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In the Power of Wisdom
lntroduction: Walking in the Way of Wisdom
In the last decade's spirituality has become a key topic not only in theology but also in commercialized forms of self-help groups and the New Age movements. The Wallstreet Journal reports that spirituality is a billion dollar business. Leading companies everywhere are tuning in to the power of spirituality as they look for the means of conveying company goals and for inspiring their people to do their best in the global market place.
We are grateful that we could gather again in this issue of Concilium a broad spectrum of feminist voices exploring different understandings of spirituality and its relations to global contexts of struggle. While there are many different ways in which the multifaceted topic of feminist spirituality could be explored, we have invited the authors to inquire into the links between feminist spiritualities and diverse feminist struggles on the one hand and the importance of human or divine Chokma/ Sophia/ Wisdom as their hermeneutical horizon. In other words, the individual articles probe the possibilities for articulating a political Wisdom spirituality that sustains rather than mutes struggles for survival and liberation. The contributions focus on religious resources for such a spirituality and centre on issues of sacred power and justice. They articulate a spiritual vision that not only expresses wo/men's struggles to survive and transform relations of domination but also critically identifies religious traditions and resources for such a discernment of the Spirit-Shekhina-Sophia's working in different global contexts.
The contributions, too, raise critical questions with respect to the figuration of the Divine as wo/man/female/feminine. They also point to the possible dangers inherent in Christian conceptualizations of struggle and suffering. The spirituality of the Divine Feminine extolling the ideal of the White Lady has a long ideological tradition in biblical religions and is allpervasive even in feminist spirituality. The Eternal Feminine or the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ was developed in tandem with Western colonialism [8] which celebrated Christian white elite wo/men as paradigms of civilized and cultured womanhood. It had the ideological function to legitimate the exclusion of elite wo/men from positions of power either in society or in the churches.
This image of the Eternal Feminine and the cult of the White Lady is a projection of elite Western educated men and clerics who stress the complementary nature of wo/men to that of men in order to maintain a special sphere for wo/men. It has not the liberation of wo/men as its goal but seeks to unfetter the repressed feminine in order to make men whole. Associated with this cult of the White Lady was and is a spirituality of selfalienation, service, submission, self-abnegation, dependence, powerlessness, de-corporalization, and collaboration — virtues which are inculcated in and through cultural forms of socialization, spiritual direction, and ascetic disciplines. In and through traditional Christian spirituality wo/men internalize either that they are not made in the Divine Image because G*d is not She but Lord-Master-Father-Male, or that they will represent the Divine feminine if they fulfill their cultural and religious calling to supplement and complement the Other. In both cases kyriarchal structures of domination are kept in place in and through Christian spirituality and the theological articulation of the Divine Image.
This issue of Concilium explores a Wisdom spirituality in two steps. The contributions of the first part investigate particular experiences of a Wisdom spirituality of struggle. Nami Kim articulates social-political struggles in Korean society as spiritual struggles, whereas Mary Hunt reflects on three specific struggles within Christian churches which are inspired and sustained by a Wisdom spirituality of struggle. Ivone Gebara in turn begins with her own experience of spirituality and then explores the spiritual experiences of poor wo/men in the Brazilian Northeast who are not necessarily feminists. She understands spirituality as encompassing ‘metaphysical’ ethical values capable of guiding people and of giving meaning to their lives.
Like Gebara, so also Diann Neu explores the spiritual experiences of wo/men, but in a United States context. She gives concrete examples of how feminist spirituality and therapy can work together in liberating wo/men from debilitating experiences of kyriarchal dehumanization and stereotyping. Finally, Mercedes Navarro Puerto concludes the explorations of this first section with a constructive probing of a spirituality of struggle. She argues that unlike traditional spirituality, feminist spirituality is not [9] expressed in warrior and fighter images or in mental pictures of war and battle but creatively uses the biblical traditions and images of Divine Wisdom-Sophia. She describes a feminist spirituality of struggle as a boarder spirituality, a spirituality of roads, of public plazas, and of doors.
In the second part of the volume the authors focus on the figuration of the Divine in the Gestalt of a wo/man, be it that of Chokmah / Sophia / Wisdom, that of the Shekhina / Divine Presence or that of the Goddess. Silvia Schroer begins the discussion with a succinct article on the biblical figure of Chokmah / Sophia / Wisdom and her interpretation in malestream and feminist scholarship. Facing objections against the positive reception in feminist theology, Schroer points to the location of such objections in Protestant neo-orthodox discourses. She goes on not only to argue for a positive feminist adoption of Divine Chokmah/Sophia/ Wisdom not in terms of the Eternal Feminine but in terms of justice and well-being, but also points to the location of a critical feminist Wisdom spirituality in cosmopolitan inter-religious discourses.
Susan Starr Sered in turn points out that it is not Wisdom but the female/feminine figure of the Shekhina that has sparked Jewish feminist imagination and ritual. However, she also warns that the female / feminine Divine figure of Chokmah / Sophia / Wisdom cannot simply be taken over by feminists because it is formed by the traditional discourses of the Eternal Feminine. Goddess thealogian Carol Christ also cautions readers not to accept too easily a Wisdom spirituality of struggle because such a Christian feminist spirituality could be another way of saying that this earth is a vale of sorrows. It also could be an often unconscious but pervasive attempt to ground Christian ethics in the absolute, maintaining that Christian ethics is superior to other moral systems that do not begin with and subscribe to an ethics of struggle. Instead Christ advocates an ethics of ambiguity and gratitude for life and love.
Clara Luz Ajo Lázaro contributes a descriptive essay on the religion of Santería which is central in Cuban popular culture and religion. She shows that Santería effects a religious inversion of Christianity as a strategy of survival. Instead of appropriating the symbols and concepts of Christianity, the African Yoruba slaves in Cuba masked their ancestral traditions with the symbols of White Christianity in order to preserve their own religious traditions and categories, to endure slavery, and to give meaning to their lives.
In ‘Brigit: Soulsmith for the New Millennium’, Mary Condren also explores the interaction of Christianity with Celtic religion and the significant [10] role of Brigit in the acculturation of Catholicism in Ireland. She shows how Christian feminists draw on Brigit’s pre-Christian roots, the archaeomythology of her sites, her Christian Lives, and the rites to be found in contemporary folklore, and they do so in order ‘to bring wo/men together in search of new cauldrons to hold, ferment and nourish our hungry spirits’.
The article ‘In The Movement of Wisdom’ by Silvia Regina de Lima Silva which concludes the second part of this Concilium issue details how feminist spirituality and rituals have nourished and inspired wo/men's movements to reinterpret the experiences of the Divine in their lives. De Lima Silva sees ritual and liturgy as a public space, as symbol making from lived Wisdom experience of every day life. It is a moment to change and live new relationships with greater respect for life and human dignity, a subversive memory, a feast and utopia, a recovering of the body and bodiliness, an expression of holistic faith and a community in the lap of Divine Wisdom.
Co-editor María Pilar Aquino completes these variegated feminist explorations of a Wisdom spirituality of struggle with a critical reflection, gathering in and sifting through the rich intellectual fare and spiritual harvest offered by the authors. The ministers of Divine Wisdom have been sent out to the public places of the global village. They invite all of us to eat the bread of Wisdom-Sophia, drink of her wine and walk in her ways of creative justice.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza