The Madeleva Experience

St. Mary's College, University of Notre Dame

The Madeleva Tradition - For sixteen years, the annual Madeleva lecture at St. Mary's College for Catholic Women, University of Notre Dame, has honoured Sister M. Madeleva, C.S.C., PhD., scholar, poet and college president for twenty - seven years. Her legacy includes a celebration of the eroticism of mystical love, poetry celebrating women of the Bible, and the establishment of the first graduate studies in theology program for women of the United States at St. Mary's College in 1943. Typical of her unconventional stance is her poem, " I will remember Rahab," which "praises the Old Testament prostitute whose generosity and courage saved her...The speaker of the poem emphasizes, God's judgement is not the same as ours. For one thing, "God is no prude."1

The distinguished list of Madeleva lecturers has included such well known theologians and authors as Elizabeth Johnson, Joan Chittester, Maria Harris and Monika Helwig. Dr. Sandra Schneiders, IHM, professor of New Testament Studies and Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, delivered the 16th annual lecture. Seventeen of the women scholars and Madeleva lecturers participated in the preparation of the "Madeleva Manifesto" which follows.

A New "Take" on Feminism: "With Oil in Their Lamps: Faith, Feminism and the Future" from the Madwleva Lecture delivered by by Dr. Sandra Schneiders, IHM and based on the published copy.

In imitation of Sister Madeleva, Sandra Schneiders recommended "colouring outside the patriarchal lines."2 Although she would not have called herself a feminist, Madeleva was, in fact, a "protofeminist,"2 who led women into the future with education and nurtured them into competence conditioned to embrace feminism. Feminist theologians have since influenced all facets of this subject.

Dr. Schneiders assured the audience of the vitality and validity of the feminist vision. "Rooted in women's experience," she said," feminism embraces a different vision of reality." The emergence of women has been "a defining characteristic of the 20th century."3 With prophetic force, feminists in religious life have participated in creating new cultural forms in the 21st century. They have envisioned the ideal of recreating humanity with respect to the reformation of relationships. Nothing less than self-possession, agency and freedom supported by education will enable women to participate in the revisioning of the human.

Schneiders Defines Feminism

"I will define [feminism]," she says, " as a comprehensive ideology, that, rooted in women's experience of sexually based oppression, engages in a critique of patriarchy as an essentially dysfunctional system, embraces an alternative vision for humanity and the earth, and actively seeks to bring this vision to realization… It is a mentality or life stance that colours all of one's commitments and activities… [It is] a vision of a different reality, and an active participation in change to bring about that different reality."4 She sees "third wave" feminism as concerned "not simply with social, political and economic equality of women with men but with a fundamental re-imagination of the whole of humanity in relation to the whole of reality, including nonhuman creation." Feminist consciousness has deepened to include the requirement of a recreation of all relational aspects of humanity and its habitat - "according to a pattern of ecojustice."4

Women's Religious Life: A Resource for Women's liberation in the Church

"Feminism…is actually more indigenous to the Church itself than an import from the surrounding culture" It "is the eruption of a nonviolent revolution that has been germinating since the eighteenth century and that is deeply rooted in the Gospel and the experience of Catholic women, especially Religious,"5 says Schneiders. The Religious are seen by Schneiders to be in an anomolous position in that they are both lay and ministerial. They are therefore in a paradoxical and potentially prophetic position with respect to the hierarchical church. Their "immediacy to God and social marginality constitute a unique 'place' from which the Religious as individuals and as a lifeform in the Church, raise the question of the Church's fidelity to the Gospel in the calling for and building a just society."6

Advances made by women's religious communities have enabled women to become educated and competent not only in health care, social work and education, but in fields related to church leadership. The nonclerical nature of Religious ministry, emancipated from the necessity of running ecclesiastical institutions, has led to women Religious "serving not only in parishes but as chaplains in prisons, [schools] and hospitals, as NGO representatives at the United Nations, in ministry to the homosexual community, to the victims of AIDS, to women who have had abortions or been victims of rape or domestic abuse, or wherever societal or ecclesiastical dynamics marginalize or victimize people." Schneiders sees them as developing into a "Corps of Professional Women in the Church."7

