An interview with Carol Lee Flinders

Your book, At The Root Of This Longing, explores the traditional opposition between feminism and spirituality. Why are they generally thought to be in opposition?

If you ask people what comes immediately to mind when they hear the word "feminism," most of them will bring up variations on the theme of anger -- words and phrases that represent female anger as particularly noxious and repellent. But if you asked them to define feminism they would be just as likely to talk in very neutral language about the historic movement to ensure equality for women. Ask them what "spirituality" means, on the other hand, and they repeat words like "patience," "compassion," "acceptance," and "goodness" and indicate that as far as they can tell the two concepts couldn't be more remote from one another. Which is interesting, isn't it? Because it suggests that anger has no place in the life of a spiritual seeker. It suggests that if something in your surroundings makes you really angry, you'd probably better not look at it. While I was on tour recently someone waited after a signing until everyone else had gone and then told me very quietly that although she had read Alice Walker's The Color Purple she hadn't read any of the other books I'd mentioned that evening -- books by people like Gloria Steinem, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison and others because I think I was afraid to have those feelings.

In what ways did your own experience living in a spiritual community make you aware of this opposition?

Well, when I first took up residence in a meditation community, it felt entirely appropriate to withdraw my attention from the turbulence of "the outside world." I could never have gotten started in meditation if I hadn't done this to a certain extent. But over the years, especially after I had a son (and being a parent can't help but involve you more in that "outside world," because, after all, that world is helping shape your child, and you're continually having to help her or him make sense of it), I felt I had to look squarely at it all once again. Certain things happened in my life that made it imperative that I acknowledge how profoundly, how cosmicly, angry I was at the level of violence in our culture -- particularly the violence directed against women and children. I didn't feel I had the luxury any more of withdrawing my attention. I felt a new degree of responsibility, precisely because I had been meditating for a few decades, to address the problem and identify what I thought were some of the root causes. In other words, I had been "afraid to have those feelings" too, and probably for very good reason, but now it seemed to me I'd had time to develop some spiritual tools for harnessing those feelings -- the anger, the grief -- and that surely I could begin to find ways to use all the energy contained in them to get at the real causes.

What are some of the ways that spiritual practice directly contradicts feminist principles?

Traditionally, people who want to turn inward through meditation or interior prayer behave in roughly the same way, whether they're Catholics, Sufis, Hindus, Buddhists. They seek out silence -- beginning with quiet places where they can pray in peace, and then moving on to the creation of silence within themselves -- slowing and even stilling the movements of the mind. Speech is kept to the minimum, eliminated altogether in some situations. Second, they practice some form of what medieval Europeans called "self-naughting" -- the systematic rooting out of every trace of egotism and self-will. Third, they tend to enclose themselves in one way or another -- in a monastic cell, a Himalayan cave, an anchorhold or an ashram. To focus all attention inward, all one's defenses need to be lowered. The public arena, the marketplace, are counter-indicated! Fourth and finally, desire itself is seen as the fuel for one's journey inward. Renunciation is the hallmark of every great mystic. Like someone throwing extra weight out of a boat to reach their destination sooner, people like St. Francis or Gandhi scan their life for any and every form of attachment that might be impeding them. And yet the central tenets of feminism would seem to lead us in quite the opposite direction. Find your voice, tell your story, and make yourself heard at the highest level of every institution that affects your life. Establish your unique identity. Develop a sturdy sense of self. Take back the streets! Take back the night and the day! Reclaim your body and its desires from all who would objectify, commodify, or demean them. Determine what your own desires are and how to meet them. It?s remarkable in how many ways spirituality and feminism seem to differ and radically. Yet if you look more closely at each, look beneath the superficial stereotyping involved in quick summaries like the ones I've just sketched out, you can get a very different impression.

One of the obstacles to the entry of women into spiritual practice has been the renunciation of the outside world necessary for the interior work of spiritual growth. Why do women, especially in today's world, find it difficult to engage in the practice of turning inward and retreating from public life?

When men make this sort of renunciation, they're understood to be doing so because they choose to. It's a voluntary act -- a willed, conscious choice -- and therefore meaningful. When women retreat from public life, and turn inward, this niggling doubt can accompany them: Am I doing this for the sake of deepening my meditation, or because the culture has always told me it's more "womanly" to stay out of public affairs, and I'm just finally caving in to the pressure? Is it because I'm tired of fighting my way into institutions that are hostile to women? Is this really a kind of defeat? My own understanding of what it means to be on a spiritual path is that all of one's choices must be as fully conscious and freely made as possible: that whenever I find myself yielding to external pressures -- internalized compulsions -- I'm in trouble!

You say that few feminists have shared your interest in the medieval women mystics because they have seen them as submitting to patriarchal institutions of their day. Why and how have you seen them differently?

