Women's Voices From Many Faiths, Cultures and Traditions

BY CHRIS BURDETT-PARR

This gem of a book offers prayers from a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions from women who often view prayer differently from men.

Review of Women Pray: Voices Through the Ages, From Many Faiths, Cultures, and Tradition Edited by and with introductions by Monica Furlong

Skylight Paths: 241 pp., $19.95

Women Pray is a little gem of a book, beautifully designed (the jacket incorporates images from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.) and comfortable to read thanks to a typeface that is very easy-on-the-eyes.

As the jacket indicates, "the prayers come from a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions East and West, including medieval Christian mystics, ancient Greeks, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Jewish poets, and Buddhist nuns."

Monica Furlong is an author and journalist living in my hometown, London, England, and has written a warm, informative introduction to this lovely little book.

She discusses how:

God has been many things to many people – the sun, the moon, dancing energy, life force, creator, king, judge, lawgiver, father, mother, the earth itself – as well as being manifested in animal form. To those peoples suffering terrible forms of oppression, God has been a witness at a time when they had no other.

However, she asks, “what is it about women’s prayers that make them need a book to themselves?” I found a particular part of her explanation to be a sad description of women’s voices silenced:

In most religious cultures throughout history, for a complex variety of reasons, women have been silent. In Christianity, the advice of St. Paul to the Corinthian congregation in the middle of the first century – “that women should be silent in the churches” was observed with an unquestioning precision so that up until the 1960’s, and much later in some cases, women did not preach in churches, or, often enough, read or sing in choirs.

(There were exceptions to this. The Shakers were led by a woman, Ann Lee; the early Methodists allowed women to speak in public and to take services; and the Society of Friends has always allowed an exceptional role to women.) The enforced silence of women was especially tragic, since increasing evidence shows that it was not like that at the beginning of Christianity.

Women played a key part in establishing the early Christian churches, and as the story of Perpetua reveals, were prepared to suffer as martyrs alongside the men and to be vocal about their reasons. But as so often happens, a sense of propriety killed the early liberation; the early churches, eager to acquire adherents, worried about "what people might think."

However, she also states:

I do not think it helps for modern women to view the past as a kind of male conspiracy to keep women down, because the blindness around the assumptions were so universal, among women as well as men, that almost no one, women or men, saw through them until before the enlightenment brought them into question.

I recommend this enlightening, and sometimes surprising, book as a wonderful little window into women's spirituality throughout history.