Roger Ray, pastor
May 8, 2011
Proverbs 6:20-22 20
My child, keep your father's commandment, and do not forsake your mother's teaching. 21 Bind them upon your heart always; tie them around your neck. 22 When you walk, they will lead you; when you lie down, they will watch over you; and when you awake, they will talk with you.
A part of most weekday mornings for me is a few minutes of watching Morning Joe, a news commentary program co-hosted by former Republican congressman, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. They are two intelligent people who have different perspectives on the news and they often interview some of the most influential people in the world.
The people on the set are, of course, all multi-millionaires and they regularly shamelessly hawk their own books. Mika produced her first auto-biography last year and, this past week, has already released another auto-biographical book.... It seems to me that the talking heads on TV news often have a terribly inflated view of their own importance but this second book may have at least a footnote of real value because it is, after all, about knowing your own worth.
Joe and Mika sit side by side every Monday through Friday morning with Mika doing most of the heavy lifting of the more complicated conversations about the news but she discovered that MSNBC was paying Joe Scarborough seventeen times as much as they were paying her. Not twice as much. Not ten times as much..... seventeen times as much.
I may not have the proper level of concern about Mika's plight since I generally believe that the people who sit in front of TV cameras are all over paid but her situation symbolizes the sorry state of affairs which still exists in the inequity between women and men in the workplace.
Huge strides have been made. A lot of barriers have been dropped and in any particular case you may be able to find a plausible reason why a certain female candidate did not get more votes than their male rival, or why a university hired four male deans in a row even though there were qualified women applying for each position but still, let me ask you to pull back the lens and look at the world.
Right now, in the 21st century, men own 99% of the privately owned property in the world. Women perform 66%, two thirds, of the world's work. Women produce 50% of the world's food but they are paid 10% of the world's income and own 1% of the property now tell me how that can be fair in 2011?
I want to share a little video clip with you from a recent Oprah program about an African woman named Tererai:
http://www.oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trent-Returns-to-Zimbabwe-to-Share-Her-Story-Video
Tererai's story is told more completely in the book which had caught Oprah's attention. The title is "Half the Sky," saying that though women own only 1% of the property in the world, they still own half of the sky.
The book tells the story of women who have risen from both poverty and obscurity in Africa to become fully actualized human beings.
I don't want to take anything away from Tererai who really is a phenomenal human being but this video clip ends with Tererai saying, "I did it. I did it." And when she has been allowed to more fully tell her story, she gives a lot of credit to other people in her life.
Yes, she was largely self taught in her early life. Her father not only wouldn't let her go to school and he married her off to a horrible man when she was only 11 years old. She bore three children to that man while still herding cattle in her African village but taking correspondence classes.
On Oprah, you hear that her husband beat her because she was trying to learn and gain an education but when Heifer Project gave her a scholarship to come to the United States, he was more than willing to come with her. They lived in a raggedy trailer in Stillwater, OK while Tererai went to Oklahoma State University.
A local church helped the family with food. Her husband did not work but often sent what little money she had back to his family in Africa to present himself as being successful. But, again, what you don't see on TV or in the book, is that her husband was HIV positive and very lazy. Even in the US, he regularly beat Tererai and deeply resented her success.
She approached my friend, Dr. Jeanmarie Verchot, and asked her for a job washing dishes in her research lab.
Jeanmarie soon discovered that Tererai actually had a keen grasp of lab procedures and she took her under her wing and gave her an ever expanding role in the lab. Tererai "did it" but it was Jeanmarie who helped her to believe that she could report her husband to the police, even though her African upbringing had taught her never to stand up to a man.
Eventually, because of his violence and Jeanmarie's persistence, her husband was deported and he returned to Africa where he did not long survive without Tererai's support. Tererai was carrying a load of 21 hours, caring for 3 children and working in the university laboratory. Her advisor did not want to consider all of the correspondence work she had done in Africa and tried to make her stay in school at OSU for an extra year but Jeanmarie went to the dean and did a degree audit, proving that she had more than enough credits to graduate. Again, Tererai would never have stood up to a man in authority; she needed another woman in her life to help her to find her path to becoming the person she longed to be.
