“But do you know, in nineteen years of marriage my husband never once looked into my eyes and told me I was beautiful.”
Shannon Harris, The Woman They Wanted
Shut the book for a second, Aimee. Hurt with her. Hurt with Shannon. With beautiful Shannon.
I went to high school with Shannon Hendrickson, the Shannon before she was Shannon Harris. She was two grades higher than me, but we shared a best friend. Public school girls, we are. The Shannon I knew was beautiful, popular, very talented, friendly, and always smiling. Everyone adored her. I remember when our shared best friend, Kathy (one of her former girlfriends named in the book whom she was pressured to drop ties with), told me that Shannon married this Christian author I may have heard of, Joshua Harris. Shut the front door! I pushed Kathy in shock.
Shannon married the basically new celebrity Christian of the purity culture. We didn’t know to call it that, then. Of course she did! Of course he did! Joshua Harris married beautiful Shannon. And since he seemed to have an obsession with the so-called perfect courtship/marriage model (spoiler, turns out it ruined many lives), I only imagined how enraptured that man must have been after they said their “I do’s.”
Read more: He Never Called Her BeautifulAnd of course I had to get her memoir as soon as it hit the shelves. I’ve followed the train wreck of Covenant Life Church with the celebrity leadership, hyper-emphasis on “biblical manhood and womanhood,” reports of abusive behavior from CJ Mahaney, the evil of sexual abuse of children and cover-up from the leaders, and church split, followed by the news of the Harris’s leaving for Joshua to attend seminary, and then the deconstruction and divorce. I only live like a half an hour or so from Covenant Life, so our church at the time picked up some refugees from there. Never have I heard Shannon’s story, though.
And it’s a story. There is a lot to reflect on that I could write about. But this line on page 202 reveals it all. Why they got it so wrong. These men could not recognize real beauty; they could only sexualize it. Try to consume it. Or else, cover it up, squash it down, silence it, infantilize it, exploit it, manage it as best they can. But never behold it. Never gaze in awe and wonder over it. Never be vulnerable before it. Or intimate with it. Or be playful and bask or enter into the invitation of beauty.
I mourned for her. Joshua, their church and its many leaders, missed the beauty all along.
Beauty captivates us because it tells a story. It’s the story our hearts already know and long for. Robert Jenson suggests, “beauty is realized eschatology, the present glow of the sheer goodness that will be at the end.” A church and a theology that subordinates women are going to miss the beauty. They are going to miss what is real. Typico-symbolically, woman beckons us to what’s real in her very being. Woman—who was gloriously created second and not from the earth! As a picture and testimony to where we are headed (people and place), the woman represents the second order—the final act of creation that we await—arrayed with the glory and radiance of the Son. Woman tells a hella story about beauty. And Joshua Harris missed 19 years of opportunity to revel in and speak to Shannon’s beauty. She never felt it. Never heard it.
Everywhere we encounter beauty beckons us to a reality that, tragically, these church-goers could not participate in. They were not seen as gift. Over and over in Shannon’s story you see that she was not free to receive and give herself—her real self. And now she is left with the sham of it all at the cost of 20 years of stuffing herself down and being a ghost of a woman. Beautiful Shannon!
“If beauty represents an invitation to the real, and goodness our involvement in it in freedom, truth above all is our reception of reality, on its terms. It is for this reason a living relationship, one with the capacity to transform.”
D.C. Shindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament
And what is beauty but Christ himself? Our beauty and the beauty we see and experience around us is but a whisper, radiating from the face of Christ and his glory realm. What a horrible charade of a church that has missed Christ and failed to point thousands of others to beauty. All I could think about was the Song of Songs, where we have the words of Christ to his beloved, over and over and over, calling her beautiful. Where we have the words of the woman dominating the Song, reciprocating this praise and seeking out beauty. The beckoning between the two is all over the pages, sweeping us up in it with all our senses. And he tells her:
My dove, in the clefts of the rock,
in the crevices of the cliff,
let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.
