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The Contemporary Church and the Real Presence of Women: Of Liturgy, Labor, and Gendered LivesTERESA BERGERGiven that the title of this essay links "real presence"—traditionally associated with Christ's body—with female bodies, "women," it seems appropriate to begin with two transgressions. The first is an act of transgression, the second the story of a transgression. First, the act: the topic for the 2002–2003 Institute of Sacred Music Colloquium at Yale University is "The Contemporary Church and..." I conform to this topic in my title and in the remainder of this essay, but will transgress with my beginning. I will commence with a story from the twelfth century, rather than from the twenty-first century. The story itself is the narrative of a transgression, involving liturgy and women's lives (even if the story follows the traditional script of a named, male hero as its central figure). Here, then, is this story of a transgression: Somewhere around A.D. 1114, Robert d'Arbrissel, the founder of several monasteries in which ascetic women and men lived together under the authority of an abbess, wanted to preach at the little church of Menat in Auvergne. He was told by the locals that women had been forbidden from entering this church ever since a saint, five hundred years earlier, had decreed it so. Any woman defying the ban would die. Robert d'Arbrissel, in a stark and simple response, proceeded to enter the church with a group of women. He then eloquently defended his defiance of the local saint by insisting that "saints are not the enemies of the spouses of Jesus Christ."1 And if women ate and drank the body and blood of Christ—the real presence of God—what folly it was to believe that these women could not bring their own real presence into this church. Robert's twelfth-century challenge to a tradition of distancing women from the center of ritual power and real presence is an apt lead-in to my theme,"The Contemporary Church and the Real Presence of Women." Against a tradition that has frequently distanced the real presence of women from the real presence of God, I will argue that the real presence of women and the real presence of God are, in fact, relational to, and co-constitutive of, each other. I will begin with a look at gender as a fundamental marker not only of all cultural formations but also of liturgical life. I then will consider the peculiar labor of being "woman" and its relation, or non-relation, to the labor of making meaning in liturgy. This will lead me to examine one liturgical fundamental, namely, the proclamation of the Scriptures, with gender as my interpretive lens. I will conclude with a reflection on the relationality between the real presence of women and the real presence of God. |
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