The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

by Sue Monk Kidd

  This female-child is the new potential we all have to become women grounded in our own souls, women who discover the Sacred Feminine way, women who let loose their strength. In the end we will reinvent not only ourselves, but also religion and spirituality as they have been handed down to us.

  Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison wrote of her character Pilate that “when she realized what her situation in the world was . . . she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero.”2 With her new awareness, Pilate conceived herself and birthed a new way of being woman.

  When my dream came, the potential to do the same rose up. Only it would take a long time to shed my old assumptions and begin at zero.

  THE DEEP SLEEP

  The dream left me with a vague kind of anticipation, a sense of restlessness. Two things happened as a result. First, I made plans to go away two months later for a solitary retreat at a Benedictine monastery, which I typically did when something was stirring inside. The second thing involved a journal.

  Writing is not only my career, it’s my compulsion. I keep voluminous journals, normally beginning a new one each January, so it was revealing that soon after the dream, even though it was September, even though I already had a nice journal with months of pages left, I went out and bought a new one. I bought a pink one.

  Many mornings throughout October, I sat by the windows in the den before the children awoke, before my husband, Sandy, came in and started the coffee ritual. I sat there thinking about my life as a woman.

  So much of it had been spent trying to live up to the stereotypical formula of what a woman should be—the Good Christian Woman, the Good Wife, the Good Mother, the Good Daughter—pursuing those things that have always been held out to women as ideals of femininity.

  One morning I wrote about something that had happened several months earlier. I’d been inducted into a group of women known as the Gracious Ladies. I’m not exactly sure what the criteria was, except one needed to portray certain ideals of womanhood, which included being gracious and giving of oneself unselfishly. During a high-lace ceremony, standing backstage waiting to be inducted, I felt a stab of discomfort. I thought about the meticulous way we were coiffed and dressed, the continuous smiling, the charm that fairly dripped off us, the sweet, demure way we behaved, like we were all there to audition for the Emily Post-er Child. We looked like the world’s most proper women.

  What am I doing here? I thought. Lines from the poem “Warning,” by Jenny Joseph, popped into my head and began to recite themselves.

  When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me, . . . / I shall go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens / And learn to spit.3

  I turned to a woman beside me and said, “After we’re Gracious Ladies, does that mean we can’t wear purple with a red hat or spit?” She smiled but appeared vaguely dismayed that someone who’d managed to get into the group had just said the word spit.

  “It’s from a poem,” I explained.

  “I see,” she said. Still smiling.

  It occurred to me on that October morning that living the female life under the archetype of Gracious Lady narrowed down the scope of it considerably. It scoured away a woman’s natural self, all the untamed juices of the female life. It would be many years before I read Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s words, “When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized,”4 but somehow even then, in the most rudimentary way, I was starting to know it.

  In my spiritual life I was also a sanitized woman. I had always been very spiritual and very religious, too, so as I wrote in my journal I began trying to put my womanhood together with my spirituality and religion.

  I wrote that I was mainstream orthodox. It sounded very dull, but actually it hadn’t been dull at all. I’d pursued a spiritual journey of depth and meaning, but—and this was the big realization for me—I’d done so safely within the circle of Christian orthodoxy. I would no more have veered out of that circle than a child would have purposely drawn outside the lines in her coloring book.

  I had been raised in the Southern Baptist Church, and I was still a rather exemplary member of one, but beginning in my early thirties I’d become immersed in a journey that was rooted in contemplative spirituality. It was the spirituality of the “church fathers,” of the monks I’d come to know as I made regular retreats in their monasteries. I was influenced by Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich, who did, now and then, refer to “God our Mother,” but this had never really sunk in. It was nice poetry. Now I wondered: What did “God our Mother” really mean?

  Morning after morning I wrote, starting to realize how my inner journey had taken me into the airy world of intellect and the fiery realm of spirit, places that suddenly seemed very removed. I thrived on solitude, routinely practicing silent meditation as taught by the monks Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating. Because I visited monasteries and practiced the spirituality they were built upon, people often asked me, “Why do you like monasteries so much?” I would grin and say, “Well, what do you expect? My middle name is Monk.” Like the Gracious Lady, Monk was an archetype—a guiding inner principle—I lived by.

  I’d read many of the classics of Christian contemplative literature, the church fathers and the great mystics of the church. For years I’d studied Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, Ignatius, Eckhart, Luther, Teilhard de Chardin, The Cloud of Unknowing, and others. Why had it never seemed peculiar that they were all men?

  I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, “This is my body, given for you,” not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.

