Digging the Well - Fitting the Divine Feminine into the Ecclesia

Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Teresa"

Having just marked my 40th birthday – a good excuse for celebration and totally non-stressful I’m happy to say – I’ve been reflecting on the obvious issues of body, youth, age, fitness, sex and all that stuff that starts coming to a head long about the time that a woman realizes she is now, finally and absolutely, much more than her mother told her she was. Unless of course her mother was an exceptionally self-aware advocate of women’s body liberation and that is exceedingly rare.

I’ve met accomplished women, self identifying feminists, who are every bit as uptight and domineering over their daughters as the conservatives they love to hate. For better or worse, the politics of women’s sexuality are more tangled, charged, loaded and – for some – frightening, than the politics of women’s lib and almost any other aspect of life. Your mom might wave the flag for equal pay, but mention equal access to safe sex and she’s likely to blow a gasket. And you can forget about discussing this stuff at church.

Who knew? Well a lot of women it turns out, and some of them write books now. Some of them run stores that sell things that buzz and pulse and smell like mango. Some of them home school children and cook sensuously beautiful food. Some run clinics where teaching women how to be unafraid – of themselves, of life – is the mission. Some make films. Some make babies. Yet with all these women out there knowing these things to be true, we still talk fairly little about the subject. And we only rarely bring it into discussion in the context of parenting. But there, in truth, is where the rubber hits the road. Pun absolutely intended I’m afraid. A woman first learns how she may, or may not, express herself in this world watching her mother support, inhibit, celebrate or denigrate her daughter’s transformation from girl to woman.

For better or worse, this process is intimately related to a woman’s spiritual identity. Seriously, it is. This is not an excuse for two-dimensional goddess rant. Men experience something similar, I think, in modeling their fathers or resisting them. But I can’t say how that relates to their connecting to the numinous. I welcome their input. Who taught by example in your life and who taught you through partnership? The straight men I’ve talked to about this say it was a girlfriend or wife who helped them “connect.” And for those whose mothers were, themselves, uptight or unhappy in their own sexual selves, their lives are too often full of escape and hiding behavior. Drugs, alcohol, false identities at work or school, relationships with girls who fit the Madonna/whore cliché. The man who marries the one and seeks the other on the side. Fortunately, it’s not a life sentence. Some find their way out.

For women certainly, there is an underground tunnel running between the deepest wells in her life – an elemental connectedness between how she relates to her body and how she relates to all things divine and transcendental in the universe. Plug up her access to the first and you might as well close down the second.

Which is why we should be discussing people’s sexuality - women’s sexuality in particular - in church, probably. Or maybe just on Tuesday nights or something – a young women’s discussion group at 5:00pm, and a mature (21+) women’s group at 7:00. But you try bringing that subject up in any church you know... Can you imagine?

I can see it now, approaching the patriarch of the regional Orthodox church. He’s based in Los Angeles I think. He’d think I was mad. Or worse, an ecumenically inclined wiccan or something. Either way I’d be politely invited to shop elsewhere.

The oldest Russian Orthodox church in the contiguous United States is just steps from my house. Anything in America with roots older than your living relatives is impressive. But this church is especially so. It’s a small and terribly pretty little building, full of new members, people fleeing from the Roman Catholic and American Church of England. The bells there, saved from disasters in St. Petersburg in the 1920s, ring a hauntingly beautiful song across the city hills, on Friday evening and Saturday evening, and Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. They sound like nothing else – very Eastern, if you can imagine. Like Balinese gamelan music.

The Eastern Church is a poetic, jewel-encrusted, mystic and life affirming celebration of humanity’s relationship to the Divine. They don’t mess about. While much of their philosophical tradition is, according to common understanding “negatively defined” meaning they conceptualize God and the Holy Spirit by what he is not, in practice they spend a great deal of time celebrating earthly manifestations of grace, beauty and the “Divine Feminine.”

Still, with all the bells and the smells, most Eastern Orthodox expounders are very conservative on matters relating to sexuality, which is a shame. If any of the major religions has a liturgical claim to celebrate the spiritual significance of womanhood, it’s the Eastern Orthodox. For them, the mother of God, Mary, is nearly as central a figure as Christ and the Holy Spirit. Alas, in spite of a poetic tradition that is, at times, overwhelmingly sensual, even sexual, they clearly espouse a conservative agenda. Sex is for marriage and making babies. It’s an opportunity lost, I’m afraid.

That leaves Sophia, and Mary Magdalene, and every woman who wants her church NOT to repeat the sins of our mothers – may God be gentle with her – looking for a spiritual home. The Gnostic traditions (plural intentional) appear to flower in this direction. We can see the bud turning towards the sun here, instead of away. Or perhaps I should say the moon. One hopes the Gnostic Ecclesia will include a field of “moon flowers,” rooted deeply in this earth, but with faces turned to the moon and the stars for inspiration.

That’s the purpose of this blog, I think. To plant more of those seeds. To encourage a connection for women seekers and to celebrate the men who support this path. To bring out the Divine Feminine in both literal and numinous aspects, for men and for women. Perhaps, one day, to bring the subject of sexuality – women’s AND men’s – firmly back into the sphere where it belongs – into the bosom of the church where we can treat it with dignity, irreverence, playfulness, poetry and comedy. This is my hope. It won’t be the first windmill I’ve tilted at in life.