The Religious Experience of Women
by Christine Michael
Published by "The Modern Churchpeople's Union" in their journal "MC"
In a recent paper entitled 'The bearing of empirical studies of religious experience on education,' David Hay makes reference to the fact that in Western societies we are particularly reticent about reporting religious experience for fear, perhaps, of appearing mentally unstable. One woman describes her experience in quite simple terms:
I'm surprised that 1 didn't make a note of the date, but 1 believe it happened in Spring or early Summer of -. My husband was still away in the army, 'somewhere in England' but in no particular danger, our son was bouncing about in his pram outside, the sun was shining and 1 was making the bed; there was nothing in my life to make the day different to any other, suddenly, 1 was filled with an absolute certainty of the reality of God. No lights, no voices, no exotic feelings. Just a quiet, utterly convincing certainty 'Of course there is [a] God' ... It was cool and quiet and certain - and very surprising. 1
The experience, in its quiet simplicity, was sufficient for the woman to confirm with certainty the existence of God, no gender description seems necessary. There is no indication that the experience includes any admonishment for the fact that she is a woman. ['A woman should be covered with shame at the thought she is a woman.' (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, 11, c. 190).] Has secularity freshened the stream and flushed out much of the ambivalences that women have carried through centuries of Judeo-Christian attitudes? Can women make a fresh start with their religious experience and rename it?
Colette Dowling in her book The Cinderella Complex speaks of summoning up the courage to forsake her 'religious education.' She tells how after her marriage broke up she became phobic and barely able to walk down the street for attacks of anxiety and vertigo. She said that 'the sudden change from my old apparent strength confused me as well. Wasn't I tough? Wasn't I 'together'? Hadn't 1 kept my family intact, almost single-handedly, for years?'
She goes on:
"Looking back, it seems clear to me now that there were signs all along the way of a potentially devastating lack of congruence between my inner self and my outer self. The outer self was 'strong' and 'independent' (especially as compared with how women were supposed to be). The inner self was stricken with doubt; self-effacing. There had been a peculiar episode in college, something I'd put behind me as quickly as possible. One Sunday, during High Mass, 1 was suddenly impelled to run from the chapel. The pomp and incense and remote formality of the ritual made me sweat with unprecedented anxiety and nausea: my first 'panic attack'. What was happening to me? I wondered, hanging on to the pew in front of me for support as waves of dizziness flooded over me.
It seemed to take for ever before 1 got up the nerve to leave the chapel. The leaving, 1 think now, was symbolic of a greater leaving, a premonition that the rituals of Catholicism would not always be there for me to fall back on. Would there ever be anything to fall back on? 2
She states a little further on: 'What lay ahead in the immediate future was the work of putting together the first crude essentials of a belief in myself. 3
The woman in David Hay's paper receives a certainty that came from within herself. Colette Dowling, after struggling with the imposed strictures of her religion from without, finds herself fragmented and uncertain even of her own self. Such a state goes beyond one of ambivalence. Why?
Maria Riley uses as the title of an article in Womanspirit, lines from a poem by May Sarton, 'My Sisters, 0 My Sisters': 'Eve & Mary and Mother And Our Stem All Our Centuries Go Back To Them', stating that the lines capture the central paradox of women's experience. She goes on:
" The paradox extends through many dimensions: personal, historical and cultural. On the personal level woman is caught in the conflicting images of being identified as the source of all that is evil - Eve - or the source of all that is good - Mary the Mother 4
The ambivalence women often feel about their religious experience is caught between these two models of her being. Women's experience is neither that of Eve or Mary though they have often been told they must be one or the other. This is a cruel kind of silencing for the true experience of women has been squeezed in between the images of Eve and Mary and made somehow invisible. Apart from being devastating for women, such a state of being has created a general religious and cultural crisis.
While, in a secular society, there would appear to be taboos about relating religious experience, there are likewise, within the context of Christianity itself, taboos relating to the questioning of religious traditions which are, of course, different to actual experience.
In a recent paper entitled Methodology in Feminist Theology given at a seminar at Nottingham University, Angela Pears spoke of the treatment of women over the centuries and the relevance of that treatment to their contemporary experience. She spoke of an undoubted need to uncover the silences and then move on. There was a need for change because a critique of traditional theology revealed a predominant reflection of male, rather than female experience. For women the God-language in current usage is inadequate to their experience and an exploration of alternative methods is required. Feminist theologians are, in the main, critical of dualistic conceptualisations and hierarchical structuralism in which women are often portrayed as 'other'. Attempts, therefore, are being made, to be holistic and non-hierarchical. There is an assertion of women's rights to full equality and a necessary recovery of women's bodily experience and connections to the earth.
There is a need to rename ultimate reality and this is fostering an ontological spiritual revolution. This existentialist quest for women involves an emphasis on 'nothingness' and 'living on the boundary' - the theme is hope.
