Her

For this reason I bow my knees before the Mother, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,

that She would grant you, according to the riches of Her glory, to be strengthened with power through Her Spirit in your inner being; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length, and height, and depth; and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of Goddess.

Now to Her who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Her be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

I'm only in the intro, but two themes stood out to me.

"...a woman's right to define the sacred from a woman's perspective."

"... [A] struggle to wake up, to grow beyond old models of womanhood and old spiritualities that no longer sustain."

I cannot shake the conviction that the vitality and vibrancy of women, our stories of women, and women's authentic voices in the church, arts, politics, etc is deeply essential to my hope and future as a man.

To quote the Dakota Fanning version of Lily Owens, in all of it's 14-year-old drama, "My whole life's been nothing but a hole where my mother should have been." A hole where the strong feminine should have been. The "wholeness women have lost within patriarchy" (Sue Monk Kidd's intro again) was devastating to me as a boy and haunts me as a man.