call to adventure – Feminism and Religion

Carol Christ’s Legacy honored by Laura Shannon, and the Ariadne Institute

Adventure by Autumn Skye with permission of artist

When I teach the Heroine’s Journey in my Sophia Women’s Wisdom Group, I draw on Joseph Campbell’s idea of the mono-myth, an archetypal story that resonates with every human across time: The Hero’s Journey. I combine Campbell’s ideas with pieces of feminist Maureen Murdock’s heroine’s journey to recognize the unique pathway of the feminine. I call this my hybrid heroic journey. If you are not familiar with Maureen Murdock’s work, I invite you to see how she brought her feminist eye to Campbell’s iconic Hero’s Journey in her book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. After her conversation with Joseph Campbell six years prior to his transition, Murdock felt he missed “that the focus of female spiritual development was to heal the internal split between woman and her feminine nature” (p. 2). In my hybrid heroic journey, that split in the early stages is internalized negative masculinity. The rejection of our feminine nature may appear differently in each woman’s life but it is often characterized by treating ourselves how we imagine men perceive us.

My recent Pilgrimage to Crete was astonishing; my epiphany, gradual. As I share my adventure, imagine stages of your own heroine’s journey wherever you are in that cycle. I hope that by sharing this series, you will experience a real life example of Dion Fortune’s definition of magic: ‘The art of changing consciousness at will’. Starhawk, Truth or Dare, 1988.

“Set out, pilgrim. Set out into the freedom and the wandering. Find your people. Godde is much bigger, wilder, more generous, and more wonderful than you imagined.”
― Sarah Bessey

Joy and justice reside in grace. Thrive in gratitude. Find fulminating llanos of miracle, might, and magic contoured in story. Etched in song. Sculpted in the untempered and unmanacled invitation of HER resplendent and resounding voice and vision willing us to be the very creative fires we wish to live. To come to recognize, at the time of age-ing and sage-ing, the call to freedom.

The call to be wage-ing pilgrimage and poetry with and because of being Grandparents, is a gift SHE bestows upon us, often when we are not even aware of the liminal’s need of our life’s learnings.