A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  Debi Pearl, author of Created to Be His Help Meet, wrote, “A young mother’s place is in the home, keeping it, guarding it, watching over those entrusted to her. To do otherwise will surely cause the Word of God to be blasphemed. Even if you could disobey God and it not produce visible ill consequences, it would only prove that God is long-suffering . . . but the judgment will assuredly come.”5

  “Quite simply, there is no such thing as ‘Christian feminism,’ ” explains Stacy McDonald in a book titled Passionate Housewives Desperate for God. “We either embrace the biblical model . . . or we reject it and plummet over the cliff with the rest of the passengers on the railcar.”6

  All this talk of judgment and damnation and runaway railcars made me wonder how these ladies would feel knowing I’d chosen an ex-con for a teacher, was secretly squeezing a few business trips into my schedule, and had every intention of stocking up on liquor each time I crossed the county line . . . for the braised ribs, of course. Perhaps the real reason I’d chosen Martha Stewart to accompany me on this leg of the journey was the fact that her drive, intelligence, and unapologetic ambition allowed me to preserve some small part of myself as I ventured into a world that didn’t yet feel my own.

  Sure, Martha can be a real stickler for doing things her way, but you don’t hear her saying that you’ll go to hell if you don’t.

  The wise woman builds her house, But the foolish tears it down with her own hands.

  —PROVERBS 14:1 NASB

  Besides the fact that we were eating dinner at about nine thirty every night, the first week of cooking went well. I started with soups, because according to Martha, “the measure of a good cook is how well he or she makes soup. Not a complicated, multicourse meal or a delicate soufflé, but a simple soup.”7

  I’m not so sure I’d use the word simple, seeing as how Martha’s basic chicken soup took me over three hours to make. This was mostly my fault, of course. Tearing a whole chicken into bite-size pieces requires that a girl get rather intimate with her meat, and I hate getting intimate with my meat. Wiggling those fleshy little legs until they separated from the joint made me feel like some kind of animal. Not even a pair of rubber gloves, two feet of distance, and closed eyes could convince me that I was doing anything but handling a carcass.

  “How do you like the parsnips?” I asked as Dan took his first sip of soup that night.

  “They’re good.”

  “I’ve never cooked with them before. I didn’t even know what they looked like until yesterday.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “They look kinda like seasick carrots, in case you’re wondering. How do you like the chicken?”

  “It’s good.”

  “I used free range organic-fed chicken so we don’t have to feel guilty. Do you think the pieces are too small?

  “No. They’re good.”

  “It tastes fresh, doesn’t it? It smells fresh, too, like you can tell it’s homemade.”

  “Yeah. It’s good.”

  “Good grief, Dan. Could you please use a word besides good? How do you really feel about this soup? Tell me the truth.”

  Dan looked trapped.

  “How do I feel about the soup?”

  “It’s watery and bland because I used water instead of stock. That’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Well, maybe a little, but overall it’s . . . it’s just good, okay? That’s the best word I can come up with. I’m sorry I don’t have a fancy vocabulary like you.”

  I let it go, mostly on account of the vocabulary compliment. Besides, it was nearly 10 p.m., and I hadn’t started the dishes or decided whether to start the stock that night or the next morning. There’s no time for arguing when you’ve just realized a mangled chicken carcass has been sitting out on your counter for an hour.

  Fortunately, the rest of the week’s meals conjured some better adjectives from the other side of the dining room table. Among our favorites were Martha’s savory French toast BLT, Martha’s roasted autumn harvest salad, and Martha’s beef and stout stew.

  The project had revealed its first truly surprising result: I enjoyed cooking. In the four hours it took me to prepare that beef and stout stew, I forgot about all the loose ends and screwups and unreturned e-mails in my life and instead concentrated all my scattered energy like a magnifying lens into one hot beam of unadulterated intention—chopping and mincing, browning and frying, grating and blanching, and stirring and boiling. Even when dinner didn’t turn out perfectly, I found the process itself rewarding.

  The first week of domestication would have gone down in the books as an indisputable success, were it not for all the housework.

  My robust lexicon notwithstanding, I struggle to find the right words to describe just how much I despise, hate, abhor, revile, detest, and categorically abominate anything to do with home maintenance. While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears.

  Now, don’t get me wrong; I like things to be clean. It’s not as though Dan and I “live in squalor,” as my mom likes to say. But each time the laundry basket starts to overflow or the fridge gets crowded with old leftovers, I put up a fight. And when I’m not in the mood for a fight, I just sit around and feel guilty about it.

  In a matter of days, The Martha Stewart Homekeeping Handbook had turned this little complex of mine into full-blown neurosis. It started with the checklists—Martha’s list of “to-dos” for every day, every week, every month, and every season. These would have been helpful guides had they not revealed what a complete and utter failure I am at everything I attempt. As it turns out, until I started this experiment, pretty much everything on Martha’s “clean every day” list I did about once a week, pretty much everything on Martha’s “clean every week” list I did about once a month, pretty much everything on Martha’s “clean every month” list I did about once a year, and pretty much everything on Martha’s “clean every season” list I’d never done in my life. That’s right, folks; I’d never vacuumed our refrigerator grille and coil. We lived in squalor after all.

