The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (17 page)

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 our
selves 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 Power 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.

Already I had the inscrutable sense that something purposeful had guided us here. Then Kathleen led us into the chapel. There in a soulful moment I came face to face with the identical picture I'd encountered in California, the
Cartoon of St. Anne.

I gazed at it with the same electric hum running through my body that I'd felt before, the same magnetic pull. I was filled with awe at happening upon a synchronicity such as this. Synchronicities, those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what's happening inside, are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illumine a way for us.

Coming upon the
Cartoon of St. Anne
a second time suggested many things to me, not the least of which was that this place would become deeply significant to me. Perhaps here I would begin to find my way into the space of the Great Lap.

And so it happened.

Three months later, in July, Betty and I returned to Springbank for a weekend stay. On Saturday morning, despite a muggy heat, we followed a trail through Springbank's fifty-eight acres of woods.

After twenty minutes or so, we entered a clearing. It did not take but a second to realize that we were standing in a circle of trees.

Another synchronicity, but one that startled me far more than the picture. Here was the symbolic circle I'd happened upon on the airplane, the circle I'd sketched, imagined, dreamed about, and looked to as a guiding image of the feminine ground.

The circle was formed by pine, dogwood, magnolia, small oaks, and scrubs, the clearing inside thirty or so yards in diameter with a small fire pit dug in the center.

I walked around the circle, touching the tree trunks as the circle and the Great Lap became one and the same. Far from churches, prayer books, sermons, and theological propositions, I felt intimately embraced by nature.

The circle touched Betty in an equally strong way, and we sat within it on the ground. There were only two seeming blemishes in the entire clearing, two small unsightly stumps. They need to go, we agreed, and before we had really thought about it, we were on our way back for tools.

Much of the afternoon we spent digging up the stumps. It turned out to be harder than we had anticipated. The roots went deep. As I worked, I became aware of anger, the anger at patriarchy that wants to come like a purifying blaze. I felt it with every swing of the ax and jab of the shovel.

It wasn't until we'd finally wrestled the stumps out of the ground, refilled the holes, and sat down to rest that we fully realized the symbolism of what we'd done. We'd ritualized digging up the dead, stunted tree—the old way, the old model, the patriarchal stump. We were getting rid of it, releasing anger, transforming it into something creative. We were reclaiming the feminine ground.