Articles – Page 183 – Religion Online

Hemophiliacs and AIDS: Contracting a Killer

It seemed an endless wait between the test and the medical report. Weeks crept by before David knew if he had tested positive for AIDS antibodies. A dark cloud hung over him. By 1985 hemophiliacs across the U.S. -- including David -- wanted to know if they had been exposed to the deadly disease. As he waited, his thoughts wandered back to the difficult year of 1981. He had spent a lot of time in the hospital with internal bleeding (the common plight of hemophiliacs, whose blood is missing a key ingredient to cause clotting) He was given more than 50 transfusions. Through this blood supply, he had probably been exposed -- unknown to himself and medical workers -- to the AIDS virus.

When his doctor revealed his test results he learned that the report was negative. No antibodies were present, indicating that he had not been exposed to the virus. David continues to be tested voluntarily every six months, but for the present, he believes that only God could have delivered him from it. Most of his hemophilic friends are not so fortunate. About 90 per centof severe hemophiliacs have been exposed to the AIDS virus. Perhaps as many as 50 per cent of these will contract the disease.

Today relatively few hemophiliacs actually have AIDS -- comprising only about 2 percent of AIDS sufferers. Still, the epidemic has rocked this community like an earthquake. After so many years of being stigmatized as "bleeders." hemophiliacs were just beginning to conquer their troubles through advanced treatment. Now AIDS has brought them another nightmare which will haunt them in the years ahead.

At a meeting last spring for hemophiliacs and their loved ones, I noticed the fairly routine way in which subjects such as new treatments, patients’ rights and orthopedic problems were handled by the audience. Yet when the topic became AIDS, the group’s intensity heightened and the discussion became animated. Hands went up all over the auditorium. The subject of greatest interest had obviously come to the floor.

The church needs to understand this aspect of the AIDS crisis because many hemophiliacs with AIDS are seated in our pews, representing another dimension of today’s most serious medical issue, too often ignored by the media and even by those of us interested in helping AIDS victims. Several important issues need to be understood in order to approach this subject with compassion. First, we must understand hemophilia itself. Then we must understand the social problems that hemophiliacs have faced for years because of their bleeding disorder. Finally, we must see the way in which AIDS has complicated an already difficult life for these sufferers and the panic this fatal disease has brought to the hemophilic community.

A hemophiliac will not bleed to death from a single small cut, but a bump or a fall can cause painful bleeding into muscles or joints. Bleeds in the head and internal organs can also occur. Such bleeds are often the result of an accident. however minor, but they can also be spontaneous.

A hemophiliac’s blood system does everything right; however, it lacks one protein critical to the final chemical reaction. Often a hemophiliac keeps right on bleeding. He does not bleed faster or harder than other people, he just bleeds longer.

To treat a bleeding episode, the missing protein, which has been harvested from human donors, is injected intravenously. This protein is used by the hemophiliac’s system to control the clotting process. However, because the protein lasts only a few hours, and must be received from a human donor, it is impractical to give this treatment except as a response to an injury. There is no cure for hemophilia, and the person with the condition does not improve as he gets older.

The life of a hemophiliac is difficult. When he is a child, friends notice something different about him: he plays very few sports and is often absent from school. When he returns he may very well be on crutches or even in a wheelchair. As he grows up, he has trouble finding a job that will accommodate his condition. Since hemophilia is hereditary, family planning questions require sensitive genetic counseling.

In recent years, living with hemophilia had become much easier due to advances in treatment and care. A concentrated blood product, introduced in the 1960s, if given soon after accidental bleeding has begun, can eliminate much of the crippling effect the condition has traditionally inflicted on stricken joints. Wider use of physical therapy as well as contemporary psychological practices have benefited those who are recovering from severe bleeding episodes. Parents of hemophilic children have more help in raising their children than ever before, and laws protecting the handicapped have helped adult hemophiliacs on the job. Many even treat themselves intravenously at home and so have fewer hospitalizations. They have been moving more comfortably into society’s mainstream without stigma.

But AIDS has severely set back hemophiliacs dealing with their condition. Today there are over 420 reported cases of AIDS among hemophiliacs, and many more have been infected with the virus.

Since 1985 all blood concentrate used for hemophiliacs has received a special heat treatment which has been shown to kill the AIDS virus and has almost completely removed the risk of infection for those born since then or not yet exposed. So the number of hemophiliacs with AIDS should remain stable. Nevertheless, the present generation of hemophiliacs with AIDS has tough issues to face.

In the fall of 1987, Ricky Ray, aged ten, and his two younger brothers, all hemophilic children from Arcadia, Florida, who tested positive for the AIDS antibody, tried to go to school. Nearly half the student body boycotted the first day of classes, and the school received bomb threats. On the following Friday night a fire gutted the Rays’ house. The family chose to leave Arcadia and try to pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere.

Fear of and discrimination against hemophiliacs will not disappear easily. One Los Angeles-area family whose child is hemophilic recently attempted to enroll him in a private daycare center run by a church. The parents did not tell the center when they applied that their child had this disorder, but they did inform the director prior to the first day of attendance. However, before taking their son to the center they received a call from the facility informing them that the family whose place they were taking had decided to return and that they would have to be placed on the waiting list again. The center assured the parents it was not changing its mind because the child was a hemophiliac. The family was assured that nothing was wrong with the child. Yet it has been months and the center has not called back.

Certainly a daycare center has many reasons to be fearful of enrolling a hemophilic child, and private institutions are exempt from handicap discrimination laws. Discrimination, in fact, would be difficult to prove in the above case and, indeed, may not have been present at all. Yet the situation left this family feeling pushed out by the church.

Another hemophiliac with AIDS, Ryan White from Indiana, has suffered his own nightmare. Drummed out of his school, often sick, he finds even his church uncomfortable. When his contraction of AIDS had become known, his mother went to the church to work out a plan for the Whites’ attendance. It was agreed that in order to protect Ryan’s delicate health, people with colds or illness would not sit next to him: and he would not sit next to anyone who was opposed to his attendance. (Some in the congregation were deeply involved in the actions to keep Ryan out of school.)

"After awhile.’’ said White’s mother, ‘‘it just didn’t work. We felt like a spectacle walking into church. Everyone looked at us. When Ryan coughed, they would turn around and look. On Easter Sunday everyone was warmly shaking hands. No one shook Ryan’s hand." (Though the church, along with others, did help when the Whites’ great financial needs became known, enabling them to keep their home from foreclosure.)

The church needs to respond to this suffering group with love and compassion. Being informed about the primary condition, hemophilia, is important: being sensitive to hemophiliacs’ struggle with AIDS is even more important. Churches can also help educate the public to lessen the irrational discrimination being visited on those with hemophilia.

Caring for Time’s Survivors

I am not a widow myself. I’m watching the two neighbors while I clear the table after a leisurely breakfast shared with my retired husband. But there is a weighted chance that I too will become one of the widows on my street. And any married woman reading this, whatever her age, faces weighted statistics that predict she will survive her mate. We are likely to be survivors. This is part of the mysterious chemistry of being a woman: we carry longevity within ourselves the way we carry children: a man, of course. carries neither.

My neighbor Mary has family, and a church family besides. She has been active all her life in her faith, and once participated in a vital lay missionary movement. Sundays are special for her. Her daughter. a college professor, arrives with her own family to drive Mary to church. Smartly dressed and carrying her Bible. Mary is off to Sunday school and worship. Afterward, they share Sunday dinner and her lively grandchildren play in the yard.

But across the street at Nellie’s, Sunday is nothing special. The only kin who ever comes is a niece, one afternoon every other week. Nellie still drives, but only for a once-a-week Thursday morning venture to buy groceries and the cats’ food. I suspect that Nellie’s cuisine is even leaner than "Lean Cuisine." Laboriously, she struggles first to open the garage doors: after the slow journey, she struggles carrying grocery sacks inside and closing the garage again for the week. Later I can see her between her front window draperies, rocking and resting, holding Cindy in her lap.

I am an observant neighbor. as you can tell. Fortunately. I am not alone in taking notice. More and more, churches are paying attention to their survivors and their needs. The generic person once called ‘‘the man in the pew’’ is really ‘‘the woman in the pew." and she is growing older. Like society as a whole, churches are aware that a steadily increasing percentage of the population is over 65. My own Episcopal Church, through organizations like ESMA -- Episcopal Society for Ministry on Aging -- is tackling some of the problems of the aged. That the aged have problems. I agree. That the aged are problems. I deny. They are our prized possessions. They are my neighbors. Told to love his neighbor, the lawyer in the Gospel of Luke challenged Jesus: ‘‘And who is my neighbor?" I can tell you, legal sir: her name is Mary, and Nellie, and Sallie, and Helen. and all those others on my street.

Mary and Nellie illustrate two stages of the aging process that the church ought well to address. Mary belongs to the "young old.’’ Textbooks in gerontology use this phrase to describe people in their 60s and 70s who have minimal health problems, are active, outgoing and satisfied with their self-image. Petite, pretty and trim, Mary wears the most fashionable colors in stockings and suits that set off her slim waist and fluffy hair. She enjoys people and social occasions. For her, the church needs to be a social center where she wants to go regularly. Guilds and clubs, bridge and other special-interest groups can offer her attractive weekday outings. A full calendar in Fellowship Hall means a full, rich life even for a woman who lives alone.

It’s a different story on the other side of the street. One of the ‘‘old old,’’ Nellie can no longer get to where she would like to go. Her life-space has shrunk to just her modest house and yard. The church needs to come to her, in innovative ways. One well-used way is the church newsletter. For the elderly shut-in, that is often the only bond to remembrance of the church as it once was. Names in the church newsletter are always important, but to no one more than a reader whose memory goes back three generations for each family. Perhaps an occasional paragraph of news about older parishioners can help to preserve their ties, or to bring them together. My husband receives an emeriti newsletter from his university that both elicits and distributes twice-yearly reports of what the retired faculty are doing.

In every church, a sustained program of personal visiting -- especially by laypeople -- is an important need of the aged, Clergy, of course, cannot be expected to do all things, Serving communion to the elderly in their homes once a month is reasonable to expect from a minister: a weekly contact is not. But any Christian can manage a single one-on-one contact with a neighbor once a week. "Pure religion is this," says the Letter of James: ‘‘to visit widows in their affliction.

Visitation needs to reach out to survivors in their final life-space; for many, this will be half of a room in a nursing home, Many a pleasant neighborhood has its street of widows, but in all nursing homes you will find that they fill the corridors. For ten years, my husband and I have ministered to nursing-home residents. We could count on ten fingers the men who lived long enough to be served by our mission. "We will bury you" is no idle threat from elderly women to elderly men,

Visitation eases the aged person’s hard transition to this ultimate closed society, the care home. Part of the aging process is withdrawal to an increasingly closed society. Feelings of vulnerability and fears for security may lead the "young old" to seek a kind of closed society from the church, a safe refuge with shared values, When that ceases to be available, the older person may still have the small pleasures of independence in her own home, Eventually she can no longer care for that. After, years of aloneness, a widow is suddenly the roommate of another widow, the privacy of both as lost as youth. Who can understand the sorrow of it better than other women?

My vision of the church’s care for survivors is women ministering to women -- every woman assuming some responsibility for an older woman. At 62, I am old enough to appreciate the gentle caretaking relationship I already enjoy with a woman in her early 40s. In my turn, I assume responsibility for some women older than I. In fact, I function as a kind of block mother to the aged, the way young mothers become block mothers for schoolchildren. It takes very little time for a woman keeping house to be alert to the habits and hours of other women keeping house nearby. I know what time Mary’s bedroom shades are raised in the morning. I know that at 9:00 P.M. Nellie’s last light will go out, and that she rises at 5:30. If there is any variation from those set patterns, I watch throughout the day to make sure my neighbor makes some appearance. Perhaps an element of feminine curiosity is involved here. For centuries women have been curious about other women’s lives, about people in general, because that was the only curiosity they were permitted to satisfy. Now that women are allowed to explore their curiosity about the secrets of nature, they have become physicists, physicians or astronomers. But they are still concerned about the lives of other women.

Women ministering individually to women is my vision because I believe that women’s nurturing instinct is deep. Mothers cared for us; in our turn, we care for our aging mothers. When our mothers are taken from us, how easily we let that love flow toward a second "mother." I believe that in the divine economy of the universe, no love is ever wasted. This is one way not to waste love. Women identify with other women, as men cannot, in sharing the extent and power of sorrow. So often, women’s lives are lives of loss and sorrow. We have a capacity for grieving that men scarcely approach. We see a surviving beauty in older women that few men see because men are acculturated to value desirability and physical attractiveness. A highly educated and professional elderly man I know well turns from elderly women with aversion, prizing still the beauty of youth. "The church," he says scoffingly, "is full of docile old women who give the minister his power, who never question."

Women need to learn how to minister to older women. Listening can be anyone’s modest ministry. All the elderly long to tell their stories, For soon the past will be gone, impossible to retrieve, Listen on the telephone, for they appreciate the few minutes of a reassuring call. Listen during a visit to a chosen person to whom you can relate sensitively and for whom you can provide sustained contact. Listen and watch, if you live on a street of widows. Be a block mother to the aged. Make it a Lenten obligation this year to bring into the church’s social circle one survivor who is actively young-old, and to take the church out, lovingly, to one survivor who can only sit, waiting for that love to come.

The Fundamentalist Surge in Latin America

Two decades ago, when Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals were regarded as religious "crazies" in many parts of Catholic Latin America, converts tended to keep their religion to themselves. ‘People didn’t admit to being evangelical," recalled an evangelical pastor in Bogotá, "because they feared they would be rejected by their neighbors and employers." Today when, in the pastor’s words there are "evangelicals everywhere," adherents not only openly proclaim their born-again conversion but actively seek recruits on buses, street corners and in parks. Such big-time evangelists as Argentine Luis Palau and U.S. television preacher Jimmy Swaggart pack city stadiums with tens of thousands of enthusiasts; only the pope draws larger crowds. Unlike the previous generation of evangelicals, today’s conservative Protestants in Latin America are aggressively challenging Catholicism’s religious monopoly -- and succeeding.

The Catholic Church’s own surveys show how serious is the challenge: every hour 400 Latin Americans convert to the Pentecostals or other fundamentalist or evangelical churches. One-eighth of the region’s 481 million people belong to fundamentalist or evangelical churches, and in some countries, such as Guatemala, it is estimated that half the population will have switched into those churches by the end of the century. Not since the mass baptisms of Latin American Indians by the conquering Spanish in the 16th century has Latin America witnessed a religious conversion of such magnitude.

