Rediscovering and Claiming the Feminine Soul
Edwina Gateley

Since Edwina Gateley is better known as a preacher and storyteller than as a writer, we asked her permission to transcribe a sample of her powerful message from her tapes. The next four pages are selected passages of Edwina's three-hour, two tape series called "Rediscovering and Claiming the Feminine Soul, " transcribed and edited by Bill Thompson.

Did you know that every day ten American women are battered to death? Did you know that one in every three American women is raped? The highest rape in the world come from the U.S. Did you know that three out of four American women will be subject to at least one violent crime in their lifetimes? Did you know that 85 percent of all people in U.S. prisons were abused as children?

We have more people in jail in this country than in any other nation in the world, and we are supposedly the land of the free. We raise our flag and say, "Freedom!" but the little ones - the incest victims, the rape victims, the children - are crushed beneath our powerful system.

When you face that kind of violence and oppression, how do you feel? Helpless? Angry? Like you want to cry?


Once upon a time there was a woman. According to Scripture, she had a problem. The Scripture writers were a bit hung up about women's bodies and natural functions, so they said she had a hemorrhage. The real problem was that she was, menstruating - for 12 years! In the culture of the time, a menstruating woman was considered unclean - a leper, alienated from society - because if she touched another person, particularly a man, she would communicate the uncleanness.

So the woman had to withdraw from society until her period was over. It still happens in many African tribes today. But imagine this woman: for twelve years, the bleeding wouldn't stop. (Imagine all the money she spent on gynecologists and medical insurance. And nothing worked.) So for 12 years the little lady stayed in her own corner, with her own cup, her own plate. Ostracized. A nobody.

One day she heard through the grapevine about this man Jesus, who was going about curing the blind, healing the lame, even raising the dead. Her heart skipped a beat. Maybe there was hope for her. But then she took reality into account. How could I? How dare I, a little nobody, think I could reach out for dignity, and wholeness? Who the hell do I think 1 am?

She accepted the status quo and stayed in her corner.

But it wouldn't go away. Something inside her kept popping up. So one day she did it. She opened her door and came out of her corner.

All the people were gathered around Jesus -- the Great One, the Prophet, the Guru. She knew she was taking her life in her hands. If they discovered who she was, they could kill her - for breaking the Law, coming out of her corner and reaching out for something else bigger than herself.

She moved through the hostile crowd, in and out -- weaving, like a woman who knows how to weave. Suddenly she found herself right up front. How dare she! The disciples were surrounding Jesus, protecting the Holy One, the sacred place -- but she slipped right between their legs until she was face to face with Jesus. She did it. She had taken the journey.

She knew she didn't have to give a homily, or a speech. As a woman she knew the power of touch. She leaned forward and touched the hem of the garment woven by his mother. And suddenly, from Jesus came the power, into the woman. He turned around. "What was that? Who touched me?"

The disciples, always the last to understand, said that everyone was touching him. No, said Jesus. Someone is touching me at a deeper level. The woman knew it was her. She came forward and said, "It was me." Jesus loved her for herself, and he must have smiled. "Woman, stand up." And the woman who for 12 years had been bent down by her so-called disease, her inadequacy, her inability, stood up straight. "Woman, your faith has made you whole."

Can you imagine what it was like for that little lady, after all that time in the corner, thinking 'I am nothing, I am nobody, I can't do anything, I can't be anything,' when at the command of Jesus, she stood up? My question is: WHAT DID SHE DO THEN? Say 'That was a nice experience,' and go back to her corner? Or did something radical happen in her belly, so that she was never the same, and she began to go around telling people, 'Guess what happened to me! If I can stand up straight because I have seen the dream, the vision, and I have been called forth, nobody will bend me over again.' Was there a light in her eyes that communicated itself to others who were bowed down? Did she go around to others and say, "Stand up. It's OK. I know about the journey' ?

