The downfall of getting back online and trying to avoid politics with a thumb-scrolling vice-grip is that I ran into something on Facebook called The Transformed Wife. It’s an account with a whole lot of likes and a curiously nineties feel to it. Felt transported back to a pre-blogging world of email forwards and floral notebooks.
One post, in particular, generated a lot of heat and light on Twitter—the one about men preferring women without debt and without tattoos. Seems a pretty mild point of outrage to me, in a world where pedophilia is no big deal and where a men’s clothing company can gain social media traction by being named after a monkey whose homosexual proclivities were so shocking twenty-five years ago. Everything old is…who am I kidding…is still old, and boring, and tired.
Anyway, the post that I didn’t love over at the Transformed Wife was this one, and I quote,
One of the main characteristics of wifely submission is being quiet. We are called to have meek and quiet spirits, win him without a word, and be silent in the churches. God knows women have a tendency to talk too much, share our opinions too quickly, confront when we disagree, and argue to be right. We need to learn to be quiet and hold our tongues and not say everything that is on our minds but be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Support him in his leadership and honor him as your head. In this way, you will be a godly submissive wife.
This simple advice is handwritten with a pink pen in a large round printed hand on notebook paper. The transforming wife seems to have written it out, taken a picture of it, and posted it online. Excuse me while I go dig up all those old articles from last year about a crisis of authority in the blogosphere, which has devolved into Facebook, which is now spinning out on Twitter and Instagram. Lots and lots of women seem to be finding a rallying point over on this page. Casting about for something to do, some way to be, and not wanting to fall to the zeitgeist of the age, the easy advice, “Be quiet and don’t trouble anyone,” is apparently the hope and comfort many are looking for.
I’ve done a lot of marriage counseling though, and one of the most important aspects of marriage is the talking. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it every single time, in unison with my husband as we lean forward desperately, looking into the faces of the dewy-eyed young couple, hands metaphorically outstretched in prayer that they will be happy together, “You Have To Talk, and Even More Importantly, You Have To Listen To Her Talk.”
The cornerstone of marriage, actually, is a man listening to a woman talk and then climbing up out of himself to say things in response. If the man isn’t listening to the woman talk, well, after a while, if he hasn’t landed in our office in desperate unhappiness, he often finds that there’s almost no marriage left to salvage.
You know who doesn’t talk quite as much in a marriage? The children. The children do get to talk, but not nearly as much as their mother does. She talks and they listen and learn, perhaps not very submissively but hopefully with some kind respectfulness. The father also talks and they listen. They learn. And by listening…and I can’t believe I’m having to spell this out…they learn speech, they learn the actual physicality of putting sounds together, and then concepts. The point of all the listening, and indeed the practicing of sounds and words, is so that they will eventually be able to talk.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but speech is the touchstone of the created order. God likes it so much that he used words to call creation into being, and then he identified himself as the Word. And, get this, not so that we would always be silent before him, although some silence is not the worst thing for the human person, but so that we would be bound in a relationship so intimate that he himself likens it to marriage—not child rearing, but marriage.
What is the point of a human relationship where one person talks and the other sits around bored, meekly cultivating a gentle and quiet spirit to such a degree that she has become mute? There isn’t a point.
Interestingly, the Transformed Wife uses human communication in the form of written words to impart her sage advice. By means of the internet, untethered from locally accountable familial and ecclesial contexts, she interprets the Bible for her fans, wresting biblical texts not only out of their immediate contexts, but out of the very rich spiritual earth from which they grew up in the minds and hearts of the human and Divine writers. This is not the way to read the Bible. This is not a useful way to gather to yourself a theological worldview. One might even wonder if it is dangerous. A woman who wanders around her life thinking that she can’t say anything might find herself isolated, stuck, unloved, lonely, eventually desperate. When she is in trouble, what is her recourse if her mouth has been stopped?
Are Christian people honestly to think that one half of God’s created human family is to remain silent? Is that why God called the church into being as a bride, a love for the Son? So that he would talk and she would never respond? Is that how any of us make friends with each other, know ourselves, or even have any kind of connection to God himself? What is love if it does not include two people looking each other in the eye and, through language, trying to make a way together day by day? When you stop the mouth of one, you don’t have marriage, you have a tragic infancy, a flattened loneliness.
If we’re going back in time, let’s shoot past the nineties and go all the way to Pentecost, when the very Bride of the Son was quickened, brought to life by tongues of fire. What a moment that must have been. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go say some things to my husband and children.
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