‘Her bleeding stopped’: the embodied borderland of the menopause
A paper given at the SST Conference in 2021
Papers shift and change - not least the passing of time and the limitations the pandemic has placed on research. However the focus of this short paper remains the same: to explore the embodied borderlands of the menopause, with a focus on the woman whose constant bleeding stopped. It’s a borderland of life and mortality, generatively and barrenness, flows of blood and of power. So I want to talk about the M-word before focusing on one woman’s story; we’ll look at a some commentaries - and the theological space it opens up around bodies, before ending with a coda on the ecclesial body.
On their 2003 album “One Last Flutter”, the satirical cabaret act Fascinating Aïda founded by the amazing Dillie Keane, sing a track called: ‘is it me or is hot in here?’ It’s a song which names just one of the physical aspects of the menopause - hormonal shifts which effect the body’s temperature regulation:
First I’m dressed up like the yeti; then I’m just a sweaty betty.
The song concludes with the humorous, but recognisable: Put your cardies on girls; take your cardies off girls; cardies on, cardies off… too darn hot.
There is no equivalent of ‘the talk’ before this season of life accompanied by not only fluctuations in temperature, but of mood, libido, body hair, sleep and weight. Those things mark out the transitional years of peri-menopause, before the menopause itself - defined as twelve months without a period. Until bleeding stops, bleeding might be erratic, sporadic or heavy to the point of life-restricting flows of blood.
Until recently, conversations about the menopause have been largely absent from public discourse. High profile voices within the media such as Kirsty Wark (“Menopause and Me“) and Mariella Frostrup (“The Truth about the Menopause”) have begun to examine our reluctance to talk about it and the questions we’re embarrassed to ask. They’ve discussed the science and self-care; named the frustrations when talking to GPs or the costs of treatment and therapies (from diet, HRT, CBT to exercise).
In the light of this, and its impact on spiritual life, relationships and ministry, I wondered if we might make some theological understanding of this embodied borderland might look like.
These bodies bleed, and live; they carry the potential to give life; a fragile and painful potential as well as a joyous one.These bodies bleed with discomfort and stigma and disappointment. When these bodies stop bleeding, they enter a physical borderland. This is not just the borderland between the yeti and sweaty betty, but a borderland of what is possible or impossible when it comes to promise, fulfilment, tragedy and letting go.
The biblical narrative carries within it glimpses of the stigma of infertility and glimpses of grace in unexpected pregnancy in old age. I thought I might dwell more on those matriarchs today; but instead I want to focus in this paper on an intriguing episode which invites us to consider a peri-menopausal and menopausal borderland.
It’s a story retold in the Synoptic Gospels about a woman, whose illness led to constant bleeding. It’s a story picked up in early Christian art in the catacombs.
Elaine Storkey suggests that persistent and erratic bleeding for 12 years places her in middle-age.
She’s someone who’s life is “locked down” by pain, fatigue and discomfort. Her cycles bound by then cycles of law and purity; her social, physical and economic life, depleted.
When she reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment in hope of healing, it reads as a moment when her suffering and isolation ends. The language Storkey uses suggests we take from it blessing, renewal, future and purpose meaning that we too are no longer ‘defined by limitations’.
It can be read or heard as a moment of interruption or disruption whilst Jesus is on the way to someone else’s house. He’s going to a twelve year old daughter who’s dying, at the point of death or already dead.
Mark’s description of her situation might echo many a menopause documentary: she’d endured; visited many physicians; had spent all she had; and felt worse rather than better. For as long as one daughter had lived, this middle-aged daughter had bleed.
Some commentators treat this interruption with brevity. Stanley Hauerwas notes the desperate situation of isolation - based on the Levitical laws on menstruation - and her extraordinary act of touching Jesus’s cloak. He credits her faith - that is ‘confident that Jesus is who he says he is’ [ 2006, p.102]. A cure is pronounced; her isolation ends; the narrative moves on.
Others such as Anna Case-Winters, sees the stories of dying daughter and the daughter with the flow of blood as being intertwined: ‘on the way to the restoration of one, Jesus restores the other’ [2015, p.134]. Both, she writes, are situation which violate ritual purity customs because of blood and death; yet Jesus extends himself to those in need. The woman does not make a public appeal. She approaches ‘discretely and timidly from behind’ - an approach, which Case Winters describes as ‘consistent with her status - doubly marginalised by her gender and her ritual impurity’ [2015, p. 136].
Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III dispute the centrality of ritual impurity. They highlight in particular Luke’s focus on medical condition - and her economic condition having ‘lavishly spent her money on physicians’ [2018, p.241]. In all three accounts, there is a moment when the private reaching out becomes a moment of public recognition: of the need, of her trust, of the healing. She is to be a daughter who “takes heart” because faith had made her well.
Yet amongst the crowd and these moving feet, there is not only a flow of blood but a flow of power.
A powerful man has no power to save his daughter; he’s hindered when this woman’s unseen disruption becomes public. She felt in her body that she was healed; Jesus felt that power had gone forth from him.
Levine and Witherington focus the nature of this embodiment: ‘Jesus recognises his own physical reactions: he is as much in the body as the hemorrhaging woman: as she felt blood flow from her, so he felt power flow from him’ [2018, p. 241]. In their commentary on Luke, this is a Christological point - the genuineness of Jesus’s humanity and the woman’s declaration of faith. As she states why she touched his cloak and how she was healed, Jesus affirmed her testimony.
