Is the world moving toward more spiritually based concepts of womanhood and manhood? What practical implications does this movement of thought have for how you live your life? For your prayers and your work as a healer? Contributing editor LOIS RAE CARLSON, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher in Chicago, talked with our Chicago-based staff writer, Warren Bolon, about these and related issues. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

If you were writing a progress report on humanity's understanding of womanhood and the advancement of women's rights, what would you cite as progress, and what would you put in the "still needs work" category?

In Western culture, and particularly in the United States, I see women having so many more choices about how they organize their lives—especially fine tuning the balance between work and motherhood. Putting boxes around women's talents and their freedom to do what is theirs to do is certainly fading. In the United States, for example, a prospective employer can't ask if a woman is planning to have children. Nor can they discriminate if she's already pregnant, or eliminate her job if she takes maternity leave. These are points of progress.

But so many women in the developing world have been relegated to the level of basic survival. Those women lined up for water in Darfur, for example. Your heart just aches for them because you know that there are talents there going untapped. But I also remember women like Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who worked with women's groups in Kenya and the Green Belt Movement to plant millions of trees. In her example, despite the hardship, you sense womanhood being part of the solution. We don't have to think of women as victims anymore. We have the right to see them as essential ingredients in the progress of the race, bringing their individuality and ideas, their intuitive skills, to the table. Women can perhaps accomplish some things that men have not been able to accomplish, as in peacemaking in the West African country of Liberia, for example.

And yet, when we talk about the progress of women, there's got to be a way to achieve it that lifts it out of the limitations of gender. I'm interested in understanding the spiritual authority of womanhood, not primarily in terms of women's rights, but as the triumph of the qualities of true womanhood. In Western culture there's now such a unisex mentality that we avoid cherishing womanhood and manhood qualities. And sometimes we're accused of being sexist when we attach certain qualities to a gender. If we could see the universal value of qualities like purity, constancy, and resilience, of unselfishness and the joy of service, then we would want to pray to cultivate and support them in ourselves and others instead of minimizing them.

The term man can seem sexist, but in Christian Science it's understood as a generic term—in Mary Baker Eddy's phrase, man stands for "the 'male and female' of God's creating" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 249). Will we see the "authority of womanhood" more fully expressed as we free ourselves from language-based limitations?

Whenever we talk about the great metaphysics of Spirit—such as the coincidence of the human with the divine, which was fully expressed in Christ Jesus—the human mind's going to rebel in some way. And ultimately, when I think of the perfect model of manhood, I think of it as the coincidence of the Christly qualities. If we could focus more on Christliness, we wouldn't stumble over "manhood" so much. It's only because spiritual manhood still seems abstract to us that we're not really yielding to the Christliness that is natural to our own being.

My grandmother and my mother were wonderful examples of womanhood—both very feisty women, very independent thinkers. My grandmother was one of the first women to get a driver's license in Minnesota. My mother has always believed in my talents and encouraged me to go forward, and I've found that's been a tremendous support to me in the healing work and in learning to be a parent and spouse.

A spiritual view of womanhood is oriented to the needs of others in a way that we unselfishly find joy and satisfaction in the progress of others. When society puts so much focus on women getting ahead and proving that we can stand on our own two feet, we may lose the commitment to nurture and support, and we've fallen into a spirit of competition. Because true womanhood involves being devoted to the progress of another, I can see how essential it is to the practice of Christian Science healing. In my own practice, I've seen how important it is to have compassion for those who ask for prayerful support, and to respond with patience. Showing compassion is as important as affirming the truth about God and spiritual creation.

A metaphor that has always helped me with my healing practice is this: When a child is learning to walk, taking her first steps, and she falls down and starts to cry, you don't tell her to walk across the living room to where you are so you can help her. You go to where she is. That's what I sense true motherhood and true healing are. It's going right to where we're needed.

So when you speak of the authority of womanhood, it's not in the sense of women asserting power over men.

That's right, Warren. In Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy explains that "Christ's Christianity is the chain of scientific being reappearing in all ages, maintaining its obvious correspondence with the Scriptures and uniting all periods in the design of God. Neither emasculation, illusion, nor insubordination exists in divine Science" (p. 271). Right now we're needing to understand that womanhood, as it supports and nurtures someone else's progress, can't be used as an excuse for emasculation or illusion or insubordination. I've noticed in my own healing work that it's important not to mother patients in a way that reduces people, but rather to lift them up to the sense of equality that enables you to see that their healing mission echoes your own.

So, anything that would smother another's individuality or purpose has an emasculating effect.

Yes. From the time a woman has the first intuition that she's expecting a child, the joy of a spiritual perspective requires that with each passing year she loosen the biological bond to respect the child's direct relationship to God. The mission of motherhood is to defend the child's freedom to make his or her contribution to civilization. At the times when I've had my own greatest heart-tugs with my sons, I've had to keep asking myself, Did you raise this child for God's glory, or did you raise him for your glory? For the child to discover his own purpose, or to fulfill your own idealism? As a woman and a mother, it takes a tremendous alertness to keep honoring the child's uniqueness, and not to circumscribe it.

