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What is it to be a woman in the fullest sense?
***
It's been just over a year since the feminist theologian, Mary Daly, died.
People felt many things about Mary Daly and what she taught, wrote and espoused. In
reading about her and her life, I found that feelings ranged from celebration to
vilification.
I hadn't heard of Ms. Daly until just a year before she passed away. For anyone who has
read the scholarly works of the feminist movement, Mary Daly is a staple. However,
even though I reached womanhood in the '70s, and even though I personally witnessed
the way the feminists of the second wave were vilified, something that still haunts me to
this day is the fact that I didn't really read feminist scholarly works. When I first read
some of what Daly wrote, albeit the tamer bits, I was blown away by the ideas she
brought to the table.
"Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical
Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin," she wrote in the opening of "Sin
Big," her New Yorker piece. "The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root
'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for
a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the
fullest sense is 'to sin.'"
That is a bold, bold statement: "For a woman ... 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin.'"
Mary Daly was one courageous woman. For many, she was way too out there in her
feminist radical philosophy. She was confrontational. She pushed the limits of what it
means to be a feminist, and she pushed them hard. She set the parameters. She was
willing to go toe to toe with the deeply held principles of patriarchy, the structure that
espouses and enforces domination as a way of life. Many found her to be just as
oppressive as those she was confronting.
I have found a very wide spectrum of opinion about Daly, her philosophy, her manner,
her life, and pretty much everything else you could think of. Mark Vernon of The
Guardian wrote, "She was an audaciously creative spirit; an awkwardly witty, deadly
serious writer. She arguably did more to stretch what is possible to think in
contemporary feminist theology than any other."
At the end of Vernon's post, the comments created a stream of back and forth banter
that, in itself, was telling of the spectrum of opinion on feminism, and the still-very-
much-present gender upheaval that exists in the world. Even after her death, controversy
still surrounds Mary Daly.
***
But back to my question: what is it to be a woman in the fullest sense?
As I consider the ramifications of Daly's statement, that to fully be this female human
being that I am is "to sin," I wonder, does this point to the most basic premise that we,
as women, are already sinners simply by being, by breathing, by existing? Basically,
this is the whole Eve complex, the fall from grace, the idea that we women are
responsible for sin.
It then follows that if we do something to minimize our fullness, meaning we learn how
"to be" in the "not-fullest" sense, then we mitigate our sinning potential, so to speak. We
minimize how much of a sinner we are.
I have to admit, when I am really honest with myself, that many of my 54 years here on
this Earth have been filled with an underlying, nauseating sense of something being
wrong with me, solely because I am a woman. I know I have minimized myself in order
to not feel this.
If I could somehow be less "womanly," less "seen," heck, just "less," then I would feel
less, meaning I wouldn't have to "feel" being a woman.
To see it in this raw form, though, to see it so bluntly equated as woman=sin, felt
sickeningly true, not intellectually, but somewhere in my psyche. Some part of me
believes this. But, where did this come from? Where did I learn this?
***
Adyashanti, a teacher of awakening, speaks of the word sin and its meaning, which in
his words means "to miss the mark." Upon researching this, I discovered this:
In the Aramaic Language and culture that Jesus taught in, the terms for "sin" and "evil"
were archery terms. When the archer shot at the target and missed the scorekeeper
yelled the Aramaic word for sin: it meant that you were off the mark, take another shot.
The concept of sin was to be positive mental feedback. Sin is when you are operating
from inaccurate information and thus a perceptual mis-take. When you become
conscious and aware of the results of your inaccuracy, you have the option to reconsider
what you have learned and do as they do in Hollywood, "do another take." By the way,
where the arrow fell when it missed the target was referred to as evil.
So, this derivation of sin would have been about the time of Jesus.
Diving further into the etymology of the word, I found this definition of the word sin,
one that comes from more recent times:
Definition of SIN
Origin of SIN
Middle English sinne, from Old English synn; akin to Old High German sunta sin and
probably to Latin sont-, sons guilty, est is -- more at IS