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A Woman's Journey to God:
Finding the Feminine Path
by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. |
What is Holy?
That which is received.
What is holy?
That to
which we are present.
Looking into the
dreamy eyes of my newborn child
lifted from the salty ocean of the Great Mother,
blood still pulsing in the cord that joins two hearts.
Sunning myself on a
warm rock, carefree as a cloud
snowcapped mountains reflected in the
deep blue-black waters of a crystal lake.
Listening to a
lover’s lament, tears over a gentle man
with roots as yet too shallow to drink in the
full sun of her being without wilting in the light.
Praying at the
Wailing Wall, the ghosts of ancient women
whispering their stories into the ears of stones
worn smooth by the slender fingers of their longing.
--Joan
Borysenko
A quiet awakening is under way across America as women
are coming together to worship, to tell their stories
and to find their place spiritually, if not always
religiously, in the household of God. Women’s
spiritual groups are cropping up everywhere like
mushrooms after a nourishing rain. Far from being some
kind of New Age phenomenon, they involve women of every
Christian and Jewish sect including Catholics, Mormons,
Mennonites, evangelicals, and others. Buddhist, Hindu,
and Muslim women also discuss the woman’s way. Women
of color and Hispanic women are likewise exploring their
spirituality and roles in organized religion. Gay women
and straight, those who consider themselves feminists
and others who abhor the word, are nonetheless searching
for authentic spiritual expression.
We do so organically, through the medium of sharing
our stories, writing and performing songs and poems,
celebrating the Divine with our bodies through dance and
movement, creating rituals that celebrate the important
passages of life and heal its inevitable wounds,
creating egalitarian and participatory models for
worship and by reaching out to others to heal social
injustice, racism, and discrimination. God as a jealous,
punitive white Anglo-Saxon male with a long beard and a
longer arm lacks appeal for many contemporary women.
This has led some to run into the arms of the Goddess
and find meaning in earth-centered or neopagan rituals.
It has led others to join Buddhist sanhas where there is
no personified god. And it has led many more to question
the relevance of their religious beliefs to the homely
reality of everyday life.
For eons women have been viewed as second-class
citizens by the three "religions of the Book"
-- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- because of Eve’s
act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden. It is written
in Ecclesiasticus 25:24, "From a woman sin had its
beginning, and because of her we all die." Many
women are tired of repenting for Eve’s imagined sins
and are ready to reclaim the energy that has been lost
to religious traditions in which the framers were
singularly unconcerned either with women’s
spirituality or with their basic rights and gifts as
human beings. Nineteenth-century women like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, editor of the controversial Woman’s
Bible that appeared at the turn of the century,
fought for women’s suffrage in part by stating that we
would never be truly free until the theological errors
underlying the discrimination against women were
corrected.
Many contemporary feminist theologians are attempting
to do just that. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza of the
Harvard Divinity School has written fifteen books of
scriptural exegesis and commentary from a woman’s
viewpoint. In a 1978 essay she wrote that "feminist
spirituality proclaims wholeness, healing, love and
spiritual power not as hierarchical, as power over,
but as power for, as enabling power." In the
twenty years since she wrote those words, the wave of
the baby boom has crested, washing up an enormous number
of midlife women on the shores of wisdom with the power
and motivation to create change. Women are, in fact, the
backbone of a rapidly growing social movement called
Cultural Creatives, 44 million strong, who are committed
to healing, community, social justice, spirituality and
to creating a sustainable environment. This emerging
group is fascinated by other cultures and religions that
can enrich our lives spiritually, increase our
understanding, and help bring a new world of tolerance,
respect, and care into being.