Within Christianity there's a wide spectrum of views on womanhood, and of the role of women in society. What will it take to lift perception to the higher view that you've been talking about?

It's most discouraging when women in other churches are deprived of ministerial roles and leadership. We've got to face the accusation that somehow women are the conduit of sin. We're either believed to be a distraction to men, or the source of our children's debilitation. And there's even the accusation that a woman's devotion to motherhood could somehow compete with her healing mission. It's so important for a woman to feel within herself that there's a plan and a purpose unfolding for her, one that's uniquely hers. And often you have to believe in your own mission long before anybody else notices it. That does take courage, and a tremendous amount of self-surrender. Not only can other people's preconceptions be too small, our view of ourselves can be restrictive as well.

Do these popular misperceptions of womanhood come from the way the Scriptures are perceived?

Yes! It's those curses that were said to be put on Eve after she was supposed to have been the conduit for Adam's downfall. They're really quite ominous curses: "I [the Lord] will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Gen. 3:16). As I see it, the curse that has to be lifted off womanhood is the false belief that her desire to love and support another becomes the means of her own entrapment, even enslavement. This one point is enough proof to me that the Adam and Eve account of creation, presented in the second and third chapters of Genesis, is actually a fable. And that the first chapter of Genesis presents the truth of creation.

The magnitude of being the image and likeness of God gives us the freedom to give and to enjoy giving. Actually, in giving we find our freedom; there's no bondage in doing what we're designed to do. A hymn of celebration and thanksgiving in the Christian Science Hymnal thanks God for "confident giving and giving's reward" (No. 150). There's no greater freedom than the freedom we find in giving, because unselfish giving makes you acknowledge what you have to give. It silences all those voices of self-doubt, and perfectionism, and the feeling that you have to conform to what other people think about you. And Christ Jesus said, "We speak what we do know" (John 3:11).

For all the unanswered questions about our lives—wondering if our lives even make a difference at all—when you feel the freedom to share something with somebody in the context of supporting their progress, all those unanswered questions are silenced. You feel the worth of your own godliness and why you exist. To feel that authentic willingness to give what we have, that's the greatest joy. And there's no enslavement there.

Isn't that also the authority of womanhood—entering a relationship as an equal and giving without feeling subordinate or superior?

I think so. In relationships, we're not being asked to commit to the human mind view, which can be very fickle and unreliable. What we're being asked to commit to is the godliness that we know is indestructible, that can't be put aside.

One of the qualities I've just been cherishing for mankind as a whole—for our church, for business, for government—is the quality of trust. To me, there's nothing more painful than seeing two people who ought to trust each other gobble each other up. It undermines marriages, church families, and politics. True womanhood includes a commitment to relationships. While the masculine qualities may offer a wide perspective, and a commitment to that same vision for relationships, womanhood includes the commitment to bringing folks along with a vision.

Mary Baker Eddy talked about faith in terms of the difference between trustfulness and trustworthiness (see Science and Health, p. 23). The problem with trustfulness, she said, is that you end up trusting your welfare to other people. That has the built-in danger of feeling controlled by others. But when you accept the alternative, trustworthiness—"which includes spiritual understanding and confides all God"—then, there's the safeguard of God's presence among us. When people behave badly or unjustly, you aren't left in a state of vulnerability. Rather, you always have the recourse of knowing that God is working among you, and you can go forward together instead of suffering a constant disconnect.

What about some of the other forms that the notion of curse takes on for women, such as bodily curses?

At different times in my life, my body has felt like a punching bag for women's diseases and deformities. I've had wonderful healings of pain and deformity in my breasts, as well the healing of a longstanding hemorrhage. But interestingly enough, I think the healing that really was the most significant to me was that of the healing of menstrual cramps. I know for some women that must sound very benign, but in my case, the healing took a couple of decades. I kept being told that after I had children it would be fine, and it wasn't. I would be wiped out for one or two days at a time every month.

The turning point came when I stopped dreading the week of my period and really committed myself to praying daily throughout the month for the women of the world. I started to feel the momentum of this prayer, despite the pain being more intense than ever at times. But inwardly I knew that it hadn't taken away my peace—that my oneness with God was not disturbed.

There's this Bible verse that says God "maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat" (Ps. 147:14). That was new for me—that the intensity of pain could not disrupt the stillness that constituted my relationship with God. I relished that stillness. For the first time, I could pray during the pain and not just endure until it was over. Instead of reacting to the pain, I claimed that the stillness of my relationship to God was ever present. The stillness couldn't go anyplace, and therefore it had authority over the aggressive symptoms. I was healed and felt the joy of being myself any time of the month.

Maybe that's a description of the authority of womanhood—feeling like yourself, even as you love and nourish others. Even if others don't like you, attack or belittle you, or try to make you feel unworthy.

The greatest growth in our spiritual maturity comes as we stop belittling ourselves. We all have the completeness of divinity within our own nature—the saving power of God that we call Christ is working with us. Intuition and compassion, as well as boldness, leadership, and vision, are valuable and needed. They all come from Christ. css