Nostra Aetate; DECLARATION ON THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

"  NOSTRA AETATE
PROCLAIMED BY HIS HOLINESS
POPE PAUL VI
ON OCTOBER 28, 1965

1. In our time, when day by day mankind is being drawn closer together, and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Church examines more closely her relationship to non-Christian religions. In her task of promoting unity and love among men, indeed among nations, she considers above all in this declaration what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship.

One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth.(1) One also is their final goal, God. His providence, His manifestations of goodness, His saving design extend to all men,(2) until that time when the elect will be united in the Holy City, the city ablaze with the glory of God, where the nations will walk in His light.(3)

Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stir the hearts of men: What is man? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What is moral good, what is sin? Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve? Which is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come, and where are we going?

2. From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.

Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry.

They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination.

Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways," comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.(4)

The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.

3. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.

They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

4. As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock.

Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ-Abraham's sons according to faith (6)-are included in the same Patriarch's call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people's exodus from the land of bondage.

The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.(7) Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.(8)

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.

As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation,(9) nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading.(10) Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle.(11) In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).(12)

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God's all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.

5. We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man's relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: "He who does not love does not know God" (1 John 4:8).

No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.

The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to "maintain good fellowship among the nations" (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men,(14) so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven."

Source of Post
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

Interview with shaman Mira Michelle Jones; Bringing Back Goddess Church

Bringing Back Goddess Church
All Faith Spiritual Sanctuary
Port Townsend Washington

Pastor; Priestess; Reverend Crystal Cox
ReverendCrystalCox@Gmail.com

Searching for the Divine Feminine: Looking for Aspects of "Her" Between the Lines; Bringing Back Goddess Church, Reverend Crystal Cox.

"May The Blessing of God Go Before You

May Her peace and grace abound.

May her spirit live within you.

May her love wrap you ‘round.

May her blessing remain with you always.

May you walk on holy ground.

~Miriam Therese Winter, Life Prayers

I always had a sense that if there was a God, there had to be a Goddess.

Host-Hostess. Steward-Stewardess. Actor-Actress. In my heart I knew there had to be a yin to the yang I grew up knowing as the Divine source of all that is. I just did not have a clue as to how to find Her.

It wasn’t until I was in seminary school that I began to truly see the many feminine faces of God, known as Goddess, as she exists in so many of the world's religions and traditions.

My path included many bumps, questions and doubts along the way. I share my insights with you because I suspect that many people raised in our traditional religious culture may find it hard to believe--and perhaps even sacrilegious to consider--that the male God of the Bible is one of many interpretations of divine presence that exist in the world’s religions.

Fortunately, I was trained by a seminary that encourages free thinking and exploration. Its motto is "Never instead of, always in addition to." In order to embrace all faiths we were taught that God is one source and yet that source manifests in many ways, through many paths, religions and spiritual practices. And that God is represented by a wide-range of deities with different names.

Nevertheless, the fear of acknowledging a feminine face of God grabbed hold of me in the middle of seminary school. I was doing what seminarians are supposed to do... grappling with God. As I studied comparative religion, I was trying to reconcile the belief system I was raised with--God is a man, no two ways about it--with the new belief systems I was learning--The Divine is neither male or female and/or The Divine is indeed both male and female.

One day I was praying to a feminine deity...and I became panic stricken: What if the Male God gets mad at me and cuts me off? What if he’s saying, Oh, switching teams, eh? We’ll see about that...

Many people are even afraid to consider the Divine as feminine in form or nature. Yet I learned on my personal journey that in order to be truly whole, whether we are women or men, we must embrace both the male and feminine aspects of the divine--and we must embrace those aspects of ourselves and of one another.

I discovered that I am among so many women--and men--searching for spirituality that brings both The Father and The Mother to the table. As we desperately seek balance and peace on our planet, and in these times of deeply disturbing and frightening world events, many of us are searching for what’s been missing in modern life.

And I believe one of the most important missing pieces of our lives has been The Sacred Feminine--not instead of, but in addition to, The Sacred Male. In the tradition of all-inclusive spirituality, we refer to the Divine as God, Goddess, All there is.

She is there, in between the lines

When I first began to search for signs of the Mother in the world’s religions, I found a few beautiful examples, including the "she aspect". One was in the gentle spiritual practice known as Taoism, founded by Loa Tzu in the 6th Century B.C.E..

