The Feminine Face of Creation

Feminist theologian and psychotherapist Sister Madonna Kolbenschlag was the author of Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (Doubleday, 1979) and Lost in the Land of Oz: Befriending Your Inner Orphan and Heading for Home (Harper & Row, 1989) when this article appeared. She was on the staff of West Virginia University Health Service in Morgantown and a member of the Women's Commission of the state of West Virginia. She was a member of the Sisters of Humility of Mary, Villa Maria, Pennsylvania. Kolbenschlag was interviewed for Sojourners in December 1990 by Mary Judith Ress, who was a Maryknoll missionary in Chile. --The Editors

MARY JUDITH RESS: In your latest book, Lost in the Land of Oz, you describe the experience of many women as one of orphanhood and call yourself a "spiritual orphan." Could you explain what you mean by orphanhood?

Madonna Kolbenschlag: First of all, I would say it is not only women's experience, but it is truly the experience of our time, the story of all humanity at this point. The concept of orphan came to me as I thought about the real conditions of humanity today.

In a literal sense, we have an unprecedented number of displaced persons, of refugees. In my work around Central America issues, I found that one out of every three people in the region is displaced. So I see orphanhood -- the experience of abandonment, the loss of connection, the loss of resources, being made to feel worthless and disposable -- as being a very pervasive condition that many people concretely experience.

But I also see orphanhood in a broader, spiritual sense as describing us all. The conditions of modernity -- of becoming a modern culture -- have inundated our lives with technology and bombarded us with media, accelerating our proximity to so much and to so many; the sheer velocity of our lives, the pace at which things change, has had a tremendous impact on us. In large part, it accounts for our feelings of, I've been abandoned; nothing is under my control; nobody's watching out for me; I don't feel safe.

Social mobility has increased to an extraordinary degree; people have to move, whether it's the new job, or the new spouse, the new house. We are constantly in the process of uprooting ourselves, going toward what we think is something better. And that produces a subsequent loss of connection.

I was in Europe last summer when the borders were lifted and people started flooding across them. You could see the exhilaration of autonomy and freedom in the peoples' faces. But you also saw fear -- the terror of having all these choices and of being exposed to so much more is also going to have its effect.

The human being is designed to seek autonomy, but as one acquires that -- as a culture or as a person -- there are greater risks and a greater rate of change accompanied by inevitable costs. The psychological cost is the growing sense of disconnection; we feel more vulnerable; we feel more unprotected; we feel more exposed. And I use the orphan as a kind of metaphor for all those feelings.

We are the first generation to have this experience of being vulnerable to everything that happens. We're the first generation to really know the Holocaust, to know a Hiroshima, a Chernobyl, a Bhopal. Environmental disasters that could affect all of us -- the ozone problem, the greenhouse problem. We're the first generation to have a scourge like AIDS, a truly universal scourge. And we're the first generation to really know international terrorism and random violence. We all know that we can go out there and be struck down by almost anything.

Generations before us when life was simpler and slower and less technological did not have this same experience and that makes us feel orphaned. We're out there all by ourselves!

On the personal level, I see this in my work as a therapist. People are coining for treatment who are anxious or depressed; much of this is coming from this loss of a sense of connection, a loss of a sense of meaning because everything is in the process of flux. They are experiencing the fragmentation of their families, broken relationships, failed ambitions, a loss of the sense of belonging and of being known.

Ress: Is this condition of orphanhood an unavoidable evolutionary process of our species, or are you suggesting we should return to a time when life was simpler and we were more connected?

Kolbenschlag: Some would advocate that. But I would propose that because human nature or the human person is an evolutionary creature, we are designed to learn by trial and error. We are designed to learn and to become our best only through challenge. I don't think we would have survived this long as a species if we hadn't faced comparable challenges.

