It was the purest inner knowing I had experienced, and it was shouting in me, no, no, no! The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.
I waited. Lightning did not strike. I looked around to see if people were staring. I was sure I must have said the word no! out loud, but everyone seemed properly engrossed in the sermon. One woman was nodding in agreement with the minister, nodding so profusely that I saw the depth of my heresy by comparison.
Later I would think of Ibsen’s play A Doll House, how Nora had done the same thing. At the point when she decides to go away and discover her own life, her husband asks, “Have you no religion?”
Nora answers,
I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is. . . . I know nothing but what the clergyman said. . . . He told us religion was this, and that, and the other. When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events, if it is true for me.58
This is a stupendous moment for a woman—when she decides to live from her own inner guidance. It is, however, excruciatingly hard for a patriarchal daughter to accomplish. She may have to do it, as I did, in stages.
What is held over her head is condemnation, even damnation. We’ve been led to believe that leaving the circle of orthodoxy means leaving the realm of truth. Typically the church has considerable stake in our staying in the orthodox circle. It knows if we claim ultimate authority as something in ourselves, as some inchoate voice in our own souls, it has lost all power over us. We have rendered ourselves independent, outside its control. We have stepped out onto our own path. For some reason this scares people senseless.
It terrified me just pondering it.
Women grow afraid at this moment because it means giving up a world where everything is neat and safe. In that world we feel secure, taken care of; we know where we’re going. Then we wake up and find the old way doesn’t work, that it no longer fits our identity, that by clinging to it, we’re cutting ourselves off from something profound. But we cling anyway because it’s all we’ve got. We call our desire for security loyalty. We yearn for the something we’ve lost as women, but it’s so unknown, so unbearably unknown. And then one day it all comes down to this: Can we trust ourselves, our inmost selves, our feminine wisdom?
That day sitting in church, I believed the voice in my belly. “[The female soul] resides in the guts, not in the head,” wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés.59 I think that morning my female soul was shouting for her life.
I asked myself, How many times have I denied my innermost wisdom and silenced this voice? How many times can a woman betray her soul before it gives up and ceases calling to her at all?
My heart pounded throughout the rest of the sermon. When we stood for the closing hymn, I slipped out of the pew and descended the steps two at a time, holding onto the rail, trying to steady my impulse to bolt from the place. It was like that feeling of being underwater and scrambling for the surface, for air. Thirty-nine years in the fish tank had caught up with me.
I walked toward the exit sign, my eyes locked on it.
As I passed through the front door, light and wind hit my face along with the scent of pine and wood smoke. The sun was glinting off everything—trees, sidewalk, car windshields. For a few seconds I stood on the steps, taking in breaths of air like I was storing it up.
I waited in the car for the children. Sitting there, staring up at the church steeple, I remembered the dream I’d had—the old woman supported by her stick with the snake spiraling around it. I recognized her then as the image of my female wisdom. I also thought about Wisdom in the Bible, the feminine aspect of God who is personified as a woman. I knew practically nothing about her, but I resolved I would find out.
The voice in my belly was the voice of the wise old woman. It was my female soul talking. And it had challenged the assumption that the Baptist Church would get me where I needed to go. She was saying that by clinging to that steeple, I was somehow living against my female soul.
I eventually came to see that she was also challenging the androcentrism of the entire Christian Church, its singular aim toward a male God in the sky. She was challenging the way it took me away from earth, matter, and the feminine ground of my being, fueling a dualism that had split me in two.
“I’m not going back,” I told my husband.
It was late Sunday afternoon. He was on the patio filling the dog’s water bowl with the garden hose. He thought I meant I wasn’t going back for the evening service.
“Fine,” he said.
“No, I mean I’m never going back.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me. The water ran over the sides of the bowl. I walked over and turned off the spigot.
“I can’t explain it exactly,” I said. “I just know I don’t belong there. I have to leave. I’ve decided to join the Episcopal Church.”
He was very uneasy, weighing everything he said. “If you think that’s best. I guess you have to do what you think is best.”
The Dam Breaks
The following March I was confirmed into the Episcopal Church. Of course, patriarchy was there, too. But leaving the Baptist Church was an important first step for me. It was an exercise in letting go, in trusting my Feminine Wisdom, trusting myself. I needed to do that, to know I could do that.
But looking back, I think some half-conscious part of me was also seeking a last-ditch way to make it all work. Moving into the Episcopal Church, I was looking for a more compatible circle of orthodoxy. I thought if I could be surrounded by the liturgies, rituals, and Eucharist—the things I had missed in an evangelical church, maybe that would fix everything. Maybe it would be enough.
