Over to You

A quotation here from Harvey Cox, a quotation passed on to me, and I quote it to generate a conversation. I can say the same for most church bodies and African Americans, and for many and Latin Americans, and for Asian Americans… what do we lose in the silencing or segregating of voices?

Over to you.

Talking about the silencing of women which came out of the early church reading of Paul:

Whether this was the case or not, the result of this “original silencing” which antedated Leonardo Boff’s by nineteen hundred years, was not just to deprive half of the church’s members of their full humanity, a wounding that would be serious enough in its own right. It also set an ugly precedent, and it fundamentally distorted the entire structure of Christian worship and teaching. Insofar as it was actually enforced, it deprived the community’s prayer and hymnody of the symbols that could be brought to it only from the lives of women. It impoverished its ethical life and its diaconal service by assigning less weight to those particular forms of pain that women, as the bearers of children and the objects of patriarchal power, bring to expression. It thinned out the celebration, not just for women, but for everyone, by preventing the unique joys and ecstasies women feel from being shared by all.

The deformation that resulted from the silencing of women is that the whole body was crippled and its capacity to hear anything or anybody seriously attenuated. One cannot tune out some without at the same time tuning out others. By muting the sisters, the early church inflicted on itself a form of deafness that has persisted ever since. Women were the first to be silenced, and in many respects that archetypal silencing continues today. But women were not alone. Once silencing found its way into the company of the faithful, there were others whose songs and stories were also stifled. Women share this disallowance of speech, of saying one’s word, with many, many others. Their enforced quiet is also the lot of millions of the world’s poor, and of those who are rejected or excluded for a variety of other reasons from full participation in the human family. This is probably why women everywhere have responded with enthusiasm to those theologies that take as their starting point the perspective of the voiceless, a preferential option for the silenced. In the biblical tradition, God is known as the Holy One who speaks to human beings and who expects them to answer. Therefore, to silence someone it could be said is a type of blasphemy. It denies that person the opportunity to respond to God’s call, and therefore it denies God. To silence is to fashion a kind of idol, a false God who calls everyone but who does not expect everyone to answer, or who expects some to answer for others.

Harvey Cox, “Oneness and Diversity” in Alfred T. Hennelly, Liberation Theology: A Documentary History (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), p.442-3.