Don't you think maybe that's what it's all about? Women - US - must come out from our corners, enter that life-risking journey, through the crowds and the hostility, because we know that all of us are meant to stand up straight. There should be no one bowed down, no one underfoot, no one hungry or homeless. We know that in our bellies. That's why we gather - as women, and indeed as some men - to empower ourselves to remember that the Gospel of Jesus tells us we must stand up straight. God is with US. God is indeed with the menstruating woman. Go tell the Good News to my brothers, says Jesus.

What happens when women start doing it? Start standing up for justice and dignity? We rock the boat. The system begins to shift and change when the powerful force of the feminine stands up and commands new life and dignity. Slowly the world begins to change, because women will no longer stay in the kitchens, or be bent double, while they rape our children, jail our sisters, and pimp our daughters. Now we say, 'Enough!'

More Women in the Scriptures

For centuries women have been standing up against the system, trying to make it more wholistic, refusing to obey unjust laws. In the Book of Exodus, everybody remembers Moses. But have you heard about Shiphrah? Or Puah? No? Well, that's the problem. Everybody says "Rah, rah" for Moses, but nobody knows about these two Hebrew midwives.

When the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, the great Pharaoh looked at all the Hebrew people multiplying, and he said, "If there are many more of them, they might rebel. We must control the population." So he called in Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives: "Every time a Hebrew woman gives birth to a boy, I want you to strangle it at birth." "Yes, sir!" said the midwives, and went about business as usual. The great King saw the people still multiplying. "Shiphrah and Puah are not doing their job," he said, and he called them in again. "Your honor, sir," they said. "Every time we get a call from a woman in labor, we rush there. But these Hebrew women are so strong, that by the time we arrive, the baby is already born. We couldn't do what you wanted."

Women will find a way to get around unjust laws. Weaving their way around, finding a way that was not directly confronta- Shiphrah and Puah didnot kill the children. And then, Moses was born. And his mother, to save him, put him in a basket in the river, and called her daughter Miriam to watch the child. And one day the daughter of Pharaoh saw the baby in the basket, and said, "I will take care of it," -- just like a woman would do. So Moses, the Great Liberator, was born and nurtured because five women conspired in the background! Women need to understand the role of all those powerful "little ladies" in our history and in Scripture if we are to see that WE have a role.

Jesus' first great miracle took place at a wedding party at Cana in Galilee. Everybody was having a good time, and there was Jesus, having a few drinks with his mates at the bar. And Mary and the women were having a good time too. But Mary also kept her eye on the food and drink. Isn't that what women do? And she noticed the wine was going down. Nobody else noticed it. The guys were all drinking and telling war stories. She went up to her boy, tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Son, they're running out of wine."

What she did was absolutely wrong. In the customs and culture of that community, it was not simply allowed for an adult female to speak in public to an adult male. Women were to keep silent. Jesus was mortally embarrassed in front of all his friends. He turned to her in humiliation, and said, "Woman, what is that to me and to thee?" How dare you? The rest of the guys were trying not to look or to notice. But Mary knew the power of motherhood, and knew as a woman that the important thing was not the rules and regulations, but rather: "Did you celebrate? Did you have enough to drink? Are you happy?" She called the waiter and said, "Do what he tells you." And Jesus must have thought, "Oooh, where did I get her from?" But Jesus made the choice. He could have told her to get lost, and he would have been fine in the eyes of his friends. But the beauty of Jesus was that he was fair. He listened to his mother, saw that she had a point. He changed the water into wine, and gave the people what they wanted so they could celebrate.

Women and children have a different perspective. They often give us another side to the situation.

