The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  I do not think in words so much as in pictures, and the image that often came to me as I was cloistered away in that small inn was a wind sock, hanging still and empty on some lonely stretch of land. I could see myself as the wind sock. The prevailing wind, the identity and meaning that had filled me like a gale-blown force, had died away. Unable now to point the direction, I felt emptied of my meaning, unable to know the shape of myself.

  I wept at the possibility of losing my marriage, my career, at the vulnerability of shedding my daughterhood, the loss of religious alignment.

  My perception of the Divine had proved rigid, inadequate. Western Christian patriarchal boxes could not hold it. The Divine was more of an unmapped mystery than I’d fathomed. Yet as expansive as that might sound, I did not lose the accustomed symbols of my religion without grief. Also, the thought of forfeiting my dependence on masculine validation and giving up salvation through male saviors left me feeling alone and denuded, thrown back completely on myself.

  I’d struggled to come to terms with my feminine woundedness. I was aware of my lost feminine standpoint and the severed connection to my feminine soul. I sensed how my exclusive identification with a Father in heaven had encouraged my estrangement from my female self, from earth, nature, Mother, and the wisdom and validation of these things. Patriarchy had created a world where spirit is split from body, humans from nature, and natural from divine, and I could feel those splits in myself.

  I mourned those gaping holes. During those isolated days I sometimes stood before the mirror, inwardly saying the first of many goodbyes to the woman I had been.

  In crossing the unexplored gorge (an act that cannot be accomplished in several days, to be sure, but can take months and years), our task is to surrender to the experience and make the descent consciously, with intention and awareness. We will need to let the old forms break, giving up our identity as spiritual daughters of patriarchy and learning to say good-bye.

  In the trek across the gorge, we often scan about for shortcuts. During that period, I often wished some wise woman who’d been there before me would appear and tell me how to zip through it. If she had, though, she probably would have admonished me to give up seeking a shortcut and just be where I was.

  There is deep wisdom in giving up the fight to make it go away. When we instead come home to our path, we come home to what is. You are where you are. So be there. Stop trying to protect yourself from the harshness of right now, fleeing into a long fabrication about how it’s going to be one day. That’s a way of avoiding the here-and-now truth of our lives.

  Women who want to be grown-up women will have to come to a blatant self-acceptance. I think the wise woman, if she had appeared, would have said, “Don’t try to leap over yourself. Just accept what is and be with it, really be with it, because when you do that you are being in the moment, in the truth. You are being present as you live your life.” In the end, is there anything else?

  In an old Sumerian myth, the Goddess Inanna, making a descent to the underworld, moves through seven gates. At each gate she must strip a piece of her clothing away until at last she is naked, arriving without any of her former trappings. At the depth of her descent she is turned into a piece of meat and hung on a meat hook for several days before being resurrected as a woman.

  I’ve often wondered if that’s where we get the idea of wanting to be “let off the hook.” Those days at the inn were my meat hook (one of many), and a lot of the time I wanted someone to come and get me off it. But I also began in bits and pieces to be present while I lived my life, to stay on the hook despite the sense of loss and unmeaning I felt.

  Holding onto the circle of trees helped me stay there.

  Even when my sense of losing everything, of disappearing into nothing, was at its most vivid, the image of the circle of trees appeared and reappeared. Once when I fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon I dreamed of it. On waking, I drew the first of many circles of trees in my journal, strengthening the hope that I could create a sacred and vital space in which to be free as a woman and unfold my feminine journey.

  My last morning at the inn I rose early and went downstairs for breakfast. I gazed through the window across the square, where dozens and dozens of Chinese Americans moved in slow motion under the trees. They were doing tai chi, a form of exercise as exquisite as ballet. Compelled, I walked across the street and sat beneath a tree to watch.

  Jean Shinoda Bolen has written that when we’re at significant junctures of transition, outer events and meetings are often filled with messages that should be heeded. That was the case as I fixed my eyes on a lone Chinese woman among a sea of men. A striking elderly woman, she had deeply wrinkled skin and long graying hair that had slipped partially from its coil.

  The group was copying the movements of a leader out front, following them with rigid exactness. But with bold improvisations all her own, the old woman ignored the rest and moved spontaneously to a soundless music inside herself. Wildly out of sync, she danced her own dance and no one else’s. This woman has heard the flute, I thought. And for the first time during that interval of pain, I smiled.

  I watched until the class had finished and she had gone. What was it about her? I realized suddenly that she reminded me of the old woman in my dreams, the one who’d come with the snake-twined walking stick, bidding me to follow my own feminine path instead of a male-defined way.

  I remained sitting there a long while. For days my thoughts and feelings had been like shards of glass flying in all directions, but now they came together, forming something solid and singular, an unimpeachable knowing: What I was experiencing was okay; I was okay feeling it; and moving to the soundless music inside, even when that music became a symphony of pain, was necessary and beautiful.

