Fishbowl Metaphor

by Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter

“But it came to me suddenly and without question that I must leave the Baptist world. I sat still on the little chair and breathed in and out very slowly, taking this in. A goldfish bowl sat on a piano across the room. It was empty of fish and water, but I saw almost immediately the metaphor it represented. For so long the Baptist world had been both my goldfish bowl and the water I swam in. I’d come to think of it as the whole realm. I’d grown used to seeing everything through that water. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to leave. At a deep level, I’d not known I could make such a large choice.

“It sounds silly, but at the time leaving this realm seemed as daunting to me as leaving the goldfish tank might have seemed to a goldfish. I wondered if I could survive outside the safe perimeters I knew so well. And I was not even thinking at that point about taking my leave from the entire church. I wasn’t yet thinking about learning how to breathe in brand new spiritual environs, in a feminine realm where the old breathing mechanisms don’t work at all.

“Despite the growing disenchantment women experience in the early stages of awakening, the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the churn, is almost always unfathomable. It’s that old the-world-is-flat conviction, where we belief that if we sail out on the spiritual ocean beyond a certain point we will fall off the edge of the known world into a void. We think there’s nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a whole new consciousness.”