Celebrating Female Mystics

A modern-day theologian gets this long-overdue party started.

There is a secret fiesta going on in a wildwood, and you are invited. This party has been unfolding for millennia.

Its hosts are women mystics from all branches of the soul family: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and every indigenous wisdom way. Its guests include anyone whose heart has ever yearned for union with the Beloved and the alleviation of suffering for all sentient beings. Which means YOU.

The gathering is secret simply because, historically, for wise women to gather openly has been to risk death.

It’s not that they have been afraid to die, but rather they have known in every muscle fiber that they must protect themselves because their knowledge is needed. Their love and clarity and beauty are profoundly, urgently needed.

And so they have gone about in disguise, sprinkling party invitations in the public square, waiting to receive us when we come. They wait patiently, but they are excited.

Come. Feast on the mercy of Quan Yin and the compassion of Tara, the brilliance of Sophia and the shelter of the Shekinah. Break the bread of courageous prophet Mother Mary and dip it in the spicy oils of holy daughter Fatima. Drink yourself into a swoon with the songs of the ecstatic bhakti poet Mirabai and then sober up with the rigorous brilliance of Saint Teresa of Ávila. Dance your ass off with the fierce goddess Kali and her majestic sister Durga. Roll down into the boundless Valley of the Tao. Take refuge in the jewels of the Buddha-as-Woman, in the dharma as taught by women, in the sangha that gathers together a circle of wild and welcoming women.

Across the faith traditions women are being initiated, ordained, and sanctioned as rabbis and acharyas, priests and priestesses, ministers and murshidas, lamas and shamans.

We are disrupting the balance of power and reorganizing the conversation.

You don’t have to be female yourself to walk through these gates. Men are welcome here. You just don’t get to boss us around or grab our breasts or solve our problems. You may sample our cooking and wash it down with our champagne. You may ask us to dance, and you may not pout if we decline. You may study our texts, ponder our most provocative questions.

You may fall in our laps and weep if you feel the urge. We will soothe you, as we always have. And then we will send you back to the city with your pockets full of seeds to plant in the middle of it all.

The secret is out. The celebration is overflowing its banks. The joy is becoming too great to contain. The pain has grown too urgent to ignore. The earth is cracking open, and the women are rising from our hiding places and spilling onto the streets, lifting the suffering into our arms, demanding justice from the tyrants, pushing on the patriarchy and activating a paradigm shift such as the world has never seen.

Beyond Religion

Women do not always feel comfy inside traditional religious institutions. That’s probably because the architecture of the world’s organized religions has been designed largely by and for men.

These structures are built to fit and uphold a male-dominated paradigm.

Such boy-shaped arrangements no longer preclude a place at the table for women who wish to sit there, however. Across the faith traditions women are being initiated, ordained, and sanctioned as rabbis and acharyas, priests and priestesses, ministers and murshidas, lamas and shamans.

We are disrupting the balance of power and reorganizing the conversation. Increasing numbers of men, secure in their positions of privilege and authority, are voluntarily abdicating their power and handing it over to women, calling God “she” from the pulpit, seeding the academy with female philosophers. The alienation of the feminine is as obvious to them—and as perilous—as it is to the women who have been historically excluded from positions of leadership.

Many of us, however, are not even interested in being invited to join the fraternity. It’s not a matter of wanting to storm the gates of the male-dominated religions and take back what we consider to be rightfully ours. We have no desire to wear the mantle of the king. We’d rather take off all such coverings and go about naked. Replace the crown of jewels with a crown of daisies. Praise one another’s beauty and wisdom and build fires to keep one another warm. We would much rather be undefined than ordained in traditions that don’t fit our curves.

This does not mean that we see religion as a waste of time. Far from it! What we see is that the world’s great wisdom traditions are like a giant garden of the spirit, every flower and weed, each tree and species of blooming grass a unique and glorious example of the Beloved’s beauty.

