What Exactly Are We Afraid Of?

In my 20s, when I was part of a “soft complementarian” church that did not quite believe in women’s leadership—one that put gendered limitations, sometimes explicit and sometimes just quietly understood, on the roles women were expected to play and the gifts women were (or were not) expected to offer—I spent so much time unsure whether or how to voice my frustrations. I felt hesitant, not wanting to offend the well-intentioned men in my world and uncertain whether my concerns were worth raising. Maybe it was enough, I thought, that we held the really important things in common, and fully affirming women’s gifts and power was not one of those things.

Several years later, no longer a part of that church, I started speaking—by which I mostly mean writing—the truths of my experiences in patriarchal religious spaces. I have so many good memories, memories of warmth and community, and I have so many memories of things that were not okay. 

As I work to put my thoughts and feelings into words, I think often of Audre Lorde. I have a quote on a bulletin board by my desk: “Your silence will not protect you.” 

Lorde wrote these words as she grappled with her cancer diagnosis. “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality,” she reflects, “priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.” 

Death, the final silence. As much as dominant US culture wants us to go about our daily business in total denial that death will come for us, it is coming, and we do not know when. Our denial does not serve us. We do not know how long we have to say what needs to be said. 

Lorde goes on to say that with “every real word” she has spoken, she has “made contact” with other women who see the world in a similar way, or who long to build a new kind of world together. I love this. And I feel the challenge of it. 

Our silences really do not protect us; rather, they keep us from connecting with other people who might deeply resonate with the truths we would speak.

Only by speaking these truths do we find these others. And even, or perhaps especially, in the truths of our experiences that might make us feel so utterly alone, it often turns out that there are so many others. 

As I write, for example, about my memory of a male churchgoer explaining that giving people what they want isn’t always what’s best for them (in the context of debating women’s roles in leadership), I find others who were equally appalled by this comment but didn’t know that I was too. Or as I reflect on my memory of a male preacher pointing out his “smokin’ hot wife” and asking her to “stand up and turn around,” so many other women join together to affirm that this is not okay.

I wonder what it would have been like to talk more openly about these sorts of things at the time. I’m not sure if my friends and I could have found the words back then. But our churches needed to hear from us. The views of its leadership were skewed without hearing from us. The truths they told were incomplete. 

I want to offer grace to my younger self, so much grace. Grace for her frustrations. Grace for her silence. Grace for the choices she made. That was such a hard place for a young woman to be. 

And I will not pretend that there would have been no cost to truth-telling. I don’t know how it would have been received. But, as Audre Lorde asks, in light of our own mortality, what exactly are we afraid of? Our lives are short no matter what, sometimes much shorter than we may have hoped or imagined. The time to speak the truths that burn in the core of our hearts—the truths that could liberate us and others—is now. 

We might lose so much. But we also might gain so much more. We might gain amazing, liberating communities of people who share a vision for the kind of world we want to build.

The times I have spoken have felt liberating. And the times I have kept my truth inside feel like regret. My silence has not protected me. But my words, along with the words of so many others speaking similar things, call community into being. 

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