A variety of women’s worship circles have sprouted
both within and beyond the walls of traditional
religion, honoring the ritual spontaneity spoken of in
Mariam Therese Winter’s Defecting in Place:
Women Claiming Responsibility for Their Own Spiritual
Lives. Jewish women may celebrate together in
Rosh Hodesh groups, a monthly celebration of the new
moon, which many link to their menstrual cycles. Books
like Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb’s She Who Dwells Within
plumb the depths of the feminine face of God in Judaism,
the Shekhina, and give elegant and moving advice for
celebrating the Sabbath, Rosh Hodesh, and other
women-centered rituals. In Four Centuries of Jewish
Women’s Spirituality, there are many stories of
women’s ritual relevant to the emotional concerns of
daily living, created by friends for other friends
outside the bounds of the synagogue.
E.M. Broner writes of sitting shivah for a lost love,
shivah being a week of ritual mourning for the dead. But
even though this ritual is called a shivah, Broner
describes a practical, heartfelt outpouring of
friendship and healing that women of any faith can
relate to. She tells of a friend with a broken heart,
whose coloring has changed to "boiled red,"
because she cannot stop weeping. Her
sixty-three-year-old lover of nine years has taken up
with a young woman of twenty-three. On the day of his
marriage to this young woman, a circle of friends
gather, bringing only a tape recorder and a cooked
chicken.
Taking turns talking into the machine, they
"correct" their friend’s memory and remind
her of her own intrinsic wholeness. It is a holy circle,
a sacred circle. They "acknowledge amputation,
separation as part of life." They cook and eat
together, talking of everyday things. Life goes on. They
toast the wholeness of the friend. They embrace Her and
let their tears wash her clean. Finally they cut a black
armband for the friend to wear while she grieves,
stipulating a period of mourning, and a time to end it.
Women from all religious traditions crave
person-to-person ritual relevant to the problems and
celebrations of everyday life. One of the difficulties
with organized religions is that there is so little of
this kind of connecting.
Women are intrinsically mystical, that is, we tend to
experience direct connection with the Divine. This may
occur not only during formal worship, prayer, or
meditation but any time. Women often report a deep sense
of connection to God as part of friendship, or
mothering. We see the God in others. Finding God by
adhering to specific rules and regulations, plans and
paths, priests and mediators is not a necessary
component of the woman’s journey. For women there
really is no journey. Life and spirituality are one and
the same.
Going through menarche, infertility, stillbirth,
cesarean sections, normal births, the decision not to
bear children, the loss of a child, menopause--these are
women’s mysteries and passages that are intimately
related to our spiritual lives, and for which we seek
meaningful ritual to celebrate, to find strength, and to
mourn. Rituals such as these are exactly what are
missing in biblical Scripture, written by men for men.
Scripture, moreover, is concerned largely with public
life rather than the details of private life, so little
is known about the role of women. Only 151 of 1,400
people who are referred to by name in the Hebrew Bible,
and proportionately about twice that number named in the
New Testament, are women. These numbers testify to the
small attention paid to us, to our daily lives, forms of
worship, hopes and dreams.
For many years I have been intimately involved in
facilitating or cofacilitating women’s spiritual
retreats for dropouts, returnees, and loyalists who have
managed to find nurture in whatever their religious
orientation of childhood might have been. Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, Unitarian, Christian Scientist, Wiccan,
and Muslim women have come together at these retreats to
celebrate commonalities in women’s spiritual
experience. The retreats have had formats as different
as the creation of ritual, celebratory liturgy, and
occasions of deep healing, to an exploration of
spirituality as it evolves through the feminine life
cycle, to weekends of silent, centering prayer and
humor. Central to each has been the act of women sharing
their stories, not in any contrived way but as women do
when the occasion presents itself. We talk over
breakfast, in pajamas, in the bathroom, out on walks. The
stories unfold, often surprising the speaker as well as
the listener. The hidden reaches of the heart become
accessible as words are received by a compassionate
listener. Where there once were two, there is a wiser
one.
