Group Discussion 1/19/2016
We noted the difference between the two articles. Sarah Coakley’s ‘Femininity’ and the Holy Spirit? was more of a systematic approach to figuring out whether we can find femininity in God given our current cultural contexts. Spirit Sophia by Elizabeth A. Johnson was more of a poetic reclamation of the Holy Spirit that she understands to be steeped in an intimacy, and thus an awareness of gender complexity that “does not restrict the range of the Spirit’s activity artificially to what are traditionally ‘feminine’ traits, experiences, and occupations, and [which] also…implicitly subordinate the Spirit to a Father who…remains as a ‘masculine’ stereotype with the theological upper hand.” Historically, femininity has been ascribed only to the Holy Spirit which makes it not only outside and other to God and Jesus, but more often than not a problematic minimization and/or trivialization of women, which in turn informs how we understand and enact gender relations. In light of a more holistic understanding that both Coakley and Johnson espouse, we talked about the similarity within the psychoanalytical field. Specifically, the Jungian theory of animus and anima: in the unconscious of a man, the unconscious finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of a woman it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus.
We talked about The Body Keeps the Score since the stark difference between a life giving understanding of the Spirit and a culturally disembodied Spirit was emphasized in it. Van Der Kolk talks about depersonalization and how it affects an individual by making the world appear “strangely diminished in size, at times flat. Sounds appear to come from a distance…The emotions likewise undergo marked alteration. Patients complain that they are capable of experiencing neither pain nor pleasure…They have become strangers to themselves.” Our current cultural theology encompasses a Holy Spirit that we have depersonalized to the extent that we feel neither pain nor pleasure in the ways the Spirit means us to in relation to each other, and the new life we are to bring about.
The residual question we had from all the aforementioned discussions centers on how to personalize femininity within the Holy Spirit without demystifying it too much.
