Changing our Environment and Ourselves…
Posted on February 6, 2014 | Leave a comment
Today, thanks to a friend’s sharing on Facebook, I ran across this powerful clip featuring Jean Kilbourne, the woman who has spoken up so much in the past 20+ years about women in the media. Her collection of work, “Killing Us Softly,” has shown us time and time again of the insidious ways women’s bodies are manipulated to not only sell merchandise, but to create in us an insecurity that has the potential to destroy our confidence, and sometimes, our very lives. This clip is no different. Please watch it…. then note her final question: What is it that we can do to change all this?
In answering her own question, she states that we need to become aware of the way the manipulation and misuse of the female form hurts all of us. The objectification of our bodies leads to violence against us; the presentation of unattainable ideals tortures our self-image. Truly, she says, this is a matter of public health, a matter that can be addressed only through changing our environment.
Yes, I say, let’s change our environment!!! Let’s insist that women are, indeed, worthy and capable of all forms of leadership, even within churches as ordained ministers.
Yes, I say, let’s change our environment! Let’s insist that God – especially within our Hebrew/Christian Scriptures – never condones nor demands that women be subservient objects within a patriarchal society. (It is male interpreters who have created the illusion of God doing so…)
Yes, I say, let’s change our environment! Let us insist that God – in being beyond all we can ever imagine or know – exists not only within a male father figure, but in all sorts of manifestations of the human person and creation. Let us celebrate the images of God that exist within Scripture – that of a mother bear protecting her young, a hen gathering her chicks under her wings, a woman searching for a lost coin, a woman giving birth, a mother nursing her baby at her breast. And let us be open to new ways of God breaking through to us so that we may see the Holy in everything and everyone….
Yes, I say, let’s change our environment …. and also go even further….
Let us change our own experience of ourselves.
Let us embrace the fact that upon our creation God breathed life into us, animating us with God’s own spirit. Let us learn to treasure and cherish that spirit within which longs to be expressed through our own unique beings in the on-going dance of creation. Let us truly know that any attempt to attain another’s ideal – whether it be that of another person, an advertiser, a media mogul – we crush the very essence of who we are called to be ~ and we deny, then, creation of the gifts only we can give. Only then, I believe, will we break free from the tyranny we now face….
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