The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  It was one clear moment in time. Like going to the Deep Ground that underlies all things and seeing, really seeing, what is and being pierced by the unbounded nature of it.

  The experience I had in my backyard revealed to me a new feminine consciousness that grows out of feminist spiritual awakenings, initiations, and groundings.

  It is first of all a consciousness of we, in which relationship with all that is is held in primacy. It is a consciousness of mystical oneness and interconnection. Second (and growing out of the first), it is a consciousness of resacralized nature, one in which the earth is alive and divine. And third, it is a consciousness of liberation, thrusting a woman into the struggle for value, dignity, and power for every human.

  What gives rise to these three layers of overlapping consciousness?

  Herself, of course.

  We-Consciousness

  We-consciousness is knowing and feeling oneself intimately connected with and part of everything that is, and coming to act and relate out of that awareness. It is experiencing oneself not as I, but as We. To carry this consciousness is to come to the bare mystery of it all, that we are all one in the universe.

  Beatrice Bruteau writes, “The question is: How big is your ‘we’?”34 Who knows, our future on this planet may hang on how we come to answer that question.

  For a long time we’ve lived under an illusion of separateness. We’ve lived as detached egos, unaware that we’re part of a vast fabric of being, a divine and communitarian oneness. Now we’re learning from the new sciences that the universe has actually been constructed as a We. Everything in creation—oceans, whales, mountains, humans, eagles, roses, giraffes, and viruses—is a dance of subatomic particles. Fields of energy flow and mingle together. They are all stitched into the cosmic quilt, which underlies and gives rise to everything.

  When we relate to Herself, we’re inviting a new force to bring us into relationship with this whole. Goddess is that which unites, connects, and affirms the interrelatedness of all life, all people. Being related is at the core of Divine Feminine Being. She is the dance of relation, the mystery of the Divine communing with Herself in all things.

  Connectedness is intrinsic in female life, and certainly when we envision the Divine as female we release a new and unique emphasis on relationship.

  Her love is primarily envisioned as Mother love, a love that, as Sallie McFague argues, is unifying and reuniting, nonhierarchal and inclusive.35 Despite loving descriptions of Father God in the scriptures, our perception of Father love has sometimes retained a kind of distance about it. This distance emanates from the classical approach to theology that dominated until modern times. Called theism, it shaped many of our ideas about how God relates to the world. Theism held that God was basically unrelated to the earth and should not be identified with the world. “He” was beyond it, over it. In theism God is distant, at the top of a heavenly hierarchy—the ruling king high in heaven. We’re all familiar with the image of God as the white-bearded man on a throne in the sky. Theism emphasized God’s transcendence, “his” untouchability, dominance, power, kingship, and judgeship.

  This view has broken down considerably in present-day theologies, but nevertheless, Father love has often retained a faint theistic tone.

  The world has not really tried divine love as Mother love. But when it does, divine love may break upon us with fresh and unexpected intimacy, shattering these theistic traces in a dramatic way.

  I know of nothing needed more in the world just now than an image of Divine presence that affirms the importance of relationship—a Divine Mother, perhaps, who draws all humanity into her lap and makes us into a global family. Many have suggested that having only parental models of the Divine works to idealize and overemphasize our role as children, fostering dependent and infantile patterns rather than full, responsible personhood. Considering that, we could also image a Female Friend, whose model of relating is symbolized by a web of interconnection. We could also consider the Divine as Sister, seeing her in the mutual dance of love that is ideally reflected between sisters.

  I remember the aftermath of the fights I had with my brothers when I was a girl, the way my mother would draw us together and say, as if introducing us to one another, “This is your brother. And this is your sister. No matter how angry you get, there’s nothing as important as that.”

  She would make us stand there without speaking and gaze into each other’s faces for a whole two minutes without looking away, and it would become impossible not to take him in, not to grin at him and understand that he was my brother. And what mattered next to that?

  This is what feminine love does. It reunites us with each other, with nature, with the whole. It causes us to look deep into the face of whatever is before us and understand that it is our very sister we are gazing upon. And more than that, it is our very selves.

  The fact is, we all come from the same womb and are related in ways we haven’t yet allowed ourselves to experience. Through the body parable of pregnancy we learn how our lives indwell one another. As one spiritual feminist wrote, “Certainly the distinction between me and not me becomes a little blurry, to say the least, when one is inhabited as a mother.”36 We-consciousness means carrying that pregnant sense of being spiritually inhabited.

  I had a memorable experience of we-consciousness breaking through one rainy afternoon in my study. Spring had almost gone, and I was primed with nearly a year of grounding myself in Divine Feminine imagery. I was reading an interview with philosopher Jean Houston. She referred to her work with dolphins, pointing out that they have evolved millions of years more than humans, that they don’t have wars or attack each other, and that they don’t experience the levels of anxiety we do. She said dolphins do real work, use language, play using a high degree of whimsicality, and even seem to reflect on death, exhibiting high concern when one of their members dies. All this was quite interesting, but then Houston said something that totally captivated me. She said there seems to be evidence dolphins are beaching themselves out of despair when caught in polluted water.

