Glendale Racquet Club, Colorado Springs, CO, Saturday, May 19, 2012
Jasmine bends forward and touches the floor between her straightened legs, wondering how she might reply. The four friends have Court 1 reserved most Saturdays for their own doubles game. On Thursday evenings, Glendale reserves half of its courts for Mixed Doubles Night, where Jasmine has been Davie’s standard partner. For men’s doubles, he partners with BD.
“BD said I
should ask you,” Gabbie continues. “Do you
know what’s up with him?”
“You? And Davie?” Gabbie picks up a ball, bounces it, and shakes her head. “And the church?”
“--is freaked out.
He’s the youth pastor. He’s not
supposed to do stuff like that.”
Gabbie turns to face Mindy and scrunches her eyes. For real? Mindy nods. Gabbie shifts to stretch her right leg and turns to Jasmine. “How do you feel about that?”
“I was steaming mad,” Jasmine replies, adding that she was judged without a hearing, then sent off. “What Bible do they read?” She shakes her head, perplexed. In a voice so quiet her friends can barely hear it, Jasmine mumbles her own answer. “Not the one I read.” But now, she is resolved. She lifts her head up. “The real punishment is not seeing my partner, my friend, and--” Jasmine sighs, “--the one I can’t quit thinking about.”
Kristin quietly pulls out a can of balls, bounces one, then bounces it to Jasmine with a smile. “Let’s play.”
Since their opening conversation distracted Jasmine, Gabbie and Kristin take decisive wins. As the friends walk into The Alley, Glendale’s sports bar, for lunch, they see four large screen TVs showing Tiger Woods making a putt on The Alley’s ESPN station. “We’ve got to hear about that kiss,” Gabbie teases, while pulling out her seat to sit down. “Order a real drink on me.” She smiles and winks at Jasmine. “But get your own lunch.”
Jasmine points to the daiquiri special on the table’s triangular drink menu. “Daiquiris for us all!” Kristin lifts her right hand with cupped fingers, like she’s already holding the drink, and raises it to a toast. “Is this your first?” Jasmine usually orders pop, while the others order beer or wine or something more fun. Jasmine smiles. “No, not quite.”
Leaning over the table so she can whisper, Jasmine tells her friends about the kiss, its magic, her nightly recollections of it, and confides her longing for love-making with Davie.
“So you do fantasize sex with him?” Mindy teases. Jasmine blushes. Time to shift the topic. “I’m trying to scheme a way to reconnect with him. I can’t go to Men’s Night. I’ve been blackballed from church. Where else can I find him?”
“You can’t just text him?” Kristin asks.
“What would I text?”
As hard as it’s been to have been cast out of church and to go three months without seeing Davie, Jasmine shares she’s been learning more than ever before: about herself, Tim, her marriage, why it worked when they got married and why it’s not working now, and also about women and what the church says the Bible says about them that the Bible doesn’t say.
Gabbie and Kristin stare at their friend. “That’s a lot.” Gabbie takes a long sip of her daiquiri. “Why did your marriage work when you got married, but doesn’t now?”
“Tim was the rock I needed then, and now I’m more like a ball rolling down the hill, rolling further away from that rock.”
“I get that, Jazzie.” Kristin smiles. “But I’m curious. What have you learned the church says the Bible says about women that the Bible doesn’t say?” Kristin had been raised in a conservative, Christian home, and in middle school, she refused to keep homeschooling. Then in high school, she rebelled against the church altogether, a choice she and her parents still argue over.
Jasmine moves forward in her seat and rests her arms, crossed, on the table. “I started at the Beginning, and I can’t even get past those first three chapters of Genesis. The writer – or writers – of these chapters were so forward-thinking, but the church has turned the story upside down, especially when they demonize Eve, and then leave out how she was cursed, and they leave out their responsibility to repair that curse. Right there, in that story we think we’ve all read, Eve was cursed to be ‘ruled over’ by her man. You won’t hear pastors admit that.”
Kristin chuckles. Jasmine nods and says she’s just discovered something new, a tantalizing play on words the translators missed. “You know that pesky little verse that calls the woman the man’s ‘helper’?”