With all the research into the lost civilisations involving goddess worship and of great matriarchal societies, women are currently having to rethink their religious experience. The ambivalence women feel about their sinfulness really does go back to Eve. Maria Riley states:
"Regardless of how we interpret the Genesis story, these are mighty curses attributed to God which carry a cultural bias from which we have never recovered. Woman is cursed in her sexuality and maternity; man is cursed in his work. Woman is cursed for who she is; man is cursed for what he does. 5
In order to be in the modern world, women must recover their history before Eve in order to make sense of Eve and of their own true selves. They must ground themselves in their own experience and get in touch with their own perceptions about ultimate reality.
Ironically, Maria Riley notes that:
" With the advent of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, rationality became more and more identified with the scientific method, empiricism and with liberal political philosophy, namely democracy. Faith and religion became identified with the irrational, the intuitive, the emotional, the enthusiastic ... A side effect of this identification of faith and religion with irrationality, was that religion began to be identified with the feminine and thereby lost status in the secular world." 6
Just as the patriarchal revolution closed off goddess worship calling it pagan and sinful, the scientific revolution has closed off the intuitive and emotional calling it irrational and unstable. Women are allowed to be as long as they remain other as Simone de Beauvoir has shown in The Second Sex. Marina Warner points out that in the early account in Genesis Eve is created from Adam's side to be a helpmate to Adam but that in the later version God commands that man be made "in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:26-7).
The other version of the creation of Eve being made in Adam's rib gained preference however. But, says Marina Warner - 'this beautiful image was made of treacherous stuff: it permits the interpretation that woman, as man's helper, was his subordinate; and as the afterthought of God she was not made in the divine image. How does this kind of research, the rediscovery of the face of the Goddess assist contemporary women in their actual religious experience? The whole perspective on culture and society is shifted, but the recognition that there was deemed to be a period when women were revered certainly gives back women some self-esteem which has been taken from them as a result of the Eve myth. If it really was the case that males in the tribes were unaware that they had anything to do with conception during intercourse then women must have seemed extraordinarily powerful in their capacity to bring forth offspring. It is possible that 'virgin birth' myths were an inherent part of tribal culture. So what kind of interpretation of ultimate reality brought about the mythical notion that woman was made from the rib of man?
The Babylonian account of the creation of the world as it appears in the Enuma Elish tells of the son-god being born from the bones of the Great Mother-Goddess Tiamat and as a metaphorical description of birth this would make some sort of empirical sense, but Davis maintains that while they were being held captive in Babylon the Jews heard this legend and on their return the priests bowlderized it so that the lines of the Enuma Elish: "In the beginning Tiamat brought forth the heaven and the earth.. Tiamat, the mother of the gods, creator of all," became "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," ete ... 8
So we have a reversal of the original meaning that Adam was born out of the Great Goddess. Goddess worship was seen as pagan, and entrenched in evil fertility cults which must be suppressed. Thus Eve is not merely subjugated to Adam, she is potentially evil because of her sexuality. If all women are daughters of Eve then the evil of their sexuality must be kept in check. How long must women bear the guilt of the face of Eve? If the Jewish prayer of thanksgiving included the words: "Blessed art thou, Lord, that thou has not made me a woman" how are women to feel about their own self image? Women's image of themselves has not been particularly enhanced by statements by some of the church Fathers: 'To embrace a woman', wrote Odo of Cluny in the 12th century, 'is to embrace a sack of manure.'...every Christmas women are expected to sing or listen to - in however secular a context - the words from the Adeste Fideles, 'Lo! he abhors not the Virgin's womb', as though Christ's tolerance of a woman's body was an extraordinary concession on his part. The connection between sexuality and sinfulness runs deep in the Christian psyche and until this is resolved then the ordination of women will continue to cause controversy, and relationships between the two sexes in our culture will be less healthy than they should be. Christ, in theory, has atoned for original sin but the myth lives on particularly in the form in rape and pornography. We still carry with us a heavy burden of a fear of sex and misogynistic attitudes towards women.
At the root of the Christian message is love and the face of Mary Magdalene is the face of a woman redemmed by love. That love contained the revival of Mary Magdalene’s own self -respect. Women have borne the guilt of Eve for long enough and need to find their own spirituality in their own experience.
Ursula King refers to the work of feminist groups in promoting a sisterhood which actively seeks the mutual support among women and assists them to have their consciousness raised with regard to their situation as women in society. The mode of the groups is non-hierarchichal with someone facilitating and the notion is one of shared story-telling, telling each other their personal life stories and experiences leading to the development of self-esteem and independence. Kathleen Fischer speaks of women seeking "spiritual direction in order to grow in the Christian life". She says:-
"...Because traditional models of holiness have been restrictive for women, they are being replaced by new ways of envisioning Christian growth. A feminist spirituality is evolving, one not yet fully articulated; it is arising out of the experience of women themselves as they reclaim traditions and create new ones. 11
Slowly women are becoming more articulate, but what makes things difficult for women to experience God is as Kathleen Fischer says, "something missing in the gospels: the incarnation of God in terms of female experience. Although Fischer quotes an encounter experienced by Rosemary Radford Ruether:
" ..in a class she was teaching on violence against women. One of the women in the class told of her experience of being raped in a wood and recounted the fact that during the rape she had become convinced that she would be killed and resigned herself to her impending death. After the rapist fled, she found herself still alive, and experienced a vision of Christ as a crucified woman. Commenting on this vision which had filled her with relief and healing, she said: "I would not have to explain to a male God that I had been raped. God knew what it was like to be a woman who had been raped" 12
Most rape crisis counsellors will advocate their theory that rape isnt so much a sexual act, but an act of violence in which case we really are in a state of cultural crisis. The woman in Rosemary Radford Ruether's class dynamically experienced the femaleness of God but she also, in the state of being a victim of rape, experienced centuries of negative attitudes towarrds women. If God is fully emphatic with the experience of rape (and all our experiences) then the dynamic movement of that realisation informs us a great deal about God in receipt of human attitudes.