Remember Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus? Martha was the homemaker, great in the kitchen. They were all great friends of Jesus. Whenever he passed by he would stop for dinner and a couple of drinks or whatever. They had a wonderful relationship. Then one day Lazarus got a virus, and got very sick. So Martha, who was very well organized, a real ENFP number 8 in the Meyers Briggs, the kind who always gets her letters out, sent Jesus a letter to come home because Lazarus was sick. Jesus was real caught up in what he was doing - he didn't want to break into the eight-day retreat he was giving, or whatever - so he leaves the letter aside. Later he gets the feeling of fear that Lazarus may not have made it. He says to the disciples, 'Let's go back.' They rush back. And who is waiting for them? Martha - ENFP Number 8, standing there - in the cemetery, no less. She must have seen him coming and looked at her watch and said, 'Where the hell have you been? I wrote to you two weeks ago.' And according to the Gospel of John, she said to Jesus, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that anything you ask in the name of God will be given to you." And she stands right in front of the tomb, and says, "Well, you are the Christ, the son of the Living God. So do it!" And Jesus moved forward at the command of the homemaker, and said, "Lazarus, come forth," and the dead man rose again. The greatest miracle in the New Testament - the resurrection of the dead - is very clearly associated with a woman, a homemaker, who says, 'Come on, man. You know what is possible. For you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

Who else said those words? Peter. "And for this I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven," said Jesus. My question is: Where are Martha's keys? Think about it! She said the same thing. Doesn't she deserve to have, and need to claim, the keys of the kingdom? And why haven't we women asked for them? For heaven's sake, let's 's claim them - not let them be the prerogative of one man when a woman said the same thing as he, and in conjunction with the greatest miracle of Jesus, while Peter spoke in the midst of doubt, and later betrayed three times. The woman stayed faithful to Jesus of Nazareth. I'm not saying discard the man. But let's be fair.

It's just like with prostitution. Arrest the woman and put her in jail, and the man goes home to his wife and kids. Right through our history we have a double standard. But God will have none of it. And that is why God is concerned about the little ones, the children, the oppressed, and says, 'Come on! Don't let them do it. I am with you till the very end. But you have to come out of your corner."

Did you read that passage in First Corinthians - it's one of my favorites: "Women should keep silent in church!' Let me tell you something. The very fact that that needed to be stated indicates that women were not being silent in church! Women were preaching, and teaching, and interpreting. You know what women are like. They get into things. They gather. That's why our church services are 90 percent women: they are the ones who search for the sacred and the spiritual. The men organize it, and are in charge of it, but it is the women who are the seekers. They gathered around Jesus. They gathered small communities. They were the community leaders in the early Church, to the point where the guys said, 'This is getting to be too much," and made a new rule: women would be quiet in church. Our God is gentle - compassionate - free. Our God will have no dealings with exclusion, with power, with barriers. As the Masai tribe in East Africa say, and I love this: God is moist, warm, wet and salty. Ah! That is more meaningful to us than 'God is Almighty, King, Lord, Judge and Father. The nomadic, African, so-called 'ignorant' peoples have a better understanding of God's nature than we who need definitions from a rational, logical perspective. Our God is the God of the little ones, the disenfranchised, and it is there that we will find her, and she will empower us to make a difference.

Sophia and the Feminine Mystics

In the beginning there was the Spirit of God. Wisdom. Sophia. Ruah in Hebrew. Co-creator with God in the Hebrew Scriptures. She danced, and was playful, and called the universe into being. The Spirit, working side by side as co-creator with Yahweh. Bringing forth, birthing the earth. Filled with imagination, life, energy. And she was the feminine principle. She was female. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only Moses, Job, David and God are treated in more depth than Sophia, Wisdom. She was such a powerful force in the beginning. But today it seems that Sophia-Feminine-Wisdom is not commonly understood. Our children don't talk about her calling forth new life. Slowly she was edged out of our traditions. Marginalized in favor of the single, male, Yahweh, because Sophia, the Feminine, was too exuberant, too elusive, too ambiguous for our rigid Christian doctrines. She was left to the fringe groups: the school of John, the poet, the artist. She was left to the mystics, who were always a little bit wild. The whole feminine dimension of God's creative power had to be suppressed if we were to put some order and rationale into our Christian doctrine.

Today Sophia, Wisdom, is sneaking back. Little by little, I believe, from a grassroots, deep level, the Spirit of Wisdom is reemerging in our consciousness. She is returning - mostly in women.

