Celebrating and Con-questioning Mary Daly

It was five years ago here at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference that I first saw Mary Daly in person. At that session, one of the women who spoke with Mary said, “nothing is complete. There is no complete system—there are only conversations, we can learn and receive from each other, and we can give and teach each other.”

And that is part of what I want to emphasize here today: how we can build on and build up each other’s work. One of the first things Mary Daly did at that AAR session was conjure our foresisters. It was a beautiful practice and a new one for me that I witnessed her model that day. She started by quoting, “You will forget us but maybe someday someone will remember us”—so we remembered them: Sappho, Sojourner Truth, Hildegard, Theresa of Avila, Virginia Woolf, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.¹

Some of the women I knew; some I did not, but rest assured that I went home and looked up the ones I didn’t know. Mary set a mood of gynergy, remembering the liberating work of women gone before us, affirming that their energy and work still exist and was present. Mary herself invited women to build on her work and each other’s work. For nothing is complete—there is no complete system.

At times, Mary’s work reads as if she thought she had a complete system—but she herself knew better. I worked with her the last two years of her life, learning from her and learning to con-question with her, as well as engage in the mundane tasks of everyday life with her, the beta. Although, with Mary’s fiery spirit, nothing ever was really mundane. That first day in Mary Daly’s presence, I lost my breath and all ability to articulate any words—I was a bit of a bumbling goof. But I went from that first moment with her to being with her during her last days, the days when her own breath was leaving her. It is one of those rare experiences that makes you really believe that divine forces are at work for your delight.

Mary Daly expected us all to continue building on each other’s work, learning and receiving from, questioning, and building on. When we would raise questions to her or disagree with her, she would say—“Good then, now go build! Go beyond what I’ve done.” She did not take for granted the wisdom we receive from one another and the fact that we can continue building on it. Because no wisdom is complete. She knew that.

And so she called women to Con-Questioning²—that is, to the practice of questioning together, the proclivity/activity of Nag-nostic searchers—who are women who Nag our Selves and Others with recurrent awareness of questions and uncertainties.³ Too often in academia, or academentia⁴ as she liked to call it, we define concepts and ideas in exclusive terms—something is this and not that. We define ourselves in opposition. But things are never that simple or clear-cut. The human spirit and lived reality do not fit nicely into exclusive or binary categories. We cannot be reduced in such ways—nor should we want to be.

I am feminist—proud and empowered. I am also Latina, Mexican American, and mujerista. I am Christian, I love Jesus, and I love Goddess. I am lesbian, I came out some four years ago, and yet, my family, the one I share my everyday life with, still includes the man I married eleven years ago. Some of us cross boundaries and borders and blur lines and categories every day. And yet none of us can be reduced to just one part of our entire being—as Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “Would you chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label?”⁵ And so we need methods and ways of engaging that make room for all that—that invite our Con-Questioning and don’t lead us to...