For this we need Herself. “For the body to be considered holy once again, the Goddess (the female aspect of the deity) must return, for it is only through a Goddess consciousness that matter can be perceived as having a sacred dimension,” writes Jean Bolen.43
The same is true of nature. We also need Goddess consciousness to reveal earth’s holiness. Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.
How are we altered? For one thing, if we discover Herself in the earth, we will not be so inclined to rape her forests, pave over her jungles, poison her rivers, dump fifty million tons of toxic waste into her oceans each year, or wipe out whole species of her creatures. Sin becomes defined as refusing to befriend and love the earth, for in doing so, we refuse to befriend and love the Divine.
This new feminine spiritual consciousness will help us recognize that humans, having special abilities, are responsible to the rest of the earth, not superior to it. We will realize that everything here has a purpose all its own, that its value lies in its own “beingness,” not in its usefulness or how well it benefits humankind. This means something dramatically new—that the rest of creation is here to be related to, not dominated.
In many ways Goddess is a symbol of ecological wisdom, and as we face a massive ecological crisis, this particular symbol becomes timely and important. Passionist priest and geologian Thomas Berry says that when it comes to saving the planet, the return of the feminine is the most important thing happening. Many are saying that we may have no habitable future without her. Berry maintains that to survive we must “reinvent the human.” We must reverse our severe alienation from the natural world, which lies at the root of its devastation. Christians have gotten so committed to the Bible, he says, we’ve lost our capacity to deal with a primary revelation of the divine in the natural world.44
As Christmas came that year and I thought about the incarnation, I finally took it to its ultimate conclusion. For the first time I discovered a new and radical incarnation in which the Divine comes not only through human form (which the doctrine of Christ revealed), but through the earth as well. Here, as Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, is the “second coming” of Christ, the birth of the Divine within earth and matter.
Mystical awakening in all the great religious traditions, including Christianity, involves arriving at an experience of unity or nondualism. In Zen it’s known as samadhi, the experience of the mind no longer divided against itself. When our nature is no longer divided against itself, the inner splits are healed and we see earth and spirit as one. Transcendence and immanence are not separate. The Divine is one. The dancer and all the dances are one.
The Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen reflected this when she wrote about the Divine as a Spirit-Sophia filling the cosmos:
I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every living spark and I have breathed out nothing that can die. . . . I flame above the beauty of the fields: I shine in the waters, in the sun, the moon and the stars. I burn. And by means of the airy wind, I stir everything into quickness with a certain invisible life which sustains all. . . . I, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from me.45
And Mechthild of Magdeburg, another Christian mystic, confessed, “The day of my awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God, and God in all things.”46
For those who go deep into spiritual practice, at some moment the veil slips away and you see what is, and everything that is has a spiritual essence.
Goddess offers us the holiness of everything.
And Still I Rise
The previous spring I’d planted cedars in my backyard and begun a yearlong process of realizing a new feminine spiritual consciousness. It had been a remarkable year of waking up to my relationship to all things, discovering the Divine within the earth. But in this year I’d also been discovering another aspect of this consciousness.
One evening I gathered with Betty and our friend Ramona beside the lake in Betty’s woodland garden to participate in a ritual. Standing among cedars, river birch, and arbor vita, beneath a moon two days past full, we symbolically tied each other’s wrists together with yarn then asked the question “What binds you?”
As Ramona asked me the question, two things came instantly to mind: fear and silence.
We wandered to private places to contemplate our answers to the question. Sitting beside the water, I thought of the fear that was never far, the deadening inclination toward silence. The yarn was cutting a little into my skin. It was somehow appropriate.
Fear and silence. As I pondered the powerful ways those two things cut off a woman’s journey, I thought about the book I was currently reading, the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Much of it was her personal struggle to break free from silencing structures and a life that confined her true female self. I remembered her description of the day she realized she was trapped:
“You’re so thoughtful,” Mrs. T. said. “I’m lucky to have such a quiet student. You wouldn’t even know you were in the house, you’re so quiet!”
(A lovely girl, no trouble at all!)
I had woven so carefully, with such close texture, my visible layer of “no trouble at all, a quiet student, always ready with a smile (if the decayed teeth could be hidden), always happy,” that even I could not break the thread.47
Lovely, quiet girl, no trouble, no trouble at all. You wouldn’t even know she was in the house. That is often the yarn twisted around women’s wrists.
I thought about all the yarn on all the women, how it constricted and stopped our journeys, and I began to feel an energy rise up inside me. I didn’t know what to call it, but it made me want to tear the yarn not only off my wrists, but off the wrists of Betty and Ramona and all the other women, too.
