Finding my road back to Her

Some are aware of my reading Sue Monk Kidd's "Dance of the Dissident Daughter." I've mentioned how amazed I've been to read someone putting to words feelings I've had about the inadequacies of mainstream religion in its approach to the Sacred Feminine. Inadequate is really an incorrect term, though, because to be inadequate would indicate some attempt to be adequate. There is none. Through my personal studies as well as the research of others, the Feminine Voice has been shut up, stomped down, locked away, and silenced. But not destroyed.

Unlike Kidd, I don't receive many spiritual messages in my dreams. Minus those nightmares about me drinking again (trust me, it's pretty ugly), my dreams are just the incoherent babblings of an asleep brain. But I do see the signs in life, especially when I look backward.

I cannot remember the first time I experienced the lack of Sacred Females with whom to relate. Sure, there's the Virgin Mary, but who can relate to her? I couldn't. Then there was Mary Magdalene, but my 4th grade catechism teacher said she was a sinner, no one to worship. When I reminded her, "Aren't we all sinners?" She told me, "Not that kind of sinner."

So I resigned myself to the fact the Virgin was all I had. Sure, I got pretty good at the rosary, but I didn't feel a longing to know her. The lack of spiritual role models who were of my gender festered in me. As I grew, so did my anger. When I turned 16, I finally had the freedom to skip church. I'd take the car, lie to my parents that I was going to the late mass, then spend the next hour driving around. Anything was better than hearing that bullshit, male-focused, fear-based doctrine.

It wasn't until my senior year of college while taking a "Women in Antiquity" course, did I learn that early pre-Christian cultures worshipped a female deity. It was before the Bronze Age, before "man" wielded weapons and learned that brute trumped fertility. I felt on fire when I learned this! Yes!!! There is a Feminine God out there. But I lacked the ability, the wherewithal to find her.

Then Dan Brown came out with that beauty of a "fictitious" tale about Mary Magdalene's womb being the Holy Grail. Brown's "DaVinci Code" renewed my sense of hope that there was more out there, kind of like my own personal X-Files. Looking at his bibliography, I was lead to other authors.

Margaret Starbird's "Woman With the Alabaster Jar" propelled me even deeper into this growing belief in the reality of a Feminine Sacred. I read another of her works, "The Goddess in the Gospels" and moved on to translations of the "Pistis Sophia," "The Gospel of Mary Magdalene" and "The Gnostic Gospels." To be honest, I haven't made a deep effort to muscle through the last three, they're on my self, waiting for me to be ready.

But reading Kidd's "Dissident Daughter" is confirming beyond any doubt that the Feminine Sacred is real and it doesn't replace the male image of God nor is it relegated to the slightly lower status of Holy Spirit, but is a spirituality in combination with the patriarchal view held for thousands of years.

Some people roll their eyes at me, others blow me off as a bitch; there are those who aren't comfortable with it, and still others who don't care. All of these reactions are fine. All I know is that patriarchal religious doctrine DOES NOT WORK FOR ME. All I ask is to continue my search without your judgement because I know I'm onto something. I can feel it in my bones and sense it in my heart and gut. And I see the signs.

Just 30 minutes ago, listening to some quality Bob Edwards public radio, he interviewed musician Joan Osborn on her new disc, "Little Wild One." He introduced her by playing some bars from her one-hit wonder: "If God Was One of Us" and those bars included the lyrics, "If God had a name, what would it be and would you call it to his face, if you were faced with him in all his glory? What would you ask if you had just one question?" Immediately I thought of a question, "Where's the women?" Then Bob proceeded to play the opening bars of the lead track, "Hallelujah in the City," from her new disc. While the disc pays homage to her home-away-from-away, New York City, I cannot deny the messages I heard in both songs:

I have been unfaithful.
I have been untrue.
How'd I find the road that brought me back to you.
Hallelujah!

I have spent my life yearning for the Feminine Sacred, but refusing to do the work to find Her. And in spite of myself, I found the road that is bringing me back to Her. Hallelujah!