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

by Sue Monk Kidd

On a spring day in 1994, I copied a quote by Anaïs Nin on a card and propped it on my desk for inspiration. It said: “The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me, . . . / I shall go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens / And learn to spit.3

“What does it mean to be unambiguously a woman?” writes Heilbrun. “It means to put a man at the center of one’s life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position.

One’s own desires and quests are always secondary.”

When I use the term feminine soul, I’m referring to a woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural instinct, guiding wisdom, and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is.

Connection with this inner reality is a woman’s most priceless experience.

To reconnect with our souls we need to claim the freedom and power to shed our conditioning, to tear out the stitches from the old fabric, and to define for ourselves who we are as women, what is sacred, and how we relate to sacred experience.

Although outwardly appearing stable and satisfied, inwardly we may feel silenced, afraid, stuck, self-doubtful, unable to carry through with things, angry but unable to express it directly. We may grow perfectionistic and driven, but strangely at the same time we may feel powerless, without boundaries, overwhelmed with the roles we are expected to carry out. Moreover, we may harbor fears of being left alone, of risking ourselves, of conflict.

Trivializing our experience is a very old and shrewd way of controlling ourselves. We do it by censoring our expressions of truth or viewing them as inconsequential. We learned the technique from a culture that has practiced it like an art form.

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

I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is. . . . I know nothing but what the clergyman said. . . . He told us religion was this, and that, and the other. When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events, if it is true for me.58

“I took my lyre and said: Come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument,” wrote the poet Sappho.63 Sometimes I can still hear the song the turtle made in the sand that night as she dug her hole, and I imagine her like a great lyre that takes women’s experience and turns it into a song.

As Sartre said, “Genius is the way one invents in desperate situations.”

The word authority has lots of meanings, both positive and negative, but I like the meaning that comes from the Greek: “to stand forth with power and dignity.”

“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Being a virgin, she says, refers to “a quality, a subjective state, a psychological attitude, not to a physiological or external fact.” For a woman it means she is uncaptured or, as Harding puts it, she is “one-in-herself.”

you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!”

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”