Written over twenty years ago, this courageous memoir documents Sue Monk Kidd's journey from being a Southern Baptist (and Southern) evangelical woman who writes inspirational pieces for Christian magazines, her growing feminist consciousness, and her full embrace of feminine spirituality and to seeing women as sources of wisdom and power. And it all began when she visited her teenage daughter, who was working at the local drugstore and putting away stock on a lower shelf. She overhears two middle-age men commenting, "That is how I like my women, on their knees." And something broke in Kidd, reprimanding the men and beginning the process of questioning the patriarchy she had unwittingly accepted her whole life. I was struck by how helpful the book remains for those coming out of a traditional subculture. What makes the book all the more impressive is that she undertook this journey, which meant putting her writing career in jeopardy, before knowing that she would one day become a best-selling novelist.

Mih. Kidd is very articulate, but I really don't identify much at all with what she's writing; my "feminine experience" has been very different from hers. In fact, my sympathies through the story were pretty much with her husband as he tries to figure out what's going on despite her lack of communication with him beyond "this is something I have to do." Pfft. Real helpful, that.

She goes off searching for understanding & accepts the experiences and ideas that resonate within her. That's great, but it makes for incredibly subjective "truth."

And I didn't like when she claimed to mind-read. She would describe seeing someone's facial expression, and then the next paragraph is about what this person is experiencing. I dunno, maybe she went back and interviewed them, but that's not how it reads, and it created a definite disconnect for me, pushing me further into "shyeah, right, whatever."

Wow.........a lot to unpack in this book. I may have to read again.
Highly recommend for anyone wanting to go on this journey.

Even though it felt a little too train of thought sometimes, then it all came together and was just so damn good. Here’s to continued journeys!

hmmmmmmm

I adored this book, it is a book you will continue to pick up and enjoy again and again. if it doesn't speak to you right at the first few pages, it probably isn't time to read it. But if you are drawn in, you will be relieved that someone has finally written down your deepest story, your discomfort with "organized religion will suddenly be explained, and your journey will be validated in the most beautiful of ways!

If you are "in that place," Monk Kidd is writing directly to your heart. Otherwise, it sounds like drivel. In reading her non-fiction, as in music, timing is everything.

Pick it up, read a page. If it resonates, you're ready.

I’m not really that much into nonfiction, but I did find a lot of this very interesting. I’ve always been a feminist so I found a lot I agreed with here (although the rituals went a little overboard for me). This should make an interesting bookclub discussion tonight, which I’ll be hosting in my yard, in a circle of trees ;)

3.5

She did a brilliant job at capturing some of her life’s key spiritual moments - explaining her discoveries so eloquently it helped me be open to ideas I wasn’t to before. I found most of her ideas to be empowering and very healing for my own spirituality.

Because she is very clear about her motives and honest about her hardships, I would dare say that even for the more orthodox reader, her journey would elicit compassion for women who struggle with some of the male-centric aspects of religion.

That said, things to keep in mind:

1) Sue Monk Kidd takes you through her spiritual journey in approx 250 pages… which means that approx for 1/3 of the book, she lists off a myriad of events but only talks about each one of them for a couple sentences.

I wish she would’ve spent more time there because the chapters where she really dissects her experiences are so beautiful… I struggled to get through some of the middle chapters where there’s so little detail to what is happening, it’s hard to keep track of her story, of what’s happened already, and of what hasn’t.

2) This was written in the early 90s, so I feel like the ideas she proposed here (female deity, female ordination, various interpretations of the creation story, etc) and the level of depth which she goes into might be already familiar to you if you’ve studied feminist theology before. Her insights about these different ideas were still fascinating, but just as a heads up in case what you’re looking for in a book is something different.

TLDR: yes, would recommend.

