Healing the Sacred Divide: Making Peace with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World

Healing the Sacred Divide is timely: As issues of faith and women drive our political dialogue at national and local levels, it offers a highly useful window into troublesome assumptions rarely recognized. Bringing these into the open can be enormously helpful for resolving conflict and promoting fruitful compromise between entrenched parties. Author Jean Benedict Raffa first explores eight common ways of thinking about God that create strife in ourselves and contribute to the rampant divisiveness in our world. She then helps us see (and work with) the emotional ignorance of this situation that spoils relationships—through distorting what we think “God” and others want of and for us. Raffa then invites us to entertain what she calls “an integrated God-image.” She offers it as a basis from which to bridge differences and work creatively with fundamental dualities such as masculine/feminine, good/evil, relationship/individuality, heart/head, subjectivity/objectivity, experience/belief, mystery/clarity, etc. In the process she explores a variety of personal crises and political dysfunctions that arise from overemphasizing masculine ego-values in ourselves and our conception of God, and ways to overcome them by honoring feminine values equally. Doing so, she says, makes available “nine wisdom gifts” that offer a reprieve from unrelenting anxiety and guilt about never being good enough, and help us connect intimately with what feels truly sacred to us. From there, she suggests, we are in a much better position to make peace with ourselves and one another, and to contribute together to “humanity’s noblest dream of universal peace, justice, and love