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Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., feminist mentor: rightly did the maidens love him

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2003 by Carole R. Fontaine

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I recall his response to my first tentative insights into the role a goddess tradition might play in female spirituality (Why Protestant Women Need the Goddess) when I asked if he thought I was "all wet" on my reading of Woman Wisdom: could our crusty old sages really have included a female-identified tradition in their reading of the cosmic scene, given all that patriarchy? "Well, give them some credit for not being idiots!" he cried out. "Of course they could have cared about women enough to include an Israelite "response' to Ishtar!" He went on to say that he could certainly see the value of my argument about the special needs of Protestant women, but then said, "But what I don't understand is: if women need the Goddess, don't men need the Goddess, too? Why don't I feel this need?" Of all the things I was expecting him to say, this was not even on the chart--that he should so sympa thize with the arid theological horizon of my women students that he could take on their need as a human one and look for the signs of the same deprivation in his own soul! "Roland! I said, Protestants! You don't feel a need for the Goddess because you know where to find the Lady Chapel, and know what it means when you get there!" I told him. He blessed my struggles and told me to keep him posted: through long nights with the Hurrian Black Ishtar, or the Shekinah, I felt the light of my teacher shining on my researches. Incorporating some of this work later into his many-editioned TREE OF LIFE, he wrote the perfect assessment (to my mind) of the role of goddess traditions in the formation of the character of Woman Wisdom--"Genealogy is not identity"--thus honoring them and recognizing the genuine differences in the biblical material, as he pressed us all to greater integration in our thinking. Reading my most recent book in proof stage, where I argue for greater theological attention to the concept of a Mother's Torah, (that Torah-of-hesed of Proverbs 31), for once he didn't send me a list of typos and corrections (I knew his health must be flailing by that little omission--even now, though I am writing this article in "talking voice," I can hear him sigh over all these split infinitives!), but said, 'Well, you seem to have become a Second Ezra--finally, a woman lawgiver! Teach us what the Law needs to look like now." As a Torah-mother should, I replied to him in handmade book form, in color, for his 85th birthday (he had warned us all off handing him yet another festschrift!). "These are by your granddaughters," I wrote him: I had made digital color copies of the work of all my women scribes in a recent Exodus class, and bound them up for him as "A Book of Exodus." All the work of my maidens was there for him to see--acknowledging that in a real way, this too was part of his legacy.

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Roland always used to remark when he was applauded for his teaching that "It's easy to get people to think you are a wonderful teacher. The trick is to get really great students!" This was typical modesty of a sort not that common in our guild. I submit here that it's not quite so simple as the monk would have us believe: great students are possible only in the context of fine teachers! Roland Murphy was such a one.

Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., feminist mentor: rightly did the maidens love him

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2003 by Carole R. Fontaine

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