Emerging Women

By Cindy Wallace

A few weeks ago I gathered on the beach with other women to take a moment at the summer solstice and praise God for the spring and the summer, for creation, for the rhythm of our lives as women, to praise God for the beauty and beg mercy for the pain.

The image I couldn’t get out of my head was of a young migrant worker holding a baby, trying to get the child to nurse. But the baby won’t eat. The baby is sick after spending months in the womb while its mother worked in fields sprayed with devastating pesticides and lived in shacks at the edges of these fields. (Cherrie Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints is a powerful statement about this reality, as does Ana Castillo’s novel So Far From God.) I couldn’t stop thinking of this young woman, and many more like her, and the spotless produce I buy for the price of their infants’ wellbeing and even lives. I thought of the aching loveliness of life, and the aching agony of it, and babies’ cancer-wracked bodies that someone in an office somewhere refers to by phrases like “spatial racism” or the “geography of racism.”

I thought about the sticky jeweled purple of the plum pie I had baked the day before, its tart-sweet nutmegginess and flaky crust. I had stood making pie dough in my 90-degree kitchen, grating frozen butter to mix in with the flour. I relished the melt of the yellow butter, the feel of the words “sweet cream” in my mouth. I used the back of my hand to brush hair off my forehead in a move I’m sure millions of women have done throughout time, leaving that iconic slight trace of flour on my face. I thought of the plum pie cooling on the table, and then cut and tumbled into white porcelain bowls, and its tang next to the smoky smooth of a dark cup of coffee. I thought of how simply thankful I was for this pie, the process of making it, the slow joy of eating it bite by bite.

And at the same time I thought of the laborers who pick the plums, and their babies, and their wages, and their sunburned skins. I thought of floods and droughts, famines, food surpluses left to rot because of that idol-god “the market.” I tried to pray aloud, and I choked on my own words, and I felt the anger of helplessness, an anger I have been feeling a lot recently as I read books recounting histories of injustice and raise my eyes to look at the world around me.

When will we have the beauty without the pain? Especially, when will we have the beauty without someone else’s pain?

And I thought of the cross.

The beauty will always be based on Someone Else’s pain.

But not the pain of the migrant worker, or the sweatshop laborer, or the sex slave: because one day, the Messiah will make it right. Jesus Christ will redeem what he has promised to redeem. He will make us whole, and the whole earth that groans because of what we have done to it, and the whole population weeping because of what we have done to them — we all together will be made whole.

What are we doing now in the name of that promise? How are we, as the continuing presence of God on this earth, Christ’s body, pursuing wholeness for our sisters and our brothers? Tonight, I stood in the wholeness of a circle of women praising God for the beauty and begging mercy for the pain.

I don’t understand this economy of justice and grace. But here are a few words from Psalm 10: may they convict us even as they give us hope.

Psalm 10.1-2, 10-18 (NIV)

Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.
His victims are crushed, they collapse;
they fall under his strength.
He says to himself, “God has forgotten;
he covers his face and never sees.”
Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
“He won’t call me to account”?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness
that would not be found out.
The LORD is King for ever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

Cindy Wallace is a graduate student, a recovering fundamentalist, and a church-planting plotter with her red-goateed seminarian husband. She blogs at http://lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com/.

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