|
|
|
by Erin ORiordan
Romance, 8 pages.
Originally Published in The Erotic Woman, 2007
(1) Rate this Story This essay is a romance. It’s the story of one woman in search of her soul and the two books she loved, even though they were from opposite sides of the literary tracks.
Synchronicity, Carl Jung said, is the appearance of inner archetypes in the outer world. I wonder if Jung ever considered the appearance of inner books in the outside world.
I’m a woman with issues. A few months ago, I decided to tackle those issues head-on and embark upon a Twelve-Step journey. Step One, admitting I was powerless over alcohol (among other things) and that my life had become unmanageable, was easy enough. Step Two, coming to believe that a Power greater than me could restore me to sanity, was a problem. I dropped out of organized religion at seventeen. The twelve years subsequent to that hadn’t changed anything. I’m still too feminist and not literal-minded enough to swallow any of the traditional patriarchal religions whole. Clearly I had issues, though, and at the moment, the Twelve-Step program was the only thing offering me serenity in my life. Which meant that I had to try to accept the program on its own spiritual terms.
Searching for some spiritual guidance, I browsed the religious book section of my local library. I wasn’t looking to be converted. I just wanted something that would help me reach out to that Power who could restore me to sanity. At the same time, I needed a book that would embrace all of my multiethnic, polyreligious heritage: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Pagan.
Maybe I thought such a book into being. Either way, there it sat on my library’s shelf: Joan Borysenko’s A Woman’s Journey to God: Finding the Feminine Path. A woman’s journey, not a man’s religion. Not patriarchy, but a feminine path. I don’t know what else to call it but synchronicity.
I already admired Joan Borysenko, having read her A Woman’s Book of Life (The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle) in college. But this isn’t a review of A Woman’s Journey to God. I can never stick to reading one book at a time, anyway.
My second book at the time was something I’d picked up purely for pleasure reading. As a general rule, I’m not a reader of romance novels. In fact, I think I’ve avoided them most of my life because they reminded me of my mother. And frankly, Mom and I have issues. But, as I followed my Twelve Step path, Mom and I slowly started to resolve some of our differences. For the first time in my life, I let her recommend books to me. Reading the same books at the same time gave us something fun to talk about and created a bond between us. She started me off with The Da Vinci Code. Then we were on to romance novels.
Mom, it turned out, wasn’t into your garden-variety boy-meets-girl story. She was immersed in the paranormal romance genre. According to Meg Chittenden, a novelist who wrote on the subject of paranormal romance for The Writer, books with “woo woo” elements have been gaining popularity since the rise of films like The Sixth Sense and the Harry Potter series. My mother prefers novels in which the male protagonist is a vampire. She’s particularly fond of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series.
After reading six volumes of Sookie’s vampire/maenad/ werewolf/witch/fairy troubles, I departed from Mom’s reading list and branched out on my own. Book addict that I am, I belong to several mail-order book clubs, including Doubleday. In one of their many mailings I came across a flyer for several supernatural romances, including one called Wolf Tales by Kate Douglas. It came with an “explicit sex” warning, something for which Charlaine Harris’s books don’t quite qualify. Intrigued, I logged on to Doubleday’s member website to see what other readers were saying.
“I bought this book thinking it would be a good paranormal romance,” wrote a Doubleday reader named Donna S. “I did not expect male/male action and female/female action. I wanted the hero and heroine to be with each other, not every other character in the book.”
Donna S. was disappointed. I, on the other hand, do expect male/male and female/female action from my fictional characters. I took Donna’s review as a glowing endorsement and ordered the book.
When I got down to reading Wolf Tales, I enjoyed it as an interesting piece of pornography, sexually arousing but not morally edifying. Then I happened across A Woman’s Journey to God.
I can’t say I’d never been exposed to the intersection of religion and sexuality before. I did, after all, minor in women’s studies at a Catholic women’s college. I’ve read Luce Irigaray and Carol Christ. But I don’t think I’ve ever read the case for the sacredness of sexuality expressed as eloquently as in this statement from Joan Borysenko:
“Sex is the life force. It is the creati -- [End of Preview.]