The tale as old of time

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of women but there is another side to their stories of violence and anonymity, Claire Williams reflects.

Claire Williams

Claire Williams is a theologian investigating women’s spirituality and practice. She lecturers at Regents Theological College.

A woman stand beside a busy road with her back to the camera. There is a red sky behind her.

Florian Kurrasch on Unsplash.

From accusations of assault by celebrities to the murder of a teenage girl on her way to school, and the discussion on television about feminists and their lack of sexual appeal - we have had our fill recently of stories of trauma and violence done to women. These events are brutal interruptions to the lives of women whose futures have been changed, or even stopped, by these terrible acts. It is a story that we read in the news over and over again. It is also an ancient story, of women who are mistreated by men in power over them. It is the tale as old as time. When we tell these tales we anonymise women, for their own safety and privacy, but also lock them in their story. They are, to those of us who read or hear about it, only the tale of violence, we see nothing else about them.

We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone.

In one ancient telling in the bible, there is a story of a woman who is cast out, loses position, hope for the future, agency and bodily autonomy. Hagar was a servant in the household of Abraham. She was an Egyptian and therefore of a different ethnicity to her master and his wife, Sarah. Hagar, as a servant, had no choices in life and would do what she was told and when she was told. So, when she was commanded to become Abraham’s wife in order that he might have a child with him, she had no choice at all. In the bible there are stories of Abraham and his quest to have a son and heir when Sarah had been unable to conceive. It was indeed Sarah’s idea. Hagar underwent what could be described as a rape and a forced pregnancy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah and Hagar fell out. Hagar ran, she ran away from the cruel treatment of her mistress and the violence perpetrated unto her and into the wilderness. Hagar’s story is out of time with our own stories yet has resonance none the less because of her subjugation, the violence done to her and the consequential fear and fleeing. I wonder as I read about Hagar, what she looked like, or what her other stories are. What did she like to do? What had her hopes been for the future? But Hagar, is unseen by us, apart from the stories of violence done to her. She is unseen like the women who are raped, stabbed, assaulted, followed, catcalled, touched and upskirted. For these unseen women, stories are all that remain.

Telling of the stories isn’t enough. With violent, or emotional, trauma, words are only some of the message. We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone. The loneliness from being unknown is bone deep. That nobody understands is part of the horror of the traumatic injury. Hagar’s story does help us here. Twice Hagar runs into the wilderness to escape from Sarah and Abraham. When she is there, she expects to die. After her child is born, she puts him away, under a bush, so that she doesn’t have to watch him die. Both times in the wilderness, where she is away and hidden there is one who sees her and acts. The first time, so the bible tells us, Hagar is met by an angel in the wilderness who speaks to her and promises her the future we assume she has lost, Hagar identifies her visitor as from God – the first person to do so. In response to God seeing her, she sees God. She is not anonymous to God. The second time, as she lays down to die, God provides not only hope but water and we learn that she has a future with her son.

The story of Hagar is told still, as a reminder that God sees. This does not mitigate the harm that is done to women, nor use it for higher purposes. However, we only know a small part of these stories, these terrible accounts of horrors, God holds their entire stories together.

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of these women in the stories, either the ancient story or the most recent ones. Male violence against women is repetitive and so far, little abating it. I do not offer a solution to why these terrible things happen to women, why they continue to happen even though millennia separate Hagar from today. Nonetheless, despite the uncertainty that surrounds the traumas wrought upon women in situations such as above there is another side to the story of violence and anonymity, that is of a hope in God who sees the women and offers a future.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it.

These women are not unknown, their stories, which are acts of resistance to the violence that was perpetrated upon them, are known to God. With telling and retelling of the stories of women we testify to their story and acknowledge it. There is hope in this situation, a promise that those who come to Jesus can find rest, that they will not feel condemned or ashamed in his presence and that there is the possibility of hope and wholeness in the face of such devastating actions of humanity. This can seem trite and it does not offer a sticking plaster solution to the problems of great trauma, but rather a God who, in Jesus, is a witness to the pain and the hurt and one who offers peace, who sees the women at the heart of these stories of terrible violence and who knows them. The promise of the future is that every tear will be wiped away, that when the final plans of God are enacted on earth there will be a world where there is no longer violence and the long-lasting pain, injury and horror will be removed.