  After trying and failing to cross every item off Martha’s to-do lists, I decided to conduct a room-by-room deep-clean of the house, starting with the kitchen. According to Martha, “it’s the room with more home concerns than any other.”8

  This was certainly true in our house. When we first purchased the house seven years ago, I made a big stink about replacing the old maple cabinets and mustard-yellow countertops, but I guess one can grow accustomed to cooking in a veritable cave when, by the grace of God, it includes a gas stove. Working with less than seven feet of counter space and no pantry, I’d assembled a motley crew of add-ons, including a wobbly folding table, a kid’s writing desk, and a hideous microwave stand that a retired missionary was getting rid of, which really tells you something.

  According to Martha, “it’s not the amount of room you have that matters, but how you manage it.” With most of my counter space cluttered with appliances and cereal boxes, and with cabinets so disheveled that finding the lid to the stockpot required spelunking experience, it was clear that I wasn’t using my space as efficiently as possible, a problem I needed to solve before tackling something as involved as beef bourguignon.

  So I took everything out—pots, pans, dishes, stemware, cutting boards, appliances canisters, pottery, platters, soup cans, cake stands, measuring cups, and muffin pans—piled it all in the dining room, and stood in my empty kitchen for two hours until I knew exactly where everything had to go.

  Mom did this every now and then when we were kids. She’d put a Carole King tape in the stereo, empty all the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, and clean the whole thing top to bottom while singing at the top of her lungs about the earth moving under her feet and the sky tumbling down, a-tumbling down. Amanda and I watched, bewildered, among the stockpots and frying pans. Shouting above the music,
she told us, “It has to get messy before it gets clean”—a philosophy that pretty much sums up every meaningful experience of my life, from homemaking to friendships to faith. Sometimes you’ve just got to tear everything out, expose all the innards, and start over again.

  Sure enough, cooking is a lot more fun when you’re not at war with your kitchen. As much as I hate to admit it, the sixteen hours I spent deep-cleaning my kitchen turned out to be some of the most valuable hours of the project. The task required creativity, problem solving, innovation, and resourcefulness, and it forced me to confront the ugly air of condescension that permeated my attitude toward homemaking. It was out of ignorance and insecurity that I ever looked down my nose at women who make homemaking their full-time occupation.

  I got so confident, in fact, I did something I’d have never dreamed of doing before: I called Mom and officially invited the whole family to our house for Thanksgiving dinner.

  When Brother Lawrence sought sanctuary from the tumults of seventeenth-century France, he entered a Carmelite monastery in Paris, where his lack of education relegated him to kitchen duty. Charged with tending to the abbey’s most mundane chores, Brother Lawrence nevertheless earned a reputation among his fellow monks for exuding a contagious sense of joy and peace as he went about his work—so much so that after his death, they compiled the few maxims and letters and interviews he left behind into a work that would become a classic Christian text: The Practice of the Presence of God.

  “The time of business,” explained Brother Lawrence, “does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”9

  For Brother Lawrence, God’s presence permeated everything—from the pots and pans in the kitchen sink to the water and soap that washed them. Every act of faithfulness in these small tasks communicated his love for God and desire to live in perpetual worship. “It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God,” he said.10

  After reading Brother Lawrence, I tried to go about my housework with a little more mindfulness—listening to each rhythmic swishing of the broom, feeling the warm water rush down my arm and off my fingers as I scrubbed potatoes, savoring the scent of clean laundry fresh out of the dryer, delighting in the sight of all the colorful herbs and vegetables and cheeses on my countertop. And sure enough, I found myself connecting to that same presence that I encountered during contemplative prayer, the presence that reminded me that the roots of my spirit extended deep into the ground. I got less done when I worked with mindfulness, but, somehow, I felt more in control.

  I get the sense that many in the contemporary biblical womanhood movement feel that the tasks associated with homemaking have been so marginalized in our culture that it’s up to them to restore the sacredness of keeping the home. This is a noble goal indeed, and one around which all people of faith can rally. But in our efforts to celebrate and affirm God’s presence in the home, we should be wary of elevating the vocation of homemaking above all others by insinuating that for women, God’s presence is somehow restricted to that sphere.

  If God is the God of all pots and pans, then He is also the God of all shovels and computers and paints and assembly lines and executive offices and classrooms. Peace and joy belong not to the woman who finds the right vocation, but to the woman who finds God in any vocation, who looks for the divine around every corner.

  As Elizabeth Barret Browning famously put it:

  Earth’s crammed with heaven,

  And every common bush afire with God,

  But only he who sees takes off his shoes;

  The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

  Faith’s not about finding the right bush. It’s about taking off your shoes.

  Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.

  —1 PE.3TER 4:9

  It’s a good thing I retired the Jar of Contention at the end of October or else it would have been fully restocked at the conclusion of November 8.