I see this terrible vulnerability, this freedom that both terrorizes as it exhilarates, as being the challenge that will pull our species to a new level, to a new way of being human. And I think it will have to do with the new ways we develop to bond with one another, since the old ways of kinship are casualties of so-called progress; I think the challenge will result in a new quantum leap for the species -- if we can rise to it. We have done so in the past, but this time it will take a universal effort because the stakes are much higher.

Ress: How does this universal sense of orphanhood apply specifically to women?

Kolbenschlag: Extending the idea of orphanhood, I think we are all orphaned in a number of ways. In some way, our family of origin orphans us, leaves us vulnerable or deprives us in some way. We all come with these sets of deprivations. Nationhood can also orphan us because it closes us off, it inhibits our ability to respond to the stranger. Institutions can orphan us. They're supposed to take care of us, but they can deprive us when they don't fulfill their purpose. Gender role is probably the very first way in which we are all orphans. This is especially true for women because by reason of our gender we are implicitly excluded from automatic power in the culture.

Every young male comes into the world with a charter, and one piece of that charter is son preference, which is predominant in 90 percent of the world's cultures. The second part of that charter is male entitlement to power; every little boy grows up just assuming he has a right to it. Otherwise we wouldn't have research that says that very few young boys ever express the desire to be female, but lots of little girls want to be little boys. Now where do you suppose that comes from? They're not weird. Even children perceive who is in power in the culture.

The third part of that charter is what I call "androlatry," which is the worship of what is male-identified. Everything that is admired or praised in our culture is somehow related to male performance. The male standard has been the norm.

So the first awareness that a young girl has is that she is not an empowered person. I think I felt that a great deal while I was growing up. I was surrounded by boys; I had no sisters, and even though I don't think my parents consciously administered that charter, it's just there. It's the air we breathe.

Then in my professional life, I was one of a few women with a large number of men, so that very early I perceived how this system works. And of course probably the archetypal classic of male power is the church.

Gender role makes women feel as outsiders. If they haven't blocked it, women are very aware of that. Males are more unconscious of the way they've been orphaned. I delve into that a good deal in my book. I feel I have a right to say something since I've been around men so much and have worked most of my life in male-dominated systems (church, university, government), and I think we can see that maleness or masculinity in our culture has been bought at the price of the suppression of the feminine. Male culture is taken as the norm.

All this is related to a myth of power which is the fundamental basis of our civilization. If we are not to end up orphans, anxious and unhappy and maybe self-destructive, we have to do something about the myth of power.

Ress: Could you enlarge upon this idea of "the myth of power"?

Kolbenschlag: Let's back up. I think that the most powerful myths that drive any civilization are those that reflect its conception of power. The myth of power underlies everything from the roots of our language and our thought patterns to the way a culture sets up its social structures. Today we hear a lot about patriarchy. I think patriarchy is just a particular example of how the myth of power is played out; when I look at our civilization's function of that myth, I see the myth of domination -- the belief in this idea of one-up, one-down, that some people are more valuable than others. It presumes the notion of hierarchy. It presumes the notion of unequal distribution of resources. It presumes private property and accumulation. It presumes all sorts of arrangements that we've come to accept as natural.

I really challenge that because basically, the fundamental idea underlying the idea of dominance is power hoarding; that some people can have more than others, whether it's power or resources, whether you're talking about family -- the old notion where the male held all the power -- or whether you're talking about the myth underlying some of our religious traditions. Some hierarchical interpretations of Genesis are a prime example of this: God, man, woman, children, animals are presented in that order. And the earth is ours to exploit. That kind of interpretation is an expression of the myth of power.

I maintain that we are far more influenced by this than we realize. When Aristotle was asked what would be the ideal form for the human community he said it would resemble the patriarchal family. He looked to the existing model that we had of the myth of power. And he in effect canonized that as the best form of government, etc. So that was about all we had through the Middle Ages.

