Becoming the Subject of our Lives

Sheri Hostetler

“For Just Such a Time: Living Out the Call”

Brethren Mennonite Council/Supportive Communities Network Conference

San Francisco, California

July 2007

Esther was supposed to be one of the silent ones of history. As a woman in a patriarchal society, an oft -despised minority – Jew – in a majority culture, and an orphan in a culture where kinship defines you, she had three strikes against her. She was destined to remain nameless, faceless, powerless. She was never supposed to hold the destiny of her people in her hands.

But here she is, oddly, in the king’s palace. She is in fact, more oddly still, the queen. She alone, among all the Jews, has the power to save her people. Yet it comes with great risk. For even the queen could be killed simply for appearing, unsummoned, before the king. Simply for standing up and walking into the chambers of power, much less speaking and making a request. But this is what she must choose, this is what she must risk, if she is to save her people.

Not much in Queen Esther’s life up to this point equipped her for making such a choice. She was socialized from a young age to be obedient, passive, compliant – the ideal woman. Indeed, in the book of Esther – the book named for her -- we are first introduced to her only by way of a man, Mordecai – his lineage is recounted, and then we are told that he adopted his cousin, Esther, after she is orphaned. The next thing we know, another man, King Ahasuerus, is searching for a new wife – having banished the old, rebellious one. Esther, who is very beautiful, is taken into the king’s palace and placed under the custody of another man, the harem master. Notice the verb tense here. Esther does not go into the king’s palace; she is taken there. She is passed from the custody of one man to another, since she cannot possibly belong to herself.

And she can’t even belong to her people. She does not reveal her Jewish identity once in the king’s palace. She passes as Persian. She does this, because, we are told, Mordecai told her to and (I quote) “Esther obeyed Mordecai just as when she was brought up by him” (Esther 2: 20). Well-trained, she also makes no demands of the harem master after she is taken under his wing. When offered anything before going to see the king, she makes no request -- other than what the harem master wants to give her. Even when she has some power – she is, after all in the king’s palace – she doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. Schooled in powerlessness, she can’t seem to recognize the power she does have.

In short, Esther is the object of other’s people’s lives, not the subject of her own. A subject acts. The object is the thing acted upon. And this is Esther. Never the subject, the one doing, initiating, acting. Always the object, the one acted upon. She is the one commanded, spoken to, taken, summoned – or not. She is so used to doing this, she can’t even recognize that she, also, can command, summon, speak.

How does this happen to us? How do we become objects instead of subjects? How do we –who are made in the image of God, made in the image of the one who creates, who speaks and calls a world into being – how do we lose our agency, our ability to act in the world, our subjecthood?

For years in the city of Nashville and elsewhere in the South, African Americans patronized the department stores that would sell them a coffeemaker but not allow them to drink a cup of coffee at the store’s lunch counter. For years, gay and lesbian Mennonites and Church of the Brethren believed that silence and secrecy, anonymity and hiddenness were their only choices. And you don’t have to be African American, or gay or lesbian, or Jewish or an orphan to experience objecthood, do you? We can experience objecthood – that loss of our agency, that loss of our ability to act – in a workplace or a family or a church if being true to ourselves and our deepest beliefs is threatening to others, if speaking up and acting out carries risk.

Why? Why do we allow ourselves to be the objects of people’s fear, people’s ignorance, people’s projections? Why do we allow others to define for us where we can sit down, what we can speak, who we can be? How do we – who are made in the image of God, made only a “little lower than the angels” as the psalmist says – how do we become objects instead of subjects?

We do not willingly forfeit our agency, our subjecthood. Only fear can so suppress that divine part of our nature. Only fear can cause us to renounce – or forget -- who we are. Only fear can make us into an object. Fear of losing our life. Fear of being physically hurt. Fear of losing our job. Fear of losing our funding. Fear of losing our social status. Fear of losing our tribe. Fear that if we speak up, stand out, stand tall, we will be shamed. Fear that someone will get angry at us.