Rabbi Nachman, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov who
founded mystical Judais, said that if you wanted to find
the Shekhina, the Divine Feminine, then you should go to
the place where the women tell stories. Women’s
spirituality, after all, is less about the hereafter
than the here and now. It is embodied and earthy,
relying on personal experience versus abstract theology
and the validation of that experience by sharing our
stories. Women’s spirituality can be summarized as
relational, active, emotional, mystical, imaginative,
creative, practical, positively concerned with the
healing of the world, body centered, sensuous, given to
spontaneous acts of ritual and worship, based on a sense
of inner divine authority, composed of a diversity of
images of God, tolerant of other religious traditions,
and rooted in the everyday practicalities of living.
Coming together as friends in religious contexts
requires respect for forms of worship different than our
own. These differences keep heart and mind open. They
are soul food. If we are to find a path of our own, it
helps to know and appreciate the paths of others. To
realize that the household of God is indeed big enough
for all gives everyone room to live and grow. The idea
that there is only one right way home, one path for all,
creates judgment and separation. Women’s spirituality
is about connectedness.
As we continue to follow the thread of feminine
spirituality through ancient labyrinths, we will come
face-to-face with our power, the power of the she-bear.
The energy that may have been tied up in old religious
wounds will become freed to speed us on our way. That
accomplished, the question remains, "How can we
find our own path within the feminine way?"
Considering ritual and prayer, as well as the conflicts
and synergies between doing and being, what we do versus
who we are, our authentic soul voice can emerge.
Appreciating both the hero’s and the heroine’s
journey, the balance of female and male in ourselves,
our religions and the world, women can come home to
themselves, to communities of worship, and to God.
Excerpted
from the new book, A Woman's Journey to God: Finding
the Feminine Path, by Joan Borysenko. Riverhead Books.
Reprinted by
permission.
Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., has a powerfully clear
personal vision--to bring science, medicine,
psychology and spirituality together in the service of
healing. Her brilliance as a scientist, clinician and
teacher have placed her on the leading edge of the
mind-body revolution, and she has become a
world-renowned spokesperson for this new approach to
health, sharing her pioneering work with a gentle
graciousness, enthusiasm and humility.
Trained as both a medical
scientist and a psychologist, Dr. Borysenko has gone
beyond her traditional academic training and developed
depth and breadth in a number of fields including
behavioral medicine, stress and well-being,
psychoneuroimmunology, women's health, creativity and
the great spiritual traditions of the world. She
completed her doctorate in medical sciences at the
Harvard Medical School where she also completed three
post-doctoral fellowships in experimental pathology,
behavioral medicine and psychoneuroimmunology and
where she was instructor in medicine until 1988.
Also a licensed psychologist,
Dr. Borysenko was co-founder and former Director of
the Mind-Body clinical programs at two Harvard Medical
School teaching hospitals, now merged as the Beth
Israel/Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. These
programs were the foundation for her 1987 classic New
York Times bestseller Minding the Body, Mending the
Mind.
Dr. Borysenko is a spell-binding
lecturer and workshop leader who blends science,
psychology and spirituality in a unique and powerful
way. Her presentations are full of humor and personal
anecdotes as well as the latest scientific research
and practical exercises for both personal and
professional growth. Her nine books are a complete
library of healing, combining scholarly wisdom with
the language of the heart, and bringing body and soul
together with unprecedented clarity and
sophistication.
Dr. Borysenko's work has
appeared in numerous scientific journals and has been
featured in many popular magazines and newspapers. She
is well known for her ability to bridge diverse
disciplines and open up new lines of communication. A
widely sought expert for the media, she has appeared
on Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, Sonya Live, Geraldo,
Hour Magazine and Good Morning America among many
other appearances both on commercial and public
television. Her work has been featured in U.S. News
and World Report, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
Reader's Digest, Success, Bottom Line, The Leifer
Report, American Health, Shape, Glamour, Vogue, Ladies
Home Journal, Living Fit, Success, Yoga Journal, New
Age Journal, and many other magazines and newspapers.
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