BISFT – A Tribute

When the Britain and Ireland School of Feminist Theology (BISFT) started, I was in a failing marriage, caring for an ailing mother and a dying mother-in-law and bringing up two relatively young children. I was trying to reconcile these roles with what a girls’ grammar school, a university honours degree in music and my profession before bearing children of Head of Music in a girls’ grammar school with its two orchestras, four choirs, five folk groups and regular BBC performances had prepared me for. I did not know then that I was experiencing what many women of my generation were experiencing – how we could reconcile the role models given to us by our education and pre-marriage roles with our roles as wives, carers and mothers. There appeared to be nobody to help us, as marriage kept us apart from one another in separated homes and so-called nuclear families.

I was a cradle Anglican with a deeply religious mother and a faith that I had gradually taken and adapted to my own needs. Religion had always been very important in my life with an altar in my childhood bedroom and an important practice of personal prayer. I was aware from my earliest childhood of a call to the priesthood but then it was never even on the horizon. I asked a lot of questions as a child; I was thirsty to understand the big theological concepts – all of which seemed to end in ‘tion’, like salvation, redemption, creation; but I was banned from asking questions in my confirmation class. In the lecture halls of the music department of Oxford University I sat next to numerous products of cathedral choir schools – all, of course, male. How I lamented the fact that these schools were never open to me. How I would have enjoyed the incredible spaces, the beautiful recitation of the Psalms daily, the poetry of the language and the drama and dignity of the ritual! How much better prepared for the Oxford University music course I would have been if that had been my experience! I was a good singer and could see no good reason for my disenfranchisement. Nobody offered me any. It was simply the way the world was.

The result of these dilemmas was serious mental health problems. My faith became important in handling my depression, particularly when Transcendental Meditation was added to the prayer patterns of my youth. Psychiatric medicine could offer nothing more than a succession of pills to quell my righteous anger and strategies to put me in the place offered by the misogynistic Freud. In one of my hospitalizations, one well-meaning psychiatric nurse offered me the following piece of enculturated wisdom: ‘You have a husband and two children, what more do you want?’ Another therapist lamented the fact that he could not make me ‘normal.’Over and over again I was pushed back into the position carved out by male psychiatrists, some of whom would have studied alongside me at Oxford.

During these hospitalizations I spent a great deal of time alone. When my contemplative practice and reading of Julian of Norwich produced what might have been helpful visionary experiences, these were considered to be part of the illness rather than the cure – both by a psychotherapist who declared that she had not yet read Jung on religion and even by a priest. They were on a par with the suicidal impulses. Most of the area of female intuition was placed in the zone of madness. When I organized a music evening that included many patients playing and singing and was enjoyed by all, I was given more tranquillizers rather than a suggestion to develop my community music-making skills. I absorbed effectively the damaging maternal archetype of the women-fearing Jung that has persecuted good enough mothers for a century; the result was that even when I rediscovered my adolescent composing ability in a set of piano pieces based on Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, I came out of hospital determined be an even better mother and wife – to be a proper woman – rather than explore my talents beyond the home. There appeared to be no way out of the cages that the society had constructed and psychiatric medicine reinforced; I could not even see the entrapment in which I was caught.

To be fair to my encounter with mental health services, one good suggestion was that I had two hours a week away from caring to write and a priest/therapist did support my long and difficult journey to a professorship and ordination.

I had scarcely been aware of feminism, which had not formed any part of the curriculum at Oxford; although it had entered my consciousness through the National Housewives Register, I had not identified my increasing problems with the issues addressed by many feminist thinkers. Even when later I embarked on a part-time PhD on children as improvisers and composers, feminist thought was not part of the academic agenda, except in the final chapter in which I included a comment that someone should write Women and Their Symbols to balance Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In fact, I had an ambivalent relationship to what I knew of feminism, as I struggled to be a traditional wife and mother, following the tradition of my own mother who always declared proudly that she had given her life to me. If only I had met Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique! In fact, I did eventually meet Jean Baker Miller’s Towards a Psychology of Women, which I found in a charity bookshop; that was the first feminist text that I encountered. I still remember the sense of exaltation that it engendered. I could not put it down.

But my sustained nourishment from feminism came through the interconnected networks of feminist theology in BISFT, Catholic Women’s Network and Women in Theology. My regular encounters with the finest scholars through BISFT shifted my depression into a righteous anger concerning the place of women in our society and societies in general. I began to see the nature of the prison into which an unhealthy combination of religion and culture had placed me. I found new companions on my journey of liberation – women who shared my questions and had begun formulating at least some answers. Theologians, like Mary Grey and Lisa Isherwood, and good friends, like Myra Poole and Ianthe Pratt, stood by me while the marriage crumbled and I reworked a model of womanhood which was not entirely made up of caring and nurturing others. At last I had people who could help me make sense of my dilemmas, to whom I could explain the problems and who could help me make a meaning from them that was not a deep sense of guilt and failure. I even spent some time at the heart of liberation theology in the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, largely as a result of my contacts in these circles.

A nurturing God intimately bound up with humankind and the natural world and issues of justice entered my consciousness. Women leaped out of familiar biblical narratives which had hidden them. The Bible was now subjected to a hermeneutics of suspicion and its role in my sense of persecution became clearer. I had already realized God’s involvement with racial justice in Notting Hill in the 1960s where I worked post the race riots; but justice for women had not emerged out of my time working there in the late 1960s. I was excited and stimulated by feminist liberation theology. I started writing hymns, knowing that this was a way of getting the ideas of the feminist theologians better known. It was like a dam being unblocked, starting at the point when the prescriptions of psychiatry ended; BISFT gave me both material and opportunity for my hymn writing. I started by versifying Celtic texts and moved to complete hymns like We shall go out for Nicola Slee’s service in Southwark Cathedral concerning silenced women’s voices. Strong women emerged from the hiddenness of the Middle Ages, like Hildegard of Bingen, to provide me with a role model for a composer and director. I started singing her music and writing about her. I founded the Hildegard Network.

I embarked on a new journey into the heart of God. It was to include a variety of religious traditions especially the more shamanistic ones that had helped me to escape from the clutches of the toxins of the pharmaceutical industry. Celtic Christianity opened up the possibility of easy relations with paganism. Religion could be inclusive. It could include goddesses as well as God and I examined the role of Mary as the feminine in God. It could treat other traditions with respect and I drew on many of them to enrich my Christian roots. The journey was to be rich and fruitful, opening areas of myself that I had never known, exploring the difficult area of the motherhood of God, writing and creating new liturgies and eventually becoming a priest – the vocation I had longed to be fulfilled all my life. Now the ideas from these sources flow through my sermons and the hymns, that I now write, often on a monthly basis. Over three hundred now exist, many in print and widely used. Time and time again women come up to me and say that they have been thinking these things all their life and had always thought they were wrong. I am so glad as women begin to see their ideas – borne out of their rich experience – validated and affirmed.

Thank you, BISFT for your role in this journey. Thank you, all my BISFT friends. I remember dancing high on the Welsh cliffs. I remember the gathering singing my hymn to our foremothers and taking off their scarves and waving them like a football crowd while sitting on barstools. I remember doing some of the one woman performances for the first time at BISFT conferences, especially Juggling – A Question of Identity which sets out some of the dilemmas. I remember being invited to give my first theological keynote lecture on Unconventional Wisdom. I remember long intense discussions over coffee and wine late into the night. I recall them all and shall carry on doing so with gratitude for the re-membering of me that they initiated…