Song of Songs 2:14
Shannon went to church to learn about God. To walk into that life with God. And she now says:
The “biblical woman” was not a real woman, she was a picture, a projection, a product! A man-made product, literally. An ideal to achieve. You can order whole books on Amazon and become her too. But she wasn’t me and she wasn’t tons of women. She was the woman they wanted. That’s all. The woman they wanted.
Without her beauty.
On the seventh day, God beheld his creation and said “behold, it is very good”.
Man was to enter into that Sabbath rest, rejoicing in the beauty of Jesus and His creation.
But the church has turned the Sabbath into another chore to do…
They work so hard at arguing over what they are allowed to do or not allowed to do that they missed beauty, liberty, love, joy and peace.
And this carries into all of life.
Excellent words.
We can begin the everlasting Sabbath in this life by finally learning to see beauty as the reflection of God.
Hi Aimee! I have loved and followed your work for a long time! I grew up in the OPC and have spent most of my adult life in reformed Baptist type circles. I plan to read this book and agree that her experience sounds heartbreaking. However, as a woman with a disability that causes physical differences- scars, skeletal deformity, it’s always been painfully obvious that even especially in the church because I am not thin, beautiful, unscarred and able bodied, I am not considered wife material. While beauty is a gift from God, that reality is a hard balance with recognizing that thin white beautiful able bodied women are considered virtuous for their beauty.
Thanks so much for your comment, Sarah. You speak into a huge barrier in our ability to see beauty, to see the gifts and invitations before us, and in my understanding, to even see God. The Song of Songs speaks into this as well, with the woman saying “don’t stare at me because I am dark…” and the Bridegroom later praising her, “You are absolutely beautiful, my darling; there is no imperfection in you.” Seeing one another through the eyes of Christ, scars and all, is our beckon. Hope bears scars, and what a testimony they tell!
Lizzie Velasquez is one of the most beautiful women in the world. I am sure you are too. You need to be surrounded by people who value what G-d has created and fearlessly celebrate true beauty.
First response: shit. That is just shit!
“These men could not recognize real beauty, they could only sexualize it.”
Ugh. So heavy.
Imma go find my wife now and remind her how much I love her and adore her beauty!
In the beginning God said, Let us make ‘human’ in our Image, male AND female created He them. He created them together as partners in God’s glorious work. Beauty is a quality in men and women esp as we reflect Christ. Everyone needs to hear this and reflect on this.
Aimee, this is such a token to real beauty and to Shannon!
Love everything you said!
I knew her at Covenant Life Church and she so was lovely in every way. We shared deep pain then, and it’s horrible to hear how much she’s suffered since. I can’t wait to read her book – especially as I’m in the throes of writing mine, which will include CLC’s toxicity.
Yes, we left, after they destroyed my marriage and drove my husband and children away from Christianity by 2002. My daughter just got wind of this book and told me about it – she wants to read it too, after we just shared the feeling of never being free at that church.
Unbelievably, last week I found myself in tears talking to my pastor, recalling how horrible the pastors and teaching was at CLC. Still hurts. Hard to believe. Thank God for good churches, for a GOOD God.
Wow, Ruth, thanks for your comment. I’m sorry for the suffering you went through at Covenant Life as well and the cost to your family. What a gift to have a pastor that you can feel safe to be vulnerable about this with. It’s so much to work through.
I am going to read this. Never went to CLC, as I live in New Zealand. But, suffered greatly when I was once part of Anchor Church in New Zealand. The sexism, patriarchy, grooming, sexual harassment, racism, gaslighting, biblical abuse, mental and emotional abuse, dealing with harassment from men who wouldn’t accept I had no interest in them, manipualtion, fear mongering, triangulation, rape culture enablement…. Even heard men make jokes implying rape, and many not even consider marital rape (rape is rape!!) a real thing!! The pressure of having children, and the view women are sacrifical in child birth. It’s horrible going through the abuse in a cult of a church which really isn’t a church at all, and how ingrained the abuse becomes inside you, even years later when you try to heal. The damage and abuse is real and no myth. I am just one of many women abused in this place.
My heart hurts reading this; I am so sorry for what you have endured in a place called a church.