The Taoists explain the origin of all that is as feminine, yet is manifested as both male and female, in what is known as the Yin and the Yang. It is this energy that the Taoist religious text Tao Te Ching attributes to the creation of the cosmos. "Conceived of as having no name, it is the originator of heaven and earth...it is the Mother of all things."

In Kabbalah, the mystical aspect of Judaism, the indwelling aspect of God, also known as Shekinah, is considered to be the feminine aspect of God. Kabbalists also know the soul as "She." Consider this petition to the divine from the tradition of mystical Judaism:

"My soul aches to receive your love. Only by the tenderness of your light can she be healed. Engage my soul that she may taste your ecstasy."

The Judaic scriptures and the Gnostic Christian doctrines also include wisdom as a feminine aspect. She is called, Sophia and considered the personification of wisdom.

The Buddhists confer that Praj-na-para-mita (which means the perfection of wisdom) is feminine. An important Buddhist text, Sariputra, puts it this way: "The perfection of wisdom gives light, O Lord. I pay homage to the perfection of wisdom. She is worthy of homage. She is unstained and the world cannot stain her."

Then of course, there is Grace. In Christian Theology it is the expression of Gods love in his free and unmerited assistance. And, as the New Testament puts it, Grace can only be conferred through Faith. Isn’t it interesting that those are names assigned to women?

That Grace and Faith evoke perhaps the greatest sense of connection to the Divine, yet do so in the name and essence of the feminine. I was excited to see that when you dig around a bit you will find the feminine between the lines of well-established religions. Still, I was searching for a God who looked like me--feminine in nature and in her manifestations...The spiritual mother I longed for.

Hail Mary

Conventional religious belief is obviously dominated by references to and images of a male Divine, whispering ever so softly of feminine energies between the lines. Yet Catholicism has given us our most tangible mainstream connection.

Mary, mother of God’s only begotten son, along with a handful of popular female saints, have been the most highly visible aspect of the feminine in the traditional religion for 2,000 years.

Because of that, The Blessed Virgin cuts across religious boundaries. She is, in many ways, the adopted spiritual mother of all women, and people of many faiths embrace her. She has been solely responsible for keeping the sacred feminine alive for a couple of millennium.

Yet there are many cultures that are rich with mythology, spiritual practices, religious experiences and sacred texts that show us many ways in which The Goddess has been and can be worshipped, remembered and evoked.

It is extraordinary to realize that just over 2000 years ago, less than 40 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, queen Cleopatra of Egypt prayed to the mother Goddess, Isis, who was the favored deity of the Queen’s temples. Cleopatra’s beloved, Julius Caesar, bowed to Isis’ Roman counterpart, the Goddess Venus.

What was considered sacrilegious in their day was not the worship of Goddesses… but Caesar’s worship of Cleopatra, which was so intense that he erected a statue of Cleopatra as Venus, but looking like Isis, in a holy temple to the Roman Goddess. The Romans did not appreciate that interfaith approach to Goddess worship back then.

When the Romans conquered Egypt, they ultimately replaced the antiquities and images of Isis and her infant Horus with images and icons of Mary and the baby Jesus.

Although Mary and Jesus are the most famous mother and child, the image of the mother and the child (or the pregnant, fertile mother) abound as a motif of cultures that worshiped The Great Mother. Joseph Campbell often said that the same essence of the Divine Feminine could be found in the religious mythology and folklore of every culture. Many of the stories are the same, yet the names and specific circumstances change according to cultural tradition.


History of the Goddess

The earliest signs of Goddess worship date as far back as 33,000 years ago. One of the most famous artifacts of the Divine Feminine is The Venus of Willendorf, which is believed to have been carved in stone 20,000 to 30,000 thousand years ago.

And while she looks like a rotund female--pregnant and voluptuous--when you place a replica of her famous statue flat on her back, she takes on the form of the earth--the hills and valleys, mountains and ravines, are all in her body.

And that is how the ancients worshiped The Great Mother--as Mother of the Earth, Mother Earth and Mom Nature. They followed an earth-based religion. The Great Goddess Mother was the earth--alive, growing, pulsating with life.

She was fertility, death and regeneration, as witnessed in the flowers and trees, the moon and the ocean, the cycles of life and nature. She was seen in so many diverse forms--fluid, capable of assuming any role. Much like our own mothers.

