One by one we sat in it. When it was my turn, I could think of nothing but the names of our mothers that we had recited in the Trapeza cave: Leah, Sue, Roxie, and all the others. There are moments when love moves out of the abstract and becomes a real thing, sudden in your chest, and I felt it there, sitting in the lap of the Mother and all my mothers. I felt healed.
Someone took my picture, which sits today on my desk. A dark-haired woman wearing a red baseball-style cap is beaming all over.
My mother knew I’d gone on a Goddess tour to Crete. Also, some time before departing, I’d given her a copy of an essay I’d written entitled “Going Back for Mary.” The premise of it was that when the Goddess disappeared, Mary had in some ways carried on the Feminine Divine for us. The first time I saw my mother after arriving back home was Christmas. She handed me a small box wrapped in silver paper, then stood nearby watching as I opened it. Inside was a small pewter statue of Mary.
When I looked up, Mother was smiling. I carry that picture of her in my mind; it is the one I will always keep and cherish, because for the first time, I knew—I really knew—that she understood. It was as if she had given me her blessing. She was my mother, but she was also a woman like myself. I smiled back at her, and my eyes filled with tears.
TRANSFIGURING ANGER
Back during my awakening I’d learned to recognize my anger and allow it to have its place. I had stopped treating injustice against half the human population as a misdemeanor. Inside of me there had been a firestorm, and it had needed to be there for a while. It had opened my eyes, seared my heart, ignited my passion, and steepened my fierceness. But later, as I moved into other passages of the journey, especially the healing, I knew the anger would have to be healed along with other parts of me. It would have to be transfigured.
By transfiguring anger, I don’t mean that we wave a placating wand and poof! anger disappears. Nor do I mean that anger is turned into sweet resignation. By healing or transfiguring it, I mean to imply, in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s words, that anger becomes “a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.”59 A conflagration may embolden and impassion you for a while, but if you get stuck in it, it can burn you up. A fire that cooks things, however, can feed you and a whole lot of other people.
During my awakening, for a period of time the church had become a flash point for my anger. At the core of the feminine wound is betrayal, and the more we’ve trusted and invested in a relationship, the deeper the feeling of betrayal will be. When it came to the church, I’d trusted much and invested much. But gradually as episodes of healing took place, I began to move beyond reacting and blaming. Instead of simmering over patriarchal structures and wounds and acts of injustice, I started to respond creatively. I began to redirect the energy toward writing, imagining, speaking out, and empowering other women.
The transfiguration of anger is a movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within. Rage, or what might be called untransfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy that changes the conditions that created it. It needs to become out-rage.
Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister. She is the one who recognizes feminine injury, stands on the roof, and announces it if she has to, then jumps into the fray to change it. She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating. She is the one who never bores God or Goddess.
The summer I returned from England, that summer when feminist spiritual consciousness was dawning in my life, I went to speak at a contemplative conference at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery where Thomas Merton had lived.
I’d not returned to a monastery since that visit years earlier when that “Father Sue” comment had caused such an implosion. Returning, I didn’t know what to expect.
The first day was a vat of emotions. The place seemed to turn into a microcosm of the entire father-world, a world layered over with male entitlement, male language, and male-centrism. I relived the exclusivity and patriarchal underpinnings in the most vivid and sharpened way.
Most of all, I kept thinking about the balcony. The last time I’d been at the abbey, years before my awakening, I hadn’t been allowed on the floor of the church because I was female (at least that was how the nice monk had put it), and I’d climbed the stairs to look down from the balcony. I told myself that at least I was on the premises; in some monasteries women couldn’t even be retreatants at all, and I’d been turned away because of my gender several times. Even so, climbing the stairs on that first visit, I’d felt a vague sense of rejection and sadness. I had stood up there looking down, feeling quarantined so that no one would be infected with my femaleness but then dismissing that feeling as my own pettiness.
The memory of it now, however, made me seethe and ache. I thought of the balcony in the movie theater in my hometown, where blacks were sequestered during the segregation of the fifties. Balconies had long served as symbols of exclusion and unequal power.
That week at Gethsemani, the pain that patriarchal Christianity had inflicted in women’s lives—the exclusion, the anger, the regret, the sense of betrayal—welled up and would not go away. But paradoxically, at the same time, I was touched by the beauty of the monastic chants, the honoring of Mary as Mother of God and Christ-bearer, the dissident female saints who often rocked the church and seemed everywhere around us, the nonviolent gentleness that pervaded the monks, the way the holy and the ordinary were blended into something seamless.
