Ochre

Women’s Spirituality and the Primacy of Women’s Stories

Elizabeth Shillington

Women's Spirituality

Women’s spirituality provided the context for my dissertation about women’s menstrual stories, both as a field of study and as a spiritual path that all women who tell their stories share in some way. Women’s spirituality as a field of study owes much to the feminist movement (especially to radical and cultural feminism) and to the field of women’s studies, which emerged in the early 1970s in order “to challenge the silencing, stereotyping, marginalization, and misrepresentation of women prevalent in historical, social, scientific, and literary/cultural scholarship, whether theoretical or empirical.” (15) 15. Joanna de Groot and Mary Maynard, “Doing Things Differently? A Context for Women’s Studies in the Next Decade,” in Women’s Studies in the 1990s, ed. Joanna de Groot and Mary Maynard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 2. Women’s studies has offered women an extremely valuable intellectual space in which to explore and discuss their lives, histories, identities, and experiences in a scholarly way. It is an interdisciplinary field that both looks at the place of women across the disciplines, including, among others, sociology, religion, literature, history, and psychology, and challenges those disciplines to address their own biases in terms of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Feminist research methods that were developed within this field are central to the way I have done my research.

The women's spirituality movement is also interdisciplinary and encompasses a wide variety of perspectives, possibilities, and practices. Central among them, for many, is the image of the Goddess or Divine Feminine: Earth Mother, Universal Matrix, female energy, life force, Spirit of Nature, as well as the possibility of many individual goddesses, sacred women, and grandmothers. She may be seen as the Earth (or the Universe) and all that is within it, the energy that flows between all living beings, femaleness, female power, the life process with its cycles of birth, death, and regeneration, or a specific female deity. Feminist thealogian Carol P. Christ defines Her as “the power of intelligent, embodied love that is the ground of all being.” (16) 16. Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), xv. She is an extremely powerful symbol for women who are ready to look beyond patriarchy for new ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.

The Goddess represents the organic wholeness of life. Instead of being only about light and life, for example, She represents the light and the dark, life and death, fertility and decay, order and chaos. She is both creator and destroyer, (17) 17. Paula Gunn Allen, “Grandmother of the Sun,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 22. giver and taker of life. (18) 18. Marija Gimbutas, “Women and Culture in Goddess-Oriented Old Europe,” in Weaving the Visions: (see note 4), 68. She is a holistic, rather than a dualistic presence. She incorporates the entire cycle of birth, death, and regeneration in Her being. The darkness in Goddess thealogy is not necessarily a negative force or fearful place, but another aspect of life, one that holds immense potential for transformation. (19) 19. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, 30.

Since the Goddess is inherently female and manifests physically in the form of our planet Earth, She affirms the female body and, with it, female sexuality, the erotic, the capacity to give birth and nurture new life, all phases of the life cycle, and the love women have not only for their male partners and children but also for each other. Instead of feeling the shame and guilt about our bodies that most Western women experience growing up, women who love the Goddess are encouraged to love our own embodied selves, too. As women, we learn to appreciate the ways in which our bodies reflect the processes of the Earth and Cosmos. We know the Universe to be beautiful, so we come to know and appreciate our own beauty in new and (potentially) deeply healing ways.

When we affirm our female sexuality, our erotic energy bubbles to the surface. Audre Lorde reminds us that although we’re taught to distrust the erotic and may have suppressed it within ourselves, it is “those physical, emotional and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.” (20) 20. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 208, 210. It is the “yes!” to life, the seed of creativity, the longing for connection that lives in every woman. The erotic brings us to our greatest sense of fulfillment, awareness, and joy. As the character Shug, speaking of the erotic in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, says, “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did.” (21) 21. Alice Walker, “God Is Inside You and Inside Everybody Else,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 103. Diane Mariechild and Marcelina Martin, authors of Lesbian Sacred Sexuality, said:

Sexuality and spirituality are facilitated by a deep intimacy with one’s inner nature, with the physical body, and intimacy with the natural world. This intimacy brings a quality of loving connection and sensitivity to life. It is energetic, spontaneous, and joyful. Sexual or creative energy radiates through all life. Erotic, creative, divine, Goddess energy. Fertile, rich, passionate, abundant energy. It is life itself and as such is sacred. The sexual act is but one expression of this energy. We make our sex sacred, in the same way we make any life experience sacred, through our intention. (22) 22. Diane Mariechild and Marcelina Martin, Lesbian Sacred Sexuality (Oakland, CA: Wingbow Press, 1998), 56.

