Earlier this spring, I was exploring the city I’d just moved to and decided to stop at a used bookstore. In the spirituality section, I found a book called, The Feminine Face of God: the Unfolding of the Sacred in Women, written by Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins. As I was checking out, the clerk told me it was one of the best books he’d ever read.
It took me quite a few months to finish this book since I gave birth about a month in. But over the last few weeks, I finished the second half and fell in love.
The two women authors both had visions and dreams that led them to the conclusion they needed to write a book about how spirituality was awakening in women across the country. Through the book, they tell dozens of stories from the women they interviewed and cover specific steps in the journey of a woman going through a spiritual awakening. Although they spoke with women of all kinds of faiths, from Judaism to Jainism, they found commonalities in each one and discussed these at length while uniting personal stories, sacred texts, and historical figures.
I found this book was exactly what I needed to read. It’s what ultimately led me to starting this blog, though I think the idea has been brewing for some time. I love how you can find such life-changing works of art not because someone recommended it to you or you sought it out. Sometimes, they just fall into your lap. When that happens, it feels even more special, like no matter what, that book would’ve found me. I felt the same thing with a book I found at a little free library called, Love is Letting Go of Fear by Gerald Jampolsky. (Oddly enough, I just found out that Patricia Hopkins co-authored a book with him and William Thetford called Good-Bye to Guilt).
The structure of the book reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s mythology studies, which the authors referenced frequently. The same way he focuses on certain themes that come through in multiple myths, these women tell stories through common themes. The main themes that stuck out to me were:
Being authentic to oneself
For whatever reason, whether because of how society has conditioned us, how tightly we are bound to other people, or how we have a fear of offending or rocking the boat, many women struggle to know what they want and to follow it. This book discussed how seeking the sacred and embodying it is uncomfortable and scary, but we must be true to ourselves. We must listen and follow. One artist that was interviewed said:
Ultimately, I think you need to follow the intuitive way that unfolds out of you and leads you… But you have to give yourself permission to follow that path. If you sit back and think, ‘If only I could travel, if only I could have time alone…’ and never take yourself seriously, nothing will happen. You must do it. Do it! Pack your bag or unpack your closet. Be alone or be with people. Do whatever your inner self is telling you.
Returning to the body
Much of religious tradition has vilified the body and separated it from the soul. Compared with men, many women have much different relationships with their bodies. We receive another person’s body during sex. Each month when we menstruate, we see just one of the cycles our bodies participate in. When women get pregnant, they create an entirely new body separate from theirs, birth it, and later have the ability to nourish it until its mature enough to take food.
Both women and men can find that reclaiming this connection with the body is very powerful. Instead of seeing themselves as a fractured creature, they can begin to feel God in their body instead of just trying to conceptualize it in thoughts.
Rev. Alla Bozarth-Campbell was quoted in the book from her essay “Transfiguration/Full Moon”:
As I came to own and accept and celebrate my womanhood as a gift from God, bringing my own new value for the female side of life into prayer, I experienced a kind of inward leaping which was ecstatically physical as well as spiritual; an inward bodily leaping that made me feel God in my nerves and blood and deep down in my bone marrow as well as in my emotions and intellect.
Connecting with the earth
I believe this is strongly connected with the previous point, since we all came from the earth. Much of the book’s structure centered around the idea of a sacred garden that we are all called to enter and tend into maturity. I loved the analogies and metaphors of us being gardeners, nurturing plants, and healing the earth as well as ourselves.
From the book:
As many of the women we interviewed are coming to know, the distinction between spirit and matter begins to blur as one honors the sacredness of her feminine nature and her intimate connection with Mother Earth.
Bringing all spiritual work into “real life”
There are many lofty truths in religion, spirituality, and sacred work. Many people choose to devote their entire lives to these walks. Many others don’t have that choice or simply don’t want it. The question is, how do we carry our spiritual work into our every day life so that we can create better communities, foster relationships, and heal the planet? The women interviewed discussed their desire to build community and to use inner work as a foundation for work that extends to others.
The last chapter said:
To embody the sacred so deeply that it flows into all our relationships–this, the women say, is where we are going now. It is where we need to go.
This book focused exclusively on women, but I personally believe that anyone, regardless of gender or sex, could learn something from the book and the various journeys of people interviewed. Women may resonate more with certain societal pressures or social conditioning discussed, and females will find truth in how their biology influences how they see the world. But the feminine isn’t connected to genitals or chromosomes. Everyone is a blend of both feminine and masculine energy, and I think it’s important to have both. The feminine has been oppressed for a long time, but even since this book was written in 1991, we’ve seen changes across the world for women, men, and all those in between.
After reading the book, I was curious to learn more about it and the authors, so I started looking around online. Neither of the authors have a huge online presence. The book is not a long-lasting bestseller like Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Some of the reviews on Goodreads criticized the book for being very basic, containing “nothing new”, and too heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity. But I think every spiritual or religious text is speaking a truth that has been spoken before.
This truth is from the point of view two well-educated women who felt a calling in the 1980s to write about how American women experience the sacred in their lives. I’m glad they followed that calling because by the end of the book, I felt exactly what Jean Shinoda Bolen described in the foreword:
It may have an even deeper impact on individual women who, as a result of reading it, will be profoundly changed and quietly empowered to live authentic lives.