The River Knows Its Own Way…
The River Knows Its Own Way ~ On Sacred Texts and the Women Who Read Them
I. The Nature of Water
Listen, I want to tell you something about water and walls. About how every religion builds dams to direct the holy, and how the holy—being what it is—seeps through anyway, finds cracks, makes new channels, refuses to be contained.
Water has no shape of its own. It takes the form of whatever holds it, yet it remains essentially itself—whether in a temple's brass vessel or a muddy roadside puddle. This is the first mystery: that something so formless can carve the Grand Canyon.
When I walk into temples, churches, mosques, I notice things. The way light falls differently on men's shoulders and women's bent heads. The way certain voices rise to explain eternity while others remain seated, listening. But here's what surprised me—in the earliest Christian catacombs, the frescoes show women raising their arms in the orans position, the gesture of priestly blessing. We painted them leading worship in the darkness before we forbade them from leading in the light.
There's a pause here worth dwelling in. Between the darkness where we first worshipped and the light where we built our rules. Something shifted in that transition from cave to cathedral, from hiding to institution. The holy became organized, and organization requires hierarchy, and hierarchy—well, hierarchy has opinions about who stands where.
II. The Question of Ranking
Someone asked me once to rank religions by how they treat women, as if faiths were birds I could line up by the brightness of their plumage. The question itself reveals our hunger for simple answers, for clear winners and losers in the game of righteousness.
But here's what I've learned from watching rivers—every tradition contains its own fierce currents and stagnant pools, its own rapids and quiet eddies where surprising life grows. The Ganges, they say, flows backward for one day each year. Even rivers keep secrets. Even holiness has its contradictions.
Let me tell you what I see when I look closely, the way one might examine the underside of a leaf or the pattern frost makes on glass. Not to judge, but to understand. Not to rank, but to recognize.
III. The Illusion of Separation
Buddhism arrives first in my thinking, not because it's perfect—nothing is—but because of something the Buddha said that cracks everything open like an egg revealing sky. He said gender, like everything else we cling to, is ultimately an illusion.
Think about that. Really think about it.
The very thing that determines who can touch the holy books, who can sit in the front row, who can explain what enlightenment means—the Buddha called it maya, illusion, no more solid than morning mist. And yet, and yet, he didn't want to ordain women at first. His stepmother had to ask three times, and even then, he predicted his teachings would last only half as long.
But here's the surprise that matters more than his hesitation—his stepmother, Mahapajapati, didn't just become a nun. She became the first woman to demand religious rights in recorded history. She walked barefoot for miles, her feet bleeding, each step a prayer and a protest. And when she got her yes, she founded an order that outlasted kingdoms.
Sometimes I wonder if the Buddha's reluctance was less about women and more about knowing what institutions do to radical ideas. Maybe he could already see the committees forming, the rules crystallizing, the freedom calcifying into doctrine.
In Thailand, in Tibet, there have always been those who lived between genders, or beyond them, recognized as touching something sacred in their very being. The kathoey of Thailand were once considered closer to enlightenment precisely because they'd transcended binary thinking—that exhausting either/or that keeps us trapped in opposing camps. Though even now, in too many temples, women still can't receive full ordination. The river gets dammed, but it keeps flowing underground, waiting for the stone to crack.
IV. Equality Written in Scripture
Then there's Sikhism, young among religions, which wrote equality into its very scripture like pressing flowers between pages—preserved, intentional, impossible to remove without destroying the whole book.
Guru Nanak didn't just say women were equal. He said it while Hindu priests were performing a ritual that blamed women for solar eclipses. Context is everything. He was standing in the midst of cosmic misogyny and saying, "No. From woman, man is born; within woman, man is conceived; to woman he is engaged and married. Woman becomes his friend; through woman, the future generations come."
The Guru Granth Sahib contains women's words, women's songs. Not hidden in apocrypha, not relegated to footnotes, but there in the main text, inseparable from the whole. In the langar, the community kitchen, everyone cooks together, everyone eats together, everyone sits on the floor—no high table, no separate rooms. The fifth Guru's wife, Mata Khivi, invented the langar's sweetened rice pudding that's still served today—a woman's recipe becoming sacred tradition, feeding bodies and souls for five hundred years.