With the Enlightenment came a new idea: Liberty, equality, and fraternity. When you examine the myth of power underlying the Enlightenment, which had a profound influence on the American culture, you find that it is liberty, equality, and fraternity for males. It is a concept of democracy, if you will, but a democracy that empowered only free males. Not women and not slaves.

Another whole period of evolution has passed. And now I think we're coming to a new time in history when the myth of power is finally seen for what it is. Any form of power that says that one shall be up and one shall be down is simply no longer acceptable.

One of the reasons I'm so interested in the question of power is because of what we see happening in the world today: an enormous consciousness change taking place primarily in women. Women are beginning to realize that as human beings they have dignity, they have everything they need to be fully human, but that there are conditions in society today that prevent them from doing that. Women represent a part of society that has never been allowed full expression of its capabilities and potentials, among which are the skills we need for the future, skills we haven't valued because they have been female-identified.

Among those skills are things women learn because they have been the primary caregivers, have had to stay close to the land, nurturing children, etc. They've had to learn more about the skills of cooperation and coresponsibility than their male peers did down through the ages. Because they were not as strong in the physical sense, they had to learn more about how to create change through negotiation rather than through acts of force.

These values are part of what I like to call the feminine face of creation. I like to call it the anima of creation, which has been suppressed in civilization's psyche until now. Patriarchy isn't enough any more. Male bonding, which is what democracy has primarily been, isn't enough. We need something new. And the only relationship we haven't taken seriously is the way in which women have created kinship over the centuries.

The philosopher Michel Foucault says that the key to evolution is an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges." I love that expression and think it's really true. Women's ways, and women's systems of bonding, are among the most crucial of the "subjugated knowledges" that we are now on the verge of incorporating and revaluing in the entire human community.

Ress: If we are on the verge of a whole new leap in consciousness, a whole new way of bonding, of re-establishing relationships not based on dominance, what does this do to our belief system? Where is this taking us in terms of our understanding of God?

Kolbenschlag: When we shift from a cultural perspective to a spiritual or religious one, which interests me enormously, I see religious belief or spiritual conviction as the driving force behind all human evolution. It is probably the most powerful engine of social change that we have ever known. For example, Exodus has become a metaphor that has undergirded some of the most important revolutions of human history. Today, however, I think we are on the verge of discovering what I would call a new religious myth.

In my view, Western religious traditions for the most part have produced images of God that are replicas of our own self-image. The image and expectation for us of being primarily an omnipotent self has generated a God who is omnipotent, almighty, transcendent, powerful, even vengeful. Our God up to now has been a mirror image of our own illusions of power, autonomy, and omnipotence -- of being masters of the universe. In some sense we've just stuck these images of ourselves onto God -- which is why Freud talked of the prosthetic God. Our own illusions of our ideals or preferred social structures are a reflection of this -- the concept of power, the patriarchal family that we've just talked about.

Now these images are obviously going to change if our own self-image changes. If we are now beginning to see that pure autonomy, radical independence, or imperialism -- which is the omnipotence of the self -- do not function in our best interest, psychologically or culturally, then obviously as our new self-image evolves our God-image will change. No one has ever seen God. All we have are images that emerge out of our own experiences of being human.

And where will the new images come from? I maintain that the experience of orphanhood, of getting in touch with our losses and our true condition, will give us new images of God. In my book, I describe one woman who went through that process: Etty Hillesum, as recorded in her book An Interrupted Life. In reading her diary, you see that she suddenly realizes that God is powerless. Her experience of the holy is that of a nonviolent God, a God who does not intervene forcefully.

The experience of spiritual orphanhood is one of coming to realize that our spiritual tradition is quite culture-bound. We have to try to extract that which is truly spiritual and visionary in that tradition and separate it from the flawed condition of much of the human superstructures that have been created around it. I think that all of us today are experiencing a distance from our own traditions or denominations because we are becoming aware that the human and material superstructure created around it isn't the essence of the tradition. Therefore, one who is going to the Holocaust or one who is experiencing spiritual orphanhood will experience a powerless God as a meaningful way of seeing God.

