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Earthsong, Godsong: Women's Spirituality
"Just as the portrayal of the hills in the shape of a sleeping woman can be a metaphor of women's unconsciousness to our native mode of spirituality, the portrayal can also be seen as our own immersion in the very context of the wholeness. Ultimately, we are not observers of that wholeness, as if it took place only outside of us, but we are participants in that wholeness. Our giving voice to it--our singing its song-might well be called the completion and celebration of this kind of spirituality. "
BORN a New Englander, schooled in California, I moved to Kansas for a brief period from 1972-74. I'd been accustomed to beauty formed by the rocky hills and coasts of New England, and then the grandeur of sweeping valleys and snow-topped mountains in California. But what was this strange, treeless, undulating land of the midwest? In those days, I had occasion to drive from the little town of Winfield in south-central Kansas to Lawrence in the northeast, and that's when I encountered the Flint Hills. A highway sign announced them: "Scenic Flint Hills," it read, and I had the ignorance to laugh. Scenic? But where were the trees, the forests, the rivers? Where were the mountains, or the stark vastness of the desert? What was scenic about these lowly, barren hills? But I made a number of trips to Lawrence, and gradually it happened. The beauty in those low lying hills and in that caressing sky began to seep into my soul, transforming its ignorance into the wisdom of recognition. Here indeed was beauty: beauty of the severely simple shape of earth, touching the sky, and beauty of the ever-changing configurations of the sky, touching the earth. On one memorable evening's drive from Lawrence to Winfield, I could barely contain the emotion of wonder. As the sun was setting to my right, the moon was rising to my left, and in between was encompassed all the grandeur of land and sky embraced in blessing. I remember being overwhelmed with the beauty, hardly able to keep my eyes on the road, and thinking that there really should be some sort of highway sign warning the driver, "Caution: beauty ahead; may be hazardous to your driving." Then I remembered the sign seen months before, "Scenic Flint
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki is the Academic Dean of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. She did her graduate work at Claremont and has taught at the University of Cincinnati and at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She is author of God-Christ-Church: A Practical Approach to Process Theology (1982).
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Hills"- I had been forewarned! But the hills themselves had to educate me to the fullness of what was indicated by the sign, opening the eyes of my soul for a new encounter with beauty.
Shortly thereafter, I went to a museum exhibit and was bemused by a striking landscape showing simply the shape of some hills against the sky. By now I was attuned to the wonder of such things, so I looked carefully at the depiction of those hills, that sky, and suddenly I caught my breath. For the hills were in the shape of a woman, sleeping-it was a woman, embraced there by the sky; a woman, sleeping, not yet awakened to embrace the sky in return, as with those lovely Flint Hills.
I
The two experiences together speak to me of women's spirituality, calling women to waken to the potential for a mode of spirituality which might be considered native to us. It is a spirituality very attuned to our context, finding its expression in an affirmation of the world where transcendence and immanence-sky and earth, earth and sky, in reciprocal importance--embrace; it is a spirituality that looks to the wholeness of things, that feels the relationality that binds the whole into unity. It is a "this worldly" spirituality that sees an ultimacy of existence in and through the world. Just as the portrayal of the hills in the shape of a sleeping woman can be a metaphor of women's unconsciousness to our native mode of spirituality, the portrayal can also be seen as our own immersion in the very context of the wholeness. Ultimately, we are not observers of that wholeness, as if it took place only outside of us, but we are participants in that wholeness. Our giving voice to it-our singing its song-might well be called the completion and celebration of this kind of spirituality.
To speak thus of spirituality may place it in apparent contrast to traditional modes of spirituality, but there are many points of contact. For instance, the spirituality being developed here requires initial attention to the extensiveness of our context rather than the intensiveness of ourselves; it requires a mode where outwardness takes priority over inwardness. Many traditional modes of spirituality focus initially on inwardness. But the inward and the outward are not opposed; to the contrary, the double terms are, like transcendence and immanence, each necessary to the other, leading to the richness of the other. There is a weaving of opposites in the fullness of spirituality, and whether one begins with a mode of outwardness or inwardness may be optional.
