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Healing the Wounds of Patriarchy - One Woman at a Time:
A Quaker Woman's Ministry
By Peggy O'Neill
The Workshop
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| Honoring that of Goddess Within workshop group 2005 - relaxing after a sacred circle dance. |
Day four of the Friends General Conference Gathering workshop for high school women, "Honoring That of Goddess Within." Twelve Young Friends, ages 14 to 18, sprawl on couches in the dormitory lounge where we meet every morning, each girl intently writing in her journal after the morning's guided meditation.
One of the prettiest young women in the group, with shining long hair, lovely face and figure, and stylish clothes, suddenly throws down her journal, crying, "I hate my body! It's so ugly! I can't stand it!" She sobs loudly, as the others look on, open-mouthed. A moment later, a usually reserved member of the group pops out of her chair, runs across the room and jumps onto the crying girl's lap, throwing her arms around her, and exclaims, "But you are so beautiful!!! Your body is perfect!" As she strokes the whimpering girl's hair, rocking her and making soothing sounds, the other Young Friends slowly draw near, wrapping their arms around the pair. They gently sway together, softly humming a sacred chant we sang together that morning, until the girl's trembling stops.
This was not my plan for the morning, but scenes like this happened regularly during the decade I have led versions of this workshop for high school women at Quaker gatherings and for women of all ages at Pendle Hill. Sometimes a woman gets in touch with self-loathing or deep wounds to her self-esteem from verbal or emotional abuse. Sometimes it is about physical or sexual abuse. Usually, the group spontaneously surrounds the crying woman, comforting her while she grieves, holding her only if that's what she wishes. Each time, the group finds its power to support her. Much healing takes place in these circles of women as they tell their stories and find their connections to each other and to the Divine. There is also a lot of laughter, dancing, singing, and joyous celebration of our sacred feminine natures.
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| Young Friends love a good group hug! FGC 08 Honoring that of Goddess Within workshop for Young Friends. |
Women struggle to accept ourselves and our bodies when this misogynistic culture tells us that women are not acceptable, no matter what size we are or what clothes or makeup we wear.
Many Western women, including myself, have an inaccurate perception of our bodies, believing ourselves to weigh at least 10 pounds more than we actually do. We spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours dieting, exercising, and obsessing about our weight and our bodies. This may seem trivial to women from other parts of the world who struggle to feed their families. But the pain of Western women is real, as our obsession with weight and appearance consumes so much of our energy. Anorexia and bulimia, both life-threatening conditions, are epidemic in the West. Young girls begin dieting and obsessing about their weight as early as eight or nine years old. Recent studies have found that more than half of normal-weight teenaged girls, and a quarter of boys, describe themselves as being too fat.
As a follow-up to the workshop, one group of Young Friends spent a long afternoon in my hot tub, talking about their bodies, menstruation, and sex. I shared with them Her Blood is Gold: Celebrating the Power of Menstruation, by Lara Owen, which traces how women throughout history lived with their natural cycles, before it became "the curse." Redefined by religion as "dirty" and "unclean," women were banned from churches and synagogues during their bleeding time. It was enlightening to the girls to learn that there are cultures where a girl's first blood is still celebrated, and she is honored during this sacred time. As the hours went by and their skin turned wrinkly from their long soak, these young women found their connection to one another and a new perspective on their bodies.
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| Mother's Day retreat, Honoring the Sacred Feminine, at Pendle Hill, May, 2010 |
My leading to share these workshops grew out of my own life experiences as a woman, many of them painful, as I have sought to heal lifelong issues of body, weight, and self-esteem. Through the years, I have incorporated into these sessions modalities that have been most healing for me, including sacred dance, chant, guided meditation, breathwork, journaling, artwork, ritual, and deep sharing. Women's spirituality is most often experienced through the body and through connection to others, and it has been through moving my body and being in circles with other women that I have felt closest to the Divine. Creating a safe space for sharing our journeys is always my first priority.
Many women tell me that this workshop was one of the most healing experiences of their lives... .an opening into awareness of their Divine heritage, acceptance of the beauty of their bodies and their sacred feminine natures.
History of Feminine Spirituality
In 2007, feeling a need to deepen my understanding of the calling to this work, I attended the Pendle Hill workshop "History of Feminine Spirituality" with psychologist Erva Baden. I felt as though a veil fell from my eyes as Erva painted a picture of the Great Mother, honored for millennia in ancient cultures all over the world where men and women lived in peace and equality. Then, in the course of a few centuries, the Goddess was brutally suppressed and replaced with a warlike male god.