Our new awareness of ourselves as siblings of the earth is also producing a new sense of the closeness of God, the presence of God, of the supreme energy of the Spirit in the smallest material thing. That's a new concept of God that I think is definitely emerging. The God that the spiritual orphan looks for is inherently going to be a God of many faces.

Ress: Then what kind of spirituality can we expect to see emerging from imaging this vulnerable God?

Kolbenschlag: I'll answer again with a kind of metaphor. I think we're evolving what I'd call a wilderness spirituality. We've seen it before, when the Israelites left Egypt and risked all by moving into the desert. They were not in the Promised Land yet, so they were between myths. And I think that's where we are today: between myths -- myths of power, myths of who we are; what the meaning of the universe is. While they were in the desert, the Israelites never knew where God was going to appear next.

I think that's an indication of the spirituality we must be comfortable with: seeing God under new images continually -- and we will be surprised continually. The virtues of this spirituality will above all be those of listening and being attuned for where God is going to appear next, which will be in an unexpected place or an unexpected person. There will be a lot of uncertainty; things will not be so clear as they were in the past. But we will be met on the way. I truly believe that. There's an old Celtic prayer that admonishes: "Leave a space in your heart for an altar to the unknown God."

Ress: It would seem that such a wilderness spirituality would certainly put you in the desert! How do you balance this sense of God with your involvement in the church and as a member of a religious congregation?

Kolbenschlag: It seems contradictory. But I don't think it is. None of us ever leaves our past behind. We carry it with us, and it becomes what we stand on in order to stretch to the next place. I would not be who I am today or have this sharpness of vision about the myth of power if I hadn't experienced an institution like the church from the inside and been able to sort out the core vision I think does exist, certainly in the Christian tradition and in all great religious traditions.

In Christianity, that core vision is the call to conversion. The call is continuous, and it applies to individuals as well as to cultures and institutions. That's what I carry with me. That is the primary gift of my tradition. The rest become the stones on which I stand in order to reach, but if I took those stones away, I wouldn't be who I am.

Ress: Specifically, what energizes you today?

Kolbenschlag: I think it's primarily what's happening in women, because I see that they are on the cutting edge of the human agenda. Whether it's clients I'm working with or significant persons in my own religious community or in my civic community, or my neighbors. I am excited by what I see as an awakening in women that is extraordinary. I have met it in other cultures and in many countries, and it's happening in women in a different way all over the world.

Looking at the past, when the then known world, the "Old World," was faced with the urgent need to redistribute resources, what did it do? It avoided confrontation and the need to develop new structures and instead ran off and found the new world and exploited that. Historically, the existence of the frontier has been an excuse to avoid inventing a new social arrangement. Today we're running out of frontiers. The last one left is space, and I hope to God we don't repeat ourselves there.

We have to look again at subjugated knowledges. For instance, last summer I visited Hawaii and came across the ancient Polynesian tradition of the gift circle. The basic perception of that tradition was that people were guests on the planet, and therefore no one could really own anything. People only possessed something for a limited amount of time and then they were expected to give it as a gift. I think that notion of the gift culture is one we need to come back to.

I think we're also coming to a profound recognition that we are not imperial selves or autonomous individuals. We really are cells of a larger organism, part of something larger than ourselves.

Ress: Do you believe in a transcendent God any longer?

Kolbenschlag: That's a good question. I think our concept of God is a product of our own dualistic thinking, which is that things are either transcendent or immanent. And I don't believe that anymore. Spirit and matter are not split in the manner that we have stereotypically thought of it. My experience of God is of being transcendent and immanent all at once. They are not two separate notions.

Ress: So who is God for you?

Kolbenschlag: Well, let me put it this way. I no longer believe that God is up there, and I don't believe that God is only within me, and I don't believe that God is merely out there in history. I think we are actually in God at all times.