She was revered as the great power because women were seen as the great power. It was human women who could conceive, birth, and nurture children from their own bodies. A Miracle. But a miracle akin to the magic of mother earth--who could nurture flowers in the summer, protect them in her womb in the winter, and magically let them grow again in spring.

It is believed by many scholars that it was the eruption of violence as perpetrated by the newer, male dominated cultures that obliterated the peaceful, earth honoring ways of Goddess worship and paved the way for the strong hold of Christianity and eventually the obliteration of the Goddess from religion, religious texts and teachings.

Native American and indigenous shamanic cultures

The shamanic religion--50,000 years old and still going strong, and considered the oldest of all religions--also reveres the mother, along with the father. She is the earth, the Great Mother. Some cultures call her Patchamama or Corn Woman.

She is the nurturer who feeds us from her own body and sustains all of life. In Native American cultures she is represented by the turtle--a hard shell with a soft inside. A popular Lakota chant sums it up well: "The earth is our mother... we must take care of her."

Who is the Goddess?

Like most people who are unfamiliar with the concept and rich spirituality of including The Goddess, the first time I began to explore the aspect of Feminine Divine called Goddess I was afraid that it meant I had to worship only a SHE and practice a spirituality that excluded men. Wrong.

Almost three decades ago, Merlin Stone wrote a groundbreaking book called When God Was A Woman, tracing cultures that worshipped "The Goddess" or "Goddesses".

She described Goddess this way: She is the "divine feminine principle" or the "sacred feminine principle in the universe."

In this millennium we are seeing a resurgence of the Divine Feminine and an observance of the feminine as sacred. We are seeing her in history, art, folklore, religion, spirituality, archeology, media, and mythology.

Many scholars and clergy agree that we need Her help to midwife this new point in history... Because she brings to our world--and our lives--those qualities that, as discussed, even some traditional religions and most mystical religions assign as feminine qualities: Wisdom and the expression of the Soul. When we tap into wisdom and follow the call of our souls we can then forgive, be tolerant, appreciate everyone’s individual evolution, and love without conditions. The energy of the Divine Feminine also balances the energy of the male; without it, the qualities traditionally associated with male energy--which include warring and aggression--will get completely out of hand.

Rich spiritual traditions and religious mythology can help in everyday life

The natural progression of my search for the Divine Feminine is to write a book that puts together all that I have learned about the Goddess and how she can help us in our daily lives.

In researching my book, A Goddess Is A Girl’s Best Friend (Perigee, Fall 2002), I found thousands of ways the Divine Feminine is personified in different cultures.

The rich mythology of the Feminine Divine has reemerged to offer role models--and guidance--to modern men and women. She comes to us as The Mother, and also the Maiden and The Wise Woman. She is also Sister, Daughter, Best Friend. For example:

The Greek Goddess Aphrodite, also known as the Roman Goddess, Venus, is Goddess of Love and Infatuation. She has completely insinuated herself in our culture, helping us to evoke the love within us all and encouraging us to experience high romance.

The Egyptian Goddess Isis is one of the most revered Goddesses, worshipped as Queen of Heaven in the ancient Egyptian religions. A healing and resurrection Goddess who was also considered a physician, she brought her beloved Osiris back to life from the dead and bore his child Horus, who went on to be the chosen son to represent the father, on earth.

She lives on through her image and energy in reliefs on ancient temples and tomb walls. She shows us we can heal, survive our grief, and live fruitful lives.
Goddess Isis

The Chinese Goddess Kuan Yin is a beautiful Bodhisattva who has captured the heart of Buddhist worshipers and beyond, just as Mary has captured the heart of so many in her religion of origin and around the world. She comes to tell us to be merciful and compassionate--especially to be our own merciful mothers.

Lakshmi is the Hindu Goddess of Good Fortune who brings abundance and beauty into our lives, pouring her gifts upon us. She, like Aphrodite, was born of the milky waters of the sea. She is symbolized as beautiful woman with four arms, one pouring coins into the ocean from whence she came. She is still worshipped daily in Hindu temples and homes, as are all Goddesses in that tradition. Read More About Lakshmi in Rev. Laurie Sue's Monthly Column at SoulfulLiving.com.

