I’ve been a part of the New Age spiritual movement (even though I never called myself a “New Ager”) since I was 11 or 12 when I used the family computer to research earth-based religions like Wicca and practices like witchcraft.
I had been raised Catholic and made my communion. I was taking catechism classes after school and getting ready to make my confirmation.
I loved nature, animals, and being in the woods. I always felt that there was intelligence or wisdom of the earth and that humans were too oblivious and self-important to understand.
And I had always felt misunderstood and unheard.
I felt a strong connection and kinship with the natural world. I would sit quietly by myself in the woods away from the other kids who were so loud and who I felt so different from.
Yeah, I was the quiet weird kid and I learned to be pretty good at hiding it.
I’ve always been drawn to the mystical, transformative, wildness of spirituality – but also to the grounded intelligence, wisdom, and beauty of Mother Earth.
I couldn’t find that sense of awe, wonder, beauty, truth, or peace within The Church. It felt robotic, exclusive, judging, isolating, and shallow. I didn’t feel connected at all. Unless I was with the trees or the animals.
I didn’t see the point. It all seemed made up. I felt something real in nature but I didn’t feel anything at church. I figured all these people had been fooled.
I told my mom that I didn’t want to make my confirmation and I stopped taking catechism classes. She was disappointed but respected my choice.
I continued my research into alternative religions and dug up dirt on the Church. I was convinced that practicing Christians were angry, hateful people who judged everyone else and claimed everyone was going to hell. Except for themselves, of course.
I bought a bible for the sole purpose of highlighting all the immoral and disgusting passages I could find. And the next time anyone tried to convince me of God’s goodness, I’d have a quote to throw in their face.
When I thought of Christians I thought of the Westboro Baptist Church holding up “God Hates Fags” signs at soldiers’ funerals. I thought of child molestation by the priests and The Church covering it up. I thought of those people who would quote scripture to justify past and present sexism, and how it was used historically to defend slavery.
I was supposed to believe that these people were followers of God?
Right.
I knew God would have wanted me to fight for the rights of gay people, women, and ethnic minorities. I knew that God would want me to protect the earth from destruction. And I knew that God would have wanted me to have compassion for people who had made mistakes.
So I didn’t know who the god of the bible was, but it wasn’t actually God.
At least he wasn’t mine.
Although Christians claimed that you couldn’t be a good and moral person unless you followed the god of the bible, I knew that wasn’t true.
I continued seeking all my adolescent and adult life into my forties. I looked at shamanism, paganism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and took things from each. I learned about meditation, chakras, yoga, and all different kinds of healing modalities. I even started studying different goddesses and the archetypes they represent to do shadow work on myself. I threw myself into self-help.
I moved into an ecovillage to learn about permaculture, volunteered at a Krishna temple, and worked for a few years at a holistic retreat center that held a similar vision of the world I desperately wanted.
I loved that the men and women I met during my adventures seemed to understand the balance of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine. Even if they didn’t follow a particular religion or didn’t make their spiritual path known to me. There seemed to be an unspoken understanding that the feminine was recognized and respected along with the masculine.
There seemed to be a natural kinship among us as seekers, and breakers of societal expectations and “normal” modes of thinking. I had found community with those who thought and lived outside the box.
I’ve met all kinds of amazing people doing great things to make the world a more beautiful place. And for a while, I felt like I was part of something that could change things for the better.
And I was.
We were co-creators in an emerging new world of creativity, compassion, liberation, collaboration, and respect with each other and the earth.
It was an expansive time in my life.
But I’d always find myself back in this empty, lonely feeling.
I’m not saying this happened every day or even every week. But I knew that something within me needed to be healed still and I didn’t know how to do that.
I’d feel so connected and liberated and shared amazing experiences that I wouldn’t change for anything. But the feelings of separateness, unworthiness, and shame were always there waiting for me a little further down the road.
As I dug more deeply into the dark goddesses I took an interest in Kali and Lilith. For those who don’t know, a dark goddess is the aspect of the Divine that encompasses themes or archetypes of destruction, sexuality, death, and liberation from the toxic parts of yourself. This is why I wanted to work with them for my shadow work.
