Many girls are socialized to expect a man to ride up on a white horse and rescue them. This is the message of far too many fairy tales and animated (and rom-com) movies. Even if not literally swept off their feet, in many cultures, women are taught to see their worth and value in relationship to a man – their father or a husband.
Of course, many women rebel against these messages from society. They decide: We are not waiting for some man, some anyone, to come in and save us.
But let’s be honest, life can be hard. It throws curveballs when we least expect and I, for one, have wished that someone – a fairy godmother? – someone could wave a wand and poof … make it all better. This is the stuff of fairytales.
It doesn’t work that way.
No one is coming to save us.
Tananarive Due and I said this over and over again in our webseries, “Octavia Tried to Tell Us: a Parable for Today’s Pandemic.” During the quarantine days of COVID, we felt that acutely. A sense of helplessness. Seeing no clear way to better.
How we get to better is a very old question. What heals? What makes use whole? What saves us?
Protestant Christianity is built around the idea that Jesus does this for us. That “faith alone” will save us. When Martin Luther pushed this idea in the 1500s, he was speaking in contradistinction to a notion that people could work, pay (as in tithe), or pray their way into Jesus saving them.
A constructive theologian, I push my students to ask: What are we being saved from? What are we being saved to? How do we get there? I remind them that the root word of salvation is “salve” or a healing balm. Salvation is not just an escape from the things we don’t like. Salvation connotes healing, wellness, wholeness …
In the “Octavia” series, we often talked about how we had to save ourselves. That we – this collective we – we our friends, we our communities, we our families, we our culture – we could not wait or depend on someone else to come in and rescue us. Octavia Butler’s protagonist Lauren felt this acutely.
Rather we would get to “better,” and to wellness and wholeness in and through community. We had to save each other. We had to look out for each other, care for each other, show grace to each other, try not to hurt each other, imagine and strive for and build something better than we’ve got. We could not simply place our unhappy disempowered selves in the place of those with power. No, we had to construct a new system, a new world, a new ethos by which we could thrive. We have to work together to creatively transform what we’ve got into something novel.
As a theist, I believe that God is involved in this process. I believe that God grounds, inspires, vivifies, calls, guides and even surprises us. I have good friends who have deep confidence in the human spirit, and they find this boundless potential there. They are even more convinced than many of “us religious people” that we must save each other.
I appreciate many contemporary social movements for refusing to look to a sole charismatic individual for the path to salvation. I like the way that they move leadership among a community of people and how they empower local communities to do what works best in their context even while there is a shared sense of liberation over time and space. They well understand that one person won’t save us and that “salvation” may look different in different places. They understand that we have to work together: some resting, some working, some funding, some speaking, some digging into the earth, some shooting for the stars.
Most of today’s society looks to a leader – with praise and critique for who and how that leader can help a wide community. And I know that leadership matters. But I hope we don’t rely on that leader, that person, that one thinker to …get us to better. Even when our soul craves that magic wand to be waves. I hope we think about (and vote for) what is happening in our contexts too. I hope we think about the kids in our local school;, the basic needs for health, housing and care of the people in our neighborhood; the freedom that we want to believe, travel and exist safely and extend that to people who are radically different from us.
Tananarive and I looked towards Parable of the Sower for ideas about how to do this – as have many people before and after us. Some people look to their sacred texts. Some people study and learn from history examining what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Some people reach deep within their imaginations.
However we get there, I hope we commit to working with whoever your “we” are to get to the place of wellness, wholeness, “better” that so many of us crave.
Dr. Monica
