40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” – Luke 10
So, Afghanistan has been in the news lately. I have some questions. The first and most primary one is this:
What if the “honor culture” of Afghanistan that we view as hopelessly backwards is actually being presented before us as an opportunity to name and own our own “shame,” and our responses to it, in ways that we, assuming ourselves to be governed by “civilized laws,” otherwise couldn’t?
In No Good Men Among The Living, by Anand Gopal, Senator Heela Achekzai tells her story. She tells of how she was lucky, because her husband only got violent with her twice. Granted, he broke her arm one of those times, but she had talked back to him that time. For the similar offenses, other women in hers’ or neighboring villages had their head split open by an axe (and survived) or were held down by the women of the family while being shot dead by the brother-in-law. “When men say something, women should just listen,” Heela said.
I find both this violence and this assimilation to be unsettling and horrifying. I don’t find them to be good reasons to send “freedom” and “democracy” to Afghanistan. I do find them to be good reasons to deal with Patriarchy here in our own place. But, I’m not sure we’ve adequately addressed what drives it.
I think here of Martha’s sitting at the feet of Jesus. We tend to imagine that her problem was that Mary wasn’t helping with the chores. That wasn’t it. When it says that Mary was “sitting at the feet of the rabbi,” it means she was training to become a disciple. This meant being edified and equipped for public life and authority. Just like the women who held Heela’s neighbor down, Martha had been assimilated into what we would call a “system” of half and false security and authority governed by shame. Mary wasn’t bound to how we can comfortingly and securely know things hold together. Jesus tells Martha that Mary “had chosen the better portion,” and he wasn’t going to take it away from her.
Gopal also tells in his book of how such violence against women like Heela is part of an “honor culture” that is “clannish.” There is no centralized government with legal authority to speak of that controls social practices and adjudicates conflict. “In the lawless mountains, you needed strategies” just to maintain some semblance of security in a very precarious situation. This required close reliance on those you trust most. Hence the “clannishness.”
As a commodity that could at any time also be plundered by rival clans like a sheep on the hillside: “A woman became the embodiment of her family’s ‘honor,’ always signaling, through her behavior, the virtues of her parents and siblings. To safeguard this honor, families cloistered their women in the home.” To have your wife raped and stolen from you in that context isn’t “bad” so much because it’s not “ethically right” – much less legally wrong, since that’s not really a thing there. Rather, it is reacted against, because it is extremely shameful. This practice of seclusion is called “purdah,” and it is symbolized by the burqa. A woman can’t leave the home without being accompanied by a male. Another man who visits isn’t even to catch sight of the woman of the house, nor even hear her voice. The other time Heela’s husband was violent with her was when she allowed village elders to visit, hear her voice, and discuss business with her, all without him even being present.
Her husband angrily struck her this time, because he was ashamed. He obviously had no control of his uppity wife.
Why was the laughter in the crowd so exuberant after John MacArthur essentially said Beth Moore should shut up and go home (link HERE)? It’s probably good to remember that the shame that drives that violent keeping of women in their pace, that keeping of the social order according to male authority, isn’t actually foreign to us. As best I can discern so far, this is part of why these stories are so unsettling to me.
Another reason I find Heela’s story unsettling is because such normalized violence makes me question my understanding of our own social order. I tend to function as though the orientation of our politics around individual rights and self-autonomy inherently depends on and is a practice of our alienation and of our disembodied abstraction. These are problems Hella doesn’t have. But what if our way really is progress? What if I really can trust and give myself to our default emotional responses that are oriented around hopes and aspirations to “progress”? What if our visceral anger when it is challenged, and our repulsion from what renders it tenuous, is justified by Heela’s silent wounds? What if our joyous celebration over progress from her husband’s violence is obviously warranted? And, what if America’s quest to bring “freedom” to Iraq and Afghanistan was a good thing that failed rather than an inevitably vain and conceited endeavor in the first place?
I would like to explore what happens if I flip this line of questioning on its head. What if this maintenance of the social order through violence with the honor of the family at stake isn’t a reason to be angry that women in Afghanistan don’t have “rights”? Would that, in turn, be a reason to shrink back and imagine there’s nothing we can do? What if both attempting to fight a war in Afghanistan and then shrink back from it are actually responses to our own visceral shame? What if the “honor culture” of Afghanistan that we view as hopelessly backwards is actually being presented before us as an opportunity to name and own our own “shame,” and our responses to it, in ways that we, assuming ourselves to be governed by “civilized laws,” otherwise couldn’t?
Perhaps that feeling in or gut and our throat when we are presented with Heela’s story isn’t a reason to fight, fight, or freeze. Are we able to pay attention to our shame, name it, tend to it, and relate to it differently? What would it look like and require to do something other than turn our heads down and away from our depths and our darkness? What would it look like to do something other than lash out violently in assertion of our power? Was this not what we did and collectively longed for in our campaign of “Shock and Awe”? Does our own shame lie under our fight for Afghanistan’s “freedom” while, at one and the same time, binding and blinding us to our dis-ease?
Are we able to instead deal with our shame by moving towards others in mutually vulnerable, caring, and edifying relationship? The Light invites us. As I see it, Heela’s story is a reason to, rather than grasp to obtain it by asserting our own way, give honor away by giving women a voice in our own contexts. What might that look like?
I think here of the story of the menstruating woman. In our context, we miss that, without being accompanied by a male relative, she wasn’t supposed to be out in public, much less speaking to or touching the Rabbi. In the face of her incredible courage and risk, Jesus doesn’t respond by violently controlling her. He becomes her male relative. He empowers her speech. “Daughter, your trust has healed you…”
Can we trust the grace and care of God to come to face this shame? Sometimes, when I become present to previously unrecognized shame that had been driving me all along, I am shocked and awed both at how I missed it and the destruction it wrought. What if God is presenting us with the opportunity to be humble rather than ashamed?
Knowing God 