Voices of a new spirituality

Abstract

Many different dimensions and definitions of spirituality exist, even within one single religion. Feminists, too, vary widely in their understanding of spirituality, but there is no doubt that the issue of spirituality provides an important focus for the thinking and being of contemporary women. ‘Women talk about Spirituality’, ‘Women’s Spirituality Rediscovered’, ‘Discovering Spirituality for Ourselves’, ‘In Search of the Feminine’ are only some of the titles given to women’s workshops and publications in Britain. In the USA the interest is much greater still and began much earlier. Some of this is associated with the so-called free spirituality movement which links women’s spirituality with a separate women’s culture. There is also the journal Womanspirit, published since 1974, which insists that spirituality is not just the pursuit of a privileged or fringe group but that ‘womanspirit lives in the —lives of all women’. It is a matter of women trusting their own experience and evolving their spiritual consciousness, power and strength within and among themselves.

‘We dare to raise the issue of spirituality for women, to begin to redefine it, and to say it is of vital importance to the women’s movement.

Feminist spirituality has taken form in sisterhood — in our solidarity based on a vision of personal freedom, self-definition, and in our struggle together for social and political change. The contemporary women’s movement has created space for women to begin to perceive reality with a clarity that seeks to encompass many complexities.... We choose the word spirituality because this vision presupposes a reverence for life, a willingness to deal with more than just rational forces, and a commitment to positive life-generating forces that historically have been associated with a more limited definition of spirituality....

In its broadest context, spirituality is being open to reality in all of its dimensions — in its rational, irrational and superrational complexity, and acting on that understanding. This requires a radical departure from the present compartmentalized ways of perceiving and determining action.’ — Judy Davis and Juanita Weaver, ‘Dimensions of Spirituality’, pp. 368ff.