From Library Journal
On turning 50, Letty Cottin Pogrebin observed, "I stood on a fault line, feeling the world rearranging itself beneath my feet." For Flinders (literature, Berkeley), the shifting sands of 50 have less to do with beauty lost or opportunities missed than with as simple (and as nebulous) an issue as reconciling her own tensions between spirituality and feminism. A member of a northern California Hindu spiritual community for more than 20 years, she categorizes Western women as "cultural orphans...barely connected to a living ethnic tradition." Of her own emotional reconstructive work, Flinders claims closure and lobbies hard for American feminism to craft its own meaningful spiritualities and rituals outside the purview of traditional orthodoxies. Although her work is somewhat limited?by her own admission, it is personal and local in scope?spiritual questers and students of meditation will find a kindred spirit within. Recommended where interest is high.?Sandra Collins, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Lib.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Enduring Grace (1993) brought Flinders to the public eye as a writer on women in religion. Here she expands on her research on medieval women mystics, especially Julian of Norwich, who she feels were able to find spiritual truth within a patriarchal context. She also shares much of her own spiritual journey as a woman living in an American ashram dedicated to life in harmony with an Indian spiritual leader's teaching. Absorbingly written and very revealing, the book documents her struggle to reconcile her feminism and her spirituality. She defines four practices in which religion seems to encourage women to contradict feminism: silence, "self-naughting," redirecting desires, and enclosure. Oddly, she never asks whether there is a spirituality more suited to women, though she mentions goddess-honoring friends in passing. Many women for whom patriarchal religion remains central will be touched and intrigued by Flinders' intellectual struggle and will warm as well to her passion for both her subjects. Patricia Monaghan
Review
"Imagine that your enjoying that rarest of pleasures--a leisurely visit in the late afternoon with a dear friend, a visit where together you explore the subtle, hard-to-penetrate questions that you never before have put into words. Questions about what it means to be a woman on a spiritual path, about the path itself, about yourself as a woman. You feel yourself relax more deeply than you have in a long time. You sigh and put your feet up. And you smile with relief and gratitude that, finally, you have found your way to such a good, honest, engaged discussion.
"This is how I felt reading Flinders' book. Grateful. And full, and wanting to send copies to all my friends." -- -- Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D., coauthor of The Feminine Face of God
"From cover to cover, this work both evokes and challenges popular images of power-filled, feminine beings. The multi-hued voices at the root of Flinders' reflections are deeply nourishing." -- -- Rachel Bagby, J.D., vocal artist, activist and author
"Moving, warm, and very wise...tackles an issue central to women right now. Flinders sorts out the tangled strands of our longings and reweaves them into a vivid and glorious pattern. These are really difficult questions, delightfully and profoundly resolved." -- -- Margaret Miles, dean and vice president for academic affairs, Graduate Theological Union and author of Seeing and Believing and Reading For Life
"At the Root of this Longing is a compelling book that will be an important addition to the feminist section of your store." -- --New Age Retailer
"Carol Lee Flinders provides the rationale, the means, and the inspiration to create a balanced, essential life--one which responds to the urgings for a strong social voice that matters, and a contemplative solitude that lasts. She is the perfect witness and a wonderful writer." -- -- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run With Wolves, The Gift of Story, and The Faithful Gardener
From the Back Cover
Bestselling Author and Professor Explores the Paradox After living through the sixties and seventies in a spiritual community of work and service where meditative practices defined, nourished, and sustained her very being, Carol Lee Flinders experienced an awakening. She heard the clamoring bells of feminism and glimpsed its imminent clash with her spiritual practice. At The Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist Thirst is the memoir of her journey to understand what seemed to be irreconcilable. What does spirituality look like when it coexists with feminism's sharp critical faculties? And what does feminism do when it is steeped in spiritual perspectives? Author of the critically acclaimed Enduring Grace and co-author of the bestselling cookbook Laurel's Kitchen, Carol Lee Flinders has written a poignant and deeply moving memoir of her internal battle to find her way as a woman and a genuine spiritual seeker. "I feel as though I am looking at two distinct cultures, with two sets of values, for whom the same world could well have two different meanings." In At the Root of This Longing, Flinders identifies and explores four key points at which the path of spirituality and feminism collide: Vowing Silence vs. Finding Voice: How does one reconcile the spiritual practice of being silent and stilling the mind with the feminist practice of finding a voice and making oneself heard in the halls of oppressive institutions?
Relinquishing Ego vs. Establishing Self: How does one reconcile the spiritual discipline of putting oneself last and unseating the ego with the feminist call to "know who you are" and establish and live up to one's authentic identity?
Resisting Desire vs. Reclaiming the Body: How does one reconcile the spiritual practice of re-channeling one's desires and dis-identifying with one's senses with the feminist insistence on reclaiming the body and its desires from all those who objectify and demean it?
Enclosure vs. Freedom: How is one to reconcile the discipline of turning inward and disentangling oneself from external and public activity with the feminist discipline of moving freely and "taking back the streets"?
