One of the challenges we face in building a new women’s movement is defining women’s power. We want to define women’s empowerment, but the only metrics we have are masculine, and to use metrics that don’t apply means abandoning ourselves and our power as women.
The difficulty of a shortage of models to define true power makes it particularly profound to encounter a living, breathing example of some of the feminine aspects that we know constitute power. This is how I experience Reverend Joanne Coleman.
Rev Jo and I recently sat together for one of my daily Eros talks and spoke at length about various topics. Among them, a few stood out as key to the path to power and as undeniable attributes of being in the presence of greatness itself.
Feminine leadership uplifts
For 30 years I have sat with masters, people who have the anointings of being masters in Asian countries, the rabbis, all of them. I know the perfume of one with genuine mastery. Reverend Joanne sits among them. In my estimation, true power invisibly uplifts or inspires and, like gravity, moves everything toward its greatest benefit. It doesn’t have to be forceful or authoritarian. It leads from below. And this is what I experience as elegant about Rev Jo’s leadership as the embodiment of feminine leadership—it is perpetual upliftment. It doesn’t matter how low she has to go to lift you up. It has no pedigree and no status, either.
Rev Jo has been this for me since we first met. One evening, a mutual friend who thought I could benefit from the reverend’s approach to the Bible introduced us. At the end of that evening, Rev Jo told me, “I’m yours,” and it changed my life. It changed the way I relate. It was like a great blessing showing up at my door. She told me that I had prayed her into being, and perhaps the more shocking part was that I believed her.
It is like Rev Jo has been counter-conditioned not to wait to offer her best. The standard ego take is, “When everything gets better, then I’ll start,” while Spirit says, “When I start, everything will get better.” It’s counter to conditioning to start at “I’m yours for life.” It is a deeply feminine method to offer all of you from the beginning so that others can bring their best from there. It means putting yourself on the line and risking repeated heartbreak.
Rev Jo and I went on to do two years of Bible study together without a Bible, and she did it in her old-school style, her tradition, and in her own way. In her tradition, it’s much more like sitting at the feet of the master, although she is a mistress and there is no feet-sitting. Although I would have sat at her feet because of what she has to offer, and I believe I do too, in my way.
Erotic friendship
The experience of being with her was like drinking water. It was just drinking. It was being so parched, which is something I can feel in almost every realm of my life, especially the sexual one. It can be a feeling of “I am not going to get enough.” “They’re not going to stay long enough.” “They’re not going to meet me long enough.” “They’re not going to connect with me, be here and present.” But in Rev Jo’s presence, this feeling of unadulterated sufficiency was offered with no accounting so that I could take it in at the depths and for the time I needed it. And for me, there was this humiliating feeling of need, and having someone front-load the fact that I don’t have to be humiliated with her, that it was her great joy to offer to me. It was extraordinarily profound to have all that moved out of the way and then to just be able to receive.
Every Tuesday for years, and after that, in every moment of need and desire, Rev Jo met me in places where people don’t meet you. She has been there in the high of celebration and joy, in the mystical, and further than most can reach, in deep duress—bringing love and laughter with her. She has put her highly reputable reputation on the line to walk me into the federal courthouse, arguing with me to get on a plane to fly here for that purpose.
“When that first gunshot was fired in your direction,” Rev Jo said to me, “I knew that all that civil rights work I had done, I could bring to the fore. I can bring the courage. I can bring the smoke… I knew your life was on the line,” she told me. “I knew those gunshots. I knew that fire was going to be out there. If you weren’t effective, they wouldn’t come for you. It wouldn’t be a problem if you were mediocre because you wouldn’t transform anything. But if you have the taste, you provide a real sip.”
Having ‘a calling’
As she explained during our Eros talk, she had instantly identified me as a kindred spirit who, like her, is in conscious contact with her own divinity and seeks to light up others from our single candle. “I knew that you were a woman who was doing what I was doing,” she said, “which was putting my life, your life, on the line for something you believe in.”
