the cassandra pages

Can We Please Put the Women in Charge?

This week, as the 2007 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women conference ends in New York, the Anglican women delegates responded to the all-but-one-male Anglican archbishops who met in Tanzania and issued a stern ultimatum to the American church and its progressive attitude of gay rights: do it our way, or you will be exiled from our communion. Unlike the men, the women pledged "to remaining always in 'communion' with and for one another" as a model for reconciliation. The report is from the Episcopal  News Service:

In the view of the Anglican women, the Primates' warning is inconsistent with the Christian mission of reconciliation and compassionate ministry, and a decidedly male approach to struggling with difference. All of the Primates are men of power, they note, except for Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

"The women of the Communion have, I believe, moved from bewilderment to outrage at the ways in which a small cabal of leaders have continued to insist that the issues exercising them alone over human sexuality are inevitably to preoccupy us as well," said Jenny Te Paa, an Anglican UNCSW delegate and ahorangi, or dean, of Te Rau Kahikatea, the College of St. John the Evangelist in Auckland, New Zealand.

"The arguments are all a male ancient power play for territory and ownership of space, be it physical or theological," agreed Phoebe Griswold, a UNCSW delegate from the United States. "The women's ways forward have to do with working for the welfare of creation and the full flourishing of humankind."

Griswold is the wife of the just-retired presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold, and she has traveled all  over the world with her husband on Anglican matters; she was a strong and consistent voice for justice for the Palestinian people during her husband's tenure as presiding bishop.  She helped found Anglican Women's Empowerment (AWE), an international grassroots movement which promotes gender equality and women's voices for humanity and justice. AWE was behind the effort to bring women from all provinces of the worldwide Anglican Communion to the UNCSW.

What the Primates have failed to realize, Te Paa said, is that "the priority focus for Anglican women always has been the pressing issues of life and death, which are daily facing too many of the women and children of God's world. How can we compare the needless horrific suffering of women and girls being brutally raped when collecting firewood or water with the endless hysteria of male leaders wanting to debate whether gay men have full humanity or not?"

It's interesting to read their statements in light of the earlier, Ash Wednesday reflections here about taking on repentance "for the whole community."

...For the Anglican women, the mission to work together to heal God's world takes precedent over their theological differences. In their statement, they pledge to live out reconciliation for the sake of a suffering world.

"This sisterhood of suffering is at the heart of our theology and our commitment to transforming the whole world through peace with justice," the statement says. "Rebuilding and reconciling the world is central to our faith."

How proud I am to be an Anglican woman in their company.

Old Wounded Men

He greets us from an armchair in the lobby, and gets up slowly, groaning. There’s a wan smile. “Our usual table is reserved,” he announces, and hands his bag and cane to J. Fifteen minutes later we’ve all gotten our food from the buffet – it takes him a long time now – and are seated. “What sort of soup is this?” he asks me, staring at the thick white liquid in his bowl.

“Clam chowder. The New England kind.” He turns up his nose.

“It’s good,” I tell him. “There are lots of chunks of potatoes in it too, along with the clams.”

“Eech,” he says unhappily, searching through the bowl with his spoon. “I don’t want chunks of anything.” These days, what he likes for soup is broth.

“So how are you?” I ask.

“No good,” he says, shaking his head. “Declining very rapidly.” It used to help when I reminded him that while the part about decline might be true, the rate wasn't, since he’d been saying the same thing for years; today I don’t try that logic. He is declining, and any protestations to the contrary would be denied for the pretense that they were. None of us can tell how steep a slope he’s on, though, so we do our best to ignore it and talk of other things, but as his world narrows that becomes harder and harder. He can’t hear the television or radio and find world politics very depressing; his eyes won’t allow him to read much, though he still tries; he has limited meaningful or mind-stimulating conversation now that most of his friends have died; he no longer writes letters, and phone conversations are getting very difficult. He looks forward to sitting with us after these lunches, in his own room, surrounded by books and papers, having a conversation that ranges easily from one subject to another: the usual tour of the family members, what he’s gotten in the mail, what he thinks of Bush this week, what he’s reading, how his friends are, who’s been to see him. When we can, we try to engage him in stories about his childhood or career, or the subjects he taught and cared about. Today he’s crotchety, and he doesn’t seem to want to stay on any particular subject, except to ask me to explain about the Anglicans in Africa, and then, when I do, he tells me the whole problem is because my church has lost its orthodoxy and is becoming just like the Unitarians – which is particularly ironic, considering that he was a Unitarian Universalist minister. “You just want someone to hold the line,” I tease him, trying not to allow myself to get annoyed. “You want the Catholics to be Catholic.” He smiles a little, caught out, and tells me about a former Episcopal priest in the same town where he served. “He was a good man,” he said. “And very orthodox. But I felt closer to him than any of the other ministers in town.” Tomorrow, he’ll call and offer a half-hearted apology, saying he was very tired.