The challenge clearly worries the region’s Catholic bishops, who cite the growth of conservative Protestantism among their top concerns, along with the foreign debt and guerrilla and military violence. "The springtime of the sects [a deprecatory term for the new churches] could also be the winter of the Catholic Church," warned Msgr. Lucas Moreira Neves, the archbishop of Sao Salvador da Bahia in Brazil.

According to a recent study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, nearly 10 per cent of the country’s 140 million people belong to 4,077 evangelical churches. The majority are Pentecostal, the fastest-growing evangelical group in Latin America. Exported from the U.S., Pentecostalism holds an emotional appeal. particularly for poor Latin Americans, through its emphasis on ecstatic personal experience, such as speaking in tongues and receiving the "gifts" of healing and prophecy.

Studies by Protestant and Catholic scholars show that one reason for the evangelicals’ success is the lack of sufficient Catholic priests to serve the burgeoning population. Although religious vocations are on the rise in several countries, including Brazil, the Catholic Church remains woefully understaffed. In many parishes there is only one priest to serve 10,000 faithful. Priests, unlike evangelical pastors, are expected to spend long years in theological study, an experience that often alienates them culturally from their people. Poor people are impressed by the evangelicals’ emphasis on strict morality, and the way conversion can transform a neighborhood bum into an upright community leader. Once a man surrenders his life to Jesus," proclaims evangelist Palau, "he finds he can stop drinking and chasing women.

Equally important in the evangelical surge, say students of the phenomenon, are deteriorating social and economic conditions. Since the 1950s, millions of peasants have left their villages because of guerrilla and military violence or to seek a better life in the cities, changing the balance of Latin America’s population from rural to urban. Uprooted from families and religious traditions, living in slums and at the mercy of criminals and sometimes of governmental predators, the urban poor are a fertile seedbed for evangelical proselytism. "Many peasants and slum inhabitants need religion as a refuge in a society in permanent and progressive disintegration in order to deal with fear, threats, repression, hunger and death," explained a report on the subject by Pro Mundi Vita, a Belgian-based Catholic think tank. But too often the Catholic Church has ignored such said Pro Mundi Vita, because it lacked clergy, money and imagination.

The Vatican came to a similar conclusion in a 1986 study titled "Sects or New Religious Movements: Pastoral Challenges." While agreeing with the Latin American bishops that the new churches were supported by "powerful ideological forces as well as economic and political interests [ in the United States]," the document admitted that the evangelicals were fulfilling "needs and aspirations which are seemingly not being met in the mainline churches. The [Catholic] church is often seen simply as an institution, perhaps because it gives too much importance to structures and not enough to drawing people to God in Christ."

Evangelical inroads into traditional Catholic territory have led to religious tensions throughout the region. For example, in Cotopaxi province in central Ecuador, a dispute between Catholics and evangelicals led to two deaths and nearly 100 injuries after two Indian evangelists denounced their Catholic brothers to the local military.

Chilean Catholics took umbrage at statements by televangelist Swaggart during his visit to Santiago in early 1987, after he defended the regime of General Augusto Pinochet and congratulated him for having expelled the devil -- meaning the left -- in the 1973 coup. The fundamentalists, who have converted approximately 10 per cent of the Chilean population, including 15,000 members of the armed forces, are called "Reagan cults" by Catholic critics because of their close association with such Reagan supporters as Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But the fundamentalists are popular with the Pinochet government because of their political conservatism and emphasis on passive acceptance of authority -- in contrast to socially activist Catholic groups inspired by liberation theology.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s. Guatemala’s Catholic Church suffered severe persecution under a succession of military regimes because of its defense of human rights. During the 1982-83 administration of the born-again General José Efraín Ríos Montt, for example, several Catholic priests and hundreds of catechists were murdered. While Catholics were being slaughtered, U.S. fundamentalist churches, including Ríos Montt’s church, the California-based Gospel Outreach, received the army’s blessing to evangelize among the Indian population. Even after the military ousted him for abusing the principle of separation of church and state, Ríos Montt continued to enjoy the support of Pat Robertson.

Catholic bishops in Guatemala -- as elsewhere in the region -- resent the persecution by governments seen to be in league with U.S. fundamentalist missionaries. "The sects divide the community," said Guatemala City’s Archbishop Próspero Penados, who argued that their growth has aided the Reagan administration in dominating the region partly by weakening Catholic unity. "The church is the only voice that defends the people" against persecution by governments allied with the United States, he said.

The results of such divisions can be tragic, as demonstrated by the desperate plight of the Guatemalan village of Semuy. The residents were forced to flee their homes in 1981 after a member of a fundamentalist sect denounced the village as "communist" to the local military command because the people would not convert from Catholicism. The sect’s leader, with a bandana covering his face, led the army into the village and pointed out people he claimed were ‘subversives." Thirty-four villagers were taken away and never seen again; the rest fled into the mountains, where they hid for five and a half years. When they eventually emerged. under the protection of the local Catholic bishop. they found that Semuy was controlled by the same fundamentalists responsible for the 1981 raid.

Guatemalan fundamentalists remain unmoved by such suffering, for they believe the Indians are ‘demon-possessed" because so many of them are Catholics (at least nominally) And since demons are associated with communists, the Indians are subversives, too. Similarly. US. fundamentalists working in Guatemala agree with Swaggart that Catholicism is a false cult" and the "doctrine of devils." A letter from the U.S. head of one fundamentalist group in Guatemala. for example. spoke of doing "battle in the heavenlies" against the pope and his priests so that God would "arise and scatter [Guatemala’s] enemies and establish her upon the rock that is Jesus Christ." The tone of U.S. fundamentalist and Pentecostal radio programs, which blanket Central America, is equally aggressive. Indeed, the only point on which the fundamentalists agree with the Catholics is that the religious war is likely to get worse. "Guatemala could become another Northern Ireland," predicted an evangelical pastor in Guatemala City.

U.S. fundamentalists have also been deeply involved in the Nicaraguan contra war. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network has been among the biggest contributors, raising millions of dollars for food,. Medicine, clothing, vehicles and other aid for so-called Nicaraguan refugees who also happened to be contras, or for Miskito Indians drawn into the contra struggle. Although Robertson tried at first to pretend that CBN contributions were not meant for the counterrevolutionaries, his organization did not deny that the supplies were being shipped through intermediary groups with close ties to the Reagan administration or that they were being sent to the war-torn Nicaraguan-Honduran border, where the contras were headquartered. In contrast, such politically neutral refugee aid groups as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees purposely located their Honduran relief camps at least 33 miles from the border to avoid involvement with the hostilities. That CBN’s refugees were indeed contras was confirmed by Mario Calero, the brother of contra leader Adolfo Calero. who said that the counterrevolutionaries were an army of refugees. "Some of the refugees are freedom fighters," he said, adding that he considered himself one of them.

Fundamentalists’ humanitarian aid served two purposes: it freed other funds for the purchase of military hardware, and it was enlistment bait for the Miskitos, thousands of whom had crossed the border after periodic clashes with the Sandinistas. Hungry and penniless, the Indians often had no choice but to join the contras, although they hated them at least as much as they did the Sandinistas. "It’s clear that the-border relief programs are not designed to meet the long- and short-term interests of the Miskitos, but rather are designed for political purposes as a conduit of aid to the contras." a relief official said.

Robertson never hid his feelings on the matter. He frequently likened the contras to freedom fighters. and when the U.S. Congress balked at providing more aid in 1985 he went on television to denounce the "craven submission of our leaders and Congress to the demands of communism, [which] makes you sick to your stomach." Robertson also visited a contra training camp in Honduras to preach his fundamentalist gospel and distribute good cheer. "I think God is in favor of liberty and justice and He is against oppression, he told the troops, comparing the contra struggle to the American Revolution. "If we can do something to help these men fight for freedom, I think it is perfectly in God’s plan." The visit, which was later shown on U.S. television, shocked some religious leaders because of the way Robertson seemed to be saying that the contras had God’s blessing. Richmonds Bishop Walter Sullivan, among the most outspoken Catholic opponents of U.S. aid to the contras, was so outraged that he publicly criticized Robertson, saying ‘‘I cannot imagine Jesus reviewing troops.

Robertson furiously replied that he had not been reviewing troops and that, if Sullivan didn’t watch his words, he might be in trouble for "libel and slander."

Sojourners and its editor, Jim Wallis, are highly respected in certain sectors of the evangelical community. Therefore, instead of snapping at Wallis as he had at Sullivan, Robertson took the more conciliatory approach of writing to say that "most of the reports which allege-- . . . [CBN] aid to the Freedom Fighters of Nicaragua are not true. Less than a year later, however, he told a meeting of religious broadcasters in Washington that he was supplying "chaplains" and Bibles to the Honduran-based contras, thus admitting a direct link to them. As Wallis observed, most of the secular press missed the religious implications of Robertson’s aid. "They didn’t think it was any big deal, since a lot of other right-wing political organizations were doing the same thing. But religious people were outraged that they [Robertson’s organization] were doing this in the name of God and that many churches had been unknowingly involved through their connection to CBN. Christian support for terrorism, whether it be from the Right or the Left, is simply wrong. To allow political ideology to overshadow human needs and fundamental issues of life and death is to go seriously astray. And to use the plight of innocent refugees, who have already suffered so much, to cloak political motivations is to compound the offense."

But many fundamentalists do not share Wallis’s opinion, believing in a "God-is-an-American" religion that dismisses any challenge to U.S. hegemony as the work of the devil. "You can make a strong case for saying the American way is synonymous with Christianity," claimed William Murray, a U.S. evangelical active in the fundamentalists’ contra-aid operations.

Catholic critics claim that the primary attraction of the "American way" is the money lavished on religious converts by their U.S. sponsors. But while poor Latin Americans agree that gifts of food, clothing and other handouts are an incentive to convert, many say that the gifts are less important than the welcoming religious atmosphere in fundamentalist churches. Most are small and neighborly, with the pastor living in the same block as his congregation. They also respond to the people’s yearning for religious symbols, or "popular religiosity," through dancing, popular songs and physical gestures such as raising arms to heaven. In contrast, traditional Catholic churches serve vast numbers of people who have little or nothing in common, and they are often impersonal "supermarkets for the sacraments," as some liberation theologians call them. Rituals frequently seem remote and cold, and community relations, so important to the impoverished urban newcomer, are virtually nonexistent.

But while experience shows that the Catholics’ answer to the fundamentalists lies in the base communities, only a minority of bishops have strongly pushed for them because of the Vatican’s frequently voiced concern that they are too "horizontal" -- meaning that they are a democratic influence on a hierarchical church -- and liable to become involved in social and political issues. The Roman Curia is also suspicious of the communities because they are a popular expression of liberation theology. Thus although the church has the means to meet the fundamentalists’ challenge, it is afraid to apply it. "Unfortunately," said Pro Mundi Vita of the Vatican’s attitude toward the Latin Americans’ lay-directed renewal, "the church’s efforts have been directed more toward preserving discipline, order and doctrinal purity than the great work and challenge of being evangelical."

We Are the Church Alive, the Church with AIDS

"Heaven has as much to do with life before death as with life after death." Steven Clover was able to voice that vision in the last months before he died of AIDS, as his body fought off rare forms of cancer, pneumonia and other disease. Once dapper and golden-haired. he was the essence of a refined gentleman, the sort who might own a couple of jewelry stores in Boston -- which he did. He also served as an assistant pastor of a black church, Union Baptist Church in Cambridge. He left all that behind in August 1986 to attend Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCC-SF) , a predominantly white church in a denomination that ministers to the lesbian and gay community.

In October of that year he was diagnosed with AIDS, and as Christmas approached he was hospitalized. Thirty children from a black Baptist church in San Francisco showed up at the hospital to sing carols for Clover and other people with AIDS (commonly referred to as PWAs) In the ensuing months he was able to bring together the congregations of Double Rock Baptist Church, which condemns homosexuality as a sin, and MCC-SF, which preaches that homosexuality is a gift from God. These seemingly irreconcilable churches sponsored events together, including a gospel music concert that raised more than $1 ,000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Food Bank in July 1987. Clover died a month later.

Clover’s church is our church, MCCSF, which is encircled by San Francisco’s biggest gay and lesbian neighborhood. And in many ways, Clover’s story is our story. What he and others have experienced individually, we have undergone and still undergo as an institution. We believe that our drama is having an impact on the larger body of the whole Christian community, especially churches whose members include parents, relatives and friends of PWAs.

Currently, we know of 30 congregants who have AIDS, and the number threatens to keep rising. About two-thirds of the men in the congregation are "antibody positive," a sign that they have been in contact with the AIDS virus. Every week our worship service attracts at least one person who was just diagnosed. Death also attends weekly -- the death of a member or a member’s friend. Moreover, we perform several memorial services each month for people with AIDS who have never set foot in our church. Their friends and relatives, who come from churches all across America, turn to us because they know we will welcome them, honor gay relationships, and provide acceptance that they cannot expect from most mainline churches.

Just as our members with AIDS suffer discrimination in housing, employment and medical care, our church suffers anti-AIDS discrimination. For example, a Roman Catholic retreat center said we could not use its facility unless we informed other groups that people with AIDS would be there. We regard this as denying us equal access. For the retreat center, the bottom line was the presence of PWAs in our group. "And what about the bathrooms?" the center coordinator persisted, revealing her ignorance of how AIDS is spread.

We have come to understand ourselves as a church with AIDS. This doesn’t mean that our church will soon be dead and gone. No, in fact it means that we live more deeply. The whole gay male community is undergoing a parallel transformation. A lifestyle characterized by carefree promiscuity has given way to dating and friendship. Many people are seeking intimacy and spirituality, which has had the effect of a revival. Thus, despite the deaths of many members, our membership has actually grown by a third in the past year.

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was founded in Los Angeles in 1968 by Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal minister who aimed to spread the new gospel that God loves gays and lesbians. "All we had time to do was to celebrate and to grow," recalled Howard Wells, who founded MCC-SF in 1969. Grow we did: today there are more than 30,000 MCC members in more than 200 churches worldwide. But our innocent sense of celebration has died of AIDS. Wells, himself a PWA, says we now live with the end in sight, a state, he calls "eschatological living."