All that is Divine is both Female and Male

The Hindus teach us that the Divine essence of all that is is the creative summary of both male and female principle. And so do the Taoists, who show us the feminine and the masculine principle that feed one another and make up the whole in the symbol of Yin/Yang.

The circle of black and white halves show two opposite energies, from whose interactions and fluctuation, the universe and its diverse forms emerge. Tibetan Buddhist do the same with their most sacred objects, dorje and bell. The bell represents the feminine and the dorje is the male principal. No worship service is ever conducted without use of each, together, one held in each hand.

In these systems of belief.... You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have day without the night. You can’t have man without woman, or masculine without feminine. In very, very simple form, you can forget about toast for the rest of your life... you can’t plug in a toaster without both the male plug and the female outlet.

When we really understand that the Divine nature of all that is contains both the masculine and the feminine principles, it begins to make sense that men and women each contain those Divine principle; that the energy of the Goddess exists within all of us; and that one energy might at some times be more prominent than the other.

For example, any man or woman in a traffic jam may choose to evoke their male energy by vocalizing dissatisfaction with the traffic or even trying by driving aggressively. On the other end of the spectrum, both the man and the woman who share a moment of gentle nurturing and loving are operating from a more receptive and gentle feminine energy.

We are all children of God, Goddess, All There Is. When we acknowledge that we are all Divine, as well as complex beings that are both feminine and masculine in nature, we can begin to access true balance in our lives. It is in acknowledging that these qualities exist in all of us that we begin to find balance in our relationship to ourselves, our relationships to one another, and in our relationship to the world we live in.

I Believe The Goddess Is Re-emerging Just In Time…

The Goddess is re-emerging to show us another side of ourselves. Or at least to help us consider God is both masculine and feminine in nature, and therefore, that we all possess The Divine Within. She’s come just in time. Here’s why:

Women feel left out of traditional religion. 

It’s not just about becoming a clergy person or having power, it’s about being able to recognize our own divinity. Men have been able to recognize their divinity through worship of a male divine. It’s time that women access The Goddess Within but first… we need role models.

Men are shut off from their feminine energy and, quite frankly, their softness in many cases, and there is so little in religious environments in our culture--and most of the world’s cultures--that nurtures that side of males. Because of this, men are suffering, and our world is suffering, because we still do not completely support the idea of men being sensitive, loving, gentle, forgiving, healing, even mushy. This is so odd, because that was exactly what the ministry of Jesus Christ was about. Jesus was, in so many ways, the embodiment of both the male and female principle.

Of Mary Magdalene, it has been said, "he could not see her in tears without himself weeping." He spent every waking moment of his ministry embracing people in his love and continues to do so. I mean, who would dare call Christ a wimp? Yet, we often label men who are in touch with that part of themselves by that name.

Because of the ingrained idea of a male divinity, our relationship lives are utterly confusing. Love means war when instead of accessing all the qualities of the male and feminine in ourselves, we seek partners to make us whole. We have to learn to come into relationships whole and we can only do that when we embrace all aspects of the Divine.

We’ve got kids to raise and it’s time we teach them that all of who they are is okay; that their sex doesn’t have to assign them to specific gender roles; that we are all made up of the male and female principle, the yin-yang. If we raise our boys to know the divine only in male terms than we deny them access to a part of themselves, and if we teach our girls that the Feminine Divine only exists in fairy tales, they will grow up as Barbie Dolls instead of as Goddesses.

We live in a world that is spinning out of control. This became so painfully evident in the September 11, 2001 attack on our nation, which brought forth a darkness that shocked and pained us all. But even before that, we were at war with one another and within ourselves, and our world reeled with imbalances: violence in our schools, people starving to death on a planet that has plenty of food to feed everyone, one natural catastrophe after another. Mom Nature has been trying to get our attention. God, Goddess, All There Is has been whispering in our ear… We must take stock of our world and ourselves. We must change, now.

New York author Rick Carrier told me that his book, The Mother of God, is about a female deity who walks the earth to come and tell us: CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM. It is time to clean up our planet, our personal lives, our pain, our wounding of one another and our earth, our relationships, our bad habits, our unconsciousness.

The Feminine Divine lives to love and protect all her children. She’s there for us, always. But she’s screaming out for our attention: "Listen to your mother," she calls, "I know what’s best for you!"