These fears are real. Who wants to be beaten? Who wants to lose their job? Who wants to be seen as different, as the only one? The subject, after all, is the one who acts, and actions provoke reactions. It’s the law of physics: For each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Who wants to deal with the reaction? It’s so much easier not act. To be safe, to be comfortable. And this is not a bad choice, my friends. It is not wrong to want safety, want comfort. Sometimes, especially if we have been threatened for a long time, this is what we need. And sometimes, if others (and we ourselves) have seen us as an object for so long, we may not even realize we have a choice between acting or not acting, between being a subject or being an object.

But, there comes a time when we need to make a choice. There comes a time when we are called to become the subject and risk reaction. Esther’s time is up. That choice is now upon her. And she resists making it for as long as she can. It’s almost comical. When she first learns that Mordecai is weeping and wailing and wearing sackcloth and ashes, she sends clothing for him to wear. Why? So he could look more presentable as his people are annihilated? She doesn’t even ask why Mordecai might be in such public pain. Mordecai responds by sending her the written decree that spells out in black and white that her people are about to be destroyed. He pleads with Esther to go before the king. Esther tells him, “Mordecai, everyone knows that any one can be put to death for entering the king’s presence without being summoned. I can’t do it. I don’t have the kind of power you think I do as queen.”

Don’t you sympathize with Esther? Don’t you identify with her? She has to choose to act or not, but she stalls for as long as she can. She pretends she doesn’t notice something is wrong; she pleads powerlessness. She’s the queen, for God’s sake, but she still sees herself as a powerless woman with three strikes against her. An orphan. A woman. A Jew.

Finally, Mordecai says something that gets through to Esther. “If you keep silence at such a time as this, you and your father’s family may perish anyway. Who knows?  Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” 

Mordecai says this to her, and something happens. Something comes alive in her. Perhaps she realizes that she is the queen. It is she who wears the purple robes of royalty. Perhaps she remembers that she is, also, a Jewish woman, made in the image of the God of creation, who speaks and calls a world into being. Perhaps she remembers who she is. Because Esther is not the same after this. She becomes a confident, assertive, wily woman, who takes charge. And the first thing she does is draw deeply upon her community and her community’s spiritual resources. She outs herself as a Jew, prays and fasts for three days, and asks the entire Jewish community to do so with her. And then, she steps unsummoned into the king’s court. She may die, but at least the choice has been hers. She has become the subject of her life.

An organizer named James Lawson, who had studied with Gandhi’s disciples in India, came to Nashville in 1959. He told the young black college students there that they didn’t have to quietly accept their status as second- class citizens. They could sit at any lunch counter they wanted. But they needed to draw deeply upon each other, and upon the spiritual resources available to them. For weeks, they prayed and sang and learned how to sit down together at a lunch counter and how to help each other when the reaction came. James Lawson reminded the black community of Nashville of their royal dignity, and they made their choice. They became the subject of their lives.

In the mid-1970s, several gay men and their partners – men like Martin Rock, Jim Lichti, Ed Driskill – began breaking silence. Yes, there were gay Mennonites and Church of the Brethren. And they wanted others to know this. So they drew deeply upon each other, and the spiritual resources available to them, and they began sending out a newsletter and passing out brochures with trembling hands at Mennonite conferences, and making themselves available for discussion with church leaders. Jim told me: “I was scared. Not many people were willing to be that visible back then.” But they had found their royal dignity, and they made their choice. They became the subject of their lives.

Esther was not killed, and neither were her people. And her people remember her to this day as the savior of her people, and her story is told every year at Purim. The college students of Nashville were beaten and jailed. But their beatings awakened the conscience of a city and a nation. Six months after starting their campaign, the lunch counters of Nashville were integrated, and the victory gave momentum to a civil rights movement that changed the country. Martin and Jim and Ed’s talks and newsletters became the Brethren Mennonite Council for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Interests, and we are here because of these early pioneers. Thirty years later, we are not only breaking silence, we are starting to define the conversation.

There is much to fear, my friends. The fear is real, and the consequences of action are also real. But this fear makes us an object, and this is not who we are. We become who are when we fulfill the promise of being made in the image of a God who speaks and calls a world into being. We become who we are when we remember our royal dignity. We become who we are when we become the subjects of our life. Who knows but that we – like Esther, like the black college students of Nashville, like Martin and Jim and Ed – that we, too, have been called into our royal dignity, for just such a time as this? Amen.