"The specter of AIDS catapults us into accelerated spiritual growth -- or toward early death -- and it all depends on the model of eschatological living we choose to follow," he said. On good days, being a church with AIDS helps us to see how fragile and important every moment is. We rediscover images -- such as heaven -- that we used to dismiss as anachronistic or overly sentimental. We claim for, ourselves the model known in Scripture as "the realm of God," which Wells defines "an alternative way of living."

It’s not easy. Institutionally, we suffer the stages of grief on a grand scale, ricocheting through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Long-range planning is difficult for the church, just as it is for people with AIDS, who are overwhelmed by having to make plans about wills, medical care and finances. Yet never has planning been more crucial. Promoting church growth feels almost macabre, but without it we cannot meet the challenges ahead.

Sunday worship is marked by tears, laughter and unforgettable singing. One of our favorite hymns was written by UFMCC members Jack St. John and David Pelletier in 1980, before we were aware of AIDS: "We are the church alive, the body must be healed; where strife has bruised and battered us, God’s wholeness is revealed." Like Clover, we find that our struggle with AIDS. has brought us insights into what it means to build heaven into our everyday lives, to try to realize the realm of heaven here and now.

Our most intimate, intense worship service is the monthly AIDS healing service, at which 15 to 20 people affected by AIDS request and receive laying-on-of-hands prayer from each other. To listen to their stories is to enter into the enormity that is AIDS: A doctor sobs over his inability to heal his best friend. Someone who recently tested antibody-positive confesses that his anger has separated him from his friends and his God. A withered man prays simply for an appetite. Another person with AIDS proudly proclaims he is "living with AIDS, not dying of it. A nurse who has accidentally jabbed herself with an AIDS contaminated needle says she feels numb now that ten of her co-workers have died of AIDS. We also hold special services, such as AIDS prayer vigils and the blessing of banners for the NAMES Project quilt that was part of the Lesbian and Gay Rights March on Washington last October. The quilt will be touring 25 U.S. cities later this year.

In a sense, all of our worship services are AIDS healing services. Every Sunday we provide a gay-affirming environment where Scripture is related to lesbian and gay experience and same-sex pairs can receive, as a couple. communion and laying-on-of-hands prayer. Our very existence challenges the often-held Christian position that AIDS is God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality, a position that breeds a self-hatred that many of us still struggle to overcome. Recently a young man confessed to the pastor before church that, under parental pressure he had vowed sexual abstinance if God would cure him of AIDS -- a typical response and one that reveals the heart of gay self-hatred.

Community prayer is the phase of Sunday worship when the impact of AIDS is most tangible. We join hands and share words and phrases that crystallize our concerns and joys. Every month we hear more petitions for "my friend who was just diagnosed" or "my lover in the hospital" or "more government funding for AIDS research" or "help with my diagnosis."

Peer support groups provide a spiritual context for people to discuss what they have in common -- in this case, a life-threatening illness, or being "antibody positive" or being a caregiver to a person with AIDS. In addition to these groups that are obviously related to AIDS, our men’s retreats and Men Together discussion/worship series approach the subject indirectly by encouraging men to make and deepen friendships away from bars, the traditional gay male meeting ground. All of these become opportunities for dealing with AIDS-related grief. For example, at the spring 1987 retreat, men wrote, read and discussed their experiences of touching other men. One of the readings discussed was this:

Scott and I spent hard and precious times together from the time he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1983 until he died in 1984. . I was at work one day -- my great escape from the illness was work -- when I suddenly felt the need to be at home. . . I lay with Scott, all the while telling him how much I loved him. I mentioned every person I could think of and made sure he heard that they loved him as well. Scott’s labored breathing continued with long lapses between breaths. Each lapse, I thought, would be his last. At 4:42, Scott’s breathing stopped and never began again. I held him in my arms and softly told him again and again how precious he was. We spent 45 minutes alone, with Scott in my arms for the last time. His body grew cold before I was finally able to release my hold of him. That most precious touch was to be our last.

People turn to us for counseling at every stage of the AIDS crisis. Most of this is handled by clergy with support from student clergy and the AIDS Ministry Team. Touching is one of the most important ingredients in all AIDS counseling. Although AIDS cannot be spread through casual contact, people with AIDS tend to be treated as untouchables, which adds to their pain.

A congregant’s first AIDS-related counseling often revolves around being tested for AIDS antibodies; a positive result means people can transmit the AIDS virus and may develop AIDS themselves. Just deciding to take the test is excruciating. Even those who imagined they were prepared to face a positive result are often devastated by feelings of grief, guilt and betrayal when the verdict is presented.

AIDS-related counseling also means providing home and hospital visitation, funerals, memorial services and bereavement support. An unforgettable example occurred in summer 1987 when one of us visited an AIDS hospice to take communion to a member, his parents visiting from the East Coast and a few close friends. The man, obviously near death, urged everyone to pray not just for him but for their own needs -- a reversal of the angry response he expressed earlier in his illness. "I can see heaven," he told them. "It’s a beautiful place, the place you’ve always wanted to go to, and anyone who wants to can go there." The boundaries of heaven and earth seemed to shift that afternoon, so that they no longer corresponded to birth and death; it felt possible to reach into the skies and tug heaven into the present. Death became "a foretaste of the feast to come."

The man died a few hours later. His mother spoke at his memorial service, with tears in her eyes: "He was the best son a mother could ever have." But she and her husband dreaded going back to their home church, being reluctant to tell anyone in their United Methodist congregation that their son had died of AIDS. They didn’t think anyone there would understand.

Another set of parents, also United Methodists, asked one of us to come to their son’s hospital bedside to join them in prayer. There the mother asked, "Why are people so mean?" She was referring to unsympathetic church members back home. The next question was even harder: Was it OK to pray for their comatose son to die soon? The whole church is coming to see that physical death is not necessarily something to avoid; it can even mean healing.

MCC-SF also strives to educate people outside the gay and lesbian community about AIDS, through letter-writing campaigns, public presentations and workshops on AIDS, which have been given in a variety of settings, including the San Francisco AIDS Interfaith Conference, the United Methodist Consultation on AIDS Ministries, the Presbyterian Ministers Association, and Pacific School of Religion’s AIDS Awareness Week. In addition, MCC-SF members enrolled at Pacific School of Religion continually pressure the seminary to live up to its policy of fair treatment for students with AIDS. Joint activities with Double Rock Baptist Church have been educational, too. While we have confronted our racism, the Baptists have had to surmount unfounded fears about catching AIDS. One Double Rock usher described holding hands with gay people during prayer time as "the most growing I have ever done."

In our church. AIDS has also brought reconciliation between the sexes, a rift that has been especially deep between lesbians and gay men. Like other women, lesbians face economic disadvantages. But in the case of lesbians, their resulting anger at men is untempered by romantic involvement with the opposite sex. Most lesbian feminists feel it is a waste of energy to spend it in the traditional female role of helping men, their oppressors. However, that feeling doesn’t prevail in our church. When the topic of lesbians ministering to men with AIDS came up during a reception the women of our church held for Karen Ziegler, pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in New York, Ziegler responded this way: "I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing -- I receive energy by ministering to men with AIDS." She told us how some men I love very much -- my friends David and Tim -- began to die of AIDS. I had the experience of coming closer than I ever had come to a man before. David and then Tim opened a door to their souls in a way that I had never experienced before and my heart has been opened in a way it never was before, too. We’re all experiencing that transformation together."

We have also connected with Congregation Shahar Zahav, a Reform synagogue with a lesbian and gay congregation, located a few blocks from our church. Together we sponsored a reading by award-winning lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. That evening Rich told us, "Lesbians and gay men have confronted mortality. We have mourned our friends and lovers together and we have stitched an extraordinary quilt of memory together . . . I think that the coming together of Jewish and Christian, lesbian and gay and straight congregants is an important part of this. I also think that the coming together those of us who are non-congregants with you is very important."

Making this kind of connection -- between Jew and Christian, female and male, gay and straight, black and white, parent and child -- is what eschatological living is all about. With the end in sight, we do more to savor and value life, including the people we once viewed as hopelessly different from ourselves. As a church with AIDS, we try to embody eschatological living. AIDS is killing us at the same time that it heals us.

This must be the vision Steven Clover was talking about when he told us, "Heaven has as much to do with life before death as with life after death."

And it must be the vision Rich meant to convey when she wrote the poem that has become a kind of creed for our church:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age. perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

This must be what Jesus meant when he said, ‘Behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."

Why Is the D.Min. So Popular?

When the ATS authorized the awarding of the D. Min. in 1970, schools could offer both the "in-sequence" D.Min., awarded as a first seminary degree after four years of study, and the ‘in-ministry" degree, based on a continuing education program for clergy already in ministry. Many assumed that the former type would become the rule, and that the latter was merely an interim measure to give clergy with B.D. or M.Div. degrees the opportunity to secure the doctorate. However, the opposite proved to be the case; the in-sequence D.Min. did not become popular but the in-ministry degree did, and in a large way.

Why the popularity of the in-ministry D.Min.? What does its popularity say about the dynamics and issues of ordained ministry? There are some quick answers to these questions. Certainly the initial success of the degree was partly due to the broader continuing-education movement that gained momentum in the early 1970s among the professions in general. Without doubt the success of the D.Min. also reflects the importance Americans attach to credentials. Some cynics believe, too, that the D.Min. has provided one way in which clergy can try to bolster their status and enhance their careers.

But there are deeper reasons as well, reasons more directly related to the circumstances of ordained ministry. I want to explore some of those reasons that are suggested by a recent national study of the D.Min. which I undertook with Barbara G. Wheeler (A Study of Doctor of Ministry Programs [Hartford Seminary, 19871) Data came from the schools themselves (faculty, D.Min. program directors, presidents and deans) , from samples of D.Min. graduates and current students, and for comparative purposes, from a sample of non-D.Min. clergy in six denominations. We also conducted on-site case studies of selected D.Min. programs. For various reasons, we excluded from consideration specialized programs in pastoral counseling. Our interest was in who D.Min. participants are, why clergy are attracted to D.Min. programs, and what effect the programs have on participants.

One might argue that the D.Min’s popularity is restricted to a particular segment of the clergy. The data suggest that, especially in its early years, the D.Min. appealed primarily to white, male, mostly mainline Protestants in midcareer, whose congregations were slightly better educated than those of non-D.Min. clergy.

However, this profile appears to be changing. More clergywomen with the requisite ministry experience and an increasing number of Roman Catholics are entering programs (especially women religious and lay professionals) ; the number of blacks enrolled has grown slightly; and clergy from evangelical denominations are enrolling in much larger numbers, partly as a result of the growth in D.Min. programs at evangelical seminaries.

Second, the D.Min., as a professional degree, provides a way of gaining new knowledge and skills for the practice of ministry. Clergy in general recognize the need for knowledge and skills that they either did not or could not gain in their first-degree theological education.

External supports are a third aspect influencing entry into D. Min. programs. These supports include congregational and denominational expectations for continuing education, which seem to be slightly stronger in the case of those who study for the D.Min. than for other clergy: Further -- though we are not entirely certain whether these are causes or effects of seeking a D . Min. -- a bit more time and financial support are available for continuing education for those pursuing the D.Min. than for other clergy.

Thus, the degree attracts clergy who are looking for a structured program that will allow them to grow in the practice of ministry, and whose denominational and ministry settings support such an endeavor.

What about the anticipation of enhanced status or upward mobility by virtue of having a doctorate? We would be wrong if we did not say that our data reveal these to be aspects of the decision to enter D. Min. studies. And the data also show that these hopes are not entirely in vain. However, status-enhancement and aspirations for upward mobility are not the primary or decisive motives of most D. Min. students.

Further clues to the attractiveness of the D.Min. can be found in some of the effects of the programs. Here, in most instances, we must refer to perceived effects, either by seminary personnel or by participants themselves, rather than to measures of actual effects.

The results of receiving a D.Min. are mostly regarded as positive. Perhaps the chief negative effect is the difficulty students encounter in balancing the time demands of studies with those of ministry. The positive effects most regularly mentioned in interviews and questionnaires refer to participants’ raised morale and self-esteem, increased enthusiasm about ordained ministry, and renewed commitment to their current jobs. Over and over again we heard from ministers that the D.Min. gave them a new sense of their efficacy and enhanced their confidence and sense of self-worth. Morale-building is obviously not a sufficient justification for a doctoral program, but it is undeniably important both for D.Min. graduates and for students during their years of enrollment.

D.Min. participation also has salutary effects in increasing participants’ professional competence. Respondents report increased abilities in the practice of ministry, especially in organizational leadership. Programs that emphasize particular content or a specific method -- case-study, organizational development or church growth, for example -- seem particularly strong in their impact on professional competence. Such programs expose students to areas of theory and method that are difficult if not impossible to teach at the M. Div. level. While some of these programs are too narrowly focused to qualify as being at the doctoral level, they do contribute to participants’ sense of professional competence.

D. Min. graduates also report that the programs have improved their capacity for critical theological thinking, another dimension of professional competence. However, faculty, while not discounting the possibility of this type of growth in their students, are less inclined to believe that it occurs -- perhaps because their standards are somewhat higher. Our reading of a large number of D.Min. projects leads us to agree with the faculty; the level of critical theological reflection in many of these projects is not high.

Generally, however, graduates do demonstrate growth in professional competence. Whether they do so sufficiently well to reflect the "advanced level of competence" called for in accreditation standards is debatable. For example, faculty members surveyed believe that, on the average, more than four out of ten D.Min. students in their schools do not achieve an advanced level of competence. Given the importance of this admittedly vague objective in accreditation standards, we believe that this admission by faculty members is a matter of considerable concern, and we have addressed this issue elsewhere in our research report. Nevertheless, it still seems to be the case that the degree’s benefit outweighs its problems.

Besides leading to improved morale and professional competence, D.Min. graduates are more likely than other ministers to have made a recent job move and to be serving somewhat larger churches in larger communities with more highly educated members. Furthermore, they reach a higher salary level than that of comparable non-D.Min. clergy. Thus our findings show that the D.Min. has rewards other than educational ones or heightened morale.

Has the success of the D.Min. been something of a historical accident then? I think not. Rather, the degree at its best offers clergy an educational experience not possible in the M. Div. program as it is now conceived. Unless the M. Div. were to be extended to a substantially longer program than its current three years, with something analogous to a residency of several years and with settings that function as practice ministry locales (analogous to medical residency in a teaching hospital) -- neither of which development is likely -- then clergy need something like the in-ministry D.Min.