The outward and the inward combine, since it is the manyness of things in this teeming, buzzing existence that bombard our souls, to be woven together in our inward experience as the richness of being and given back to manyness again. Openness to the many brings depth of experience to the one, and the one adds yet again to the richness of the many. Such giving and receiving, receiving and giving, mark the fundamental process of existence.
In traditional Christian spirituality, there is likewise a combining of
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inwardness and outwardness. The journey inward into intensive knowledge of God and the self must lead finally to an affirmation of the contextual world, and, in fact, presupposes affirmation of the world. The reason for this affirmation is twofold. First, the inward journey is itself supported by a community of otherness in the world. The disciplines that enable the inward journey are not self-discovered; they are learned from the experiences of many companions sharing the Christian journey. Second, the God the Christian seeks is the God who has affirmed the world in incarnation, the God of John 3:16 who "so loved the world." To intensify one's love for God is inescapably to intensify one's love for the world God loves. Thus, a spirituality that begins in intensive inwardness is not opposed to extensive outwardness; to the contrary, it must surely affirm it.
The mode of spirituality that focuses on otherness obviously requires the cultivation of openness-one must attend to listening, to seeing, to sensing the manifoldness of that which we encounter and which encounters us. For a very pragmatic reason, I think this is natural to women-not because it is part of our genetic structure, but because of customary conditioning. That conditioning is the manifoldness of motherhood. I do not mean that all women must be mothers, only that all women have mothers, or have had mothers, who ordinarily functioned as our models. When we were small girls, we were not necessarily aware that as adults we would or could choose not to be mothers; we tended to see mothering as a role belonging to us whether we liked it or not.
The conditioning, I think, was to see always the multiplicity of relationships. Many (though surely not all) women were brought up in a context of a father and/or siblings centered around the mother's attention. A mother usually must balance relationships and see them contextually, so that even though she is attending to a particular relationship, the others are also in view. Mothers live through "peripheral vision," attuned to the many, even while focused on the one. For mothers, there are always edges to things-always a penumbral awareness of things not necessarily in view.
Further, in this world of multiple relationships, each relationship is conditioned by the others, and no relationship is isolated in its effects. To tend to one child sets up a reaction with the other child(ren). I remember my own case of sibling jealousy, crying into a pillow because my mother must surely love my younger brother more. How I remember her gathering me into her arms, and laughingly, lovingly telling me she loved each one of us. Perhaps I fully understood her then, but I think the depths of what she meant I only really knew when I, in turn, became mother to three children. Relationships do not compete for love; rather, each creates its own love, enriching all loves. Women as mothers relate in simultaneous multiplicity, living each relationship in the context of acknowledged emotion.
As daughters, girls attune themselves to such a mode of existence in the world, so that it seems "natural" to them. And if these daughters
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become mothers themselves in their turn, they reinforce the pattern as they act it out in the context of their own child or children. Relationships are complex, involving multiplicity and emotionality and purpose. Everything is itself plus its effects upon others, and the pattern is repeated, and repeated, and repeated yet again. I often think that woman's so-called "intuition" is no more than our experience of seeing into the "more than" of every relationship, and seeing into the context and multiple effects attendant upon each relation. We become attuned to the edges of things.
Can we not see in such relationality a paradigm of existence generally, and not just that of women? To exist is to be inexorably in relationship. The basis of each moment of becoming is our reception and creative response to the influences of the whole wide world. We are always bombarded by more data than we can handle. There is nothing that does not affect us to some extent. My brother, a physicist in San Francisco, has the audacity to tell me that if a mouse runs across the Golden Gate Bridge, it has an effect on me, even though I am on the other side of the continent! The effect is negligible, but it is nonetheless an effect. What kind of a world is this? Everything has an effect upon everything else! Our sanity requires that we sift the data, negate most of it, and admit into consciousness only what we can easily handle. Even this is a task that often defies our doing; we are often forced to admit the unlovely, the "dis-ease," the annihilating reality, and to experience attendant distress and pain.