The power of the erotic is so strong that once we become aware of it in ourselves, we are no longer willing to put up with the things we were previously (in a more deadened state) willing to accept. In touch with the erotic, we are willing to say “no!” to injustice, cruelty, and despair. We no longer are willing to settle for less than wholeness and beauty in both our own lives and the lives of those who surround us. If we let eros flow through all our relationships, instead of only our sexual ones, we increase our sense of interconnectedness with each other and realize more clearly the unity that binds us together in the web of life. That realization may lead to activism on behalf of the Earth and those who suffer from injustice when it is no longer possible to separate our own experience and quality of life from that of the other living beings with whom we share the planet. All aspects of Nature become sacred—the animals, trees, rocks, flowers, ocean waves—all are manifestations of the Goddess and imbued with Her Spirit. As long as the Earth or any part of Her suffers, we suffer too. She is us and we are Her. As ecofeminist poet Susan Griffin said:

I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us. (23) 23. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 227.

Goddess spirituality celebrates not only the love of women for their children and male partners, but also for other women in friendships and in sexual relationships. The experience of making love has been described by some lesbians as one of reuniting the self with the world. (24) 24. Mariechild and Martin, Lesbian Sacred Sexuality, 56. It is a very intimate way of recognizing the Goddess within oneself and one’s partner, and in so doing, the female energy of the entire cosmos. As poet Elsa Gidlow expressed it:

In the blaze of love it is known:
We are particles each of each
We are cells of the Mother of all
We cannot be cast off
From sister cells or from Her. (25) 25. Elsa Gidlow, “In the Blaze of Love,” quoted in Mariechild and Martin, Lesbian Sacred Sexuality, 115.

My own personal perception of the Goddess is that She is the energy of love that permeates the universe—that exists in earth, sky, sea, stars, plants, animals, rocks, people. She is an expression of the life force of the Universe—an energy that can be called upon to protect, to forgive, to love as fully as possible. The Goddess manifests Herself physically in the natural world—in the beauty and the darkness—but is also Spirit, present everywhere and within every sentient being. She moves all beings through the cycles of their lifetimes, exchanging energy given out and received in ways that we, as people bounded by space and time, can not fully understand. Her desire for us, as for all of creation, is that we attain wholeness, live in harmony, act always out of unconditional love, recognize Her power within us, and use it for the highest good. Yet She gives and takes according to our choices, until they lead us back to our Source. I believe Her to be a divine presence that is both transcendent and immanent, an energy “out there” that also dwells “in here,” who embraces from without and empowers from within.

Love of the Goddess is expressed both in solitude and in community, where circles of women may gather to celebrate and perform rituals together. Women come together to find a space apart from the rest of the world where we can bring our concerns and feel our connection to each other and the Earth. In ritual we can speak the words that affirm our womanhood, our bodies, the Earth, and the Goddess. By entering into sacred space we leave the mundane aspects of our lives behind and “bring the Goddess to consciousness.” (26) 26. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, 25. Starhawk, one of the Goddess movement’s most well-known ritualists, says that ritual acts trigger altered states of awareness, allowing new insights to be revealed and awakening forgotten powers of the human mind. (27) 27. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 22, 27. Rituals change the focus of the participants so that we can both become more aware of ourselves and more receptive to information coming to us in new, non-verbal ways. (28) 28. Lara Owen, Honoring Menstruation:A Time of Self-renewal (Freedom, CA:Crossing Press, 1998), 105. In ritual, women become more aware of our connection to the natural world, more able to let go of old patterns that no longer serve us and to create something new in our lives. Ritual also connects us to our ancestresses and all the women who have preceded us in space and time. It helps build community and gives us an avenue through which to celebrate common values and concerns that may not be shared by the world at large. Ideally, in ritual we come together in a circle where all women hold an equal place, where each woman’s voice is heard, and where we can offer our creativity to express our spirituality in communion with our sisters. It is a place where, as Starhawk says, “our Deep Self” is evoked (29) 29. Starhawk, “Ritual as Bonding,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 326. and we come into authentic existence in a space apart from the other concerns of work and family life that fill up our daily lives.

