The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (15 page)

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 my 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.

Now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, 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.

I would never have thought to call it initiation. Yet that's precisely what I was about to undergo. In the months ahead I would
plunge into a series of initiatory events, making my transit toward a new spirituality, toward Sacred Feminine experience and a new way of being woman.

Initiation is a rite of passage, a crossing over, a movement between two worlds. For women on a journey such as this one, initiation is the Great Transition.

Making this transition into Sacred Feminine experience can be beautiful and deeply moving, even cataclysmic in its effect on our lives. But it also means a time of ordeal, descent, darkness, and pain. “In that experience of being formed anew, I may often feel torn asunder; old aspects of my self-conception must die in order for my new transformation into selfhood to take place,” writes feminist professor Penelope Washbourn.
²

If I had to reduce the meaning of initiation to just two words, they would be
death
and
rebirth.
Those are the essential tasks in any initiation, and especially they are the tasks of women who undergo initiation into feminist spiritual experience. The old forms, which grew small and confining as we woke, now crumble and give way as something new and large and mysterious rises up inside us. Attachment to the patriarchal world, which we've struggled to unname and unhinge, begins to dissolve and die away, and we are immersed in the feelings that go along with dyings.

Initiation is a sacred disintegration. Despite its pain, we carry the conviction (often only faintly) that even though we don't know where we'll end up, we're following a soul-path of immense richness, that we're
supposed
to be on this path, that it's required of us somehow. We move in a sense of rightness, of lure, of following a flute that pipes irresistible music.

Early that winter, approaching initiation, I carried the sense of belonging on this path, but I knew nothing of the intensity I was about to enter. I only knew I had waked and was entering a place where the old meanings, concepts, and values no longer fit. The vista of the Great Transition.

When landing in a place like this, usually the best thing to do is be still, be quiet, gather one's wits. Inside I felt queasy and alone,
like I'd disembarked on some beautiful but unnamed island and was standing there, watching the last boat recede into the distance.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. She comes to an unknown place where she must let the old way of being woman die and the new way come forth. During initiation the new feminine potential—that rambunctious girl-child who was conceived and birthed inside during her awakening and who really had been there all along—starts to grow and develop into the woman she will be.

THE UNEXPLORED GORGE

It was New Year's Eve. Sandy and I sat together in the den reading. We did that some years, avoiding the parties and staying home by the fire. I was reading Adrienne Rich's poetry, beautiful lines about moving through an unexplored gorge. I laid the book down and closed my eyes, trying to take in the image.

Finally I walked outside onto the patio and stared at the sky, clear and speckled with stars. The evening was not cold by December standards, not even December in the South. Before me hung a sliver of new moon; behind me light slanted out from the windows of the house. As I looked back through the French doors, suddenly the arrangement seemed all too symbolic: me out here in the dark, looking back at a space both familiar and secure.

The thought of an unexplored gorge filled me with mystery and love, yet at the same time, fear. The unexplored gorge, I repeated. I had found a name for the new terrain I was entering.

But then I had another realization. Moving into a gorge implies descent.

Self-Captivity

Women's lives are made up of cycles of descent and ascent. At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move
down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light.

Years back I'd visited the Cloisters in New York, a museum of medieval art and home of the famous unicorn tapestries, which had been woven around 1500. I was drawn to one tapestry in particular,
The Unicorn in Captivity.
It pictured the magical creature sitting alone inside a small circular fence beneath a tree, enclosed in a private space.

This image of captivity and containment returned to me that New Year's Eve as a picture of what I needed—to “capture” myself, to bring my inner process with all its tensions into a contained and private space.

According to Jungian analyst Karen Signell, the unicorn represents “a woman's deep feminine center.” It is her “early feminine Self, free and solitary, yet also highly vulnerable.”
³
This is the part of us that is newly developing, and at this stage it can be elusive, hidden, and difficult to contain. Like the unicorn, it can fade into the woods and be lost, writes Signell. It needs a safe inner sanctum and a time to dwell there in separateness.

I wanted to give myself this kind of space, to face what was happening, to let the small green shoot of my feminine soul have its hothouse. I needed an immediate retreat, but with writing deadlines piled on my desk, this was impossible. Flipping ahead in my calendar, I noticed a speaking engagement I had in California in late February. I decided to stay over for a while afterward. To let it become a place of self-captivity.

I told Sandy about my plans one evening as we sat across from each other in the den. I told him my world was unraveling. I asked him to try to understand, that I was tired of serving institutions designed to favor men while depriving women, that as a matter of fact, our marriage had in some ways been one of those institutions. I told him I needed time alone to sort through it. That I was going to take several days away.

He squeezed the little hump of flesh between his eyebrows. “Don't,” he sighed.

He was talking about more than my going away. He was talking about the whole journey, and we both knew it.

