Sue Monk Kidd. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
I do not remember being angry the first time I almost finished reading this book. Let me explain. First, angry is not the word; it was more like sparked. I remember that by the time I was almost through the book, I was sparked into responding to what I had read. As I remembered, I wrote my response in my journal, taking Kidd to task for two things: for “regendering” the world and for her defection from traditional evangelical Christianity. It seemed to me that she had fallen into the trap of saying that one can only see the world through the prism of one’s gender (or by extension, one’s race, or whatever extension one chooses to use). It was therefore puzzling to me that she could not seem to understand why others took exception to her new understanding. After all, it was theirs. Most were satisfied with the understandings that they already had; it was hers that was now out of step.
Sure, part of it was just the overreaction of a male chauvinist. That would be my point of view.
Much later I picked up the book again, figuring that I probably should finish reading it before I read The Secret Life of Bees, which I had been intending to read for awhile. So I started at the bookmark, just a chapter and a half short of the ending. I found that I had stopped too soon, for the first few pages I read opened up a whole new appreciation.
I started thinking about conversion. Not the type of conversion that you usually hear mentioned in everyday evangelical conversation, where the question begins and ends with the question “Are you saved?” but real conversion. In my tradition, we believe it is both an event and a process. It is a wooing by the Spirit in the times and places of the Spirit’s choosing. The event itself is often a crisis, a dramatic dawning that may be the disintegration of all of life’s previous understandings and a new orientation of our lives. But the Spirit is never through with us. Indeed, a new reintegration of our lives has begun. Sometimes during this process/crisis/process we may move from extreme to extreme as new definition is added to our lives. It is easy to be misunderstood by others because we are still working out the understanding of ourselves. [The bane of conversion is those who while experiencing the disintegration of their previous worldview never go beyond that into the process of reintegration. Without this growing step, this move toward maturity, their experience is perceived as a final certainity.] Hopefully, the result of this is a new balance which becomes the source of new energy in our lives. This is exactly what Kidd is describing as her experience. What makes it a little unnerving is that it is her experience. But it is not as dramatically different as it seemed at first glance. Indeed, it is rather affirming the Spirit moves where and how the Spirit will.
Which begs the question: What is it like to convert? To realize that we are in the midst of a process that involves our orientation toward life itself; to accept that though we cannot see the end of what is happening, we are beginning to live it now; to move toward the balance resulting from the reintegration of our new understanding with the act of living. I really do not think that is anything to be afraid of; in fact, quite the opposite. What I had missed the first time was the peace that Kidd came to with the Divine masculine.
Ironically, I had first laid the book down in March 2000. I finished reading the remaining chapter and started looking for my journal entry in March 2005. I found that I had really forgotten the direction of my reflection then, but had come back to the conclusions (actually, at that point, more like hopes) that I had drawn previously. If you would like to read those entries, click here.
3/18/05