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Journal and anthology extracts
A goddess-loving Quaker ponders her dilemmas
I
was brought up firmly in the Christian tradition: Church of England at
home, Methodist for nine years at a girls’ boarding school. So I
attended the colourful ritualistic Anglican services at the parish
church during my time at home, while at school there were daily
‘assemblies’ with lusty hymn-singing and a strong Biblical basis for
weekly sermons and Scripture lessons. For some of my fellow pupils this
was fine, because the Judaeo-Christian tradition fed them spiritually.
For me, it was like being a vegetarian and having a feast of meat put
in front of me. I was told ‘There’s food,’ and it was food. But it
wasn’t the right food for me. I didn’t know why it wasn’t right, and I
kept on trying to make it right.
Looking back, it’s clear that
my problem was not with Jesus, who I still find an inspiration, but
with the structure of the church itself. It demanded obeisance to the
invisible God, which generally translated into obedience to the
all-too-visible male clergy. For a girl becoming a woman there were few
possible rôles beyond silent service. To use the term which emerged in
the 1960s, the problem was patriarchy. That concept came a decade too
late for me. As I grew from a shy child to a gawky teenager, I thought
it was me who was wrong.
I was especially wrong when it came
to the sacrament of Holy Communion. Week by week when I was among
Anglicans, termly when I was a Methodist, I went up to the Lord’s Table
hoping to receive the promised essence of the divine. Week by week I
returned to my pew having received nothing at all….
Then, when I
was in my 20s, I came across the Quaker meeting for worship. I fell
into its depths immediately. Relief swept through me. No theology, no
sacraments, no words. Just an inward journey supported by an outward
community, with accompanying social and political witness. Bliss. For
me as a feminist there was a special delight in the Quaker testimony to
equality, because I found that in the Quaker world women and men work
together according their gifts.
It’s 38 years since I went to
my first Quaker Meeting for Worship. For most of that time I’ve been
part of a large and thriving Meeting. I’ve looked after its children
(as well as my own) and helped to nurture its spiritual life as an
elder. I’ve joined in national Quaker affairs, mainly on the literature
and publications side. I’ve only occasionally acted as clerk, which is
odd, because one of my particular passions is the Quaker business
method; in fact one of the reasons I’m still a Quaker is that we take
the spiritual nature of decision-making seriously. The Quaker business
method involves the whole community both in day-to-day practicalities
and in big spiritual and moral challenges, and it makes provision for
change and growth. Of course it doesn’t always work that way, because
we’re fallible human beings, and we Quakers fall into bad power
struggles just as we fall into empty phases of worship. But the ideal
is still there to return to.
So what happened to my search for union with the divine? Did I find it in the quiet of Quaker Meeting for Worship?
I
did. Into its depths I could bring my passion and my despair, my many
seekings and my few findings. There they would join the seekings and
findings of my co-worshippers, to mingle like ingredients in the divine
cooking pot as, individually and together, we moved inward and emerged
changed. In Thomas Kelly’s words (Quaker Faith & Practice 2.38), we
‘found our separate lives were all one life, within whom we live and
move and have our being’… (PE)
[But] a space lay inside me like
an organ of my spiritual body, empty and waiting to be filled. As a
spiritual person I had found my spiritual community among the Quakers,
but as a worshipful person I had nothing to worship…
I marched
to Greenham Common to protest against the nuclear missiles there and
found myself, a feminist and a pacifist, among a group of women
fighting. How could it not be clear what I was longing for? But you
can’t long for what you don’t know. You can only feel the longing, and
wait. There seemed no alternative to the waiting - waiting, as I wrote,
in the void, even though in Quaker Meeting I was waiting in the light.
My
Quaker life was rich, busy and thoughtful. Quakers have no creed or
liturgy; they worship in silence, in which anyone may share the
spiritual inspiration they have received. This worship nourished me.
Nationally I was active in the Quaker publications scene, and wrote and
edited in the Quaker context. I value the social witness and the
pacifist stance I find among Quakers, and have taken my part to a
certain extent in both, but for me it is the inward journey that is
always primary…
I was at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in
Birmingham and met a young woman who took me on the next stage of my
journey. One free afternoon we walked round the lake in the grounds and
sat down on a bench to watch the quiet ducks and rampant Canada geese.
‘Would you like me to recite a Goddess prayer?’ she asked. I said yes.
She fumbled a little to remember the exact words, and then gave out a
long prayer of great beauty and resonance. I remember little of the
detail now. I was simply moved to my bones. My clearest thought was,
‘Why have I been deprived of this for so long?’
