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

by Sue Monk Kidd

“Once you wake up, can you wake up any more?” Two decades later, it seems appropriate to ask the

Woman is as common as a loaf of bread, and like a loaf of bread will rise. From a wall poster

Christian history there had been two traditions regarding women. The first we could call the revolutionary tradition, which included Jesus’ “feminist” and egalitarian intent and practice. This tradition, preaching a gospel of liberation and mutuality, treated women as equals. Evidence exists that Christian women carried out priestly functions—teaching, baptizing, and blessing the Eucharist—on a par with men. But soon another tradition asserted itself, the patriarchal tradition with its antifemale, body-negating spirituality, insisting on the dominant cultural taboos and sanctions concerning women. This tradition, which had started long before Christianity, viewed women as naturally inferior and as the property of men, associating women with matter, flesh, evil, and sin. For a while these two traditions—the revolutionary and the patriarchal—clashed, but soon the revolutionary tradition was stamped out, sealing an interpretation of women as inferior that has continued to this day. For a brief moment in history, a window of opportunity to reverse patriarchy opened, and then it was slammed shut. I can still remember the sense of loss that washed over me when I read Elaine Pagels’s words:

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf sums up what is happening as men make this choice: The world of men is dividing into egalitarians and patriarchalists—those men who are trying to learn the language and customs of the newly emerging world, and those who are determined to keep that new order from taking root. The former group welcomes these changes, seeing that though they are painful in the short term, over the long term they provide the only route to intimacy and peace. But the latter group sees only loss. . . . The patriarchalists’ world view, shared by women as well as men, is battling the emerging egalitarian world view, which is also shared by people of both sexes.10 After nearly fifteen years as a teacher

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I am remembering something that Rilke said, “Again and again some people in the crowd wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and they emerge according to much broader laws. The future speaks ruthlessly through them.” Looking back now over the past ten years, I wonder