But I've also seen how culture creeps in like kudzu, covering the original teaching. In Punjab, where Sikhism was born, they still sometimes kill girl babies. The same tradition that says God's light shines equally in all beings somehow gets twisted until that light seems dimmer in daughters.
How does this happen? It's like watching a clear stream become muddy—you know the source is pure, but by the time it reaches you, it carries silt from every bank it's touched. Yet in 1999, a Sikh woman named Jagir Kaur became the first female leader of a major religious body in India, and the old men who opposed her had to quote Hindu texts, not Sikh ones, to justify their resistance. They had to import their prejudice because they couldn't find it at home.
V. Before the Binary
The indigenous traditions—what some call folk religions—they're too various to capture in one net, too wild to cage in single definitions. But notice this: before the missionaries came, before the colonizers brought their carefully gendered God, many peoples had three genders, four genders, five genders.
The Bugis people of Indonesia recognize five genders, and you need all five present to conduct the most sacred rituals. Sit with that for a moment. Holiness literally requires gender diversity. The sacred cannot manifest without the full spectrum of human being.
The Native Americans called them two-spirit, those who carried both male and female inside themselves like twin rivers converging. In Samoa, the fa'afafine are considered the best teachers of children, precisely because they embody both masculine and feminine wisdom, because they can see from multiple shores at once.
It makes you wonder what we lost when we decided God only speaks in two voices. What harmonies we silenced. What wisdom we declared impossible.
Here's something that stopped me cold when I learned it—the Dahomey Amazons of West Africa weren't mythical. They were real women warriors who protected their king, and when Christian missionaries arrived, these women asked why, if their God was so powerful, He needed only men to speak for Him. The missionaries had no good answer. They rarely do when the questions come from unexpected directions.
VI. The Spectrum of Christianity
Christianity spreads across the whole spectrum, like light through a prism showing every possible color, every interpretation from liberation to oppression, sometimes in the same denomination, sometimes in the same building.
There are churches where women preach and marry each other, where transgender ministers baptize babies, where the Holy Spirit is She. They read Galatians—"neither male nor female in Christ"—and they believe it. Not as metaphor, not as spiritual abstraction, but as lived reality. They remember that Jesus first appeared to women after resurrection, that women funded his ministry, that a woman anointed him for burial—she knew he was dying before his disciples did.
But here's what almost no one mentions—the word for "apostle" appears in feminine form in Romans 16:7, referring to Junia. For centuries, translators changed her name to the masculine Junias, a name that never existed in ancient Rome, rather than admit a woman apostle. They invented a person who never lived rather than acknowledge the woman who did.
And there are also churches where women must cover their heads and remain silent, where they can teach children but not men, where their bodies are considered too dangerous or too holy or too something to approach the altar. The Catholic Church says women can't be priests because Jesus chose twelve men—never mind that he chose twelve Jews, too, and that hasn't stopped gentile popes. Never mind that in the 1970s, archaeologists found a mosaic in Italy labeled "Theodora Episcopa"—Bishop Theodora—with feminine grammar, and the Vatican tried to claim "episcopa" must have meant "bishop's wife," though no such usage exists in Latin.
The Orthodox churches, many evangelical churches, they build elaborate theological structures to explain why God's mouthpiece must be male. As if the divine were too fragile to survive a soprano. As if heaven operated on the same frequencies as earth.
VII. The Divine Feminine Paradox
Hinduism holds such contradictions it makes my head spin like a dervish seeking God in dizziness.
Here is Kali, dancing on her husband's chest, wearing a necklace of skulls, her tongue out, wild and terrible and free. She is destruction that creates space for new birth, ending that enables beginning. But did you know her tongue is out because she's embarrassed? The story says she was so lost in her dance of destruction that she didn't notice she'd stepped on Shiva until that moment. Even the fierce goddess apologizes for taking up too much space. Even infinite power learns to make itself smaller.