So I plunged in. I went to the Episcopal Church regularly. I taught a class. I tried to focus on the ancient beauty within the Eucharist. I tried to connect with the sacredness of the liturgy. I knelt in the pew and crossed myself and tried very hard. I kept whispering to myself, Maybe I can find a way to live within patriarchal hierarchy and theology, take the good, ignore the rest. I won’t think too much about what’s not here. It will be okay, it really will.
And in the newness of it, in my determination, I drank up the beauty and sacredness of the experience.
Plus, there were the children to consider. They were, for me, the biggest concern of all. One evening that spring I paused in the doorway of the kitchen and watched them—Ann sitting on the floor doing homework, Bob busy with a video game. I’d explained my decision to them to attend a different church, and they’d been fine with it. In fact, the whole family had come with me at times. And in the years ahead, Sandy and the children would become confirmed in the Episcopal Church themselves. But what if I challenged that institution? Not setting the “proper and accepted” religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn’t the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?
As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.
As summer came and went, I noticed my sense of betrayal had not diminished. Sitting in church listening to liturgies that excluded the feminine, feelings of restlessness, alienation, and anger began to well up again. I began to yearn for a sacred environment that could help me remember my deep feminine self.
One day, finding myself at a luncheon with a male Episcopal priest, I bravely (maybe even naïvely) explained my feelings about women and the church. He patted m
y hand. He said, “It’s counterproductive to get hung up on side issues like that.”
End of discussion.
Autumn came. I kept trying. But Sunday after Sunday I sat in church feeling a little like the Dutch boy with his finger plugging the dam. It seemed like I was holding back a reservoir of doubt, pain, and disillusionment.
One cold Sunday morning full of wind and flight, I went to church as usual. I sat on the last pew. I asked myself, Since when is women’s spiritual well-being a “side issue”? Where is the feminine standpoint in this service? Where are the earth, nature, Mother? Where are the power and celebration of women?
The dam broke.
I knew right then and there that the patriarchal church was no longer working for me. The exclusive image of God as heavenly Father wasn’t working, either. I needed a Power of Being that was also feminine. I needed a sacred space free of the stain of sexism with core imagery that embraced the feminine, a space that welcomed women to places of power, engaged them fully as equals, and helped to heal their wound and empower their lives.
Nearly one hundred years earlier Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the mothers of women’s suffrage, wrote, “With faith and works [woman] is the chief support of the church and clergy; the very powers that make her emancipation impossible.”60
I sat quietly on the pew. I knew that despite how unthinkable and forbidden it was, I needed to move beyond religion in a patriarchal institution. This may not be true for every woman. But for me it was crucial to my spiritual maturity and growth. At that moment I took sole responsibility for my spiritual life.
I went home with clarity about my feelings but frightened by them nevertheless.
Marriage and Spiritual Autonomy
My husband noticed my preoccupation. “Something on your mind?” he asked. When I finished telling him, I think he felt like the dam water had rolled over him, too.
He’d been seemingly open, if a little reluctant, about my awakening experience thus far, but now he objected with the finality of a slammed door.
“I just wish you’d stop all this,” he said.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“You know, this whole feminist thing.”
He felt threatened; I could recognize that even then. He didn’t want anything in our comfortable world to change.
The next few weeks I struggled to stand my ground, the unfamiliar new soil of defiance. I was becoming more certain that I couldn’t stay married in the same way. Not in a relationship built on patriarchal values. I was asking myself, What will happen to this marriage if I claim real autonomy? How can I blend my spiritual quest as a woman with my marriage?
During that time I was reading the journals of May Sarton. One day I came across this wise passage:
[Women] have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves. . . . This cannot be done against men, and that’s the real problem. . . . It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.61
I adopted this as my guide, but it was difficult not to fall into adversarial confrontations. Over and over, out of his own fear, Sandy tried to talk me out of the powerful feelings erupting into my life. He would become logical, then angry, then frustrated. I think deep down he expected me to defer to his wishes.
In her poem “Cinderella,” Anne Sexton suggests how far a woman will go for the prince. Drawing on Grimm’s rather than Disney’s version of the fairy tale, she records how Cinderella’s sisters excitedly try on the glass slipper. When they find their feet too large, the eldest sister slices off her big toe in order to fit into it. The other sister chops off her heel.62 I did not want to amputate the new growth happening inside me, yet wearing the prince’s slipper seemed to demand it.
