Home to Her: Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine

By Liz Childs Kelly

Home to Her takes us on a journey, personal and collective, through time and place, to remember and reconnect with the lost and stolen wisdom of the Sacred Feminine, an ancient Divine force known intimately by ancestral peoples around the world. While in some cultures She remains a vibrant, living force, in the West Her wisdom and tradi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Womancraft Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781910559796

Book preview

Land Acknowledgement

This book was written on land taken from the Saklan (Saclan) tribe, often referenced as part of the larger Miwok Tribe, located in the East Bay of California, as well as on land taken from the Monacan Nation of central Virginia. Both the Miwok Tribe and Monocan Nation are federally recognized tribes with documented histories of continued, ancestral presence on the land prior to the arrival of European colonizers.

When my time comes around

Lay me gently in the cold dark earth

No grave will hold my body down,

I’ll crawl home to her.

– Work Song, Hozier

Take up the sword and drink from the cup, and remember all of who and what you are. This is the message of the Goddess, for to Remember is to Know.

– Sharon Paice MacLeod

Intro

Several years ago, I came across a thoughtfully worded op-ed, penned by a rabbi, in the New York Times. In it, he made an assertion that might have felt wildly provocative for some: In the Jewish faith, God is dual-gendered, and the earliest adherents of Judaism would have known and embraced this.

I loved this perspective for lots of reasons, not least of which was seeing a religious man assert that God might be something other than an old, stern white guy who’s ready to dole out judgment from on high – and via a prominent U.S. news source to boot. The rabbi’s suggestion also flew in the face of everything I had learned about God as a kid. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and while most of the talk was about Jesus and how He represented love, I had enough exposure to the Old Testament version of God (plus the viewpoints of those in my religious community) to know full well that He damn sure wasn’t a woman. To suggest that He was a She would not have been simply silly or foolish, it would have been straight-up, heathen heresy.

But the op-ed also reminded me – again – of questions that had been bubbling up for me with increasing frequency at the time. Certainly, anyone who’s had a truly transcendent, spiritual moment, no matter how fleeting, knows that God is much larger than any of our limited notions of gender. But if God really contains both genders, then why is it considered normal to only discuss the male version of Him, or for more progressive folks, to hopscotch over the entire issue of gender and simply declare God gender-neutral? Why is it still so rare that we speak of the divine specifically as a She?

I posed these questions in an article I wrote for Human Parts, an online magazine published by Medium, and the responses indicated that clearly, I’d struck a nerve. While many were supportive, one man told me, I sense you have an agenda fueled by your desire to break free from your feeling of being dominated by men and wishing that women could rise to dominance. He went on to explain that women have always been dominated by men, even in prehistoric times (duh! it’s science!) and that trying to switch pronouns on God was just courting unnecessary controversy because we all already know that He means everybody.

Another man quoted Pope Benedict XVI to me, who apparently said, We are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother. One man told me that If we start calling God ‘She’ then we might well end up with the current situation in reverse, an unbalanced emphasis on the feminine rather than the masculine (given our history, I’m willing to take my chances). And still another man challenged me to show him even one modern Christian who believes in sexism. One. That last one actually rendered me speechless.

In a way, some of these responses were funny, but they still stung. From the very beginning, my deep interest in understanding the Sacred Feminine, learning Her sacred stories and generating conversation about them has always felt like a profound calling. This might seem like a gift, but it brings with it intense vulnerability. It’s hard to stand up and be seen as an unabashed advocate for conversations about the sacred, let alone the still controversial notion that it’s acceptable to discuss God in female form. And it’s still hard for me to share views that I know go against the grain of much conventional thinking, no matter how much historical evidence of the Sacred Feminine I’ve amassed over the years.

And yet I keep doing it. It’s almost like the Sacred Feminine stoked a long dormant flame in me years ago, and that flame has been desperate to find fuel so that it can grow and grow and grow. I live for those moments when I tell someone that I research and write about women’s sacred histories, and see reflected back at me not a glazed look of discomfort, but a spark of hungry recognition that matches my own. In those moments, I find myself reverting back to a childlike state, so eager to connect with anyone else who might be a kindred spirit that I can barely get the words out fast enough (my apologies to any of you who’ve been on the receiving end of this).