In the privacy of ourselves, we sift, contrast, and compare data at subliminal levels of being. Consciousness itself is a result of work already undertaken by our preconscious energies. In our conscious existence, we deal with the integration of data that has already taken place almost as a matter of course, and add further depths of interpretation to that integration in the final creation of who we are. Throughout, there is the attendance of emotional response which is integral to the unification of experience. But no sooner have we completed this process of creative integration than we ourselves affect others, who thus change and require further change in us. No sooner is one task of integrative response complete than we are called upon to do it yet again. There is a continuous birth of ourselves out of the welter of energies coming into us and emanating from us. We exist in a relational world, responding to relations with all our energy and, in our own being, creating yet a new element of energy for all the world. What a dancing world it is; what a great interlocking network!
II
So now, what is spirituality in such a world? We might call "spirit" that nonconfinable portion of ourselves that extends beyond our skin, beyond the limitations of localization, to the "more than" of our being. This "more than" might be named as the very relations that form part of the network of who we are. Relations enter into us, to be transformed by
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us into the stuff of ourselves-but is it so easy to say where relations stop and "ourselves" begin? Perhaps the sharpness of distinction given to sight is not so fundamental a separation as we ordinarily assume. The connectedness of relation means that we are always ourselves-and more than ourselves.
To consider our relatedness to others as an essential mode of spirituality is not so strange a thing. To be sure, under such a definition to be human is to participate in spirituality; it is our openness to relatedness and the quality of relatedness that constitute our spirituality as rich or poor. For example, would we think a person richly spiritual if, in fact, that person rode roughshod over others? Connectedness with others is the means of good or evil; to misuse our spirituality is not to be bereft of it, but to impoverish it. Consider a happier example, one of rich spirituality, given to us by Mother Teresa of India. What is the relationship between her care for the poor and dying and her spirituality? Can they be separated? Is it not the case that her care for those who suffer is in fact her living spirituality? In a world where we are involved in relationality, spirituality is the extension of ourselves for good or ill toward all of those with whom we are in relation. But if relationality is as extensive as all existence, then a rich spirituality is measured by the extensiveness of our caring for the well-being of all existence.
Imagine some of the dynamics that might take place in this form of spirituality. Imagine that relationships are energies transmitted to us at preliminal modes, filtered into our consciousness. But aren't most relationships ordinarily lost to consciousness in the process? And wouldn't spirituality, or a certain quality of relatedness, be the development of a greater attunement to those relationships ordinarily filtered out? In modes of spirituality that are accomplished through inwardness, there is a concentrated stilling of the conscious mind, a refocusing of one's own energies inward. This refocusing pushes back the lines of consciousness. It begins to break the solid line that divides our selected understanding from the wealth of raw data that first informs us. We develop a "leaky ego," getting back to the multiplicity of the "more than" data which ordinariness filters out.
Yet I propose that spirituality can be accomplished by outwardness as well as inwardness. Openness to the other is also a route to a greater awareness of relationality. It is not a stilling of consciousness, but a focusing of consciousness upon the other. It involves giving a fullness of presence to the other. In such presence, more of the other comes into view: the "more than" that goes beyond the apparent surface of things becomes a stronger factor in the relationship. One embraces the other with one's own intention toward the other's well-being, in whatever way is appropriate to the process. Whether one cultivates spirituality through inwardness or openness, the measure of spirituality is finally love. Active affirmation of the world toward the mutual well-being of all its inhabitants is the goal of spirituality.
Why name this "women's spirituality"? It is true that this spirituality
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is not inherently restricted to women. It is a mode of spirituality that can apply to men and women alike. But this naming works with the stuff of our experience, developing theological implications from the concreteness of our dailiness. Inasmuch as the spirituality offered here as "woman's spirituality" is derived from an understanding of the "more than" of relations experienced by women as mothers and as daughters, then it is a woman's-and process-mode of spirituality. If it is useful to fathers and sons, that is well and good-for affirmation of the other in mutuality is not restrictive, but generous.
