Little Boxes

“Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.”

I was a child in the 60’s and those words were part of that childhood. I remember singing it at school camp in 5^th grade and wondering what it meant. (Of course, in those days it would never have occurred to the adults around us to explain what song lyrics meant – we were just given the songs and taught to sing them.) But I really couldn’t fathom why everyone would come out all the same ..

I spent my childhood amazingly oblivious to the pressure to conform. Because of the emotional emptiness and chaos of my home life, trying to differentiate myself and become myself was far more important to me than the approval of the herd. For a child who was so shy and timid in many respects, I was singularly unconcerned about fitting in. It didn’t worry me to say I didn’t care for the Beatles when every other girl in the class was trying to choose her favourite, or (a little older) to be the one who openly admitted that she didn’t know how to dance, wasn’t allowed to watch the ‘in’ TV shows and didn’t own any vinyl records of my own. And it was exactly the same with gender: growing up in an all-girl family and attending all-girl schools, I missed out on learning any rules. I still didn’t understand the little boxes, because no one had pushed me into one and thrown away the key.

Then I got married, and my education began. I learned that I was supposed to live in complete submission to my husband, bring up perfectly disciplined children, keep an immaculate house (who me? well, let’s just say that I am not a naturally tidy person) and be suitably ‘womanly’ on all occasions. Apart from dressing in a feminine way, I had no idea what that meant. 

Then I started to learn:

“Men don’t like women with brains.”

“Women don’t have opinions about the Bible – they leave that to their husbands”

“Why would you want to even speak to other men? Isn’t your husband enough for you?”

“Womanly women would rather work in the church kitchen to serve the men than be in the hall listening to the speaker.”

I was learning about boxes, and that if I didn’t fit neatly into one of the predetermined ones, the church would have to do their best to squeeze me into one, and, like Procrustes’ bed, lop off the bits that didn’t neatly fit inside – all my soul’s sake, of course! Though I could not name it yet, I was discovering a huge, yawning cognitive dissonance at the heart of evangelicalism: all the books and sermons inspire me, as a Christian, to stretch and grow and become all that I can be for Jesus, and yet, at the same time, as a Christian woman, I was to make myself small, smaller, smallest to honour Jesus. The song describes the little boxes as “pink ones .. and green ones, and blue ones and yellow ones” but in the church there were only pink ones and blue ones, and, given my anatomy, I’d better compose my limbs neatly and fit inside the pink one .. or else!

Little boxes are very safe --  look at those impermeable walls! – but oh you can get a cramp tucked up inside them if you haven’t managed to make yourself tiny enough!  Is that really what Jesus died for, so that there might be 2 neat rows of blue Christians and pink Christians, each produced by their respective cookie cutter and lined up with identical smiles?

If we are going to be all that Jesus has called us to be, both male and female, then the first thing we have to do is chop up those little boxes for firewood. We follow a Saviour who came to set the prisoners free. And if this means dispensing with a few man-made rules (like girls stay on the pink squares and boys stay on the blue squares), well it isn’t the first time in history that a few well-established tables have been tipped over in the church.

We are brothers and sisters doing the Kingdom together as the unique and amazing individuals God created us to be. Thirty-six years ago I said my marriage vows and they included the words “forsaking all others ..”. Did that mean that I was going to retreat into a little pink box marked ‘married woman’ and never relate to any other male again? Or did it mean, as I believe it did, that because I was committed to one particular man for all my sexual expression, that I was now free to relate to other men as friends and brothers, without fear of romantic misunderstandings? The boundary around my sexual intimacy has been set, I am free to enter into wholesome, life-giving spiritual and personal intimacy with anybody else, male or female, whom God calls me to befriend. To say that I cannot do that is to say that my gender and sexuality is the most important thing about me, more important than giftedness or character, more important than being a New Creation, who is a member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of God. I will stand at the foot of the cross and I will say that the greatest narrative of my life is Jesus, not ‘sex object’.

Jesus came to set us free, and that includes being free from the little pink and blue boxes that evangelical culture wants to lock us into.

This post is part of the February Synchroblog “Cross Gender Friendships”. This is the list of posts that people have contributed

Chris Jefferies – Best of both

Jeremy Myers – Are Cross-Gender Friendships Possible

Lynne Tait – Little Boxes

Dan Brennan – Cross-Gender Friendship: Jesus and the Post-Romantic Age

Glenn Hager – Sluts and Horndogs

Jennifer Ellen – A Different Kind of Valentine

Alise Wright - What I get from my cross-gender friend

Liz Dyer – Cross-Gender Friendships and the Church

Paul Sims – Navigating the murky water of cross-gender friendships

Jonalyn Fincher – Why I Don’t Give out Sex like Gold Star Stickers

Amy Martin – Friendship: The most powerful force against patriarchy, sexism, and other misunderstands about people who happen to not be us, in this case, between men & women

Maria Kettleson Anderson - Myth and Reality: Cross-Gender Friendships

Bram Cools - Nothing More Natural Than Cross-Gender Friendships?

Hugo Schwyzer – Feelings Aren’t Facts: Living Out Friendship Between Men and Women

Marta Layton – True Friendship: Two Bodies, One Soul

Kathy Escobar – The Road To Equality Is Paved With Friendship

Karl Wheeler – Friends at First Sight

Doreen Mannion - Hetereosexual, Platonic Cross-Gender Friendships–Learning from Gay & Lesbian Christians

Jim Henderson – Jesus Had A Thing for Women and So Do I

Elizabeth Chapin – 50 Shades of Friendship