Does this passion for the Sacred Feminine come from a deep desire for balance that I believe the Western world desperately needs, or for a healing of old wounds I received by only being given a depiction of the divine as male? Or does it represent something even older? Once, sitting across from a beloved sister in a Sacred Feminine-inspired ceremony, I had a profound flash of remembrance that I can barely explain. Just for a moment, she and I were transported to another place, another time, and there she was, her clear gaze meeting mine, as we enacted the exact same ritual.

I don’t know where the passion comes from; I only know that since that flame was first lit by Her, it has sought out fuel. It has pushed me to speak even when I feel afraid, to write words that I know might invite criticism, to hold space for community about Her, to invite others to speak to me about their experience of Her, and to spend years researching and writing this book. I can only assume that She wants the flame to grow, for others to see Her sparks and for their individual flames to glow brighter, hotter and be more visible to all, too.

I hope this book stokes your own flame of Sacred Feminine remembrance. I hope it shows you, unequivocally, that She is a real, historical, living and powerful force with great relevance to our world today. Above all, I hope it shows you that it’s always OK to call God a She, and introduces you to the incredible transformation that is possible when we do.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Who is She? She is your power, your Feminine source. Big Mama. The Goddess. The Great Mystery. The web-weaver. The life force. The first time, the twentieth time you may not recognize her. Or pretend not to hear as she fills your body with ripples of terror and delight. But when she calls you will know you’ve been called. Then it is up to you to decide if you will answer.

Lucy H. Pearce

She found me at a women’s business conference in the spring of 2014. I was sitting alone, one woman in a crowd of 5,000 attendees, wearing a professionally tailored, red dress and thousand-dollar shoes.

Other than the events of the day, it’s the shoes I remember the most. They were, and still are, spectacular: pointy-toed, kitten-heeled, red and tan patent leather, with three ankle straps covered in shiny metal studs. They were ridiculously showy, conversation starter, ‘look at me’ shoes. And that was the point, of course. I wanted to be noticed, and in exactly the right way.

It was a cool spring day in San Francisco, and I was attending this conference for the first time. I was a little fish with my own communications consulting company, trying to stand out in a sea of women representing large corporations, and I was there for a very specific reason. I was hoping to snag what one of my business mentors referred to as a whale – a large, corporate client that could serve as an anchor and a steady stream of revenue for my small business.

I’d owned my company for six years at that point, pouring most of my time and all of my creative energy into growing it. I’d started it as a true labor of love, alone, in the tiny one-bedroom loft apartment that I shared with my husband, Tom, and our dog in San Francisco, and in some ways, I was immensely proud of what I’d accomplished. I led a mostly female team of employees whose work ethic and skills had given the company a strong reputation for high-quality work. I had also joined the board of a women’s nonprofit and began funding a scholarship program for Oakland girls to help offset the cost of college tuition. I believed I was the best advocate for women that I could possibly be, and by pursuing success in the business world – an option not readily available to my mother’s generation – I also believed I was being the best feminist I could possibly be.

But I never felt good enough. I secretly worried about my credentials, my knowledge, and my right to claim any success I’d already had. I had crippling anxiety before virtually every meeting or speaking engagement, something I constantly tried to hide. I was terrified of not having the right answers or being seen as an imposter. These fears never eased, even as the years passed, and I never thought to question the environment in which I was operating; I just assumed there was something defective about me. That’s why the shoes I was wearing that day were so important. If I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin, I could at least look the part.

Something else was going on that day, too. I was four months pregnant with my second child, and I was determined not to let that be a distraction or even a talking point of the day, which is why I’d chosen a dress that artfully concealed my waistline. And the shoes would draw attention away from my belly, I hoped.

I didn’t end up meeting a single other person at the conference. Instead, I experienced something remarkable that ultimately changed the course of my life.

I snagged a seat in the back of the main hall for the opening session, which flowed along uneventfully until a beautiful, seemingly ageless woman appeared on stage. She wasn’t the keynote speaker – that was business and media mogul Arianna Huffington, who would appear later. I could barely see this woman from my seat in the back, but her radiance lit up the giant screens framing the stage. Her name was Dr. Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, and as an anthropologist and National Geographic Fellow, she had spent years studying the wisdom traditions of different cultures around the world. In a lilting, hypnotic voice, she spoke at length about the navigation techniques of sailors from the Pacific Islands.

