‘The Secret Life of Bees’
May 21st, 2009 by Bill
‘The Secret Life of Bees’
Frances Power Cobbe was one of the most accomplished and influential Irish women of the 19th century. She was an early feminist, campaigning for female suffrage and for the acceptance of women into the ministry, and she devoted much of her later life to the cause of animal welfare, founding in 1875 the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection. She was born in 1822 in Newbridge. Her family was Anglican, and her great, great, grandfather, who had come to Ireland as Chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant, eventually became Archbishop of Dublin. But Frances became dissatisfied with the evangelical Christianity in which she had been raised, and around 1845 she discovered the works of the American Unitarian theologian Theodore Parker, and this gave her the taste for a different kind of religious expression. She knew that there were Unitarian congregations in Dublin, but she didn’t want to upset her father by making a special journey to attend a Sunday service in one of them, but, on New Year’s Day 1847, when she was in the city on other business, she slipped unobserved into the Unitarian church in Eustace Street, excited by the prospect of listening to a Unitarian preacher for the first time. She describes the experience in her Autobiography:
I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st January and drove to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big, dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The service was a miserable, hybrid affair, neither Christian as I understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At last the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived. The old Minister in his black gown ascended the pulpit, having taken with him – what? – could I believe my eyes? It was an old printed book, bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1819 or thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek article when used before the word Theos! My disappointment not to say disgust were such that – as it was easy from my seat to leave the place without disturbing anyone – I escaped into the street, never (it may be believed) to repeat the experiment.
Frances never did return to the Eustace Street church, but she maintained her attachment to Unitarianism, eventually travelling to England where she became a member of James Martineau’s congregation in Great Portland Street, and she would attend services there whenever she was in London. Martineau’s ‘noble’ sermons, she said, ‘made up the richest part of our happy lives.’
According to Dr. Ann Peart, from whose essay on Women in the British Unitarian Movement before 1904 I have taken the above information, Frances Cobbe and other Unitarian women of the 19th century would have agreed with the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell when she asked for ‘some really spiritual devotional preaching instead of controversy about doctrines.’ Frances was also concerned that Unitarianism – along with most of Christianity – had lost the doctrine of the Motherhood of God, and she said that a ‘woman’s idea of God should have a place in all our teachings of religion’. She goes on:
I think that there must be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will conceive, and only a woman’s lips can teach; truths, perchance, which have come to her when baby-fingers have clung round her neck in the dark while infant trust overcame infant terror, and she has asked herself; was there anything in heaven or earth which could make her cast down to destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of care and guardianship, the helpless little child thus lying in her arms – a living parable of all our race in the everlasting Arms of God.
But, a hundred and thirty years on, religion is still in the hands of men, and men are still arguing, as they will, about the precise meaning of words in the Bible, and they are still giving us a view of God which is almost totally male, and which projects those unwholesome male characteristics of revenge, punishment and violence on to the deity. On Friday’s Late Late Show, the unfortunate Anglican Bishop, Gene Robinson, told us how he had received death threats from crazed Christian fundamentalists who are objecting to his homosexuality. Apparently, when he was consecrated bishop, he had to wear a bullet proof vest in case an assassination attempt was made during the ceremony. Last Monday night Channel 4 showed a documentary about certain ‘Christian’ groups who were preaching hell fire and damnation to all who have not been ‘born again’. This stuff is alive and well, and when you see examples of it you could almost give thanks for the likes of Richard Dawkins who rightly condemn such a message as abominable and anti-human.
On youtube there’s a short piece by the American comedian George Carlin (at least I think it’s by him). Religion, he says, is the greatest con-trick of all time. It’s convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky, and he’s watching you every minute of every day; and he has a special list of ten things you mustn’t do, and if you do any of these things he has a place of fire and smoke and burning and anguish and torture where you will suffer and burn and choke for ever and ever until the end of time. But, he goes on, he loves you! He loves you, but he needs money! He may be all-powerful, all-perfect, all-wise, all-knowing, but somehow, he just can’t handle money!
Money, power, control, and obedience, seem to be the obsessions of those who worship this deity. This, unfortunately, is the face that much religion presents to the world, but, as Frances Power Cobbe realised, it’s not the only face that religion can show. There is another way of understanding and practising religion, a gentler, less contentious and divisive way, which has been taught by groups within all the major traditions for millennia, but which has been shouted down by the loud and aggressive voices of those who want to use religion as a forum for argument and as a means of generating hostility among disparate groups.