As a woman, I’d stuffed my foot into all kinds of slippers that assured me of winning patriarchy’s love. When the cultural father told me I should be sweet, deferring, passive, silent, and secondary, I’d accepted those shoes and felt obliged to limp around in them for decades. When the church told me God was male only and relegated women to the peripheries, I’d sliced off a toe and put on that stance, too. When the priest told me not to get hung up on the side issue of women, I’d taken on that standpoint (for a brief while anyway). Now it seemed my husband wanted me to cut away one of the most vital awakenings in my life in order to go on being the good princess.
Years later a friend said to me, “When a conventional wife with a conventional husband experiences a feminist awakening, there is bound to be a marital explosion.”
Now the explosion had come, and I kept telling him the matter was not man against woman or Sue against Sandy. Rather, it was change against stasis, freedom against control.
It was only at night when I lay in the darkness and thought about my marriage that I doubted myself. Beneath all my brave pronouncements, part of me could not imagine risking my marriage. There had to be a way through this.
But it wasn’t only my marriage that held me back. I began to glimpse the chasm that lay between the inclinations of my soul and my ability to carry them out. I had had a clear, pure moment of knowing that compelled me to risk my religion and move beyond patriarchy at church and within my spiritual life, but actually doing it? Now that was something else altogether. And my career—could I actually risk that?
Yet, I was withering within these things. Internally I felt trapped.
Leaving the Jar
While entangled in these feelings, I happened to hear about an experiment in which flies were sealed in an aerated jar and left for an extended period of time. Finally the lid on the jar was removed, but—strange thing—the flies did not try to leave. Well conditioned by now, they no longer looked for the exit. They just kept circling the tight perimeters of the glass, going in their familiar patterns. Their reality had shrunk to that jar. It had become their entire world. It had become safe. Life beyond it had ceased to exist.
I’m in the jar, I thought.
I hadn’t been able to leave the tight perimeters of the old, confining way of being a woman. It had been my entire world, and I questioned whether I could live beyond its safety. Unlike the flies, however, I knew the lid was off. I’d struggled, myself, to open it, but now that I had, I couldn’t seem to muster the daring and insurgent energy I needed to fly. It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it, that a woman can prefer the safety of cages to the hazards of freedom?
Throughout the previous two years, my awakening had shown me new truths about my religion, my life, and the lives of women. I had survived a landslide of awarenesses. But I didn’t know if I could act on them.
When you can’t go forward and you can’t go backward and you can’t stay where you are without killing off what is deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation. And so it was that I went that autumn afternoon to run my errands, walked into the drugstore, and found my daughter on her knees.
As I listened to the man say, “That’s how I like to see a woman—on her knees,” something broke within me. I felt there was nothing more of that old life worth holding onto. I saw that this was not only just about me. It was about my daughter. It was about all the daughters everywhere.
That day I took my leave of the jar. I made an unconditional relationship with the journey. The sound of dragging feet ceased, and the silence was deafening.
Later I would think of the poet’s line:
Kabir says: The only woman awake is the woman
who has heard the flute.63
I thought of it because in the silence that followed, I began to hear the first strands of a music that has pulled me unceasingly ever since.
I do not know what to name this music except to say it comes from a place of hope in the feminine soul. It awakens us even as we awaken it.
PART TWO
Initiation
Now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unkno
wn, the unknown unknown.
D. H. Lawrence
The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
Joseph Campbell
Death of the old form and new life or birth are fundamental to initiations.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
The days grew shorter and winter closed in. It seemed impossible that over two years had passed since the dream of birthing myself and the experience at the monastery that had started it all.
I often found myself mulling over the events that had followed—the painful acknowledgment of the feminine wound, my exasperating resistance to the journey, the night with the dancing women on the beach. I recalled the sketches I’d made, then burned, the Magritte painting, unraveling the cultural images of womanhood, unnaming myself as woman so I could begin to remember who I was. I relived the intense months of reading and reading, forming my critique, truth telling, anguish, and anger. Through all of this, I had conceived myself as woman. I had been reseeded.
I thought often, too, of the old woman with the snake-twined stick who’d come in my dreams, the struggle to disentangle myself from patriarchal institutions and their wounding power and to cast my lot, as theologian Carter Heyward writes, “with those who resist unjust power relations.”1 I thought of the struggle to make my husband understand, the tensions I’d felt inside—those stymied, trapped, aching, ambivalent feelings. And I was grateful for the catalytic day I walked into the drugstore and found my daughter on her knees, because it caused me to get off mine.
As I looked back, those events and images melded into my own unique landscape of awakening, into a craggy inner geography that I’d traveled but seemed now to be leaving for a different terrain. I had a vague sense of being perched on the lip of a new phase of experience, a whole new passage in my journey.