Revolutionary patience dorothee soelle biography

The terror and anger of the last two weeks might make us want to turtle up and hide away. Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israel and the indifference to civilian death in Israel’s military response creates such overwhelming moral confusion in me that it’s hard to look at the news. I would like, at this time, to take refuge in my faith, to treat it as a door I could close or a blanket I could pull over my head. But I can’t, because my faith isn’t private, and it can’t be, almost by definition.

During the past week I’ve returned to a book that I find myself reading again and again. Dorothee Soelle’s The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance may very well be the most important thing I’ve read in the last ten years.

I fell in love with the Christian mystical tradition a decade ago, and read many of the great mystics. I learned the traditional prayer practices and benefited from them. But I was taught to approach these practices and to read the mystics through the lens of private devotion. That is, I was taught that the mystics were mostly talking about things that could only be experienced in the depths of one’s own soul during daily, prayerful, withdrawal from the world. Yes, it’s true that Teresa and John ran around reforming the Carmelites, and that Meister Eckhart was the Provincial Superior for Saxony and in charge of forty-seven convents, but we talked about them as if this was somehow separate from their real life with God. Mysticism was something that kept them balanced and sane, and we would often imply, when we told their stories, that it was quite a pity that they also had to contend with hectic work schedules.

Soelle’s book doesn’t accept this narrative. She is interested in ora et labora, the unity of the active and contemplative life. The entire biblical story is about people encountering God and this encounter leading to action, or about people encountering God in the midst of action. Moses encounters God and is sent to free the Heb

            The “second wave” of American feminism was still in its early days in 1975 when Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003) arrived at Union Theological Seminary. Feminist theology was a recent endeavour and the mainstream feminist conversation was still largely shaped by secular liberal ideals. Liberal feminists sought to counter the notion that women and their femininity were ill-suited to the professional public sphere. They worked to abolish legal inequalities women faced; in particular they sought to address issues that prevented women from being accepted in the workplace. Liberal feminists, through organizations like NOW, looked to achieve equality through legislation. They also sought to counter notions of essentialism and, in turn, heavily emphasized the individual. Upon befriending American academics at Union, Soelle was surprised to find so many women identifying primarily as feminist theologians. Christian E. Gudorf, who worked as Soelle’s teaching assistant at Union, remembers Soelle’s confusion: “to her [feminism] seemed a narrow cause advocated by women of privilege—white, middle-class, American women—when there were so many other groups…who should be the focus of efforts for justice.” Through conversations with students and faculty at Union, as well as her own process of reflection, Soelle gradually began to consider feminism differently. In her own words, feminist “manifestations gave me a better understanding of a number of things in my own biography.” Soelle eventually adopted the title feminist for herself. 

            Adopting the term did not mean she immediately began towing the party line, however. Her different context—as a German, a Christian liberationist, and a member of the Left—meant her feminism differed from the “mainstream” feminists of her time, as well as some other feminist theologians. She acknowledged this difference in her autobiography Against the Wi