The Time is Now: Women, Spirituality and Leadership

By Kathlyn Schaaf

This article was published in the Proceedings of the Women's Global Connection International Conference in July 2004. 

On the Gather the Women website is a quote from British poet Matthew Arnold: "If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."[I]   That time is now; those women have begun to come together in powerful new kinds of collaborative networks; and the energy behind this growing matrix is enormous. It is, in fact, much more powerful than Matthew Arnold could have imagined in the 1860s because women have begun to connect within the container of a profound shared spiritual intention, and thus have begun to manifest a radical new kind of global leadership based on the values of faith, compassion and integrity.

During the past two years, I have had the honor to be involved with Gather the Women, and I have had a lived experience of the magnetic power of this opportunity. There is no accident that I am here on this fragile planet at this challenging time in this community of mature, wise and compassionate women. I can feel my own profound and deeply personal calling in my very cells, and I have met women from around the world who feel the same energy guiding their lives.  We are being pulled into circle, into spiritual commitment and into global action; we are being mobilized to bring a new kind of leadership to our families and to our communities, and thus to change the very fabric of our human family on a global level.

The challenges we face are enormous. There is no need to retell the current story of devastation to all life and to this planet. It does not matter whether the motivation is war or commerce, hatred or greed; the cumulative effect of our global human choices has brought our planet to the point of crisis.

That crisis is our opportunity. Rather than being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, or paralyzed by the complexity, we simply need to do what women have always done. We need to reach deep inside to access our faith, our intuition and our compassion. We need to reach out and link arms with other women. We need to ask for help from our own Divine Source and listen in new ways to the answers when they come.

In Letter to Earth, Elia Wise writes:

When you don't see the way, it may be inventing itself before you.  Trust the nature of things.  Permit the nature of things.  You are not called upon to rely on blind faith.  Let your faith spring from what you have actually seen and felt: from what rings you like a bell of truth, making goose bumps on your arms; and from the transformation that is becoming apparent.  You do not need to fix the world; it is not broken! Like a heart that feels broken, it is in the throes of transformation. Its pieces will fall into depths unknown.  From that place of discovery it will regenerate with resilience and compassion, able to access heights unknown.  You need only sustain a supportive and trusting environment to nurture this transformation of your life and all life.  It is important to the whole of the Universe that each of you come into greater love and understanding. Start with the moment you are in. Be conscious that you are creating the world. [II]

As women, we know how to recognize the "yes" of intuition and we know how to weave and sustain the kind of supportive and trusting environment Wise describes. Elisabeth Sahtouris, the acclaimed evolution biologist has affirmed, "It is women who most deeply understand and create healthy living systems and thus intuitively, and thought their experience, know the path not just to our survival but to our thrival as a global family." [III] It is women who can begin now to create a new world.

The History of Why

So why have women remained on the fringes of global leadership for so long? Why are the voices of women not joined together calling loudly for balance, wholeness and mutuality? Who or what has confined so many women to passive, reactive or reparative roles on a global scale.

In two of her books, At the Root of this Longing and The Values of Belonging, Carol Lee Flinders follows the thread of these questions along the trajectory of human history. At some point in this journey she focuses on patriarchy, acknowledging that "few women like to discuss patriarchy". [IV]  

As I have spoken before groups of women (and men) over the past two years, I have personally observed that there are indeed strong collective reactions to certain words. "Patriarchy" is definitely one of those words.  The best way I can describe the reaction is as a contraction: a sharp, shallow inhale of the breath accompanied by body language of drawing back or closing up. I pay attention when I see such a response in any setting, because it means I am no longer in connection with the other and that connection is vital to understanding.

Whether we are comfortable or not with the word, Flinders offers us the opportunity to look closely at the moment in human history when our global culture experienced one of its most powerful "tipping points", a radical shift in the relationship between humans and their environment that rapidly led to new behaviors, changed social structures and a completely different set of guiding values. Flinders suggests, "The missing half of who we are isn't just women, but the constellation of values that defines pre-agricultural life - a coherent, radiant whole that's much more than the sum of its parts. The retrieval of those values would be the best thing that could happen to humanity in general, and also the best thing that could happen to women." [V]

The values that went missing sometime between 3000 B.C. and 2000 B.C. were the values essential to survival of nomadic gatherer-hunter bands: intimate connection to the land, empathetic relationship to animals, balance, expressiveness, mutuality, playfulness, inclusiveness and openness to Spirit. They were replaced with the values of an agricultural economy: control and ownership of land and animals, acquisitiveness, hierarchy, competition and aggression.