Shadow work is digging deep into yourself and uncovering aspects of your unconscious mind. The unconscious includes parts of your personality, emotions, patterns, memories, false beliefs, personal weaknesses, etc, that you are not aware of or are so ashamed of that your ego will not let you see them. The idea is that once you are made aware of these things within you and accept them, they will no longer control your life and impact you negatively. You can even transform them into healthy habits, beliefs, and actions.
So Kali is a Hindu goddess who is known as the ego-slayer. It is said she loves you so much that she would destroy everything in your life that is holding you back from liberation and becoming your true self. Even if it is excruciating and turns your life upside down with grief.
Talk about tough love.
I had a vision of her while on a mushroom trip several years ago before I even knew who she was. The encounter felt very uncomfortable, intense, and invasive.
After that vision and finding out about her, I took an online course that was supposed to help me work with Kali. This led me to another course offered by the same facilitator on the dark goddess Lilith. The visualization exercise had me sobbing and I did feel like I was letting something go.
And then the facilitator told me to imagine the pure compassion and unconditional love of Mary Magdalene pouring over me.
I was taken aback.
I had heard of Mary Magdalene since my obsession with musician Tori Amos began in 1998. She mentions Mary often and I bought a couple of books about this mysterious character but never read them for some reason.
Looking back now I can see that I wasn’t ready.
Mary Magdalene led me down a path that had me questioning everything about my spiritual beliefs and my view of Christianity.
I finally read those books I bought about her, I started reading the “Gnostic Gospels,” I listened to podcasts and lectures, and dove into Christian mysticism and early Christian and pre-Christian history.
I even began to think about Mother Mary differently and started praying The Rosary.
I was transfixed.
I felt like I had found what I felt was the missing piece that I had sensed the religion when I was 12 but couldn’t fully articulate:
The Goddess in Christianity.
I don’t mean that in a literal way. I mean I found the balance hidden underneath all the “Father” and “He/Hims” in all of it.
She had been there all along.
Men (the people who wrote the bible) had just chosen to see God as they see themselves.
But God can’t be defined by men (or women).
Nevertheless, She is there and leaks out from time to time:
- Doesn’t wisdom call out? Doesn’t understanding make her voice heard? At the heights overlooking the road at the crossroads, she takes her stand. Beside the gates leading into the city, at the main entrance, she cries out: “People, I call out to you; my cry is to the children of Adam.” – Proverbs 8:1-4
- “The Lord acquired me at the beginning of his creation, before his works of long ago. I was formed before ancient times, from the beginning, before the earth began. I was born when there were no watery depths and no springs filled with water. Before the mountains were established, prior to the hills, I was given birth – before he made the land, the fields, or the first soil on earth. I was there when he established the heavens, when he laid out the horizon on the surface of the ocean, when he placed the skies above, when the fountains of the ocean gushed out, when he set a limit for the seas so that the waters would not violate his command, when he laid out the foundations of the earth. I was a skilled craftsman beside him. I was his delight every day, always rejoicing before him. I was rejoicing in his inhabited world, delighting in the children of Adam.” – Proverbs 8:22-31 (emphasis mine)
The Word, or Wisdom of God, is Sophia. Sophia was a skilled craftsman beside God The Father during creation.
In the Old Testament, they used the word Elohim which is the plural word for God in Hebrew. In the New Testament as well we see mention of a plural God:
- In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it. John 1:1-5
- The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14
John is talking about Jesus here. But what I get from John chapter 1, is that the Word Itself, or the Wisdom of God, incarnated into Jesus of Nazareth to live a human life.
Is Jesus the human incarnation of Sophia?
This alone has sparked my interest in Christianity in a completely new way.
While maybe I can’t call myself a Christian, I am open to what this path has for me and the possibility for a new way of thinking and identifying myself.
The spiritual journey is lifelong and continues to surprise me!
I will continue to explore this and share what I learn and what inspires me.
I’m sure most initially found this blog because it fell into the self-help and “new age” category, so I understand this may not appeal to you for the same reasons this didn’t appeal to me back when I was a teenager and up until as recently as a year ago.
I can see where this blog may be heading is not where many of you wish to go. So if this is the last post you read of mine, I wish you the best on your spiritual path. I understand a lot of you will not want to open the door back up to Christianity and you are completely justified in that. <3
And for those who have been headed in this new direction, thank you for sticking around. I hope this can be a place where we feel free to talk about things that aren’t allowed to be spoken in the current culture without shame or feeling judged.
I’m so glad you’re here 🙂
Nicole Ivy