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Fermenting Impasse: Women's Critical Communities and Ecclesial Transformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Introduction (And Abstract)
My reflections are rooted in the spiritual suffering of impasse experienced by women in today's Church. Against the background of Constance Fitzgerald's seminal article, “Impasse and Dark Night,” I will engage Edward Schillebeeckx's category of negative contrast experience in conjunction with what Beverly Lanzetta has named the via feminina to begin to envision what may be fermenting in this dark night. Then, moving from individual to communal contemplation, I will discuss the role of Critical Christian communities in Schillebeeckx's theology, with attention to his analysis of the cross-grained nature of Church history in which genuine tradition includes “breaks.” Finally, drawing on the experiences of “Circles of Women Seeking Wisdom” with which I am involved, I will examine how critical communities of women in the Church constitute a mysticism of resistance with potential for ecclesial transformation.
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- Copyright © 2013 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2013 The Dominican Council
References
1 Constance FitzGerald's description of the spiritual and social dynamics of impasse in the context of mysticism has become the paradigmatic feminist articulation of women's reality in the Church today. See “Impasse and Dark Night,” in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, ed. Conn, Joann Wolski (New York: Paulist, 1986), 287–311Google Scholar.
2 Lanzetta, Beverly, Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.Google Scholar)
3 “By impasse, I mean that there is no way out of, no way around, no rational escape from, what imprisons one, no possibilities in the situation.” Fitzgerald, 288.
4 Ibid., 292.
5 Johnson, Elizabeth A. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints. (New York: Continuum, 2003)Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., 289–90.
7 See Schillebeeckx, Edward, “Church, Magisterium, and Politics,” in God the Future of Man, trans. Smith, N.D. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 155–56Google Scholar.
8 Reflecting on Dark Night in John of the Cross, Fitzgerald notes: “…(I)f we could see the underside of death, we would see that it is already resurrection.” Fitzgerald, 291.
9 “It is precisely as broken, poor, and powerless that one opens oneself to the dark mystery of God in loving, peaceful waiting.” Ibid., 297.
10 Lanzetta, 13.
11 Ibid., 16.
12 Schillebeeckx, , Church: The Human Story of God (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1990), 5Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 6.
14 Fitzgerald cautions against the danger of getting stuck in an ideological and merely superficial altering of God images in terms of gender, when what is required is genuine conversion wrought by the mystical experience of dark night. See Fitzgerald, 302: “…(O)nly women's experience of God can alter or renew our God images and perhaps our doctrine of God.” Writing of the doctrine of God, Elizabeth A. Johnson highlights the limitations we place on God, and thereby, on women made in God's image, when we create Divine constructs out of narrowly defined “dimensions” or “traits” of either gender: “Image-breaking is a part of religious traditions, because focussing on a fixed image not only compromises the transcendence of God, but petrifies and stultifies human beings into the image worshiped….” (See Johnson, “The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female” in Wolski Conn, Women's Spirituality 243–260 at 257.)
15 Iris Marion Young notes that “women's oppression consists partly in a systematic and unreciprocated transfer of powers from women to men….The freedom, status, and self-realization of men is possible precisely because women work for them.” Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 50Google Scholar.
16 Schillebeeckx discusses this point in The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, (New York: Crossroad, 1990Google Scholar; Baarn: Nelissen, 1985), 62; he further states, “If the law reduces people to despair, it forfeits all authority.” Ibid., 117.
17 Lanzetta, 71.
18 Fitzgerald, 301.
19 Lanzetta, 72. See Fitzgerald, 306: “(W)omen need to realize that the experience of anger, rage, depression, and abandonment is a constitutive part of the transformation and purification of the dark night. This very rage and anger purify the ‘abused consciousness’ of women in the sexism they have internalized.”
20 Some may ask, “Why?” Schillebeeckx notes the necessity of the Church for the historical mediation of Christian meaning. Here he means “Church” as “community”—as a living embodiment of the Story of Jesus, which is our Christian story. The whole of the living Church community is now the subject of this mediation. Church: The Human Story of God, 110; cf. 99.
21 Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, 29.
22 Title of a collection of essays which reveals the diversity of women's experience and perspectives within the Catholic Church. See Johnson, Elizabeth A., ed., The Church Women Want: Catholic Women in Dialogue. (New York: Herder & Herder, 2002)Google Scholar.
23 Edward Schillebeeckx observes that the kingdom of God both approaches and entails metanoia—a changed new relationship of men and women to God—the visible side of which is a new type of liberating relationship between men and women within a reconciling society….Schillebeeckx, Church, 111ff.
24 Church, 66.
25 Ibid., 213.