Something's out of balance.
A lot is, in fact, very, very badly out of balance.
We know it. We see it all around us. Climate change is perhaps the biggest manifestation of this imbalance. It’s the alarm bell warning us of unimaginable disaster if we don’t correct our course. But the signs of something being wrong have been all around us for what seems like forever.
Poverty, war, oppression, violence wielded against every kind of targeted community. Societies that are built on hierarchy rather than mutuality, where white supremacy, patriarchy, and economic oppression allow a few to wield immense power at the expense of the many until the very Earth cannot sustain it any longer, let alone our bodies or our communities.
We know this is not how it's meant to be. And in fact, many indigenous cultures around the world preserve the memory of a time when there was a greater balance - a balance between people and the Earth, men, and women, even between the relatively more and less powerful members of society.
Throughout the world, at different points in history, human societies have existed in sustainable relationships within their communities and with the Earth. Today, our future depends on moving back into that balance.
Rebalancing our world is a deeply spiritual task: a fundamental question of who we are as human beings and how we desire to live in relationship with one another. Will we choose a path of love, mutuality, and nonviolence in our relationships with one another and the Earth? Will we make choices that honor the dignity of all beings as sacred, essential parts of the great Web of Life? Or will we continue to ignore our fundamental connectedness to all of life and all of love, for the sake of maintaining the systems of power and wealth we have created?
This spiritual aspect of the Great Rebalancing is the “decision behind the decision,” the true underlying choice we face about our values and our identity as the human family on planet Earth.
And at the heart of this spiritual rebalancing is the resurrection of the Divine Feminine.
Who is the Divine Feminine? She is Sacred Source, the Universal Mother, the energy of Life itself that births the cosmos. She is God — but not the small, vindictive, punishing god that so many of us and our ancestors were taught to fear.
She is Divine Life and Love, as She has been worshipped by different cultures and religions throughout human history. She is Mother Mary, Kali, Quan Yin, Pachamama, Yemaya. She is the lifeblood in our veins, the compassion in our wombs, the creative power in our sexuality, the deep knowing in our intuition.
She is the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of all that is.
She speaks through the voices of women and those who have been oppressed, demanding justice for all Her children.
And it is She who, like a gentle mother, teaches us to live in loving, mutual relationship with all beings in the Web of Life.
Our prevailing image of God has been an old, bearded white man sitting up in the clouds on a throne
It’s no accident that many people have never heard of Her. For as long as Western history can remember, our prevailing image of God has been an old, bearded white man sitting up in the clouds on a throne. Like any personification of God, this is a metaphor; but this specific metaphor has become so embedded in the Western religious imagination that we forget it is not literal. This god rules the world from above through the threat of punishment for sin, and his image has become so widely accepted that even those who are not religious know a picture of him when they see it. His titles, without fail, have to do with power: Lord, King, Father, Almighty.
Of course, this is less a description of the Divine than of the power systems we have put in place in society. Our images of the Sacred both emerge from and reinforce our value systems. So, a white supremacist, patriarchal society will portray God as white and male, teaching us to trust and obey the power wielded by white men because they are the most “godlike,” and demonizing and diminishing the power and agency of others.
It’s hard to question the “divine right” of a father to rule over his family when you believe “God the Father” does the same. It's hard to speak up for Black lives or the rights of the poor when God seems to be identified with the powerful, the white, the colonizer, the wealthy. And it's hard to advocate for peace and nonviolence when God seems to be full of the most violent threats.
And so — despite the fact that the great religious traditions of the world originated with experiences of divine love — we have arrived at a point where our commonly held image of God helps to justify violence and oppression against Mother Earth and against her children whose lives challenge the dominance of white supremacist patriarchy.
One of the most effective ways to correct our course is to bring back diverse feminine names and images of the Divine.
When we name God as She, we retrain our minds and hearts to perceive the Sacred in those who have been left out of our traditional god-images and begin to value loving, protecting, and nourishing the entire Web of Life on Earth over protecting our systems of power.
We know this works because it’s been done before.
In The Chalice and the Blade, cultural historian Riane Eisler describes how the Goddess-worshipping European and Mediterranean societies of the Neolithic period were remarkably peaceful and egalitarian. In these early agricultural civilizations, women played key roles in all aspects of public life, including religion. But rather than being “matriarchal” societies in which women ruled over men, archaeological evidence shows that these cultures made almost no distinction in wealth or value between the sexes, or even between classes (the leaders and their people).
Eisler calls these “cooperator” or “partnership” societies: civilizations in which, under the loving care of the Goddess, men and women worked together to create a nearly classless society where everyone could flourish. War was so rare in these cultures that some areas seem to have gone 1500 years or longer without sustaining any war-inflicted damage.
