Lyz Lenz Quotes

Capitalism can be just as extractive as marriage. And if you are going to have your labor exploited, it might be easier to do it in a nice home. But I think the problem is that both narratives are failures. Women dedicating their lives to being cogs in the wheel of capitalism isn’t fulfillment. But neither are home and children. Jobs can be lost. So can homes. Children grow up to become their own people. And home, children, and marriage, however much you want them, might not be accessible for everyone.

But when we get these partnerships, all these “best friends” we married don’t text us back like our female best friends do. They can’t wipe a counter to save their lives. Don’t know how to vacuum. And their learned helplessness becomes the punch line to all our jokes. Memes lampoon this male inability to function. A TikTok video shows the face of an exasperated wife on the phone with her husband, who is presumably wandering the grocery store looking for ketchup, and she’s lip-syncing to the song from Hamilton, “Look at where you are. Look at where you started. The fact that you’re alive right now is a miracle.” Hilarious. These are the good men.

I’m not good at believing the things I’m supposed to,” I said. “I’m not good at being the person I’m supposed to be.

Chained to a child or chained to a desk, a woman's value is contained within her (re)productive abilities. And when these abilities fail, through miscarriage, stillbirth, medical problems, infertility, or she opts out of the whole process, we don't know how to see her. We can't see her. (pg. 52)

I am comforted by the ritual of liturgy, the way it provides a scaffolding to access the mystery of what is happening around us.

Two men came to look for Jesus and he told them about death. Put a seed into the ground and let it die. Only then can it grow.

Seeds outside of soil are inert things. Put into the ground, a seed falls apart — it becomes a fluid nourishment to the seedling. It's a dissolution. A rearrangement of the elements.

It’s worth pointing out that while studies show that women do more housework than their male partners, this work goes largely unobserved by men, half of whom statistically perceive themselves as doing equal work, while only 3 percent of women agree. Add in the fact that husbands add an additional seven hours of labor to a home — labor done by their wives — and it’s a bleak picture of domestic partnership.

It’s a racist narrative trick we always do when we talk about Christianity in America. When we say “Christian” we mean white people. When we talk about great Evangelists in American history, we mean Billy Graham, not Martin Luther King. King is a black activist. But Graham is allowed to be for all. This is the narrative trick being pulled when people tell me to disregard Chicago. It’s the erasure of othering. As if centuries of struggling together and against one another hasn’t left us all deeply and irrevocably changed.

Chicago’s story, like the story of St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Iowa City, is a Midwestern story. The story of the black Evangelical church is the story of the Evangelical church. These stories might not fit the narrative we want to tell about ourselves, but they are as essential to the meaning of who we are as any other story.

In the stories of faith I grew up with, men were allowed a full range of emotion: King David, who calls on God to destroy his enemies. Absalom rising up against his father the king. Jonah stewing under his tree, looking out on the city God saved but he hates. Job crying out to God for his miserable fate.

But the rage of good women in the Bible is all in the subtext. Nowhere is there an Eve angry for being removed from Eden and the loss of her two sons. Where is Esther, where is her horror and pain watching the genocide of her people? Or Ruth, who followed her miserable mother-in-law to a foreign land and had to listen to that lady bitching as if she felt nothing?

The women allowed to have feelings in the Bible are always the villains. Michal sneering at David that he ought to put his clothes on and stop dancing like a naked fool. She is indicted for her words, but hadn’t she just been married, abandoned, and then taken back by this man? Used as a political pawn, then ignored for Bathsheba. Then there is Sarah, who beat her maidservant Hagar, blaming her for what should have rightly fallen on the shoulders of Abraham. And Job’s wife, who Biblical scholars condemn for telling her husband to curse God and die. But wasn’t she just wishing him a swift end to the suffering that they had walked through hand in hand?

Everything is political. Our wounds and our worship. We want our faith to transcend the political, but we can only do that when we exist in sameness. When barriers collapse, our wounds are revealed, and wounds are political because they involve pain.

Why did I stay in churches that I didn’t like for so long? Why did any of us? Because we loved the people there, and we had been taught God was big enough for all of us, and we had the audacity to take those lessons at their word.

"We speak of men and their rage as if it I laudable. "Men just get mad and push each other and it's over", we say. "Women are just bitches; they never let it go." That's because we never can let it go. Because where would we put it? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?"

We make women feel brave for sticking it out. For keeping private all the screaming fights, the late nights, the broken cups on the floor, swept up in the morning. We make women feel like they are doing something right for persisting in the lonely drudgery of the American marriage, when the aftermath of the happily-ever-after of the heterosexual marriage is simply negotiating a relationship that is inherently unequal. A relationship made unequal not by accident, but as a function of a society that relies on that inequality to fill in the gaps that it refuses to fund — childcare, eldercare. We do not make women feel brave for making the opposite choice, for walking away from unhappiness.

Sometimes your biggest freedom is found in your greatest fear: letting go.

There are so many churches that remain strong, while being awful to women or providing safe havens for the power hungry. And there are so many good places that close despite being a home for the hungry, the lost, and the hurting. To brush off problems with churches as the problems of the inherently flawed nature of people is to miss the bigger picture: that life and faith can function together in a place where all are welcome and respected.