The Journey Home for this Divine Spark, Flying Free
D’vorah J. Grenn, Ph.D., Kohenet
When did I take my last – or my first – breath that was safe from patriarchy, that wasn’t influenced, dominated by, enveloped in the damaging structures and language of a patriarchal culture?
When did I begin to pray freely, openly, unencumbered, unafraid, un-self-conscious, without shards and shreds of imposed guilt and patriarchy running through my consciousness?
How insistent and constant were the voices of white patriarchs informing my image of G’d and keeping the Goddess hidden from me, putting forth instead only the image of an old, judgmental white man with long white beard, not the vibrant female whose embodied, protective energy can be felt through Shekhinah, Ishtar, Lilith, Anat? Her Presence is so alive in Kali and Durga, in the tree, wind and water goddesses Asherah, Yemaya/Olokun, Oshun, Oya, there can be no mistaking Her power. Now I see Her everywhere, Her essence in the coast live oak, Japanese black pine and Nature-sculpted piece of giant redwood in our garden.
It is said in the Talmud that when two people study Torah together, it is as if the Shekhinah – often called “the female face of G’d” in Judaism – is between them. Not G’d, but Shekhinah AS G’d, a secret well-kept from me until I was in my late 40’s. I was so excited to learn this, and so later viewed with disbelief that She had once again been erased, in an image projected onto one long New York museum wall; it said G’d, not Shekhinah in the quote. I viewed it with outrage, knowing that few people would automatically think of G’d as representing a female energy.
In starting this article, several questions swirled through my head: which trauma do I write about? How many of them? Didn’t Goddess come into play to help me cope with all of them, even unbeknownst to me? Did She save me from being raped in Golden Gate Park when I was a 17-year-old virgin? As I thought about how to begin, I felt such an essay would entail my remembering all the traumas and so might be too dangerous to attempt. But my subconscious knew I had to write what I could.
As I speak these words aloud, thinking through how the process might go, I remember another attempted rape in an empty hotel bathroom in California at age 23 and two date rapes. Do I include the date rapes? I didn’t even have language for them until long after the fact. I hadn’t classified them as violent – though they were forceful – perhaps because I was partly in shock or denial, and partly blamed myself for getting into compromising situations. I’m not sure rape was a word I used to describe them until much later.
After these events, I continued on with my life. But what went missing was my full voice, the ability to recognize the incidents for what they were and their impact on me. Perhaps I lost a small piece of me after each incident.
All these acts left for a time a soul-killing residue. Our culture teaches us not to see certain things, or to live with them, to be silent for fear of consequences from ostracization to violent blowback. Our own guilt, shame, self-accusation, internalized oppression do a good job of concretizing these silences; that itself is part of the patriarchal design. It’s emotionally and spiritually lethal in its effectiveness… hiding in the shadows yet making itself felt in changes to our personality, in shutting down trust in our own intuitive alert systems so that we can’t recognize or name what’s been done to us. After years of conditioning both societal and personal, we start believing the lies: “Oh, I must’ve overreacted, must be remembering this wrong. Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Oh Oh Oh…” until we have talked ourselves out of our own sense, collaborated in stripping away our essence until sometimes there’s nothing left of us, or just a shell, a silhouette of who we were.
Patriarchal systems perpetuate trauma by convincing us something we’ve gone through “wasn’t that bad” or didn’t compare with another woman’s more visible or constant injuries. We now recognize this as minimizing our pain, ignoring the reality/validity of our experience, or as gaslighting to make us question our own perceptions, even our sanity.
I didn’t find the Goddess and Her healing presence and properties until my husband died – and even more fully 21 months later, after watching a lover die in front of me. The deaths were a compound trauma and put me in a state of spiritual emergency, which in retrospect I feel was Goddess’s way of getting through to me as I walked through life in a workaholic oblivion. I was cracked open and threw myself headlong into Her open arms without quite knowing why. I just knew I was hungry to know more about this Goddess I’d read about after the deaths; She felt like much more than just the female face of G’d, or one of the benign goddesses we learned about in school, Greco-Roman co-optations of the earlier powerful ancient Mesopotamian and African deities.
Through reading Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman, Vicki Noble’s Shakti Woman and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, I started to understand what had happened to me, what parts of me had been slowly stripped away or killed off with great intent, parts that could return now that I was free and on my own. Not needing anyone’s approval or fearing anyone’s punitive response, I became consumed with Her study and Her worship, and began writing liturgy. I wrote my first piece in 1999, “Inanna-Lilith-Shekhinah,” later published in my Talking to Goddess anthology. She became an organizing principle, and more: part of my very lifeblood, a vital affirmation of all the things I was and am. I realized how many parts of Me were never allowed to surface, never given support or encouragement because of the imposition of patriarchal values, mores, expectations.