When we name God as She, we retrain our minds and hearts to perceive the Sacred in those who have been left out of our traditional god-images and begin to value loving, protecting, and nourishing the entire Web of Life on Earth over protecting our systems of power.
A massive cultural shift began around 4,000-5,000 BCE when the peaceful, egalitarian Goddess civilizations were gradually conquered by invading tribes. They held a starkly different view of the Divine; God was a warrior king who conquered by force and subjected everyone to his will. And with this change of Divine imagery came a devastating shift in social organization that has continued until today.
The ancient Goddess-worshipping cultures, Eisler explains, valued and worshipped the power to GIVE life. A power they witnessed especially in the Earth and in women. For them, the sacred cycle of life, death, and rebirth flowed in and through the seasons, the sun, the moon, & the cycles of the female body. Their reverence for the Goddess and Her life-giving power taught them to honor and nurture life, which produced social systems of mutual cooperation for the sustenance of all.
In contrast, the patriarchal cultures that worshipped masculine warrior-king deities based their power and their gods’ powers on the ability to TAKE life — the violence, or threat of violence, that won them control over others. Through violence, they conquered the Goddess-based agricultural civilizations, and through violence, they maintained strict social hierarchies in which all members of the society were subordinated to the most powerful male rulers. Heartbreakingly, this type of violent, oppressive social order — justified by a vision of God as a dominating warrior-king — has remained the norm of Western civilization ever since.
But today, we are at a turning point in human history and in the history of the planet.
We have come to a time when Mother Earth Herself can stand no more of this. And as people across the world rise up to protect the dignity of all human beings and defend our world, the social and religious systems of control established under those ruling male deities so many centuries ago are crumbling.
#metoo #blacklivesmatter #noplanetb
The Divine Feminine is rising again, and with Her, our reverence for life itself rises anew.
We have the ability to, and we must, evolve back into the balance of partnership and interdependence among human beings and with all of the Web of Life - just as the ancient Goddess peoples knew She had intended life on Earth to be.
Ressurecting the Goddess
Get started now, here’s how —
At this critical time in history, resurrecting the Goddess means both welcoming Her into your life in whatever way feels life-giving to you, and allowing Her to show you how you can contribute your gifts to the collective task of rebalancing our world.
Do you experience Her as Mother Earth?
Get out into nature. Enjoy Her presence in this amazing world — join a group that advocates for climate justice.
Do you encounter Her truth in wise women?
Seek Her by listening to the incredible women around you and women leaders you admire — advocate for the rights that allow women to speak their truth and be heard, especially women who also experience oppression based on race, class, and/or gender identity.
Does She call to your heart as the Creator, Great Mother Goddess, eternal Source?
Bring Her into your spiritual practice.
- Hang up some beautiful Divine Feminine art in your home.
- Build an altar to Her.
- Pray to her for love, help, and comfort.
- Talk to others about how you experience God as a loving Mother.
In your references to the Divine, swap out Him for Her or, if you prefer Them.
Notice what happens, including how people react to the change. Do this even if you are not religious. Because, we have all internalized the image of God as a toxic, powerful, white, masculine “lord” or “king,” and to save ourselves and our planet we need to start separating that image from our collective understanding of what is sacred and good.
If you experience the Sacred Feminine in those parts of yourself that Western culture has feminized and subordinated to the “masculine” intellect — your emotions, intuition, body, creativity, sexuality —
resurrect Her by loving and trusting those most intimate parts of yourself. Work with a therapist or spiritual director to help you reclaim the aspects of yourself that you learned were unacceptable to God. In doing so, you’ll discover the power of Her very life within you, the life that no system of domination can ever take away.
And finally, connect with communities that welcome and celebrate the Divine Feminine.
Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the mistakes of patriarchy over the past 6,000 years, it’s that no one can truly do anything alone, and no one person should be in charge of everything.
The more time you spend consciously with the Divine Mother, the more aware you will become of your life path: your soul calling to shine your light in your own unique way, which cannot help but contribute to the Great Rebalancing.
After all, at your core, you are nothing less than a spark of Her own divine life. And the Divine Herself is longing to shower on the world the gifts that She can only give through you.
If this feels big, breathe. Again, none of us can do it alone.
Start by choosing one practice that helps you welcome Her into your own life. Then choose a form of justice that is dear to your heart, and offer something of your time, talent, or treasure to an organization working to create a more balanced and sustainable world.
The Goddess and your grandchildren will thank you for helping to bring Her back when She was most needed.
#divinefeminine #goddess #healing #divinemother #gaia #spirituality #planetearth #earth #community #sustainableliving #balance