A couple of
months later, Rose Flint and I took her beautiful lurcher dog on a
windy day to one of the sacred sites on Ynys Môn, the island of
Anglesey. She told me about the first Goddess Conference in Glastonbury
a week or two before, where she had been poet-in-residence. I expect
she described the invocation rituals and the dancing and the workshops,
but what stayed with me was her account of an invasion of the
Conference by women from Rainbow Campers, a group of voluntary and
involuntary exiles from the mainstream economic system who meet every
summer for their only holiday at the free camp near Glastonbury. They
were angry at this party of middle-class pseudo-spiritual
pseudo-hippies taking over the town and excluding women like themselves
from a spiritual binge that they’d love to be part of. Rose could see
their point. But she knew, as they didn’t, that a good proportion of
the women came to the Conference free by working their passage, that
one of the reasons for the cost was that women who are often exploited
could on this occasion be paid a reasonable rate for their skills,
their wisdom and their art. Rose also knew that Kathy Jones, who had
inspired the whole occasion, was in the process of treatment for breast
cancer.
Her account of how the two groups faced each other
across the Assembly Hall, listened to each other through fear and
hostility and tears, and how at a crucial moment a shaft of light came
in with the movement of sun and struck the statue of the Goddess so
exquisitely that Rose cried out and drew everyone’s eye towards it,
told me that the divine was alive and well and living, probably in lots
of places, but certainly at the Goddess Conference. Elinor Gadon
writes, in The Once & Future Goddess: ‘To come face to face with
your own interior landscape and recognise it as the sacred territory of
the Goddess confirms an inner spiritual presence that most Western
women have been out of touch with for millennia... There is nothing
supernatural about the process of discovery, merely reactivating the
powers of the psyche that have lain dormant for so long.’ I now see
these process of healing and re-seeing as just that: reactivating the
goddess within me, which has lain dormant for so long… (FT)
At
the [Goddess] Conference I learned about the ways in which [pagan
seasonal] festivals have been celebrated in our north European corner
of the world. There could be fires and candles, music and drumming and
dancing, or quiet night watches under the stars. There would be
reverence for the stirrings of new life at Imbolc, a celebration of the
glory of spring and sexual fulfilment at Beltane (which remains with us
as May Day), thanksgiving for the fullness of the grain at Lammas or
Lughnasa, and a recognition of the closeness of the spirit world at
Samhain. (Every year I’m distressed by the degradation of this deeply
reverent celebration of past souls into the modern, tricksy-treaty,
commercialised Hallowe’en.) I knew that early Friends had rejected
‘times and seasons’ on powerful theological grounds relevant to their
time and mindset. But it seemed wonderful to me, three hundred and
fifty years on and living in an urban, technological culture, to
connect with the cycle of nature. It seems ever more wonderful the
longer I do it.
At first it was strange to use the word ‘pagan’
for these insights and practices. Paganism has had a bad press for
thousands of years, ever since monotheism discovered how to write its
own story. In Europe, as the early adherents of the Christian religion
struggled to establish Christianity as the dominant faith, they
vilified all things pagan. This vilification lurks even today, with the
term still sounding like an insult in some contexts.
The word
‘pagan’ actually comes from the same source as ‘peasant’, meaning ‘of
the countryside’; it means rural, homespun, ordinary-people-based,
rather than head-of-state-based as the monotheistic religions have
been. Time and again, because they’re part of popular culture rather
than part of the structure of dominance, pagan attitudes and imagery
have almost been wiped out. Probably some aspects have been wiped out.
But pagan ways have never wholly disappeared, and keep on re-appearing
in the works of stonemasons and storytellers, artists and poets.
As
I sporadically entered this world, an important lesson for me to learn
was that the pagan Goddess doesn’t in any way replace the God of
monotheistic religions. There are many thousands of Goddess stories and
images. Almost every language and culture has them. In each culture,
myths of the Goddess have been passed down from generation to
generation in oral form, rather than in writing, so that they change
and develop rather than becoming frozen as scriptural texts. Each and
every name of the Goddess is a symbol of some aspect of the eternal
female principle. The Goddess is not a single Being, set apart from the
natural world and the everyday life of the planet. Quite the reverse.
All the stories and songs and images of goddesses are facets of the
whole, signposts to the inward and outward creative impulse which turns
the earth on its axis and sustains it, body and soul.
Another
vital lesson was that the divine female must unite with the divine male
– the Goddess with the God. That’s the way growth comes. At Newgrange,
a World Heritage site near Drogheda in Ireland, a huge earth mound
protects a ceremonial stone passage shaped like the human birth canal,
and that passage-way is penetrated by the sun for just seventeen
minutes every year, at dawn on the Winter Solstice. During the
ceremonies accompanying this and similar events at other ancient sites,
our European ancestors celebrated the physical and metaphysical union
of female with male which lies at the heart of all creation, and those
celebrations are now being revived.
If it seems that, among
those who are involved in this revival, the female side of the seesaw
is pressing harder than the male, maybe that’s a necessary redressing
of the balance after millennia of patriarchy so that in due course full
and equal union can be restored. (PE)
(This is a compilation of extracts from Alison’s article in Feminist Theology (FT), September 2003, www.sagepub.co.uk, and her chapter in Patterns and Examples (PE), ed Jarman and Tucker, Sessions of York, 2005, www.sessionsofyork.co.uk ) See also www.quaker.org.uk, www.goddess-pages.co.uk, www.goddessconference.com
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