Here is Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, without whom there would be no learning—yet many Hindu schools still won't teach Sanskrit to girls. How do you worship the feminine source of wisdom while denying wisdom to women? Here is the concept of Ardhanarishvara—God as half-man, half-woman, complete only in this union, a concept that predates Plato's Symposium by centuries. The divine itself is non-binary, yet the culture insists on rigid categories.
The bhakti poets included women like Mirabai, who left her husband to dance in the streets for Krishna, who wrote: "I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious." When they tried to poison her for this transgression, she drank it like nectar and survived. Mythology or history? Does it matter? The story survives, which means the possibility survives.
Andal wrote erotic poetry to God so explicit that male scholars still blush translating it. She wrote about her breasts aching for the divine touch, about preparing her bed for God's arrival. They call her the only female alvar, but new research suggests several unnamed alvars might have been women whose names were masculinized by history, their feminine endings scraped off like old paint.
But here too are the Laws of Manu, saying a woman should never be independent, always under some man's protection—father, husband, son. A woman's life divided into portions of belonging to different men, never belonging to herself. Here is sati, the widow burning on her husband's pyre—which, surprisingly, was rare until the British colonizers, disturbed by women's property rights, encouraged it as "tradition." Colonialism has a way of freezing cultures at their worst moments, then calling it authentic.
VIII. The Veil and What It Covers
Islam, in its traditional interpretations, draws lines with the confidence of an architect who believes the building is finished. But every building settles, cracks appear, light gets in.
The Quran gave women rights they didn't have before—to inherit, to refuse marriage, to keep their own money. Revolutionary for the seventh century. Here's what surprises most people: the Quran never mentions covering women's faces. The word "hijab" appears seven times, and six of those refer to spiritual veils between humans and the divine, not cloth between women and the world.
Khadija was a businesswoman who employed the Prophet before she married him—she was his boss before she was his wife, and fifteen years older. She proposed to him. She chose. Aisha led armies and narrated thousands of hadiths. When accused of adultery, she didn't defer to male relatives but defended herself so eloquently that her innocence was revealed in Quranic verse. Her words became scripture. Fatima is revered as one of the perfect women of paradise, but they rarely mention she used to argue with her father about women's rights, that perfection included dissent.
Yet in many interpretations, a woman's testimony counts as half a man's—though this was actually progressive for its time, when women's testimony wasn't accepted at all. Her inheritance is half her brother's—but before Islam, she inherited nothing.
Do you see what happens? Progress becomes ceiling. The revolutionary becomes the limit. What lifted women up becomes what holds them down, because the world changed but the interpretation fossilized.
Progressive Muslims say this isn't the Quran speaking but culture, patriarchy using religion as its mask, its costume, its excuse. Amina Wadud led mixed-gender prayers in New York, and death threats followed. Asma Barlas found equality written in the same verses others use to justify oppression. But they're called heretics for seeing what others say isn't there.
In Iran, more women than men pass university entrance exams, so they've instituted quotas—to limit female students. Think about that. Women studied so well they had to change the rules to keep them out.
IX. The Pattern and Its Breaking
Do you see the pattern? Every tradition starts with something radical—Buddha saying suffering is universal, Jesus eating with outcasts, Muhammad elevating women's status, Guru Nanak declaring all equal. Lightning strikes. Mountains move. And then?
Then the institutions form, like bark around a tree, and suddenly what was fluid becomes solid, what was open becomes closed, what included everyone becomes carefully controlled. The radical becomes routine. The revolution becomes religion. The movement becomes monument.
But here's the surprise within the pattern—it's not just institutional calcification. In every generation, in every tradition, someone discovers the radical root again. Like finding seeds in permafrost that still sprout after thousands of years. Like water finding a crack in stone.
The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that early Jewish communities had women leaders titled "presbyter." The Gospel of Mary, discovered in 1896 but not translated until 1955, shows the apostles asking Mary Magdalene to teach them what Jesus taught her privately. Peter gets jealous. He always does in these hidden gospels, as if even then, there was tension about who gets to hold the keys.