  An energy rose in me from down under, the kind of energy that sends flowers and grass through cracks in the driveway. I told myself this: Whatever time it takes for the old patterns to die and the birth of a new feminine consciousness, I would allow it. I would not, could not forfeit my journey for my marriage or for the sake of religious acceptance or success as a “Christian writer.” I would keep moving in my own way to the strains of feminine music that sifted up inside me, not just moving but embracing the dance. I knew that by being here in my solitary descent I had already begun to create a circle of trees and that I would go on creating it.

  My descent didn’t abruptly end here, though I found the sense of loss and fear lessening for a while. Descent would continue for many months as I traveled new places in the gorge.

  It is worth noting that rarely is any awareness or process on this journey a one-time event. We seem to return to it over and over, each time integrating it a bit more fully, owning it a little more deeply. I may be laying out the general contours of the feminine spiritual process, but there are no neat, clear-cut lines where one phase precisely ends and the next begins. Each woman has her own timing and her own way. The passages she takes will overlap and spiral around, only to be experienced again.

  OPENING TO THE FEMININE DIVINE

  The afternoon after encountering the Chinese woman, I made my way to Mercy Center in Burlingame for a quick visit before returning home. As I came into the entryway—a shadowed, still room deserted of people—I found myself gazing at a large picture, one I’d never seen before. It was a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s Cartoon of St. Anne.

  I felt a quickening sensation in my body, a soft current that spread from my belly up through my breasts and down my arms. Jean Shinoda Bolen calls the sensation “a sensory intuition” or “tuning fork phenomenon.” It may occur when something deep inside us responds with an instinctual awareness to sacred moments and events. Feminine knowing often registers in the body even before the mind.

  The picture portrayed a great, flashing-eyed woman whose immense lap held both Mary and Christ. I felt I was looking at an image of the Divine Feminine, the Great Mother, for the woman in the picture seemed to birth, contain, and encompass everything,
even the male savior.9

  Standing there, I felt a deep, magnetic awareness of her.

  When we truly grasp for the first time that the symbol of woman can be a vessel of the sacred, that it too can be an image of the Divine, our lives will begin to pivot.

  Today a lot of women are seeking feminine imagery of the Divine. More women than we can imagine have embarked on the quest, enough women to set in motion a whole shift in our religious paradigm. I’ve met countless numbers of these women—married, divorced, and single, some of them Christian theologians and ministers but also insurance agents, real estate agents, nurses, students, psychologists, travel agents, schoolteachers, mothers who stay home and work, artists, writers, accountants, to only name a few—all of whom are talking passionately about the return of Mother God or Sophia or Goddess. I’ve been struck by how these women’s lives are anchored in the “real” world, how bright and unique yet ordinary they are. The Divine Feminine is returning to collective consciousness, all right. She’s coming, and it will happen whether we’re ready or not.

  That day at Mercy Center, I studied the picture a long time. The lap dominated the image. It seemed to me like a sacred space, another circle of trees, a place of loving containment and feminine embrace where a woman could be reborn.

  I carried that image with me on the plane home. The whole way I had that feeling you get inside when you stop swimming salmon-backward against yourself and yield to your own internal flow. But I knew it didn’t necessarily mean everything around me would coincide. I kept thinking of my husband.

  Sandy met me at the airport and he held me tightly for a very long time. Then on the forty-minute drive home, he asked about my trip. I did not hold back. I told him how I’d felt at the inn, about the Chinese woman, the painting at Mercy Center.

  The car filled with silence, but I could see in his face that he was struggling to get something out. “While you were gone, I was thinking,” he said. “I realized I’ve been so invested in maintaining everything exactly as it is, I couldn’t allow your experience.”

  My eyes widened.

  He didn’t say much else, and I knew that he didn’t really understand what I was doing and maybe would never be at peace with this journey of mine. And although neither of us knew whether things would work out in the end, because there are never guarantees, I knew that right now he wanted to try. And for me it was enough.

  Sometimes you get very unexpected gifts.

  I think of the dictum that when one person in a relationship starts to become conscious, the other is compelled to become conscious, too. Awakening precipitates awakening, and sometimes a woman’s dogged groping for enlightenment and wholeness will ignite the process in her mate (or vice versa). But it’s not always so. There has to be enough wick present—enough willingness, openness, pliability, and grace—to receive the flame.

  Women should not be naïve: wicks, wind, and fire are uncertain business. Sometimes rigidity and resistance are too encrusted and the relationship cannot survive the changes going on in a woman. No matter the patience, love, and consciousness brought to bear, it may happen that the relationship simply cannot break through to a new place. I’ve met women who in such circumstances have stayed and others who’ve left. Such choices are achingly difficult, and I’ve learned to respect whatever a woman feels she must do.

  Sandy’s transformation began with that tiny pivot of consciousness he described that day in the car. Over the next few years, I watched a slow but dramatic evolution unfold in him. I watched with stupefaction and awe. I will not say much about it because it is his story, not mine, to tell, but as time went by he, too, was thrust into soul-searching. He began to look at the roots from which his own life sprang. He came to see, and I did, too, that patriarchy wounds men also, that men have their own journeys to make in order to heal and differentiate themselves from it.