Jeanmarie helped to get her into a masters program, and then on to earn her PhD in agriculture and she is now the assistant director of Heifer Project international. I can only tell you about Jeanmarie's role in Tererai's success because Jeanmarie is not here today. She went back to Oklahoma yesterday to spend Mother's Day with her son.
But the fact that she has refused my requests to tell Tererai's story here in one of our classes or to allow me to tell you this story in her presence forms a large part of what I want to say on this Mother's Day.
I don't do Mother's Day sermons for a whole host of reasons not the least of which is that the traditional greeting card holiday fundamentally diminishes the value of women as whole human beings and exaggerates the singular fact that women bear children. A great deal of what is extolled in Mother's Day greeting cards is the selflessness of women, and while compassion and generosity are values we certainly hold dear around here, we do not value self-subjugation.
One of the points Mika Brzezinski makes is that while men are self-promoting, women often tend to be self-deprecating. Women are constantly saying, "I'm sorry," when men are pointing out what they have accomplished. Men argue their value to their corporation or their university and women are constantly apologizing. I don't get invited out to the "girls night" conversations but as they have been reported by many professional women, they often use their confidential friendship time to tell their friends where and how they are failing, what they are afraid of and how unhappy they are with their bodies, their home life or their jobs.
Women do 60% of the work and get 10% of the pay in the world because they spend way too much time waiting for men to play fair. Look at Tererai's story:
She was encouraged to dream and work hard for success by her mother. It was a female Heifer Project director who got her a scholarship to come to OSU and start a real education. It was a female professor and employer who helped to liberate her from abuse and stood up for her in a male dominated university culture to get her first degree.
I'm not trying to say all men are bad, but you can't avoid that fact that Tererai's father held her back, her husband beat her and held her back, her male advisor tried to keep her from graduating..... if it were not for the women in her life who championed her, mentored her, empowered her, Tererai wouldn't be sitting on Oprah's couch saying, "I did it, I did it."
The director of the bar association here in Springfield, Crista Hogan, is a friend of mine who has had to deal with some really crazy hard challenges in life not the least of which has been the suicide of her first husband and the death of her second husband to cancer. She now finds herself having to manage her own children and her second husband's children as well as a bunch of lawyers who act like babies and a good deal of rental property. When I told her what I wanted to talk about today she wrote this to me:
"All women are mothers.... I always had my mother, and several assorted mothers of my chosing. And I serve that role for dozens of young people. And my kids have me, and they all have mother substitutes. So I don't think fertility is terribly relevant.
... but if someone could give me a message it would be something along the lines of "forgive yourself ..... You love you children, they love you. The mistakes are inevitable, so forget your shortcomings and move on."
I can tell you that I always thought Mothers' Day was bogus, and I had a personal opinion that it was designed to celebrate conventional mothers and not the ones that function like me.
I applaud the stay at home moms who cooked and cleaned and froze their buns off watching their kids play soccer or football, and helped with homework and clipped coupons' and sewed Halloween costumes.
But I also applaud the mothers who get up and go to work to show both their sons and their daughters that half of the sky belongs to women and that the sky is the limit for where their dreams can take them.
And I applaud women who stop apologizing and focusing on what they can't do and what they are afraid of and who start telling one another how powerful, how intelligent, how creative and capable they are.
And tell one another that you are beautiful. It makes me crazy to know that more women die in this country from anorexia than from breast cancer because women are so insecure about their appearance that they are starving themselves to death. It makes me crazy that we spend more on breast implants than we spend on Alzheimer's research. Stop it. You are beautiful. You don't need to look younger, or thinner.... You don't need to surgically altar your face or your figure unless you want to do it for you and you alone. It is your body and should stop worrying about what men think or what men like.
Ladies, before you go home today, you tell one of your daughters, or one of the women for whom you are a mother or a sister.... "you look beautiful." And try to find a way to say to another woman, "You sure are smart.... You are so talented.... You are amazing."
I'm not encouraging gender competition. I'm not saying that this is a battle between men and women but I am saying that if women ever want to own more than 1% of the property in the world, they shouldn't wait for a man to hold open the door to prosperity.
