c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) My wife is away for 12 days, helping her father move to a retirement center.

Our house feels emptier. Not totally empty, for I have plenty to do. But not as full. Not as much balance.

It has to do with purpose, I think, rather than company. As I step through domestic tasks, I sense that I am getting through the day, not doing these things for someone else. They are tasks, not an expression of love.

The word “lonely” doesn’t come to mind, because I think life is a lonely affair much of the time anyway. Like many who have moved frequently, I have had to accept a persistent shallowness of connection. It is the difference, I suppose, between colleague and friend, between being recognized and being known, between being greeted briefly and being treasured.

Home, by contrast, is a place where someone knows me deeply. Having a partner answers the question: Does my life matter?

This, I believe, is the underlying context for our culture’s ongoing wars over gender and sexuality. Yes, an issue is power _ who gets to run things. Yes, an issue is justice _ the unfairness of denying access and advancement on the basis of gender or sexuality. Yes, an issue is getting beyond the historic role of women as scapegoats, a role shared these days by homosexuals. But the context goes deeper.

On the one hand, much has changed, as women have flooded into formerly male professions like medicine, military and ministry. On the other hand, as you study salaries, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, domestic violence and the devaluing of work when it becomes “women’s work,” you realize that fundamental obstacles remain.

The clue, I think, lies in the word “partner.” We need each other. We can get through the day and do our tasks, domestic and professional. But without partners we tend to function mainly for self. Partners draw us outside ourselves and give us the opportunity _ perhaps the only opportunity in these self-centered times _ to live for another.

But we resist naming the parched land of self. We resist seeing our neediness. Perhaps our neediness is embarrassing. Perhaps it is too deep to risk naming.

During Jesus’ lifetime, women and men were full partners in his eyes. He broke through ancient traditions and welcomed women as friends and disciples. He ignored gender-based hierarchies.

When three women went to anoint his body on Resurrection Day, they did more than their female duty. For it was they who first witnessed the empty tomb, it was they whom the angel treated as worthy to hear and to spread the good news. But the point wasn’t their gender, but the good news itself.

It took the early church less than a century to make gender the point again, to evict women from the inner circle and to erase the memory of partnership. They reclaimed the very traditions which Jesus had spurned. They baptized the paternalistic structures of Hebrew tradition, despite Jesus’ manifest desire for new ways.

They made a delicate icon of Jesus’ mother (in fact, a sturdy and lively woman), a prostitute of Mary Magdalene (perhaps Jesus’ closest friend), and blurred the identities of the female disciples.

They distorted the Scriptures, making too much of the named apostles’ being male, misusing Paul’s narrowly focused counsel to a group of gossipy women to remain silent. They lost what Jesus had tried to establish: a household where people lived for others and ancient walls and enmities were overcome.

We can only speculate on what caused this mood shift, but it was clearly pervasive _ and could have been worse, to judge by the Gospel of Thomas, a violently anti-female tirade which fortunately didn’t make the final cut for inclusion in the New Testament.

It is time we named the distortion and saw what Jesus tried to do. Not out of magnanimity or noblesse oblige or today’s cause, but out of the needs that we all share as God’s creation: a need for other, a need for partner, a need for purpose, a need to escape the prison of self.

Easter was a victory for everyone, not just for the few who claimed its privileges.

DEA END EHRICH