But where do women go from here? Recovering the goddess retrieves a new face for God and gives women back their viability as spiritual beings, but both Father-God imagery and Mother-God imagery, though useful as a psychological base for the person-God relationship, may still be insufficient bases from which to experience God. The women referred to in this article have actually experienced an event which for them, was a religious experience.
Kathleen Fischer speaks of the importance of the skill of listening and how it should be the basis for spiritual companionship with both men and women. For women the quality of this listening is crucial because they have historically 'lived in the intervals between their inchoate experiences and the definitions given to experience by the stories of men.'
The imagination knows the language of mystery and the sacred; revelation comes first at this level. Moreover, symbols and images operate preverbally and prerationally. They provide access to levels of experience deeper than, but not yet able to be formulated in clear concepts. The new spirituality of women will first appear in these forms, and that is why the language of the imagination - image, symbol, story, dream, and ritual - is so important for spiritual guidance with women. 13
Recovering this incredible sub-text involves listening with the imagination, which isn't merely listening, it is bordering on sharing the actual experience and that, subsequently, borders revelation.
And so we come to the notion of story-telling mentioned by Angela Pears. Storytelling is nature's way for us of making sense of our experience and to pass stories on is to create a genetic memory. Not only that, stories work subversively, to change our ways of thinking about things. We have to reach deep into the silences and retell the stories in order to link them with faith experience. Stories relate events and in the sharing of stories and listening with the imagination can be the makings of a religious experience.
Kathleen Fischer states: Memory is another function of the imagination, and an imaginative companion is one who remembers not only the individual's personal story but the collective story of women: the stories of Eve and of Mary of Nazareth, of the trial of women as witches and the struggles of women reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Such a companion is liable to suggest connections between individual and collective stories. This is crucial for women because they need to be reconnected to the larger family of women, to learn how they are similar to and different from other women, and to move beyond notions generated by the dominant culture. 14
Before we can transcend the boundaries of former stories however we need to demythologise them and understand how oppression has worked through them. Then perhaps, we can speak in terms of what Kathleen Fischer calls 'this model of the discipleship of equals, on the worth of all persons and the gift of the spirit to all.'
In order to explain our world we name it in terms of our experience of it. If our world has already been named for us with embellishments added and this naming does not match our own experience then ambivalence sets in. The mismatch needs to be redressed by re-naming from our own experience. Women's groups that encourage the sharing of experiences whether secular or religious are important because they are supportive. Such networks encourage the sharing of life stories as seen from the female point of view and where women can say to each other, 'yes, something like that happened to me,' or 'I felt that too!' they are telling about their world in their terms and their experience is seen to be significant and valid.
Women listening to their own experiences and those of others should be a creative process - a movement from a position of marginality and otherness to a position of being in the world and having a reason for being. Creative listening involves being still, not interrupting, and listening with the imagination to what is being said, allowing the story its own space. The long sub-text of women's history will ironically require the silence of creative listening. This can only happen if women give credibility to their own experience and their naming of the certainty of it.
Footnotes 1. Hay, David, "The bearing of empirical studies of religious experience on education", Research Papers in Education, Volume 5, Number 1, 1990, p.12.
2. Dowling, Colette, The Cinderella Complex, Women's Hidden Fear of Independence, Sumniit Books, U.S.A. 1981, p.25.
3. Dowling, The Cinderelia Complex, p.26.
4. Riley, Maria, "Eve & Mary The Mother And Our Stem All Our Centuries Go Back To Them", Womanspirit, Volume 2, p.4.
5. Riley, "Eve & Mary The Mother And Our Stem All Our Centuries Go Back To Them", p.S.
6. Riley, "Eve & Mary The Mother And Our Stem All Our Centuries Go Back To Them", P.S.
7. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex, The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, Pan Books Ltd., 1985, p.178.
8. Davis, E. G., The First Sex, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London 1973, p. 141/142.
9. Armstrong, Karen, The Gospel According to Woman, Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West, Elm Tree Books, London, 1986, Introduction.
10. Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman, Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West, p.23/24.
11. Fischer, Kathicen, Women at the Well, SPCK, 1989, p.29.
12. Fischer, Women at the Well, p.81.
13. Fischer, Women at the Well, p.7 & 10.
14. Fischer, Women at the Well, p.18.
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