As these new values took hold in most of the major population centers of the world, the role of women in the microcosm of global culture also shifted drastically; she was no longer an equal partner in the daily work of survival but instead quickly became another form of commodity to be controlled in the service of competition. Her physical and emotional characteristics made her "weak" in the competitive world of manual labor and in the face of a singular focus upon the goal of acquiring more land, more money and more power. Her most valued function was to provide many children who could work in the fields.

Flinders describes three different kinds of separation that were imposed upon women by patriarchy during this time:

1) By commodifying women's sexuality and reproductivity, it separated them from their own desires and feelings.

2) By erecting barriers of race and class and making enclosure the mark of respectability, it separated women from one another.

3) By dethroning the goddesses and demonizing the religious practices of women, it closed off the well-spring of their own spirituality. [VI]

She suggests that we will not be able to bring balance and wholeness to this planet until we have healed these three separations.

Healing our Separations

Life on our planet Earth in the year 2004 is complex, fast-paced, technological and modern for some; for others, each day is a struggle for basic elements of survival - food, water, shelter, safety. What does the female lawyer in Los Angeles have in common with the woman in the Sudan struggling to feed her children? In what ways are we not separate?

As a mother, I already know one of the answers to that question. I know that there are millions upon millions of mothers who feel the same deep love for their children, who also offer fervent prayers that their child thrive and find happiness, who also express a fierce protectiveness and experience a keen vulnerability stirred by their children. I know that when my heart opened to my child, it opened to every child everywhere. I know there is common passionate language shared by the mothers of the world, and I long for the day when they rise and speak that truth in one voice.

Several weeks ago, I experienced one of those complex moments when the continuum of time folds in upon itself. The internet, that incredible modern tool that is capable of connecting us all, delivered to my inbox the vibrantly alive words of a woman from the last century. Julia Ward Howe wrote this proclamation in Boston in 1870 calling for the creation of Mother's Day. Her words capture our shared dilemma and describe the opportunity that is still waiting for us today:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace [VII]

I recently found my way to another perspective in my husband's copy of Notre Dame Lawyer. In an article by Teresa Godwin Phelps about her recent trip to Bangladesh, she writes, "Women in America, just like women in Bangladesh, suffer from 'traditions' that perpetuate violence against women and continue women's economic marginalization. We should come together and insist on justice for all the world's women, not remain fragmented by fears of 'imperialism'." [VIII]

We have been "fragmented" for too long. We have been fragmented by our fears. We have been fragmented by our lack of faith in ourselves and in one another. We have also been fragmented by our own choices to live in judgment on one another.

Teresa Phelps experienced on her journey a simple truth that many women learn when they reach out to make connection; we discover we have so much in common when we come together with the intention of finding what we have in common. We always have a choice in our interactions with others to focus on differences (and contract or defend or dismiss when we find them) or to listen for commonalities (and open to feelings and learning and understanding).

Gather the Women is a sacred space where women can explore this common ground. Patricia Smith Melton, the Executive Director of one of the partners in Gather the women, Peace by Peace, describes, "Gather the Women is the place of opportunity.  It's where the 'women at the well' gain the tools of virtual reality.  It's where we begin to see our numbers and our strength and come to understand that together we are, in fact, unstoppable.  It's where interior vision can become manifest in ways that change the world.  It's where women are experiencing a vertigo made of realizing they are in new territory but also experiencing that this is the territory they have been searching for all their lives." [IX]

Gather the Women began as an inspiration in 2001 and has quickly grown to include over 6,000 women from 70 countries and from more than fifty different women's organizations. Those of us who have been involved at the core of leadership have been barely able to keep up with the exponential growth and have all been deeply touched by the brilliance, passion and commitment of the women we have met along the way. We have learned that the women of this world are ready to fully heal Flinders' three separations, and have, in fact, already begun to put one foot in front of the other down that sacred path.

The first step is a deeply personal one. It is the moment of realizing your own profound and precious worth in the world; it the daily opportunity to live in gratitude for who you are, what you have been given and for the opportunity to serve.  That moment is best described by the Vision Statement of Gather the Women:

Gather the Women is evoking at a profound level
an experience of our own woman's worth to the world.

As women we bring life forward.
We are in touch with the cycles of life
and we function in a context that is deeply relational.
We have the capacity to generate
creative solutions that benefit
all life on the planet.

