Read Online The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online

women’s dedication to the church came up. “But for all our dedication, we’ve certainly gotten a rotten deal,” I said. It is the sort of thing waking women blurt almost without realizing it.
    A man rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re not one of those women, are you?”
    â€œWhat women?” I asked.
    â€œYou know, those screaming feminists who are always yelling about how bad women have been treated.”
    â€œNo,” I told him fast as I could. “I’m not one of those.” And I dropped the subject as if it was toxic waste.
    He had effectively dismissed my voice and experience. But then it hit me: Wasn’t that what I’d been doing to myself—dismissing my own experience, the voice speaking deep inside?
    Trivializing our experience is a very old and shrewd way of controlling ourselves. We do it by censoring our expressions of truth or viewing them as inconsequential. We learned the technique from a culture that has practiced it like an art form.
    The trick works like this. An image is created of a “screaming feminist” with an ax to grind. The image takes on enormous negative energy in the church and culture. Branding a woman with this image effectively belittles her opinion and discredits it. So rather than risk the image being attached to her, a woman will often back quickly away. I later realized that’s what I’d done when the man threatened to attach the label to me. It is a rare and strong woman who has enough inner substance to face the ridicule and pain that can come from expressing feminism.
    The church itself has used this negative image as a way of controlling women and discouraging them from challenging the status quo. Once when I suggested to a woman that she stand up for women in a church situation, she said, “I really want to, but I’d hate to look like one of those fanatical feminists our minister preaches about.”
    Sometimes, though, others’ attempts to control and trivialize don’t work. Once when I led a discussion at a mixed-gender retreat, a couple of women began to express their pain as women within Christianity. A male clergyman, who I suspect was feeling uncomfortable, said, “Oh, come on, the church is human, it makes mistakes. Why can’t you just forgive and be done with it?”
    I’m not sure he realized what he’d done—brilliantly trivializing and dismissing their feelings. I mean, who could argue with what he said? Yes, the church is human. Yes, it makes mistakes. Yes, forgiveness is good.
    There is a time to be gentle and a time to be fierce, and each of the two women managed to be both at the same time. Each spoke fierce things with a tone of gentleness. One said, “Must you focuson my need to forgive and let go? I’m not yet at a place where I can do that. I really need to express what’s inside me, and I need the church to listen. Why not go to the heart of it and focus on the church’s need to repent and change?”
    The other woman said, “Think a moment. If men were at the bottom and women were the ones in charge, if our theology tended to give us the power and excluded you, if it deified the feminine only, would you still be saying, ‘The church is only human, why don’t you just let it go?’”
    She brought to my mind the comment by Nelle Morton, one of the grandmothers of feminist spirituality, who said things are always different when you are looking “from the bottom up.” This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we