I realized that despite everything, strains of the deep song that played inside Christianity played inside me, too. Do you know what it’s like to place your ear to a sea-beaten conch and hear a deep, mysterious whispering or to open a broken old music box and find the strains of a waltz suddenly escaping? It was a little like that—startling, strange, haunting, nostalgic.
What do I mean by the deep song within Christianity? I mean the music that plays beneath the patriarchal overlay. I’m referring to Christianity’s inner life, the life of Jesus, the stories, the belligerent call to justice and compassion, the mysticism, the meditation, the saints, the art, the icons, the smell of wine in the communion cup.
There was the “balcony,” yes, but there was also the resonance of this inner song. Probably that’s what compelled me that week to volunteer, along with a few other women and a couple of men, to learn a liturgical dance, which we practiced every afternoon in the conference room.
One day, however, feeling the enormous tension inside, I went for a walk in the monastery woods. Following a little trail, I came unexpectedly to a life-sized bronze statue of Christ kneeling in agony, as he’d done in the garden of Gethsemane before his death. I sat on a log. I stared at it.
For a long while now I’d felt alienated from Father God. In my mind God as Yahweh, King, Father, had become associated with oppressive patriarchal power, with those who deny the feminine aspects of deity and women as equal participants. I felt the estrangement like a split, a deep crevice I could not bridge. I didn’t know what I might do about it, but for the first time I noticed a small willingness to try to do something.
Our liturgical dance was going to be performed during a mass on the last day, but somehow it hadn’t dawned on me that this would happen during the monastery’s regular mass on the main floor of the church. (As far as I know, an unprecedented thing.) I felt nervous as I rose from my chair and began along with the others to move around the main altar, but I quickly lost myself in the dance, a feminine ballet filled with graceful arm movements, dips, and turns.
Then I happened to look up and see the balcony. I was so shocked at the sight of it, by the reversal of being “down here” and not “up there,” I nearly stopped dancing. Look at me, I thought. I’m not up there. I’m here on the floor of the church, dancing. I’m dancing because ultimately the feminine cannot be denied
or shut away. It dances even here.
The balcony, which had been such a symbol of exclusion and betrayal, seemed to recede, then dissolve, the bitterness it represented dissolving with it. I began to dance with my whole self lifted into it, feeling the presence of the Divine Feminine in my arms and legs, as if she were writing some new calligraphy in the monastic air.
An old monk sat on the front row in his black-and-white robe. I met his gaze, then turned. When I looked back, he was still watching me. He looked nearly transfixed by it all, his mouth parted like a child’s, his eyes smiling, and I realized it was joy and love I was seeing on his face.
I was a woman dancing around the monastery altar—present, included, celebrated, loved. It was all there in the monk’s face, and I knew even then that his face seemed to me the face of Father God. Suddenly I felt again the old, familiar presence.
That dance, which opened into unexpected healing, became my reuniting bridge. It evoked a mysterium coniunctionis, the unity of the divine symbol in which the Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine began to come together in my life.
What is ultimately needed is balance—divine symbols that reflect masculine and feminine and a genuine marriage of the masculine and feminine in each of us. Meinrad Craighead in her book The Mother’s Song refers to this. Her Catholic heritage and her deep foundation in God the Mother came together, she says. “The two movements are not in conflict, they simply water different layers in my soul.”60 Dancing at the monastery taught me what she meant.
FORGIVENESS
That dance was also a ritual of forgiveness.
Perhaps it’s possible to forgive in one grand swoop, but I didn’t experience it that way. I did it in bits and pieces, one stage at a time. The dance began the process.
You forgive what you can, when you can. That’s all you can do.
To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.
The circle of trees had represented many things to me—a refuge, a place to express my anger, a place to be supported, to heal, to encounter the Sacred Feminine, and to knit a way back to my soul. But eventually it also became the space of compassion. For in the end I knew: There is no healing without forgiveness, no forgiveness without love. Indeed, love is everything.
I was driving alone early one Sunday morning in Atlanta. I stopped at a traffic light beside a small brick Baptist church. I looked at it, then at a few daffodils blooming wild in a ditch nearby. They made me think of the daffodils I’d planted in the circle of trees at Springbank. I wondered if those were blooming, too.
Who knows what impelled me to do it—probably the need to finish and mark the forgiveness with a tangible act—but I pulled the car to the side of the road. I picked the flowers and tied them with a string, making a little bouquet of yellow. Then I walked to the church and left the bouquet at its front doors.
We can name the places in our lives where such offerings need to be left, places where the wounds have happened, and when we are ready we can mark them with the beauty of our forgiveness. The naming and the marking release us.
Driving away from the church that day, I felt I’d made my peace.
