My Take on “The Woman Who Became a Fox”
The following is my retelling of Martin Shawâs story: âThe Woman Who Became a Foxâ, that was the first story in his The Green Knight course. I have been hesitant to respond because my thoughts are prickly and people donât always receive prickly thoughts well. Here is a link to a preview of an earlier and different telling if you want to check out his rendition: The Woman Who Became a Fox. Martin Shaw and his House of Beasts and Vines has been a source of inspiration. He is very generous in what he shares. I highly recommend you subscribe. Well, here is my modernized take.
He wasnât ugly when she married him. No, not at all. He shimmered with the shine that only comes when people fall in love. She believed in happily ever after. But it wasnât long before she woke up one day and realized he was ugly, with one eye, what every man has tucked in his loins, what every man thinks with at one time or another. She couldnât stand his quiet. He was so private, she thought he kept secrets. She couldnât stand those secrets because sheâd been raised in a family whose kept secrets were worse than the truth. So one day she followed him to the forest, uh, restaurant where he met with his friend. She saw him flirt with a waitress. She thought he was secretly in love with her, a plain woman. It was the dance of the one eye. Is this what I get for cooking and cleaning and doing his laundry? Her jealousy burned.
But her husband came home to her, night after night. He never left on weekends.
So she left him. She set out to find herself. Isnât that what her friends advised when they heard her whine, cry and complain? No one told her what M. Scott Peck has said, That real love begins when the shine of romance wears off. âWhether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationshipâ (140).
No one told her what Bo Lozoff says in âThe Work of Oneness,â
Two people fall in love and get married. For whatever reasonâkarma, fate, destiny-they looked at each other and saw something sparkling, divine. But if youâre together long enough your spouse is going to be privy to the worst, ugliest, and pettiest in you. Thatâs why the wedding vow is traditionally âtill death do us part, through richer or poorer, through thick or thin, sickness or health. (The Utne Reader, Dec 1996, 53 â 54)
Her friends never said how evenings would burn with loneliness. After work, she stared out the window at streetlights that hurt her yes, so she went to the local bar. Her face was so sour, the bartender didnât warn her when the giant sat next to her and offered to take her home. It wasnât long before his rage tossed her about. Then he loved on her. She was soon trapped, as all creatures are when you canât predict when the reward comes.
She found several beautiful cloaks in his closet and was filled with longing to try on each one: crowâs feathers, fox pelt, bearskin. Sheâd always wanted to fly, so she tried on the gorgeous one made with crow feathers. The feathers rustled, with a black sheen blue. But it was so small it pinched her arms. So she tried on the next coat. It was a beautiful coat made of a foxâs pelt. She stroked the soft red hairs with black points. She shrugged it on her shoulders, while thinking about how her brothers called beautiful women stone fox goddesses. It fit perfectly. Her hands went to the pockets where she found a key. She opened the door and walked out.
But as time does what it does, adding minutes to days to weeks, she forgot what it meant to be an unhappy wife, or a frightened captive. If she thought she had lost herself while married to her husband, she truly lost herself, once she slipped on the fox cloak. Soon she dropped to all fours. And sniffed out chicken coops, grabbing the hens who refused to go inside for the night. âFox went out on a chilly nightâŚâ trotted through her head as she turned toward her fatherâs house. It wasnât long when even that lyric faded.
Her father  was startled when she curved around his legs, rubbing her face against his ankles. He was startled because this friendly creature must be the fox that ate his hens night after night. Though he glowed a bit, thinking he might be a saint, with such a wild animal unafraid and he wasnât even holding a fish. He had no idea she was his daughter. When she finally left, they say her galloping in wet grass not only tossed water into the air, but it sent stars shooting into the sky, a gift to her whole town. (Did she go work for Starlink?)
My response
This story annoyed me because a common story talks about women who want to find themselves, who leave good men to strike out on their own. Iâm not talking about the abusers, the narcissists, the drunks. Iâm talking about leaving the quiet men, who are their own mysteries, who you never quite know. Iâm talking about the hard work of commitment, of staying put, of loving who is front of you, even though they donât fit what the romance novels or even therapists say will make you happy. Iâm talking about continuing to walk through the roses and brambles.
Bruce and I found a therapist while we were renovating our farmhouse. There had been a shooting at NIU. Iâd gone cold turkey on hormone replacement, so tears easily sprouted. Â I fired the therapist the day we had one of the worst fights of our marriage because the counselor held me in contempt. I have thought since that if we stayed with that therapist he would have blown our marriage apart. I have learned to love what is, the gifts Bruce offers. I have learned to receive them.Â
These days I have become skeptical of the therapeutic model that tries to fit people into a preconceived notion what a healthy relationship looks like. During house renovation one of the carpenters said that marriages have a kind of ecology, that can be different for each couple. You canât expect a marriage that is quite happy being a desert, to become well-watered farm fields or a busy market. He said the house being remade, all in akimbo, was an image for our marriage. He encouraged me to rest in that chaos because it would pass. His boss, our contractor pastored us through the difficult time, that comes with the decisions involved in remaking a house.
Lately, Iâve observed the quiet steadfastness of women who are committed to their husbands until death do them part despite the husband not being the easiest person to love. This through decades of marriage. Iâve seen what in sickness or health looks like.