The Fatimid Caliphate had women scholars who issued fatwas. Buddhist nuns in ancient China wrote poetry that surpassed their male counterparts. We keep finding evidence that the past was more radical than the present. That our ancestors were more expansive than we imagined. That the tradition we're protecting isn't traditional at all.
X. The Geography of Freedom
A progressive Muslim woman in Los Angeles might find more freedom than a Buddhist nun in Myanmar. A Lutheran church in Stockholm ordains lesbian bishops while a Catholic parish in Poland won't let girls serve at the altar. I know a Hindu temple in California where women perform all the rituals, and one in India where they can't even enter the inner sanctum.
The tradition matters less than who's doing the interpreting, who holds the keys to the scripture, who gets to say what God meant. Geography is theology. Power is scripture. And both are always shifting, like tectonic plates creating new continents of meaning.
XI. Cleaning the Painting
The reformers in every tradition—they're like people trying to clean a painting that's been covered with centuries of varnish and dirt. Underneath, the original colors are brilliant, inclusive, alive. But there are always those who prefer the painting dark, who've gotten used to the grime, who insist that cleaning it would destroy something sacred.
"That's not dirt," they say, "that's patina. That darkness is holy."
In 2012, an elderly woman in Spain tried to restore a fresco of Jesus and turned him into what the internet called "Monkey Christ." But here's the twist—her church now gets thousands of tourists coming to see her failed restoration. Sometimes the mistake becomes the tradition. Sometimes we worship the error instead of the original. Sometimes we can't tell the difference anymore.
XII. When the Rivers Run Free
What would happen if we let the rivers run free? If we removed the dams and let holiness flow where it wanted?
Maybe that's what some people fear—not that women and non-binary people can't understand the sacred, but that they understand it too well. That they might read the texts and find something others missed. That they might channel divinity in ways that make the carefully constructed hierarchies collapse like walls built on sand.
I learned recently that sand can sing. In certain deserts, when conditions are right, the dunes emit a low hum that sounds like nothing else on earth. Scientists say it's just friction, grain against grain. But to hear it—to really hear it—you have to be quiet. You have to stop talking about who's allowed to listen. You have to stop explaining why only certain people can interpret the song.
XIII. The Memory of Rain
I keep thinking about water finding its way—through stone, around barriers, over time carving new channels that become rivers themselves. No matter how many dams we build, water remembers it once fell from the sky as rain, touching everyone equally.
The Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, but it started as drops too small to see. The Niagara Falls moves backward three feet every year, eating its way through rock, patient and unstoppable. And maybe that's what the sacred keeps trying to tell us, if only we'd stop trying to contain it long enough to listen.
Water has no prejudice. It will flow through any hands cupped to receive it.
XIV. The Collapse That Wasn't
There's a shrine in Japan where for a thousand years, women couldn't enter. Mount Fuji itself was off-limits to women until 1868. In 1872, they changed the rule. You know what happened?
Nothing.
The mountain didn't crumble. The gods didn't flee. The only thing that collapsed was the idea that holiness needed protection from half the human race.
That's the biggest surprise of all—when the walls finally come down, we discover they were never holding up the sky. They were just blocking the view.
XV. Return to Water
So we return to water, to its patient persistence, its refusal to be permanently contained. Every sacred text began as rain—pure, falling on everyone. Then we built our gutters and pipes and reservoirs, directing it where we thought it should go, deciding who deserved to drink.
But water remembers. In the deepest aquifers, in the ice of glaciers, in the clouds gathering even now above our heads, water remembers when it was free. And it waits, with the patience of the sacred, for the containers to crack, for the dams to age, for someone to remember that holiness was never meant to be hoarded.
The river knows its own way. It always has. The question is whether we'll have the courage to let it flow, to follow where it leads, even if—especially if—it leads us somewhere we never expected to go.
Listen. Do you hear that? It's the sound of water finding a new crack in the wall.