The in-ministry D.Min., coming as it frequently does as one approaches midcareer, provides a significant oc

casion for disciplined research and reflection on the experience that one has gained in ministry. In such research and reflection, many of the foundations laid in earlier educational experiences can take on new depth and significance. Additionally, the D.Min. provides an occasion for clergy to address issues of ministry that they could not have addressed realistically during their previous schooling because of the absence of firsthand experience.

As I noted, underlying the popularity of the D. Min. is the structure and discipline its preparation offers. My colleagues and I have come to view that structure and discipline as a kind of rite of passage for clergy as they move into their midcareers. Rites of passage arise around various transition points in the life cycle that, if unaddressed, may lead to crises for individuals and the group of which they are a part. Birth, puberty, marriage and death, for example, have all given rise to rites of passage that function to integrate both individuals and groups. It does not stretch the point too much to say that clergy experience a transition point in their careers that calls for a rite to prepare them for a new career stage. And completing an advanced degree, almost irrespective of what the student learns, seems to be a test of clergy identity and a bridge to renewal and recommitment.

Does the D.Min. ‘s considerable popularity and success mean that its educational programs have no problems? This is not our conclusion. In the full report, we raise a number of concerns. For example, the identity of the degree as a professional doctorate is in considerable need of clarification, and its somewhat unclear identity may seriously affect its future. We are also concerned that the program has not fulfilled its considerable potential to generate significant research on the practice of ministry. Addressing these issues is critical to the future of the degree.

But the appeal of the D.Min., for which we have tried to account, is considerable, and we acknowledge and applaud its contributions to ordained ministry.

Twelve Steps for Women Alcoholics

Many pastoral counselors routinely recommend -- or even require -- that their alcohol-dependent counselees attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. However, a substantial number of people drop out of A.A., and some data suggest that half of A.A. ‘s new participants do not continue after 90 days. Denial of the problem is certainly a major reason people drop out. But there may be other reasons. Some people dislike the spiritual nature of the recovery program. And some women find that A.A. is overly masculine in approach and its Form of spirituality. While certain A.A. groups have addressed the former problem by identifying themselves as pagan or agnostic, few have responded to the latter complaint.

The latest research on women with addictions, particularly on those who are chemically dependent, shows that these women’s concerns and needs differ from those of male addicts. For example, alcoholic women are more likely to suffer from low self-esteem than their male counterparts. For such women, depression and self-derogation may lead to a feeling of purposelessness in life, and thus to substance abuse. More often than men, female alcoholics turn their anger on themselves rather than on others, with anxiety and guilt being the result. They frequently feel inadequate to the point of futility in fulfilling the female role.

Our male-dominated society confers upon women a status subordinate to men; women of color or of differing sexual orientations suffer even greater oppression. Therefore, addicted women need a spirituality that empowers them, lifts their self-esteem and gives them a sense of identity and worth, A feminist revision of the Twelve Steps makes paramount an idea that is implicit in A.A. -- that members be dependent upon one another. This mutuality is, in fact, more essential to the A.A. recovery process than the addict’s independent spirituality.

A.A.’s Twelve Steps insinuate a hierarchical, domination-submission model of the individual’s relationship to God. God is always referred to as male, and God’s activities are described in stereo-typically masculine terms. A.A. portrays the individual in a one-to-one relationship with his or her God, before whom the person must admit total powerlessness (at least over alcohol, though absolute powerlessness is implicit throughout) The alcoholic then comes to "believe in" (cognitively) a God who is omnipotent and has the ability to "restore sanity" to the addict, a God to whom one must surrender one’s will.

Next, the individual admits guilt and exact wrongdoings, and humbly pleads to be imbued with God’s power. Through vigilance, prayer and meditation, one continues the process of recovery, which requires relationships with other group members only for steps five and 12. God here is judge and power-broker; recovery hinges on how well the individual submits to God. The addict is a lone ranger on a personal spiritual journey, albeit a journey paralleling that of others.

The image of a domineering, paternalistic God is condescending to adult women, and hinders the development of the mature sense of self that addicted women lack. The call for submission can all too easily blend in with other demands to submit, such as in sexual abuse. A more appropriate image of God for addicted women would be the Holy Spirit, who ignites the spark of hope within each woman and breathes life through the group, working for each member’s well-being and recovery. Through the experience of self-in-relation, participants find liberation and the healing power of a community empowered by the Spirit.

With this theology in mind, and drawing on my experience counseling substance abusers, I have adapted the Twelve Steps to reflect women’s spirituality.

1. The first of the original Twelve Steps is this: "We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable."

In the feminist revision: "We have a drinking problem that once had us."

This is taken directly from the first of Jean Kirkpatrick’s 13 Steps of "Women for Sobriety," which she designed to enhance women’s self-esteem. (Her further steps, however, are too much oriented toward positive thinking or New Age spirituality for mainline church people.) Powerlessness has always been women’s particular handicap. For men, admitting powerlessness indicates their readiness for God to move in and save them (see Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, about men who are brought low in order to realize salvation) Women, says Campbell, take the opposite journey; they need to stand up, affirm their will and empower themselves.

2. "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

Feminist revision: "We realized we needed to turn to others for help."

For women, to look above for power has almost always meant to look to men. Women need to develop faith in themselves, and in their relationships with other women. A more helpful image of God would be feminine or androgynous, since the father figure reinforces women’s feelings of being treated like children. And to mention sanity seems irrelevant, at least in view of the disease model of alcoholism, which A.A. supports.

3. "Made a decision to turn our lives and our will over to the care of God as we understood Him."

Feminist revision: "We turn to our community of sisters and our spiritual resources to validate ourselves as worthwhile people, capable of creativity, care and responsibility."

This step draws on the assertions of psychological theorists such as Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan who assert that the strength of women is in their sense of relationship with others.

4. "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

Feminist revision: "We have taken a hard look at our patriarchal society and acknowledge those ways in which we have participated in our own oppression, particularly the ways we have devalued or escaped from our own feelings and needs for community and affirmation."

Feminist psychology begins by looking at one’s behavior within familial and cultural contexts. Women alcoholics have even more trouble than most women do in validating their feelings.

5. "Admitted to God, ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."

Feminist revision: "We realize that our high expectations for ourselves have led us either to avoid responsibility and/or to overinvest ourselves in others’ needs. We ask our sisters to help us discern how and when this happens."

Dwelling on the past is not as constructive for alcoholic women as it is for alcoholic men. Women’s feelings of guilt are often pervasive and diffuse, whereas men’s remorse tends to be tied to specific acts.

6. "Become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character."

Feminist revision: "Life can be wondrous or ordinary, enjoyable or traumatic, danced with or fought with, and survived. In our community we seek to live in the present with its wonder and hope."

This step affirms life in its fullness, with all of its ambiguities. Many women ignore the inherent value of their lives. Often they are overly self-critical, brooding over their failures and dismissing their successes. Counselors specializing in women’s issues regularly point out the need for women to be in touch with their childlike side, which hungers for care, joy and play. Too often female alcoholics and addicts distort natural variations in emotions in an effort to keep control of all situations, including their own inner anxieties.

7. "Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings."

Feminist revision: "The more we value ourselves, the more we can trust others and accept how that helps us. We are discerning and caring."

This is a long journey of trust, however. Women have been socialized to discredit the value of other women’s care and support, preferring to depend on men for affirmation of self-worth. Maya Angelou, when asked if she were a feminist, responded, "I’m too old not to be on my own side." To learn to trust themselves and other women, women may repeatedly need to receive sincere affirmation, survive open conflict and initiate gentle confrontation.

8. "Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all."

Feminist revision: "We affirm our gifts and strengths and acknowledge our weaknesses. We are especially aware of those who depend on us and of our influence on them."

Unless told otherwise, children may assume they have caused family troubles such as divorce, physical abuse or even a parent’s alcoholism. In an effort to deny their own problem, parents sometimes blame their drinking on their children. Research by Claudia Black and others shows that although children of alcoholics may appear functional, even over-achieving, the impact of their parents’ emotional instability and inconsistency is long-lasting. These children may not become aware of these effects until they become adults.

9. "Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others."

Feminist revision: "We will discuss our illness with our children, family, friends and colleagues. We will make it clear to them (particularly our children) that what our alcoholism caused in the past was not their fault."

10. "Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."

Feminist revision: "As we are learning to trust our feelings and perceptions, we will continue to check them carefully with our community, which we will ask to help us discern the problems we may not yet be aware of. We celebrate our progress toward wholeness individually and in community."

Celebration is crucial in feminist ritual. The modern tendency to deconstruct and demythologize religion has deprived it of its rich myths, symbols and rituals -- and of a sense of the sacred imbued in the ordinary. Liturgical renewal within mainline Protestant churches reflects an effort to remedy this deficit. In movements such as women-church, Jewish and Christian women are rewriting and creating new rituals commemorating the important transitions in individual and community life.

11. "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out."

Feminist revision: "Drawing upon the resources of our faith, we affirm our competence and confidence. We seek to follow through on our positive convictions with the support of our community and the love of God."

Dorothee Soelle asks how a woman can know the will of God when it isn’t announced by metaphysical thunder. Our decisions are our own, Soelle says; God’s will simply calls us to decide.

12. "Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs."

Feminist revision: "Having had a spiritual awakening a result of these steps, we are more able to draw upon the wisdom inherent in us, knowing we are competent women who have much to offer others."

My aim is not to discredit A.A.’s Twelve Steps and their spiritual tone, which thousands of persons have found crucial to recovery. Rather, my aim is to open up ways of thinking about recovery that could be especially helpful to women. I have presented these revised Twelve Steps to a variety of women’s groups, including clergywomen, spiritual growth groups and psychotherapists from a variety of backgrounds. They have responded enthusiastically to the way these steps directly address women’s spiritual experience in regard to the entrapment of addiction. My own counselees have used them either as a more satisfying version of the Twelve Steps within women’s support groups, or as an alternative way to begin thinking about their personal spiritual journey in conjunction with supportive friends.

Schemes from a Marriage

The film, Scene’s from a Marriage, leaves unexamined the questions of how to redeem community in the larger society; it seems to have gone irrevocably to the devil as it has become technically more nearly perfect.

Text:

Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage tells, like the Lenten season, a serialized story culminating in violence, dawning in a quiet denouement of fragile new life. Made originally for Swedish television, the film came to American public networks in the uncut version this year. Shown in six segments -- in Chicago, just late enough to catch after the week’s Wednesday evening church service -- Scenes happened to follow the rhythm of Lent. What could its gospel story have said to Johan and Marianne in their passion narrative? Even several weeks after the TV showing, faithful Bergmanians I know are still haunted by this most disturbing, complex film.

A work in the personalist Bergman line of Cries and Whispers and Face to Face, Scenes from a Marriage has been dismissed by some as a middle-class indulgence, like those voyeuristic encounter groups on late-night TV, sponsored by local churches as the groovy alternative to the stained-glass Meditation for Living. Yet Scenes is not just an exercise in simulated sensitivity to the imaginary pains of the affluent. It is thick with personal and political implications, a scarifying image of life in the ‘70s and beyond to which Christians will be ministering. At a time when the churches are tooling up their ministries with bureaucratic, corporate, and new-therapeutic technologies, Bergman’s arresting film compels us to re-examine, especially, the techniques we use in service of that ministry.

What “happens” in Scenes from a Marriage? In the first scene Johan (Erland Josephson), a 42-year-old associate professor at the Psychotechnical Institute, and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), a 35-year-old lawyer, display to a Swedish magazine interviewer their ideal marriage, a second one for her: at a dinner party shortly after, before their eyes quarreling dinner guests play out the vicious rituals of a hellish marriage. This scene, “Innocence and Panic,” ends with a painful blending of both emotions evoked by Marianne’s revealed pregnancy, their tenuous decision to have the child, and then her inexplicable abortion. “The Art of Sweeping Under the Rug,” scene two, portrays daily life and working environments, erupting in smoothed-over anxieties. In scene three, “Paula,” Johan suddenly announces that he is leaving Marianne; her elaborate defenses are brutally shattered. Six months pass; in the fourth scene both characters go through “The Vale of Tears” -- a ragged meeting between them, set off balance by his growing sense of failure and by her uncertain recovery.

In the fifth, climaxing scene, “The Illiterates” meet in Johan’s sterile office late at night to sign the divorce papers, but after making love they break out into a fight that ends in bloody exhaustion. Much later the sixth scene takes place: Marianne’s meeting with her now-widowed mother and later her touching rendezvous with Johan “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World.” Both characters, now remarried to others, show signs of new maturity and freedom. By some miraculous dynamic of health in the nature of things -- is it grace? -- “two new people begin to emerge from all this devastation,” as Bergman writes in the preface to the published script.

The fragile “happy ending” such as it is -- can be anticipated all along: it is there in the characters’ engaging qualities, survival instincts, continual relapses into intimacy, evident fondness for each other, and -- it must be admitted -- their visual attractiveness (Liv more than Erland, needless to say). Inevitably the camera effects a kind of cinematic exculpation: Liv Ullmann’s delighted smile can cover a multitude of sins. Interestingly, the character of Marianne is much less attractive on the pages of the script than the Marianne we both saw and heard on the screen: much more selfish, demanding, even cruel.

What is Scenes from a Marriage about? The title suggests the film’s fragmentary character, and that in turn suggests one of the film’s main themes: the failure of technique to redeem lives from chaos. Johan tells the interviewer in the first scene: “I think you must have a kind of technique to be able to live and be content with your life.” Through all the “scenes” what we see and hear is a moving mosaic of many scenarios, schemes used and discarded by both central characters as they try to explain the causes of their misery and the forms of their salvation.

Technique -- process, treatment, “schooling” -- is modern industrial society’s typical way of tackling its problems, as Ivan Illich and others have lamented, only to create monstrosities of modern life together. In some rather surprising ways, Scenes from a Marriage is about the need for “deschooling” marriage and people’s souls. In the compass of two lives, Bergman’s film shows us what the 19th century belief in progress through technology and treatment -- vastly expanding in the 20th -- has brought in “interpersonal relationships.”

The major shift of setting from the first scene to the last tells us much about what their society and “home” mean for this conventional Swedish couple. In the first scene they pose with their daughters for the public photograph, on a sofa described in the script as “round and curved and Victorian and upholstered in green; it has friendly arms, soft cushions, and carved legs; it is a monstrosity of coziness.

