The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (14 page)

Throughout this period of looking at Christian patriarchy for the first time, I felt deeply betrayed by a tradition I had served. I also became more aware of my anger.

In the beginning I'd felt the anger like a current, deep and distant, something molten and moving inexorably toward the surface. As it rose, I gave it few outlets. Except for a pen thrown across the room, an outburst in the taxicab, and a few other passing flashes, I'd kept a lid on it.

The church has been afraid of the power of anger. It has seemed to equate anger with sin. But was anger really sinful? What if the sin lies not in feeling the anger but in what one does with the feeling?

Most of my life I'd run from anger as something that good daughters and gracious ladies did not exhibit. Perhaps the thing most denied to women is anger. “Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which publicly to complain; they took refuge in depression,” writes Carolyn Heilbrun.
⁵⁶
Her words came true for me. Without the ability to allow or the means to adequately express the anger, I began to slide into periods of depression.

There were days that autumn when I had little energy to write or paint or even read. On days like that I felt like somebody had switched off the lights inside. Part of the darkness was the grief that happens when you realize what's been done to women and what we've allowed to be done to us. Part of it was because I didn't know where this journey was taking me and I was scared, and part of it was due to the loss I was starting to feel inside, the loss of feminine soul. But certainly a lot of it came because betrayal and anger sat in me like boulders and I couldn't move them.

I desperately needed to give myself full permission to get angry.
The permission finally happened in a most unexpected way. I was having lunch with a young woman who'd recently been ordained as a minister and was on the staff of a large church. When I asked about her work, she told me about one of the first Sundays she had been allowed to conduct the worship. Before the service she had met the senior minister in his study. She was wearing a pair of medium-sized gold earrings along with her clerical robe. Noticing the earrings, the minister asked her to remove them.

“I don't think he wanted to call attention to my being a woman,” she said.

As she reported the event, my anger suddenly issued forth in a stream of fury. Feelings of outrage and insult. Pure, unblemished wrath. I wasn't responding to that one incident, I realized later, but to all of the injustice done to women. I'd given myself permission to get mad as hell.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to cause you to get so angry.”

“Don't be sorry,” I said. “It's about time we all got angry at this stuff!”

The violation of women is an outrage, and anger is a clear and justifiable response to it.

As I released my anger more often and more consciously, the cycle of depression ended. I began to express the anger when my friend Betty and I got together and talked (she is good about letting me rant without interrupting). I pounded pillows. I poured the anger into my journals. I let it come.

Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger's enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our ability to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love.

TRUSTING YOUR OWN FEMININE SOURCE

Going through the process of unnaming myself, forming a feminist critique, and questioning old certainties left me feeling unhinged. But it also created a space for my own feminine wisdom to break through.

Little by little, I began to contact a feminine source within that didn't come from patriarchy or need to be validated by it. The source was a deep, ancient-feeling place inside me, a place I hadn't known existed.

This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source. Inside I carried the poem that says:

oh woman

       
remember who you are woman

woman

it is the whole earth
⁵⁷

Signs of Exit

My remembering began that same autumn when an old woman came to me in a dream. In the dream I was standing in front of my Baptist church when suddenly she appeared at my side. I did not know it then, but this same figure would come to me often in dreams and meditations throughout my journey as a personification of feminine wisdom. And whenever she appeared, I learned to brace myself. Some grace and havoc were about to be set loose.

In dreams the wise old woman often symbolizes the Feminine Self or the voice of the feminine soul, and her coming can mark a turning point for women. This dream was my turning point:

The old woman has shining white hair and a face that hangs in folds and furrows down to her shoulders. Her lips are apple red, and she carries a walking stick with a snake
wound around it. I notice strange flashes in the air about her as if someone is shaking out gold glitter.

She points to the church steeple. As she does, it changes from a steeple to a rocket ship aimed at the sky. The old woman shakes her head and says, “You think this will take you where you need to go. Think again.”

Crazy dream, crazy old woman, I told myself when I woke. But there was no denying she was a numinous figure with enormous energy and power. She lingered in my thoughts for days.

Then one morning in late November, I sat by myself in the church balcony during Sunday service. My two children were sitting with friends. I don't recall why Sandy wasn't there.

The minister was preaching. He was holding up a Bible. It was open, perched atop his raised hand as if a blackbird had landed there. He was saying that the Bible was the sole and ultimate authority of the Christian's life. The
sole
and
ultimate
authority.

I remember a feeling rising up from a place about two inches below my navel. It was a passionate, determined feeling, and it spread out from the core of me like a current so that my skin vibrated with it. If feelings could be translated into English, this feeling would have roughly been the word
no!

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?