Our spiritual and religious stories have tremendous power. When these stories centre upon our personal relationship with the Divine (known to be ineffable, yet commonly referred to as God, the Godhead or the Numinous) they can help us, as individuals, understand our sense of self, our place in the world, and give our lives meaning by building and/or sustaining our paradigmatic vision of it. A complex genre, spiritual memoirs are a form of “fictive” literature—a term used to indicate the author’s selective use of events and experiences, perhaps with embellishment, to tell traditionally non-fictional stories of personal pilgrimage or Divine revelation. Consequently, these stories have enormous power and are capable of maintaining, altering or shifting existing faith traditions and beliefs. Religious, or spiritual, memoirs have served, over the centuries, as an important literary method to chronicle personal experiences with the Divine. In the past few decades, this non-fictional genre has seen a dramatic increase in both publication and interest in the West.
In great numbers, women (mainly but not exclusively from the United States) are writing and publishing their spiritual memoirs — chronicling journeys in search of the Divine. What is perhaps far more vital to the theological significance of this genre is that these women are detailing experiences with an immanent Feminine Divine – an internal God with a feminine face and voice. By experience I am referring to the direct personal contact with, awareness of or knowledge of the Divine recorded in the works in my study.
Literature is the locus theologicus as my doctoral dissertation examines the spiritual memoirs of five writers: Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. (Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage, 1994), Sue Monk Kidd (Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, 1996), Phyllis Curott (Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess, 1998), Margaret Starbird (The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, also published in 1998) and Christine Downing (The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine, which was originally published in 1981, but only recently rose in popular acclaim with its 2007 reprint). As each text chronicles the authors’ individual experiences in coming to know and embrace the Divine Feminine in any one of her forms, they also, collectively, speak of similar experiences, journeys, and transformations—often turning away from their original religious or spiritual traditions, if they had one, and moving toward one of the various forms of “Goddess Spirituality” which now openly exist in Western society. For the purposes of this essay I would like to focus on the central spiritual experience of the immanent Feminine Divine recounted in these memoirs.
Comparing and contrasting the memoirs reveals an intriguing and significant trend — these independent works bring to light fundamental collective experiential similarities and raise some intriguing theological questions: How might these collective similarities be explained? And how do we, as scholars, come to understand this praxis of faith from the perspective of the adherents? Traditional theological enquiry is an unsuitable lens with which to examine the untraditional, heterodoxical, numinous territory found in the spiritual memoirs; it differs considerably from the established monotheistic belief systems. Dominant rationalist and monotheistic paradigms that are predominant in Western culture might have problems accommodating a Feminine Divine. Rationalism could deny the plausibility of this model, and fundamental monotheism might rebuff this possibility based on the fact that the Divine presents itself as feminine – disrupting traditional images of a masculine God. Existing lenses are often singular (or monocular) in view and perception. Oftentimes they stand in opposition to the ‘Other’ through religious creed, culture, gender, etc.—creating a schism and point of conflict instead of uniting and integrating in wholeness and balance. Therefore, a plural (compound) lens is needed. Moreover, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Wayne Proudfoot would remind scholars that when studying religious experience, the academic must approach the experience from the perspective of the adherent. Proudfoot writes: “a religious experience, belief, or practice must be identified under the description employed by the subject.”[1]
As a result, the plural lens required to understand these experiences is drawn from two significant, albeit highly-controversial, perspectives: Carol P. Christ’s thealogy and women’s spiritual quest, and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology. These lenses were selected because both of these models and/or their proponents are mentioned by name in the memoirs in this study and help to form the authors’ basis of understanding of their religious experiences.
Carol P. Christ’s foundational work on the feminist thealogy, theological importance of women’s religious experiences, women’s story, and the feminine spiritual quest provides my thealogical model and lens. The origin of the term thealogy is open to debate. According to my research the term Thealogy or Thealogian was first used in publications by both Isaac Bonewits (“The Druid Chronicles – Evolved”) and Valerie Saiving (“Androcentrism in Religious Studies”) in 1976. Naomi Goldenberg continued this new thread by using the term in The Changing of the Gods.[2] Since then, many have attempted to define “thealogy”. Carol Christ, a self-professed Thealogian, first used the term in her Laughter of Aphrodite in 1987, and years later succinctly defined it as “the reflection on the meaning of the Goddess.”[3] Rita Nakashima Brock illustrates her understanding of the term thealogy in her 1989 article “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward an Asian American Thealogy”: “I use the word thealogy to describe the work of women reflecting on their experiences of and beliefs about divine reality”[4]
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[1] Wayne Proudfoot. Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199
[2] Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, 96
[3] Christ, Carol P. A Feminist theology as post-traditional theology, The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, Susan Frank Parsons (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 79
[4] Rita Nakashima Brock. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward an Asian American Thealogy” Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (eds.) (New York: Harper, 1989), 236