Our group sat in stunned silence when Erva posed the question,
How would your life and the world be different if the images of the Divine we honored were of a woman giving birth, and not of a man dying on the cross?
As we engaged deeply with this question, we each realized that our individual lives would be quite different and our world would be transformed. In that moment I saw it as though written in neon lights:
Sacred images are mirrors that show us who we are and who we strive to be.
With no sacred images of powerful females, women struggle to know our power. DUH!
A Year at Pendle Hill
Hungry to learn more, I made the difficult decision to spend the next year at Pendle Hill, the Quaker study center in Pennsylvania. I needed to explore this topic and my calling, so I took unpaid leave from my work in continuing education at Virginia Commonwealth University and said a tearful goodbye to my beloved husband of 40 years. Twenty-five books about the Sacred Feminine traveled with me to Pendle Hill; I read them all, plus many more, during that year.
In the Pendle Hill classes on Quakerism, Marcelle Martin illuminated the lives of 17th-century Quaker women who fearlessly set out across the ocean to offer ministry in the New World, leaving their husbands home with the children. These are incredible stories, considering that women of that time were considered possessions with no rights of their own. There was even a popular debate about whether women had souls. I was especially captivated by the life of Margaret Fell, who, I came to realize, was actually the co-founder of Quakerism, along with George Fox. He had the ideas and the spiritual openings; she had the organizational skills and the persistence to make things happen—her passionate, articulate letters to the King of England are amazing! Their central message was that each person, male or female, has direct access to the Divine Light within.
How did the early Quakers come up with the radical idea that women are equal, I wondered... was it original? Or were there still whispers of the Great Mother alive in the ether in 17th-century England? While I have found no written proof (yet!), a fellow workshop leader at the FGC Gathering told me about his family, living for many generations in England among the sacred groves where the ancient Celts worshipped the Goddess. He thought it quite possible that these beliefs were still alive in England during the time of the early Quakers. (Another pilgrimage calls!)
I was drawn to Quakerism in the late '70s because of social activism and stayed because I found acceptance of different expressions of spirituality, free from the confining rules and guilt of my Catholic upbringing. Now I see that it was full empowerment of women that made me feel most at home in Quakerism. I never got to be an altar boy; the best the Catholic Church could offer girls was to become a nun, a silent, invisible woman in black. When I learned that Quaker women had always been considered fully equal, their brave voices ringing out loud and clear in the major social movements of the last five centuries, I knew I was home.
One night during my year at Pendle Hill, while sitting in prayer and meditation in my room, moonlight shining on me through the open window, I asked Mother/Father God for a direct experience of the Divine, and to show me the way forward in my work. Deep peace came over me, and I noticed my hands resting on my rounded belly. The thought came into my mind that my body is made in the image and likeness of the Goddess, just as the images from ancient cultures depicted Her, with full belly and breasts.
I had just started the clay class in the fabulous art studio at Pendle Hill. Even though I had not yet learned sculpture, I felt a strong urge to get a lump of clay, take it outside, and make an image of the Divine. Sitting in Owens Garden, bathed in the light of the full moon, I closed my eyes and let my hands play with the ball of wet earth. What took shape was a rough figure of a woman, her belly contracted in labor, her baby's head emerging. As I continued kneading the clay, surprised by the figure showing up, memories came to me of giving birth to my youngest son, Jonathan, 26 years earlier. When his head popped out and wriggled around, I had instinctively put my hand on his downy pate, resting it there until the next contraction, nearly two minutes later, and then I pushed him out into the world. It was so strange and wonderful being fully present to this mysterious moment when a soul moved from spirit to body.
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| Women in the Pendle Hill Mother's Day Retreat 2011 gather around the center altar they all contributed to during the weekend. The little goddess statue in the center was made by the author. |
Looking at the little statue in my hands, the sounds and smells and feelings of this magnificent moment swept over me, and tears of joy and deep connectedness flowed.
Today, the statue reminds me of this birthing of my son and myself, when I felt the awesome power of my own body and the presence of Spirit. The statue now lives on my altar and travels with me to all my workshops and presentations, where the story of her creation has been inspirational for many women.
