These excerpts from a presentation Lucile made at the UUA General Assembly on June 17, 1980 include comments she made about the three periods of her life. She ends her presentation with a vision of how she would create a montage with the names and statements of many women who have brought special insights to her as she sought to recover her childhood spirit.
(LF) Context: This presentation took place three years following the passage of the W & R Resolution. At that time, women were encouraging one another to engage in life reviews and share what they had discovered. By listening to each another and reflecting together, women were beginning to feel their own sense of agency. This process helped many to grasp where and how they wished to make changes in their lives, often going in new directions. Remember, this was when opportunities and alternatives in life style and career for women were still in the beginning stages of emerging.
TEXT OF THE ROOT OF LUCILE’S FEMINIST THEOLOGY
The Root of My Feminist Theology
Lucile says:
“I was a child of the soil who often wandered alone in the woodland, amidst the growing grain, comfortable with solitude. A sense of euphoria comes over me as I see her in my mind’s eye and relive her yearning to be intertwined in the forces of life. She was, as I believe each small child potentially is, a feminist. She cares for all of life – for the cosmos as she perceived it.
“Her spirit is still mine! It is the root, the essence, of my being in spite of the suffocation that that spirit suffered over the years from the swaddling – the wrapping, wrapping – that encased my sense of self as I accepted more and more of society’s prescriptions for being a woman in our culture.”
She then reviews several developments in her life:
“In the early 70s although I didn’t then perceive what I was doing, I began tearing apart the shroud of life – long acculturation, unwrapping the cocoon of patriarchal perceptions in which my whole understanding and my sense-of-self had become so tightly ensnared. I began reaching for, nourishing and now passionately developing the self of my childhood.”
She ends with a poetic vision of a montage she would create that contained the contributions of her sisters in the Feminist Spirituality community, thanking all the women who by their presence and participation supported her own spiritual growth.