This week in âMarriage as a Lifetime of Sufferingâ Stephen Freeman likened marriage to martyrdom. (Iâve heard scholar Father John Behr says the same thing.) He says:
The classical Christian marriage belongs to the genre of martyrdom. It is a commitment to death. As Hauerwas notes: faithfulness over the course of a life-time defines what it means to âloveâ someone. At the end of a faithful life, we may say of someone, âHe loved his wife.âÂ
Freeman discusses how our culture has entered a dark age, and how the Benedict Option, where Christians gather in small communities, might be a proper response, but because itâs a decades or even centuries long solution, we might not see them come to fruition. He says no matter what, we will suffer despite societyâs stamping its foot, saying we can avoid it.
Modern culture has emphasized suffering as undesirable and an object to be remedied. Our resources are devoted to the ending of suffering and not to its endurance. Of course, the abiding myth of Modernity is that suffering can be eliminated. This is neither true nor desirable.Â
Virtues of patience, endurance, sacrifice, selflessness, generosity, kindness, steadfastness, loyalty, and other such qualities are impossible without the presence of suffering. The Christian faith does not disparage the relief of suffering, but neither does it make it definitive for the acquisition of virtue. Christ is quite clear that all will suffer. Â It is pretty much the case that no good thing comes about in human society except through the voluntary suffering of some person or persons. The goodness in our lives is rooted in the grace of heroic actions.
Iâve seen these heroic actions in something as small as Bruce welcoming Aiden into our home, despite the fact heâs quite an imposition as a rambunctious puppy, and then offering to take Aiden for long walks in hopes he burns off his energy. Iâve seen it with a neighbor who visits her husband in the nursing home daily. And my other friend who is folding greeting cards for her husbandâs start up. Another friend tended her husband in late stages of Parkinson’s, working her schedule around his needs. These are all martyrs, witnesses, to the living practice of loving their neighbor who happens to be their spouse. They are as much emptied of self as the men saying prayers twenty-four seven in their monasteries. So my response to the woman who left her ugly one-eyed husband and became a fox, is big whoop.
What I Saw This Week
First thing, I walked Omalola when the sun broke the horizon. I hadnât reached the point where I could walk both pups down the road. That came a day later. The light scraped the clouds to the east with pink and orange. Then to the west I watched a faint pillar reach into the western sky. As the sun grew brighter, you could see all the colors. Then the full arch. There was no sun shower. Just heavy gray clouds. And the wide rolling soybean field, that had just been cut. I phoned Bruce to tell him to come look.
Often I wake afraid because chaos, because war, because outrage. God drowned the earth when he saw mankind had become utterly wicked. Back then the sons of God married the daughters of men and there were giants, mighty men of old. Paul Kingsnorth, citing Robert Bly, in Against the Machine has said we’ve taken on their spirit:Â
The Giant is a killer of fathers, destroyer of families, eater of children…It is the Giant–resentful, angry, greedy, marooned in a permanent present–who best represents what we have become, nearly three decades after Bly’s book was published. The culture of inversion is the Giant’s creation, and ours. Adolescent and surly, we can find little good in the past and little hope in the future. (142).Â
By culture of inversion Kingsnorth means how everything is upside down, how the elites want to eradicate western culture and tear down cultural norms. He says:
Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channeling is rage. In our perpetual sibling society–sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, Godless–we have forgotten how to behave like adults or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud. (146)
Civil war has come up in several conversations. I hop on Facebook and spark with outrage at what some people post, and hold back because anything I say will lead to insults, and arguments that go on for days. As I’ve said many times there’s more to people than their politics. Kingsnorth, again referring to Robert Bly, supports the futility of fighting.
In times of conflict, whether our weapons are pikes or words, the temptation is always toward total war. But war is the Giant’s work, and like the Giant it will consume us all if it can. ‘The inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,’wrote Robert Bly ‘cannot be called down by anger, They are called by extremely elaborate practice–and stories.’ (147)
And yet it was the bow set in the clouds that came with the promise that God would never again flood the earth, to wipe out mankind. Rainbows have been showing up frequently and I swear they contain the hope that “the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,” God himself will challenge us to turn from our wicked ways, what Kingsnorth says is doing the “hard work of growing up, rebuilding families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment” (147).
I thought of how the rainbow is the promise that God won’t drown the world to bring judgement, though He has warned of the earth and heavens set on fire at the end.  On this day, I felt there was more to the rainbow than the sun doing its refracting thing with water droplets, splitting light into colors.  The air was rich, heavy, redolent with presence. I thought of Ezekielâs vision of Godâs glory:
âand seated above the likeness of the throne was a likeness with a human appearance. And upward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. And downward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him like the appearance of the bow that is in the clouds on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking.â (Ezekiel 1: 27 â 28, ESV)
What if the âbrightness around him like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rainâ was there just as much as the arch I saw in the sky, only thank God I didnât see the brightness, I didnât fall down on my face, smashing my nose on the asphalt, Omalola barking up a storm. Thank God we see through a veil darkly but even so what if what St. Paul says is true, we are seated with Jesus, right here, right now? With that same brightness, that same glory. With the appearance of the bow that is in the clouds on the day of rain.
Bruce met me at the head of our road. Heâd seen it too. We both recited: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.
