Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [35]
SPIRITUAL SELVES
Many of the great idealists of history, such as Anne Frank and Joan of Arc, were adolescent girls. This is a time when girls actively search for meaning and order in the universe. Often this is the time of religious crisis and of exploring universal questions such as what happens after death and the purpose of suffering. Some girls become deeply religious and will sacrifice everything for their beliefs. Others have a crisis in faith.
At thirteen I was a loyal Methodist. Then I read Mark Twain’s story “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” in which he pokes fun at heaven as a place where people sit around and play harps all day. That story catapulted me into an examination of my faith. At fifteen I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and debated with my minister and my friends about the existence of God.
One client at thirteen accepted Christ as her personal savior. She committed herself to a Christian life and evaluated her behavior daily. She believed that her most important relationship was with God, and that her most important time was the time she spent in prayer. She became the spiritual leader of her family and chided her parents when they acted in un-Christian ways. She led her younger siblings in daily Bible study.
This is a time of great idealism—many girls this age become environmentalists or advocates for the poor or sick. Another student organized recycling for her neighborhood. One friend of Sara’s spent part of her allowance on sandwiches for homeless people. She carried food to their street comers and visited about their lives while they ate. Soon she knew most of the homeless people in town by name. Still another friend monitored canned tuna to make sure it was caught in dolphin-free nets, and she protested fur sales at downtown stores.
Many girls become vegetarians. They love animals and actively work for animal rights. I think this cause is popular with girls because they so easily identify with the lack of speech and powerlessness of animals. One girl I know wore a button that said “If animals are to talk, we must be their voices.” Girls identify with gentle, defenseless creatures. And they will work with great idealism and energy to save them.
The sixties were a great time to be an adolescent girl. That was an era of optimism and idealism, and many girls say they wished they had lived in those times. It’s much harder to be idealistic and optimistic in the 1990s. Girls who stay true to themselves manage to find some way to respect the parts of themselves that are spiritual. They work for the betterment of the world. Girls who act from their false selves are often cynical about making the world a better place. They have given up hope. Only when they reconnect with the parts of themselves that are alive and true will they again have the energy to take on the culture and fight to save the planet.
Adolescence is an intense time of change. All kinds of development—physical, emotional, intellectual, academic, social and spiritual—are happening at once. Adolescence is the most formative time in the lives of women. Girls are making choices that will preserve their true selves or install false selves. These choices have many implications for the rest of their lives.
Of course, the above generalizations about adolescence don’t hold true for all girls. Some girls have had tough lives as children and don’t experience their elementary school years as happy. Other girls who are stable and protected seem to slide through junior high. The intensity of the problems varies, as does the timing—from age nine to around age sixteen.
Another caveat: Much of what I know about junior-high