You Go Girl

by Madeleine W. Manning

In the beginning, it is now clear, our window to the divine was female. But we have had no word to express this reality. "Goddess" is derivative, like "woman," like "female." The proposition that god, man, male is the pattern of truth is built into our words themselves.

I propose a newer pattern -- and an older reality. I rejoice to live in a time rich in exploration of the primacy of the female in fields as diverse as archeology, genetics, and theology. I rejoice especially in the searching in theology, god-talk -- thealogy, as wonderful German women have dubbed our probes into the mother-lode of divine images. In 1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced her longing for the emancipation of the language of the book in which the Western world, from societal institutions to the intimacy of self-understanding, has been incubated. Today that conversation blossoms. Around the world women are digging in the depths of the past as well as the depths of their own souls to bring to light simple realities which have proved to have an amazing resilience under millennia of labored patriarchal misinterpretation. From the angriest voices, which seem to emanate from Roman Catholic nuns, to the blithe Maypole dances of white Wicca, women (and even men, imagine that) contribute to an ever-growing honoring of the feminine divine.

To this polylogue I bring myself and my loves. I am a privileged member of the richest segment of the globe, a Lutheran Irish-Catholic woman of bardic heritage, a lover of words and wordplay whose deepest knowing is preverbal, a child with body and soul invaded but unconquered by a purveyor of God, a long-distance swimmer in a primordial river of divinity, a lover who continues to find that both my deepest core and my farthest outer reaches of identity exist in my relationship with divinity. And so I look around the burgeoning fecund growth of recovering, renaming, reimaging the divine, and I rejoice. And I sometimes despair.

I despair that we can hardly talk about our discoveries, insights, and intuitions without contradicting ourselves, without undermining our new understandings, because our very words for feminine divine are constructions that derive their meaning from the masculine. I have delighted and reveled in the myriad variations of goddess-talk. I have grown exponentially as I have discovered a goddess who looks like me. (Especially the ancient nameless fat and saggy ones!) But after the first rush of excited discovery I have seethed at every use of the word "goddess," which has brought healing and satisfaction to so many of my sisters. Humanity's first perceptions of divinity were female. So I need a word that says just that, and "goddess" doesn't do it. I must understand "god" and then add feminine to arrive at "goddess."

As my discontent gestated in the recesses of my mind and heart, a vital aspect of my healing from the molestation of my childhood came to my aid once again. I had found no words that fit my experience, first because I was exposed to sex before I heard its vocabulary. More profoundly, because our sexual words describe adult experience, and so were always a bit "off," they could never quite capture my inner knowledge. Creating ways to communicate my reality became an indispensable part of finding a whole, healthy place in my soul for the positive as well as the wounding aspects of that part of my life. My naming of "god/goddess" felt like a familiar process, with an identical priority. Honoring my experience of life in divine presence was primary. As so often in my search, once I found the question, the answer was self-evident. What says the divine in a truly inclusive way? "Goddess" adds, so subtract.

GO.

Verb. Dynamic. Alive. Growing. Expansive. Generative. Fun! GO has come to dance for me in all the glorious fecund images of feminine divine offered to us by so many artists and scholars in growing abundance today. GO can generously grow into "god" when inclusion of males becomes needed, while maintaining original integrity. GO lets me shed patriarchal baggage as I live in my love of a GO, an indwelling, in-forming divine energy my soul knew before the Word of my culture. GO carries no contradictions; orthodoxy has nothing to fear or condemn in GO. Elemental feminine knowing -- of eons gone and of rawest individual essence -- finds organic oneness with the Word She has labored to birth.

We stand in the beginnings of an awareness of divine that is older than time, yet new as discovery and imagination. Primordial mother-consciousness can be enriched rather than replaced by patriarchal revelation and interpretation. I thank and celebrate all the sisters whose dance of discovery I am privileged to join. Whether you are at the heart or the furthest edge of the swirling patterns of women searching for ways to describe your numinous experience, welcome to you. Try GO on for size. It may fit you as well as it has me. You GO, girl!

GO, you flow through me in an ever life-giving river. Far, far below depths even my wild and playful imagination can plumb, you are purified by the hidden power of strata layered upon strata of rock. Closer and closer you move to the seething core, until you vanish -- only to burst up and out of me in vaporous gases which flow far beyond me into the alien, familiar river of the Milky Way. I love you dearly.

Madeleine Manning, a writer and liturgist, is convener of Worship Weavers and the Evening Dream Community of Brigid's Place.