III
As for the relationship to God, if God is not present in and to the world, then I dare say that God is nowhere. We have described existence as inherently relational and interdependent. Why not extend that understanding to the way we experience and express God? Is God not in relation to the world? To be in relation is to be affected by that which is, and therefore to have an effect on that which becomes. Christian theology has long held that God has an effect upon all things through creative and providential power. Why should it be so unlikely that the relationship is reciprocal, that God is also affected by all things? Usually, so the argument goes, such an effect upon God would undermine the self-sufficiency and perfection of God, so that such a God would not be God. Is sufficiency and perfection indeed to be constituted by total impassivity to all that is? On the human level, we should deem such a mode of being-if it were possible-as impoverished indeed, lacking in the fullness of spirituality. Rather than ascribing to God what is of less value, why not consider that the highest possible mode of spirituality-absolute relatedness to all that is, both giving and receiving, receiving and giving-is a better description of the God who relates so centrally to us through Jesus Christ? The God revealed through the cross is, indeed, affected by the world, responding to the world in salvific love. Resurrection is God's response to crucifixion, bringing about a community of faith from the isolation we created on that cross.
If God has an effect upon all, surely that effect is fitted to each one relative to a past and a possible future. How else would the effect be relevant, affecting each reality for its highest good? But the relevance of that effect is gained by God's own knowledge of the world, a knowledge itself formed in God as God receives the world in every moment. With this knowledge, God draws from the unlimited resources of the divine nature to fashion redemptive responses to the world.
God is Spirit: in relation with all things individually and collectively toward the highest good. God is touching the world in all its variegated manyness, waiting for the world's freely creative responses, and receiving the world, only to touch the world again in everlastingly creative and redemptive love.
And is not that effect most truly a relational effect, a transmission of divine energy touching each finite existence for its good? Insofar as
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God's touch is relational, fitted to what the world can and will bear, then the world acts as the veil of God. We are not able to see God directly, in the fullness of divine power; we are only able to see God indirectly, bending to the condition of the world. To use an old metaphor, it is like seeing footprints in the sand. While the sand reveals something of the shape which made the prints, it reveals this through its own stuff. Primarily, we see the sand. We do not see the maker's own reality. The world is like that sand, revealing indirectly through its own responsiveness something of God. In this sense, God is the "more than" at the edges of every finite reality. To be attuned to the "more than" defined as all the relationships that affect our becoming is to be attuned to the manifoldness of the world and the pervasive activity of God.
If God is present to the world, leading it to its good, then each time we reach out to embrace the world for its good, we tap into God's own concerns. Thus, a spirituality that focuses upon that which is around us is not at all antithetical to a spirituality that focuses upon God. Instead, one might say that to focus in love upon what is around us is to be close to God. Likewise, to focus upon God in an inward form of spirituality will quickly unite us with God's concerns and lead us to love the world as well. The very "more than" that haunts the edges of every existence may well be an intimation of the divine presence. To embrace the earth is to embrace God, and in the embrace to exist from the "more than" of our existence.
But in this relational understanding of spirituality, God not only affects the earth, but the earth affects God. God feels the world, and thus can fashion for the world lures deeply suited to its variant realities. For such a God, crucifixion is a shockingly accurate revelation, for to feel the world in its entirety, as God must, is to feel its every pain and all the twisted dimensions of its tragic refusal to conform to the divine leading. God's faithfulness is a will toward the world's good, despite and even through its evil. It is a costly redemption God offers, fashioned through God's own feelings and consequent wisdom, offering the world its own possibilities of resurrections suited to its many forms of crucifixion. A spirituality based upon relatedness involves not only beauty and goodness, but an openness to tragedy and evil as well. Through the power of God's own resurrection nature, tragedy and evil are met with an openness to the transforming good that God in faithfulness makes possible.
Counterpointing the tragic dimensions of such spirituality is a joy created in the openness of relationality. To be open and present to the other is to be vulnerable to the other, but it is also to be enriched by the other and to participate in God's own care for the world. To care about the world's well-being is to be forced into corporate action for the world's well-being.
