Envisioning a Spiritualized Feminist The*logical Tradition: Being the Change We Want to See

I agree with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza that Catharina Halkes's birthday was a milestone for the feminist movement that deserved celebration. I agree, that is, now that I've looked Halkes up on the Internet. I had no idea who she was. Which is, precisely to Schüssler Fiorenza's point, the problem. Many women (and some men) of my generation working in one corner of feminist the*ology have already "forgotten" a Halkes we never even knew. If even those of us operating in overlapping fields can be unaware of one another's work, how can we possibly expect our ideas to gain traction in the broader academic enterprise and beyond? The issue, as Schüssler Fiorenza indicates, boils down to the lack of a feminist intellectual tradition that is taken seriously, preserved, and shared among scholars across schools. We are constantly "reinventing the intellectual wheel" and the weight of institutional entropy is against us.

I find myself wanting to lash out at patriarchs, women complicit with patriarchy, my stubborn undergraduate students who disavow any connection with the "F" word, and even other feminists' problematic ideas. I want to slash and burn until I find the true culprit. I think about making this piece a cleverly worded, heavily footnoted complaint about everything that's wrong, including some feminist thinking, and I start a draft to that effect. But then I think: Why would I do that, when I could offer something a bit more constructive and aligned with my own spiritual belief that words create reality? So, I will use this invitation to offer commentary as an opportunity to envision the healthy feminist traditions—and, particularly, feminist the*logical tradition(s)—I would like to see us develop. In so doing, I attempt to address some of the problems Schüssler Fiorenza mentions in her piece while also offering approaches that are somewhat radical and outside the box—which is, after all, where deep feminism really resides.¹

In the new schema, women who are speaking, writing, teaching, and providing leadership are doing their own spiritual and psychological work in deep and committed ways. We attempt to be the change we want to see by first looking at the worst: our own inner Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal is the inverse of Inanna, Sumerian queen of heaven. Ruler of the underworld, she represents everything loathsome about ourselves: our hidden and rapacious grasping for power, our own complicity with kyriarchy/patriarchy when it suits us, our holier-than-thou righteousness (from gender, spiritual, racial, ethnic, and any other perspectives), our tendency to push ideas and control others, our desire for glory and attention, our sexual manipulations, and, when needed, our secret, unabashed, and unabated willingness to cut down and betray colleagues and promising young students when they prove to be too smart, too successful, too beautiful, and too great. We find our own individual ways to locate these parts of ourselves in a manner that runs deeper than the intellect: therapies, trance journeys, sacred medicines, body work, group process, and the arts.

In this healthy new feminist the*logical tradition, we have looked at our own individual and collective psychospiritual shadow material with honesty and a kind of macabre fascination: This, too, is me! It's not just "out there," in patriarchy, or disagreeable colleagues, or inquisitors of the witch hunts, or wherever else, it's also "in here." We work this understanding over time. We get a sense of the origin of our pain, our trauma, both individually and collectively, without blame. For, ultimately, we come to see that in the great wheel of samsara/karma we have been both perpetrator and victim many times over.

This in no way dampens our passion, revictimizes us, or makes us culpable for systemic social troubles (i.e., it's all women's/mother's/Eve's fault). Rather, paradoxically, we find that knowing our own negative side helps us become even more powerful individuals and agents of social change. In our personal relations, we come to sense where our own...