  Suddenly I was engulfed by an image—dolphins despairing, weeping over what humans are doing to their waters. I sat still, gazing through the window, my heart starting to burn in a strange way. I tried to imagine what it was like to be a dolphin. I took myself out of the skin-encapsulated ego I often walked around in and placed myself in the sleek body of a dolphin. I imagined swimming waters laced with drift gill netting, poisoned with billions of tons of toxic waste, oil, and sewage.

  Some weeks later I read Susan Griffin’s lines about a red-winged blackbird: “I fly with her, enter her with my mind, leave myself, die for an instant, live in the body of this bird whom I cannot live without . . . because I know I am made from this earth as my mother’s hands were made from this earth.”37

  I had entered that same elusive place inside where consciousness overlaps and boundaries dissolve. Grief boiled up. Tears curved under my chin. I felt a deep and holy connection with dolphins that startled me with its intensity. I had, as the mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg put it, lay down in fire.

  I began to wonder why I’d ignored the earth, the despoiling of oceans, and the plight of dolphins so long. Was it because I’d become so locked in a narrow ego-consciousness that I failed to understand that dolphins and I came from the same stuff of life and were linked more deeply than my wildest imaginings? Had I existed so long in a culture of hierarchies, which fostered a sense of estrangement from the earth, that I’d lost the ability to feel and identify with the rest of the planet? Had my own Western Christian roots, with their deeply embedded separations of spirit and matter, created a rift between myself and the natural world? Probably it was all these things.

  One day not long after this experience, in one of those odd, synchronistic moments that can only be acknowledged, not explained, I walked into the den and saw my daughter, Ann, watching television with tears in her eyes. On the screen was a fishing boat carrying a garbage heap of
dead dolphins that had been trapped in drift gill netting for tuna. The dead dolphins were being tossed overboard, while the dolphins who had escaped the nets bobbed beside the boat, watching and making an eerie, wailing sound almost like crying. And there it was: an actual image of weeping dolphins.

  You know the feeling you get when you stumble on a moment like that, like some great mystery has brushed your shoulder? I stood there and watched Ann crying with the dolphins, discovering her own primal connection to the earth. I sat beside her and touched my finger to her tears. I was trying to say, “I understand. The suffering aches in my heart, also.” She nodded at me. She understood.38

  More and more I found my illusions of separateness crumbling. I was feeling my connection to the earth, my compassion for it, sometimes like a raging empathy. I find such fierceness in the poet Susan Griffin, especially in this, my most beloved passage of hers:

  This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am how we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.39

  As the symbol of Goddess begins to function, we will wake to the knowledge that we are connected with everything in a deeper way than we’ve imagined. It will free a new valuing of the force that moves us into relationship with everything else.

  I have a carving that I bought in 1974 while in East Africa. It’s called an uaa out of rich, black ebony. The color of the wood and her skin were nearly identical shades, and the totem was the same circumference as her forearm. When she held the carving in her hand, it almost looked as if she was carving an extension of her own arm. I asked her, “Is that your family group you’re carving?”

  “No,” she said. “This one is the family of Mungu.”

  Mungu is Swahili for “the Divine.” I looked at her with surprise, but she only smiled through very old eyes. Perhaps you would like to know what the Divine’s family looks like. Picture a fifteen-inch totem. Squatting at the base are five pregnant women in a cluster. On top of them are four more pregnant women and on top of them four more.

  I bought the carving, thinking it would make an interesting conversation piece. When I returned to the United States, the ujamaa sat on a shelf and people asked about it. Eventually, though, I packed it away.

  Then during the summer when we-consciousness was erupting and breaking down the old partitions in my life, I opened a box in the back of a storage closet and found the carving again. I turned it around and around, seeing for the first time what the old woman meant about it being Mungu’s family. I saw how inextricably linked all these figures were, how they grew out of one another—their heads joined, their faces blending, this one’s foot flowing from that one’s hand, and all their arms wrapped around one another like vines circling a great tree.

  In her art the African woman introduced a new origin myth for me, one that shifted my inward reference point further from me to we. Holding the ujamaa, I thought: Maybe the Divine One is like an old African woman, carving creation out of one vast, beautiful piece of Herself. She is making a universal totem spanning fifteen billion years, an extension of her life and being, an evolutionary carving of sacred art containing humans, animals, plants, indeed, everything that is. And all of it is joined, blended, and connected, its destiny intertwined.40

  Resacralizing Earth and Body

  After the dolphin experience, I had begun to spend more time in the natural world. I started placing things on my altar that I found outside or during trips to the woods, mountains, and beaches of the Carolinas. Rocks, shells, feathers, driftwood, seedpods, a snake skin, a turtle shell, pieces of bark.

