Speaking for Ourselves. Katerina Katsarka Whitley

       Introduction

      The women of the Bible. They friends who are always with me. They come to me during the night, and in the daytime, and I listen to them. They speak their stories to me; and I have recorded them in the monologues of this book. I say this not as a mystic, but as one who loves these women for their humanity. They come to tell me their stories. And I, an avowed Protestant, an Episcopalian thoroughly immersed in Scripture, am bold enough to admit that I owe it all to the Virgin Mary.

      I was born in Greece. Yet, I was a rather strange Greek. I did not grow up in the Greek Orthodox tradition. As a result, my evangelical family and I missed much of the beauty and, what seemed to us, the slight lunacy of that tradition that is overloaded with saints. We ignored the Virgin Mary and all the saints with a zealous, deliberate, Reformation-inspired indifference. My fascination with the Virgin Mary came later, in my middle age, when I realized how much we evangelicals had thrown away, frightened as we were of becoming infected with what my father called “the sin of Mariolatry” (Mary worship). He explained to us that our nonevangelical compatriots were Orthodox Christians only by birthright. They did not read the Bible for themselves, so they did not realize that they had elevated Mary to the status of the divine. And, as children, we accepted this. Later, when I realized that language reveals history and culture, I was convinced. The Greek language is full of exclamatory phrases that pepper every conversation and storytelling. Let me explain.

      A Greek woman, when confronted with something sad or joyful, will exclaim, “Ach, Panayía mou!” (Oh, my All-Holy-One!). The ending of this phrase is understood to be feminine, and there is only one Pan-ayia, one “all-holy” woman for the Greeks—the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the tradition of those who are greatly loved, her name and all her titles are used in the Greek language for exclamations as well as, unfortunately, for major blasphemies.

      Her name as “Panayía,” never as Maria, is taken in vain constantly, but a Greek will pray to her before she ever thinks of praying to God or to Jesus. Jesus is usually Christoúlis—little Christ. In the Greek lexicon and in popular religion, he has never reached the stature of his mother.

      However, in a country long steeped in the worship of women, this is not at all strange. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, the protector of the Athenians and all Greeks, was pictured and sculpted as fully armed, with a helmet, javelin, and shield. Homer’s writings are full of Athená’s help to the Greeks, especially to the crafty Odysseus, and there are testimonials of her fighting alongside the Greek armies. Likewise, in 1940, twenty-eight centuries after Homer, soldiers returning from the Albanian front, where the ragged Greek army defeated the Italians of Mussolini, described how they had seen the Virgin Mary, fully armed, leading them on to victory. Every Greek child has heard these stories, and for people like me, who were children during the war, the memories are indelible.

      In our evangelical home we grew up believing that a Christian must pray only to the one God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to no one else. So I grew up ignoring Maria, the mother of Jesus, because I did not want to fall into Mariolatry. But by the time I became the mother of two daughters, occasionally paralyzed by the fear of something terrible happening to my children, I was ready to rethink my attitude toward the mother of Jesus. In doing so, I was helped tremendously by the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers and her marvelous cycle of plays, The Man Born to Be King. Her plays, which I read in the seventies and used during Lent as the basis for a reader’s theater in my home parish, radically changed my Christian understanding. For the first time, Jesus and his mother, and his friends and disciples, became living, breathing human beings throbbing with life and pain, sorrow and laughter. The incarnation became the central focus of my faith, and Mary became for me the girl, the woman, and the mother I had neglected. I was ready to listen to her.

      She came to me as a mother and, because that spoke to what was and is most precious to my heart, I heard her. Her talking about the birth of her child and the wondrous circumstances surrounding it made her so real and so fully human that I felt as though a door had opened that led to light. Beyond that door I saw much that I would call joy, but also great pain. I wondered, if she can talk about this child with so much promise born in such strange surroundings, what was she remembering at the foot of the cross? What happened to that promise?

      And what about all the other women who come to us through the stories, but usually only in tantalizing hints? What would they say? I remembered all the Old Testament stories that I had heard as a child, when my father read us a portion of Scripture every single night of our childhood years, even those years when we had no electricity because of the German occupation of Greece. I can still see his dear face as he bent over his Bible and we sat around the table listening, our shadows long and mysterious on the walls, the soft light of the lamp, my young self full of emotion and questions. Why are these women punished and not the men? Why do some of these stories make me so sad? Underlining all the marvelous stories was Daddy’s assurance that all this was inspired by God, that there was nothing false and nothing wrong in the Bible. Yet, his explanations of faith and obedience didn’t always satisfy me.

      When I was in college, in America, and under the influence of the writings of C. S. Lewis and several beloved professors, the mantle of inerrancy fell from the stories. This was liberating for me, as it has been for countless believers who have emerged from fundamentalism. (I no longer felt obligated to believe in an Old Testament God who ordered babies to be dashed against the walls and who punished Saul because he did not utterly destroy his enemies.) It is difficult for people who have not been brought up as fundamentalists to realize the freedom that comes with the understanding that the writers wrote down these stories; they were not dictated by God. The stories reveal the level of understanding of the divine that the people of the time had reached, rather than God’s absolute truth written in stone.

      When the time came for me to listen to the women, I was ready to hear them because I had shed the notion that they had acted in the way they did because they were foreordained to do so. I knew then that their stories were not written down by inerrant writers hearing the word of God directly, but by human beings who saw them in a particular light—that of their own faith, inspired by God but also inspired by misconceptions and the limited understanding of a man-centered culture.

      I wondered about the writers of the Bible who wrote about the women, some in remarkably vivid stories, like those of Miriam and Tamar, and others only in passing, like the mention of Lydia or Gomer. What was going on? Why did the writers choose these stories? Given the status of women in biblical times, I was amazed that the writers did not totally ignore such women but included them in the narration. What compelled them to write so much about women in a culture where only the men seemed to matter? Did these particular women leave such a strong memory behind that their stories could not be ignored? What was the oral tradition that kept their memories alive, and how did these stories influence the women who came after them? These are questions I longed to examine.

      During the years of my travels for the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief (the relief and development arm of the Episcopal Church), I came face-to-face with poverty and suffering—of women and children—that broke my heart and shook my faith in a loving God. I went back to Scripture to find out how the people within its pages dealt with questions that arose out of suffering, confusion, persecution, the mores of the times, and the prejudices and ignorance of the ancient world. I found in the women’s stories much that sustained me and gave me strength to go on. It is these women, who gave me this strength, that you will meet in the monologues.

      Each one of them visited me and spoke to me in her own way. These were not mystical experiences. Each monologue came out of reading the story, researching the related Scriptures, and then simply listening. Whenever I read about a woman in the Bible, I think, this is like shorthand. What else went on in this story? What is hidden here? These are a few of the questions I focus on, but above all I always ponder this one question: How would Lydia, Miriam, or Tamar tell this story in her own words? If any of them were interviewed by the writer, what would they remember? How would they express it? The personal story of each woman usually starts with a picture or with the first sentence playing itself in my mind. The rest comes