I didn't say anything. He kept rubbing his thumb across his open palm. “I don't understand what you're doing,” he said. “This journey you're on . . . I wish . . .” He shook his head. He wished I would cease and desist, that's what he wished.

I thought how scary it must be to have a wife of nearly twenty years wake up. About five thousand years of repressed feminine wisdom and strength are simmering in the cells of her body, and something way down inside him knows this, knows that if it ever gets loose, life as he knows it is over.

I was silent a long time. I loved him deeply, but how could I deny this journey? Women had made whole careers of self-abnegation and sacrifice because we've been told this was the noblest way, the “Christian way.” But was it noble to cling to passivities and diminishments, to love ourselves so little we smothered any flame in our own souls? In my favorite May Sarton novel,
The Reckoning
, Ella writes to her friend Laura, “Do you suppose growing up always means diluting [our] fierce purpose for the sake of others?”
⁴

In some ways, spiritual development for women, perhaps unlike that for men, is not about surrendering self so much as coming to self.

“I have to do this,” I told him softly. “I really have to.”

His whole body went limp, reminding me of a glove when a hand has just been withdrawn. There seemed no fight left in him. He got up and walked away.

In a moment of sadness I wondered what would become of us. He didn't understand the extraordinary passion in my heart for this journey; he didn't know my fierce need to be unbridled, the ache for my feminine soul. I yearned for his support. I wished for a marriage where we could walk paths that allowed for the unconditional sharing of soul. Without it, marriage becomes very lonely.

Writing poignantly about the strain on her marriage that came from following her feminine journey, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda
Bolen wrote, “The need to share what we experience, to be listened to, to have what is going on
inside
us matter to the person we are married to, to engage in a two-way dialogue, is the cry of one soul yearning to meet another.”
⁵

It was my cry, but I couldn't seem to make it heard. And to be honest, I couldn't hear his cry very well, either.

In the weeks that followed, I canceled most of my social engagements, worked to clear off my desk, and stayed at home. I poured uncensored words into my journal, took walks in the cold, shed tears from old, forgotten reservoirs. I felt like I was dissolving. A dandelion going to seed.

I didn't have guidelines for what I was doing. I didn't really know if what I was attempting was possible. Was there really another story to be lived beside the one I was living? If so, no one had ever told it to me. I imagined there was another way of being a woman, but what was it?

At times near-panic swept over me. What am I doing, what am I doing? I would ask. What will become of my marriage? my religion? Are there other images of the Divine that do not obliterate the feminine? Is there another container to hold my spiritual journey? If so, what is it?

I had fond thoughts about regressing to the old way. I would stare at women in the grocery store, women who drove their carts about the aisles with seeming content, and I would think, I want to be like that again.

I wished for security, knowing it could not be had. In February I boarded an airplane for California.

Finding the Circle of Trees

It was night. I was sitting in an aisle seat on the plane. A beam of overhead light, thin and yellow as a pencil, drifted down to dilute the gathering dark. I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever.

I ran down the list. I was losing my marriage (at least the marriage we'd had in the past). My spiritual life was crumbling (at least
the way it had existed before). My career of inspirational writing might even follow. I was also losing my identity, the roles of daughterhood that had sustained me, and along with that, my way of receiving validation in the world. I was losing the values from my childhood, my orientation to life. I was on this plane flying through the darkness, and it was not lost on me that spiritually I was also flying blind. I had no real idea where I was headed.

Years after this plane ride, I traveled to Crete with fourteen other women, all of them on feminist spiritual journeys. While there, we descended into a cave called Skoteino, where thousands of years earlier women and men had come to worship the Goddess as Skoteini, Goddess of the Dark. We moved by candlelight, climbing down four levels, the air growing dark and cold, until finally we came to the cave floor. We sat, holding beeswax candles. On the count of three we blew them out. No one spoke, though I could hear our breathing loud as wind.

We stayed that way three, four, five minutes in the blackest black I've ever known. I began to lose my boundaries, even the sense of my own skin. I was floating in darkness.

And from the darkness, the one image that returned to me was that plane ride years earlier. Flying to California. I had the same sense in the cave that I had on the plane, of floating in darkness, having no markers by which to define my world, no path, no container, no place to be.

In the cave one of the women began to sing, “Skoteini.” Others joined in, until an aria of women's voices sifted through the blackness, calling on the Goddess of the Dark. Finally someone struck a match, lit her candle, and offered her flame to the woman beside her. The light moved woman to woman around the cave, each woman's face flickering momentarily behind the flame. Watching the light grow, thinking back to the plane ride, I realized that even back then something inside me was calling on the Goddess of the Dark, even though I didn't know her name. And I thought, too, how important it was at times like that to receive light from other women—to receive their permission to be where we are.

But on the flight to California I had no idea where to find light, and really it was too soon. Descent is not about finding light but about going into the darkness and befriending it. If we remain there long enough, it takes on its own luminosity. It will reveal everything to us.