Since the Second Vatican Council, Religious have "created a place and space where many people alienated from other institutional expressions of Church have been able to find acceptance and refuge. "7 With its new concepts of community as "individualized participation in a common life and project" rather than as "uniformity in dress and lifestyle," there has been a broadening of the vision to include diverse ministries and living situations. "Individuality and community, now distinguished from individualism and collectivism, are increasingly seen as mutually reinforcing rather than competetive. The broading of the vision has included an increase in interaction with people outside their communities. With "personal friendships no longer seen as a threat to community but as an enhancement of the person and an enrichment of the group," there has been an "explosion of different forms of relationship of laity with Religious congregations as associates, oblates or volunteers in ministry." 8

Now that religious communities are opening up - as it were- to their secular sisters, there is an enormous potential for fruitful interaction toward the creation of a "Gospel" feminism which will be able to re-imagine relationships such that a society of right relationships rooted in Biblical justice can emerge. With renewed hope, lay women can stay the course in the feminist movement, making "a positive contribution to the future of the human family and the universe."9 To do so, Scheiders urges us to heed the"biblical metaphor of eschatological preparedness, which only makes sense to those whose faith and hope are undaunted." By filling our lamps like the faithful women of scripture, we can set out to do what little we can knowing that " the light of truth shining in the darkness is borne by those who are ready, with oil in their lamps." 10

Endnotes

1. Mandell, Gail Porter. Madeleva: One Woman's Life. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1994 p.25

2. Schneiders, S.M. With Oil in Their Lamps. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000, p. 1

3. Ibid., p. 4

4. Ibid., p. 7-8

5. Ibid., p. 62

6. Ibid., p. 66

7. Ibid., p. 70-71

8. Ibid., p. 69-70

9. Ibid., p. 83

10. Ibid., p. 125

An excerpt from the 1993 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality, "Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit," reprinted with permission of the publisher, Paulist Press and CTA.

by Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ Distinguished Professor of Theology, Fordham University, and former president, Catholic Theological Society of America

It is an interesting point, and one of the saving graces of the religious patriarchal tradition, that in addition to the natural world, women's reality is also thought suitable to image the Spirit. The most extended biblical instance of female imagery of the Spirit occurs in the wisdom literature where the Spirit's functions are depicted as acts of Woman Wisdom. The female figure of Wisdom is the most acutely developed personification of God's presence and activity in the Hebrew scriptures. Not only is the grammatical gender of the word for wisdom feminine: Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, Sapientia in Latin. The biblical portrait of Wisdom is consistently female, casting her as sister, mother, female beloved, chef and hostess, teacher, preacher, maker of justice, and a host of other women's roles. In every instance Wisdom symbolizes transcendent power pervading and ordering the world, both nature and human beings, interacting with them all to lure them onto the path of life.

Early in the book of Wisdom this female figure is identified with spirit, a people loving spirit: "Wisdom is a kindly spirit" (1:6). In a subsequent passage the metaphor
shifts slightly to say that Wisdom has a spirit. Her spirit is then described in glorious vocabulary with twenty? one attributes, or three times the perfect number seven. She is:

intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted,

distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane,

steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all powerful, overseeing all, and

penetrating through all other intelligent spirits (7:22?23).

Poetic parallelism clinches the Wisdom or Spirit equivalence: "Who has learned thy counsel, unless you have given Wisdom, and sent your Holy Spirit from on high?" (Wis 9:17). These and other allusive wisdom texts point to the fittingness of speaking about the Spirit in female imagery, given Sophia's undoubted female symbolization.

