Page 12 RAIN April/May 1983 the courage to scrap men’s definitions of the Divine, of grace, sin, and redemption, of religion, worship and mystics, and to explore what these words and concepts are for women, based on women’s experiences. All the issues are hauled out without reservation and examined upside down and backwards. I often ran into my own half-expressed thoughts stated boldly—for example, that the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity is the deliberately forgotten Motherspirit of pre-patriarchal days. None of these writers is out to prove the rightness of her analysis and the wrongness of all others. 'The commonality is that we are in the process of exploration. The essays are mostly written with the assumption that although male definitions have nothing in them for women, the spirit of religions that we have known have at their philosophical core and in their traditions, histories, and to some extent in their practices, something of value for women. After all, women have often been the carriers of the spirit and values of the culture. A Jewish saying goes, "One learns Talmud from one’s grandfather, but s/he learns Torah from her grandmother.” None of these articles rejects the religious impulse itself, and in fact they reinforce our need to celebrate and be joyous. They explore new meanings for new rituals and try to describe what a womanspirit religion would be like. Unfortunately, the reader may sense some uncertainty here. The authors describe some of the qualities of a womanspirit religion as communal and non-hierarchical, based on our own experiences, stressing the unity of being and spirit, and allowing for constant change and growth within the individual and the community. None of the writers of these essays seems to have a very clear sense of what women’s religion has been in actual historical practice — not a surprising situation within a patriarchy. 'They know we need to draw on it; they just don’t know what it is. For that I would recommend turning to a book called Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures for shedding of light upon our own culture — not Western culture but women’s culture. For here is a description of women’s religious lives as practiced for thousands of years in men’s worlds. These individual case studies are written almost entirely by anthropologists. Through these essays we meet women from India, Africa, the Carribean, Nepal, Korea, Japan; we meet Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, and North American Indians. It’s a fascinating book full of vibrant, alive, courageous, intelligent women who are all faced with the dilemma of living with men’s culture in both their everyday and their spiritual lives. 'This book states clearly that in order to understand women’s religion, one needs to explore women’s everyday lives and rituals, not the textbook religion or even what the textbook religion has to say about women. 'The pattern emerges: women’s religion is focused around giving birth, nurturing, burying the dead, protecting family and crops and animals, holding family and community together. It is everything Womanspirit Rising said it would be and more — it is unconsciously communal, it celebrates the rhythms of birth and death and rebirth, it is passed orally from grandmothers to granddaughters. None of the women’s rituals described here are to be found in a description of the major religion they are in theory practicing. It seems that women have kept on practicing their own ancient rituals while the men’s religion has grown up around them. And excluded them. Interestingly, it is the older women who are the keepers of women’s religious rituals, the ones who practice them and who teach the initiates. Not coincidentally, older women are the least valued members of a male-centered culture. Clearly their religious practices have played an important psychological role for women throughout the world. I came away worried that as women gain more strength and visibility in our culture, that we will lose the impulse that kept us alive and strong for so many thousands of years. It is the experiences of oppression and the sense of nothin^ess that has caused women to have to hold onto the faith in order to nourish their families and keep themselves and their community alive. I wasn’t sure I wanted all of our secrets rooted out and explored and pasted up on paper. The final book in the journey that I recommend is Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. This book explores the writings of Kate Chopin in The Awakening, Margaret Atwood in Surfacing, Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City, Adrienne Rich in Diving Into the Wreck and Dream of a Common Language, and Ntozake Shange in for colored girls who have considered suicide! when the rainbow is enuf. I felt worshipful while reading this book. 'The others I underlined freely and used as textbooks, as motherlodes of information. This I read more as a sacred text, for these are the voices of our prophets and teachers, our visionaries and our mystics. ’These are the poets who tell us our story, of women awakened to their nothingness, who go on to affirm themselves, define their world, and insist on our right to live. This book made me realize just how necessary it is that women have the courage and the faith to use our power or the power to use our faith — to demand that the world change in our image. If we don’t, the men’s deathmachine will kill us all. If we are confused about "how to put together our spirituality and our politics,” these books will confirm for us that our spirituality is a political act — it is the fundamental political act. Our spirituality is the grounding that will give us the courage to act, to find each other, to create the commonwealth here and now, to end the patriarchal war machine for once and for all. It’s a task we must do; we have no choice.oo Goldenberg, Naomi, The Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Beacon Press, Boston, $9.95, 1979. Christ and Plaskow, Ed., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, Harper and Row, San Francisco, $6.95,1979, 287 pps. Falk and Gross, ed.. Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures, Harper and Row, San Francisco, $5.95, 1980, 291 pp. Christ, Carol P., Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, Beacon Press, Boston, $6.25, 1980, 150 pp. Margaret McCrea, former owner of Garden Variety Produce, is currently a freelance political activist.
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