“Eve’s Revenge” A Review
Never judge a book by its cover. That is one of the first, and for some of us continual, lessons we human beings learn about knowing others. With a slightly confrontational title like Eve’s Revenge, we’d do well to apply this lesson to books too. In her debut book by that title, Lilian Calles Barger explores what, if any, meaning the body has for us and how, as committed Christians, we should live in light of that. But beware – this is no self-help book, nor is it an instruction manual. Barger has been on a journey and she invites us to journey alongside her and make our own assessment which is one of the things I really appreciate about this book.
As I read the early chapters of this book, I felt an increasing heaviness over the ways in which women try to measure up to false standards of beauty, value, and success fed to us by incessant media broadcasts and advertisements. We are all born into imperfect bodies with imperfect souls but there’s an endless range of products and services available to help us in our quest to measure up. Religious and non-religious women alike are lured to either renounce the body as having nothing to do with the true self; or use their resources to take control over their body – even alter it, to create a culturally acceptable identity for themselves. But those diverging paths do not lead to integrated lives. We need lives that have meaning where our embodied experience points us to greater realities beyond ourselves.
There is one who we can look to as we seek, in Barger’s words, “a spirituality that allows us to remain in the body as we reach for something greater and outside ourselves, along with a social vision that redeems the whole person in community and in place.” It is none other than Jesus of Nazareth who came to give us abundant life. In his ministry on earth, Jesus treated women inclusively as able-bodied participants in ushering in the
Kingdom of
God among us. In a culture where women’s bodies were often seen as unclean, he was not afraid to extend his healing touch, welcoming all who would come to him into God’s peace and freeing them from a life of exclusion. He teaches us by his example to live lives of congruence between body and spirit in the places where we find ourselves today. Reading this book has reinforced my love for Jesus and it has awakened in me a desire to see other women know him and live lives of wholeness in Christ-centred community.
For those of us within the church this book is a wake-up call to begin thinking about our bodies as God’s good creation, bearing His image. We must realize that the things we do to our individual bodies have a communal significance. As the body of Christ on earth, our uniqueness is not something that we should harbour to ourselves but like our Lord we are to work towards reconciling a lost world to the transforming love of God. If you want to know where a lot of searching women are, and you doubt that the church has anything to offer them, may I suggest you read this book?