|
|
Bringing women into a broad space to liberate feminine spirituality
The patriarchal domination of women's faith in conservative contexts has disempowered women's significant faith-experience through limiting ways of knowing God to ways of encountering God that are personally engaging in a masculinised paradigm. Such limitations stifled the validation of women's self-actuated faith.
The aim of this study is to hear the stories of Australian women
about their experience of faith throughout their life journeys and to
hear authentic recounting of the value of a spiritual direction space
enabling a feminine spirituality to emerge. The social narrative
research methodology which is used in this study is intentionally
open-ended, using a feminist research approach based on relationship and
story-telling. Each narrative is analysed through looking at early
religious experiences, life chaos events, growing spiritual awarenesses
or shifts and the role of spiritual direction within that story.
The validation of feminine ways of engaging faith is found to be
facilitated by characteristics of the spiritual direction process and
the outcomes consistently reported are of reclaiming personal identity
and faith agency, each contributing to a maturing spirituality profile. A
theory of spirituality which is dynamic and evolving within life's
contexts, and which connects with the sense of inner authority for one's
relationship with the divine, benefits from the openness of the
spiritual direction space. Participants believe such support liberates
from expectations of the rightness or acceptability of relationship with
God imposed by an externalised framework. Personal truth emerges from
within through expanding an interiority freed of the fears and
constraints of former religious patterning.
Beth Roberton is the Dean of Studies of the Vocational Graduate
Diploma in Spiritual Direction, Dayspring, Western Australia.
|
|
