The Sin of Hiding

I think that the following Mitazi Minor article is extreme on the side of feminism, especially the naive, condescending, and disrespectful view that the Syro-Phoenician woman "bested him in the argument." However, she makes some good points and the "sin of hiding" is descriptive of people I know.

I like better the C.S. Lewis quote from Letters To An American Lady (see previous blog entry):

“I have often had the fancy that one stage in Purgatory might be a great big kitchen in which things are always going wrong — milk boiling over, crockery getting smashed, toast burning, animals stealing. The women have to learn to sit still and mind their own business: the men have to learn to jump up and do something about it. . . . It is simply my lifelong experience — that men are more likely to hand over to others what they ought to do themselves, and women more likely to do themselves what others wish they would leave alone. Hence both sexes must be told “Mind your own business”, but in two different senses!”

following is quoted from:
SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Summer 1991, Vol.43 No. 2, pp. 134-141
http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/91432minor.html

Mitzi Minor:
The Women of the Gospel of Mark
and Contemporary Women's Spirituality

bold font added by blogger:

CONTEMPORARY women who are seeking to nurture the spirituality both of themselves and of other women have discovered the need of women to develop their own sense of self, to become fully human, so that they are able to relate to God and to others as whole persons capable of developing and sharing their vital energies and creativity with the world. This need is a result of the reinforcement by most patterns of family and education of two roles for women: (1) women are socialized into being desirable objects who dress, think, and act in order to receive acceptance and adulation, especially from men; (2) women are socialized to live for others, that is, to submerge themselves in others' identities, needs, interests.(1) A woman who has been so socialized can give up too much of herself so that nothing remains of her own uniqueness. She may come to view herself as an emptiness seemingly without value to herself, to her peers, or, perhaps, even to God, writes Valerie Saiving (37). In such circumstances, this woman's sin, instead of being encompassed by such terms as "pride" or "will-to-power" (definitions of sin constructed primarily on the basis of masculine experience)(2) requires other terms such as triviality, distractibility, lack of an organizing center, dependence on others, inability to make decisions for oneself, sentimentality, mistrust of reason, weak submissiveness, fear, self-hatred, jealousy, timidity, manipulation -- in short, underdevelopment or negation of self (Conn 37,39,11).

Susan Nelson Dunfee has called this sin "the sin of hiding" and notes that it results in a woman expending her energy not in the acceptance of her own freedom and full humanity but in running from that freedom by pouring those energies into the lives of others (319). To have a healthy spirituality, women must "repent" of this sin. Furthermore, according to Karen Barta, instead of pursuing what is often viewed as the highest Christian virtue (i.e. self-sacrificing love which makes negation of self into a virtue),(3) women must first seek to become fully human by being self-asserting and self-possessing so that they have the courage to expose themselves to the fears and dangers involved in being fully responsible for themselves (94). By such claiming of themselves they come to understand themselves as whole persons with worthy contributions to make to God's creation.

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NOTES

(1) Joann Wolski Conn, "Women's Spirituality: Restriction and Reconstruction," in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, ed. Joann Wolski Conn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 10-11. In a similar vein, Sandra M. Schneiders, "The Effects of Women's Experience on their Spirituality," also in Women's Spirituality, writes of women being socialized to "nonpublic" roles. In public roles, a woman is "male-dependent" -- the daughter of, the mother of, the sister of, the wife of someone who had a name in a way she never would" (32). Both of these articles were originally published in Spirituality Today, the former in Winter 1982 and the latter in Summer 1983.

(2) Saiving (35). See also Wendy M. Wright, "The Feminine Dimension of Contemplation," in The Feminist Mystic and Other Essays on Woman and Spirituality, ed., Mary E. Giles (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 109.

(3) Dunfee (321). Dunfee also noted that the sin of hiding actually hides under the guise of self sacrifice (322). Conn, in "Women's Spirituality," claims that "women are led to believe they are virtuous when actually they have not yet taken the necessary possession of their lives to have an authentic 'self' to give in self-donating love. They are often praised as holy when they are still spiritually dwarfed" (12).

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WORKS CITED

Barta, Karen A. The Gospel of Mark. The Message of Biblical Spirituality Series, vol. 9. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988.

Conn, Joann Wolski, ed. Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.

Dunfee, Susan Nelson. "The Sin of Hiding: A Feminist Critique of Reinhold Niebuhrs Account of the Sin of Pride." Soundings 65 (1982).

Saivin & Valerie. "The Human Situation: A Feminist View." In Womanspirit Rising. Ed. by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.