Looking for role models among the spiritual leaders of history? Look to the women in their lives

Sometimes I think the entire point of religion is to help men behave more like women.

Members of a religious community are supposed to get along with each other, even if they don’t like each other. But women don’t need religious rules to teach them social graces. From birth, we are socialised to prioritise the needs of the collective above our own.

Most of the world’s major religions recognise men as their founders. For example, Christianity was founded by Jesus, Buddhism by Siddhartha Gautama and Islam by Muhammad. They were men who did not have to find time for their spirituality between cooking dinners and attending work meetings. But I want a spiritual role model who would have understood how to avert a meltdown at school pickup every day. So who are the women spiritual leaders?

Because of my Christian upbringing, my natural starting point is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Christians believe that Jesus was god incarnate. To retain her son’s deity status, early Church theologians described Mary as a virtuous virgin who conceived Jesus “immaculately,” no body fluids required.

Rather than fall at the feet of a woman with a magical womb, I am drawn to her lesser-known cousin Elizabeth. A pregnant and unmarried Mary travelled into the hill country to seek Elizabeth’s advice. Elizabeth was an older woman who had believed herself unable to conceive, but was six months pregnant when Mary arrived at her door. I imagine Elizabeth hearing Mary’s news, and shouting poetry at her cousin, helping her to believe that Mary’s baby, no matter how legitimate, was a miracle.

“Hail Mary,” Elizabeth may have said, as the scared young girl laid out her worries before her. “You are full of grace! Blessed are you, and blessed is your baby. You are a link in a chain of magical women, snaking back to the beginning, the women who birth the universe. Mary, you are a mother of all the myriad things.” I can only assume that Mary believed her cousin, because she raised her son to become a god.

Then there is Mary Magdalen, who discovered Jesus’s resurrection when she went to anoint his body after death. The gospels note that Mary Magdalen was one of three women who supported Jesus out of their own financial resources. Mary Magdalen understood that five loaves of bread, and two fish, can only metaphorically feed five thousand people.

Perhaps I could look to Priscilla who, with her husband, Aquila, spread Jesus’s teachings across Asia Minor and Europe at a time when Christians were hunted and killed for their beliefs. Priscilla was a preacher right alongside her husband. The better-known Paul plied his missionary craft with the couple, eclipsing them down the ages with his epistolary fame (and injunction against women preaching).

 

The founder of Islam, Muhammad, may never have received a visit from the angel Gabriel if it weren’t for his wife’s business acumen. Khadijah ran a successful caravanning business which supported Muhammad throughout his regular spiritual retreats. According to tradition, after his divine revelation, Muhammad returned to his wife in a state of shock. Khadijah wrapped him in a blanket, calmed his nerves, and told him, “You will be the prophet of your people.” She continued by his side, despite the threat her husband’s teachings posed to their family’s lives and livelihood.

My favourite female spiritual leader of history is probably Yasodhara, wife of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. In my twenties, I spent many hours cross-legged, visualising not the Buddha, but Yasodhara, his wife and the mother of his child, whom he deserted to seek enlightenment. Had she wanted to get up and leave? Probably. But did she? No, because someone had to look after the baby.

Yasodhara is said to have maintained her own meditative practice throughout her long life, and in her old age, she visited her husband. “I’m 78 years old now,” she told him. “My refuge is made in myself.”

Unlike the men in their lives, Yasodhara, Khadijah and Mary Magdalen did not have spare days, weeks, or years to pray in a cave, wander the desert, or meditate under a tree. These women ran their businesses and households, cared for their families, supported their religious teachers/husbands, and maintained a spiritual life of their own. They were archetypal jugglers, practical and resourceful, forging their way in a world frequently hostile to women of independent means or thought.

I have a bracelet from my Christian youth group years with the letters, “WWJD” – “What would Jesus do?” From now on, I am going to read it as, “What would Jackie do?” Like my spiritual heroes, I can work, support my family and be part of my community. I take refuge in them, and myself.