Jesus sent out the disciples “two by two and gave them authority over unhealthy spirits.” “So the disciples… drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.”
Authority has roots in the term auger, the farm implement used to open the soil. Auger, and thus authority, means we “cause growth.” Our authority is a birthing energy, messy with diverse and ever so humble people growing new life together. The life-giving authority growing from commoners like Jesus, his disciples, and us, is needed for the “unhealthy spirit” that is Militarism and more specifically its patriarchy – domination, rule by males. Patriarchy undermines our conscientious authority that is a birthing energy, messy with diversity and humble communion by promoting ranked autonomy that is sterile, singular, and statused. Patriarchy wants to describe autonomy as the “experience of acting from choice” “rather than pressure” (APA). But, patriarchy’s ranked autonomy pressures our experience of choice. We are pressured to choose rank in its many violences, for example class, race, over nature, gender. Patriarchy pressures us to not choose power – together, to not choose authority – together, but to choose rank over others. We feel pressure to do so as bosses, white people, property owners, males. A prime developer of patriarchy’s ranked autonomy was the patriarch Immanuel Kant. Kant acquiesced to all manner of ranked autonomy and its violences; of colonists over natives, whites over blacks, man over nature, and men over women, “Nature was fearful… about the preservation of the species, and implanted… fear… and timidity… in woman’s nature. Through this weakness woman rightfully demands that man be her protector.” The patriarch overtly pressures women to choose men’s ranked autonomous domination over themselves. He covertly pressures women to choose men’s ranked autonomous domination for themselves over others. When women reject patriarchy’s pressure to be subordinate, they often, unconsciously, accept patriarchy’s pressure to be dominant. For example, women choose to join the ranks of patriarchy’s dominating military / police forces or choose as heroes female fictionalizations of dominating patriarchs as in Wonder Woman, Assassin’s Creed’s Kassandra et al, Marvel’s Black Widow et al. They are choices for control, for domination, but are made to feel like choices for power by women pressured by patriarchy’s ranked autonomy. Patriarchy trains women out of genuine power – authority – the power to grow life. We mimic the dominators and claim autonomy – unaware it is patriarch’s ranked autonomy. Patriarchy hinders women having authority over the unhealthy spirit that is patriarchy because it is pressures us to be the unhealthy spirit that is patriarchy. Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her Defense of Abortion scenario chooses patriarchy’s sterile, singular, and statused autonomy. Imagine, “You wake up in the morning and find yourself” “kidnapped.” “A famous…violinist’s… circulatory system was plugged into yours” for “you alone have the right blood type.” “To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months.” Thomson says a “woman has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.” The violinist/a baby, “does not establish that he has a right to be given” use of your body. “(Y)ou do not act unjustly toward the (violinist/the baby) in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him.” “Surely, we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person,” she says. Patriarchal autonomy – sterile, singular, and statused – is a basis of the pro-choice position. Ranked patriarchs experience any infringement upon their autonomy, or choice, as victimization. It explains why in this U.S. military empire complaints of victimization bellow from its dominators. Ranked patriarchal autonomy explains why the rich complain they are victimized by the poor; why whites complain of victimization by blacks, polluters by needs of the earth, and why men complain they are victimized by women. Each dominator is experiencing their sterile, singular, and statused autonomy devised by patriarchy being touched by nascent, diverse, and humble communion – with human beings who are poor, of color, with the earth, and women whose authority is causing the patriarch to change, to grow. Each dominator is rejecting that touch of powerful authority. As women are enticed into patriarchy’s domination, they too reject the touch of powerful authority. They choose instead Kantian patriarchal arguments of autonomy and fight off infringements upon it. So it is that women too complain of victimization in having to tolerate a birthing energy, messy with diversity and humble communion, for example, with their unborn babies.
“Here is the endless wet thick cosmos, the center of everything… dense sap, branching vines, … belching bogs. Here is swamp, here is struggle… trying for foothold, fingerhold, mindhold over such slick… slack earthsoup. I feel not wet so much as painted and glittered with the fat grassy mires, the rich and succulent marrows of earth— a dry stick given one more chance by the whims of swamp water— a bough that still, after all these years, could take root, sprout, branch out, bud—make of its life a breathing.” (Crossing the Swamp – Mary Oliver)
Prayer: Source of Life, we breathe in powerful authority – its birthing energy, messy with diversity and humble communion.
Question: How does the unhealthy spirit that is patriarchy, with its ranked autonomy, pressure me to choose its many violences?
July 11, 2021 Gospel Mark 6:7-13 Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time