Over the next few months at Pendle Hill, I grew into the knowledge that my work is about sharing with women their spiritual heritage so that they can see themselves as made in the image of the Divine. I wanted to help women to accept and love their bodies, embrace their power, and have their own direct experiences of the Divine.
The Impact of Language
I began to notice that, even among Quakers, we refer to God as "He" most of the time. When I read A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality, by Patricia Lynn Reilly, I realized why this practice makes me feel so uncomfortable. "As a result of our immersion in male names and images of god, we have been excluded from the divine. God and humankind ("mankind") have been imagined as male. Therefore men have been considered representative of a full and complete humanity. They are divine and their experience is normative. We are not divine and our experience is considered peripheral. Thus we have been barred from full participation in family, world, and church."
I was also struck by the story Joan Borysenko shared in her beautiful book, A Woman's Journey to God: Finding the Feminine Path, about a "thought experiment" conducted at Harvard Divinity School. Nelle Morton asked the audience to imagine that they were a lone male student in a classroom full of women in a completely female institution, and to understand that feminine words are meant to apply equally to both women and men. "Every time the professor said 'womankind', she means, of course, 'all humanity.' When one enrolls in a seminar on the 'The Doctrine of Woman' the professor intends at least to deal with men also. When one sings of the Motherhood of God and the Sisterhood of Woman, one breathes a prayer that all men as well as women will come to experience true sisterhood."
I became Pendle Hill's "Inclusive Language Policeperson," constantly adding feminine words and images of the Divine to conversations and worship. Surprisingly, it was women who became most impatient. "What difference does it make?" they asked. "We all know that God is neither male nor female." But I had awakened to the deep wounding that the exclusive use of male pronouns and images has had on me and on other women, even though many women seem not to have be aware of these wounds.
When my daughter-in-law Elizabeth DeSa introduced me to the term "Godde," (pronounced "God"), the Old English spelling, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was uncomfortable using the term "Goddess" because it refers only to the feminine, excluding men, just as the term "God" has become totally identified with the masculine, excluding women. I emphatically do not wish to engage in spiritual practices that deliberately exclude men. Having witnessed the deep wounds inflicted on my sweet husband and my two beautiful sons by our culture, with its intolerance of anything remotely "feminine," even color choices by little boys, I wish for all of us to have the freedom to express our full humanity.
The Way of Ministry
During the ensuing months at Pendle Hill I pondered how to take these messages to the world. Why is the Sacred Feminine important for Quakers to understand and embrace? Is this work just for me to do, or is it a corporate ministry for Quakers?
The Way of Ministry program of the School of the Spirit was my clear next step after Pendle Hill. This one-year program enrolled 25 Quakers from all over the U.S. and Canada, each seeking to clarify their leadings and discern how to act on them. The group, mostly women but with a number of men, has a wide range of leadings, everything from working with youth and people in prisons, to other forms of activism, as well as writers, an artist, and a poet. During our four residencies at Pendle Hill we explored our callings and discussed the nature of ministry in the Religious Society of Friends. We each formed Care Committees at our home meetings, and met with these groups monthly.
As the year in the Way of Ministry program progressed, I was able to better articulate my particular ministry: to help women heal from the wounds of patriarchy, and to help restore the balance between the masculine and feminine in our world. This is based on my deep knowing that Godde is much more than either male or female, and that each one of us, men and women, are made in the image and likeness of Godde.
During this year I also discerned that my leading is for a corporate ministry by Quakers, not just for independent actions of my own. Although my liberal unprogrammed meeting was not accustomed to using the term "ministry," and there is still some discomfort and confusion about the responsibilities of the meeting towards the minister, Richmond Friends Meeting has given me a travel minute to introduce me as I travel in this work. Since then I have done many presentations, workshops and groups at my home meeting, at our yearly meeting, at FGC Gathering, and at other meetings, to discuss the importance of the Sacred Feminine in our time.
Violence Against Women and the Earth
One of the aspects of this topic that I have found that Friends resonate with is the connection between violence against women world-wide and the suppression of the Sacred Feminine.
The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity Worldwide, Nicholas d. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, describe the horrifying statistics that they discovered about huge numbers of recent occurrences of "bride-burning" in India, deaths of thousands of baby girls in China because of medical care being withheld, thousands of women in Pakistan doused with kerosene and burned to death by relatives for perceived disobedience, and an estimated 100,000 girls who have been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery in Asia. "The statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was a battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world."