  When those particular thoughts struck me one morning as I was writing, they pricked a bubble of anger I didn’t know I had, and I surprised myself by throwing my pen across the room. It landed inside the fireplace in a pile of soot. I had to go get the pen and clean it off. There had been so many things I hadn’t allowed myself to see, because if I fully woke to the truth, then what would I do? How would I be able to reconcile myself to it? The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.

  The thoughts and memories I was collecting in the journal were random, disjointed. Frankly, I couldn’t see what any of them had to do with the dream. It was as if I were walking around and around some secret enclosure, trying to find a way into it. I sometimes wondered what good my pacing was doing.

  But after leaving the process for a few days, I would be back in the den, picking up where I’d left off, trying to make sense of things. I wrote about how odd it was that at the same time I was making these retreats in monasteries, going to Eucharist, and meditating on the words of Merton and St. Francis, I was going to a Baptist church—not just on Sunday mornings, but also on Sunday and Wednesday evenings—where the emphasis was not on symbol and silence and God in the soul but on evangelizing and preaching and God in the word. I was a contemplative in an evangelical church, which is sort of like trying to squeeze a round soul into a square slot. It was all I could do to hold the tension between them. I had one foot on shore and the other in a boat that had started to drift.

  But despite the inner tension, I kept trying to adapt. The Southern Baptist Church had been the fabric of my religious existence since childhood. And if that wasn’t enough, I was married to a Southern Baptist minister who was a religion teacher and chaplain on a Baptist college campus. That alone was enough to keep me securely tethered to the flock. So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlu
cks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.

  I filled pages about my life as a Baptist.

  I recorded the time Ann, then eight, tugged on my dress during a church service while the minister was ordaining a new set of deacons. “When are they going to do the women?” she asked.

  “The women?” I echoed.

  She nodded. Her assumption of equality was earnest and endearing. These days you will find a few female deacons in the more moderate Southern Baptist churches, but not so much then. I’d felt like a harbinger of cruel truth when I told her, “They don’t ordain women, honey. Only men.”

  She had frowned, truly puzzled.

  That day in church, the words only men, only men, only men went on echoing in my head for a good five minutes, but it soon passed. With a little more ripeness, I might have conceived a new female life that long-ago day, but then I was too consumed with staying in line and being a good and proper woman, something that renders you fairly sterile as far as feminine journeys go.

  Writing down that memory reminded me of the time I was eight and had my own first encounter with “cruel truth.” I was in the church yard during Vacation Bible School. It was hot. Georgia hot. The girls sat under a tree, making tissue paper corsages, while the boys climbed the limbs above us. I could not remember how it started, only that a quarrel broke out—one of those heated boys-are-better-than-girls or girls-are-better-than-boys arguments that eight year olds have with such verve. Finally one of the boys told us to shut up, and, of course, we wanted to know who’d made him our boss. “God!” he said. “God made us the boss.”

  So we girls marched inside to the teacher and asked her point-blank if this was so. We asked her with the same earnest and endearing assumption of equality with which Ann had posed her question to me. And, like me, the teacher was slow to answer. “Well . . . actually . . . technically, I guess I have to say the Bible does make men the head.”

  “The head?” we asked.

  “That means in charge,” she said and looked at us as if to say, I know, I know, it’s a blow, but that’s the way it is.

  I stared at her, amazed. I had never heard anything like this before, and I was sure it had to be a mistake. A big mistake. I mean, if this were true, then women, girls, me—we were not at all what I thought. At eight I couldn’t have expressed it fully, but on some level I knew what this meant. That we were less than males and that we were going to spend the rest of our lives obeying and asking permission or worrying if we didn’t. That event and others like it would eventually limit everything I ever thought about freedom and dreams and going where they took me. But worse, those events said something about the female gender itself—that it simply wasn’t up to par. It had to be subdued, controlled, ruled over.

  For girls there is always a moment when the earnest, endearing assumption of equality is lost, and writing about it in my journal thirty years later made me want to take those two eight year olds into my arms—myself and Ann, both.

  October was nearly spent before I finally got around to reflecting on my life as a “Christian writer,” which was how I was often identified. I’d been a prolific contributor to an inspirational magazine with millions of readers. I’d written articles for religious journals and magazines, books about my contemplative spirituality. It always surprised me where my readers turned up. One time I called L. L. Bean to order Sandy a denim shirt, and the operator said she was reading one of my books. I got lots of mail from readers. I spoke at Christian conferences, in churches. As a result, it seemed people expected me to be a certain way. Of course, I expected me to be a certain way, too. And that way had nothing remotely to do with feminist spirituality.

