From Silence to Lyricism

These words come from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. With four sections to the book, Awareness, Initiation, Grounding, and Empowerment, it's from the final one, Empowerment, that she offers a few paragraphs titled, From Silence to Lyricism. She tells the story of Sappho, a poet of ancient Greece who

"...was not silent at all but extravagantly lyrical. In Sappho, the Western world heard perhaps for the first time in written history the lush, creative voice of the female. Her lyric voice graced the world with a power that was unsurpassed. While male poets of her day were writing and singing of war, politics, and worldly commerce, the lyric Sappho sang poems about love and suffering, about orchids and crickets and the moon in its roundness. At times her voice was joyful and sublime, other times insulting and ironic, but it was always fired with individual truth."

Monk Kidd continues,

"The silent Sappho came later, as her voice was condemned by patriarchy. In 350 C.E. the bishop of Constantinople ordered her writings burned wherever found. Today, of the more than five hundred poems she wrote, only seven hundred lines or fragments remain...The lyric Sappho is [an] image of an empowered female self. She is the woman in us who takes up her real work, creates, sings her verses to the world."

I want to be that woman - one who takes up my real work, creates, and sings my verses to the world. At the same time, I know of my own resistance to such; the voice inside me that says I have nothing worthwhile to create or sing, that no one would really want to hear me. Again, Sue Monk Kidd speaks to my doubt:

"The first step toward lyricism is simply acknowledging our creativity. Second, we must explore it. Ask yourself, “What is my deepest passion, really? What moves me profoundly?” And let the answer float up from the truest, most vulnerable place in your heart. Greet this answer like it is your own newborn self being placed in your arms. Love it. Bond with it. Feed it. Don’t push it aside, minimize, make excuses, and starve this thing of beauty, because this answer is the window into your creative life."

So, that's what this blog is for: a place for me to answer the question, "What is my deepest passion, really?" A place to serve as a window into my creative life - into the truest, most vulnerable place in my heart.

At least at this point in time, my deepest passion is to re-tell Biblical narratives, particularly those of women, in ways that allow us to re-imagine ourselves as deeply connected to and part of the Divine; to know, celebrate, and live out our profound beauty and power; to know the blessing, strength, and validation generously offered and invited through new images of God and self, to understand who we are as imago dei - amazing, glorious, and silent no more - indeed, lyrical.

Even as I type these words I feel a shudder of excitement; a nervousness, yes, but even more, an awareness that I might just be stepping into what I'm most about. Truth be told, what I most desire to offer other women is what I most desire for myself: to move from silence to lyricism, from edited thoughts and words to freedom and truth, from self-doubt and condemnation to a lived-into-awareness of carrying the Divine within me and offering it to the world around me.

Another quote from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter speaks profoundly to me and articulates even further what I hope to create in this space:

"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."

Because I have come, albeit haltingly, to hear the divine voice in my own soul, I now feel like I can return to the Bible, to the stories it tells, to the women in its pages and let the Divine voice speak anew - through me, through each of them - to women that need to hear, to my daughters that need to hear, to a church that needs to hear, to men that need to hear, to a world that needs to hear.

Daunting? Yes. But it is time for me to "simply acknowledge [my] creativity..." I must "let the answer float up from the truest, most vulnerable place in [my] heart...[not] push it aside, minimize, make excuses, and starve this thing of beauty..."

May I (and all of us) be like the lyric Sappho. May she be "the woman in us who takes up her real work, creates, sings her verses to the world."

From Silence to Lyricism. May it be so.

Oh...and my next post? Starting from the beginning: Genesis 1-2.