The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 monasteriesso 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,