by coryy » May 18th, 2005, 5:43 pm
whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.
hmmmmmmm I've been thinking whether or not i should jump in here, as the flames shoot higher, but i can't resist.
I am female, raised catholic, and have been strongly influenced in my adult life by the Hindu faith, so i have some observations i would like to make.
First, It has been a long time since I picked up any of C.S. Lewis's works (20 years or so), except to read LWW to my 8 year old. HOwever, the Catholic part of me (maybe the Jesuit part of me?) wants to point out that the BIBLE, per se, is not a stand-alone research database, if you will. If my mother were ever to refer us to a point of contention in our worship, it would NOT be the Bible that she turned to consult, but her catechism books, or theology books. There is a strong tradition of the educated questioning and analysis of faith as a whole, including church "fathers" , and as such, Catholics that I know (note how i am framing this in personal references), turn to "auctoritee" figures (i think i spelled it in the Chaucerian way) more so than the Bible. With the entire Chaucerian/medieval sense of "auctoritee" behind the bulk of respected theological works, not just the Bible.
Point two, and as a feminist, this hurts to say: boy, being a woman is hard. And an educated woman is torn between a life of the body and a life of the mind/soul in a way that dichotomizes one's experiences in an excruciating way. For instance, my guru once told me that as a woman it was considered that samadhi was unattainable. perod, point blank. Now i have been enriched beyond measure by my experiences with Tantric meditation, chanting mantras, chanting OM in my daily life, and to have heard that as a married yet childless woman, i was appalled. Who was he, guru or not, to tell me what i could and couldn't achieve?
well, hmmm, then i had children. 3 kids and 8 years of breastfeeding off & on and homebirth and motherhood have taught me that ouch, my job is VERY VERY earthly, and my body is made for these earthly things and wow, a lot that i took for granted as an intellectual just pales in comparison to the feeling of the rise and fall of a sleeping babies chest.
HOW CORNY AND STEROTYPICAL< right?
oh this KILLS me that i am admitting this.
BUT I chose motherhood, and to be fully aware of my task as such, involves an immersion in female spirit and female nature of a fallible body in ways that men just don't have to face, ever. It's not just birth, it's the millions of niggling ways my spirit is interrupted in its quest for contemplation ( breastfeeding, lunchmaking, potty training, menstruation). It the fact that my good friend's daughter didn't flinch when she saw dad climbing a vertical crack, but when mom was halfway up, sobbed hysterically until she completed the ascent and rapelled down. I could chose a life of the mind, but it would be a life left bereft of the full experience of motherhood and the feminine. And as I have been born into this particular life as a female, I feel it might be somewhat disrespectful to turn away from that in my nature to pursue a life of the mind that left any part of my femaleness out of the equation, as it were. I am stuck now in my 30's trying to find female writers whose choices I respect and read their take on the balancing act of the intellect that is uniquely feminine.
Lately I have been taking hope from Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, personally, as abhorrent as it once was for me to think that there are different spheres of spiritual experience for men and for women, I find that the nature of the spiritual for the two sexes is inherently approached from different edges of a large chasm. I also feel that there is a depth in the female experience of spirituality that remains untapped and unsung, perhaps because we are too busy breastfeeding to be able to type on a keyboard with both hands. We need to approach the life of the spirit in the bodies we received, and i am not saying that either usurps the other in nearness to the Divine. As this world is the physical, what form of the physical that we embody here should naturally inform our search for the spiritual.
