The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion.

China Galland. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. 344pp. $24.95 (cloth).

I came by chance across China Galland's earlier book, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. I was waiting for this one. It carries forward the original and adventurous spiritual search of the engaging narrator of the earlier volume, seeking the divine feminine in exotic places out of her own deep need. This journey is similar, but an added connection develops during the pilgrimage. The narrator now counterpoints her stories of Durga, Kali, Tara, and Latin American Black Madonnas with portraits of living women who show similarly fierce compassion. She has come to see that the myths of a fierce, compassionate, feminine divine call out to those of us who fear for the world today. The mythic potential and the social reality of women's existence are beautifully intertwined and mutually enriching in The Bond Between Women; Galland's personal spiritual search is constantly broken open by the sufferings of real people and women who try to alleviate them.

The author takes us to crowded festivals in Nepal Calcutta, and Rio, celebrating the compassionate goddesses whose tales she intersperses with her physical travels to their shrines. We learn a great deal about Hinduism, Buddhism, and the social reality of several Asian countries - Galland is careful and reliable in mediating such information - but we are hardly aware that we are learning. Because she uses the present tense, the reader seems to move with her in scenes filled with sensory description: first of the ceremony and believers who reenact Durga's riding of the lion and killing of the Buffalo demon; next, we are beside Galland as she mops the floor at Mother Teresa's house for the Elderly in Nepal where the sisters tell her just to serve - understanding will follow. We attend the festival of Kali in Calcutta, again among frantic crowds, watch the sacrifice of a ritual goat, and touch the tongue and feet of the fierce dark goddess of the wild, the disorderly, and all that has been rejected. We bathe in the Ganges with the women who have come to cleanse themselves there before sunrise during the holy month for women. And along the way, we discover the precious quality of water, learn that the river is the goddess Ganga, and hear of women who have joined together in the heroic task of cleaning it. I remember Raimon Panikkar's laughing remark that the Ganges is clearly a holy river or the filth in it would have killed millions by now. Here and elsewhere on her journey, Galland discovers that "the divine feminine needs our hands, our eyes, our hearts too."

Shocked by the tales she hears of the frequent sale of young Nepalese girls into prostitution by their parents, she goes to visit a local woman doctor who is fighting the practice against great odds. Throughout the book we meet other such women and participate in their actions. In Rio we encounter a middle-class woman who has singlehandedly taken on the task of educating street children in a school built under a freeway. Volunteer help comes and the improbable effort thrives. Because she includes the names and addresses of many of the small groups she visits in the back of her book, Galland makes it possible for her readers to help as well.

In Argentina Laura Bonaparte recounts the kidnapping and brutal killing of seven of her family members. Somehow she managed to transform her personal losses into a fierce hunger for global justice. When she and Galland walk on the Plaza de Mayo with the Mothers of the Disappeared, we hear other tales of horror as well; worst of all, we come to realize that many still believe there troublemaking women are making them up.

Galland gained strength to endure these heartbreaking revelations through participation in the crowded, enthusiastic ritual that accompanied the feast day of Our Lady of Aparecida in Rio just before she left. She, and we, learn that we must not turn away from suffering. This black Virgin of the Excluded, patron saint of Brazil, "champions all that is left out and also symbolizes what must be included now." The ritual in the cathedral included the truly excluded; drug addicts, prostitutes, unwed mothers, the very old and very poor.

The Bond Between Women is a book in which the ideas are not imposed; they explode out of the observations and encounters in the narrative itself. Highly original, credible, and surprisingly inspiring, it will be valuable for men as well as women. Galland tell us that "the 'feminine' is ultimately a metaphor for that aspect of being human which has been considered weaker, inferior: a metaphor for the other-than-rational, the feeling, the emotive side of experience which men have as well."

And the pilgrimage, though not quite the personal, spiritual journey she intended, has a healing effect on the teller of the tale. She has unpretentiously woven the subtext of her own early abuse into this story. In a moving culmination, her continuing efforts to deal with those responsible for it are finally joined by her mother. Back home in San Francisco at the end, with such support, Galland is able to see the fierce compassion of the goddesses she sought in Asia in the people feeding the poor on the sidewalk and in the women dancing in the street. It has been a transformative search, and one that provides credible evidence for her chief insight: that when the wounds between women are healed, we can heal both natural and social ills.

SALLY CUNNEEN