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62 l APPROACHES TO THE HISTORY OF WOMEN AND RELIGION THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Ann Belford Ulanov THIS ESSAY CONCENTRATES on new trends in depth psychology and women’s religious experience. The focus is not on the explosion in psychology about women as different from men, nor on clinical practice with women, nor on the birth of feminist theology, nor on sociological studies of the construction of gender. Important as all these areas of study are, this essay focuses on women’s religious experience seen through the lens of the psyche. Focusing on the psychology of women’s religious experience means assembling dominant motifs that occur and recur in women writing out of themselves in relation to God, motifs that suggest a human mode of being that has been called feminine, thus finding a theology in the feminine rather than constructing a theology of the feminine. Such writing by North American women about religious experience springs from many large groups of women, both professional academics and lay workshop leaders, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and Asian feminist theologians. Women pastoral counselors make up these new groups, as do women liturgists, spiritual directors, Mormon women, scripture scholars, women psychoanalysts interested in spirituality, bishops, retreat leaders, women pastors and priests, women witches and Goddess worshippers, and psychics and tarot card readers. All these make up the large body of writings about women’s spiritual experience , as well as spurring the recovery of the works of women mystics of other centuries and countries who bequeath us documents about religious experience of the highest caliber. What, then, do we perceive as the commonalities that emerge in religious experience as represented by North American women? What phenomena present themselves as characteristic of women in this area? In a way this phenomenological approach treats the feminine mode as itself symbolic of one kind of exchange. There is hardly only one route by which humans experience God. Nonetheless, to assemble common qualities that surface in women’s religious experience of God introduces us to discernible, valid markers along this spiritual journey. First and foremost, women encountering the sacred accept it as gendered. Conscious of their selves as woman, they discover and explore a feminine mode of experiencing God. For some women that means God comes to them as female, although they avoid the fusion of image and reality that insists God be equated with woman. Instead, they accept the gap between all human images of God and God. Nonetheless, feminine images of God’s breasts or nurturing lap or motherly embrace grant a symbolic lens to perceive all of God, not some added-on aspect or attribute to balance heretofore exclusively masculine symbols for the divine. Just as any symbol falls far short of what it symbolizes, so feminine symbols function merely as pointers—but as pointers to the whole mystery of God. To speak of God as mother does not exhaust or define God, nor does it encompass the full range of women’s experience, much of which has nothing to do with maternity. Any woman knows that she never knows what God will present to her, yet she perceives this annunciation through the lens of her female gender. For example, one woman was astonished that at the heart of intensely seeking God’s will for her life came the certainty that she should come out as a lesbian, to live this self she was created to be fully in the world. Conscious of the lens of gender, North American women writing out of their own experiences of God are also committed to rejecting the sexism embedded in the inherited constructions of female identity found in society and its cultural life, including religion. They want to risk new interpretations and perceptions of their experience in order to affirm their own worth. Refusing the old binary system of first and second class, of dominant and submissive, of hierarchy and lower status, women find themselves pointing out new markers on their religious journey. Any religion can be tested by its response to suffering and human destructiveness. This is no less true of the process of knowing, doing, being, creating, expressing in symbols religious encounters associated with a feminine mode of being human, a mode that belongs to all of us, men and women. Instead of repudiating the body and all it symbolizes in this world’s social, political, and material life, women’s religious experience always includes the body, literally and symbolically. Body...

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