Sistuh, she got that Spirit now

[Terrance]

Vineland:  

an epiphany of  that thousand-year-old alternate
  America founded by Norse sailors, who, unlike the
  sailors who founded the America we live in, never conquered 
  the land or usurped its indigenous people. (p. 44)

  In these final chapters all the book's generations of
  the  living gather for another reunion, one that joins
  the families of Frenesi Gates's grandparents. The older
  members of these two families are Wobblies and
  Hollywood  left-wingers, bearers of a heritage of an
  alternate and unofficial America. Pynchon treats this
  alternate tradition as a matriarchal one: the novel
  traces the ancestry of all its women characters while
  treating the men as if they sprang directly from the
  earth. Frenesi's hatred for her newborn daughter,  and voluntary
  separation from her soon afterward, violates that matriarchal line,
just as her  murderous entanglement with  Brock Vond is a sign of what
the book's historical myth regards as the betrayal of the true alternate
America by the 1960s left.  After so thorough a
  betrayal no return or  recovery can ever be complete.
  All of Pynchon 's books are permeated by one or two
  central ideas: entropy in V., the  manifestation of the sacred in The
Crying of Lot 49, and the bureaucratization of charisma, as described
by  Max Weber, in  Gravity's Rainbow. In Vineland the
  central idea is less  abstract than in the earlier  books. A fall into
an era  without life or death,  followed by a return to human time,
  is less a concept than a parable of personal  experience. It 
describes in visionary terms a phase  that can occur in  anyone's life
when all significant  relations and events seem
  bafflingly distant and inaccessible.   What makes this
  vision luminous (to use Pynchon's word of praise) in Vineland is not
the  tendentious historical myth that attaches to it, but its intensely
personal quality Zoyd  Wheeler's years of separation from his wife are
his years in  a realm without time, when he dreams of an impossible 
return. But he comes to recognize those same  years as the ones in which
he learned  to value his daughter and their shared  harbor in  Vineland.
This part of the
  narrative, lightly sketched in the margins of the  brightly  colored
central plot, reads like an allegory of a lived experience of loss and
  renewal.  

  Edward Mendelson, "Levity's Rainbow," in The New
  Republic,  Vol. 203,  Nos. 2 & 3, July 9 & 16, 1990, pp. 40-6.

Matriarchal.  The Sisterhoods. Yes, Pynchon's novels continue to explore
the history of the influence of the mystics on Christianity in America.
He alludes to the Sisterhoods. In the 13th Century Europe, in every
phase of life, begins to awaken to the parables of personal experiences
of Christ, to what will later give voice and spirit to mystics like Fox,
founder of  the Friends, and to what Dixon, explaining it to Mason,
says, is an idea that begins by "looking for God in everyone." The
Spirit of democracy is also present. The people begin to awaken from a
dumb obedience. The streets are clamorous with voices demanding rights
and privileges. The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Revolt from authority
and a growing consciousness that the personal soul ought to work out its
own salvation. The Pentecost Spirit cries in every lot of every  hamlet.
Traditional Christianity had lost the way. The crusades, the incessant
wars, had left the women of Europe in pitiable plight. There were
orphans and widows everywhere, who had no protectors, and had no means
to feed themselves. There was little choice but between beggary and
shame or the convent. And the cry for spiritual bread and earthly bread,
gave rise to a Sisterhood quite unlike any in the convents.