As that weighty piece of Freudian furniture goes, so go some of the inhibitions, illusions of the past, and family dependencies of which both characters must disburden themselves. The cozy monstrosity is also, of course, the scheme of their marriage as a place of refuge from the impersonal, warlike society in which they carry on their ambitious professional lives, earning the salaries that buy conspicuous affluence.

In the last scene we understand that with their new spouses they have some of this expensive protection still. But now free of the old marriage and its gadgetry, they can “relate” as persons at last. Clinging to each other and a blanket after Marianne’s nightmare in the last moments of the film -- as on a spar in a tempest -- Johan and Marianne find some home-meaning “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World.” The Victorian monster is gone; yet the two remain, reminding one of Matthew Arnold’s lovers in the last stanza of his 1867 poem “Dover Beach”:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which

     seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new.

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor

     light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for

     pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle

     and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The “cult of personal relations,” as historian Christopher Lasch has observed, intensifies as the belief in political answers withers away. Scenes implicitly portrays this cultural pattern: the wide-scale personal withdrawal after the respective political optimisms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. (Bergman’s own despair of politics dates back to his disillusionment as a young man during the last days of Hitler’s Germany.) In Matthew Arnold’s poem of farewell to Victorian social and religious faith, at least his lovers have their love. (In those last seven and a half lines, however, one may hear even love’s “melancholy, long withdrawing roar.”)

Bergman’s lovers a century later have their love only in the most precarious way. And they are cursed by something Arnold’s lovers are yet spared: Johan and Marianne become their own illiterate armies clashing by night. (Is “fight training” what they really need?) However muted and ultracivilized, their society’s “confused alarms of struggle and flight” invade the micro-society, their most intimate space. Given the penetrating destructiveness of postindustrial society, neither the tight circle of personal relations (Marianne’s theme) nor the private region of the inner life (Johan’s) can protect them. Nor can they escape, in the midst of their comforts, the harrowing human condition.

Where alarms of mass confusion threaten the public life, schemes are called for. Two decades after “Dover Beach,” the Fabian Socialists in England were busily, busily building on the ruins with education, sociological research and reform. One hundred years after Arnold, Bergman has set his film in Sweden, the ordered, superefficient society of the future where “everything has been neatly arranged, all cracks have been stopped up, it has all gone like clockwork,” as Johan laments about his marriage. “We have died from lack of oxygen.

Not that in any ideological way Scenes from a Marriage is exclusively about the soul of man under socialism. (I suspect a slightly more efficient state capitalism would do quite as well.) The parental state, extending the smothering accomplished by Johan’s possessive parents, does to him what the parental corporation does to people we know, or the public schools to children, or the machinery of welfare to modern-day paupers. It is an agent of impotence, as Illich has argued, and as power of person is lost, relationships of all kinds become trivialized. As Bergman puts it, such a social order is based on humilia’ tion. In their admirably regulated form of social life. Marianne comes to discover an implied brutality. And she dreams of amputation; her daughter, of war.

If this is so, the cure for impotence is not more faith in mere mechanism -- in her case, schemes from the consciousness movement for reprocessing the self. It is not self-help and healthy habits that endanger, but the development in our time of autosalvation, with its reach that never exceeds its grasp? We are inundated these days with best-selling testimonials to the self-reflexive cure, as though the personal journey alone can sustain the creature’s meaning. Although at times Scenes seems to be administering the physic of the consciousness movement in rather heavy doses, the film is too complex to be dismissed as a celebration of “How to Save Your Own Life” in the mode of Erica Jong, Jerry Rubin or Gail Sheehy.

Autosalvation may appear to elude the larger oppressive technologies of “the system,” one’s parental programming, and other “schooling” schemes. But in fact the private processing of the self can reiterate this style of manipulation on the small scale. And personal technologies break no private faith with the public belief in technique to solve our problems, a belief that curiously persists despite our underlying despair of the social chaos. And if the method is faulty, so is the message. As Christopher Lasch also points out, new therapies’ solutions are tautological, self-defeating to the extent that they advise people “not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive independence on others, and to live for the moment -- the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place” (New York Review of Books [September 30, 1976]).

To those who take their moral imperatives from the consciousness movement and find their highest wisdom in its survivalist precepts, this film speaks a warning word. Without a coherent set of values that transcends the personal bog, how can even the best-informed choose well among the array of available techniques for self-improvement? More to the point of Christian ministry, how can private technologists so busily exerting themselves in the cause of their own freedom hear the word that they are gifted, redeemed, chosen? Bergman’s ailing people strive to treat themselves in the silence of that word.

III

Johan’s urbane little lecture to the interviewer in scene one shows at the outset the fatal confusion of techniques without values. “Are you afraid of the future?” she asks.

Johan: If I stopped to think I’d be petrified with fear. Or so I imagine. So I don’t think. I’m fond of this cozy old sofa and that oil lamp. They give me an illusion of security which is so fragile that it’s almost comic. I like Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” though I’m not religious, because it gives me feelings of piety and belonging. Our families see a lot of each other and I depend very much on this contact, as it reminds me of my childhood when I felt I was protected. I like what Marianne said about fellow-feeling. It’s good for a conscience which worries on quite the wrong occasions. I think you must have a kind of technique to be able to live and be content with your life. In tact, you have to practice quite hard not giving a damn about anything. The people I admire most are those who can take life as a joke. I can’t. I have too little sense of humor for a feat like that. You won’t print this, will you?

Some of the schemes that string together the people in this marriage are classic: the poetry of religion in place of religious passion, childish family-feeling, sympathy as an antidote to guilt, mockery to subdue the soul’s hunger pains. Unfortunately for Johan, he does think. His articulate awareness of his situation is, the sine qua non of all other techniques, and both partners have it in abundance. They have both been, moreover, “so goddamn well-behaved and sensible and balanced and cautious,” as he says of himself. And yet: “I don’t know.” That is the parallel theme. “I don’t know anything.”

Besides these age-old schemes and scores of their moment-to-moment rationalizations, there are certain formulas appropriate to each character, and both exhibit the withdrawal symptoms of the ‘70s. For Johan it is the cynical rejection of politics and the attempt to embrace meaninglessness (the other side of his sentimentality). For Marianne it is personal survival, couched in some of the language of women’s liberation. But there is grace as well as work-righteousness of technique: his saving grace is the occasional insight that he needs something to believe in; hers is insight in redeeming moments of fellow-feeling.

These laws and graces are thoroughly discussed in the film, for Scenes from a Marriage is almost all talk: language is the primary means these characters have for establishing order. But it is always breaking down, as the dialogue rushes and jerks along from one formulation of ‘the problem, “the truth,” and ‘the solution” to another. That onrushing reality of contradictory, transient talk -- coupled with relentless camera closeups and the film’s minimal formal elements -- eliminates aesthetic distance. As a result we are plunged into the immediate necessities of inventing order, as Marianne and Johan seem to improvise their lives. It is time to look more closely at the ways they do so.

“The world is going to the devil and I claim the right to mind my own business,” Johan declares to the interviewer. “It makes me sick to think of these new salvation gospels. Whoever controls the computers will win the game” Johan prefers “the unpopular view of live and let live.” Hell he describes as “a place where no one believes in solutions any more” -- despite, perhaps because of, computer power. After he has left Marianne he revisits her, boasting of a newfound freedom inside himself, away from the politics that failed: “Do you know what my security looks like?” he asks her. “I think this way; loneliness is absolute. . . . You can invent fellowship on different levels, but it will still only be a fiction about religion, politics, love, art, and so on.” For several years he has tried one common cure for emptiness: an affair with a younger woman, He tells Marianne he is “learning to accept with a certain satisfaction how pointless it all is.”

While it is Marianne who is most directly influenced by the consciousness movement and the belief in technique, Johan is implicated in two ways. His professional work seems to involve him in the use of technology for effecting behavioristic solutions to personality problems. Thus he talks about feeling in a clinical way, with the impersonality of his lab reports. His projects at the institute have no personal meaning, and they are useless in helping him with his own problems.

Johan is implicated in the consciousness movement in a more philosophical sense than Marianne. Appropriately older than she, he is a person who stands in a de profundis tradition that stretches back through Sartre and Camus to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes. He learns that his existential awareness does not give him self-transcendence and that his personal choices do not define his humanity -- his alternatives in this society seem so meaningless. He strikes one as Victorian in some of his attitudes and needs, modern in his attempt and failure to imagine Sisyphus happy. His angst prevents him from buying into self-discovery gospels, and his agnosticism from accepting conventional religious solutions. Like Matthew Arnold’s generation he seems stranded between two faiths, one dead or dying, the other powerless to be born. Like the modern psychiatrist Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, he cannot take the leap of faith “on to a whole new track of being” he suspects is there.

When Marianne reacts skeptically to Johan’s nihilist manifesto, he retreats characteristically: “It’s nothing but words. You put it into words so as to placate the great emptiness.” But beneath his formulations of an antiformula stretches the wasteland of his pain. His emptiness hurts, he tells Marianne in the next breath, echoing Sartre: “You’d think it might . . . give you mental nausea. But my emptiness hurts physically. It stings like a burn,” Nonetheless, he continues to rant against “a lot of loose talk nowadays” that he sees as faddish idealism. Instead of Paula’s “astonishing” political faith. Johan tries to embrace a political faithlessness that suits his own personal ennui, itself a kind of debilitated laissez-faire of the spirit which nonetheless fails to sustain him through all his other adulteries.

Once an ardent political activist, Marianne is now in law (a career imposed by her parents), but she is not pleading the cause of the oppressed as she had once dreamed. As a divorce lawyer, she plays the social role of mopping up the messes rather than working for creative social change so that relationships might be more humane and lasting. Though kind, intelligent and well intentioned, Marianne in this work is the public facilitator of the transience from which she personally suffers.

Talking with the interviewer about love, Marianne rejects the formula of I Corinthians 13 as an impossible ideal -- useful only as an impressive “set piece to be read out at weddings and other solemn occasions. . . . Instead, she has adjusted “love” to a workable formula in the modern situation:

I think it’s enough if you’re kind to the person you’re living with. Affection is also a good thing. Comradeship and tolerance and a sense of humor. Moderate ambitions for one another. If you supply those ingredients, then . . . love’s not so important [emphasis added].

Marianne and Johan have all these things; yet their marriage falls apart. The lawyer talks the talk of the new minimalism, and like Johan’s pared. down formula for the Lone Self, it is an aesthetically shapely scheme which may suffice the eye but does not save the soul. Marianne’s scheme offers no comfort in her remorse over the abortion, no compensatory wisdom for Johan as his career fails him. And how can that ideal marriage contract’s list account for the pain and danger of Mrs. Jacobi, a late-middle-aged client who comes to Marianne’s office for a divorce in order to take a step toward recovering her sense of living? In this chilling encounter, Mrs. Jacobi explains haltingly that she and her husband are “hindering each other in a -- fatal way.” Even her five senses are failing her: “Music, scents, people’s faces and voices. Everything’s getting meaner and grayer, with no dignity.” Much later, when Marianne is undergoing psychoanalysis and is “trying hard to learn how to talk” about herself, she discovers the Mrs. Jacobi in Marianne and writes in her diary:

In the snug little world where Johan and I have lived so unconsciously, taking everything for granted, there is a cruelty and brutality implied which frightens me more when I think back on it. Outward security demands a high price: the acceptance of a continuous destruction of the personality. (I think this applies especially to women; men have somewhat wider margins.)

This, too, is formula -- note the professional tone in a personal journal -- but in insight it represents an advance on the old Marianne.

In earlier scenes she, too, tries common cures for marital ennui: the fantasy of having a baby, dreams of exotic vacations. And she clings to the marriage in a neurotic way. In the third scene, when Johan announces that he is leaving her, she pleads with him over and over again: “I think we could repair our marriage. I think we could find a new form for our life together.” But to find a new form does not necessarily escape the tyranny of technique. Johan finds so irritating the fact that she is the sort of perfectionist who would want to go over their former life with a fine-tooth comb to dig up all routine and negligence . . . talk over the past . . . find where we’ve gone wrong.” Throughout this scene all the inevitable rituals of their life together still go on: they must discuss what Johan should wear on his trip with Paula, what to do about the car, the plumber, the dentist, father’s birthday -- what to tell the cleaning woman. Just as in all their married life, these rituals on the night and morning of his impending departure are Marianne’s desperate remedies to placate the great emptiness. “It’s all so unreal.” she tells him, dazed, but her efficient marital formulas cannot prevent his escape out of all this clockwork marriage.

Bergman is fascinated by what he calls “the analyzing and clarifying process of the psyche.” The major movement of this film is Marianne’s growth toward self-discovery and freedom from demanding relationships with others. Part of what that freedom requires is the dismissal of religion, which in her experience had been a vicious mechanism for destroying the person. Her childhood attempts at self-assertion, she writes in the diary, were deformed

with injections of a poison which is one hundred percent effective: bad conscience. First towards Mother, then towards those around me, and, last but not least, towards Jesus and God. I see in a flash what kind of person I would have been had I not allowed myself to be brainwashed.

The problem in this film in which it is so difficult to determine the truth of utterances is that Marianne is oversimplifying, countering their technique with one of her own. Like Jerry Rubin in his book Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, she harps on her conditioning as though growing up were mainly a matter of inventing counterpropaganda to the lies her parents told her. In the violent drunk scene, Marianne’s scenario of outraged victim -- “fighting against hopeless odds all the time” -- is played out in a grotesque way; she uses it as an excuse for vicious and childish attacks on Johan, verbally kicking him when he is already down.

Her other extreme on the religion question is another form of dependence. During this scene she admits to Johan, I even turned religious for a time and prayed to God to let me have you back.” One is reminded of Ibsen’s innocent Hedvig, who said her prayers only at night because “in the morning it’s light and there’s nothing to fear.” Or more to the point here, one is reminded of Johan’s attraction for the St. Matthew Passion. These people’s deities reflect their society’s utilitarian ethic. Like the pornographic technology Marianne turns to briefly to ease her sexual tensions when Johan is gone, these clockwork gods can be discarded and replaced with other techniques for self-pleasuring. Either they can be discarded or they must be, as pleasurable or painful. They do not transcend. Interestingly, “bad conscience” continues to humiliate, intruding into their conversations long after it has been officially banished with counterpropaganda.