  He began a spiritual and psychological journey of his own. He began to open up in new ways, to read new books, to ask new questions, to change and grow. After a lot of struggle, he came to support an egalitarian and feminist vision, not in name only, but in the way he lived and related. And he came to support me.

  Feminist writer Naomi Wolf sums up what is happening as men make this choice:

  The world of men is dividing into egalitarians and patriarchalists—those men who are trying to learn the language and customs of the newly emerging world, and those who are determined to keep that new order from taking root. The former group welcomes these changes, seeing that though they are painful in the short term, over the long term they provide the only route to intimacy and peace. But the latter group sees only loss. . . . The patriarchalists’ world view, shared by women as well as men, is battling the emerging egalitarian world view, which is also shared by people of both sexes.10

  After nearly fifteen years as a teacher and chaplain on a college campus, my husband returned to school and obtained his credentials as a licensed psychotherapist. Today, in a private counseling practice, he has a particular sensitivity to helping couples face the changes that are inevitable in the life of souls and relationships.

  That’s how it turned out in the end, but in the first months after my return from California, we experienced doubt and tension. I woke every day to uncertainty about my marriage. We found ourselves standing at the site of a leveled relationship, one we ourselves had purposely collapsed from top to bottom like those old buildings that explosive experts bring down in a cloud of dust and applause in order to make way for new construction.

  A marriage or any relationship between partners is meant to be created and then re-created. It is an edifice a couple builds until the day the edifice can no longer hold them and they must bring it down and start again from scratch. And without any of the old assumptions. It’s exactly like Carolyn Heilbrun says, all good marriages are remarriages.11

  Psychologist Jean Baker Miller, who has done extensive research on women’s development, has written about “a growth-fostering relationship” as having five characteristics. She says that in the relationship:

  1.Each person feels a greater sense of zest (vitality, energy).

  2.Each person feels more able to act and does act.

  3.Each person has a more accurate picture of herself or himself and the other person.

  4.Each person feels a greater sense of worth.

  5.Each person feels more connected to the other person and a greater motivation for connections with other people beyond those in the specific relationship.12

  Though it was slow, hazardous, and often exasperating work, Sandy and I worked to undo the old marriage and create a new one stripped of the old dependencies and patriarchal set-up, a growth-inducing relationship that offered each of us freedom to choose and be, that not only allowed for but enhanced the soul in each of us.

  A Ritual of Intention

  The April following my trip to California, I went on an overnight speaking trip and invited my friend Betty to come along. I was eager for time to talk. We spent a lot of the trip sharing stories and mulling over the growing feminist consciousness we were both experiencing, wondering how to create a spiritual path that would allow for it.

  As we were driving home, the top down on Betty’s convertible and the two of us full of excitement about our discussions, we approached a lake and she suddenly pulled the car off the road. The sun was about to set, and a sheet of burned light stretched across its surface. “We’ve talked for two days. It’s time to do something about all this,” she said.

  We decided we would create an impromptu ritual. Right there, on the spot. Two long-stemmed red roses lay on the seat between us, a gift from someone who’d come to hear me speak, and in Betty’s purse we found a vial of perfume. They were the only ritual objects we could come up with. We carried them down a slope of trees to the edge of the lake.

  Standing there in our heels and dress-up clothes, without any particular idea about how it would unfold, we spoke of our need and desire to know and relate to a Po
wer of Being that was feminine in essence, to graft back what had been excised and absent from our spiritual lives. We asked the Feminine Divine to welcome us as her own. To guide us. To bless our launching.

  We sprinkled the perfume on the water and tossed the roses onto the lake. We did this in silence, then watched the roses float across the water, moving farther than we would have imagined. In that act, we ritualized our intention to cast ourselves upon a new life, to cross to a new shore.

  As we returned to the car and drove on, I felt almost buoyant. I remember thinking that I would ever after mark that event along with the one at Mercy Center as the advent of Her into my life.

  It was my first creation of ritual. And now, after so many other creations, I still cannot understand how they are able to alter my consciousness in such remarkable ways. I don’t really try. I am glad to let certain mysteries be mysteries. I simply know that rituals performed consciously can be powerful catalysts of change. They can be moments of integration, making something suddenly clear, making us stronger inside, opening up unknown places within us and imbuing new meaning.

  CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

  A couple weeks later Betty and I were driving together once again, this time through the low country of South Carolina, when we happened upon a sign that said “Springbank Retreat Center.” I was on my way to another speaking engagement but had some extra time, so we turned off the main road and wound back into solitary woodlands, a land of gnarled oaks draped with floating moss. We stopped before a two-story white columned house.

  I looked at Betty. She looked at me. Our eyes said, “What have we found?”

  A Catholic sister met us at the door, introduced herself as Kathleen, and happily showed us around. Once a plantation during the Civil War, the place was now a center for spiritual retreat run by a small group of sisters. They had created an open, safe space that embraced the creation spirituality of theologian Matthew Fox and honored feminine and Native American spiritualities, ecology, and contemplation.