Finally the three of us came together and, holding hands, broke the yarn. Then we stretched out on the ground atop the scratch of an old army blanket. Overhead a shooting star blazed across the sky beneath the Big Dipper. And once again I couldn’t help thinking it seemed appropriate.
The yarn ritual symbolically captures the sort of consciousness I’m speaking about, the forceful, emphatic energy ascending from a woman’s gut, wanting to join hands with other women and together break every yarn on every wrist.
Women suffer. Sometimes they suffer because they’re human and it’s part of the human condition to suffer. Other times, lots of times, they suffer because they’re women. Women have suffered everywhere in the world and throughout history.
In her book Texts of Terror, theologian Phyllis Trible documents little-known biblical accounts of women who endured unspeakable abuse and suffering because they were women and no help came, neither from humans nor from God. For me, the most despicable and heartrending story is that of the concubine from Bethlehem.
The Old Testament tells what happened when a gang of ruffians threatened to defile a man staying overnight as a guest in the home of an old man. The old man admonishes the ruffians not to act wickedly, and he offers them his own virgin daughter or the guest’s concubine. Ravish either of them, he says, do with them what seems good to you, but don’t harm the man.
The men outside do not listen, so the guest throws his concubine out to them. They rape and abuse her all night long. The Bible says the next morning the man finds her lying at the door. “Get up,” he told her. “Let’s be going.” But there was no answer. And when they got home, he took a knife, cut her murdered body into twelve pieces, and scattered her body to the twelve tribes as evidence of what had been done.48
When I found this story I wondered: Why is this story not told and retold as
a narrative of suffering and injustice? Why have most of us never heard of the nameless, raped, tortured, murdered, mutilated woman who was betrayed and sacrificed so easily because she was female?
Trible wrote, “Her body has been broken and given to many. Lesser power has no woman than this, that her life is laid down by a man.”49
One day I saw a painting of a crucified woman hanging on the cross and thought of all the suffering, violated women throughout history. Thousands of women murdered in the name of God during witch burnings; little girls sexually abused; women beaten by husbands, harassed by “superiors,” abandoned to poverty, genitally mutilated in Africa, forced into brothels by the Japanese military, tortured in Nicaragua, raped in Sarajevo. I thought of women cut off from equality, passed over at work, silenced at home, marginalized at church—women suffering in all kinds of ways from the pathology of exclusion. And once again I embraced their struggle as my own.
The Divine Feminine symbol creates a feminist spiritual consciousness, which includes a passionate struggle for women’s dignity, value, and power. These lines from Maya Angelou’s poem “And Still I Rise” capture the transformation of consciousness that happens inside a woman on this journey:
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.50
It’s important that women on feminist spiritual journeys birth that cry from within. No matter what has been done to women, no matter how long we’ve been on our knees inside, no matter, we will rise. We . . . will . . . rise. We will break this yarn. The words may begin private and small, a whimper of a sound, growing until they are a roaring inside, a roaring not only for oneself but for every woman. After it comes, a woman cannot be tamed back into silence.
Poet Susan Griffin writes about the encounter of a female lion and several men who are trying to put her to sleep. They wonder what she will do if they enclose her in the room with them. One of them shuts the door. She backs her way toward the closed doorway and then roars. “Be still,” the men say. She continues to roar. “Why does she roar?” they ask. The roaring must be inside her, they conclude. They decide they must see the roaring inside her. They approach her. . . . They are trying to put her to sleep. . . . She has no soul, they conclude, she does not know right from wrong. “Be still!” they shout at her. “Be humble, trust us,” they demand. “We have souls,” they proclaim, “we know right from wrong.” They approach her with their medicine. . . . She devours them.51
Goddess becomes the roaring inside us, the force that refuses to be subdued, tamed, stifled, silenced, mollified, or put to sleep. It becomes that which challenges and “eats away” at structures that cage and oppress, that deny justice and inclusion.
I am talking about a consciousness of liberating action in which we work to change the patriarchal structures that deny women dignity, value, and power. Feminist theologian Carter Heyward suggests we consider the analogy of a house. If there’s a structural problem, we don’t fix it by changing the wallpaper. She says we must dig deeply into the foundation, discover the problem, and reconstruct the house. In other words, we must transform the house from the ground up.
It is through our roaring and rising that we become architects and builders of a new house, one that holds everybody in mutuality.
Along the way, a crossing over occurs in which we move from the private struggle for dignity, value, and power to a larger, more universal struggle. The cry “still I rise” is no longer merely personal and univocal but a choir of voices inside us. We begin to identify not only with other women, but with all disenfranchised or oppressed people because we know we are not separate from anyone who has been denied power because of gender, race, nationality, or economic class.