Understanding this equivalence, we read the wisdom texts and find magnificent renderings of creation and redemption themes in female symbols. As the Nicene Creed would later say of the Spirit, these texts say of Wisdom that she is the giver of life, she is a tree of life, "she is your life" (Prov 4:13). So intimately is the divine blessing of life associated with her that she can proclaim "whoever finds me finds life" (Prov 8:35). All life is a gift and Woman Wisdom, a personification of the Creator Spirit, gives that gift. She is the "fashioner of all things" (Wis 7:22) responsible for their existence and therefore knowing their inmost secrets. She knows the solstices and changes of the seasons, the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the variety of plants and the virtues of roots, and the ways of human reasoning (Wis 7:17?22). This passage from the book of Wisdom contains a poignant aside. Solomon, while rejoicing to learn about these things from Wisdom, admits "but I did not know that she was their mother" (Wis 7:12).

Spirit?Sophia fills the world

It is not just individual creatures who are the subject of Spirit?Sophia's life?giving knowledge, but the world as a whole is shaped harmoniously by her guidance: "She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well" (Wis 8:1). This ordering is a righteous one, inimical to exploitation and oppression. Sophia hates the ways of arrogance and evil but works to establish just governance on the earth: "By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just" (Prov 8:15). Indeed, the echoes of the prophetic promise of shalom sound in her self?description: "I walk in the way of righteousness, in the paths of justice" (Prov 8:20).

Spirit?Sophia's presence fills the world: "For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things" (Wis 7:24). This is the same divine presence spoken about in the Jewish rabbinic tradition of the shekinah, the female symbol of God's indwelling, the weighty radiance that flashes out in unexpected ways in the midst of the broken world. Most significant is her work of accompaniment, for "Wherever the righteous go, the Shekinah goes with them." No place is too hostile. She accompanies the people through the post?slavery wilderness, and hundreds of years later into exile again, through all the byways of rough times. "Come and see how beloved are the Israelites before God, for withersoever they journeyed in their captivity the Shekinah journeyed with them." In other words, God's indwelling Spirit was with them and this accompaniment gave rise to hope in their suffering.

Virtually every aspect of the Creator Spirit's activity in the world, as delineated in doctrine and
theology, is depicted in the wisdom literature in female symbolism. When things become damaged, the power to refresh them pours out from her: "while remaining in herself, she renews all things" (Wis 7:27).This renewing energy profoundly affects human beings in their relation to divine mystery and the rest of the world, weaving them round with a web of kinship: "in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets" (Wis 7:27). One aspect of Wisdom has not been seriously appropriated by Christian doctrine of the Spirit, but its time may be coming. The great creation poem of Proverbs shows us creative Wisdom actually playing in the newly minted world, delighting in it all, especially in those intelligent creatures called human beings.(8:22?31).

In addition to the texts about Wisdom biblical books hold a constellation of maternal images that
delineate the Spirit's work in the world. Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus, for example, carries a clear presentation of God the Spirit as mother. A person must be born anew in order to enter the reign of God, Jesus insists, to which Nicodemus queries, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" (Jn 3:4). Jesus' reply keeps the metaphor of physical birth and amplifies it to speak of Spirit: "No one can enter the reign of God without being born of water and the Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit"(3:5?6). Creator Spirit is here likened to a woman giving birth to offspring who are henceforth truly identified as "born of God."

Other fragments of women's experience of mothering also provide biblical writers symbolic material for Creator Spirit. Like a woman with her knitting needles she knits together the new life in a mother's womb (Ps 139:13); like a woman in childbirth she labors and pants to bring about the birth of justice (Is 42:14); like a midwife she works deftly with a woman in pain to deliver the new creation (Ps 22:9?10); like a washerwoman she scrubs away at bloody stains till the people be like new (Is 4:4; Ps 51:7).