THE DANCE OF DISSIDENCE
After two years of grounding myself in Sacred Feminine experience, I realized I’d been creating a real, though unorthodox, spiritual path. It was a path all my own.
At first, for a short while, I’d thought of my experience as one of exile, but that wasn’t it at all. My journey had created a deep, sustaining container for me, one that I could now rest within. My journey had also become an experience of unfolding, not something imposed on me from without, but the creation of my own feminine heart.
My vision of religious experience had changed and expanded considerably. My path included relating daily to the presence of the Divine; it included a web of rituals and a community of women; and it included various forms of prayer. There was the prayer at my altar when I lit a candle and asked for peace on earth and blessings for others, the prayer of turning ordinary moments into an experience of the holy, and the prayer of listening to the voice within, the voice of soul in the solar plexus that spins the thread of our own truth.
My path also encompassed sacred experiences in nature, relating to my inner life through analysis and dreams, using my creative work in the service of my vision, and struggling to act on behalf of love and justice. I had also begun to practice yoga in order to be aware of and honor my body, to practice Zen meditation and mindfulness in order to quiet my mind and awaken to my true nature.
Far from exile, my journey offered me a rich, multitextured, feminine experience of the sacred that flowed so deep and full inside that I could truly say, In my heart, I am home.
“My religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama, and I think if I had to scrunch it all down into one word, I might say that, too. Except I can never say anything in one word; I don’t seem to have enough spiritual simplicity yet to do that. So I would make it into a sentence and say, My religion is being in awakened relationship with all that is and doing so with a kind and pure heart, with an authentic feminine soul and a vision of justice. When I say my path is being in an awakened relationship with all that is, I’m referring to others, of course, but also to nature and earth, to myself, and to the One who holds us all in being.
So I made my own path. Sandy understood this, my children understood. But it was hard for some. When I tried to explain my spiritual path to those who asked about the changes in my life, I was sometimes met with puzzled, skeptical (yes, even alarmed) looks. Because they could not imagine it for themselves, they told me it was not a valid option.
I understand this. When we create paths that are utterly new and outside sanctioned models, paths that are native to the female soul, our paths are often dismissed or overlooked. “The new space,” Mary Daly rightly observed, “has a kind of invisibility to those who have not entered it.”61 But if a woman has entered this journey, down deep she sees and knows the rightness of it.
I kept thinking about that familiar Zen saying: Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water. After I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water.
After the illusions are gone, after a woman wakes up, after she has become grounded in a new way and experienced healing and forgiveness, she continues on with her spiritual life, investing in church if she chooses it, but doing so with a world of difference. Now she can bring to it a whole new consciousness. She has a new heart, new vision, new soul, new voice, new knowing, and new grit. She has a whole new dance.
Some women say you must stay in the institution and try to change it. Others say women cannot stay in without being co-opted, that we can change things best remaining outside it. I say each woman must do what her heart tells her.
When I do attend church, it doesn’t provoke the old feelings. Rather, I am there knowing who I am as a woman and allowing the church to be what it is. I find I can be connected to the community of people and honor the deep song that flows on.
Madonna Kolbenschlag suggests that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance.62 I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls, from the space inside the circle of trees.
You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred, and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Turtle Song
Walking late one night along Edisto Beach in South C
arolina, Sandy and I came upon a huge, domed shape emerging from the waves. I stopped, silenced. It was a giant sea turtle lumbering out of the sea to lay her eggs.
We turned off our flashlight and watched as she dragged herself toward the dunes. The moon hung full over the ocean so that she moved with an aurora at her back, as if rising up from some deep, shimmering mystery.
I’d never seen a creature work so hard to get anywhere. Turtles may be fluid as ballerinas in the water, but on land they take on the appearance of a toiling tractor, of Sisyphus rolling his great stone up the hill. Easily three hundred pounds and five feet long, she left a three-foot-wide tractor-crawl behind her. She stopped beside a dune where the sea oats cast moving shadows across her shell. As we edged near enough to see but far enough to give her privacy, she began to dig. She flipped the sand into a pile behind her, working her flippers like tiller blades, making a bowl-shaped pit into which her great body sank, grounding herself, not unlike the way I’d tried to ground myself in the circle of trees. I listened to the sound she made until it took up residence in me like one of those radio tunes you cannot stop hearing—a whispering sweep of sand like chafes of wind, like the cadence of your mother’s broom.
Then silence. She became still. A long while passed. Finally, slipping up behind her, I drew close enough to see the bluish white shells of the eggs. Here was female life moving through its rhythms. I sat down almost involuntarily, my legs giving way with the weight and beauty of the experience. I was thinking of the Chippewa healing song, “Great Turtle, I am sitting with you.”