Slowly, those missing pieces of Self came back together. Large pieces of my heart and spirit returned once I was able to identify patriarchy and learned that I was not alone in suffering its deleterious effects. Amazingly, unless I blocked it out, I didn’t remember knowing the word before hearing Monica Sjöö speak about dismantling patriarchy at a Women’s Spirituality Festival produced by Z Budapest. At that festival, I found a new world. The words spoken, dances danced, rituals offered stirred new connections in me; the ecstatic feeling I experienced was true embodiment, all my own and in unfamiliar but deep relationship with other women, and Her. As I moved to the beats of a mother drum, I saw women being in their wildness in ways I’d never witnessed. The weekend struck a chord so deep I moved straight into a trajectory of Women’s Spirituality graduate studies: doctoral exploration into women’s rituals within a new extended family, Lemba Jews in South Africa, and discovery of a new thealogy grounded in the Sacred Feminine, the female/androgynous deities of Yoruba/Ifa West African traditions and my own ancient and contemporary Jewish lineage.
These learnings resulted in my braiding together those traditions and a feminist spirituality as my spiritual practice, one I embraced initially with guilt, and later with great joy and a deep knowing. Such woven practices are rich and can be antidotes to patriarchal dictates since they allow for adaptations of the male-dominated organized religions in which many of us were raised.
How did Goddess help me move through the worst of my trauma? By bringing me into women’s community and guiding me into a course of study that infused me, enhanced and fed me far better than the most lavish dinner, with far greater rewards. I knew I could turn to Her in times of great need or utter despair. Just knowing She existed gave me a more alive connection to Divinity, both Hers and mine, and the freedom to surrender without fear of being subsumed. That was something I’d never been able to do before; indeed, I had rebelled against it, given that the liturgy in services I had attended spoke to us as children of a male parent, the male G’d. I have no doubt it was that kind of language that helped alienate me from my Judaism for so long. Even now when I try to be a bit more inclusive and not leave the male out entirely, it is hard. It’s not that She never gets angry. Of course, She does; at times She has a great deal of righteous rage. But unlike the male god, Her anger gives me permission to have rage, both for myself and on behalf of others. That is why archetypal figures such as Lilith, Inanna, Kali and Anat are such compelling, important models.
I can talk about Goddess as healer, as good listener, as compassionate Mother, as unconditional love, in ways that I could never imagine the male G’d to be, since that god is often portrayed and perceived as jealous, vengeful, punitive, all- powerful and omnipresent, cold and distant, issuing “Thou shalt nots” far better than He could listen or comfort.
IN CONCLUSION
Among the most obvious answers to the question posed by this volume, “How does patriarchy perpetuate trauma?” are these: Through sexist, misogynistic or white supremacist threads running through most commercials and ads, news stories, films, TV and radio shows; across social media, the gaming world, sports; on campuses throughout the country; in most organized religions undergirding their dogma, liturgy, daily office and organizational policies; in corporations, in politics, in our laws and in our lack of the laws that are much needed to fight androcentric biases; in the medical and hospitality industries, and in the majority of our institutions.
Where does patriarchy NOT perpetuate trauma might be a better question. It succeeds by self-replicating and continues by erasing our history, marginalizing women and many men, building strong walls around itself through sabotaging, defunding, and destroying people, institutions and social justice movements fighting the status quo to create a more balanced world. Patriarchy also perpetuates intergenerational trauma by, for example, insisting in some states that slavery and America’s systemic racism not be taught in schools!
In patriarchal religions, one is often taught that to get angry at or question G’d – or clergy – is unacceptable; it’s well-known this mindset has led to sexual and spiritual abuses. With Goddess at the helm, I feel invited to be relational, allowing for argument, questioning, thealogical discourse.
When men are viewed as god/s because “G’d is male” as Mary Daly said, patriarchy also perpetuates trauma by supporting abusive intimate relationships, frequently not prosecuting men, or awarding them minimal sentences that make mockery of their crimes.
Goddess Spirituality can give us many healing tools, including finding forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. It offers “thealogy as embodiment” as Carol Christ wrote. Both embodied and arts-based techniques are invaluable. When my colleagues Dianne Jenett, Judy Grahn and I co-directed a Women’s Spirituality MA program, we included a somatics-based course, Embodied Spirituality, and Art as Sacred Practice. Many students found these modalities to be healing. And certainly, finding a spirituality grounded in and by the Goddess has helped many heal from grief and move through major life transitions.
The very male-dominated system which creates and often supports traumatic situations – from rape to domestic violence and more – cannot possibly heal itself. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” poet and womanist/civil rights activist Audre Lorde pointed out. It’s up to us to end this damaging system NOW. As June Jordan and others have said, We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
(To be continued)