Another aspect of this topic that Friends find compelling is the connection between the exploitation of women and that of Mother Earth. Our patriarchal world culture considers both women and the earth as possessions to be used by man. According to Rian Eisler, "The notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman... is what ultimately lies behind man's famous conquest of nature - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even the survival, of thousands of living species, including our own...This goes back to the notion that males can, and should, control nature, which is central to the biblical creation story that is the cornerstone of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religion. What we are told is that all of nature was created simply because a male deity ordered that it be so, and even beyond this, that when God created humans in his image, he gave man dominion "over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (From Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body - New Paths to Power and Love.)
I believe that as long as we tolerate rape and violence against women, the assault against Mother Earth will continue.
Native peoples of the Americas and other parts of the world have always honored the earth as their Mother, and used her resources sparingly, never taking more than they needed. When I discovered a little book on the table at one FGC Gathering, called Sisters in Spirit, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists, by Sally Roesch Wagner, I learned that violence against women was not tolerated in most Native American cultures. "Native men's intolerance of rape was commented upon by many 18th and 19th century Indian and non-Indian reporters alike, many of whom contended that rape didn't exist among Native nations prior to white contact." Wagner found that the women of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy possessed freedoms far beyond those of their white sisters: decisive political power, control of their bodies, control of their own property, custody of their children, the power to initiate divorce, satisfying work, and a society generally free of rape and domestic violence. According to Wagner, these women were the inspiration for the early feminists, who were their neighbors, providing a model of freedom for women at a time when Euro American women were considered the property of men.
The French Connection
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| The author leading Sacred Circle Dance at the Maison Quaker, Congenies, France, October, 2010 |
A year after the end of the Way of Ministry program, my husband and I were invited to serve as Friends in Residence at the Maison Quaker in Congѐnies, France. (See Judy Kashoff's article, Maison Quaker, in Friends Journal May 2010.) Accepting this invitation, I realized that there were many sites in France that could teach me about the Sacred Feminine. I asked my friend from the Way of Ministry program, Maia Tapp, if she would like to accompany me on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in France. Maia is the author of the epic poem, Prayer of the World, which has emerged over several years through her visits to sacred sites of the earth. She immediately said "Yes!" and we started planning our itinerary.
Maia and I knew that we wanted to visit some of the many Black Madonnas located in churches throughout France, and to try to understand the connection between these images and ancient goddess worship. Through our research we learned that these images had often been revered by the people of the countryside ("pagan" or "païen" from the French) for thousands of years before Jesus' birth. The Christian church simply re-dedicated these statues to Mary the mother of Jesus, honoring her with titles such as Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother, and other names that were familiar to the païens, from their centuries of honoring the Great Mother, whom they called Asherah, Isis, Astarte, Artemis, and other names. Thus, Christianity thrived on the same sites, using the same symbols, and even celebrating the same holidays. Christmas, Easter, and other sacred Christian holidays are all based on celebrations familiar to pre-Christians.
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| Maia Tapp contemplating the beach in southern France where Mary Magdalene is thought to have landed after fleeing Palestine in about 46 CE. |
What took us by surprise in the south of France was the reverence for Mary Magdalene. Maia and I, along with Janet Ferguson, a British Friend living near Congѐnies who joined our little group on pilgrimage, visited a number of Catholic churches which are dedicated to Mary Magdalene, who is honored as the founder of Christianity in France. The "Golden Legend", widely known in Europe, tells the story of her arrival on the shores of Provence, along with her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus, Maximus, and others. Mary Magdalene is said to have preached extensively in southern France, along with Maximus, who became the first bishop of the church in Aix-en-Provence. The remains of Mary Magdalene are lovingly preserved in a huge basilica named in her honor. Since the 1200s, Dominican priests, nuns, and friars have welcomed thousands of pilgrims to the grotto at Ste. Baume where Mary Magdalene is thought to have lived her last days.
In 1969, the Church officially recanted their position that Mary Magdalene was a "prostitute," a doctrine first declared by Pope Gregory I in 591. She is now honored by the Church as a Saint and as the Apostle to the Apostles, the one who stayed with Jesus throughout his crucifixion and death, and who was the first to proclaim the good news of his resurrection. The Gospel of Mary, found in Egypt in 1896, and thought by scholars to date from the early part of the 2nd century, is one of the founding or primitive texts of Christianity. Mary Magdalene is now widely recognized as the intimate friend of Yeshua, and the initiate who transmits his most subtle teachings. She was also the one who anointed him as the "christ" which means "anointed one." Because she was the first witness to the resurrection, she was considered by the apostle John as the founder of Christianity, long before Paul and his vision on the road to Damascus.
