Religious Scholar

The scriptures of all major traditions abound with scenes in which holy men impart their teachings to large groups of people, sometimes to huge crowds meeting outside the city limits. When I read or hear these accounts, my mind’s eye twitches. When I try to put a face to the gathering, I can’t focus. I keep receiving an incomplete picture, like a scrambled message from an alien planet (which is probably an apt metaphor for the past).

Men, men, men. What’s a post-modern woman to do? Everywhere we look in the sourcebooks of spiritual development, men are “the finger pointing to moon,” to use a Buddhist phrase, and, for the most part, men are the elect who hear the message. How can people today relate to this? If, as we learn in so much of Eastern thought, eternity exists only in this present moment, what does it mean to be heirs to traditions that exclude half of the human race?

For my own part, I engage in a little poetic license. Sitting in church, hearing the thrilling words, I imagine the rapt desert wonderers consisting of women as well as men. Women with shining eyes, some taking notes, perhaps, on a 4^th century B.C.E. version of a PalmPilot. I envision some priests with beards, others with breasts. I create a mental mural that is distressing in its political correctness, but a possible way in which autonomous people, who equally share the modern world, can look back without anger.

So-called inclusive reworkings of scripture occasionally may stretch the boundaries of what we mean by “translation;” but I think it is the lesser of two evils when we couch the sublime old messages in language that 100 percent of modern people can hear. I embrace all the world’s major faith traditions in essence, and my own tradition in practice, but cannot with any shred of conscience accept a worldview that progresses to the present day exclusively through the paternal line. Certainly, focusing on gender distracts us from the core message of all religions: tolerance and peace, compassion and love. These qualities know no gender and are mechanisms for our salvation in the distractions of daily life. Let us pursue them, each of us, man and woman, as we look within and into each other’s eyes in the one world in which we are living, now and possibly forever.