My Life as a Prayer – Feminism and Religion

The Mothers, the Goddess, Lost and Found, part 2 by Elizabeth Cunningham

Excerpts in two parts adapted from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir. Part 1 appeared yesterday. You can read it here.

The Goddess finds me

Between the birth of my son and the birth of my daughter, I had a second miscarriage. The signs that something was wrong were subtle at first. I drove myself to a doctor’s appointment, hoping to be reassured that everything was all right (though I already sensed it wasn’t). En route to the office, perhaps to distract myself, I pondered why it was that I had never written about the church, or Christianity. Then…

I turn onto the main street. I glance at an old clock tower, and there she is superimposed against it, huge, big as the sky, vast as the earth.

I hear her voice.

“You have been searching for me all your life.”

She speaks inside me, all around me.

“The wild mother, the witch in the wood.” [She shows me the stories I’ve written.] “You have been searching for me all your life.”

The Mothers, the Goddess, Lost and Found, part 1 by Elizabeth Cunningham

Excerpts in two parts adapted from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir
(Note: Both excerpts have been edited for brevity)

The author’s mother as an architectural student.

The Mothers

When I was fourteen years old, I had a dream. I was pregnant and riding a donkey through a landscape, all golds and browns, hills crowned with ancient trees. I arrived at a monastery where monks with brown hands helped deliver my baby. From that time on, I longed to have a child.

My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I was devastated. Not only had I lost my longed-for baby, I had always taken my body for granted. Despite illnesses and injuries, I had assumed my will and my body’s health and strength were one. Now I knew in my own flesh that I was not in control; doing all the right things (thinking all the right thoughts) could not save me from sorrow. I sat in my own small version of Job’s ash heap.

My Life as a Prayer by Elizabeth Cunningham, book review by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Our own FAR sister, Elizabeth Cunningham has written her marvelous memoir which came out yesterday. It is titled My Life as a Prayer with the subtitle, A Multifaith Memoir. For those of you who may not know Elizabeth, she wrote regularly for FAR for many years. She is the author the The Wild Mother and the award-winning Maeve Chronicles. Her Chronicles envision the Celtic Mary Magdalen named Maeve. Throughout the four books of the Chronicles, Maeve is filled with vivacious energy and her own life of spirit. The books are Magdalen Rising, The Passion of Mary Magdalen, Bright Dark Madonna and Red-Robed Priestess (which in full disclosure is one of my favorite series of all time.)

In My Life as a Prayer, Elizabeth’s writing is lush and poetic, clever and clarifying, multilayered and depthful. I hope I can convey all those elements in this short blogpost?

How Mary Magdalen Came into My Life: an excerpt, edited for brevity, from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir by Elizabeth Cunningham

(Author’s note: Mary Magdalen, or Magdalene, comes to people in many ways. To me, she came as an unconventional, fictional character. I worked hard to get the first century setting of her story as accurate as possible. Otherwise, I make no claim to historicity. I respect all the ways in which others know her.)

When I finished writing my novel Return of the Goddess in 1990, I thought I had nothing more to say. Yet, I sensed there was something—someone—missing.

An artist friend suggested I take up drawing or painting for a time—visual art being a form in which I had no experience, skill, and best of all, no ambition. I dabbled in paint and charcoal but soon reverted to magic markers, my childhood medium.

One day a line drawing in brown marker took shape. An ample woman sat naked at a kitchen table having a cup of coffee. The round clock on the wall read a little after three in the afternoon. (The same time of day I was born.) She told me her name was Madge.