Wayfinders. That was what she called these master navigators. With the guidance of thousands of years of teachings, mostly passed down orally, they could navigate between islands using only their intuition and their ability to interpret the wind, stars, birds, and the ocean itself. They found their way by listening and watching, she said, so much so that they could sail thousands of miles just by observing the way the waves broke across the front of the boat.

She kept talking, but I could no longer hear her. Something strange was happening to me. My whole body began tingling, and heat began rising from the soles of my feet, neatly encased in their designer shoes, all the way up my body. It was not at all unpleasant; in fact, it felt like a slow, delicious burn, as if I were being gently licked by imaginary flames. As the heat reached the top of my head, the room around me appeared to shimmer and recede. I felt as if I were in a vortex of sorts, still fully present in the giant conference hall, but somehow in a different dimension at the same time.

In a daze I turned to look at the woman next to me, unspoken questions reverberating in my brain: Are you hearing this? Is this information having the same effect on you? She didn’t appear to notice and instead continued looking straight ahead, listening to Dr. Lindsey with polite attentiveness, as if it were any ordinary conference on any other day. I, on the other hand, was having the most extraordinary experience of my life. As I sat there, my body humming with heat and energy currents, I felt the center of me crack open with a question that somewhere, deep within, I already knew the answer to: What if that kind of intuitive knowledge and ability lived somewhere in me, too?

What if? I seemed to hear the waves whisper as they broke across the front of the wayfinders’ boats. What if all the wisdom we need comes from the depths of our own hearts? For a moment, it was as if I were on the boats with them – watching the waves, feeling the breeze, calmly and steadily navigating my way home.

As it turns out, intuition, or inner wisdom, is the calling card of Her – that Sacred Feminine force I didn’t yet have a name for. I didn’t know this yet. I didn’t understand that She had reached out across the room, casually struck a match and thrown it at my feet, setting my body on fire with an old and deep remembrance. I would only realize this much later.

I also didn’t understand the significance of the messenger, Dr. Lindsey, as a keeper of Indigenous wisdom. It’s a sad truth that much of the sacred practices of my own European ancestors were destroyed long ago by patriarchal forces, who ultimately went on to wreak the same havoc on Indigenous populations around the world, including Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islander peoples. With nearly 400 years of family history on American soil, I’ve been steeped in a culture of white supremacy, colonialism, and a reverence of whatever is deemed the most profitable, so it’s no wonder that I needed a wake-up call from a culture other than my own. I remain profoundly grateful to Dr. Lindsey for sharing her wisdom with me and others, and I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be on this path without the guiding wisdom of resilient Indigenous traditions that have helped me on my way.

There was so much that I didn’t understand about the events of that day, but I still knew immediately, instinctively, that something incredible had happened. After the opening session, I stumbled out of the room and through the next several hours in a daze. I spent my breaks between sessions on my iPhone, googling Elizabeth Lindsey and wayfinders. I forgot all about networking. I forgot all about my shoes. I left the business conference that day with no new clients – just a burning desire to understand what I’d experienced.

At home, I began dedicating all my free time to internet research, starting from a very literal place. Perhaps there was something specific about the wayfinders that I needed to understand. The Disney movie Moana likely brought these master navigators to the attention of many people, but this was years before the movie was released. Instead, my digging led me to an account of the wayfinders in a collection of essays by the anthropologist Wade Davis, which also detailed the cultures of many other Indigenous peoples, including the Aborigines of Australia and the nomadic Penan of Borneo. It also opened my awareness to shamanism and the Indigenous spiritual wisdom that survived intact in several places despite the devastating global effects of colonization. Much of what I was reading was written by Western anthropologists, not native teachers, which means what I was learning was undoubtedly skewed by their own cultural biases and assumptions. But however flawed my searching, I was being offered a radically different way to view the world – one not rooted in an obsession with data, logic and the commoditization of virtually everything, but instead brimming over with magic and what felt like deeper, more essential truths. I marveled at stories of people with no language for time or concept of material wealth, as my brain demanded more and more.