Gather the Women is creating
a rich exchange of cultural values
to dissolve the ties that bind us to the illusion
that one segment of our human family can win
while another loses.

Together we women are contributing
to a new collective wisdom
and we are lending our strength
to that which we wish to embrace.
From this emerging balance is being born
a new dimension of our humanity. [X]

The next step is to move into collaborative partnership with other women and other women's organizations, connecting our brilliant dots into new constellations of shared passion and purpose. The old paradigm told us that we needed to compete, that there was never enough to go around and we had to fight for our small piece in a world of scarcity. Flinders describes, "Patriarchy was not just a way of organizing society; it was also a set of assumptions about what constitutes a self, the first being that there isn't enough to go around." [XI] Our experience at Gather the Women has taught us a different kind of mathematics: that collaboration multiplies our resources rather than dividing them; that we have abundant resources when we share them fairly; that the old values of interdependence, mutuality and empathy can bring us all back into grace and balance.

Just as there is no real separation between us, there is no way to separate the third element of spiritual connection from the first two. Before any woman can discover her own personal worth and passion, she needs first to have a firm foundation of faith in a Divine Being who loves and holds and values her feminine aspects. Gerda Lerner describes what happened to women during the centuries when they were cut off from spiritual source: "Their only access to God and to holy community is in their function as mothers." [XII] Women are no longer content to be confined to this narrow role, and have begun to explore a myriad of pathways back to Spirit, back to the feminine aspects of the divine.

Whether she calls out to God or Goddess, Spirit, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Lord, Mohammad, Source, Father or Mother, or any of a hundred other names in as many spiritual traditions, a woman who has deep faith can risk and soar from the safety of that container. She can experience her own deep desires, and she can speak her own authentic truth with compassion.  She can trust entering into deep relationship with other women. It is these women who are being called together to step into this moment of opportunity on behalf of our planet; it is these women who have already created the blueprint for a new planetary system of leadership.

A key element of that blueprint may be the ability to remain open to accepting the faith expression of the woman across the circle, to once again focus upon what we have in common rather than being alienated by how we are different. You need to ask yourself whether you contracted at any of the words in the list of names for the Divine, and be open to exploring what it is that makes you afraid of that word. This may be the most important piece of the puzzle. It is certainly the point at which we have stumbled -- and fallen upon one another - throughout human history.  What if a critical mass of women from diverse faiths and cultures were able to come together on a shared piece of spiritual common ground? That question vibrates loudly and sings of opportunity.

The subtitle of Flinders' At the Root of This Longing, "Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist Thirst", describes the powerful integration of forces that is fueling a new women's movement. "Feminist" is definitely another of those words that causes contraction in any group; it is a word often associated with anger and reactionary energy. Our culture has already seen too many times what happens when the pendulum swings too far too fast from one side to another in reaction. The goal of the new woman leader is to move the pendulum with consciousness back into the center of balance - and to stay there.

This new wave of women leaders is grounded in their spiritual values, and thus able to be proactive rather than reactive, compassionate rather than angry, and collaborative rather than competitive. These women stand at the intersection where their spiritual hunger meets their most profound passion and their keen instinct for how to create healthy living systems.  This is the truly powerful combination described by Flinders when she says, "It is the sharp wakefulness of a mother who knows her children are in danger, and it is the courage, cunning and creativity she will summon out of her depths to save them." [XIII]   Could there be a more perfect resource at this moment in human history?

[I] Matthew Arnold (http://www.gatherthewomen.org)

[II] Elia Wise, Letter to Earth: Who We Are Becoming.What We Need to Know. (New York, Harmony Books, 1999) 242

[III] Elisabet Sahtouris (http://www.gatherthewomen.org)

[IV] Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist Thirst. (New York, Harper Collins, 1999) 99)

[V] Carol Lee Flinders, The Values of Belonging: Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition and Wholeness in a Competitive World. (San Francisco, Harper Collins, 2002) xxi

[VI] Flinders, At the Root of This Longing, 119

[VII] Julia Ward Howe (http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_howe_mother.htm)

[VIII] Teresa Godwin Phelps (Spring 2004) Notre Dame Lawyer. (page 6)

[IX]   Patricia Smith Melton (http://www.gatherthewomen.org)

[X] Gather the Women Vision Statement (http://www.gatherthewomen.org)

[XI] Flinders, At the Root  of this Longing, 108

[XII] Gerta Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy  (New York, Oxford Uniiv. Press, 1986) 10.

[XIII] Flinders (http://www.gatherthewomen.org)