Rev Jo brought the context of having’ a calling’ over my life when nothing else made sense. Rather than seeing the circumstances I found myself in as a bomb that blew up, I could see it happening in the historical context of having given my life over completely to something and falling down, as is to be expected at some point along the way.
Rev Jo said, “Falling down is regular. Getting up is extraordinary… getting up is everything. Not only that, but our get up, your get up, doesn’t just belong to you. You’ve got to get up, but it doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to all the people, on their knees right now, [praying to receive what our calling, your calling, gives to the world].”
“Let your lived life be evidence that you have been breathed upon”
Core to the idea of getting up after a fall is allowing the experience to transform you. “The woman who falls down can’t be the woman who gets up; that’s the transformation. Something happened to how you see the world [and] something happened to how you see yourself. Something happens and deepens and widens for how you see other people.”
Inherent to Rev Jo’s style of leadership, and one of the things that shapes our connection, is her ability to offer a certain kind of context—one that brings dignity to an experience that feels very ignoble. For instance, one of the perspectives she shares is that actual transformation is not about “the rise up onto the cross; it’s the descent into the underworld.” An underworld populated by all the things we want to hide and run away from, our sources of shame. The journey through this realm ends with the rock rolled away from the entrance to the cave, using the resurrection of Jesus Christ as an analogy for ego death and resurrection.
Your transformation belongs to a broken, wounded world
“That’s no small thing,” she explained during our Eros Talk. “Usually, you don’t pull the rock away from the inside out. You have a community around you who knows how to roll that thing to the side and then let air in, air you’ve never breathed. Air you’ve not breathed. Then you hear your name. It’s this name that only your lover knows. The sweet, affectionate name. There’s a name. There’s a calling on your life and that’s the calling, and that calling means stop being dead.”
“You got to stop,” she continued. “You hear your name, and you are roused and aroused to a life you’ve never lived before. If we had a brain and if we could use it, we would want a brain that could predict the future, but the only way my brain, maybe yours too, can predict the future is to do what it’s already done. It would put the past over there, so I’d repeat myself versus doing a life I’ve never lived. When you are called from the tomb of a too-small life, then you get up. Who comes out of the cave, for sure, isn’t who went in. But coming out means that everybody gets to come out. It’s just not your getting up. It’s the getting up of a broken, wounded world.”
Feminine leadership elevates descent
Buddhism agrees with Rev Jo. I have a friend named Temple, who is a Theravada Buddhist. He also says that everyone thinks the ascension path is the difficult part of Buddhism. But it isn’t. It’s going down into the depths and what happens there. He says it’s because what happens there can’t be fake. You aren’t working your way up; you’re surrendering your way down. In that surrender, you confront everything locked in your nervous system, that you can’t do anything but thrash out. You decide to let someone see you in your full unglory.
The question is, what if that someone isn’t there on the other side?
I’ve been granted the blessing of being in ‘the thrash.’ It actually is a blessing. The doula has arrived. But will she be here as I kick and scream and forget myself?
You don’t know the answer to that through the whole process. I practice Buddhism, so I know the whole idea of self-autonomy and relying on oneself, but this is the feminine side. This is what is vulnerable. You don’t get vulnerable in the autonomous world. The feminine side of discovering who you are in ‘a thrash’ is letting go with another human being and living with that depth of trust in a situation where you could really lose everything.
The path is that they may leave. The path is that they might stay. But that is the path, and to choose that path at that level of intimacy. This is how I understood Rev Jo’s hand, and I am deeply grateful.
I am that I am
One of the ideas I love exploring with Rev Jo is that you might not get back up after falling because it will require an entirely new life. There are the life structures we build to accommodate our painful circumstances, including the relationships that hold us to an identity shaped by brokenness.
The context that Rev Jo brings to this is extraordinary.
She compares the aftermath of healing from an illness or emerging from challenging circumstances to Moses’s encounter with God in the Bible.