“Yeah, like we’re second-class,” Kristin groans, “here to ‘help’ the gender that really matters.”
“I think it’s an error of translation,” Jasmine whispers. “For centuries, the translators haven’t known what to do with the actual Hebrew word, ezer.”
“How do you think it should be translated?”
“Let’s start with Eve. In Hebrew, Eve, or Havah, means ‘life-giver.’”
“She gives birth, so she gives life,” Mindy replies.
“It fits, right?” Jasmine takes another sip of her daiquiri. “And ezer means ‘life-saver.’” Jasmine tells her friends ezer is used 21 times in the Hebrew Bible, and in every instance other than its application to the creation of woman, ezer suggests warrior-like power and strength. It’s usually applied to God Himself as an ezer to the people of Israel or to David or to Moses. Moses even named his second son Eliezer and gave this reason: “The God of my father was my ezer and delivered me from the sword of Pharoah.”
“Powerful.” Kristin is impressed with her friend.
“In Psalms
33, 70, and 115, King David often called the Lord his ‘ezer and shield’
or ‘ezer and deliverer,’” Jasmine continues. She pulls out her phone, opens her Bible app,
and reads out of Deuteronomy 33, where God “rides the heavens to your ezer, or
salvation,” and the Lord “saves” from the root ezer, like a “shield” and
a “sword” with enemies “cowering,” while He “tramples their high places.”
“That’s more than a mere ‘helper,’” Mindy says, shaking her head.
“No doubt. From these other uses, it seems as if ezer is more like a life-saver, and a play on words for Eve as ‘life-giver.’”
“Wow, that changes everything.” Kristin shakes her head in disbelief. “Our identity as women takes on a whole new perspective."
“I don’t feel like a life-saver, though,” Mindy confesses. “I think I’m looking for a man to be my life-saver.”
“That’s also interesting, Mindy.” Jasmine takes a breath. “Eve was given three curses. We all know the first: child-bearing. The third is that chilling one that Eve’s man would ‘rule over’ her. But the second one is the most interesting to me: that she will ‘long for’ or ‘desire’ her man. Maybe what you’ve just said is part of it. Maybe she longs for him to be a life-saver to her.”
Gabbie’s eyes widen. She slowly nods. “So it works both ways? Both men and women can long for one another to be each other’s life savers?” Gabbie ruffles through her hair, searching her memory. “I think I remember learning that the Hindus say that Shakti, the feminine principle, represents the life force.”
Jasmine raises her head. Life-force?
“Shiva, the masculine principle,” Gabbie continues, “is said to become a corpse without Shakti, his life-force.”
"Shiva is the masculine, active principle, the one who acts in the world," Gabbie tells her friends. "Shakti, the feminine, represents the life force, enabling the masculine to act. Both are within us. Our inner masculine relies upon the life force of the feminine within each of us. Our inner masculine, the one who acts upon the world, is the initiator, but the feminine gives the masculine the energy and the impulse to initiate."
The merger of Shiva and Shakti, as Gabbie understands the teaching, point to something deep: "our inner feminine and our inner masculine need to harmonize themselves with each other." The friends, silent, keep their eyes on Gabbie, who takes a drink and continues. “Unless both our inner masculine and our inner feminine are alive and well, we’re stuck.”
“So what you’re saying,” Mindy muses, “is that Eve might also represent our inner feminine, our own life-force, and that Adam might represent our own inner masculine, our internal initiator?”
“If so,” Kristin replies, “any blame of women for whatever people think Eve may have done, even if she did exist, must be misguided.”
“Very true, Kristin,” Gabbie nods. “Yes, Mindy, that is what I wonder. Carl Jung says the same thing, using his own words of ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ for the inner feminine and inner masculine. They need to merge within us. We need to let our inner feminine be a life-saver to our inner masculine, so it can initiate.”
Jasmine takes a long slow sip of her daiquiri. Is her head spinning from the daiquiri or from what Gabbie is suggesting? No, her mind is too riveted. “Life-giver,” “Life-saver,” “Life Force” as the “inner feminine”? For both men and women?
These notions
are like nothing Jasmine has been raised to believe, yet they suggest truth
more genuine than anything she’s been taught.
She feels her spine tingle with electricity.