Divine activity in female form

The early Christian centuries carried forward explicit use of female imagery to characterize God's Spirit. In Syriac Christianity, for example, the Spirit's image was consistently that of the brooding or hovering mother bird tending to her chicks. This symbolism of the motherhood of the Spirit fostered a spirituality characterized by warmth which expressed itself in private and public prayer. In one prayer the believer meditates:

As the wings of doves over their nestlings, And the mouths of their nestlings toward their mouths,
So also are the wings of the Spirit over my heart.

In another prayer spoken in the context of liturgy the community implores the Spirit:

The world considers you a merciful mother. Bring with you calm and peace, and spread your wings over our sinful times.

In time most of this maternal imagery migrated away from the Spirit and accrued to the church, called Holy Mother the Church, or to Mary the mother of Jesus, venerated as mother of the faithful as well. The symbol of the maternity of the Spirit was virtually forgotten, along with the capacity of images of Wisdom and Shekinah to evoke divine presence and activity in female form. But this resonance abides in the texts of scripture and tradition, and can be retrieved.

Looked at against the background of hierarchical dualism, female and cosmic symbols of the Creator Spirit and the insights to which they give rise have unique potential to heal divided consciousness. The One who blows the wild wind of life, who fires the blaze of being, who gives birth to the world, or who midwifes it into existence does not stand over against it or rule it hierarchically from afar but dwells in intimate, quickening relationship with humanity and the life of the earth. The female symbols in particular dramatize that being women and being fertile is not a dangerous, polluted state but a participation in the fecundity of the Creator Spirit and, conversely, a sign of her presence.

Dismantling dualism

Enfolding and unfolding the universe, the Spirit is holy mystery "over all and through all and in all" (Eph 4:6). Remembering Creator Spirit this way dismantles the theological dualism that sets God apart from the universe, thus removing one of the pillars of support for dualism within the human community and between human beings and the earth. We are all woven into the fabric of the one cosmic community. Indeed, God is not far from any one of us, for in her we live and move and have our being, as some of our poets now say (cf. Acts 17:28).

1993 by St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Ind.

THE MADELEVA MANIFESTO: A Message of Hope and Courage

In the tradition of Sister Madeleva Wolff, CSC, we sixteen Madeleva lecturers have been invited to speak a message of hope and courage to women in the church. Reflecting the diversity of gifts bestowed on us by the Spirit, we speak from our particular experiences and vocations, yet share in a universal vision that is faithful to our catholic tradition.

* To women in ministry and theological studies we say: re-imagine what it means to be the whole body of Christ. The way things are now is not the design of God.

* To young women looking for models of prophetic leadership, we say: walk with us as we seek to follow the way of Jesus Christ, who inspires our hope and guides our concerns. The Spirit calls us to a gospel feminism that respects the human dignity of all, and who inspires us to be faithful disciples, to stay in the struggle to overcome oppression of all kinds whether based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or class.

* To women who are tempted by the demons of despair and indifference, we say: re-imagine what it means to be a full human being made in the image of God, and to live and speak this truth in our daily lives.

* To women who suffer the cost of discipleship we say: you are not alone. We remember those who have gone before us, who first held up for us the pearl of great price, the richness of Catholic thought and spirituality. We give thanks to those who continue to mentor us.

* To the young women of the church we say: carry forward the cause of gospel feminism. We will be with you along the way, sharing what we have learned about the freedom, joy and power of contemplative intimacy with God. We ask you to join us in a commitment to far-reaching transformation of church and society in non-violent ways.

We deplore, and hold ourselves morally bound, to protest and resist, in church and society, all actions, customs, laws and structures that treat women or men as less than fully human. We pledge ourselves to carry forth the heritage of biblical justice which mandates that all persons share in right relationship with each other, with the cosmos, and with the Creator.

We hold ourselves responsible to look for the holy in unexpected places and persons, and pledge ourselves to continued energetic dialogue about issues of freedom and responsibility for women. We invite others of all traditions to join us in imagining the great shalom of God.

Feast of St. Catherine of Siena, lay woman, Doctor of the Church April 29, 2000 Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana