The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

lavender and tells Evelyn stories about a firebrand girl named Tawanda (actually Mrs. Threadgoode herself), who never put on airs and who broke every social rule that confined her true female self.
    Inspired, Evelyn discards the lace collars and the Gracious Lady constraints. We witness her ram a car that has stolen her parking place, shouting, “Tawanda!”
    While I don’t recommend ramming cars, in lots of ways the energy of Tawanda is the cure for Gracious Ladies, those children of Miss Belle, whose real selves are suffocating inside strictures of properness, charm, sweetness, and social convention.
    Church Handmaid
    One afternoon during the same visit to my hometown, I drove by my childhood church, speculating on a certain question: What would happen if I brought feminism into my spiritual life?
    On impulse, I parked the car beside the church and found a side door open. Maybe I was trying to understand why the question I’d asked turned my hands into warm puddles. Maybe I was trying to recapture an attachment to an old pattern of faith I could feel slipping away. To shore it up. To pat it like a child pats a sand castle at the first hint of tide.
    I entered the sanctuary, hoping it would purify my doubts, but all I could seem to remember in there were sermons about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and especially that devastating sermon about Eve and the chalkboard with the downward-pointing arrows.
    I wandered into the educational building, found a child’s classroom, and sat in one of those miniature chairs. My knees pushed up toward my chin. I felt like Goldilocks in the chair that was too small.
    I thought how I’d started out in a nursery down the hall. My grandfather and father were both Baptist deacons. My mother taught children Sunday school and headed the social committee, making sure there were platters of food for all our fellowships. My grandmother had given devotionals at the Women’s Missionary Union. Growing up, I’d attended this church three times a week for services.
    I think sometimes a childhood place can lean so heavily on your growing up that later, when you are grown, you find it has become part of your internal geography. This church was such a place. But it came to me suddenly and without question that Imust leave the Baptist world. I sat still on the little chair and breathed in and out very slowly, taking this in.
    A goldfish bowl sat on a piano across the room. It was empty of fish and water, but I saw almost immediately the metaphor it represented. For so long the Baptist world had been both my goldfish bowl and the water I swam in. I’d come to think of it as the whole realm. I’d grown used to seeing everything through that water. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to leave. At a deep level, I’d not known I could make such a large choice.
    It sounds silly, but at the time leaving this realm seemed as daunting to me as leaving the goldfish tank might have seemed to a goldfish. I wondered if I could survive outside the safe perimeters I knew so well. And I was not even thinking at that point about taking my leave from the entire church. I wasn’t yet thinking about learning how to breathe in brand new spiritual environs, in a feminine realm where the old breathing mechanisms don’t work at all.
    Despite the growing disenchantment women experience in the early stages of awakening, the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church, is almost always unfathomable. It’s that old the-world-is-flat conviction, where we believe that if we sail out on the spiritual ocean beyond a certain point we will fall off the edge of the known world into a void. We think there’s nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth