Liz Hall Magill: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, or Spirituality?

About three years ago, I began exploring feminism, trying to figure out why I’d been sold a lie about equality, and what it would take to create true equality for women in future generations. I started a feminist blog—which I didn’t even realize was feminist until I’d been writing for a while—and I read other feminist blogs, along with books and articles by famous feminists.

Simultaneously, I was on a new spiritual path—one instigated by events in my personal life that required me to examine myself and my past. At first, I thought this path was only psychological and emotional. But it soon became spiritual, as I found the book Sacred Contracts by Carolyn Myss, and I began using it as a spiritual workbook. I started going to church again—I hadn’t been in several years, not since moving from Pennsylvania to Virginia. I attended a women’s spiritual gathering for Advent, and the woman leading the group, upon hearing my feminist explorations and my sense that I had never quite “fit in” to any church, asked if I had read She Who Is.

So I met Sophia. And I realized that She is who I’d always been looking for spiritually—and that She is who we need politically, in any of her forms.

The idea of woman as sacred is the catalyst we need to empower women to change our own circumstances. We must believe in our intrinsic value despite all messages we see around us, including the religious ones that underpin all the others. To find the wellspring of communal female strength to rise against demeaning societal messages and unequal treatment, we must believe we are so incredibly valuable that God—yes, even the Christian God, whose name is invoked by conservatives to argue for inequality—made us in Her image, just as He made us in His image. Only in conceiving of ourselves and God in this manner (whether we do it as Christians or Goddessians or in any other religious tradition or context) can we confront the messages we have received for centuries—and continue to receive via our politics and our media on a daily basis—that women are less valuable than men, and therefore deserve abuse, harassment, and neglect.

In claiming the sacred feminine, women will necessarily also claim political power, respect, and dignity. And in doing so, we will heal not only our own wounds, but those of men, children, other creatures, and the planet.

Liz Hall Magill
Farmville, Virginia
www.elizabethhallmagill.wordpress.com
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This is an ongoing collective writing project, initiated by Magoism: The Way of S/He and Mother Tree Sanctuary in response to the question, "Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, or Spirituality?" We will feature different women's answers here and on the Magoism blog in the months to come as part of this project.

Contributions are welcome.  Please email magoism@gmail.com or join the discussion on the Magoism group on Facebook.