I’d like to talk to him about the article in the Times the other day, about using the story of Philoctetes to instruct young medical school students. Philoctetes was a Greek warrior who, according to one version of the legend, was bitten in the foot by a snake when his ship – bound for Troy – stopped for a while. The wound festered and refused to heal, and its stench was so severe that he was left on the island while the other sailors continued on. In the play that Sophocles wrote about him, Philoctetes is an old, lonely, bitter man, complaining constantly about his wound and driving everyone away from him. When a young man, who turns out to be the son of Achilles, appears on the island, he is repulsed but also drawn to the suffering old man; he wants to leave but can’t. His mission, masterminded by the wily Odysseus, who waits offstage, is to steal Philoctetes’magical bow and arrows, since it has been prophesied that only they can kill Paris and bring an end to the Trojan War. But that becomes secondary to the moral questions of suffering, loneliness, and awakened compassion that Philoctetes – this ancient Greek counterpart to Job - brings up.

Others have been moved by this story: Seamus Heaney used it as the basis for a play, “The Cure at Troy,” moving on from the action in Sophocles play to follow Philoctetes, who, after Achilles' son gives him back his bow and arrows, goes with Odysseus back to Troy – against his will – is cured of his wound, kills Paris (the one whose love for Helen started the whole bloody mess in the first place), and becomes a hero. I haven’t read Heaney’s version, but will search it out. I doubt if my father-in-law has read the Sophocles play either, in spite of the statue of Socrates that sits beside him all day. But it’s the sort of thing he used to like to talk about. Now that he’s “on the sad height” himself, I wonder.

The medical students, of course, were supposed to put themselves in the place of the young man: entreated to stay and talk, to show compassion, even when they could do nothing to effect a cure. I thought of the research team whose work I’ve helped publish for years, who ask the most difficult questions about our health care system: “Is more better?”; “How much is enough?” “What kind of care are we getting – and what do we really want - at the end of life?” I thought of a Montreal friend, a nutritionist who works with the very elderly and ponders all the bypass surgery that is done routinely now, and often ends up prolonging the lives of people who would have died years before – like my father-in-law – but, she wonders, to what sort of quality of life at the end?

“In some ways, it really would have been better if I’d died back then, before my surgery,” he told me once. “I was still vital, still engaged, still doing work. Still in the thick of it!” When he says that, he’s judging a whole decade in the light of the past two or three years, and begging me to disagree. And while I may not argue anymore with “declining rapidly”  I will continue to refute this one. He was an excellent candidate for bypass surgery, and in his case, I think the resulting years probably were worth it by just about any measure – including his own estimation, when he’s being honest - even though he outlived his wife and has had several years of increasing limitations. I think of his face last year when his book was published: as in the case of Philoctetes, there was more to be done.

Papillons d'amour et leurs cousins

In fifth grade, every time the volleyball flew over the net the kids watched to see if M. would touch it - and if she did, they'd yell "cooties!" and the ball would drop to the floor. M. was a poor girl from the hills in that region of northern Appalachia; her father was a garbage collector. She was slow, but not slow enough to be put into the "retarded" classroom, so she was shunted along with us from grade to grade, enduring the insults and cruelty of the other children, the most common of which was the cry of "cooties." I don't remember participating, but I don't remember coming loudly to her defense, either, afraid I'd be lumped even further into the outcast-group than my brain, lurking beneath my hair, had already placed me.

Head lice weren't as common or widespread in our classrooms then as they seemed to be several decades years later when my friends' kids were in school, and they were always the shame of the poorest kids who lived in shacks and tiny subsistence farms up in the hills. Once or twice a year, the school nurse came to each of our grade-school classrooms, set up a workstation in a corner, and one by one, we'd have to go there, sit down, and bend our head forward while she picked through our scalp with two long thin wooden sticks, parting the hair and peering into that forest to look for fauna and their calling-cards, the tiny eggs clinging to hairs. I was horrified by this, but even in those days before confidentiality I only remember certain kids being hauled unceremoniously from the room for treatment in the antiseptic-smelling nurse's office. One boy had a notorious case, and spent most of his time in grade school with his head shaved.

Later on, in the hippie days, it wasn't head lice we giggled and gossiped about but pubic lice, better known as crabs. I knew plenty of kids from fancy homes who got those!