Much of Marianne’s recovery is based on helpful feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations of what is wrong with the conventional female model. Marianne was brought up to be agreeable; she realizes that her compliance has been dishonest and cowardly, an escape from the pains of creating the self. So the female eunuch strikes out: she transforms Johan’s old study into a room of her own, buys smart clothes that she likes herself in, discovers more joy of sex (without that “rubbish” about the body’s sanctity), refuses to play old roles, learns to express anger, teaches her daughters to be “honest” though they are spoiled and wayward, draws up her own divorce papers, remarries for ambition and sex, and learns to relish casual relationships with men. It is a veritable catalogue of liberationist cliches.

We are not necessarily directed toward damning Marianne for any of this: on the contrary, we admire her freer manner, her joy in living. But the bind is still there: she knows that none of these schemes guarantees her happiness. To Bergman’s credit his film is much more than a cinematic manifesto for women’s liberation or an advertisement for the new therapies that might have helped to make it all possible. And one sign that Bergman’s Scenes is not Gail Sheehy’s Passages is that his characters are always sagely advising each other not to overexcite themselves, to cope, not to panic. But of course they do panic; there are, after all, so many good reasons to.

When Johan, for example, pleads that they not sign the divorce papers but try instead to live together again, Marianne -- determined to be free of him forever -- breaks out indignantly: “I don’t want you to entreat me. I’m not certain that I’m not certain that I could cope. That would be the worst thing that could happen” But love and pain are valuable, many-hued emotions; to determine mainly to “cope” with them can be to deplete one’s own resources of sympathy and tenderness for another. As Lasch has observed elsewhere in his critique of Sheehy’s book, negotiating the crises and “passages” of one’s life simply by shedding old selves, not panicking, and taking on new interests denies the human need to grow to maturity through continuity with one’s old selves and the people of the past. Coping, moreover, has political implications: it is the scheme of an outrageous society for anesthetizing its citizens. Marianne advises her clients to cope with life-in-death, not to rage against the dying of the light.

Johan bitterly satirizes the liberation psychology Marianne espouses. But just as her salvation gospels cannot be entirely dismissed, his critique of her cannot be written off merely as rooted in his personal bitterness and his misogynist jealousy of her “boundless female strength,” There is something smug in her existence on a “special plane reserved for women with a privileged emotional life and a happier, more mundane adjustment to the mysteries of life.” But it is primarily Marianne who presents us with the limitations of what he calls the “new women’s gospel.”

In her boozy rage in scene five she parodies herself, showing us the antisocial and self-righteous side of the personal liberation theme:

Do you suppose that I’ve gone through all I have, and come out on the other side and starred a life of my own which every day I’m thankful for, just to take charge of you and see that you don’t go to the dogs because you’re so weak and full of self-pity? . . . I’ve hardened myself.

We can understand this woman’s need to break free of the demands of others who have hampered her self-development. At the same time, her hard words suggest that she has not been able to break utterly free: ‘‘If you knew’’ she goes on, “how many times I’ve dreamt I battered you to death, that I murdered you, that I stabbed you, that I kicked you. If you only knew what a goddamn relief it is to say all this to you at last.’’

In a lower pitch, now patronizing Johan, Marianne lectures him to free himself from the past and make a fresh start as she has. She claims she lives a ‘‘much more honest life now than I’ve ever done.” She does; but Johan asks: “And happier?” In her diary Marianne had written of reawakening the capacity for joy. “All that talk about happiness is nonsense,” she retorts. “My greatest happiness is to eat a good dinner.”

In Marianne’s rage we see the tremendous toll her oppression as a woman has taken. “You’re being utterly grotesque,” Johan justly observes. “So what. That’s how I’ve become,” Marianne flings his charge back,

but the difference between not grotesqueness and yours is that I don’t give in. I intend to keep on, you see. I intend to live in reality just as it is. For if there’s one thing I like more than anything else on earth, it’s to live. . . .

Marianne’s instinct for self-preservation has helped set her free of many old self-destructive patterns, but in another sense she seems grimly bound to her new agenda. Her fierce words seem to declare the doom of joy.

Yet there is another Marianne that likes people, ‘‘fine words and diplomacy.” In the first scene she quietly announces: “I believe in fellow-feeling. . . . If everyone learned to care about each other right from childhood, the world would be a different place, I’m certain of that.” Johan generally denounces this sort of thing as naïve and impractical, but he comes to admit that he simply lacks the imagination for sympathy.

Throughout the film vacillating between the legalistic and the spontaneous, Marianne seems to place the finer human qualities outside the realm of formula. Fidelity, for instance, can never be ‘‘a compulsion or a resolution. . . . Either it’s there or it isn’t” If in John Updike’s recent fiction adultery is presented as a “grace,” it is fidelity that has that inexplicable quality for Marianne -- it is all gift, not calculated as her sex life by the brink has been with Johan. (Faithfulness is also ephemeral, however; and the irony of their final relapse into fidelity is that their last scene together must be snatched on an illicit weekend when their spouses are out of town.) Tired of roles, she wishes more than once “that we could be simpler and gentler with each other,” a wish that comes true in the final episode.

VII

In the sixth scene Johan and Marianne have gained some self-understanding and acceptance. Each offers a little summary, each a kind of resignation. He tells her that he has “found my right proportions. And that I’ve accepted my limitations with a certain humility” He is still a “middle-aged boy who never wants to grow up”: he yearns for mothering. But he listens better, and can give comfort. And he has given up trying to be an existential hero. In the second scene he had announced his refusal “to live under the eye of eternity” But by the film’s end he has overcome the hubris of that technique for coping:

Because I refuse to accept the complete meaninglessness behind the complete awareness. . . . Over and over again I try to cheer myself up by saying that life has the value you ascribe to it. But that sort of talk is no help to me. I want something to long for. I want something to believe in.

Marianne announces a freedom from dependence on her new husband: ‘‘I live with him. That’s fine. I live with you. That’s fine. If I meet some other man who attracts me I can live with him too.” To guide her protean life style this appealing modern woman relies on common sense, feeling, and experience:

“They cooperate.” It is a pat, well-ordered scheme that suffices perhaps for much of her workaday living. But it lacks a reference point outside the self, as life is improvised in the here and now to fill her emotional needs under no eye of eternity. Objectivity dissolves: if she does not feel a problem, it isn’t there. This is a dangerous road, as her nightmare’s images show her: she has voluntarily amputated the hands that might hold on to some saving certainty.

The irony of Johan’s and Marianne’s greatly expanded awareness is that they “don’t know what to do.” In scene five Johan had lamented,

We’re taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it’s called, but not a word about the soul. . . . We’re left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions.

Johan declares them both “emotional illiterates.” More accurately, their illiteracy is spiritual, and their kind of omniscience brings a peculiarly modern anguish to the problematic knowledge of good and evil. “With that cold light over all my endeavors,” psychologist Johan comes to recognize, it is impossible to live.

In the final episode he expresses the irreducible sadness underlying the feats of consciousness-raising we have witnessed through five scenes from this marriage: “Think of all the wisdom and awareness that we’ve arrived at through tears and misery. It’s magnificent. Fantastic. We’ve discovered ourselves. . . . Analysis is total, knowledge is boundless. but I can’t stand it.” Suddenly sad, Marianne murmurs: I know what you mean. Even in this touching moment, irony cuts in: inevitably she takes one more little turn in the spiral of knowledge.

At the end of a film which has been so much “loose talk” that mistook itself for reasonable explanations, they find some relief in silence. “Just think if everything is too late,” Marianne says to Johan. “We mustn’t say things like that. Only think them,” he replies. Gentler now, they have given up preaching: there is too much they can’t put into words, indeed had better not: “But if we harp on it too much,” says Jolian, “love will give out.’’

Bergman’s final scene affirms the existence of qualities and experiences that break through the processed self with surprises of joy and terror. In the middle of the night Marianne awakes from a scarifying nightmare in which she has no hands, only “a couple of stumps that end at the elbows.’’ She tells Johan she is “slithering in soft sand. I can’t get hold of you. You’re all standing up there on the road and I can’t reach you.”

He comforts her and after a pause she asks: “Do you think were living in utter confusion? . . That we realize that we’re slipping downhill. And that we don’t know what to do.” ‘‘Yes, I think so, he replies. Makers and doers in all things else, they feel helpless before the mystery of their own lives. ‘‘Think how we exert ourselves all the time,” Marianne muses. ‘‘Have we missed something important? He poses a counterquestion: “What would that be?’’ She can name only the epiphanies of insight that bind her briefly to other people, even strangers:

MARIANNE Sometimes I know exactly how you’re feeling and thinking. And then I feel a great tenderness for you and forget about myself, even though I don’t efface myself. Do you understand what I mean?

JOHAN I understand what you mean.

Not the analytical understanding but the knowledge of the heart makes it possible for Johan and Marianne to do what her parents could never manage: they have touched one another’s souls. Each has found a way of understanding and accepting the saving grace of the other, Johan’s refusal to celebrate meaninglessness and Marianne’s belief in fellow-feeling. Reversing the words of the first scene’s title, Bergman has moved his principal characters from panic to a kind of knowing innocence.

VIII

Scene’s from a Marriage leaves unexamined the questions of how to redeem community in the larger society; it seems, as Johan says, to have gone irrevocably to the devil as it has become technically more nearly perfect. This film, writes America reviewer Richard Blake, “makes one wonder about the future of the soul” (August 10, 1974). What could the care of the church have to offer them -- a prophetic word about the strains of their affluence, a comforting word about the God who suffers with them, a liberating word that sets all our deeds and plans under the eye of the eternal and incarnate Lord? Discipleship, not just self-control; koinonia. not only “personal relations”; the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, not just strategies for survival day by day. And for that matter counseling, too -- with methods that incarnate these values, not counteract them.

But would they hear suds gospel tidings, helpless though they know they are? As it is, at the end one can only wonder what will become of Marianne’s complacent soul without the influence of Johan’s angst, his incessant questioning of their routine and the chaos beneath it. And what will become of his ailing soul without Marianne’s instinct for health? Marriage is a scheme for bringing together these spiritual illiterates who need each other with their very earthly and imperfect love. In many of its forms it is not a scheme that works very smoothly in these times, but one cannot help hoping that somewhere in the world, Bergman’s matched sufferers can find a breathing space to try again, in a sevenths scene from their remarriage. And one must imagine them happy.

Margaret Atwood’s Testaments: Resisting the Gilead Within

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Everywhere on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid pictures of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of all this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. . . . every word took on the value of a declaration of principles.

And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were the real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered No [Jean-Paul Satire in The Republic of Silence, edited by A. J. Liebling (Harcourt, 1947) ].

Among this century’s writing prophets perhaps the most compelling social critics are the creators of dystopian fiction -- those writers, filmmakers and other artists who imagine grim futures to teach us to read the signs of our own times. In George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, even ABC’s Amerika, we find ourselves disoriented yet at home in futures that are pastlike, familiar, futureless. Puzzling over the where and when of the story, we ask with new urgency of our own present, what time is it -- if there is time? The biblical prophets used some devices of dystopian writing to drive home the message that the disastrous future was already breaking into the present; but within the Covenant framework they could locate hope. In modern dystopias, where the inescapable model for this dark futuristic genre is the Third Reich, the prospect is not optimistic. Dystopian writers typically bear no gospels, though they may bring light.

Since 1972, when Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood published Survival, a critical study of her own national literature, and Surfacing, a novel about a woman’s recovery of identity, this powerful writer has been acclaimed for her canny exposures of sexual politics and modes of human survival. Her latest novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) , is commanding attention as a considerably more ambitious book, part of a new phase of her work that includes the poems in True Stories and the novel Bodily Harm (both published in 1981) Exposing male/female power games within an alarmingly widened field of vision, Atwood bears prophetic witness to the largest, most subtle and most violent manifestations of power in our time.

In the Tale, the nazification of the United States has arrived in the late 20th-century Republic of Gilead. In this far-rightist religious regime, it is the women who must keep silent in the state, though it menaces all. Chapters titled "Night" begin, end, and return in the tale, with chilling echoes of Wiesel, Nietzsche and Job. Yet Atwood’s heroine infers that there is in fact a resistance movement, reasoning that there can be "no shadow unless there is also light" (p. 105) Despite all odds, the Handmaid’s tale is a darkly mirroring apokalypsis of the earthly grounds for hope.

The book confesses on almost every page a deep familiarity with the scriptural tradition. Why should this nonreligious writer bother? Of course, to expose Gilead’ s backward-looking fundamentalism, Atwood needs to use material from the patriarchal narratives, and distorted quotations from Jesus and St. Paul. Those readers not compelled by Moral Majority outrage to fling this book on the bonfire will be amused and appalled by its grotesque cartoon of theocracy. But the caricature is matched by Atwood’s considerable subtlety, which challenges us to look deeper into her satire. Like biblical Hebrew, Atwood’s witty prose is thick with double entendre and allusion, including hidden puns whose meanings dawn on us only later, and outrageous jokes that don’t so much dawn as "bomb" (one of the book’s metaphors and an effect of Atwood’s powerfully laconic style)

The volume is also divided into two separate stories, set a century apart: a long first-person narrative by a Handmaid in Gilead is followed by "Historical Notes on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,"’ a fictive academic commentary by the urbane male editor of the anonymous woman’s tapes discovered in the late 21st century, decades after Gilead’s fall. These two texts constitute Atwood’s testaments: one older, in subject matter more violent; the other more recent, seemingly benign, but insidiously continuous with the violence in the first. Together they give us back the lost or muted voices of some scriptural women, while demonstrating how they were silenced by the language and values of patriarchy that have dominated biblical storytelling, canon formation, commentary, theology and historical-critical scholarship. At Union Theological Seminary’s recent Biblical Jubilee, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann testified to the field’s "incredible naïveté about the management of power in our hermeneutical conversations." It is this naïveté that The Handmaid’s Tale addresses with its appended "historical" commentary, challenging us to think about something otherwise difficult to see: the relationship between the crises of our civilization and its historic textual politics -- the continuing story of who controls, legitimates, engenders and eliminates whom and what through the power of authoritative language, grounded in the Word.

