Happy Mother’s Day! (5/5/12 – 5/12/12)

Growing up in a Baptist church there is a surprisingly small amount of things I remember from the sermons. One of things I remember vividly was the Mother’s and Father’s day sermons. Usually picking one example from the Old or New Testament, the pastor would wax eloquent on the exemplar nature of this person’s character and tell the men to be like this character. However with women it would always (well, most always) be the same. The pastor would have us turn to Proverbs 31 and he would extol the virtues of a mother’s daily routine in child rearing, household management, and her beauty as a child of God. However, the sense that one got was that according to these messages, the women’s jobs were much harder if not impossible (then the men’s). To me it always felt like the women hearing these messages thought this was impossible, like the commandment in both testaments to “be holy as God is holy.” How is that possible? 

So in reading and researching for Mother’s day in Leona’s and Jeanette’s bibles, I discovered a hidden (and not-so-hidden) strength and a gold mine of both information and wisdom - even shocking/surprising me who studied the Old Testament in grad school.

Shall we sit on the shoulders of these giants (of our faith) and see farther than them?

The book of Proverbs is called “Wisdom Literature”, and in this type of literature wisdom is not the same as knowledge, for knowledge can be acquired with hard work but wisdom is elusive and often eludes the smartest of people. In India I compared wisdom with trying to catch a greased pig (the humor did not translate since pigs are seen as “unclean” animals. Why then would you want to catch one?). Wisdom can be difficult to define, but could here be seen as “skillfully living” since the word for “wisdom” in Hebrew is the same work for skill. The people who build the temple where called by the same word, they were skillful/wise. Overall, the goal for wisdom literature is character formation, and in this sense, my grandparents knew this and were wise. They caught the pig!

In seminary I learned that the book of Proverbs can be organized accordingly:

• Proverbs 1:1-9 – Introduction (maybe the most important part of the book)

• Proverbs 1-9 – “My Son” poems

• Proverbs 10-31 – various collections of proverbs that loosely relate but relate none-the-less

Don’t let this simple outline bore you! Notice that built into this structure is gender – male! The 10 “my son” poems offer a metaphor for the reader where a “father” is guiding his “son” to find wisdom. Throughout the story the son encounters two women – Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly. The father encourages the son to follow Lady Wisdom and to avoid Dame Folly. What I never heard in church, but learned in seminary was that Proverbs begins and ends with a woman. Lady Wisdom is the bookends to the entire book of Proverbs. She is personified abstractly in chapters 1-9, and concretely in chapters 30-31. The book begins and ends with a woman!!!!! Leona hinted at this went she wrote a similar structure at the beginning of the book in her bible:

• 1-9 wisdom to sons

• 10-29 occasional advice of council

• 30-31 council for women

Stop and think about this. THE book in the bible on wisdom begins and ends with wise women! It is not a wise man; wisdom is not personified as a truthful husband, or a strong husband, but a woman. Notice that in Leona’s structure there is an inherent gender separation in it. For her Proverbs 1-9 was council to sons, and 30-31 was council to women. In her lifetime this method of character development was done with the male and females separately. This is not a bad thing, but a different thing.

I wonder if Grandma Karloski was thinking highly of femininity when she underlined the entirety of 31:10:12 and 25-28:

"Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life... Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she smiles at the future. She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and bless her; her husband also, and he praises her, saying: “Many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all.”

Both grandma's bridged the context of scripture and specifically Proverbs 31 into their own lifetime. The following are examples from Leona's bible::

• Provide for household: v. 13, 15, 17, 27

• Good shopper, thrifty: v. 16-18

• Practice Personal Holiness – 26 – 26. 27 (strength, honor, kindness, wisdom, (?), love

• Fears the Lord personally – honors the lord in all that she does (v. 30 – contrast)

• Favor and beauty that the world cannot give (I Pet. 3:4) [An interesting comparison with 1:30]

• Challenge to men – v. 31 (to help her, not discourage her, and not stand in her way) 

Leona celebrated the strength of women by singling out a list of words associated with them in chapter 31. These words are: trust (v. 11), willingly (v. 13), strength (17, 20, 25), honor (25), rejoice (25). Most importantly, and probably the best things I've read in her bible is the phrase right after the last verse. Proverbs 31:31 reads:

"Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates." 

Leona added:

"Men don't stand in her way."