  After a month of journal writing, one morning I sat as usual in the den. The light was coming up in the backyard, and the maple, at the height of fall color, appeared to be on fire. As I gazed at it, I understood that while I had gone through a lot of spiritual transformation and written about it, my changes had not deviated much from what were considered safe, standard, accepted Christian tenets. I had never imagined any kind of internal reformation that would call into question the Orthodox Christian Woman, the Good Daughter to the Church, or the Monk who lived high in the spiritual tower of her head. The risk of doing so seemed much too high for lots of reasons, but certainly paramount among them was that it might jeopardize my marriage and my career. I finally came to this:

  As a woman, I’ve been asleep. The knowing rose in me, fast and brilliant, like the light coming now across the grass. I closed the journal and put it away.

  A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine have been wounded, devalued, and limited within culture, churches, and families. She cannot see the wound or feel the pain. She has never acknowledged, much less confronted, sexism within the church, biblical interpretations, or Christian doctrine. Okay, so women have been largely missing from positions of church power, we’ve been silenced and relegated to positions of subordination by biblical interpretations and doctrine, and God has been represented to us as exclusively male. So what? The woman in Deep Sleep is oblivious to the psychological and spiritual impact this has had on her. Or maybe she has some awareness of it all but keeps it sequestered nicely in her head, rarely allowing it to move down into her heart or into the politics of her spirituality.

  The awarenesses about my female life that emerged during that month were sketchy, thin, and incomplete. A memory here, a thought there, a recognition, an insight—all of them sifting around like vapor. I knew as a woman I’d been asleep, but I had no idea exactly how. I knew I was waking up, but I didn’t possess a clue about what I might be waking up to. All I knew was that there was this tiny female life inside, some part of me waking up and wanting to be born. She was rousing me out of years of somnambulance, and something had to be done with her.

  An Unambiguous Woman

  All in all I had been what some have called an “unambiguous woman.” I didn’t know this term at the time. It was coined by feminist theorist Deborah Cameron and later referred to by author Carolyn Heilbrun in her book Writing a Woman’s Life. “What does it mean to be unambiguously a woman?” writes Heilbrun. “It means to put a man at the center of one’s life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position. One’s own desires and quests are always secondary.”5

  For me the “man” was sometimes my husband, at other times my father, male colleagues, clergy, or God. But at its most basic, this “man” was symbolic of male authority itself, the cultural father or the collective rule of men in general.

  I didn’t consciously recognize when I was being unambiguously woman; I’d been blind to it. Before October, I would have denied it vehemently, as we are apt to do when something true is unconscious to us.

  I had truly thought of myself as an independent woman. Certainly I was not outwardly submissive. I had my career, my own life, ideas, and plans. I behaved in seemingly independent ways, but inside I was still caught in daughterhood. I was deferring to the father at the center. I operated out of a lot of assumptions and ideas, but I had no idea the extent to which my ideas were really the internalized notions of a culture that put men at the center. My independent forays and outspokenness came at emotional cost and required excessive expenditures of energy. They engendered uneasy feelings, after-the-fact worry, second-guessing, and the habit of looking over my shoulder.

  Living without real inner authority, without access to my deep feminine strength, I carried around a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity.

  Such ideas may have been barely forming in me, but they still packed a lot of feeling. A lot of confused feeling. One evening in early November while the family was eating dinner, I reminded Sandy I was going away soon to the monastery for a retreat. With me gone, he had
it all—work, kids, meals, house, laundry, the whole thing.

  He grimaced. He said, “I wish you weren’t going.” That’s what he said. Here’s what I heard: Stay home. Stay put. Put me at the center of the universe and allow to happen only what honors my prime position.

  “You know what?” I shouted. “I am fed up. I am just plain fed up!” Then I left the table, with Sandy, Ann, and Bob all staring at me, their forks poised in the air.

  Sandy followed me into the bedroom, full of concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  I wish I could have explained it to him then in a neat, coherent fashion, but it was so new and such a jumble inside. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  When a woman wakes up, it’s not experienced in isolation. Her family, the people she’s closest to, will be thrust into the experience as well, because it’s not just the woman who’s expecting a new life. In a way, the whole family is pregnant.

  Broken Connection to the Feminine Soul

  I had always prayed, though much of my prayer in the last few years had been silent meditation. One morning, though, I tried to get talkative with God, to talk to “him” about the things in my journal, the fed-up feeling, the realization that a new way of being a woman wanted to be born in me. I got nowhere. I kept wondering how “he” was going to understand this distinctly feminine experience.

  I tried briefly to imagine a God like me. God as female. But it was such a foreign notion.