The 6-foot Circle

 

 

 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I’m working on an essay called, “The Imperative Jesus.” In it, I intend to list all those of his sayings recorded in Matthew that have the sense of a command. In English classes, I learned that there are four types of sentences: declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory, as follows:

Declarative: The door is open. (statement)

Interrogative: Is the door open? (question)

Imperative: Open the door. (command)

Exclamatory: That darn door is open, again! (exclamation)

I stopped for a minute or so to contemplate the “you have heard it said … but I say unto you” passages in in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:28: “Don’t even look at a woman wrongly,” in the translation I was using right then. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” in the NIV. This as an echo of the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” 

No equivalent admonition is given for women who might as easily look at a man “wrongly.” 

So a story popped … just popped into my head:

Isadore Pointyfrass was walking down Second Avenue with two shopping bags of clothes he’d just bought for his job as a high school teacher when he met a scantily clad and very beautiful woman coming toward him and he looked … wrongly, possibly, and was distracted. In that moment, his shopping bag bumped into Clautilda Armistine and knocked her bag of groceries to the sidewalk. Clautilda said a bad word and swung her purse at Isadore, but missed, hitting Andrea Pinkinslop full in the face instead. Poor Andrea never knew what hit her, for she lost her balance, fell against a lamppost head-first and died. Andrea’s husband, heartbroken, hung on for a while, but then jumped off the Broadway Bridge and drowned. At his funeral, a fire broke out in the church and seven people died of smoke inhalation because the church janitor had failed to fix the entry door and it stuck. Peter Dieter, the said janitor, was sentenced to two years in jail for his negligence but hanged himself in his cell on the first night of his incarceration.

The question: who is rightly to be blamed for all this mayhem? If the woman who distracted Isadore had forgotten her makeup and decided to wear her baggy exercise suit, would the ten people still be alive?

Depending on how one apportions blame in a chaotic world, your choice could support the wisdom of “not looking at a woman wrongly.”  Ah, but some will say, “It means looking lustfully, or looking with the intent of planning to act upon your imagination regarding a particular woman, like David lusting after Bathsheba.” 

In Orthodox Islam, men’s propensity to “look wrongly upon women” is moderated by ensuring there’s nothing to look at. A burka probably doesn’t attract “wrongful looks,” I think. The alternative preventative action of plucking all the men’s eyes out would never be considered in any world I know of. 

The same sermon also says that it’s unlawful for a man to divorce his wife unless she turns out to be unfaithful. Again, no equivalent sanction for women will be found there, but, rightly or wrongly, we’re getting used to repeating the assumption that Biblical women are chattels, like camels.

We were watching an episode of the Australian series, McLeod’s Daughters, the other day. In it, a woman complains that a man she hadn’t met until now keeps brushing up against her, touching her arms and shoulders and should she take offense at this or is she being paranoid and silly. In reply, her friend walks around her, scraping a six-foot diameter circle in the dirt with his boot. “Every woman lives in a circle like you are right now. No man should enter that circle unless he’s damn sure he has permission.”  

No matter how close we come to male/female equality in the human rights, social and business realms, similar equality in the mating, in the sexual department is impossible. There are obvious, stark reasons why women carry a unique right in this department, why the 6-ft circle, the burka and the hijab and all those other cultural habits that ascribe to them special protection are deemed right and necessary. The ultimate shame of men’s disrespecting of the feminine right to physical integrity is, of course, rape and/or abuse. In our culture, the loosening of the taboos that historically protected women is an appalling development.

The separation of sex for pleasure and bonding, as opposed to sex for procreation, seems to have left humanity befuddled. Recreational copulation needn’t be as bad as it sounds if decency, faithfulness, mutuality, your basic shibboleth (see footnote)  of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” prevail. (That latter may be an unfortunate choice of words, as if sex is something we do unto others.)

I know of no other phenomenon greater in its miraculous majesty than that of procreation. God created humankind, then handed the ability of divine procreation over to Adam and Eve and their descendants, to us. That might be one way of looking at the miracle of creating life in the bodies of women. If anything can evoke reverence in us, surely it should be that. 

And to return to where I started. Why in the Sermon on the Mountain didn’t Jesus advise women to avoid looking at men wrongly? And why didn’t he advise women that they not divorce their husbands except if they were being unfaithful? Was it really because it was a man’s world? Or was it perhaps that the 6-foot circle was so respected that it seemed unnecessary? 

Mennonite women have never been compelled to wear a burka, but among our more conservative sisters, the taboo against immodest dress is still strong. It implies, of course, that men are weak in the area of “looking on women wrongly,” that such looking can lead to unfaithfulness, and that the remedy lies in ensuring that women display nothing worth looking at … wrongly.

Good luck with that.  

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[i] Shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.