"Give me ecstasy, give me naked wonder! Give birth to the Beloved in me, and let this lover die. Let a thousand wrangling desires become one love."
For many, dogmatic wounds taint or even forbid certain pleasures, and to the most conservative believers, the Divine Feminine isn’t just an insult to established order: she’s blasphemous.
“Goddess worship, even in its ultimate form — witchcraft — is now being openly, even proudly practiced in mainstream Christian denominations, in defiance of the foundations of the faith,” one blogger wrote. “The cause for alarm is the massive nature of the assault, which doesn't end at the church door. The ultimate philosophy behind the global agendas of feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, abortion rights, multiculturalism, and anti-“fundamentalism” has its roots, knowingly or not, in the new paganism.”
Yowser.
I’m not pagan (not that I have a problem with earth worship), but a spiritual woman raised in a somewhat religious home who came to understand that sexuality and spirituality are pillars from the same divine source. It seems such an obvious question to me: If we are truly crafted in ‘God’s image’ — granted, do any of us really know what that means? (Nice to see you again, God. Been a while, say, since that flooding incident way back…) — then how can our sensual desires be judged as ‘wrong,’ or worse, something evil, an indignity to the soul?
Original sin, it seems to me, isn’t that our ancestors succumbed to temptations and ate the forbidden fruit, but that we learned to fear our physical passions as something other than sacrosanct, as if God created everything about us, but the devil slapped on the genitals.
“Goddess worship, even in its ultimate form — witchcraft — is now being openly, even proudly practiced in mainstream Christian denominations, in defiance of the foundations of the faith,” one blogger wrote. “The cause for alarm is the massive nature of the assault, which doesn't end at the church door. The ultimate philosophy behind the global agendas of feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, abortion rights, multiculturalism, and anti-“fundamentalism” has its roots, knowingly or not, in the new paganism.”
Yowser.
I’m not pagan (not that I have a problem with earth worship), but a spiritual woman raised in a somewhat religious home who came to understand that sexuality and spirituality are pillars from the same divine source. It seems such an obvious question to me: If we are truly crafted in ‘God’s image’ — granted, do any of us really know what that means? (Nice to see you again, God. Been a while, say, since that flooding incident way back…) — then how can our sensual desires be judged as ‘wrong,’ or worse, something evil, an indignity to the soul?
Original sin, it seems to me, isn’t that our ancestors succumbed to temptations and ate the forbidden fruit, but that we learned to fear our physical passions as something other than sacrosanct, as if God created everything about us, but the devil slapped on the genitals.
What a title
Thanks Howells!
Wonderful article bravo!