Ideas Fly but They Aren’t Fleshed Out

In this age of smorgasbord religion, spiritual journeying can produce seeker’s fatigue, born of constant searching goaded by the promise that just beyond the next avatar lies peace. Joan Borysenko writes of her own exhaustion after having sought meaning at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, in an ashram in India, in sweat lodges and goddess rituals and on the spiritual circuit where she’d been a speaker for years.

“A Woman’s Journey to God” promises to address both this central problem of the age, this “Waring blender spirituality,” and the struggles feminists face within the patriarchal structures of religious institutions. The two are related: Were it not for an often rigid patriarchy, women would not be seeking with such desperation and determination.

Borysenko writes very well of the bad choices with which women are often faced: to suffer the misogyny of traditional faiths, or to wander rootlessly, mourning the loss of community, tasting “a little of this and a little of that.” The women in her book have often left traditional faiths out of justified anger and have found brief solace with each other at workshops or retreats. Although Borysenko offers ideas for new rituals, prayers and healing ceremonies, her book is too often itself like a smorgasbord, a tantalizing array of foods that don’t make a meal, a Waring blender of ideas that simply whirl around.

The ground of “A Woman’s Journey” is complex and delicate and needs careful sorting out, and Borysenko’s discussion provokes several fundamental questions, which she regrettably doesn’t ask or answer. Simply put: After 30 years of feminism, is there still a gap between women and institutions of faith? Clearly the answer is yes. There are still more men in leadership in most churches and faith communities (though that gap is closing); there are still masculine references used to name and address God; there are still patriarchal assumptions made in theology, religious studies and parish life; and there is still scant attention paid to women’s voices and needs. But this is where things get tricky.

How do you close that gap without landing yourself in the temporal world of everyday modern culture? If you dump the entire heritage of any present-day religion because it reeks of patriarchy (not to mention racism, anti-Semitism, anti-sexuality) and opt for something new, you risk losing all the hard-won wisdom of thousands of years of human practice--the canons, the dogma, the prayers--the expressions of faith that people have passed down through the centuries to help transform their lives.

When women choose to leave religious traditions for newer self-created paths, as Borysenko seems to favor, the risk is great that they will go no further than the feel-good philosophies of today that only promote a reinvention of the self. Morality, ethics and the discipline of religious tradition will be casualties. As Heda Kovly writes in “Under a Cruel Star,” her memoir of the aftermath of the Holocaust, “ . . . good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort . . . “

Finally, by laying out so many individual paths to faith, Borysenko seems to discount the role community plays in the religious experience. In community--the synagogues and churches, temples and mosques where men and women together travel toward God--we have the chance to become what Philip Turner called “more than a lonely crowd in search of private ends.” And it is in community that scripture--be it from the Bible or the Koran--begins to make sense; it makes sense when it is being newly lived out, newly incarnated. Separated from community, religious stories--be they goddess myths, Native American tales or a parable from the Gospels--often appear bizarre, unrelated to life as it is lived now.

Nor does “A Woman’s Journey” pay enough attention to the reforms women have brought to religious institutions in the last 30 years: the ordination of women clergy in Protestant denominations, Judaism and Anglican Catholicism; inclusive language in prayer and ritual, changing leadership roles and empowerment of laypeople. While Borysenko mentions the work of theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza at Harvard, there are many more women scholars working today on everything from the roles of women in early Christianity to combining liberation and feminist theologies. Reforms are slow, less dramatic than the freedom of leaving altogether, and may neglect the needs of the moment, but they have the advantage of saving the baby with the bathwater.

Women live in interesting times. We are likely to wrestle with the patriarchs for some time to come. Our paths to God will look more like trailblazing. These and many other ideas fly about in “A Woman’s Path to God.” It’s too bad they are not clarified or fleshed out.

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Nora Gallagher is the author of the memoir “Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.”