The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

by Sue Monk Kidd

Such is the mystery of aging—the way we outgrow our past selves, yet carry those selves inside of us.

A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine have been wounded, devalued, and limited within culture, churches, and families. She cannot see the wound or feel the pain. She has never acknowledged, much less confronted, sexism within the church, biblical interpretations, or Christian doctrine.

And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness, the lessness, of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.

Yet the truth is, as long as one woman is dehumanized, none of us can be fully human.

The trick works like this. An image is created of a “screaming feminist” with an ax to grind. The image takes on enormous negative energy in the church and culture. Branding a woman with this image effectively belittles her opinion and discredits it. So rather than risk the image being attached to her, a woman will often back quickly away.

It is a rare and strong woman who has enough inner substance to face the ridicule and pain that can come from expressing feminism.

For so long the Baptist world had been both my goldfish bowl and the water I swam in. I’d come to think of it as the whole realm. I’d grown used to seeing everything through that water. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to leave.

Until then I had accepted that when it said men and brotherhood, that somehow meant me, too. But now, in a place much deeper than my head, I didn’t feel included at all. I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

As Jungian analyst June Singer points out, when a girl is growing up, it is not taken for granted, as it is with boys, that her life and needs will be primary, that she will have access to places of authority and power like her brothers or father.