Mostly we have seen Sophia in the early feminine mystics. The mystics are God's last resort. Because they are not normal, and have not bought into our rigid Christian doctrine, the mystics have encountered a God who electrifies them, fills them with a wild hope and dream for the human race. For a world which is hungry and tired, God manifests the Divine presence in Sophia through people who are open to the mystical experience. We have to loosen up if we are to experience in our frightened and insecure world God's more wholesome life, linked not only with the masculine Yahweh, but with the feminine Sophia.

Mystics break through with a new vision. Mystics say to the people, 'Look! There is another way.' But in that journey, mystics first hit rock bottom themselves. The experience of mysticism is a salvation experience. The mystic in experiencing God also experiences the incredible loneliness of the darkness in which God moves within us. Mystics come out of turmoil and darkness, and break through to the world with God's message: I am with you in spite of your darkness.

One of those women mystics was Julian of Norwich. She was an Englishwoman, born in 1342, and interestingly, she was nameless. She is called by the name of the church she lived in: she lived in a part of the wall of the Church of St. Julian in the city of Norwich. A nameless woman - like so many women today who struggle.

In her longing for God, Julian wanted to experience the passion of Jesus, the pain and suffering that Jesus had gone through. And poor woman, she got it real bad. She got so sick she was on the brink of death. In that near-death experience God scooped her up and assured her that God was with her and that she would live. It gave her an incredible awareness of God's presence.

The experience of pain and darkness through which we come to conversion belongs to the community. Julian moved from personal piety, from "me and Jesus suffering together for the sins of the world!" She realized that for her to be comforted was a message for the wider world. All will be well, because I nearly died. but I did not die.

Julian lived in a time when there were many troubles: the Peasant Wars, the Hundred Years' Revolution, and the great plague known as the Black Death. The plague wiped out 50 percent of Europe. People would be fine, and twelve hours later they would be dead. There was no medical science to explain it. People were terrified. The only explanation was: God is punishing us. There must be something wrong with us. (The parallel today is AIDS.) Julian went through three episodes of the plague in her lifetime, and survived them all. She came out alive, and began saying, "It's all right. Maybe we have been brought to our knees, but it's all right." She began using terms for God such as Mother and Comforter - to comfort God's people. The only reason this woman could get through to people was that she had herself nearly died. She had been on the journey. She knew what she was talking about.

So also today, women who have been on the journey of disintegration, oppression and pain are the ones who will call forth salvation, and assure people of God's presence.

People who could not diagnose the plague in those days (like AIDS today) felt that they were sinful - and this was endorsed by the Church. The whole development of confession occurred around the same time. Maybe we must appease a God who is angry. Onto the consciousness of a whole people came the sense of fear and guilt - and original sin along with it. We are sinful; we deserve to be punished. The Catholic Church in particular, I believe, has used the whole punishment business to keep us cowed, to keep us down, when our eyes should be vibrant with God's life and Spirit.

The mystics were different. The mystics celebrated and accepted the darkness as a means to salvation and God's light. That was their function. God appeared to Julian and tried to communicate to God's people through her. She said: God is incapable of anger. God is not going to zap you. God just wants us to understand Wisdom. God never promised that we would not suffer, but that we would not be overcome.

God showed Julian two major impediments facing the human race. One is our impatience with suffering, our flight from all pain. In the spiritual journey it is vital to accept pain, to find God's light within the darkness.

The second is despair. We give up hope so easily. Something sucks us down. But the spirit of Sophia breaks through the darkness. We will hit rock bottom. Both individually and as a people, a nation, we will be bowed down, so that we may experience salvation. When we as a people bow ourselves down because we have no more control, the light of faith that is left, the spirit of Sophia that is in the community, will say, 'It's OK. We will raise ourselves up because God is with us.' And maybe then we will truly be a people of God transformed.

As each individual experiences the journey of conversion, so too must the community. The mystics tried to tell us that. We say: The mystics are special, but don't try to be like them. But God says: Yes, you must follow a journey very similar to theirs.

God waits for us. If we are faithful in that journey, even though we hit rock bottom, all will be well.

From selected passages of Edwina's three-hour, two tape series called "Rediscovering and Claiming the Feminine Soul"