  As summer gave way to autumn, Ann wandered into my study. She pointed to the Minoan Goddess who stood on my altar next to the brass Jesus-Sophia. “Who’s she?”

  So I told her she was a symbol, an image in which to glimpse the Divine Feminine.

  “And what about these rocks and things?”

  “Same with them,” I said. “They show me the Divine, too.”

  As we interact with Divine Feminine symbols, as we related to the world with a new sense of connection, we often experience a second wave of feminine spiritual consciousness. We come to recognize the innate holiness of the earth, the sacred dwelling in nature, matter, and body. We understand these things are not only creations of the Divine but manifestations of the Divine. We see that nature is a dance and Divine Reality is the dancer.

  In other words, the Divine coinheres all that is. Coinhere is a fancy word but is closest to capturing the meaning I intend. To coinhere means to exist together, to be included in the same thing or substance.

  As the months went by, I began to embrace a vision in which the fullness of the Divine penetrates the whole universe. But I also saw the Divine as more than the universe, distinct and unexhausted by it. To see the Divine as encompassed by the universe is pantheism; to see the Divine as expressed by but also larger than the universe is panentheism, a middle ground between pure pantheism and pure theism. The feminine offers us this middle ground.

  As I indicated earlier, the feminine carries an old and deeply entwined connection with nature, body, and earth. Women’s experience has been largely invested in these things as we go through menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. We’ve also traditionally been the ones involved in the earthy matters of caring for children, cleaning up bodily excrements, and nursing the sick and dying. If, then, we envision the Divine as female—a symbol that incorporates nature, body, and matter—then as a people we will come to honor the feminine, nature, body, and earth. A Divine Feminine symbol renders obsolete the old idea that these things are outside the realm of divinity. It begins to shift thousands of years of dualistic thinking, setting up a new mandate for the divinity of the earth and the holiness of the body.

  That fall I noticed the phrase divine immanence started turning up a lot in my journal. Patriarchy has majored in divine transcendence, which means separateness from the material universe—being above, beyond, or apart from it. Divine immanence, on the other hand, is divinity here, near and now, inherent in the material stuff of life.

  It occurred to me that patriarchy’s emphasis on transcendence grew out of a flight from death. It sought to transcend death by transcending body and nature, which inevitably die and decay. “To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment,” says scholar Andrew Harvey.41 Is it any wonder, then, that patriarchy fears and negates the feminine?

  Restoring the feminine symbol of Deity means that divinity will no longer be only heavenly, other, out there, up there, beyond time and space, beyond body and death. It will also be right here, right now, in me, in the earth, in this river and this rock, in excrement and roses alike. Divinity will be in the body, in the cycles of life and death, in the moment of decay and the moment of lovemaking.

  I love this statement by Andrew Harvey:

  Everyone has known something in lovemaking of the great lovemaking of the universe. Every-one who has ever had one tender orgasm with someone else has known something of the divine. The divine is in everything foaming around everywhere. We’re all in connection with it, but we’ve not been given permission. . . . We’ve not been taught how to understand our glimpses and how to follow them.42

  The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual, dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is—the nice, sanitary, harmonious moments as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.

  If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth
and the cells of our bodies, and we will love her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.

  I remember a moment when that happened to me. We were in Crete on the far, southern side of the island, gathered on a remote stretch of beach. We’d had a long hike up a mountain, and now, tired and hot, with the sun setting and our feet aching, a few of the women began to peel off their clothes for a swim.

  The beach was strewn with a billion rocks of all sizes, and I was combing through them at the water’s edge when I happened to look up. A number of the women, most over fifty, moved toward the sea, picking their way together over the rocks, holding hands to help steady one another. Their bodies were nude, sculpted by long years of life and love. Full breasts, prolapsed breasts, Venus of Willendorf thighs, dimpled thighs, skinny thighs, gray hair, brown hair, puckering veins, silver scars, taut bellies, bellies stretched out from bearing children. They moved together, laughing, and I was touched by how beautiful they were. It was like a transubstantiation on the beach, the “real presence” coming into their flesh.

  As I grounded myself in feminine spiritual experience, that fall I was initiated into my body in a deeper way. I came to know myself as an embodiment of Goddess. This awareness, so crucial to women’s development, has been shut away from us. In Christianity God came in a male body. Within the history and traditions of patriarchy, women’s bodies did not belong to themselves but to their husbands. We learned to hate our bodies if they didn’t conform to an ideal, to despise the cycles of menstruation—“the curse,” it was called. Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame.

  Waking to the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to “enter into” her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music. She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred. She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head. Such a woman conveys a formidable presence because power resides in her body. The bodies of such women, instead of being groomed to some external standard, are penetrated with soul, quickened from the inside.