And yet, we are left hanging. Is this episode serving more than a literary function of delay? This woman receives no commission; we do not know if she becomes one of the women to follow Jesus; we know nothing of her return to community. Is there more to this disruption with its flow of blood, felt healing and flow of power?
This woman stretched out her hand and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment; she’s commended for her faith. Power flowed where blood flowed and her bleeding stopped.
I want to suggest that this flow of power is not about stemming a flow of blood so that “normal” cycles of fertility are resumed; but that the nature of this woman’s transformation might speak more to the transition of peri-menopause and the abating of blood at menopause. I want to suggest that it does so in ways which allow us talk about that transition well; in a way that enables us to grieve for what might have been, to reconfigure our identity and embrace this embodied borderland in hopeful ways.
In Reconceiving Fertility, Moss and Baden helpful invite precisely this sort of attention to the text: no skipping over the disruption; no inscribing of a return to “normality”; but the ambiguity of bleeding that stops. They say: ‘The woman goes from a sodden, leaky, malleable body into a dry, hard one’ [2015, p ]. This imagery they suggest “masculating”: healing takes the form of the flow of blood being dried up, her new condition is in some way “hardened”.
This language carried overtones of barrenness - and the kind of negative language used of the childless or the feelings of childbearing being no longer possible. In Mark’s Gospel, they note, this language of begin dried up or scorched is associated with judgement and death. In a biological sense, bodies that bleed are open to the possibility of new life; when the flow is erratic, excessive and finally ceases, we confront the borderlands of mortality.
In this disruptive episode, is it possible that being healed is not the same as becoming fertile, but rather an openness to a new form of embodiment. In early Christianity, was it, as Moss and Baden suggest, the fact that the ‘proverbial biological clock was overshadowed by a much louder, eschatological time-piece’? [2015, p ].
This is a provocative image of menopausal time: confronting one’s own mortality, of erratic flows of blood and of a biological clock that is ticking; and perhaps too fears of depletion, isolation, invisibility and grief.
Drawing on Ethiopian eunuch, Moss and Baden argue that the disruption and loss of biological procreative destiny does not automatically cut us off from social structures and the transmission of power. Indeed, it the evolutionary/biological phenomenon of living beyond reproductive years opens up space for the wisdom, presence and time of the matriarch (not just the patriarch).
Moss and Baden talk about resurrection bodies in the context of an ‘afterlife that is a celebration of God, not a family reunion. It is a vision… that values fertility and infertility equally’ [2015, p. 217]. They go on to suggest that ‘it is the barren womb that anticipates the finality of God’s plan for humanity. It is an arresting reversal of social hierarchies’ [2015, p.223].
The womb, when bleeding stops, might neither be a return to fertility nor a sign of brokenness or failed womanhood: but, in this radical view, ‘the telos of human existence’ [2015, p. 224]. This challenges the social norms that prize some bodies more than others - it challenges the invisibility of the menopausal body.
Yet there is in this account a kind of hope that skips the pain and grief of this transition: ‘the new rule’, the ‘new normal’ and the ‘heavenly ideal’. How does it shed light on the lived reality?
For one thing, there is something about talking about this embodied peri/post menopausal borderland in a way which breaks down the taboo of this aspect of our life. Dare we acknowledge the lived reality of these hormonal shifts, acknowledging the impact on our relational, spiritual and working lives.
The flow of blood might be a source of discomfort and isolation; but when bleeding stops, there may be forms of grief as well as relief and liberation. We hold and name these embodied borders - not solely as a one form of anticipated eschatological future, but as an expression of wisdom in the present out of which, perhaps, our social and institutional life might be strengthened.
Is there space for wise women of blood and of power: a physical shift - as felt by the nameless haemorrhaging woman - that bears witness to the flow of the Spirit within the ecclesial community?
In Un/familiar Theology, Susannah Cornwall opens up the space to consider such generativity: she talks of the responsibility we have when we take on our roles as ‘transmitters, disseminators and chapter of the culture we pass on (to our social and cultural mentees as well as our own offspring) [2018, p.6].
Does this embodied borderland of the menopause allow us to be more generous with our ecclesial boundaries perhaps? Does it allow us to name mortality, loss and grief, but also new power, purpose and passion? When her bleeding stopped, this woman became a witness - her life opening out in new, unknown and unspoken ways. The power she had felt within her becoming perhaps a source of regeneration, in anticipation of the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom.
Her body was moved and changed by the power of Jesus, when she reached out touched just the hem of his garment. Our ecclesial body too is moved and changed by the power of Jesus, when we touch and taste and see the fragility of what is given; the power of what is poured out. This body given for us is a redeemed life of the flesh. In the Eucharist, the power of blood and love flow - a constituting and reconstituting memory of God’s character shared with us in death and resurrection.
Rachel Mann expresses this sacramental turn vividly: ‘in the eucharist we are sustained and renewed as we take God into our guts. To be members of the Body of Christ means that we are people of compassion - of gut and womb’. Wombs that bleed and birth and dry up and yet speak of new life. One woman’s flow of blood interrupted a journey towards death; when her bleeding stopped, did that perhaps anticipate the restoration of life. This middle-aged menopausal body, opening up perhaps the power and possibility of new life and wisdom.
© Julie Gittoes 2021
