As a feminist theologian, I was hooked 15 pages into reading Eat Pray Love and here’s why. Gilbert prays to God for direction and she gets an answer. Immediately. And her answer comes not, as she reassures, in a freaky loud and booming Old Testament type voice; it’s simply in her own. But it’s her voice, as she has never heard it before, “perfectly wise, calm and compassionate.” It’s what her voice would sound like, she relates, “if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life.”
Rather than a more typical or traditional religious conversion experience, Gilbert understands this defining moment of hearing her own “omniscient interior voice” as the experience of the beginning of a religious conversation.
Gilbert goes on to travel to Italy, India, and Bali but, for me, the true adventure starts when she begins this divine conversation from within. That moment shifts the trajectory of her prayer- instead of casting off or out her prayers to some divine source above or beyond her, her prayers echo down into her cavernous core. The source of wisdom and unfaltering love is found deep within her. It takes most pilgrims years, a lifetime even, to get to this truth that Gilbert experiences before she steps on a plane or tastes her first Italian gelato treat.
The contemplative traditions have claimed this truth the world over, so what’s new about Gilbert’s religious conversational conversion experience with the divine that dwells within her? Gilbert represents a new form of spiritual seeker, a seeker of the fourth wave of feminism, one who refuses to abandon or deny the body as she draws nearer to God.
There is a pervasive desire among emerging female spiritual leaders to honor, acknowledge and even indulge in the wisdom and power of the body as they seek to cultivate their relationship with the divine. Women no longer want to separate their spirituality from their sexuality.
Take, for example, my cosmic twin and Harvard Divinity School peer, Sera Beak. At 29, she wrote The Red Book, A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark. She urged women of our generation to not only claim their spiritual authority as women, meaning to hear the divine from within, but to also claim their bodies as sacred.
As the founder and executive director of REVEAL, I am profoundly encouraged by the cult-like following of Eat Pray Love. The spiritual barometer in culture has risen. This gives me hope that women are ready to go within, and they are willing to believe (again) that as a sex we have something unique to say and to share about the experience of encountering the holy.
Gilbert refers to the voice of wisdom within her as her “omniscient interior voice.” My masters of theological studies and masters of divinity have demanded my lexicon contain less secular words. I refer to the voice I hear within me as the soul voice. The experience of it requires it.
The experience of hearing my soul voice is profoundly (and sometimes irritatingly) paradoxical. It’s hysterical when I’m the most stressed out and it’s filled with levity when I’m as heavy as a piece of lead. It’s the voice that offers balance when my life is most out of whack and it’s the voice that leads by empowering me to be bold enough to make choices for myself.
I can recognize the soul voice within me because it is most fierce when it comes to truth telling and yet never insists on its own way. The soul voice offers every kind of encouragement and yet is often the most challenging. The soul voice will suggest I do that one thing I want least to do, not to annoy me (smile), but to get me to face fears, to grow, to change. The soul voice — as compared to the voice of the ego — is not about drama.
For example, when Gilbert prays for God to tell her what to do, she expects to hear sublime advice about her imminent divorce, real drastic changes she must make, or hard and fast lines she must draw in her love life. Instead, she hears a simple directive, “Go to bed, Liz.” That can only be the soul voice. In that moment, this was the most sagacious, the most loving, and compassionate advice she could receive. She just needed to take care of her self. The wisdom of what to do with her life, with matters of her heart, would follow without drama and without deadlines. Her soul knows this.
Every woman has to take the journey to meet with her soul voice alone — and find that authentic truth that waits within her. Every journey taken is as different as the soul voice found.
But in my experience, the soul voice is that one voice that is always and in all circumstances waiting to be the voice of unconditional love inside us. It’s the voice that longs for us to listen and to follow its audacious call to dare us to live out our potential.
REVEAL is so concerned for women to become intimate with their soul voices, because the soul voice asks that we each in our own ways love ourselves enough to live our best and most realized lives. The soul voice leads us to transform not only ourselves but also the world around us with love, with joy, and with the taste of gelato fresh on our lips.
This post originally appeared on my former blog, StyleSubstanceSoul.
Excellent insight. Makes me want to read EPL with fresh eyes, almost. Instead, I think I’ll go see the movie and listen for my own soul voice more often.