The woman in the ordinary

Photograph by Lili Viera de Carvalho

This is a reflection on Rachelle’s recent post Poetry as Prayer.

I wasn’t really ready for poetry until my late thirties, in fact around the same age my mother was when she gave birth to me.

And there’s a correlation: having walked out on any kind of religious practice at 15, I was now giving birth to a new understanding of God. In exploring this newly spiritual life, I realised that while my teenage self had been merely bored with the sterility of the Catholic Church, as an adult I had serious reservations about the rules of this club.

My new connection with God was welcome and necessary but flat, because I was living in my head and obsessing about those rules. I could only intellectualise about it. I’d wrapped my emotions up so tight I had poor access to what I was feeling, but I knew it was something pretty powerful.

It was after a retreat at which we shared favourite pieces of writing that I began to wonder if I could connect through poetry.

I thought a place to start might be with novelist, poet and activist Marge Piercy, whose sci-fi feminist classic Woman on the Edge of Time had been enormously important to me in my twenties. She has an abandoned writing style, pouring the essence of herself onto the page.

I sought out some of her poetry and found this:

The Woman in the Ordinary

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in others’ eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.

Bam, right between the eyes! These words hooked me and reeled me in. They allowed me to recognise my fury at the expectations of a church which (still) doesn’t allow the ordination of women and which idealises women in narrow roles such as heterosexual marriage or in monastic life. (Given this, it amuses me that some of the most radical of Catholics are nuns.)

Piercy’s words allowed me to approach Christianity in my own way and with my own feelings. They allowed me, in fact, to become what many would regard as a very bad Catholic. I have now become that most undisciplined of Christians: one who picks and chooses what to believe and how to worship, even (gasp!) learning from other faith traditions.

They also allowed me to mourn for the certainty of my early childhood experience of a comfortable, unquestioning religion.

Without the emotional release precipitated by this piece of poetry, perhaps I would have given up on God as a bad job again. Perhaps I would have retreated into my head, found the whole thing so illogical as to be absurd. And perhaps I would have missed some of the most beautiful moments of my life.

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