Unbending
I had to be
in the town in the middle of the UK for a few months.
Someone recommended me to a certain “church house”.
Until my stay there I did not know that I was bent. I
knew that my Church was quite sexist, i.e. many priests
treated the women with condescendence and dismissal but
I did not know that it could be otherwise. In fact, the
whole of Russian society is quite sexist; the Church
being only a part of it, in this respect. The quip
“Jesus Christ appeared to the women first because He
knew that they would not be able to keep their mouths
shut” is a clerical norm; many consider it to be a fine
example of Orthodox humour. I do not, and not just
because I am a woman but also because the speaker
ascribes to the Christ his own vulgar perception of
women. I have endured this condescending attitude for
the sake of acquiring humility although I felt that
there was something wrong with the notion that women
must be chastised for their own good: perhaps it was
good for women but could not be good for the men
chastising them. Also, it reduced a woman to the state
of an infantile silly girl (that of course has its
benefits).
The issue of sexism was painful for me: I knew that
Jesus Christ had never treated women like many of our
priests or other Orthodox men did. Further more, there
is not even a hint of condescendence in all Gospels
stories about His meetings and conversations with women;
if one opens the Gospels s/he feels the wind of freedom
blown into their face.
The church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the church
house were located in the midst of the Muslim quarters,
not so far from the mosk. I have just returned from
Scotland, and was in love with all things Scottish and I
immediately got myself into a trouble. The priest was an
Englishman, and almost immediately after being
introduced I told him that Scotland must be independent
and that Scotts had a far superior, culture to the
English. Fr J. exploded in a not very English way, we
exchanged a few sharp pokes, and I thought that the
relationship was irrevocably ruined. There was something
strange there though. Later I realized what was
“strange” was that Fr J. spoke to me as an equal. We
were both rude but equal.
I was not a “silly” or “annoying” woman to him, or “a
woman first of all” in a way that obscures a person by a
ready-made scheme. I was a human being made in the image
of God, just like everyone. He (and his wife) was not a
priest in the sense of “someone who has an authority and
had to be obeyed” but he was an equal or even a servant.
There was the air of very natural freedom around him
just like that in the Gospels.
The Liturgies in that church were very
communion-oriented. This sounds like oxymoron because
the Liturgy is supposed to be communion-oriented but the
reality is often far from that. In that church the
Eucharistic prayers (including Anaphora prayers) were
read aloud clearly and with great solemnity, nobody
counted “God have mercy” forty times waving his fingers,
the people knew what was happening and conducted
themselves accordingly. The congregation was
international: English, Romanians, Greeks, Russians,
Ethiopians, Gypsies, etc.; the language of the services
was mixed, with variations depending on which
nationalities where present in the church.
These months spent in the church house have unbent me so
substantially that from then I began reaping the
consequences. I could no longer put up with demeaning
attitudes within the church, even if it was under the
mask of “my own good”.
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