Paradigm Shift: Adding a Feminine God

Margaret Starbird writes:
A “paradigm shift” occurs when we honor the “Feminine Face of God” –as incarnated in Mary Magdalene, the Blessed Mother [Mary] and other holy women.

Katia writes:
I wish there was a Sunday School near me that did just this — honored both the sacred masculine and sacred feminine, God and Goddess.  My kids could sure use that balance.  This paradigm shift is so new and mainstream churches need to catch on. I’ve heard a handful of Methodist Churches honor Sophia as Christ’s “spouse” and as the Sacred Feminine.  But none are near me and my family.  Time to start our own Alternative Christian Church, we realized(!). And that’s just what we did here in Dallas / Fort Worth!

Pregnant Magdalene & Jesus standing as married from a Church in Scotland early 1900sMargaret continues:
One of the major points I try to make in my books is that when Magdalene’s voice was silenced, the voices of women were silenced as well, since she is the “model” for our relationship to Christ (the Church and each soul as “Bride” or “Partner.”)

The “Partnership model” was lost in the cradle of Christianity, before it could even get off the ground…. For me, THAT is the paradigm we’re trying to reclaim. It’s a HUGE shift from the “Patriarchial” model (God with a long white beard)– and is illustrated in the “sacred marraige” window posted at the top of my website which shows Jesus and Mary Magdalene “hand-fasted”–holding right hands, a symbol for marriage. Margaret’s website is here: http://www.margaretstarbird.net/

In reclaiming Mary Magdalene, we reclaim a piece of ourselves and restore the paradigm of “cosmic balance” of masculine and feminine energies.

Peace and well-being,
Margaret

A lady named Rhonda had posted this:  “I was thinking that for so many years Mary was considered a prostitute and with all the historical evidence proving that she wasn’t and even the Vatican itself saying she wasn’t, that this is causing a VALUE SHIFT in how we think of not just Mary [Magdalene] but all women in the bible.”

All the women in the Bible.  Yes.  First we re-evaluated Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus.   Magdalene went from being a prostitute with a demon problem to being the first Apostle and first witness to the Resurrection.  Some of us have shifted our value judgement of her so far as to make her a spouse of Jesus and co-Teacher with him.  And Mother Mary – we realized she does not have to remain a virgin even after giving birth to Jesus. The Church came up with the idea of her eternal virginity in order to satisfy celibate Catholic priests who were/are so against sex they condemn/ed it as filthy and dirty. 

Mary is now coming into her own, too, and is probably an incarnation of Sophia, the Goddess in the Old Testament (she is present during creation helping God, see Proverbs).  Mary can be a full living, loving woman, she doesn’t have to be sanitized and de-sexualized into a virgin any more than her son has to be sanitized into a celibate monk disdainful of women.

So back to Rhonda’s point about viewing all women in the Bible differently.  Yeah.  Look at poor Tamar, and Dinah, and even Sarah.  Our opinions of them are changing, too. That’s the Old Testament, but the New Testament women should all be re-evaluated also.  A shift, a definite shift is occurring where women are not viewed as either harlots or virgins, whores or chaste mothers.  This is good, this is revolutionary, we must keep it up.

We must never forget that however we view them now, we cannot change how their husbands, fathers and brothers viewed them when they lived, which is usually as property, as prized breeders, but not as equals.  Very, very, few men if any viewed women as intellectual equals, as full human beings. Jesus was very avant garde in his time.

The Church says Jesus was fully human but deny he did human things like experience sexuality, mate and produce children.  Ah, the contradictions.  But we are figuring all these flaws out and re-shaping our spiritual system, our Christianity, to include God-ess right alongside her pal God. 

It’s a great time to be alive, people!

Katia