Gilead’s Commanders of the Faithful have fulfilled their dream: they have constructed a theocracy (centered in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on the lines of ancestral Puritanism and biblical patriarchy. But as the true modems they don’t realize they are, they have remembered these traditions faithlessly -- by the letter and without the spirit of traditional piety -- and have erased the life-affirming themes of Israel’s covenant. In Gilead the valuing of seed has become a neo-Puritan fertility cult, which serves the Republic in a depopulated world. The "Ceremony" of its state religion is a passionless scene of begetting (based on a reading of Genesis 30:1-3) in which the Handmaid’s fruitful womb is interposed between the presumably nonsterile patriarch and his barren wife. Preliminary rituals of Bible-reading (by the Commander to his household) preserve "bits of broken symbolism left over from the time before" (p. 60) -- bits that also appear on police vans (the Winged Eye) , in uniforms (Handmaids wear red habits and stiff white blinders) , in common speech (their standard farewell is "Under His Eye") and military orders (Guardians of the Faith watch everywhere, outranked by Angel forces). At the Rachel and Leah Reeducation Center, "Aunts" armed with cattle prods and words from St. Paul have trained up the Handmaids in the way they should go, promising salvation through childbearing, under the threat of dismemberment and death. ("For our purposes your feet and your hands are not essential," one Aunt explains, perversely re-membering the body language of I Corinthians 12:21.)

Atwood’s outrageous caricature is justified partly by the point it makes about the dangers of reducing "reality" to a rigid, life-denying ideology. For it is Gilead’s denial of history, its own historicity and any reading of Scripture other than the literalistic that make the regime a social menace. It must refuse the historical validity of "others" who do not share its privilege or ideology -- such as Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘gender traitors," scientists, and former abortionists hung by giant fish-hooks (from Amos?) on "the Wall" of Harvard Yard.

The regime itself sends genetically defective Unbabies to the "shredder" and practices a historical sweep of genocides. Meanwhile, the perpetually whirring lawn mowers testify that nothing natural can escape state cultivation. In fact, the "heart of Gilead" is a sleepy suburban landscape out of Better Homes and Gardens, tidily gridded with roadblocks. The greensward is more than a nice touch: Gilead in the Old Testament is a scenic grazing area (remembered in the Song of Songs for its goats) , and its famous trees produced a highly prized medicinal balm, absurdly recalled in the Handmaid’s longing for prohibited hand lotion. But in this Gilead, Atwood has imagined a time when our nightmares about the perils of toxic waste, radioactive fallout, chemical and biological warfare, nuclear sabotage and the building

of atomic power plants along earthquake fault lines have all come true. What was New World Edenic grazing land, "America the beautiful," has become lethal to all creation and human good. Like the cursed fig tree withered from leaf to root in Mark’s passion narrative, the infertility that plagues Atwood’s dystopia is a prophetic sign of the withering of a whole culture.

The prophet Amos also recalls that the Ammonites have "ripped up the women with child, of Gilead, that they might enlarge their border" (1:13) In the Tale, the Handmaids’ own children have been ripped from them so that these "twolegged wombs" may become the property of a state mobilized to invade all private spaces (including those "pockets of Baptist guerrillas" engaged in border warfare) In her latter days, Atwood’s heroine, like the "handmaids" in Joel 2:29, prophesies against such state-sponsored terrorism, but even more against its inscription in the people’s hearts (Jer. 31:33) : "The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you" (p. 23)

Repeatedly the reader realizes that the regime in Gilead is no anachronistic theocracy like Iran, but the religion-based state of our continuing American Puritan tradition. It is also a paradigmatic political system that makes its (male) power plausible through control of the word. In this republic of silence for women, men have once again expropriated literacy, hoarded books and banned acts of reading from public places, replacing lettered signs with pictures. While religion flourishes to justify the state, and the Word is stripped of its transcendent reference and power, propaganda is the one balm in Gilead and its most natural product.

But even propaganda’s fictions are never so powerful as those by which people choose to live. The heroine remembers the time before when she and her friends had dismissed news stories of violence done to women (as readers might dismiss literary dystopias) as "too melodramatic": "We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories." These were not gaps in their knowledge, as she confesses: "We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." The gaps are a vacuum, nowhere for humans to breathe in. The gaps are that venerable noplace, utopia. Where daily surviving is based on fictions of denial, it is our way of life that is implausible.

Surfacing issued a stirring manifesto for women in 1971: "This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing." Early on, Atwood’s Handmaid voices a motto for the ‘80s: "Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last" (p. 8). And yet the value of the struggle Sartre has described -- to think an accurate thought, speak a true word -- is inscribed on every page of this underground testimony, to me the more eloquent for resisting the absolute certainties of the "true Resistant." Like Rachel smuggling out the family gods under her voluminous garments, this Handmaid has secretly brought remnants of the word with her into exile. Although she can parrot the state’s language, as in her wondrous passing remark that oranges have been hard to get "since Central America was lost to the Libertheos" (p. 25) , her main hope for survival lies in exercising her ability to "read" and "write." For survival to be based on literacy is not a new idea in dystopian fiction or in Atwood. But in the crisis of the ‘80s (when "reading" has been escalated to "hermeneutics") , Atwood sees that we have to produce meaning in the face not only of a "basic skills" crisis in the schools but a massively anti-literate world order that has invested even its knowledge in "ignoring." The Handmaid’s illegal taletelling, though often consciously fictional and of necessity fragmentary, is her resistance to the Gilead within that brings her to the brink of deliverance from the Gilead without. Resisting is her hope-work; it becomes ours.

Czech author Milan Kundera has said that the struggle of human beings against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Although she never reveals her real name (effaced now under the patronymic "Offred") , the Handmaid begins her tale in the old high school gymnasium by recalling youthful "expectation, of something without a shape or name" (p. 3) , preserving, like Israel in exile, the time of hope, and returning in memory to the sources of existence as the only way forward. Offred’s efforts to weave together the different stages of her life remake some crucial years of common history, while keeping alive the social idea by "testifying." "I tell, therefore you are," she addresses an assumed "Dear You," enfleshing already in her reader the intimacy banned in Gilead and her hope for the future in us.

Resistance also requires a constant effort to withstand the doublespeak of the Re-education Center, a nightmare Sunday school whose lessons she must unlearn (such as the wonderful revisionary slogan said to be in Acts: "From each according to her ability; to each according to his needs" [p. 117]) At lunch they hear new Beatitudes she knows are "wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking" (p. 89) except through memory and moral imagination. Offred also creates her own subversive counter-texts and continually practices the mental acts of poetic synthesis and analysis, remaking distinctions that the State elides and reviving the language for which she hungers in this famine of the Word.

Again like Rachel sitting on the household gods, Atwood’s Handmaid sits in her room on a petit-point cushion (so faded it has been overlooked by the state redecorators) and spells out its single word "FAITH." Reconstructing from this inscription the whole Corinthian formula, she remembers what Gilead has forgotten in its "amputated" pseudo-Christian speech -- and she acts on the discovery. The comic irony of Atwood’s gospel is that as Offred sits brooding on "FAITH," "HOPE" and "CHARITY" hatch (words that keep turning up in the tale). At any rate, for a bad joke to be the good news is the kind of absurdly hopeful reversal (as in Jesus’ wittier parables) that we find often in this surprisingly funny book.

The humor of this novel is dark, and its’ vision harrowing, yet it also contains a kind of celebration, a gathering of a vast sisterhood in the ‘Everywoman’s voice narrating the tale. Just as Rachel resisting false comfort for her children symbolizes the nation in Jeremiah 31:15, so this Everywoman tells everyone’s story.

Among those gathered here in her modem voice (through scriptural images, verbal echoes, parallel situations) are women whose stories have been muffled in the Bible’s tradition -- Hagar, Bilhah, Zilpah, Mary, the Lord’s "handmaiden," Sarah, Rachel, Leah, Rebekkah, Ruth, Puah and Shiphrah (the Hebrew midwives in Egypt) , Jael, Jephthah’s daughter, the "Jezebel" of Revelation, and other, unnamed ancestresses, "missing persons without textual authority.

The novel offers no unified "character analysis" of these ancient women, certainly no hagiography; but through Offred’s tale it does suggest the complexity of their inner lives as well as the trickiness of their textual words that we do have to ponder -- discourse rarely simple, since historically women have had to express themselves indirectly, within, the suppressive language of patriarchy. And in Atwood’s sly juxtaposition of epigraphs from Genesis and Swift’s "A Modest Proposal," another bomb drops: the Handmaid idea originated with a woman and is connectable, via Swift, with cannibalism.

Lest we be tempted to romanticize woman’s capacity for rebirth" in a dying culture, Atwood tests the reader’s discernment by appending the "Historical Notes." In these Proceedings from the Symposium on Gileadean Studies, the limits of the Handmaid’s point of view become clearer with a century’s hindsight. Yet, more cleverly exposed are the ways the intellectual class, in processing the tale and its history through the standard academic apparatus, fosters the advent of the next authoritarian regime by its naïve belief in its own objectivity and its refusal to judge Gilead’s practices. The passionate immediacy of the Handmaid’s witness is muffled in a talk spiced with "harmless" sexist jests that should give the game away. But not all readers report that they understand Atwood’s irony at first. Here (as in Swift) plausibility seduces. This second testament continues Atwood’s book of revelation, showing how insidiously Gilead can persist within a text and its readers, reflecting and abetting the Gilead without.

Is it not a miracle, then, that the Handmaid’s tale does not lose its power after this historical-critical afterword? But this, too, is a parable. Even patriarchy’s deepest plots have not wholly’ silenced women in the biblical tradition, nor does our knowledge of these infamous "proceedings" have to cancel other values of Scripture for us. But as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has argued in In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (Crossroad, 1985) the biblical past, which cannot be obliterated from the Western past, can be a source of power for us in the present only as we confront ‘what is absent in it and why.

Resisting classification as ever, Atwood is neither a rescuer of biblical religion from its feminist critics nor only a "post-biblical feminist" who must reject the Bible wholesale as a gynocidal text. For her, women cannot live toward the future without having roots, nor is it safe for them to forget where they have been.

In this novel Atwood does not abandon biblical history to those who have muted female testimony; instead, she imaginatively writes this testimony back into cultural contexts that would destroy it utterly and that fail to do so, even as she reveals the violence in any amputations of human stories and the historical vulnerability of all speech and silence. To reclaim a term from Gilead’s lexicon of euphemisms, a "Women’s Salvaging" of Scripture is a possible venture, crucial for our common future, but only if undertaken with the historical awareness and moral discernment that can also illumine our reading of the current times. Only then perhaps can "faith, hope, and charity" be for women not a formula for "ignoring," but words with sustenance for our common life.

Wrestling with Advent (Luke 1:29)

And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be [Luke 1:291.

Many representations of the annunciation in painting, literature and film, while emphasizing Mary’s faithfulness, have lingered over the fear and questioning hinted at in Luke. In what depths of Mary’s heart did she ponder the angel’s words? Did she wrestle with the meaning of this Advent, like the matriarchs of old who struggled to believe that "with God nothing shall be impossible" (Luke 1:37; cf. Gen. 18:14) ? Skeptical Sara laughs, equivocates with the messenger she fears but does not quite recognize is divine. Rebekah’s wrestling begins in conception and continues in her domestic manipulations despite the oracle’s clear promise that Jacob will prevail over Esau. Rachel’s "mighty wrestlings" in a birth contest with Leah produce 12 leaders but end with her death as the "child of her sorrow is brought forth. Hannah’s song, inspiring Mary’s Magnificat, is a joyful response to the redemptive miracle of Samuel’s birth. Did Mary also experience the absence that precedes Advent, as Hannah did, weeping her prayers to God? In the other Gospels it is not clear that Mary understood what had been accomplished through her until later in the story. Did she fully comprehend her oracle? Did she, like Rebekah’s son, wrestle with the angel?

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1984 film Je Vous Salue Marie (Hail Mary) provocatively presents these questions. Though the pope has condemned the film and conservative Roman Catholic groups still picket when it is shown, it has inspired contemplative silence from many viewers. A moving, contemporary version of the incarnation, enlivened by wit and charm appropriate for a divine comedy about children, Hail Mary testifies to a mystery. Godard’s very obscurities convey the way people often apprehend God’s presence. From an avant-garde filmmaker who avoids a consistent viewpoint, we can hardly expect orthodoxy. Viewers of the available video can make up their own minds about Godard’s achievement; for me, Hail Mary prompted meditations that we do not usually consider at Advent.

Hail Mary takes place at a crossroads of traffic, choices and journeys: a garage (called "Self Gas") where a teenaged daughter helps out at the pumps. At high school, this tall young woman with the fresh, serious face plays on the girls’ basketball team, but from the beginning she is marked as alone of all her sex. Late one night her taxi-driver boyfriend pulls up to the pumps with a strange twosome just arrived from the airport: a rather seedy, stern young man with a cherub-cheeked girl who feeds him his lines from a big book. "This is the place." In the chiaroscuro of neon-lit darkness, the virgin receives her impossible annunciation across a taxi hood, arrested amid the confusion of strange arrivals and ordinary business. Gabriel also summons her to an Abramic journey -- "I know where you’re going and you will too"; the cherub charges her, "Be pure, be rough. Follow thy Way!" Mary holds firm against Joseph’s siege of questions and patiently awaits the event, iconographically positioned in windows and doorways flooded with light, reading books. Only as this advent unfolds does she begin to struggle with the meaning of this "excess of ingress," the awe-filled coming of the Lord.

In the film’s most remarkable scenes we witness Mary’s long night-wrestling with her condition and her choice. In her narrow rumpled bed again and again she flails against the white sheets that rush upon her with the sound of angels’ wings, while the sharp songs of predatory night birds outside her window attack the ear, then change into sweeter, holier notes as dawn arrives. The composition of these scenes recalls many annunciation paintings. The violent struggle depicted also suggests a hieros gamos, a sacred mating between a god and a mortal. The shadows in these encounters and other patches of darkness Godard lets fall in the film recall Gabriel’s prophecy: "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee" (Luke 1:34-5) Although there have been some efforts to read this imagery sexually, most biblical scholars reject such implications. Godard has a long tradition of erotic spirituality in Christian mysticism to draw upon, but the extraordinary collage of texts that inform the soliloquies of Godard’s Mary recalls other traditions as well, especially those of the psalmist’s laments, Job’s accusations, Jacob’s encounter with the night messenger and Jesus passional agony. Mary enters her valley of the shadow with a medley of outcries: God is "a vampire" who "profited from my pain"; "a creep, a coward who won’t fight"; one who "suffers to see [her] suffer." Over a scene of a tempest beating across a green field we hear Mary’s words of pure, rough defiance: "The Lucifer will die. We’ll see who’s weariest, him or me." Is it friend or foe? Godard’s Mary struggles to discern spirits, resists disappearing into her suffering, and, as her body becomes the site of redemptive warfare, discovers that her loss and gain are one.