Flinders finds inspiration in the enrapturing metaphor of Draupadi--the beautiful, competent, and wise princes-goddess who was known to be extremely devout and proficient in the spiritual disciplines from the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata--who fell into a meditative dance causing her sari to endlessly unfurl as her aggressors attempted to harm her, to forge her conciliatory path. At the Root of This Longing is a fascinating chronicle of the "synchronicities" that Flinders finds on her inner pilgrimage. What she discovers is that, like some of the medieval women mystics such as Julian of Norwich and spiritual teachers such as Ghandi, is that there is a well of strength, courage, and creativity within that can be drawn from through spiritual practice. "We must be capable of speaking from real depths. To be truly and effectively open toward one another, women must find their way into a genuine, active interior life. Through prayer and meditation practiced in disciplined, systematic ways, women can ground themselves in the interior and exterior life-spirit, mind, and body." At the Root of This Longing re-focuses feminism over and against its traditional rejection of spirituality and finds its true strength as a resistance movement based in sacred. Carol Lee Flinders is co-author of the best-selling vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen and has written about food for newspapers and magazines for over twelve years. In 1993, she published the critically acclaimed Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. She is an adjunct professor of writing and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and son at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, located near Petaluma, California.
About the Author
Carol Lee Flinders, author of the highly acclaimed Enduring Grace and At the Root of This Longing and coauthor of the million-copy-bestselling Laurel's Kitchen, holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is a well-known speaker and teacher who has taught writing and mystical literature courses at the University of California, Berkeley.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Synchronicities
A few years ago, when I'd made the last revisions and double-checked thelast footnotes of a substantial writing project, I relaxed into a kind offallow spell. The timing was right, because my fiftieth birthday was bearingdown on me, and a measure of anxiety seemed to be congealing around thatfact--much more than I'd anticipated (one does brace oneself for this one)because I had every reason to be content with where things stood. Marriage,son, health, work, friends: everything was fine. I couldn't account forthe flutters I was feeling somewhere around my solar plexus.
Later on, I would learn that many women experience something very like whatI did that summer and fall. Some speak about it in terms of cleaning house,an almost reckless desire to simplify and streamline. For one friend knittingis more to the point: wanting to go back and pick up stitches that may havebeen dropped along the way. To me it felt like hitting a blank place onthe map--as if I'd come up over a rise and found myself looking out acrossa vast inland ocean nobody had told me was there. The flutters were real,but so was a certain exhilaration.
It's taken me some time to be comfortable using the term synchronicity,Jung's term for the curious way in which ordinary, external reality cansuddenly click into alignment with one's inner, archetypal world. When Ifirst heard of the phenomenon I thought I was being asked to believe synchronicitiesare planted in front of us by an unseen hand like clues in a cosmic scavengerhunt. This was way too anthropomorphic for my taste. But gradually I cameto understand that these events, or recognitions, have to do with somethingmystics have always tried to convey: that the knowledge and the truth andclarity we are seeking isn't "out there" at all, but deep inside.Certain insights want to break out into daylight, but we hold them down,fearing the kind of change that might take place if we knew them experientiallyand all at once. Down through time, we've evolved different methods by whichthey can emerge, in small, manageable doses. We throw the I Ching, we dealout tarot cards, we analyze our dreams, and through these fissures in ordinarylogic we can in effect nudge ourselves along--Self talking to self in aheavily coded language.
Perceptions of synchronicity work, I believe, in about the same way. Whena message wants to move from the unconscious to the conscious level, weexperience a kind of turbulence first, the flutters that signal disequilibrium.Finally, though, something in us manages to paint it across the very landscape,where we can't help but read it, and we draw from that reading the courageto strike out into the wilderness and make up our new maps as we go along.This was exactly what happened to me now. A beguiling little bit of synchronicitygave me the gentle shove I needed--and put me in touch with someone ideallysuited to keep me company.
I had been on good terms with Julian of Norwich for more than half my life.She was the subject of my doctoral dissertation and, more recently, oneof the subjects of the book I'd just written about women mystics. I'd rereadher Revelations at regular intervals, as much for their long, lovely, incantatoryrhythms as for as their utterly original content. I imagined she must havelooked like Vanessa Redgrave or Emma Thompson--enormously kind and serene,a composite of the best women friends I've ever had. I had never consciouslyinvoked Julian, but her anchorhold, dimly lit, with a fireplace at one endand a cat, was in my mind's eye a real place, and a safe place. . . .
Even though I'd written about Julian twice, I'd never given any thoughtto how old she'd been when she wrote her famous Sixteen Revelations of DivineLove. Now that fifty was not just a stray bit of biographical data, though,but a state of mind--and body--that I knew intimately, I wondered for thefirst time what Julian's experience had been. The version of the Revelationsthat she wrote when she was fifty is actually a rewrite. A much shorterversion was composed when she was thirty, soon after the experience it describes.Did Julian's decision to recast her story have anything to do with the floodtide of raw, creative energy I was just beginning to experience myself--alongwith sleepless nights, intense anxiety states, and rooms that seemed alwaysto be overheated? What an astonishing thought: that a fourteenth-centuryanchorite could have had a body as well as a soul, and a woman's body atthat, hormones coursing through it, wreaking their own kind of regular havocjust as they were in mine.
It intrigued me to reflect that when I'd written about Julian in EnduringGrace, I'd been almost as old as Julian herself was when she wrote her fullerrendering of the Revelations, but there was more. When I'd written aboutJulian the first time, I realized, in my dissertation, I'd been thirty,the same age she was when she wrote her first draft of the Revelations.Better still, I remembered that I'd actually filed the dissertation in thespring of 1973, exactly six hundred years after the actual showings.
As coincidences go, this was all pretty tame stuff. But long exposure tomedieval visionary writings gets one into the habit of treating even small"wrinkles in time" with respect, for throughout the Middle Ages,long before the term synchronicity was coined, the visible world was understoodto be crisscrossed with "the footprints of God."