Pthirus pubis, commonly referred to as the pubic louse or crab louse, and delicately designated papillon d'amour by the French, is an insect whose biology has been rather neglected in comparison with the attention lavished on the head louse and clothing louse. Even its name is frequently misspelled. The generic name was intended to be Phthirus, but as a result of a misprint, Pthirus was confirmed as the official name by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.¹ It has no close relatives other than a similar species found on gorillas. (intro to a scientific article by Burns and  Sims in the British Journal of Dermatology)

This article in today's NY Times informed me that humans are the only species to harbor not only one variety of louse, but three: the head louse, the pubic louse, and the body louse, which lives in clothing. Why that genetic evolution probably happened, and when, is a fascinating biological story that also helps date when humans lost their body hair and began sewing skins into clothing. The DNA studies also reveal the connections between the lice of other primates and our own parasitic species - and you can draw your own conclusions from that! (The multimedia timeline helps summarize the conclusions.)

And I found myself thinking of my mother, who would have called me up today to tell me to read this article and then had a long animated discussion with me about it. When i was young, she also made it clear to me, when I came home from school telling these stories, that I should 1) never share winter hats with other kids and 2) try to be kind to M. I'm not sure I obeyed, but I remember.

Winter Sounds

The displaced Icelander

listens for the wind,

the Californian for rain.

But the Québec winter speaks

in the snow-squeak

beneath leather; the plow

that scrapes us out of sleep;

and the white weight arriving

like a host of angels

stunning earth to silence

at their beauty

and sudden, mute substantiation.

At the Co-op

Yesterday we dug out. But first J. had to fix the snow-blower. He had done that already, in the fall, in preparation, and was expecting to take it out and have it start up and run perfectly, slicing through the eighteen inches of heavy wet packed snow like...oh, a hot knife through styrofoam. But no. The motor turned on, but the auger didn't. So instead of a strenuous but relatively painless snow-blowing job of forty-five minutes, I shoveled the front walk while J.'s entire afternoon was devoted to diagnosis, then telephoning and running around after parts, then the two of us wielding vice-grips and pliers and socket sets and a shop-light on its long cord as we stood over the bisected halves of the snowblower, lying lifeless on the cold shop floor. It ran, eventually, and we discovered we had just enough gas left in the gas-can and would be spared yet another trip in the car. Today the cleaning-out was finished; paths created to the compost bin and garbage barrels, and the snow roof-raked off the difficult places where ice dams are most likely to form. C'est...Vermont.

This afternoon I went over to the local food co-op to see if there were any edible organic vegetables. In Montréal everything we buy seems so fresh and healthy, even when it's not biologique - I'm convinced the produce is much less treated than what we get in Vermont because it tastes fresher, and yet spoils much faster. Here, the supermarket produce looks good, but tastes...not. It doesn't taste, in other words. It is becoming as much for show as the wax fruits that used to decorate my grandmother's winter table.

When I arrived at the converted industrial building that houses the food co-op, a train stood on the tracks beyond the scrubby trees. A thin mother in a hugely oversized one-piece canvas work overall was on the steps, shepherding two little black girls in identical pink snowsuits into the store. I picked up a basket and went over to the small vegetable display after checking the prices on the cans of Muir Glen tomatoes, and giving a quick once-over to the bins of rice, dried beans, pasta and couscous. There were beets, turnips, rutabegas, and daikon; mesclun salad mix for an exorbitant $8.99/pound; some decent lettuces; wilted scallions and very sad-looking fruit. I felt the potatoes in their bushel baskets; the red ones went into my bag along with some Empire apples and some fat carrots from an organic farm in Canada. On the other side of the aisle a man in dreadlocks was taking yogurt out of the cooler; I went to the spice rack and shook out a small paper bag-ful of peppercorns and he came and stood near me, staring, as if he had just come in from somewhere spices didn't exist.

I stood at the check-out counter while the clerk weighed my purchases and rang up the bottle of vitamin C, the tincture of echinacea and goldenseal. Thirty years ago, when I first moved here, the precursor of this store stood on the main street and served as a gathering-place for hippies and back-to-the-land types. A few years later, this building became the headquarters of our main client, a manufacturer of one of the world's most advanced music synthesizers, whose president was, himself, one of those hippies. The close friend who had first introduced J. and me was a vice-president of the company and had gotten us our first work there. In the newly-renovated building, he'd chosen a corner office near the tracks because he was such a train buff.

I looked out the window, covered now with twining green vines, while a woman at one of the café tables in the corner read a story out-loud to a child. I turned back when the clerk handed me my receipt. David had died of multiple myeloma at 40, more than twenty years ago, not long after J. and I married, not long after the company had moved to this building. It had eventually gone under after a meteoric rise in the 1980s; the brilliant crew of programmers and hardware engineers had scattered all over the country. The food co-op had been here a long time now -- it was people's memory of this place -- but I was standing exactly where the president's old office had been, buying carrots, picked from a bin a few feet away from David's old office on the other corner. Outside, the train whistled once, and pulled away.