For women in the women’s spirituality movement, our roots in the past, as well as our family bonds, may inspire expressions of reverence for our ancestors, both those we remember and those whose names and stories have been lost to us. As Yoruba Chief Luisah Teish says, “Through reverence for [our ancestors] we recognize our origins and ensure the spiritual and physical continuity of the human race.” (30) 30. Luisah Teish, “Ancestor Reverence,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 87. Finding out whatever we can about our motherlines is a particularly empowering experience of discovering our place in a line of women that stretches back to the beginning of time. We learn to honor the women that brought us into being at this time and place—their struggles, strength, and capacity for love. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer of Laguna Pueblo heritage, says that an important reason for telling our family stories is that they provide distance and perspective for our own experiences. (31) 31. Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 52. Such stories tell us who we are; they protect and heal us. (32) 32. Ibid., 152. They may also inspire in us a desire to create a world for our children that will offer them their own creative opportunities and lessons. When we feel more connected to our history, we feel a stronger concern for the future. Our mothers’ struggles on our behalf inspire us to offer whatever we can to those who will follow after us.

When we take into account not only the lives of our ancestors, but the places where they walked the Earth, we also come into a more profound appreciation of place. As Pueblo American Indian poet, artist and author Carol Lee Sanchez points out, European Americans have no sacred origin stories that are based here on this land where we now live. (33) 33. Carol Lee Sanchez, “New World Tribal Communities,” in Weaving the Visions (see note 4), 348. Perhaps our disregard for the land comes from a lack of historical spiritual connection we have with the Americas. Instead of limiting ourselves to nostalgic reminiscences about the countries our ancestors originally hailed from, we need to find our connection to the land where we are now living, (without usurping the traditions of peoples who have inhabited it far longer). As Silko says, any location can become a sacred place (34) 34. Silko, Yellow Woman, 133. because all places and beings of the Earth are sacred. (35) 35. Ibid., 94; Sanchez, “New World Tribal Communities,” 344. As a way of enhancing our lives, and ensuring the survival of our species, it seems imperative to me that we develop that sense of connection to land and place. If we regard the Earth as objective dead matter, to be used however we see fit, our attitude will bring about our own destruction. The realization of how deeply connected to the Earth we truly are brings us into a sense of enchantment with our bodies and the Earth. We see them as awesome, magical, and worthy of great care and reverence.

In women’s spirituality we learn to value living in a world not of sameness, but of variety, harmony, and health, where all beings are considered sacred and unique. We learn to practice gratitude for all the Mother has given us, to make sacred all aspects of our lives, to see ourselves as all equally valuable, to take no more of the Earth’s resources than we need. We learn to revere our ancestors and the land upon which we walk and breathe and die. We honor our bodies and our sexuality. We see the beauty and unique gifts of each individual. We become activists for the Earth and for all beings that suffer. Such a shift in consciousness requires a strong spiritual practice, as well as communal striving.

Carol P. Christ says, “the insight that all beings in the web of life are deeply connected is the central ethical vision of Goddess religion.” (36) 36. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, 165. I believe that our actions, and even our thoughts, have consequences that reverberate, for better or worse, throughout the cosmos. We therefore have a responsibility to do our part for the web of life, which connects and ultimately unites us all in the Goddess.

Although this discussion has focused primarily on Goddess spirituality as a central focus of spiritual feminism, the women's spirituality movement also holds in its wide embrace all spiritual traditions that honor the Earth and the Divine Feminine in some form, as well as women who are seeking to reclaim the Divine Feminine within the context of more traditionally patriarchal religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.