Like Latin American and black liberation theologies, feminist spiritual consciousness focuses on the Divine as the liberating one who seeks to end suffering and bring justice. It takes to heart (generally in ways more fervent and radical than the church) the acts and teachings of Jesus when he placed love and justice above traditional law. I suspect nothing today would be more heartbreaking to Jesus than seeing an institution that bears his name exclude, devalue, and marginalize women in order to enforce and protect traditional laws.
Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself. “It gives rise to a different vision of community,” she writes, “one in which the last shall be first, the excluded shall be included, the mighty put down from their thrones and the humble exalted—the words of Mary of Nazareth.”52
A Divine Feminine symbol acts to deconstruct patriarchy, which is one of the reasons there’s so much resistance, even hysteria, surrounding the idea of Goddess. The idea of Goddess is so powerfully “other,” so vividly female, it comes like a crowbar shattering the lock patriarchy holds on divine imagery. Nelle Morton often pointed out that the word Goddess is important because it bursts the exclusivity of the old symbol and opens the way to reimage deity.
Now whenever I used the word it caused reverberations in me, setting off the “still I rise” voice. Goddess became both the force that ignited the voice and the voice itself. Believe me, there is no way this word, this symbol, can be used to hush women up or get them back in line.
One of my favorite short stories comes from the pen of Tillie Olsen. In “I Stand Here Ironing,” a mother stands at the ironing board aching for her daughter to have the life she never did. She thinks: “Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”53
As women we are, none of us, dresses, helpless before the iron, and we can help make it so there is cause for every woman to know.
HEALING THE FEMININE WOUND
During this grounding time, healing was also taking place.
I’ve discussed things that make up the feminine wound within women, church, and culture: the devaluation and negation of the feminine, the disconnection of women from their feminine soul, the silencing of the real voices of women, the loss of feminine feet, hands, mouths, and hearts. All this becomes a ravaged geography in the souls of women, a wounded Eden. Most of us have lived there in varying degrees of settling down and have normalized it as the lay of the land.
But just as a wounded Eden has been created in women’s lives, we can also create a deep refuge, a space of healing.
In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote that she could not cause light, but she could put herself in its path.54 The same may be true of healing. Maybe in the end we cannot make healing happen; perhaps it is, after all, a grace. But we can put ourselves in its path. We can create a healing refuge for ourselves.
The word refuge comes from a French word that means “retreat.” My dictionary says a refuge is a place of safe retreat, a shelter, a stronghold that protects by its strength or a sanctuary that offers a place of healing because of its sacredness.
Some time ago I watched an episode of the television show Northern Exposure set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. It portrayed a showdown between two of the town’s characters, Maurice and Ruth Ann. Maurice, a rich, powerful, conservative, ultracapitalist former astronaut, situated at the top of Cicely’s social hierarchy, represents a tough masculine figure who sees feeling as weakness. He often acts in arrogant and insensitive ways, other times in kind ways, but almost always in patriarchal ways. In the show Maurice is planning a fox hunt.
Ruth Ann becomes involved when the fox that Maurice has ordered arrives at her general store. Cast as the wise old woman of the show, something of the to
wn crone, Ruth Ann is the opposite of Maurice in many ways. Embracing a simple, no-frills lifestyle, she is liberal-minded, down to earth, sensitive, and compassionate with the fierceness to back it up.
Now enters the fox. It stares at Ruth Ann from its small cage, gnawing desperately at the latch as if it senses its fate. So she does what any self-respecting old crone would do. She kidnaps the fox and gives it refuge in her house.
When the fox turns up missing, Maurice has his hounds track it to Ruth Ann’s house. There Maurice meets Ruth Ann in the garden and demands she turn the fox over or he’s going inside after it. Ruth Ann picks up a shovel. Over my dead body, she tells him. I’ve given the fox sanctuary, she says, and you aren’t coming anywhere near it.
Maurice looks at the determination on her face and, knowing he’s licked, leaves and doesn’t challenge her again.
I was intrigued with the symbolism in the story. If we look at it as a modern myth, we see that the characters exist inside us. We carry around our own Maurice—a figure of internalized patriarchy—who represents the wounding voice inside that identifies with power and hierarchies, denies feeling, and denigrates feminine values.
We also have a part inside represented by the sad fox in the cage, the part of us that’s been victim to patriarchal power and imprisoned in our wounds. And best of all, we have a Ruth Ann, a wise, fiercely compassionate presence who creates refuge.
Of these three aspects of ourselves—the wounder, the wounded, and the healer—we’ve recognized the first two. We need now to get in touch with the third, the internal Ruth Ann who wants to make a healing sanctuary, who will, if need be, pick up a shovel to defend it.