Sue Monk Kidd’s “Finding Inner Authority”
As we watch Frances lean into her authority in Step Three, we lean on others who explore this challenge of finding your authority after years spent looking to others for approval, purpose, and belonging. Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, shows us what it looks like to move forward in faith.
“Empowerment also comes into a woman’s life as she finds her inner authority. The word authority has lots of meanings, both positive and negative, but I like the meaning that comes from the Greek: ‘to stand forth with power and dignity.’
Often we recognize or acknowledge this authority for the first time when our female backs are against the wall, when some challenge or opposition comes along and we feel our mettle being tested…
To stand firm with power and dignity has little to do with ordering people around, constantly uncorking a lot of strong opinions and judgments, controlling things, or spouting off when someone pushes your button…
We find genuine female authority within when we become the ‘author’ of our own identity. By taking the journey to the feminine soul, we ‘authorize’ ourselves.
Ann Ulanov, professor at Union Theological Seminary, writes that a woman who has found her authority ‘is securely and consciously anchored in her own feminine being.’ As a matter of course, this woman beings to experience the internal solidity I was beginning to notice, the change in substance. She comes to the solid center of herself and finds her own ground to stand on. And she stands there with her own authority.
Rather than needing to control and enforce things, she stands, steady and dignified, in this authority, with a knowing that is barnacled to her insides, that gives her the gumption and the enterprise to act in behalf of her vision and her soul. It’s what allows her to do intrepid things - sometimes being gentle, sometimes fierce, somethings waiting, sometimes leaping. But always knowing who she is.”