Like bees, we draw nectar from them all. We cross-pollinate, helping to propagate and support a more robust and resilient ecosphere.

And, like bees, we are fully capable of discerning between life-giving nectar and noxious dreck. We know better than to drink the poison.

Teachings of love and compassion: nectar. Messages that otherize and extol violence: toxic.

We gather what is best and take it back to the Queen Bee, the Source, who transforms it into honey, a sweet and golden substance with which we nourish ourselves and feed the world.

While many of us feel suspicious of religious hierarchy and alienated by religious dogma, we are deeply drawn to the essence of the world’s wisdom ways, and we find tastes of that elixir in the teachings of the mystics—especially the women mystics—of every spiritual tradition.

If your heart is as likely to open at the feet of White Buffalo Calf Woman as at those of Our Lady of Guadalupe and you find wisdom in the teachings of the Qur’an as well as the Tao Te Ching, this journey in the footsteps of the women mystics across (and beyond) the landscape of the world’s spiritual traditions is likely your journey.

My Surprise

I should probably tell you how I got this way. How I came to bow at the altars of so many different holy houses.

First I will tell you what didn’t happen. I didn’t start off safely ensconced in a single religion from which I was eventually compelled to make my getaway. I am not a refugee from my ancestral Judaism, nor am I a recovering Catholic. My family was not evangelical, and I did not fall into the clutches of a cult. I was never ever taught to believe that one religion had all the answers and that the others were wrong (or worse, evil).

No one ever told me I’d burn in hell for practicing yoga or chanting the Ninety-nine Names of Allah.

Rather, I was raised in the counterculture of the 1970s in a community that appreciated the wisdom of multiple spiritual paths, even as it rejected the divisive dogmas obscuring these treasures.

I grew up exposed to all of the major branches of Buddhism, from the windswept emptiness of Japanese Zen to the lush layers of Vajrayana, Buddhism’s tantric path. In our family we honored Jesus as a great rabbi and consulted the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination, when we had to make important decisions. At any given time there might be a sadhu, a wandering holy man, from India at our kitchen table, sitting beside an indigenous elder from the Taos Pueblo of New Mexico. This was normal.

I was drawn to every single flavor of spirit food. Curiosity developed into passion and was seasoned with study. I encountered, embraced, and assimilated many of the world’s great religions and found that I could comfortably accommodate them without them crashing into one another and waging war inside of me.

I was shocked to discover when I set out into the world that not everybody was one of each. My adult life has been a matter of coming to grips with this troubling fact and doing what I can to mitigate it.

Men Are Not the Bad Guys

Because the balance of masculine and feminine has been so terribly out of whack in human history, it may be tempting for women to blame everything from sexual exploitation in the workplace to the looming climate catastrophe on men and to project our rage onto all members of the male half of the species.

I am endeavoring to avoid this snare. Indigenous wisdom, modern psychology, and the lived experience of most humans have demonstrated that we all contain both feminine and masculine elements in our psyches, and they vary in degree at different phases of our lives and in response to changing conditions.

I see gender much the same way as I view religion. As humanity evolves, many of us locate ourselves on an ever-flowing gender spectrum—as women who lead with certain masculine impulses, for instance, and men whose feminine sensibilities are pronounced.

The contemporary interspiritual movement, too, is a natural response to a range of human expressions of the sacred. Confining ourselves to a binary gender identity (individuals who claim to be either male or female) or an exclusive religious tribe (Christianity, Buddhism, Wicca) no longer feels valid to many of us.

And yet there are jewels in each of the world’s great spiritual traditions that are worthy of safekeeping. Similarly, there is a healing elixir in the feminine experience that has been historically relegated to the fringes and that I believe the human family is ready to reclaim at last.

With its emphasis on the value of relationships, feelings, and mutual empowerment over individual success and empirical argument, I believe in the healing energy of the feminine as a fire that can melt the frozen heart of the world, the artistry that will mend the tattered web of interconnection.

This article appeared in Unity Magazine®.