Reading the Dance of the Dissident Daughter felt like walking up to a respected peer and asking, "What was it like for you?" I then proceeded to be deeply impressed and awed by her mastery of language, description and citation. Like Fiona Givens writer of The God Who Weeps, Sue Monk Kidd is well read and is adept and finding and inserting a powerful quote from across the spectrum of liturgy and traditions. Though I have walked my own spiral walk to discovery of my woman self, I learned from her perspective and was edified. Her prose even inspired a poem as I reflected on her ideas. The gauge of whether I would recommend this or not, is as I finished reading it, and before I wrote this review, I delivered it to ny mother so that she could also read it. Unfortunately, I was too late to propose it for a book for my Relief Society's book club since they decided on their book list last week. I would very much like to read this book and discuss the study guide questions with a circle of Mormon women because with their underlying belief in Heavenly Mother, I would hope the journey to discovering the Divine Feminine would be less alarming than it is for women in other traditions.

This book has been essential for me, borderline life-changing if I’m feeling dramatic. So many beautiful, shocking, difficult and important truths about the link between Christianity and sexism and the disservice it provides to women. She puts into words many of the intangible thoughts I’ve had throughout my life, plus gives so much more to consider. Sue Monk Kidd’s stories are her own, but it’s possible to find parallels in one’s own experiences. Absolutely love this woman and am so grateful for her writing.

I wasn’t sure about this book for awhile. I think the fact that my life so closely mirrored hers in many ways was what made me not enjoy it at first and also come to enjoy it. It resonated in a way that was both painful and validating. There were times I wanted to highlight large swathes of text. And other times I was like, yeah, I know, I’ve lived that, nothing new to see here. Or, I don’t want to read this pain when it’s too fresh for me.

But as her story progressed, she moved beyond the shakey, tentative, exploratory, terrifying, devastating, hopeful, awakening stage I still feel in, to this new beautiful place of confidence, peace, joy, power, and wholeness. I see glimpses of it, and this book helped me find the hope that I can get there too, to that place I have never truly been before.

I really wish I could talk with the author. I need so much to have a mentor in this journey, of someone whose spiritual life also felt too narrow and constrained and incomplete, but who renewed and remade her spirituality to find a beautiful soul-deep wholeness. To have someone to guide me as I find new meaning in life, to make up rituals with, to validate my experiences and share her own.

As she says, “The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning.
As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing.”

I don’t know how to find that healing. Even with all my dearly loved ones around, it can feel a lonely path sometimes. But the book is also very much about finding our own authority, our own resonant spirituality, our own souls. This is hard for me after some painful religious experiences but at the same time exactly the message I needed to hear.

As she also shares, “The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.”

As an extra note, I LOVED her fiction, The Book of Longings. And it was really cool to see how all her ideas—the feminine heart that so resonated with me in that book—developed in her own life.

I’m posting a bunch of quotes I want to remember:

“There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, 'My soul is my own,' and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.”

“The female soul is no small thing. Neither is a woman's right to define the sacred from a woman's perspective.”

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual, dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.”

“But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.”

“I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.”

“You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.”

“If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.”

“But as women we have a right to ask the hard questions. The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.”

“You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.
To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.”

“Why didn’t I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul.”

“This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.”

“I also learned a model of relating that unwittingly promoted women’s psychological dependence on men and male authority. Women’s personal journeys, goals, and quests were encouraged only to the extent that they didn’t interfere with those of husband or children. A woman’s surrender of herself on behalf of the rest of the family was (and often still is) extolled as the highest virtue.”

Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.

“Twenty years ago, misogyny within churches, denominations, and religious groups was often, in the words of scholar April DeConick, a holy misogyny. That is, it was sexism mandated by scripture, church doctrine, or divine decree. It can be terribly hard to change dictates that come from on high, especially when God is perceived as doing the dictating. The very idea of integrating feminine imagery and language into conceptions of the Divine and of confronting the exclusion, silence, and devaluation of women within religion could easily create a firestorm. Since 1996 there has been an evolving feminine and feminist awareness within churches, and many progressive strides have been taken. But sadly, holy misogyny continues to this day in some traditions, now framed as a “separate, but equal” policy reminiscent of segregation, causing me to wonder if religion might just become the last patriarchal stronghold.”