Day 7 - Unsilencing

Today is International Women’s Day. The theme is (the less than snappy!) ‘Gender equality today, for a sustainable tomorrow’. In other words, if we want to build a better world for our planet and the human race, all voices need to be heard. Lots of people have been written out of the story: women, children, as well as people of colour, people considered uneducated or low class. Their voices are silenced, muffled under layers of historic indifference.

So, there is an exercise of unsilencing to do, peeling back the sediment of centuries that has settled over the majority of humankind. It’s an exciting and brilliant task! There are some amazing thinkers, activists, entrepreneurs, artists and educators hidden in the folds of time. To my delight, my book in the series ‘Cultural History of Women and Christianity’ which deals with the nineteenth century, The Age of Empire, is published today: on International Women’s Day.

It’s exciting, because this explosive era saw huge advances in women’s participation in society – while at the same time, ironically, telling them that they were too intellectually weak to make decisions on their own, or else were being unnaturally unfeminine if they did! They had to shout to be heard, and then were told off for shouting (which, believe me, is still the case).

Of course women were also perpetrators of injustice. We participated in global exploitation, by trampling across great parts of the world, bringing ‘civilisation’ to some of the richest cultures on the planet, destroying wisdom and appropriating wealth as we went. Women, as well as men, were owners of enslaved people, as well as campaigners against the slave trade. It was a stupendously complex period of history, made marvellously more so, as the myriad voices that have been kept quiet for so long are unsilenced.

This didn’t start in the nineteenth century, of course, and neither is the task completed now. We can’t sit back and consider it done. And that is because the work of unsilencing is not the hobby of a few zealots, but the call of Christ.

Earlier, when I listed the sorts of people whose voices are unheard, you might recognise them as precisely the sorts of people that Jesus spent his time with. He sat with those whom the society of that time, and our own, would discount or ignore. Time and again, we see him deep in conversation with someone, while his disciples, or bystanders are shaking their heads in disbelief – ‘if he only knew what sort of woman she is . . .’.

Jesus did not give in to the cultural norms of his own day, but interacted with each person as an individual in her or his own right, with wrongs to be addressed, sins forgiven, questions to ask and answer, and a life to be transformed.

Let us pray

God of love,

help us to see people through your eyes of compassion;

forgive us when we react unthinkingly through prejudice;

open our hearts to the wonder and warmth of humanity

made in your image, loved by Jesus, and alive with your Spirit.

Amen

Janet Wootton