The God who knew Hagar and the anonymous women who report sexual violence today, also knows the end of their story, and that end is hopeful, even if it doesn’t feel that way yet. Ultimately, God intervenes for Hagar. She is cast out, she expects she will die and potentially see her son lost too. Hagar, who names God is in return named by God, ‘Hagar’ he says as he ushers her into a future,

‘get up, hold your boy, I will make him into a great nation’.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it. We leave Hagar with her fully grown son, both thriving in the wilderness with Hagar arranging his marriage. I picture her, a matriarch in her own right, with her son, not overcome by violence anymore.

This reading of Hagar is from the work of Dr Eve R Parker in her forthcoming contribution to ‘Theologies from the Inside Out: Critical Conceptions of Pregnancy and Birth’ ed. Karen O’Donnell and Claire Williams, SCM forthcoming 2024.

Voting is much more than a token gesture

The political practice can capture something heavenly.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

What makes an act sacred? Who it excludes, or who it welcomes? I found myself pondering this looking at the thin metal discs in the box I’d pulled off the shelf. I’d seen their tagged under glass at Scotland’s National Museum. Now, in an archive housed in the old kitchen of our rural community’s school, I had my first chance to touch what was once called “the open sesame to the bliss of so great a mercy”, a Church of Scotland communion token. Now items for collectors, filling drawers in local history museums, they once were the necessary payment for participation in one of the rites at the heart of Christian worship. They were the coin that verified that its holder’s faith and morals had been examined by an elder of the kirk and been found satisfactory.

Holy Communion, or the Eucharist as it is called in other churches, has its origins in the Last Supper, a meal of bread and wine Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. Christians may disagree on the exact meaning of the meal, but all hold that it is, in some way, sacred and central to the Christian life and the recognition and celebration of Christian community. Communion tokens were but one example of a strategy that Christians have employed time and again to ensure that the mystery and sacrality of the meal is properly recognised: stopping the wrong sorts of people from participating in it. Ironically, in this we have often been much more discerning, or perhaps discriminating, than Jesus himself. The companions he chose to initiate the practice were a quarrelsome lot. They were mostly provincial fishermen more concerned with establishing their place in the new kingdom they imagined Jesus would establish after overthrowing the Romans than in participating in the meal with due reverence and seriousness.

All who came were for that day, in that room, in that act, equal. All who came were welcome. No one was turned away.

A year later, I found myself sitting behind a table in the rear of our community’s nursery. It was election day for the Scottish Parliament, and I had added polling clerk to the miscellany of part-time jobs I had taken after finishing my studies. We had all arrived early to ensure that we had time to wrestle enough string and cable ties together to secure the polling station sign around the ancient tree that marked the entrance of the nursery’s car park before polls opened at 7am. It was the first, and only time I have worked a sixteen-hour day, and my exhaustion at the end of it probably contributes to much of it being a bit of blur. What I do remember is the flow of people: mums in smart blouse and skirt combinations with kids in tow, fitting us in first thing before a stop by the childminder’s on the way to the office; tradespeople and farmers catching us between jobs, their trousers still spattered with paint or mud; scions of the local aristocracy; proud parents bringing teenagers to vote for the first time once the school day ended; a couple with a young baby, asleep for now, arriving just before closing, “We’re not too late are we?”.

My fellow poll workers, two old hands, knew most of our customers by sight. I knew a few, mainly other parents I had met during school and nursery drop-offs, but it didn’t matter as the rite was the same for all. They would approach the table, give us their name and address, and once a line was drawn through them on our roll, they were given the elements, two ballots, one to vote for their constituency Member of the Scottish Parliament, and another to vote for their preferred party. All who came were for that day, in that room, in that act, equal. All who came were welcome. No one was turned away. All that was needed was their word that they were who they said they were. Once the ballots were completed, we made sure they put each in the correct ballot and then they were out the door, on to the rest of their day.

Perhaps it is also true that sometimes, as much by accident as intention, we happen upon a form or practice in our shared political life which captures something of heaven.