  Up until this point, Dan had been the only witness to my culinary exploits. This seemed rather “unbiblical” to me, considering the fact that hospitality is such a celebrated virtue in Scripture. So on November 8, I invited the Falzone family (yep, rhymes with “calzone”) over for a dinner of stuffed shells. Dayna had recently announced that Baby #3 was on his or her way, so it seemed as good a time as any to get together and celebrate.

  I found the stuffed shells recipe in November’s edition of Martha Stewart Living, and it looked easy enough: boxed jumbo shells stuffed with ricotta, radicchio, and prosciutto, baked in homemade or (gasp!) store-bought tomato sauce, and topped with butter, mozzarella, and parmesan—served with salad and bread. Arteries and blood pressure be darned, I could handle that.

  It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway to the grocery store that cooking stuffed shells for an Italian might not be the best idea. A Falzone probably has, you know, standards regarding his pasta. And if that weren’t enough, I decided to go ahead and purchase all the ingredients for Martha’s beef and stout stew that same day, which gave me a grocery list that came to three pages, typed and single-spaced, whose contents included unfamiliar items like cipollini onions, cremini mushrooms, slab bacon, and horseradish root, three of which proved wholly unavailable to residents of Rhea County.

  Which brings me to a point I’ve been meaning to make for a while now—Martha Stewart hates rural America.

  Well, that might not be entirely true, but I can say from experience that nothing makes a rural Tennessean feel precisely like a rural Tennessean than a list of ingredients that cannot be found within a thirty-mile radius of one’s home. “Ask your butcher,” says Martha. Or, “Talk with your fishmonger,” says Martha. “Visit your Asian market,” says Martha. “Try your local gourmet food purveyor,” says Martha.

  I’m tempted to remind Martha that not all of us have personal fishmongers, butchers, and stockbrokers to “tell us these things.”

  Of course, the upside to being strapped with an exotic grocery list is that I get to feel all superior whenever I walk into Wal-Mart or BI-LO with requests that make the produce guys scratch their heads. Around here, asking for arugula or chanterelles turns you into a regular foodie, as such delicacies must be specially ordered from Chattanooga or Atlanta. I admit to experiencing a touch of blithe satisfaction when the checkout clerk looked at my horseradish root and asked, “You mean to tell me you’re gonna eat that?”

  “Grate it, actually,” I said, as if I knew what the heck I was doing.

  That day it was the cipollini onions that threw everyone off. I started at Wal-Mart, where my friend Amber from frozen foods helped me find the produce guy, who helped me find the produce manager, who helped me find the store manager—none of whom had ever even heard of cipollini onions. Next thing I knew, a confluence of workers, managers, and fellow shoppers had assembled around me in the potato aisle, passing around my grocery list like it was an out-of-towner’s bad directions.

  “It’s really not a big deal,” I told the produce manager, a little embarrassed by all the attention I’d garnered. “It’s a Martha Stewart recipe, so there’s always some unattainable ingredient involved.”

  A forty-something with a wide girth, shoulder-length blond hair, and thick East Tennessee drawl, the produce manager seemed perfectly satisfied with that explanation.

  “Yeah, I’d say she done put them in there just to throw you off,” he concluded.

  Just to throw me off. That sounded about right.

  It was six o’clock when I finished cooking the prosciutto, radicchio, garlic, and onion and started stuffing the shells. We expected Tony and Dayna and the girls around six thirty. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned yet, so we may as well have been running around naked. I started rummaging through the cabinets, dramatically banging together pots and pans and releasing long, lou
d sighs in an attempt to coax Dan into the kitchen to see if he could help. Normally I would just ask, but we’d been trying to stick to traditional roles in deference to the project, which to the credit of the biblical womanhood advocates had resulted in a lot fewer arguments about division of labor. But as the clock ticked away and the jar of tomato sauce proved impossible to open, a fresh wave of resentment rolled over me.

  “Can’t you tell that I’m struggling in here?” I yelled.

  After about a minute, Dan appeared around the corner.

  “Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to do this stuff by yourself? You know, for the project?”

  I knew he wasn’t taking advantage of the situation, just trying to preserve the integrity of the project, because Dan’s big into integrity.

  “You’re just taking advantage of the situation,” I wailed.

  “Hon, you know that’s not true. I’d be happy to help you.”

  “Well then, why don’t you volunteer?”

  “I didn’t know that was allowed.”

  “OF COURSE it’s allowed! No one said you can’t initiate assistance to your wife when she’s struggling.”

  “Okay. So what can I do?”

  This felt wrong. As much as I wanted Dan’s help and pity, bossing him around and turning him into the bad guy didn’t honor the experiment or our relationship.

  “Maybe you could just call Tony and Dayna and tell them to come at seven instead. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  He let me bury my head in his chest and cry for a few minutes, leaving two distinct mascara marks on his white T-shirt. Sometimes, when I’m separating the laundry after a tough week, I find two or three similarly stained undershirts and I’m reminded of why I married this man.

  Tony and Dayna arrived right at seven, just as the shells turned golden and the sauce bubbly. Dayna, who had been kind enough to bring a dessert of apple turnovers, innocently asked how the project had affected my workout routine, which, along with my aching feet, put me in a bit of a funk for the rest of the night, even though everyone seemed to enjoy the meal.