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| St. Mary Magdalene in the Grotte de Ste. Baume, France |
In the grotto of Ste. Baume, which was for thousands of years a pilgrimage site for the followers of Artemis, we were touched by the powerfully moving images of Mary Magdalene weeping for her lost love, Yeshua, and by the devotion of the Dominicans, since the 13th Century guardians of her legacy. We wondered why we in the U.S. have not heard this woman's full story. We also marveled that women are still forbidden from being priests and ministers in the Church, when clearly that was not Jesus' position, based on his obvious trust in Mary Magdalene to carry his message.
What happened next is well documented in history. The Roman Church, under Peter, became male-dominated, eventually excluding women altogether from the worship experience. Women were considered "unclean", except the mother of Jesus, who was proclaimed a "Virgin." Sexuality and women's bodies were called "sinful." Only through celibacy could a man reach the highest pinnacle of spiritual heights. Women's natural sensuality was dangerous and must be controlled and avoided.
The first Crusade mounted by the Church, the Albigensian Crusade, in the 1200s, was against heretics in the south of France, to kill all the Cathars, professors of the Church of "Amor," followers of an independent brand of Christianity which considered women equal, and had women priests. This was the first genocide, killing over a million men, women and children. In Beziers, over 1,000 men, women, and children sought safety from the crusaders in the town church. Asked by the knight crusaders how to tell which were Catholic and which were Cathars, the bishop said, "Burn them all, God will sort them out." This brutal episode of history shows the extent to which the Church was willing to go to contain the dangerous feminine.
We know now the celibacy of the priesthood is a perversion that has nurtured an epidemic of child sexual abuse hidden by the Church.
There was much to ponder after our visit to the south of France.
My ministry about women must include sharing the story of Mary Magdalene. To me, she has become symbolic of the missing link to the Sacred Feminine for our current era, the woman whom Jesus loved, and who independently brought the Christian message. To me, she is the missing link to a time when women were honored as full partners in creation and the bringers of life. She is a powerful symbol for women of our time.
Restoring the Balance
Our world is seriously out of balance. One of the biggest reasons for this imbalance, I believe, is the suppression of what are considered "feminine" values over the last 3,000 years. Values that are considered feminine, such as compassion, nurturing, cooperation, intuition, and connection, have been devalued and vilified, or at best treated as frivolous. This has led to the marginalization of women, as well as men when they try to express their own feminine inclinations, a worldwide epidemic of violence against women, and rampant homophobia. Values associated with the masculine, such as control, competition, aggression, ambition, and enterprise, while not in themselves dangerous, have spun out of control into excess and violence because they are not balanced by strong, empowered feminine values. I believe that this has led directly to the current state of our world, with violence, war, exploitation, and an assault on Mother Earth herself that threatens our very existence as a species.
I believe that many of the myths of our culture have directly assaulted the feminine. Some of the central doctrines of Jewish and Christian belief, including Eve's role in the "fall" of mankind, the "virgin" birth of Jesus, and the church's portrayal of Mary Magdelene as a "whore" have contributed to a culture that has demeaned the feminine. Beliefs that the female body is unclean and dangerous are still being taught in many religious communities. This is in direct contrast to the ancient Goddess religions, which always honored the body as sacred.
As a result of these myths, the legacy of women has been a burden of shame, guilt and alienation from our Divine heritage. Men and boys have been disconnected from their tender, sweet, full selves, and locked in the straitjacket of maleness.
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| Young Friends having fun in the FGC 08 Honoring that of Goddess Within workshop. |
I believe that our Mother/Father Godde is nudging us towards restoring the balance between the masculine and the feminine in our world. I have hope that, with Godde's help, we will come to our senses and restore our Earth to the paradise we were given, a place where all men and women can live in peace and harmony, contributing our gifts fully, knowing that we are each reflections of the Divine.
I believe that Quakers have an important leadership role to play in this transformation, with our heritage of full empowerment of women in the ministry, our testimonies of equality, peace, and community, and with our founding mothers' and fathers' passionate commitment to justice for all.
It's time for half the world's people to be restored to full humanity.
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