The Secret Life of Bees has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for a read for almost two years. Last summer, I was lucky enough to be able to work on a project that recouped the month’s salary I lost by changing teaching jobs, and reading time was at a minimum. Now The Mermaid Chair waits beside The Secret Life of Bees on the bookshelf. It wasn’t these best sellers that would draw me first to Sue Monk Kidd. It was Dance of the Dissident Daughter instead.
Dance of the Dissident Daughter relates Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual journey transcending her Southern Baptist roots in a denomination that is an increasingly patriarchal expression of the Christian faith. She struggled beyond a conception of God which was too, too small (”two men and a bird,” as a nun once phrased it to her), serving more to exclude women and many others besides rather than to embrace them. (Let’s just get this out of the way - I find “conservative Christianity,” fundamentalist in its leanings, to be a travesty of what I know of the divine. It is patriarchal puppeteering of the most dangerous sort.) Hers became an explicit quest for the divine feminine.
In my kitchen window, a beautiful white coral sits on the sill. It is real coral, not an imitation. It belonged to my grandmother and was harvested many decades ago. I have seen a living coral reef caressed by currents, home to iridescent fish. But this coral is brittle, partly broken. I piece it delicately together and remember what it must have been. It is skeleton now rather than living organism - calcified. Like my coral, living faiths calcify in the hands of those who would tear them out of context for their own purposes. Humanity has always preferred a set of laws that reduce essential matters of the heart to more manageable matters of verifiable outward compliance, making it easy to say “We’re in” and “You’re out” and “Scripture means what we say it means, so we should run the world.” Meanwhile the simple, eternal, transformative laws that were meant to be written in the heart are out the window, ignored, subjugated to bits of text extracted from context, such that the face of God is distorted and even transmogrified beyond recognition.
People calcify, too. As I turned the pages of Dissident Daughter, I was impressed to see that Sandy Kidd, Sue’s husband, was able to accommodate her journey, stressful though the changes were.
The parallels between Sue Monk Kidd’s story and mine are compelling, and reading Dissident Daughter was, at points, cathartic for me. By that I mean that I’d be reading along, and then there would be a gasp, and tears - even yet, five years after I took leave of the first half of my life. I felt connection to her, even the need of conversation.
My friend E and I almost missed the Kentucky Author Forum when April 6 rolled around. The day had been difficult on the teenager front, and I needed some time to rebound, the teenagers being mine. An hour before the program was to begin some 35 miles away through rush hour traffic, we decided to try to go after all. There was no time to worry about what to wear; there was just time to change out of jeans and hop in the car. We (I) nearly gave it up and turned back several times, knowing we’d never make the 6:00 p.m. start time, but finally I said, “If we’re not supposed to go, they’ll have to turn us away at the door.” Then we were there, and they didn’t turn us away at the door, though we must have been 10 minutes late. The forum host was just beginning his introductory remarks when we were seated.
The conversation between Sue Monk Kidd and interviewer Jean Shinoda Bolen was inspired, and the stage hand intent upon waving “Time’s up” could not begin to get Bolen’s attention when the hour had passed. Audience and speakers could have gone on for another hour easily. Afterward, we found our way to a reception preceding the dinner for which I had irrationally paid beaucoup bucks, and there I had a chance to speak to Sue Monk Kidd for a few minutes. I told her how her book had affected me, shared enough of my story to illuminate why Dissident Daughter had meant so much, and thanked her. She was warm, engaged, gracious, and real. I wanted to hug her.
Our $100 dinner tickets admitted us to an encounter with Louisville society quite beyond my modest station in life. The result was a fleeting glimpse into another world, though not one I especially hanker to join. But the after-dinner remarks were worth the wait, and when we left, we knew we hadn’t missed a thing. Once or twice, before dinner conversation got underway, I glanced toward the front table to see Sue Monk Kidd looking my way, as if in thought. Any heart’s hope is a bold and presumptuous thing. That said, I hope we share another, more substantial conversation someday. I suppose we will, in any case, for reading is, at its best, compelling conversation.
