and sisters at St. Mark’s. I serve at King of Kings. We are a small church family without a building of our own. We meet in a hotel conference room, a La Quinta sanctuary, you might say. I’m Cormac Bruce, by the way, pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Nora Shaw,” she said as they shook hands.
“Oh, dear,” he exclaimed looking at his watch in a way that suggested he didn’t have a gift for administration, “My son needs picking up from his piano lesson . . . Should you and your husband be inclined to visit us at King of Kings, we’d all be delighted.” He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and removed a business-sized card. “Godspeed,” was his valediction as he handed it to her. “I hope we meet again soon.”
As his step descended the stairs, she looked down at the card in her hand and smiled at the familiar blue shield with its red cross, the white star in each quadrant, and the miter in the middle. “I think we will,” she thought.
Descending the open staircase she could see the whole store.
A gift section dominated by visual arts was the largest. Framed prints, yard art, t-shirts, jewelry, mugs, and knickknacks of every imaginable sort were displayed by an employee with sound marketing background. To Nora the art reflected the popular culture more than Christianity, yet it seemed to insulate a Christian subculture all the more. She didn’t see any objects with power to transform or enrich the culture. None of the prints were by Rembrandt or Albrecht Dürer. There were some beautiful photographs of the local Blue Ridge Mountains; apparently God’s creation could speak for itself. But the selection was predominantly a display of kitsch to catch the consumer.
She thought of the young artist Beatrice Edgars, who she and Luke had met last week. Her faith organically and intentionally informed her aesthetic theory and her paintings; her gallery in Blowing Rock was doing very well. But her prints would look displaced in this predictable and insipid assemblage. Car art was one genre particularly well-represented. Gnomic biblical quotations accustomed to incisive alteration of the human heart leaked power when printed on a piece of vinyl adhesive. Wisdom literature did not translate well into a five-dollar advertising slogan on a bumper sticker. One could imagine it being efficacious only in the worst of traffic jams; usually it would just lose meaning from overuse.
The children’s section was large, but again merely a cultural mirror. She saw a display of Veggie Tales lunch boxes, a shelf of Fun With Jesus water guns, and a stack of God Is Awesome stationery sets, good perhaps for making a hit at a birthday party—but not particularly productive of spiritual growth. Indeed, the stock appeared to promote identification with commercial products rather than with Jesus. The business model merged ecumenism and retail marketing, culturally specific Christianity and capitalism—not wrong perhaps, but at least uneasy bedfellows.
The greeting card section occupied at least fifty feet of wall space. Above the cards, higher than the reach of the human hand, was a large print in a thick, antique gold frame. In the center of the scene, a lovely thatched cottage radiated a deep golden light. Every flower in its idyllic English garden was visible although it was night. The vignette exhibited the baptism of Hallmark officiated by the sentimentalism of Thomas Kincaid. Was that irresistible light sourced by the love of Christ or an “Angel in the House”? If she hadn’t been so sinful, would the Holy Spirit have produced such a paradise for her family? She didn’t know, but she felt certain that the people who lived in the painted cottage could not possibly understand the losses she and Luke had endured together.
With a sudden inspiration and a prayer for emotional courage, Nora decided to take an alphabetic cruise through the “Women’s” stacks.
In the B’s Nora picked up 8 Choices That Will Change a Woman’s Life by Jill Briscoe. Scanning the table of contents did, indeed, reveal eight important choices: To resist pain or to use it; To gather wealth or to gather grace; To speak wisely or to speak foolishly; To value our time or to fritter it away; To live for ourselves or to live for the Spirit; To develop God’s gifts or to waste them; To persevere or to protest; To stand for truth or to abandon it. Nora concluded that the only problem was the title, which should be 8 Choices That Will Change Anybody’s Life.
Cheryl Brodersen’s When a Woman Chooses to Forgive brought to Nora’s mind the questions “How do the consequences of forgiveness vary according to the gender of the forgiver?” and “How does the choice to forgive impact the character of men and women differently?” She also recognized her own stupid questions.
The full shelf of Larry Crabb’s Fully Alive was highlighted by a special sign. Here was indeed a curiosity of staggering import. On his first page of part 1, Crabb insists upon gender before humanity, upending the hierarchy of biblical Christianity from its inception. Nora was flabbergasted. She had always thought that “male” and “female” were adjectives qualifying a species noun like “human being” or “dog”—that the substantive governed the modifier. She had interpreted from Genesis that all human beings created in the image of God held a unique place in the great chain of being and had profound dignity, only “a little lower than the angels”—then that human beings were either male or female. But this was flatly denied by Crabb. “Femininity or masculinity is so irrevocably and irreversibly embedded in our being that no one can accurately say, ‘I am first a person and then male or female.’”1 Nora reasoned, “So I have more in common with Lassie because she’s female than with my husband who’s only another human being. Crabb has rejected the basis for social justice and human rights in the West in a single flippant claim. Perhaps Frederick Douglass should have argued for the abolition of slavery on the basis of his masculinity? He would not then have needed to support women’s rights to maintain his logical consistency. Crabb has made dehumanization a goal, not an evil.”
Nora thought how “feminine” refers us to our human nature, while “godly” refers us to our full humanity as his image bearers. We, both women and men, are to establish our identity in Christ. We ought to desire to conform to his character not to some relative definition of femininity. Crabb has produced no biblical definition of “femininity”; the word does not appear in the Bible. Nora stopped to take a few deep breaths, but continued to fall into her Galatians 3:28 mantra.
When she began to surface, she was surprised by a lonely copy of J. Lee Grady’s 10 Mentiras que la Iglesia Le Dice a las Mujeres, and a nod at honesty. English speakers in Poplar were not given the exposure of the lies. But the little book’s appearance on the shelf suggested to the very observant shopper that other cultures might be attempting to get to the truth.
In the H’s How to Get the Best Out of Your Man: The Power of a Woman’s Influence by Hammond smacked of manipulation and the objectification of both sexes.
Sixteen titles by Sharon Jaynes lined the shelves. All contained precise definitions of gender, the feminine role, and a tightly delineated sphere for the sisters.
Le Roux and Douglas’s Promises from God for Women was bound in elegant pink leather, inscribed with a floral design (Christian Art Gifts, 2003). The only things not stereotypically feminine were the Bible passages, which were equally applicable to men.
Several titles by Stormie Omartian had prominent place, but most copies were The Power of the Praying Wife and The Power of the Praying Woman. Nora thought, “If the power comes from God, wouldn’t the power of a praying husband and a praying man be similar? Or do females pray differently than other people?”
In the P’s two feet of shelf space was filled with Piper and Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, but not a single copy of Pierce and Groothuis’s superior Discovering Biblical Equality was to be seen.
In the R’s she came across Jerry Richards’s Day Break Verses for Women. Nora loved Matins.