Early in the film, childlike, she asks the family doctor, "Does the soul have a body?" His conventional answer suddenly seems more naïve: mais non, it’s bodies that have souls. This exchange brings out that Mary suffers also because she has been drawn into a reversal of nature: a soul is getting embodied. At moments the film seems to be exposing the cruelty of a tradition that enshrines the sacrifice of female sexuality as the price of the incarnation. But more powerful are the film’s visual embodiments of the idea that "the Spirit acts upon the body" to irradiate it, making it "more beautiful than it is"; for, Mary asks, "what is flesh alone?" The Spirit finds a home in her luminous flesh and Mary salutes the light that "suddenly. . . shone in my heart" -- bringing to mind Jesus’ meditation on "the light of the body" in Luke 11:33-36. In his spiritual darkness, Joseph believes it is the body that acts upon the spirit -- the materialism of the "average Joe."

Mary’s fugue-like dialogues with herself remind us that Advent can arrive as intimate demand, confront us by rude surprise, and, despite our fierce or wily resistance, "wrest from [us] that which [we] do not give." Coming in this way, Advent is labor through till dawn, and its spirit may be difficult to discern. Is acceptance nothing more than capitulation to a superior power, like Job’s whirlwind God? "I am not sad, only resigned," Mary says, as a shadow falls. And then: "Why must one speak of resignation to God’s will? Is one resigned to be loved?" Advent may be greeted with ecstasy, or it may come with gentler grace after we have done with wrestling. In whatever way, it is through our material conditions, and through the flesh that we imagine to be an impermeable boundary of self, the solid object of knowledge and possession, or an alien substance, that Advent comes. Advent comes to fill unexpected spaces and times of our lives with Spirit, challenging our forgetful materialisms and rationalist designs, scandalizing all disembodied religiosity and even the best-meant liberal humanism.

Urging us to "embrace the scandal of incarnation more radically," James B. Nelson has written: "If we do not know the gospel in our bodies, we may not know the gospel. When we find bodily life an embarrassment to so-called high-minded spiritualized religion, we lose our capacity for passionate caring and justice. We lose the sense of the holiness of the bodies of starving children and the bodies of women and men tom by violence and torture." In this respect, Hail Mary falters. In focusing only on the virgin mother, Hail Mary does not invite us to ponder the ministry of justice and reconciliation so boldly envisioned in the Magnificat. Reminding us that the soul has a body politic as well as embodiment in precious individuals, this sublime prophetic song judges all oppressive social orders and announces their end with the coming of the Lord. As Mary sings, prophecy is already being fulfilled in this world, lifting up the humble singer, pulling faithful hearers toward the future God wills for the shalom of all creatures, and energizing them to bring home to others the real presence of the indwelling God. Advent bears good tidings that this is the One who comes as body and blood, bread and wine, to hungry mouths at the Eucharist feast, and who comes back to us through compassionate acts of filling the hungry with good things. This Christ comes to and through broken flesh, the bypassed heart, the feeble knees up six flights of stairs, the ears that hear and the eyes that read lips, the healing voice, the arms embracing, the face of rival or friend.

In the between-times of Advent, the unresolved fugal dialogues will go on. More precisely, their felt irresolution may be the active sign of a God who continues to encounter us. The Magnificat’s Lord of love and justice is in personal terms the One who "fights with us" in both senses of the phrase, our best friend and most faithful antagonist at once. A poem of Rilke’s about this paradox recalls "the Angel who appeared / to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: / when the wrestlers’ sinews / grew long like metal strings, / he felt them under his fingers / like chords of deep music." "Whoever was beaten by this Angel," Rilke continues, ". . . went away proud and strengthened / and great from that harsh hand. . ." To distinguish this gracious empowering defeat from others less noble or merely destructive is a continuing challenge of discernment. Perhaps Mary best knew this divine wrestling partner, who called forth her chords of deep music and made her perfect submission proud and strong. Perhaps also (I like to imagine, since we don’t know) , the being Jacob encountered was this very avant-garde Lady, far ahead of her appointed biblical time, who initiated the wily challenger into new love/knowledge beyond the meaning of his macho name before she consented to let him go. In my vision it is Our Lady the Wrestler who lets him go limping into the crossroads of the world, where for the first time he sees in the face of his brother, running to embrace him, the countenance of God. What manner of greeting is this unexpected reconciliation? "Let the soul be the body." Let it be, according to thy word.

Blessing Both Jew and Palestinian: A Religious Zionist View

Our soldiers are fighting against the inevitable -- namely, freedom and sovereignty for the Palestinians in a state of their own. If we do not accommodate Palestinian nationalism in a two-state compromise arrangement -- ideally, in a three-state confederation that includes Jordan -- then the Palestinians will grow even more militant and uncompromising, reverting to their earlier rejectionism, and secular or Islamic extremists will depose PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat.

I am active in the religious peace movement Oz veShalom, "Strength and Peace," a name taken from the last verse of Psalm 29: "May the Lord give strength [oz] to His people! May the Lord bless His people with peace [shalom ]!" This strength is an inner, spiritual kind -- the kind that the Palestinians are now displaying. It enabled us Jews to survive for over three millennia, even though we usually lacked political and military power, koach.

We in Oz veShalom are not pacifists. We serve proudly in the Israel Defense Forces -- as do those soldiers who choose, out of conscience, to sit in a military prison rather than serve in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today. Our religious heritage not just our history of persecution, teaches us to appreciate the moral blessing and burden that come with the capacity to defend ourselves against aggression. The true test of Torah comes after the assumption of power, when there is a sovereign Jewish head of state to whom Jewish prophets and sages can direct ethical challenges. For too long Jews were the persecuted, prophetic minority under Christian and Muslim rulers. Now we are the rulers, asking God to bestow on us the oz, the spiritual strength and courage, needed to take the risks and make the sacrifices required to achieve a just peace.

As religious Jews, we believe that our people’s return to Zion is part of the process of global redemption prophesied by Isaiah: "Zion shall be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through righteousness" (1:27) It pains us that only Israelis on the secular left echo our sacred prophetic tradition, the ethical heart of Torah, while those in the religiously observant communities are either silent on issues of justice, peace and human rights or, worse, have actively perverted Judaism into chauvinism, territorialism and pseudo-messianism.

For the religious settler movement Gush Emunim, "Bloc of the Faithful," the idea of ‘justice" means that God will restore to Israel all the land lost to the Romans and later conquerors over the past 2,000 years. The members of Gush Emunim fail to appreciate that their ideology mirrors the common Palestinian belief that "justice" means that the Palestinians will be restored to the houses and fields and orchards they lost some 40 years ago. Israel should acknowledge the right of return or compensation to Palestinian refugees; we have to acknowledge also that if the Palestinians had accepted the 1947 UN partition plan, which the Palestine National Council approved last November in Algiers, all the wars, all the expulsions and all the subsequent suffering might have been avoided, and we would today be enjoying peaceful coexistence in two neighboring states. (This observation is not meant as a moral indictment. The Palestinians saw their refusal to partition the land as justified because they were considering the quantitative demographic imbalance in 1947, without according Jews in exile [including Holocaust survivors] the qualitative, reciprocal, national right to come home and exercise self-determination in Palestine-Israel. It is not a question of retrospective blame or recrimination, but of both peoples’ taking responsibility and demonstrating repentance for self-interested choices made over the years.) We need to challenge our compatriots on both sides who cling to exclusive notions of justice, for that clinging is the greatest obstacle to peace.

Gush Emunim interprets shalom to mean either the acquiescence of the Palestinians to perpetual Jewish rule or some postapocalyptic tranquillity which the Messiah will bestow but which imposes no peacemaking obligations today. For Jews, both religious and secular, the golden rule must govern Jewish rule. If we Israelis can claim the right to self-determination and statehood, then we must honor the Palestinians’ same right, so long as neither threatens the other’s right. Gush Emunim denies the Palestinians their right out of a dogmatic belief that only the Jewish people are heirs to the promised land. These Jews forget that the covenantal promise linking the Jewish people forever to God’s Holy Land is conditioned by the demands of Torah ethics.

These militant messianists are matched in dogmatic self-assurance by Muslim zealots in the Middle East, as well as by secular nationalist zealots among the Palestinians. These extremists, for whom compromise is sinful and treasonous, need and feed on one another as they prepare for the apocalyptic day of judgment, which they believe will vindicate them.

Between the poles of the secular left and the religious right, between Peace Now and Gush Emunim, members of Oz veShalom try to communicate how Jewish tradition should guide public policy in a reborn Jewish commonwealth, one that can fulfill the promise of equal civil rights to non-Jewish citizens, though its prevailing ethos and symbolism are Jewish. We strive to create shalom not only between Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, but between Jew and Jew so that together we can make the sacrifices necessary to reach a just compromise with the Palestinian people.

Twice I have used the word "sacrifices," a religious concept. It is in assuming this sacrificial task that we Israeli Jews uphold the charge given to us by God in Exodus 19: "For all the earth/land is mine; and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." To be a "kingdom of priests" means, in our understanding, to use temporal or state power, as a sovereign community in the land, as a means toward priestly, spiritual, redemptive ends. And what is the essential ministerial role of the priest? It is to mediate forgiveness through sacrifice. It is this forgiveness that is the source of real peace, the inner peace of the soul. In our present context, it is not animal bodies which we are asked to sacrifice on the altar. It is the territorial extension of our own fearful, possessive animal bodies and human egos, both of which seek geographic guarantees (especially land unjustly denied us) for our very existence. The priestly task of a religious peace movement is to call both Israelis and Palestinians to suffer the amputation of part of their collective, symbolic bodies and agree to two independent states alongside each other in our common homeland.

Both Israelis and Palestinians must make these sacrifices, by renouncing part of their rightful claims to all the land. And what of Yerushalayim/Al-Quds, the city of Jerusalem? Clearly, the Holy City must be shared. At a minimum, this means that the flags of both nations will have to fly over Jerusalem. Whatever political compromise is negotiated, Yerushalayim/Al-Quds has to be a heterogeneous community witnessing to a pluralistic monotheism -- the greatest challenge to any devout believer of any faith, but the only healing path for Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.

Some Christians are, perhaps, also influenced by anti-Jewish stereotypes presented in sermons and Sunday school regarding "legalistic," "eye-for-an-eye" Jews, the foils in the gospel story. Too many Christians know of Jews only through the "Old Testament" and christological interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures. In their perceptions of the Middle East conflict, they might, consciously or unconsciously, think that the Jews abused their power and incurred God’s punishment millennia ago when they failed to heed the prophetic warnings, and are now returning as warriors and oppressive rulers.

However tempting it may be to paint a picture of villain-and-victim that fits some model of liberation from oppression, historical and biblical honesty compels us to search more deeply for a way toward justice and reconciliation in the Holy Land. A more appropriate biblical paradigm for the Israeli-Palestinian situation is found in Genesis, in the motif of two brothers fighting over the birthright and the blessing. (Arthur Waskow has developed this theme in his book Godwrestling.) One may gain the upper hand at one moment, but both are weak and sinful and neither can be readily labeled the oppressor.

The sibling-struggle motif runs throughout Genesis, from Cain and Abel to Joseph and his brothers, from the second to the 23rd generation of humanity. Only when Jacob, on his deathbed, is called upon to bless his grandsons Ephraim and Menasheh in the 24th generation is

this rivalry stopped: he gives the two boys a joint blessing. He asks God to "bless the lads; and in them let my name be recalled, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth" (48:16) Jacob does this while crossing his arms, symbolizing an equal portion of the blessing to the first- and second-born. Joseph protests, trying to correct what he considers his father’s mistake. The patriarch persists, because he knows (through prophetic insight, as well as the painful lessons of his own life) what he must do. He can see into the future and knows what will become of both tribes, but that is a matter separate from the blessing. Moreover, he goes on to say, "By thee shall Israel bless, saying, ‘God make thee as Ephraim and Menasheh.’" And that is precisely how Jewish fathers like myself bless their sons at the Sabbath table every Friday night, invoking as role models these two relatively minor biblical figures rather than heroic personalities like Moses, David, Solomon or Samson.

The basic message is this: You are equally beloved and deserving of blessing, in my eyes and in God’s; so don’t fall victim to insecure egos, jealousies and conflict. The blessing is meant to be shared, not fought over; otherwise everyone suffers.

The conflict over the land of Israel-Palestine is a struggle to be blessed as the first-born, the rightful heir to the land and its bounties. All the arguments about who was there first (with archaeology often used in a self-serving way) or which people constitutes a "true nation," entitled to self-determination, are pointless. Both Jews and Palestinians have experienced oppression; both are struggling to secure their own welfare and "liberation" in the narrow, nationalistic sense, often against each other. The challenge is to broaden the vision of liberation to include both peoples together, so they can share the birthright and the blessing, which are from God. This requires moving beyond self-righteousness and a myopia of both perception and moral judgment. The current tragic impasse can be overcome only through mutual recognition, "re-cognizing" the other, not as an immutable enemy but as a potential sibling and partner in the common struggle for liberation based on a just compromise.

Modern-day Israelis and Palestinians have not yet learned to share the Abrahamic legacy and blessing, the blessing that promises "through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Three thousand years after Isaac and Ishmael, we are still trying to heal the sibling rivalry. Jacob and Esau were reconciled, but Isaac and Ishmael are still yearning for that reconciling embrace of kisses and tears. The biblical text describes an emotional reconciliation between Jacob and Esau following Jacob’s long exile and his dread over the prospect of a vengeful, bloody reunion. Later rabbinic tradition contains a categorical declaration that "Esau hates Jacob," painting him as an archetypal anti-Semite (despite the biblical rapprochement) By the Middle Ages, "Esau" had come to symbolize the church and Christianity, while "Ishmael," the prototypical Arab. had come to represent the other Abrahamic offshoot, Islam. In this century, a redemptive vision of fraternal peace, transcending theological divisions, was delineated by Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935) , the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi in Palestine under the British Mandate. Writing from Jaffa in 1908, Rabbi Kook prophesied: "The brotherly love of Esau and Jacob, of Isaac and Eshmael, will assert itself above all the confusion that the evil brought on by our bodily nature has engendered. It will overcome them and transform them to eternal light and compassion."