Recovering Feminine Spirituality

Evangeline Rand is a psychologist with extensive experience in treating survivors of abuse; she is also a renowned scholar of the feminine imagination. Bringing together these two arms for a powerful embrace, Recovering Feminine Spirituality, is a book to heal the starved Christian soul of either sex. Many have diagnosed the patriarchal biases of the dominant Christian narratives of Western modernity. Rand's work is, by contrast, something much more vital, more alive. Recovering Feminine Spirituality is an act of restitution, of symbol building. To read this book is to be immersed in rich language of the feminine mysteries; of the female body as sexual, maternal, corporeal. Above all, this book shows the feminine as fertile in the dual sense of psychic and physical birthing. Rand's quest here is to rejoin psyche and body in our cultural being. Her aim is to restore by re-storying the core myths of consciousness; those we need to make us whole and are still deeply relevant to the hungry psyche of both women and men. So Recovering Feminine Spirituality demonstrates the psychological function of ancient myths and mysteries of the feminine such as those dedicated to Demeter at Eleusis. It also carves out a renewed space for feminine ways of understanding the living cultivation of the embodied soul. For what Rand is deeply aware of is the loss of the sacred as received through knowing the earth as divine mother. Earth mother consciousness is necessarily about the body as a source of the sacred, not an alternative to it. Given that the Earth mother gives birth to both women and men from her divine fertility, her base mode of connectivity means that she is prior to the division between the genders. Looking for the goddess in the interstices of patriarchal modernity is an attempt to redeem the body for both women and men. Recovering Feminine Spirituality particularly shows us why the huge work of re-balancing the symbolic imagination is so vital to the lives of women today. One of the great strengths of the book is the weaving of therapeutic material and scholarship of religion and symbolism. Women suffer through their bodies by being born into a culture that does not value female corporeality. Whether through sexual abuse, or by being ignored and/ or ridiculed for not serving the patriarchal fashioning of desire, women come to in search of their eco-pyshcological wholeness both individually and culturally. Such women, and colleagual men are on the frontline of the deep need to restructure the symbolic systems we live by. Rand's work here is for these women and for us, her readers. To engage with Recovering Feminine Spirituality is to become part of an important movement of cultural renewal. As with all the best poetry, Evangeline Rand makes words that animate body and psyche, together. I strongly recommend this book.
Susan Rowland, Ph.D., Chair of Engaged Humanities & the Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA Evangeline Rand, Ph.D., Edmonton, Alberta
Today, 2015, as the book is to be re-born I see that it is about the reclamation of 'home' not as a place burdened with exorbitant costs and branded items. Rather, home is re-conceived as a well curated safe harbour of treasured tools and artefacts, a place of time honoured, ritual ways of 'repairing' and 're-using'. This safe harbour is where we actually use our hands, 'manifesting', and making ourselves. This is a place where creations of prayer and beauty can flourish, where humanity is nourished on the immanent grace of 'bread and wine', where we can experience matters of life and the vitalities of matter. This is at the heart of a Recovering Feminine Spirituality.