Service to Christ—A Personal Journey -- By: Michele Guinness

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 19:2 (Spring 2005)
Article: Service to Christ—A Personal Journey
Author: Michele Guinness


Service to Christ—A Personal Journey

Michele Guinness

MICHELE GUINNESS Brought up in a practicing Jewish family, Michele Guinness has worked for most of the major British television companies. While continuing her career as a freelance journalist, Michele has also worked for the National Health Service for the past twelve years. She is currently full-time Head of Communications for the Cumbria and Lancashire Strategic Health Authority. As well as contributing regularly to magazines and newspapers, she has written eight books, including her best-selling biography, Child of the Covenant. Her latest, Woman, the Full Story, that expands many of the views in this article, is available at www.cbeinternational.org. She is married to Peter, Vicar of St. Thomas’ Lancaster and they have a grown up son and daughter.

Some years ago my lovely niece Shoshanna had her Bat Mitzvah along with a dozen or so of her friends. These bright-eyed, beautiful and intelligent twelve-year-olds with their lives in front of them each spoke about their favorite heroine, the woman they most wanted to emulate. Some picked the big women in the Bible—Sarah, who leaves security and home behind to found a nation, Deborah, who leads a nation, Esther, who saves a nation, Ruth, who introduces the Gentile nation into King David’s family tree. Others preferred the little heroines with the cameo parts—the clever women who save the day: the woman of Thebez in the Book of Judges who drops a millstone on Abimelech and saves her city, Jael, who kills General Sisera with a tentpeg, Abigail, who outwits her twit of a husband and takes food to David and saves her household. Ah, such women! Intelligent enough to understand that, in extremis, brain is better than brawn every time. A few of the girls chose contemporary women, holocaust survivors, dissidents and wives of dissidents, leaders and martyrs.

The Rabbi rose to his feet to address them, and every eye turned to him, waiting for his words of wisdom. “Girls,” he said, “today as you embrace womanhood, remember only this. Your greatest contribution to Judaism will be as a wife and a mother.”

My heart bled for them as they stood stoically in front of him, without a flicker of an eyelid, their disappointment registering only in the slightest hunching of the shoulders. My heart bled for my cousin, who sat watching them, whose only child had just been killed in a car crash, and for all the women in the synagogue that day who had never found Mr. Right, or had struggled with fertility issues.

Then, I reflected, their heroines, biblical and contemporary, were so fearless, determined, and feisty, such trailblazers; it was hardly surprising that the Rabbi was afraid of them, and afraid, perhaps, of what might come...

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