Embodied Embedded Mysticism: Affirming The Self and Others in a Radically Interdependent World

I have had a mystical relationship with nature for as long as I can remember. I was brought from the hospital to my grandmother's home and garden that backed onto the Los Angeles County Arboretum. My earliest memory includes peacocks screeching on the roof above my crib—sounds that while frightening or eerie to others are as dear to me as the world itself. As a child, I climbed the peach tree when it was blossoming magically in three colors, fed bread to the peacocks and watched them spread their magnificent green and blue tails, ducked through a hole in the fence with my grandmother for walks in the arboretum where we discovered something new each time. I ran through vacant lots filled with yellow mustard flowers, hiked through the dusty scrub brush in the hills at San Dimas Park, and felt myself becoming one with crashing breakers and undulating waves in the Pacific Ocean.

Thinking back, I would have to say that unlike Muriel Rukeyser, I never felt the voices of nature calling my name. The experiences I had were not about me. Rather they were about being part of a world of stunning beauty: vast, serene, delicate, and powerful. In college, I wrote on "Nature Imagery in the Prophets" because I truly believed that "the trees of the field" would "clap their hands" on the day of redemption—not because God would save Israel (or me), but because God cares about trees. Like Alice Walker's Shug, I understood that God loves all beautiful things. I suspect that when Rukeyser saw "colors of orchards, gold behind gold," she too was responding to the particular beauty of other living things (cited in Engel, 143).

Although like Mary Engel I have attempted to understand the relation of feminism and mysticism, I am not persuaded by her attempt to reclaim the mystical language of annihilation, surrender, or sacrifice for feminist understandings of the self or of God. I too am critical of the independent heroic egotistical self that Western cultures valorize. I suppose that when such a self gets "too big for its britches" it can be "brought down" by being "clobbered over the head" by God. However, I find the "club" that "annihilates" the self to be an inferior teaching tool—not one any Goddess I might worship would choose. My reasons for rejecting the mystical language of surrender and annihilation of self are philosophical, metaphysical, and theological.¹ I believe that the language of surrender or annihilation of self found in mystical traditions is rooted not only in images of God as a dominating other but also in dualistic metaphysical notions of divine transcendence found in classical theism. Feminists have criticized images of God as a dominating other (Lord, King, Father) and the dualisms (transcendence and immanence, mind and body, rational and irrational, male and female) that have shaped Western theology. However, most of us have dismissed metaphysical questions about the nature of God as abstract and irrelevant to our attempts to change the world. Yet it is precisely the nature of God that is at stake in Engel's attempt to reclaim the language of surrender, annihilation, and sacrifice of the self to God. Therefore, I do not believe we can avoid metaphysical questions.

In Diving Deep and Surfacing, I borrowed the terms mystical experience and the experience of nothingness from mystical traditions, using them to describe "women's spiritual quest" in literature written by black and white women.² I suggested that the mystical tradition's language of "dark night of the soul" and the "experience of nothingness" in which "nothing is beyond questioning, sacred, immobile" provided alternatives to the psychological labels "depression," "breakdown," and "madness," which were often affixed to the sense of emptiness many women felt when they began to challenge the values of patriarchal dominator societies.³

However, I was aware that classic definitions of mystical experience did not precisely fit the experiences depicted by the women whose work I studied—or my own. I questioned the emphasis on "transcendence...