Women’s spiritual quest takes on a unique form in literature and poetry written by female authors.
It often begins with the experience of nothingness. Women live through a sense of emptiness in their personal lives through self-hatred, self-denial, and victimhood; in their relationships with men; and within the value systems that have shaped their lives. Women experience nothingness, reject traditional solutions, and question the meaning of their lives, opening the door to discovering deeper sources of power and worth.
The experience of nothingness is often followed by an awakening an inner turning point that resembles a transformative shift in which the forces of being or existence unfold. As a woman awakens and opens herself to these greater forces, she gains a new grounding in her sense of self and a new orientation toward the world. Through this process of awakening and opening, women resist self-negation, overcome self-hatred, and refuse to remain victims.
This awakening often emerges through a mysterious identification or mystical alignment that women enter through harmonizing with their bodies and with motherhood. Women’s mystical experiences often arise in nature or within communities of other women. After awakening comes a renaming of the self and of reality a new definition that clarifies the woman’s renewed orientation toward self-realization and toward the world through her own experience of the forces of being.
When women rename the self and the world, they mirror wholeness and move toward overcoming dualities of self and world body and soul, nature and spirit, mind and emotion dualities that have long dominated Western consciousness. Through this new naming, women propose directions for social change, looking forward to integrating spiritual insight with social reality merging the spiritual quest with the pursuit of justice and transformation.
Although the spiritual journey of women may emerge from the experience of nothingness and extend in a linear way toward awakening, mystical insight, and renaming, this sequence is not fixed. Sometimes awakening precedes awareness of nothingness, and mystical insight can intensify a woman’s sense of nothingness within traditional realities. It should not be assumed that a woman can ever fully escape the experience of nothingness. As long as she lives especially within a male-centered society nothingness will reappear. The moments of women’s quest form a process in which experiences of nothingness, awakening, insight, and renaming spiral and deepen endlessly.
from Chapter Two of Feminist Mysticism
Author: Carol P. Christ
Translator: Mostafa Mahmoud
Publisher: Elles publishing house
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