That one must act corporately in such a mode of spirituality follows from the very connectedness fostered. To be open to others is to recognize one's bondedness with others, both generally and particularly.
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Generally, there is an interconnectedness weaving all the world and its inhabitants into interlocking networks. Particularly, the openness to God through Jesus Christ creates a peculiar bondedness with all others likewise open to the revealed power of God. Just as surely as my brothers and I are sons and daughter of the same parents, and therefore feel the bond of family throughout our days, even so all who name their being through the resurrection power of God in Christ are shaped by the same energy, connected into a new family. Thus, our actions in the world are not shaped idiosyncratically, as random acts we individually deem to be good, but are affected by our peculiar formation through the church. The spirituality built upon interconnectedness must be expressed through interconnectedness in deeply ethical dimensions.
IV
If spirituality is a cultivation of our interrelatedness, it follows that the most conducive setting for such cultivation is communal. Corporate worship both invites and expresses this mode of spirituality, and the two aspects of worship most appropriate to it are liturgy and communal silence. Oddly enough, these two are not opposites to each other, but are deeply similar. In liturgy, there is the power of many voices becoming one voice in speaking or singing the praise of God. In the process, we become attuned to our connectedness--our shared human condition, our shared Christian condition, and our shared union in living from and in the praise of God. In communal silence, we likewise become attuned to the many others present, feeling the invisible webs that bind us into a single body existing for God's praise. In the liturgy, we are particularly open to the interconnectedness with the past and the future, whereas in silence we are bonded more fully to the present.
Liturgy unites us with the church of the past and the church to come. The very words that we speak are not original to ourselves, but are continuous with words of the church given long ago in response to the received graciousness of God. This response has been mediated through the centuries as generation after generation joins the response, making it its own and handing it on to those who follow. When we, in our presence to one another and to God, pick up the response in the liturgy, with our own voices, we make the response of the past a present reality. There is a sense in which the church of yesterday lives in the liturgy of today. This does not depend upon retention of the language, without translation indeed, the most faithful response may be precisely that which is expressed in the language of today, not the exact language of yesterday. But as we join the liturgical response, we realize our interconnectedness with the church from its beginnings.
It is also the case that in liturgical response we anticipate our connectedness with the church of tomorrow, for we speak this response not simply for ourselves or the past but for the future. "One generation shall tell the works of God to another," and the liturgy is our faithful living of this psalm. Our faithful response to God through today's
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liturgical worship is also our faithful anticipation of a future people of God. The past is present and the future is foreshadowed in the present expression of the church's liturgy. Thus, the liturgy allows a connectedness that spans the generations, giving us a sensitivity to the historical unity of the church.
Communal silence could convey the sense of past and future, but it tends to function more forcefully to bond the present community together as the community of God and before God. Silence involves not simply wordlessness, but the stilling of the silent words of our minds, reaching for sheer presence before God and one another. Sometimes, we still our minds with a simple repetition of a phrase or word, not in order to concentrate upon the phrase, but in order to become dulled to the phrase! The phrase captures our wordiness into itself, stilling our minds for the quietness which is openness to the pounding energies that bind us one to the other. In silence, the unity forged between us through our common dependence upon God's resurrection power comes to its own wordless expression. The "more than" attendant upon every relation forces itself into our peripheral awareness and, with it, the awesome wonder of the "more than" of the God who cannot be exhausted in any one relationship. Silence tends to still the interpretive nature of our response to all relations, allowing a deeper feeling of the sheerly other into our awareness. It is not that the interpretive element can be eliminated-that is not possible in our humanness. But it can be muted to allow the raw data of the other, the "more than," to inform us. Relationality comes to its own wordless expression in the communication of silence.
