Sue Monk Kidd was a well-known and much-loved novelist, Christian spiritualist, and passionate advocate of the power and awakening of the Devine Feminine, a resurrection of the time in human history when Goddesses ruled the world, and the Feminine Divine was a religion and a way to live, not just an idea.
Kidd left Christianity as it existed behind to find a new place in the world or to revive an old one, for herself and for women.
From my strange perch up in the country, the Feminine Divine has been in my head for many months. I believe it has great significance for us now, not as a thing of the past, but as a thing of the future.
The Divine Feminine is the spiritual concept that there exists a feminine counterpart to the patriarchal and masculine worship structures that have long dominated organized religions in the world. It’s not a dead idea; it’s alive and more significant by the day.
The sacred feminine extends well beyond one belief system and can be used as a spiritual lens to balance our perspective. This is something we desperately need as a society and a country. It values many of the traits so long associated with women – compassion, honesty, empathy, kindness, love, honor, power, and independence – the things our country seems to have forgotten or abandoned, mostly, it seems, because men have been in charge for so long.
“Nearing forty,” she writes in her book The Dance Of The Dissendent’s Daughter, “I needed to rethink my life as an “artificial woman. To take back my soul.”This transformation shocked her friends in the Christian world and almost cost her her marriage.
The book is not new; I’ve read several of Kidd’s beautiful novels and some of her essays on Christianity. But I never read this book until several readers of my blog wrote to me and suggested that I read it since I have been writing and thinking about the Divine Feminine as a spark and guide to a powerful new women’s movement, one I believe will preserve and advance the best values of women and our country.
I want to know more.
Christianity was founded by women and men thousands of years ago. Men took over the Christian movement, and the world’s biggest religions, and God became a “he.” Women were banned from the priesthood. Religion became just another patriarchy.
“I became aware that as a woman,” wrote Kidd,” I’d been on my knees my whole life and not known it. Most of all, I ached for the woman in me who had not yet been born, though I couldn’t have told you then the reason for the ache. When this disenchantment, this ripeness, begins, a woman’s task is to conceive herself.”
I am touched deeply by Kidd’s’ brave journey (and am married to a woman on the same trip) and love her book; it’s not new but seems to have been written for our time.
Kidd’s decision to capture her feminine soul and to live authentically from that soul (contrast this with what men are doing to this country) makes for a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and brilliant story. Kidd has done the impossible; she’s made a successful pilgrimage from her Southern Baptist roots and away from what she believes is a suffocating patriarchal and fundamentalist Christian religious system all around her.
The book describes her anger turned to courage, creativity, and love – foundation stones of the divine feminine. She wrote what so many women have written and experienced and are fighting so bravely – a life without true inner creativity and with a fear of dissent, backlash, not pleasing others, and not living up to sanctioned and male-defined models of femininity.
Kidd is well-educated and equipped for this transition. She has an extensive knowledge of many subjects, including theology, mythology, and the arts. She knows what she is talking about; she has thought about it deeply.
When I read this book, I keep thinking that she and many other women are onto something as big or bigger than Christianity – the compassionate vision of an equal, accessible, and gentler world that women are fighting to bring to our country. When I compare this vision with the brutality so many men have brought to our lives, it makes me shiver, both in anger and embarrassment.
It was a brutal struggle for her; it almost destroyed her happy marriage. “Healing came for me as I integrated images of a strong, powerful, compassionate Feminine Being, one who was creating the universe, creating Herself, birthing new life, and holding everything in being. This was the most significant factor in restoring feminine value, dignity, and power inside – seeing female as imago dei, the image of the Divine, revealed now through women just as it had been shown all these centuries through men. It was the return of my feminine birthright.”
It isn’t simple to be a man like me, to write about women. Several women have messaged me in recent months to say that as a “privileged white man,” I had no right to write about women at all.
But I refuse to accept this kind of bigotry, towards men, towards women, towards me. Sexism isn’t stopped by more sexism.
I love my wife, daughter, and granddaughter dearly, and my wish for them is to live in a kindler, gentler, and more compassionate world. Women are the best hope.
I’ll do everything I can to help the movement Kidd is writing about, and I won’t let anyone – male or female – do to me what was done to her and women throughout history – to shut up when told, to write what I’m told, and defer when asked.
As I look around from my remote perch in the hills, I see a world in desperate need of the values of the Feminine Divine. They are the best values that I can find. I see, read, and feel that women are changing, organizing, and fighting for their rightful place in the world. They remind me of a powerful diesel train plowing through a tunnel.
Whenever I look at the news, I think of the Feminine Divine and how much better a world would be if women and their goddesses did what Kidd decided to do. This is a movement for our times, and it lifts my heart when I feel the revolution stirring. We humans are flawed, but we deserve better than this. I see and feel it every time I look at the news and every page of Kidd’s book.
I’m plowing through Kidd’s landmark book and hope to write about it occasionally. I highly recommend it. When I sat down to write this, I couldn’t help but skip to the end of the book and find Kidd’s last words:
“I look back now, and I am grateful,” she wrote. “I recall that whenever I struggled, doubted, wondered if I could pull my threat into this fabric, someone or something would always appear – a friend, a stranger, a figure in a dream, a book, an experience, some shining part of nature – and remind me that this thing I understood is holy to the core. I would learn again that it is all right for women to follow the wisdom in their souls, to name that truth, to embrace the Sacred Feminine, and that we have an undreamed voice, strength, and power. And that is what I have come to tell you. I have come over the wise distances to tell you. She is in us.”
Amen.
