Springs of Water in a Dry Land.

Spiritual Survival for Catholic Women Today

Mary Jo Weaver

Beacon Press, $22, 133 pp.

Mary Jo Weaver's Springs of Water in a Dry Land addresses a problem the author has wrestled with for years: "how to respond constructively to the anguish of Catholic women who can no longer define themselves in traditional terms but who cannot bring themselves to leave their church behind."

Weaver's New Catholic Women, published in 1985, analyzed the contemporary U.S. Catholic women's movement with insight and skill. In it Weaver responded to the tension between "religious studies professionals...not prepared to take feminists seriously" and "feminists...all too eager to dismiss religious belief and practice not related to the Goddess as irrelevant or pernicious." Is there for "new Catholic women" unwilling to bear the constraints of a patriarchal church a source of nourishment in the tradition of this church? Must they either leave the church on their own terms or stay in on others' terms? Should the question be framed as this either/or dilemma, or is there another way of defining the experience and the religious decisions of Catholic feminists?

Weaver's own spiritual life, as she describes it, is "full of apparent contradictions, nourished both by feminist criticism of Catholic Christian tradition and by the tradition's spiritual classics." Stubbornly rooted in history, historical evidence, and historical consciousness, Weaver always returns to her love of the Western classical Christian tradition, particularly Augustine, Dante, and Teresa of Avila. "Whenever I search for God in the modern world," she confesses, "I end up in the medieval world."

The problem, for Weaver and for the women for whom and to whom she speaks, is that the Catholic church has ceased to foster quiet communion with the divine Presence. The image of spiritual homelessness pervades Weaver's first chapter. The images and metaphors she finds in the tradition and uses in her theological and spiritual work are spatial--homelessness, journey, desert, quest. "We suffer," she writes, "because we try to fit our spiritual aspirations into a space that is more restrictive and less magnificent than we know to be true."

Springs is a loosely knit collection of six essays written over a period of half a dozen years. The essays include analyses of the Grail movement in its fiftieth year in the United States and of the neopagan Goddess movement, two chapters on spirituality, an examination of feminist spirituality's relationship to process theology, and a version of a speech Weaver gave in 1985 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the first U.S. conference on the ordination of women.

This chapter, though it offers no new information to readers familiar with the women's ordination and Women-Church movements, is the most institutionally provocative. Women, Weaver writes, have no hope of being ordained "in the Catholic church as we know it today .... It is time," she adds "to stop dreaming that 'they' will do something for us or that the priest shortage will work on women's behalf." Nor does Weaver believe women ought to be ordained into the priesthood as it currently exists in the Roman Catholic church; this would, she argues, be good neither for the women nor for the People of God, who need to work for a much deeper transformation of institution.

Weaver does not mince her words. "First of all," she warns, "we must refuse to shore up the patriarchal church. We must let the old system die .... It is time to quit fooling ourselves about our 'ministry' when it means we are permitted to do the work but have no power to change things. It is time to quit being 'Father's helper' in a church that considers women unfit to celebrate the Eucharist." Like other theologians identified with Women-Church, Weaver encourages women to "minister on their own terms" and to celebrate the Eucharist openly "as part of their heritage within Catholicism." Quoting Rosemary Ruerher's words at the ordination conference, Weaver calls Catholics, and especially Catholic women, to, "demystify the power of the priesthood," locating sacramental power in the believing community. Weaver addresses her remarks not only to women who experience a call to the ordained ministry, but to the many more for whom church has become an experience of cognitive dissonance, who have come to a point "where the old system does not make sense any more."

Weaver refuses to accept the popular dichotomy between leaving the church on one's own terms or staying on others' terms. Many Catholic women today--especially those identified with Women-Church--stay on their own terms, claiming the center rather than assenting to a definition of their position as "marginal." They--and Weaver--are quick to stress the distinction between abandoning patriarchy and leaving the church.

"The Catholic church, including those who seek ordination, must refuse to abide by the current limitations of that church while actively celebrating the mysteries made available to us from the tradition," Weaver writes. "If the Roman Catholic church will not 'grant' ordination to women, then perhaps they have to find their own ways to respond to God's invitation by courageous acts and dating refusals." Underlying Weaver's call to "courageous acts and dating refusals" is her belief in "a divine being whose modus operandi is disturbing the peace and calling us to new life."

Weaver also urges women called to ordination to place their gifts at the service of the growing number of Catholic women who no longer find spiritual sustenance in their parishes but identify themselves as Catholics and hunger for the sacramental life. Weaver does not address the relationship between Catholic women and the men who are their allies and peers, nor what the options are for women who reject patriarchy yet are committed to living and worshiping with communities of both women and men.

"Who is the Goddess and Where Does She Get Us?" is Weaver's strongest chapter. "Neopaganism and Utopian Poetics" is the most valuable from a scholarly perspective; and helpful in much the same way as New Catholic Women. After summarizing the history of the Goddess movement and Goddess scholarship of the past two decades, Weaver asks a series of questions about the relationship between text-based, historical traditions and movements based on nonliterate sources and utopian visions, on the nature and use of the male God symbol, and on the role of personal autobiography in one's choices about religious authority. Her essay, based on a decision to treat neopaganism "with the same kind of reverent attention I brought to any other spiritual reality," is a helpful corrective for those who either dismiss or hastily condemn the Goddess movement and the current, even broader neopagan revival.

Springs of Water has serious structural problems. There is overlap and repetition among the essays, and even within the essays themselves, giving the reader the impression of a hastily constructed book and the sense that Weaver was not well served by her editors. Many of the points Weaver makes late in the book would be more helpful early on; she waits till the third to last page to point out the diversity of Catholic women's religious autobiographies and the impossibility of speaking of "a spirituality of Catholic women."The "act of faith" of Weaver's final essay could have had a stronger impact if placed frankly at the beginning of the book with other reflections locating Weaver's spiritual and ecclesial experience, followed by an assessment of Catholic women's experiences and by Weaver's historical and theological assessment. Or Weaver might have begun the book with an image she uses in the epilogue, the story of the small nuns' chapel tucked away in a coruer of a large seminary, and moved from there into using many of the spatial metaphors she favors.

Springs is a hybrid book unsure of its own identity, part intellectual analysis, part loosely connected personal reflections, not quite a spiritual handbook. It serves as a window into one theologian's heart and mind, but not as the comprehensive resource suggested by its title. Weaver's yearning, her struggle toward hope, and her intellectual honesty add warmth and depth to her academic analysis and prosaic language. The reader emerges full of respect for the author, but disappointed in the book.