HOW DO YOU USE YOUR VOICE?

How do you look after your voice?  How do you use it?

These have been among the guiding questions of my life, beginning at a women’s college in the first-wave of the Feminist Movement through a long career as a writer, to NOW, when we considering a female candidate for President.

If you are reading this and are a woman, you know how relentlessly women are silenced – in ways large and trivial.   [Often, this silencing is simply the exercise of power for its own enhancement.]. the truth is, despite the cacophony of the digital realm, most of the world is voiceless, and the most voiceless of the voiceless are women and children.

The bullying continues unabated, whether it occurs over the dinner table as casual mockery, or from behind a microphone before a crowd of thousands.

I was immensely fortunate to have been educated by women, among women, for many years.   I was taught that women need to use our voices to uphold worthy principles, communicate our needs, express appropriate anger, articular boundaries, and defend those who can’t speak on their own behalf.

This past week, we have seen once again that women’s speaking up continues to matter.  A lot.

When the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa, were targeted by a conservative PAC to suppress their votes https://mailchi.mp/eriebenedictines/gzz-vol3-no11-nov2024?e=1a9369c9c9 – they spoke out loud and clear.    It is a story worth retelling for all of us, but especially for the daughters and granddaughters of the world.

When their names were publicized without permission on X, and the lie promulgated that in fact none of them lived at the monastery they called home, the Sisters mobilized.  They held a press conference in their chapel, and invited every mainstream (trustworthy) media outlet in the country to witness the unjust (and illegal) bullying that had been leveled against them.

But pause, please, because this is where it gets very interesting.  They spoke out.  But it was the WAY in which they did this that I find so inspiring.  If you read their press release, which I highly recommend (by clicking on the link in their email), you will read calm, self-possession, accuracy, controlled outrage.

From time to time, I teach my students rhetoric, so that they understand the principles of solid argumentation.  The sisters composed their press release with a keen eye towards rubrics laid down by the ancient Greeks.  It is a masterful piece of work.  I could – and should — be taught in any college classroom.

How do YOU use your voice?

I have a poet friend who endures an esophageal condition that regularly renders her voiceless.  She rarely performs public readings.  To maintain any voice at all, she undergoes regular treatments and tests that only work for a short while before she must go back to the clinic.  But she knows that it is worth it.  She knows that as long as she has a voice to use, she will use it.  An example for all of her friends.

The sisters, with an understated eloquence rare in the public arena today, teach us not only the importance of speaking truth to power, but the skillful means by which to do so.

We Use Our Voices for the Good….

                   To set an example

                  To make those who hear and read our words feel seen and upheld in their struggles

                  To prod – to make others wrestle with difficult truths

                  To be lamp bearers into those dark places to which we don’t want to venture

                  To be witnesses to principles that others won’t or can’t articulate

                  To tell the truth, even if there are costs attached

https://mailchi.mp/eriebenedictines/gzz-vol3-no11-nov2024?e=1a9369c9c9