Alice Connor - Brave: Women of the Bible and Their Stories of Grief, Mercy, Folly, Joy, Sex, and Redemption

What are you afraid of?

Not being enough.

Being too much.

anonymous, found on University of Cincinnatis campus

O h, hell. Its a sequel.

Dont worry, there isnt a trilogy in the works because I didnt really want to write this book. I wrote about all the women I wanted to in Fiercethe big names, the ones Id been carrying around in my heart for years, waiting to share them with someone, anyone. My editor Lisa, patient to a fault, had to ask me several times before I threw up my hands and said, I guess! Rather like the moment when I took back my college boyfriend after our breakup and began to fall deeper in love with him every day until I couldnt bear to be parted from him (and now weve been married for over twenty years with two large children), once I said yes to Lisa, I began to love these ladies too.

Theyre an odd bunch: Matriarchs tossed together with mercenaries, various moms alongside prophets and victims, even an actual dude for good measure. Im not trying to articulate precisely and once and for all what really happened but naming the ambiguity and imagining what might have been. This is a big part of feminist biblical interpretation: not making things up whole cloth but reading between the lines, taking educated guesses at whats being hinted at. We take this tack because so much of scripture and its interpretation since it was written is from a male perspective, concerned with culturally defined male activities and The Big Story that men are in charge of. This doesnt make it bad by any means, only incomplete. In the very beginning, God created humans in Gods own image, male-and-female, the first human containing multitudes. Why would The Big Story working itself out in history use only men as actors?

Theres so much more going on underneath any Bible story youd care to namemore characters, more grime and intrigue and sex. Im not supposed to talk about sexy things, though, because Im a priest and this is a book about the Bible. We are meant to be serious and wholesome, the Bible and me, and theres no place for sex-having, much less sex-enjoying, in church. Only, as I talked about in Fierce, the Bible is, in fact, R-rated for language, violence, and sexual situations, often all at the same time. The Bible reflects back to us what were going through, what we see daily in the news, what we fear, and what we desire. The Bible is R-rated because our lives are R-rated. Its moving and transformative precisely because it deals with the real, unsanitized version of existence.

In seminary, they told us the same thing: all this stuff were teaching you, you cant tell your congregations; they cant handle it. Not the God loves you stuff; thats fineits the ahistorical stuff, the editing of scripture across generations, the mythic nature of all of Genesis and Exodus, the pointing out of Jesus violent nature in the midst of his countercultural ministry, Gods concern for how we spend our money and complete silence on homosexuality. That stuff wont fly, they told us. You cant.

Oh, I can, and I will.

Ill tell you what, thoughafter Fierce came out, when I was constantly posting on social media and sharing the book trailer and drumming up interest, I got a surprising number of comments from random men quoting Galatians 3:28 at me. In retrospect, maybe it wasnt that surprising. If youre not super familiar with your biblical citations, that one reads, There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Beautiful, right? There are connection and deep freedom found in the community of God. But thats not what these dudes were after. They meant, You cant do that. Whether the emphasis was on you or that doesnt matter. They meant, How could she possibly write this? They thought Paul meant that not only was there no point in raising up womens stories in this glorious, postgender world we all know we live in, but it was their responsibility to tell me I wasnt allowed. They felt threatened, and bless them, they just didnt understand the wide-open vision God has for creation, a vision that spreads its arms beyond the limits we impose on it.

Aside from these few misguided fellas, all Ive heard for years now is thousands of people who felt like a wall came down when they read these stories. Like theyd suspected there was more to what theyd learned but didnt know where to look, like theyd longed to see themselves in scripture but had never been taught, like their shoulders unhunched and their hearts cracked open just a little and their eyes got wider like a Disney princess suddenly coming across a handsome vista or a bucolic man. So youre damn right its a sequel, and I havent said everything there is to say.

I wanted desperately to include a chapter this time about biblical trans people. But there are no trans characters in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Fierce and Brave are ostensibly about women in scripture, but theyre more about those excluded from power structures and cultural memory for not being men. There are some who say the eunuchs mentioned here and there could be understood as trans and, indeed, might be included in the sweeping arc of queer history, though only the Ethiopian eunuch and Esthers friend have any substantive conversation in scripture. Theres a playwright who wrote Joseph (of The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) as a trans man, and I am so here for it. Gender isnt binary, and I guarantee you there are characters in our Bible who didnt fit their cultures definitions. But we dont really know who they were.

We sing a song at the Edge House, the campus ministry I serve, that may get at what I want to say. The lyrics are In Gods image, I was created. Male and female God created me. At first glance, it seems to suggest a gender binary, but recall the second story of creation in Genesis when God created the first human, the adam, genderless and containing all gender. God created humans in Gods own image, male-and-female: the most appropriate pronoun for God is