As someone who did my first voting in the United States, I was a little stunned the first time I cast a ballot in the UK. Instead of having to use a black ink pen to assiduously fill in ovals on a ballot that felt like an extended multiple-choice test, all I needed to do was make a single penciled ‘X’ on a half sheet of coloured paper and make sure it wound up in the secure box. Was that it?

As I’ve reflected on that experience and had a few more goes of voting here, I have come to appreciate the elegance of the British approach. Instead of making the voter feel like an overwhelmed bureaucrat having to make a couple dozen underinformed choices on matters as diverse as national representatives, state laws, school boards, and local ordinances, the simplicity of the UK ballot means that what is centred is the social meaning of the act itself. We may be differentiated on all other days by class, culture, income, region, or football club allegiance, but in this act we come as close in our political practices as we ever do to touching something which Christians know, something which Christians sometimes see as they share Communion, that all these distinctions are ultimately passing, that beyond them each one of us is imbued with a dignity which the greatest worldly failure cannot take away from us and to which the greatest worldly success cannot add.

There is a school of thought in political theory which says that all our most important political concepts are actually secularised theological ones. They say, for example, that our exalted ideas of state sovereignty find their origins in our forebears’ understanding of God’s. Theologians draw various lessons from this approach, some worrying that what it really reveals is that we have made an idol of the state. They may be right, but perhaps it is also true that sometimes, as much by accident as intention, we happen upon a form or practice in our shared political life which captures something of heaven. It is not wrong, I think, to accord such secular practices a certain level of sanctity. It is not wrong to call the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ in some sense sacred.

No longer are we allowed to trust that people are who they say they are. They are assumed to be imposters until they produce a piece of paper which says otherwise.

But once that sacredness has been granted, we face a very similar problem to the one faced by those early Scottish reformers regarding Communion. How do we ensure this sacredness is protected, that it does not become debased? A traditional answer has mirrored the reformers’ approach to communion: erecting hurdles to ensure that only the truly worthy are allowed to participate. The unmaking of this approach has been the slow work of centuries as the franchise was eventually extended down the social and property ladder to all male citizens and, then, belatedly, to all women as well. What I experienced at the polling station that day was a miracle secured by many years’ of struggle, reform, compromise, and collective recognition that what has made this act sacred is not its exclusion, but its welcome. In this it has mirrored the welcome of most contemporary Communion services in the Church of Scotland where participants are, to be sure, asked to approach the act soberly, having examined themselves and made confession to God, but where the default is to trust that people have done so. No longer are people considered unworthy until proven otherwise by their possession by a metal disc.

When I first heard of the possibility of the introduction of Voter IDs at polling places, my mind immediately flew to how such laws were aimed in the United States. Like here, there is little to no actual evidence of voter fraud there, but in a country where the archaic system of the Electoral College means a few thousands votes in the right state can decide a presidential election, there is a real threat that such laws will sway election results. Here the influence of such laws is less clear. While they do seem to have a small effect of driving down participation, at last year’s local elections four pre cent of eligible non-voters cited the ID requirement as the reason they did not vote, recent election results have not been dramatically out of step with opinion polling.

What I do worry about losing with these laws is a little bit of the elegance and dignity which has previously imbued the UK system. No longer are we allowed to trust that people are who they say they are. They are assumed to be imposters until they produce a piece of paper which says otherwise. It is a small change, but one which nudges the rite closer to being just one more bureaucratic transaction, a bit more like picking up a package or going to the bank, than one of our most important public rites. It is a precaution that seeks to preserve the sacredness of the act, but is chipping away at what it is that makes it sacred.
If I wind up working in a polling station on July 4th, I will dutifully check every voters’ ID prior to handing them a ballot. I will send friends and neighbours home to get theirs if they’ve forgotten it. I will be careful to bring my own. I am sure if I had lived in former times in Scotland, I also would have been careful to remember to take my communion token to church. Those are the rules of admittance and the rite is too important to skip. However, I will mourn a little for what has been lost and hope for more places where we recognize the possibility of the sacred dwelling in our practices of welcome, recognition, and trust rather than exclusion.