Both liturgical and silent worship foster not simply an awareness of our interconnectedness with those of our past, present, and future, but ultimately both serve to lift our hearts in praise to God. The praise will be shaped by confession-for we name who we truly are in liturgy and experience ourselves more honestly in a silence that denudes us of covering words. This praise will be shaped by absolution-for as we are named, so are we accepted; as we are experienced, so are we received. This praise will be a channel for our immensity of gratitude to the God who is faithfully open to us, responsive to us from the power of a consistent will toward the world's good. And it will be a praise that brings to shape, through the influence of God, the direct mode of action to which God immediately calls us in the world. The fullness of praise is the interwovenness of all these elements in the complexity of worship as expressed in liturgy or in communal silence.
V
The cultivation of spirituality cannot stop with worship-or rather, it involves the diffusion of worship into the entirety of our living. Just as worship is essentially communal, even so our dailiness must likewise affirm our communality-diffuse worship and focused worship reinforce each other. Attunement cultivated in our dailiness through simple
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presence to others enhances specific times of corporate worship; and specific times of corporate worship enhance our openness in the dailiness of our lives. The fruit of both is an openness to the "more than" of every relation which is the wholeness of the world-human and nonhuman in interrelationship, called by God to live toward its own well-being.
The breadth and depth of worship is an active love for the world. Corporate praise becomes corporate discernment of what makes for well-being in the world, and corporate action toward its realization. The corporate nature of such discernment must involve a hearing beyond the circles of the like-minded, becoming open to novel forms of well-being that emerge in the process of action. The openness and risk thus experienced is an extension and perhaps even the fruit of the openness cultivated in formal worship. Yet, it is also the case that formal worship may be the extension and fruit of action toward the world's good. There is focus and there is diffusion, but both exist in reciprocity; both together constitute the praise of God, and both together constitute love for the world. Outwardness and inwardness combine, yielding openness.
This spirituality of interconnectedness can introduce a certain whimsical quality into our living. Like all other spiritualities, it involves a song of gratitude to God; but, rather atypically, it also allows us to say "you're welcome" to God. Consider why this is so. When we will the world's transformative good, and act with that will, then we are not only expanding our own spirituality, but we are also interacting with God's own will for the good of the world. That we are doing so comes from the effect of God upon us, but it is also the case that our doing so has an effect upon God. We have become a worker with God, helping to shape the good of the world. Why should it be so astounding to suppose that God appreciates our co-laboring, and that thanksgiving might be mutual between God and the world? Again, if God feels the world, then when we ourselves feel particularly joyous, God feels our joy too. Might not God be glad for that? There is a merriness to this spirituality, and a laughing generosity which dares to share its joy with God and say "you're welcome" in the sharing. We can acknowledge God's good pleasure as well as our own.
This point is not trivial, for it might well be the heart of what is special to interrelationality. If we see the "more than" in all the world, and see-as in that Kansas scene of hill and sky-a togetherness of transcendence and immanence in the flowing movement of God and the world, then the togetherness of God and the world is a harmonious togetherness, a dancing togetherness, a song indeed of beauty. But we are participants in it. We are not separate from it; in fact, our very appreciation of it is a heightening of the beauty, giving it the addition of consciousness. There is no obsequiousness in this view, no servile need to claim the world as dastardly so that God might be correspondingly magnanimous and great. God's magnanimity does not depend upon the world's lowliness, but upon the divine nature in and of itself. God is just as magnanimous with a marvelous world as with a muddled world, but
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the magnanimity will be demonstrated differently. Given our affirmation of the full dignity of the world, of the legitimacy of the "it is good" of Genesis I, then the world makes its own contribution to God. We, as the voice of the earth, likewise make a contribution. And so the "you're welcome" of the spirit comes from the depths of the affirmation of interrelatedness.
This spirituality calls for singing a song of earth, an embracing of this whole sphere of our localized being with an expansive appreciation which is spirituality. But when we sing the song of earth, we are at the same time singing the song of God, and both songs meet in our spirit and go forth from our spirit. The songs also create our spirituality with a richness and a depth and a love that seeks ways appropriate to such love in acts of justice. The sky and the earth, together: as we develop and express woman's spirituality, the hills move, the woman wakes, and the singing of the song begins.