Con-Spirando: Women "Breathing Together"

Beginning of article

Early in 1991 we began to invite other women from different settings to join us to celebrate worship together. It was an open invitation, supposing that it would be enriching, and that there was need for it. The response was positive and for almost two years we met every two weeks; sometimes five women came, sometimes fifteen. Slowly we created a space of our own, a space for women's worship, not always in the same place at first, but with a certain regularity. We shared a worshipping space open to women from different backgrounds -- Christian, indigenous, feminist, from women's groups, the human-rights movement, ecumenical institutions -- each of whom prepared worship in her own way, according to her needs and intuitions. Sometimes the celebrations were created specially for this gathering, sometimes they repeated rituals they had experienced elsewhere, prepared by other women. For us it was a process of opening up to a wide diversity of gestures and symbols, music, texts and silences.

Much later, other needs surfaced in our conversations. The fact that we had taken the liberty to open this space of worship, the presence of new women and the enrichment of sharing and conceiving new rites created the desire for a place where we could investigate our experiences of the sacred, and share what we had experienced in our churches and ecumenical organizations. Many of the latter had ties with liberation theology, the prophetic church, the struggle for human rights and the restoration of democracy in Chile, yet still they left little room for us women and our concerns. There was clearly uneasiness with patriarchal institutions, sexist attitudes, and the silence and invisibility of women and …