She says Moses had been “chiseling away, collecting, and getting the law.” He asks God who should he say sent him when he speaks to the Israelites. In English translation, God’s reply is the well-known, “I am that I am.”
But, explains Rev Jo, a scholar in Aramaic—the original language of the Bible—a more fitting translation would be, “I am what the moment requires, what the moment wants, what the moment needs.”
It is the same in Tibetan Buddhism: to arise according to the needs of the time. All of these are trying to communicate the same thing—that’s it’s here.
“It is here,” Rev Jo agreed. “You’re here, and it would love to live its life as you, as me. It would love to know itself coming to realization… The ‘I’ beyond situations and circumstances,” she continued. “A situation could have dropped you to your knees, but girl, you got to get up and grease your knees!”
In my view, it is what makes it possible to stand up again.
There are some falls so hard that you’re not standing up again. You can’t. Only it can.
Pitfalls on the path of feminine power
For eight years, Rev Jo and I have had an uninterrupted connection, except for this one time that she fell out from my sphere—a place where she seemed to be always and always available—and I couldn’t quite track her. When we came back together, she told me she fell out because, “I didn’t know I was that important.”
It was astonishing to me that this foundation of love would not know that she was important. It wasn’t that I hadn’t told her, and this is important. How, in a world in which everything can be so grumpy and disheartening, can a human being who restores hope in her very existence, with whom you can also have conversations about women, maintain a whole conditioned mind that says, “I don’t matter that much,” and not know her impact?
For me, Rev Jo’s presence is the difference between light and day. She can light up the darkness.
There are a number of conditioned infractions that women make, out of which arise, “My presence doesn’t matter that much.”
When I met Rev Jo, I’d had some bad media. I had a notion that to love her meant protecting her from what I was going through. I didn’t want it to leak over. She was very clear in telling me this was not love.
Resilience gets a bad rap
There is a reason the women’s movement I am building starts with marginalized women, incarcerated women, women of color, and recovering addicts. I want to fund a movement from infinite wealth, and resilience is hard cash—not credit.
I believe there is no greater wealth than resilience. It gets a bad rap now because it’s been so politicized, but there is a world I get to witness, and it produces genuine resilience. One of my visions for the movement is sharing those places I draw hope from in a very personal and immediate way, which is no different from where I draw hope for the future.
A lot of my vision revolves around this women’s movement, which is a despairing movement in many ways. It’s contaminated by a certain kind of bitterness or anger that passes as power, a certain kind of hopelessness that passes as acceptance, or a certain kind of material spirituality that passes as kindness. There are these imposters, but there is the real thing, and when the real thing arises, it dispels all of the contrivances.
Rev Jo, ‘born with a veil,’ as they say in her culture, was inspired by a grandmother who lived and worked in the Jim Crow era to put food on the table. “I wanted to be this woman,” she said, “I wanted, I asked, begged whatever it took to become a woman, a human being, who could get her up off her knees.”
I locate Rev Jo between the knees and feet. If you are on your knees, then you know her. Maybe it’s knees, feet, and back. She represents a radically different expression of leadership than we usually see. To my mind, it’s profoundly noble because it gives so much dignity. Falling is such an undignified experience. You don’t need anything extra there. You don’t even need someone to tell you to get up.
Apparently, you just need a lot of singing, because that’s what Rev Jo offers. When you cry, she’s right there with you.
I am constantly reminded of the metaphor of the community moving the rock from the entrance to the tomb. You can’t move it yourself when you fall to that depth. You need somebody who has both ferocity and gentleness because you’re a hurt animal, and all you want to do is lash out if anything comes near you. Someone who says, “Let us love you,” because when you fall, you don’t feel lovable, so you close off. Rev Jo held me fiercely and gently through ‘my thrash.’
It is stunning how humbling it is to let go of a hurt that defined you; much more difficult to let go of a hurt that defined you and receive the love waiting there for you.