What was really amazing about women like Clare of Assisi or Teresa of Avila was how freely they were able to function in cultures that were far more constrained and generally misogynous than our own. They actually exhibited a kind of genius for resistance. Anybody who wants to look at their lives and teachings in historic context can see this. The trouble is most of us don't. If you didn't grow up Catholic you probably never heard of them, and if you did then the version of their lives that you were given presented them as pale, silent brides of Christ. That's why I wrote Enduring Grace: I wanted to reclaim those women for all of us. There were several reasons why they succeeded in transcending the limitations that have stunted so many women down through time. It's almost as if there'd always been a secret recipe for empowering women, and it's always floated around out there, and every once in a while the ingredients happen to come together. One of these was simply the absolutely terrific things that happened when women formed communities. They developed their own styles of leadership and ways of arriving at decisions, and they supported each other in developing their gifts: for poetry, music, healing, scholarship, and yes, mystical prayer. The lives of these women are incredibly potent sourcebooks for contemporary women -- each one in its own way. Catherine of Genoa's, for example, offers a perspective on clinical depression that suggests contemporary therapy may be barking up the wrong tree altogether. Teresa of Avila, insisting that each of the nuns in her convent have a cell that no-one could enter without her permission, was anticipating Virginia Woolf's call for "a room of one's own" by hundreds of years.

How did your exploration of Gandhi help uncover the link between spirituality and feminism?

Perhaps the single most important insight I got from Gandhi regarding the link between spirituality and feminism has to do with the way he enabled the people of India to free themselves from British domination. The core of the problem, he realized, wasn't the external institutions that kept colonial rule in place, it was the internalized sense of their own inferiority that held Indians in a kind of hypnotic trance, making it impossible to challenge their foreign rulers. Once he saw this, he abandoned the idea of direct confrontation and instead worked on strengthening Indians from within -- helping them become economically self-reliant, restoring their sense of the dignity of their own ancient culture, waking them up, really in a hundred different ways. I've come to believe that by the same token women in this culture are not held back so much by the attitudes of men as they are by their own internalizing of those negative "representations." And I know of no better or more effective way of rooting out internalized errors than through the practice of meditation -- the gradual slowing down of the thought process itself so that we can "catch ourselves in the act" of self-destructive thinking.

You point out that when the Jesus movement swept across the Mediterranean world in the First Century, its initial phase was neither hierarchical nor sexist. How and why did the early Church stray from Christ's original intent?

You can probably see a similar process in the formation of most religions. The initial phase has to do with the deeply transformative visionary experience of an individual -- and what they see and what they say tends to be much the same across cultures. But very soon the surrounding culture catches up and closes in, in this case imperial Rome, and with it come all the worst features as well as the most sublime. And yet at the core of every religion there are still the traces of the original "explosion" in somebody's consciousness -- somebody who really saw and knew firsthand that all of life is one indissolubly connected whole.

You would like to see feminism think of itself as a "resistance movement based in spirituality." What does this mean?

The Civil Rights movement in the American South, Gandhi's Free India campaign, Lech Walesa's Soldarity Movement, the resistance movement taking place in Burma today under the inspiration of Aung San Suu Kyi, all of these are political movements, but they spring directly from the deep intuition -- cherished so much that their supporters are willing to die in its defense -- that all of life is one. That when I hurt you I hurt myself. That no-one has the right to demean or oppress another, and that when he or she does, they demean and oppress themselves as well. Those movements succeeded, or are succeeding, because deeper resources have come into play than can ever be released when a narrowly political or economic paradigm shapes the work.

Is feminism inherently spiritual?

Insofar as it challenges a version of "self" that is thousands of years old -- a version that sees "self" in terms of acquisition and domination -- yes, it is.

You point out that religious commitment has always played a major role in political movements (for example, civil rights movement). Why did the early stages of the feminist movement in this country lack that spiritual underpinning?

In fact, I don't think we've sufficiently understood how much spiritual underpinning feminism has always had in this country. Certainly most of the nineteenth century advocates of suffrage for women were engaged -- and their feminism nourished -- in spiritual practices and communities of one kind or another, particularly in religions that were springing up in opposition to Calvinism. Quakerism, spiritualism, evangelical faiths of various sorts. Certainly the first stages of contemporary feminism were secular in tone. And yet think about it. Try to imagine feminism in the nineteen seventies without its Jewish leaders. Without a Bella Abzug, a Betty Friedan, a Gloria Steinem, a Letty Cottin Pogrebin? A coincidence? I wonder. As a religion, Judaism has always been characterized by a powerful sense of one's responsibility toward history -- toward the here and now world -- and by a passionate commitment to justice. And as Gerda Lerner reflects in her recent book Why History Matters, being a Jew can be a powerful apprenticeship for feminism insofar as it accustoms one to difference itself. In other words, I think that when we think about spirituality and feminism we are often limited by too narrow a conception of each.

What are some of the ways that feminism and spirituality can be reconciled?

From feminism, spiritual seekers can learn not to fall into indifference or complacency toward the world they live in -- or the religious institutions within which they be living and practicing! From spirituality, feminists can learn the sort of skill that makes lasting reform possible. Patience to take the long view, for example, empathy that insists on solutions that benefit everyone. For me, now, the two commitments all but require one another. The dialogue between the two sharpens my understandings of each. What feminism forces me to see, spirituality equips me to address.

Carol Lee Flinders is the author of Enduring Grace and coauthor of the vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from U.C. Berkeley, where she has taught writing and mystical literature courses.