to either achieve beauty or to feel badly about ourselves.
What is funny is that men do not seem to look at us this way. I remember reading a man who was describing his wife. From the description, this woman was no looker. She had a bad overbite and smallish, round eyes with rounded cheeks. However, he seemed to be oblivious to the fact that his description of her painted a less than beautiful picture. He thought she was adorable – like a cute chipmunk. He had been married to her for decades and she was now a wrinkly chipmunk looking woman and he still delighted in her.
Years ago I knew a woman with teenaged sons who told me that she wished she would have realized when she was a teen how in awe of girls, from the homely to the gorgeous, teenaged boys are. She said that girls were like kryptonite to her sons. If these girls only knew the power and pull they had on the boys around them, they wouldn’t worry so much about droopy hair and zits. They too might be in awe of the power they have by virtue of existing in female form.
I was reminded of all this today after reading a really lovely article by author Walter Kirn at Elle.com (of all places) about his love for the beauty of “unconventional-looking women who too frequently call themselves ugly or imperfect”:
In the fairy tale, Cinderella goes unnoticed until her appearance is magically transformed to match little girls’ ideal of loveliness, which they grow up believing is little boys’ ideal of loveliness. This belief is wrong, though. And I should know, because I’m a grown-up boy who longs for Cinderellas who’ve never touched a pair of glass slippers—who are plenty alluring barefoot. I prefer them to some princesses I’ve danced with. . . The charm of a barefoot Cinderella is that her beauty obeys no formula and therefore can sneak up on a man. When he becomes aware of it, he feels like he’s discovered a secret. And secrets are always exciting.”
You should go over and read the whole thing. And then send it on to your mothers and sisters and daughters. And lest you think his generous view of women is just one man’s view; at the end of the article, he explains the source of French women’s infamous sex appeal:
An American pal at my grad school back in England had warned me that Parisian femininity would tempt me to relinquish my U.S. citizenship, and I’d assumed that what he’d meant was that I’d find myself surrounded by beauty queens with magazine-cover faces and centerfold figures. The reality was quite different, though. As the strolling women neared my table, what loomed were their protruding noses, their conspicuous ears, their overly broad shoulders. As they passed, I took note of their formidable posteriors, their lack of any posteriors whatsoever, and their oddly squat or boyish physiques. What lingered when they vanished, however, was their heartbreaking seductiveness.”
They came in all shapes and sizes, these French ticklers, but rarely in the standard ones. The cut and drape of their appearances was haute couture, not off-the-rack. Until I saw them, I hadn’t realized how many ways there are for women to be themselves—their best and most enchanting selves.”
Ladies, we have been lied to. We don’t have to be perfect and thin and standard to be beautiful. The men in our lives know that already. But we need to believe it for ourselves.
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A Christian Feminism
Last month, I wrote two posts about women in the bible. One arguing against the idea that women are uniquely called to submit and men are ordained to lead. The other on the proverbial Proverbs 31 woman which has been laid on Christian women as an impossible ideal to strive for. I haven’t covered all of the verses addressing women in the church and in marriage on this blog. However, in years gone by I spent a lot of time reading, researching and praying over all of these verses. I could blog about them all, but at this point, it would just be variations on a theme.When I first started looking at the issue of women in the bible, I wasn’t particularly attached to any particular set of ideas about women and men. Of course, as a child of our times a more egalitarian ideal made a lot of sense to me. However, I also knew that we get a lot further by conforming ourselves to God’s ways than to our own ideas, so I wasn’t closed off to the idea that a subordinate role for women was something I would need to make peace with.
If anything, trying to make peace with a subordinate role was my goal in studying women in scriptures. There was some thing deep within me which rebelled at the idea. I figured that if I could learn more about what God had to say and why, the idea of being under men would not be a source of pain, but would be a source of life, as all things which come from God are. If you read what I have written previously, you’ll see that the more I studied the matter, the more it became clear to me that using scriptures to demand that women take their place under men was an abuse of God’s word. At the very least, it was blazingly clear that equality in all things between men and women was not in conflict with scriptures.
However, even if we get to the point where we can see that, it still begs an important question. Why did God allow scriptures to be written in such a way that they were so easily manipulated to put women at a disadvantage? Surely God knew that this would happen and could have made things clearer – not left half His creation so vulnerable to abuse by those claiming to act in His name. Continue reading
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Liberal Misogynistic Ideology
I’ve spent a fair amount of time around here going after my conservative compatriots, so today I’m going to turn my poison pen on liberals. Odds are good that by now you’ve heard of wackadoodle Yale art student Aliza Shvart’s senior project. She claims that she repeatedly impregnated herself using artificial insemination, induced miscarriages, video taped it and collected the bloody mess. She made a large plastic cube with the miscarriage matter mixed with petroleum jelly between plastic sheeting and played the video onto it. The school says the miscarriages were faked. Shvarts insists they are real. Remember when art was about beauty?Any ways. my point in bringing this up isn’t to get into nonsense posing as art. What interests me, is what this woman claims the “purpose” of her project is:
to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are ‘meant’ to do from their physical capability. . . it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child.”
As Joanne Jacobs put it, “she should have taken more bio(logy), less art.” Shvarts seems to be working within a peculiarly misogynistic strain of feminism here: one which views anything which is particular to women as demeaning and which often views a woman’s body as an enemy to equality. Continue reading
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The Proverbs 31 Woman
I recently told my husband that Proverbs 31 was like Cosmo for Christian women; it presents a completely unrealistic image of what a woman should be. Some women get together with their girlfriends to study it earnestly and try to follow its tips and guides to be more like what is presented. Some women look at it and just feel awful about themselves because they know they can never live up to the perfection they see in it. And then there are women who grab a pint of hagen daz to eat while looking for all the tell-tale signs of the copious amounts of airbrushing it takes to make a woman look like that. I mean, the Proverbs 31 woman gets the flax, spins it into yarns, weaves the fabric, sews the garments and keeps them sparkling clean at all times? Not to mention running a vineyard, playing the real estate market, making meals, blah, blah blah. What about the servants? When do they get time to weave their own fabric? What about the nanny who can’t keep her clothes clean because the kids keep wiping hummus on it? Does she lose her virtuous woman status? (Obviously I fall into the “looking for signs of airbrushing while eating ice cream” camp of women 
)However, the fact of the matter is that this is in the bible, so it must be there for a reason, so simply writing it off as unrealistic and ignoring it isn’t really a good option for us. Yet it’s a totally impossible vision of womanhood. So what are we to make of it? As I mentioned yesterday, one of my rules for studying scripture is that when the bible appears to be contradicting itself or real life, that is usually a “red marker” which indicates a place where we need to dig deeper. Usually there’s more going on in these spots than we realize. The Proverbs 31 woman seemed like a perfect example of scriptures being in conflict with real life, so I decided to dig a little deeper. I came across these text notes at Next Bible on Proverbs 31: Continue reading
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Women’s Roles in the Bible
I have two rules which guide me in my study of scriptures:1. If the bible is unchanging, then it can not have been intended to communicate one thing to the people to whom it was originally given and something entirely different today. If our modern common sense reading of scripture is in conflict with how the ancients would have understood the same verses, then our modern understanding is wrong, no matter how obvious, universally held or apparent it is.
2. Where the bible appears to be in conflict with its self or with the real world around us, this should be seen as a red marker pointing to something which needs to be explored further. Too often we try to explain away these contradictions or make the unacceptable seem more reasonable when what we really need to do is pray, study and dig deeper. In my experience I have frequently found that these “red markers” point to areas where there is a problem with translation or our modern assumptions are interfering with our understanding and on occassion, I have even come to see that some aspect of our understanding about God or life is entirely off base and needs to be adjusted.
These two rules have served me well, although what I learn from applying them frequently leaves me well outside of mainstream Christian opinion on some issues. I haven’t quite decided yet if that is a good thing or bad thing and what I’m supposed to do with all that, but time will tell.
At any rate, one of the most vexing problems of scriptures for us moderns is the bible and women. My first revelation that there might be something wrong with our modern approach to what the bible says about women came years ago when my husband and I were newly married. We were having a really hard time and I went into a Christian bookstore looking for some sort of answer which would rid us our misery. While browsing through books, I came across one which claimed to explain the biblical injunction for wives to submit to their husbands in such a way that a woman could be at peace with her role. The key, this author claimed, was that women had the easier part; while women were called to submit, men actually had to LOVE their wives. You see, the oft quoted verses first tell women to submit to their husbands and for husbands to love their lives. Since only husbands are instructed to love their wives, this author reasoned, women were free to despise, hate or just be indifferent to their husbands so long as they were submissive towards them. Continue reading
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My Gay Marriage Manifesto
Over at the Crunchy Cons blog, Rod Dreher has a post entitled “Liberty and Limited Government” in which he uses the issue of gay marriage as an example of the inherent difficulties surrounding the ideas of liberty and limited government. Needless to say, a discussion about gay marriage ensued in the comment boxes. I want to share what I posted as my “manifesto” on why I do not support gay marriage because I think that as a whole, those in favor of a traditional definition of marriage have not done a good or even honest and fair job of explaining their position. So here’s mine:
Traditional marriage served the purpose of largely confining procreation to two parent families which are the most stable, create the least need for government supervision and on average (although certainly not in all specific cases) creating the healthiest, most responsible new citizens for the perpetuation of the society. Even in cases where a couple choose not to, or were unable to procreate, marriage was still useful for ensuring that the fertile spouse would not run the risk of procreating on the “free market” and any unintentional pregnancies took place within the confines of marriage. Continue reading
