The Courage to be a Self and a Part by Xochitl Alvizo

I just submitted to the editor the final draft of a chapter I’ve been working on for about two years (no joke). Sometimes when I really care about a subject, it can take me a long time to process, reflect, and write on the subject (I shared a bit about this project on FAR early this year)—but this one might have taken the cake in terms of how slow a process it ended up being. Still, it is now submitted and in the hands of the publishing company, Oxford University Press, for the next step in the process.

This project came about because Meg Stapleton Smith, while she was still a doctoral student working on her Ph.D. and searching the Mary Daly Papers at the archives of Smith College, came across a typed manuscript of a never completed work of Mary Daly’s. The unfinished manuscript, with an introduction and four chapters long, was titled “Catholicism: End or Beginning.” Meg, after discovering the manuscript, took on the task of organizing a group of feminist scholars to read the manuscript and write a chapter in response to be published as an edited collection along with the previously unpublished manuscript. The collection should be coming soon, but here I wanted to share a bit more about my chapter and an overview of what I see as its significance.

Daly wrote and worked on this manuscript between 1968 and 1973—between the publication of her books The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father. In fact, Christopher K. Rodkey, author of the Mary Daly chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, reports that this unpublished manuscript was the “aborted book project” out of which Beyond God the Father was born (I definitely see how that is the case).[1]

In her treatment of whether Christianity and Catholicism are at their end or beginning, Daly provides three two-fold interventions for its ailments. Daly calls for a two-fold balance between:

1. the Catholic substance [i.e. the “sacraments, creeds, liturgical ceremonies, and dogmas”] and the Protestant principle [i.e. “an attitude which is self-critical and which recognizes the relativity of all objectifications of faith”], which together allow one to preserve and live into an authentic faith;
2. the two-fold consciousness raising and depth awareness of the mystery of being [as that which is behind all existence and about which it is important to wonder and contemplate], which allows one to see myth and symbols as myth and symbols, and thus liberates them to their full power of meaning;
3. and, the two-fold connection with the depth of the mystery of being within oneself as a self and as a part which involves both individualization and participation.

Up until the moment of her writing this manuscript, while she remained within a Christian context and as a Christian-identified person, Daly was calling the church and the faithful to practice these two-fold interventions as a way to regenerate the church, to enliven its symbols and myths, and to open up the faith to radically new possibilities for transcendence, justice, and the transformation of lives.

At the heart of what Daly does, and in response to the problematic theologies she identifies that rigidifies the church and infantilizes the people of faith by stripping them of their own sense of direct connection with the divine, with the mystery of being, Daly makes a case for God as the “ground of being,” as that which is behind all that exists and without which nothing can exist. Contrary to the distortions of faith she identified as plaguing the church, her vision of the divine is fundamentally not static and calls people to active and courageous participation in the mystery and ground of being.

The theological intervention she was making was existential because it offered a philosophical understanding of oneself as finite though also intimately connected to the infinite. Such an existential posture entails responsibility for one’s own part in the world and the community’s ongoing historical reality. All of which, Daly proposed, takes courage. Courage was the heart of her theology.

Ultimately, Daly transferred her reflection on courage into her next book and toward her philosophy of women’s liberation, effectively writing herself to the inevitable conclusion that church/Christianity does not facilitate such a posture toward living. But, of course, not everyone concludes as she did. Yet, her challenge remains before us, and I leave you with her words:

If we grasp that the courage to be is the key to the power and ground of being, we are forced to take history seriously and to be creative participators in it. The idea of existential courage gives a philosophical basis for historical consciousness and for hope, for it implies the participation of finite being in the power of being, a power that is ever fresh and active and that always makes new demands for the fulfillment of meaning. (unpublished manuscript, chapter 2, page 16).

What are the demands you are facing today demanding your courageous participation, grounded in our connection with the power and mystery of being?

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[1] I here acknowledge that Mary Daly’s own work has been used to buttress transphobia and transmisogyny and caused great harm to trans persons and the larger queer community. I do not contest this fact, even while I also draw from the constructive and liberative aspects of her work. There are ways in which Daly’s own writing and logic can be used to correct the faults within her work; I aim to do this in a future piece.