The contemporary American novelist Sue Monk Kidd has explored the gentler aspects of religious expression in her book The Secret Life of Bees, which has sold nearly five million copies and has been made into a feature film to be released later this year. The novel is set in 1960s America, in South Carolina, at the time of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the moon-landings, and it’s the story of a young girl called Lily, who runs away from her bullying father and finds herself among a family of bee-keepers. Lily’s mother had been killed when Lily was just four years old, and it may be that Lily herself had a part in the gun accident in which her mother died, so in running away she is not only escaping from her father, she is also in some sense, looking for a mother. Her companion is Rosaleen, her father’s black housemaid, who finds herself in trouble with the police after causing a commotion while registering to vote in an upcoming election.
The bee-keepers who take the pair in are sisters, black women named after the months May, June, and August, and these three, particularly August, teach Lily about the important things in life – friendship, loyalty, community, courage and hope, and at the end of the novel, this poor motherless child has, in her own words, ‘more mothers than any eight girls off the street’.
The central metaphor of the novel is the beehive, and each chapter is prefaced by some amazing fact about bees. We learn, for example, that ‘it takes honeybee workers ten million foraging trips to gather enough honey to make one pound of honey’, and, in the body of the book, we learn, with Lily, of the bees’ incredible architectural instincts which enable them to ‘build row after row of perfect hexagons, angles so accurate you’d think they used rulers’, and of their power to ‘take plain flower juice and turn it into something everyone in the world loves to pour on their biscuits’. The bees are mysterious, magical even, but their secret life is only a microcosm of the great cosmic mystery that pervades the whole of creation, but which we lose sight of in our pedestrian desire simply to accumulate facts. ‘Look at the moon,’ says August to Lily on the night of the first moon landing in1969, ‘Look at her good, because you’re seeing the end of something….As long as people have been on this earth the moon has been a mystery to us…..Now it won’t ever be the same, not after they’ve landed up there and walked around on her. She’ll just be one more big science project.’
This community of black women have their own religion; they call themselves the Daughters of Mary, and they worship a black Madonna, called Our Lady of Chains. Our Lady of Chains is represented by a wooden figure which is the object of communal veneration, and about which the most amazing stories are told. August tells the story of how the statue came into their possession.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘back in the time of slaves, when the people were beaten down and kept like property, they prayed every day and every night for deliverance. On the islands near Charleston, they would go to the praise house and sing and pray, and every single time someone would ask the Lord to send them rescue. To send them consolation. To send them freedom…….One day… a slave named Obadiah was loading bricks onto a boat that would sail down the Ashley River, when he saw something washed up on the bank. Coming closer, he saw it was the wooden figure of a woman. Her body was growing out of a block of wood, a black woman with her arms lifted out and her fist balled up……Obadiah pulled the figure out of the water…. and struggled to set her upright. Then he remembered how they’d asked the Lord to send them rescue. To send them consolation. To send them Freedom. Obadiah knew the Lord had sent this figure, but he didn’t know who she was. He knelt down in the marsh mud before her and heard her voice speak plain as day in his heart. She said, “It’s all right. I’m here. I’ll be taking care of you now.”’
The Daughters of Mary have a ceremony in which chains are actually draped around the statue, only to be eventually broken, and at a certain time in the year, the statue is smeared with honey. The Daughters also have a kind of communion service in which they feed each other with honey cakes. But all this is purely figurative and dramatic. The stories which surround Our Lady of Chains are not literally true. August explains to Lily that the statue is ‘just the figurehead of an old ship’, but ‘the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over.’ The statue is the symbol of their hope; the stories they tell about it give them comfort and consolation, linking them with the struggles of the past and fortifying them for their struggles in the future. Here is a religion growing spontaneously out of shared experience, and serving to unite its devotees in loving fellowship. It’s not ‘true’ either historically or scientifically as its devotees know very well. But it works. It enables them to carry on living through the trying circumstances of an oppressed life, not, as Karl Marx would have said, by anaesthetizing the pain of their alienation, but by helping to knit the people together into a community of mutual support and care – a community which would still be necessary when the worst aspects of their oppression have been lifted.
The Secret Life of Bees is fiction, and I’m sure that religions don’t generally start in the way the book describes. It is not meant to be history or sociology, just an imaginative account of how a group of gentle people found ways to offer each other hope and consolation, and to support each other in crisis and struggle. The stories and devotional practices they use to help them achieve these things are vehicles only, tools to help them build and nurture their community. Sue Monk Kidd is giving a 21st century expression to the 19th century claim of women like Frances Power Cobbe: that religion will be transformed when we start to listen to the voice of imaginative experience, and resist the temptation to argue about the factual details.
Bill Darlison
25th May, 2008