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

Part One\ \ Awakening\ \ \ \ "That's How I Like to See a Woman"\ It was autumn, and everything was turning loose. I was running errands that afternoon. Rain had fallen earlier, but now the sun was out, shining on the tiny beads of water that clung to trees and sidewalks. The whole world seemed red and yellow and rinsed with light. I parked in front of the drugstore where my daughter, Ann, fourteen, had an after-school job. Leaping a puddle, I went inside.\ I spotted her right away kneeling on the floor in the toothpaste section, stocking a bottom shelf I was about to walk over and say hello when I noticed two middle-aged men walking along the aisle toward her. They looked like everybody's father. They had moussed hair, and they wore knit sportshirts the color of Easter eggs, the kind of shirts with tiny alligators sewn at the chest. It was a detail I would remember later as having ironic symbolism.\ My daughter did not see them coming. Kneeling on the floor, she was intent on getting the boxes of Crest lined up evenly. The men stopped, peering down at her. One man nudged the other. He said, "Now that's how I like to see a woman--on her knees."\ The other man laughed.\ Standing in the next aisle, I froze. I watched the expression that crept into my daughter's eyes as she looked up. I watched her chin drop and her hair fall across her face.\ Seeing her kneel at these men's feet while they laughed at her subordinate posture pierced me through.\ For the previous couple of years I had been in the midst of a tumultuous awakening. I had been struggling to come to terms with my life as a woman--in my culture, my marriage, myfaith, my church, and deep inside myself. It was a process not unlike the experience of conception and labor. There had been a moment, many moments really, when truth seized me and I "conceived" myself as woman. Or maybe I reconceived myself. At any rate, it had been extraordinary and surprising to find myself--a conventionally religious woman in my late thirties--suddenly struck pregnant with a new consciousness, with an unfolding new awareness of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be spiritual as a woman.\ Hard labor had followed. For months I'd inched along, but lately I'd been stuck. I'd awakened enough to know that I couldn't go back to my old way of being a woman, but the fear of going forward was paralyzing. So I'd plodded along, trying to make room for the new consciousness that was unfolding in my life but without really risking change.\ I have a friend, a nurse on the obstetrical floor at a hospital, who says that sometimes a woman's labor simply stalls. The contractions grow weak, and the new life, now quite distressed, hangs precariously. The day I walked into the drugstore, I was experiencing something like that. A stalled awakening.\ Who knows, I may have stalled interminably if I had not seen my daughter on her knees before those laughing men. I cannot to this day explain why the sight of it hit me so forcibly. But to borrow Kafka's image, it came like an ice ax upon a frozen sea, and suddenly all my hesitancy was shattered. Just like that.\ The men's laughter seemed to go on and on. I felt like a small animal in the road, blinded by the light of a truck, knowing some terrible collision is coming but unable to move. I stared at my daughter on her knees before these men and could not look away. Somehow she seemed more than my daughter; she was my mother, my grandmother, and myself. She was every woman ever born, bent and contained in a small, ageless cameo that bore the truth about "a woman's place."\ In the profile of my daughter I saw the suffering of women, the confining of the feminine to places of inferiority, and I experienced a collision of love and pain so great I had to reach for the counter to brace myself.\ This posture will not perpetuate itself in her life, I thought.\ Still I didn't know what to do. When I was growing up, if my mother had told me once, she'd told me a thousand times, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." I'd heard this from nearly everybody. It was the kind of thing that got cross-stitched and hung in kitchens all over my native South.\ I'd grown up to be a soft-voiced, sweet-mouthed woman who, no matter how assailing the behavior before me or how much I disagreed with it, responded nicely or else zip-locked my mouth shut. I had swallowed enough defiant, disputatious words in my life to fill a shelf of books.\ But it occurred to me that if I abandoned my daughter at that moment, if I simply walked away and was silent, the feminine spirit unfolding inside her might also become crouched and silent. Perhaps she would learn the internal posture of being on her knees.\ The men with their blithe joke had no idea they had tapped a reservoir of pain and defiance in me. It was rising now, unstoppable by any earthly force.\ I walked toward them. "I have something to say to you, and I want you to hear it," I said.\ They stopped laughing. Ann looked up.\ "This is my daughter," I said, pointing to her, my finger shaking with anger. "You may like to see her and other women on their knees, but we don't belong there. We don't belong there!"\ Ann rose to her feet. She glanced sideways at me, sheer amazement spread over her face, then turned and faced the men. I could hear her breath rise and fall with her chest as we stood there shoulder to shoulder, staring at their faces . . .\ Dance of the Dissident Daughter, The. Copyright © by Sue Monk Kidd. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1Pt. 1Awakening5"That's How I Like to See a Woman"7Conceiving the Feminine Self10The Deep Sleep13The Nest of Yellow Leaves24The Feminine Wound28Faces of Daughterhood41Forming a Feminist Critique59Trusting Your Own Feminine Source75Pt. 2Initiation85The Unexplored Gorge89Opening to the Feminine Divine98Crossing the Threshold103A Guiding Feminine Myth107Pt. 3Grounding131Encountering Goddess133Why a Feminine Form for the Formless?136The Coming of Herself140The Symbol Functions152The Dawn of Feminine Spiritual Consciousness153Healing the Feminine Wound168Transfiguring Anger186Forgiveness189The Dance of Dissidence190Pt. 4Empowerment195Cohesion of the Female Soul197Authentic Power199Buffalo Medicine199Voicing the Soul202Finding Inner Authority210Embodying Sacred Feminine Experience217Daughters, the Women Are Speaking223The Story225Notes229Permissions237

\ Christiane NorthrupA masterpiece of womens wisdom.\ \ \ \ \ Lauren ArtressThe psycho-spiritual redefinition that takes place when we expand our understanding of the Christian tradition to embrace the gracious challenge of the Sacred Feminine is an invisible process. Sue Monk Kidd courageously articulates this unseen path so all who read this book will understand this painful and rewarding journey.\ \ \ Murray SteinOut of reflections and words like these in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter the new forms of Christianity will be born. This work is packed with experience and insight, and it is bound to add to the gigantic shift in consciousness taking place as the millennium turns and a transformation of spiritual consciousness takes hold of the human population on a global level.\ \ \ \ \ Christiane NorthrupA masterpiece of womens wisdom.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyThe author's journey to capture her feminine soul and to live authentically from that soul makes a fascinating, well-researched and well-written story. Kidd's successful pilgrimage from her Southern Baptist roots and away from the patriarchal and fundamentalist Christian religious systems surrounding her is an account of anger turned to courage, creativity and love. A mid-career realization that she had lived without "real inner authority" and with "a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity" produced in Kidd the new mindset that made her journey possible. Additionally, her extensive knowledge of many subjects, including theology, mythology and the arts, made possible the copious references and cross-references that will prove invaluable for readers who wish to follow her in this same search. While Kidd cautions that each woman's path will be unique, there is no question but that many women will find in her book a mirror of their own present conditions and a hopeful call to self-discovery. (June)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalWhat happens when the wife of a Southern Baptist minister, a loyal adherent to his religious tradition, suddenly discovers an alternative religious tradition that speaks more strongly to her spiritual longings? Kidd (When the Heart Waits, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) recounts her own journey of anger, fear, and joy from her traditional Baptist upbringing to her new discovery of the power of nontraditional feminine religious experiences. Along her journey, Kidd encounters some of the most powerful feminist religious voices of her times, from Phyllis Trible to Carol Christ, and records these voices as guideposts on her journey. A graceful account of awakening and transformation. Recommend for most libraries.\ \