[todaysdate]
By Eric Blauer
I’m not a woman, I haven’t read the book, I’ve never entered a red tent or had the opportunity to learn my mother’s story but I did watch the Lifetime TV two-night series called ‘The Red Tent” and loved it.
This woman-centric miniseries expanded and explored the biblical story of Jacob, his wives, sons and daughter Dinah. If you are coming to the show like a religious prosecutor looking for anything that deviates from the biblical story you might not enjoy the poetic interpretations. But if you are coming to it as a story that you remember but get a chance to push past the few biblical lines and imagine the story behind the story, than you will probably find much to celebrate.
“The Red Tent” is where women of the biblical culture would live during their menstrual cycles and birthing events. Now any semi-contemplative religious person knows that blood is central to life. It never escapes me that as Christian’s we center our worship around eating flesh and drinking Christ’s blood. Most of the central themes of the biblical story of salvation weave in and out of bloody narratives. I must confess even the word: “menstruating” creeps me out, but this story handled the subject in a way that elevated it out of awkwardness and sanctified it by honoring it as part of the gift of life. I am not sure if that will help any woman through it, but it was a surprising part of the story for me.
“It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing,” -Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
As a pastor I believe ‘remembering’ is a very important part of nurturing and sustaining a healthy community of faith and reading and telling stories of people of faith is central to the biblical tradition.
Here are a few parts of the film I think are important themes:
- Giving us a story that celebrates the faith, functions and fraternity of womanhood.
- Taking issues like sex, menstrual cycles and birth and handling them in a way that sheds a sacred light on what if often denigrated, overexposed and handled artistically with clumsy, salacious and secular hands.
- Tackling issues of patriarchy in a way that was fair to the both their times and ours.
- Telling a story of forgiveness based on racial intermarriage.
- Telling a biblical story without making viewers feel proselytized, something Christian films often do.
As a poet, writer and artist, I love telling or reading stories that help us see the people and places of our present moment in a more sacred way. It’s too easy to forget the holiness of the mundane and get caught up searching for some elusive mirage of spirituality out there in the unreachable unknown, when most often, the holy is all around us.
This movie helped me look around and engage family and friends with fresh eyes and a more open heart which I think is a great accomplishment for any film.