The more I learned, the more magical my life seemed to become. My dreams, which I’d never really been able to recall, were suddenly memorable and intense. One night I dreamt that a crocodile was sitting in front of me in the dark. I could feel its eyes on me and hear its breathing, slow and heavy in the night. Oddly, I didn’t feel afraid; instead, I knew that I was in the presence of something immensely powerful and older than I could possibly imagine. I woke up drenched in sweat.

I began to see images of powerful animals everywhere – panthers emerging from the steam created on the shower door, bears taking form in clouds floating in the sky. Years earlier, I had established a practice of going outside in the early morning to meditate. In that quiet time alone, I began feeling a strange, inexplicable connection to the wind, as if it were rising and falling in rhythm with my breath. In fact, everything around me felt more alive. I caught myself constantly staring at ordinary things that I’d somehow never paid attention to, enthralled by the dance of a butterfly or the sway of the trees in the breeze. Sitting outside in my backyard, some days I felt like I might evaporate, dissolving into the natural environment around me.

Old, painful memories soon began bubbling to the surface, too. Childhood traumas, things I hadn’t thought about for years, suddenly felt fresh. My parents had divorced when I was a child and after a lifetime of secret spending habits and what my family now suspects was a gambling addiction, my father filed for bankruptcy. We lost our family home, cars, and everything else of value, and my father never really recovered from the loss of his family or his career. After a long battle with depression and a series of mysterious, unexplained illnesses, he died when I was nineteen years old.

As a general rule, we didn’t speak about any of these tragedies in my family, so I had convinced myself that this was all long behind me. Now, however, I was haunted by memories of these past events, and I found that I often couldn’t sleep at night. I’d sneak into the living room alone and sit quietly crying in the dark, trying to understand what was happening to me. I didn’t consider confiding in Tom or anyone else at the time. What I was going through felt both unexplainable and too personal to share.

In the midst of all of this, the baby inside me grew and grew. By this point I knew that he was a boy, and I began wondering if he had some kind of connection to everything that was happening to me. I was beginning to believe there were no coincidences, and at times I felt as if he were traveling with me, guiding me to go deeper into what I was learning and experiencing. This proved to be true of his birth as well.

The births of both of my children were profound, each in different ways. The day my daughter Claire was born, three years earlier, was as life-changing and memorable as it should be, but also one of the strangest days of my life. I received an early epidural before contractions had really even begun, and spent the next twelve hours reading magazines and playing online games with Tom. I felt nothing from the waist down, not even in the final stages of pushing. The nurse reassured me that this was normal, but I felt completely disconnected from my body and my daughter throughout the entire process. When the nurse finally placed Claire in my arms, I looked down at this little pink, screaming bundle, and all I could feel was tremendous fear that I wasn’t qualified to be her mother.

My son’s arrival in the world was different. For one, he was my second child. I’d been down this road before and I knew what to expect. More significantly, his birth marked another major turning point in my journey with ‘Her’ – even though I didn’t know who or what She was just yet.

Birth is the experience of a woman stepping into her power, writes Regena Thomashauer, and that was exactly the experience I had when he was born. ¹ I really wanted to have a natural labor, without the assistance of an epidural or drugs. Since I couldn’t feel anything when Claire was born, I wanted to make up for it by feeling everything this time around.

And oh, how I felt it. The pain was unimaginable. As my labor progressed, it felt like a demon was slamming a sledgehammer into my lower back at full force. I could feel it ricocheting throughout my entire body, and my whole being tensed to it. Eventually, though, we humans are worn down by pain. We are broken by it. And improbably, that’s when the magic happens.

In those wondrous and awful moments as I worked to bring my son into the world, I learned the power of surrender. I can remember the exact moment I stopped fighting the pain and simply gave into it, then watching my body take over. It knew exactly what to do. It was terrible and amazing and painful and awe-inspiring, all at the same time. And by allowing it to do what it – I – had been created to do, I suddenly felt, in the most intimate way, a profound connection to not only my female ancestors, but all those who’d given birth before me.

We named our new baby Brendan Kai – Brendan, for the Catholic patron saint of navigators, and Kai, which means sea in Hawaiian. My very own wayfinder baby.

In the days and weeks after my son was born, I returned to the moment of his birth again and again, quietly turning over the experience in my