Source
http://www.soulfulliving.com/divinefeminine.htm


Bringing Back Goddess Church
Pastor; Priestess; Reverend Crystal Cox
Port Townsend Washington

ReverendCrystalCox@Gmail.com

Reclaiming the Divine Feminine; Bringing Back Goddess Church; Reverend Crystal Cox

"I was confused about the vision I received to begin my pilgrimage to reclaim the Divine Feminine in Rome because when I close my eyes and think of this ancient city, my first image is of the Vatican. And my first association with the Vatican is it as one of the main propagators of a patriarchal paradigm. Flashes of Scripture that oppress women's voices and instill ideas of male superiority flood my consciousness, like

1 Corinthians 14: 34-35.
34 Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
35 If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home;
for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

Perhaps my vision was leading me back to the old adage All Roads Lead to Rome. My intention to reclaim the Divine Feminine on an individual and collective level is not about diminishing the masculine perspective, but elevating the feminine voice so that they can become integrated and equal while remaining unique in their own strengths.

Think of the yin/yang principle. But how can we even begin to find balance, when the stories that lay the foundation of our major world religions and mythology are undeniably patriarchal?

On a deep psychological level, I have often wondered what the impact is on women who are taught that God is male and that the only access to God is through a male priest, pastor, bishop or rabbi. 

One of the questions most human beings come across in navigating their life is about their individual relationship to God. And if God and access to God is perceived as having a male gender preference, and God is seen as the power of all things and the ideal within which we desire to emulate, where can a woman find her own map to the divine?

It becomes difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to access one of her deepest powers of intuition -- receiving guidance from the Divine and the courage to follow it -- if she inherently believes that she does not have the capability of doing so. If she has not seen images of women as divine or heard stories of women who have also had a direct connection to spirit, the possibility lives outside of her.

With the lack of the Divine Feminine in our history, coupled with the scriptures above instructing women must be kept quiet, a woman is faced with a frightening question in her own heart: Does she acquiesce to the written word that oppresses her in many ways, while bringing comfort in others, or does she venture out of the structure that was created so many years ago to find her own truth?

In the book "The Alphabet and the Goddess," the idea is introduced about the power of language and how the alphabet was used as one of the main ways in which the feminine was oppressed and patriarchy could take and retain power, not only over women, but men over other men.

The author Leonard Shlain explains that the Old Testament was one of the first alphabetic written works to influence future ages and the words on its pages anchor the three powerful religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. He proposes the impact of these scriptures depended as much on their being written as the moral lessons they contained.

Because theses stories and words were written down, they were seen as the ultimate authority of truth. And this written word was used as a way to bring people together in a shared belief system that explains where we came from, why we are here and where we are going after this world.

It also helped strengthen the power of the word when anyone who disagreed with this written story was killed, like in the Crusades, Inquisition and other religious wars, many of them which began with the Romans.

All of this was on my mind that first morning, when I stumbled upon one of largest feminine sites in Rome. I had just missed the bus and the next one wasn't coming for 30-40 minutes. It was then I looked up and saw a huge church across the street and decided to explore it. The church was called Santa Maria Maggiore. It's the largest church in Rome dedicated to Mary as the "Mother of God." 

To my astonishment, I experienced a profound sense of peace in this church and was so moved by the images, each of which portrayed Mary above or next to Jesus, showing and honoring a feminine expression of the Divine that my eyes were so thirsty for.

The synchronicity of finding this large church devoted to Mary on that first day affirmed the vision I had to begin my pilgrimage in Rome.

The coincidence of setting out to reclaim the Divine Feminine and finding her the first place I looked, in all her glory, drew me into a deeper place of being able to trust myself.

This experience illuminated the first insight from this pilgrimage: one of the core practices in reclaiming the Divine Feminine is the ability to trust one's intuition, vision and gut instincts. One has to be willing to go beyond what has been written about the past to explore and interact with life in present time following your instincts vs. your expectations.

Put any cynicism aside for a moment and imagine the power that you as an individual would feel and could hold if you truly trusted yourself. If you believed that you had a direct connection to God/Goddess/Spirit and that the visions of your highest destiny and next steps you could trust and follow.

And then imagine how it would feel if you didn't believe that was true, if that power was outside of you or not available. And lastly, imagine you could choose.

Imagine you as an individual could believe that you had a divine spark within you, access to infinite inner wisdom and the capability to decipher it from your ego. Do you already believe that? If not, would your life be different if you chose to believe such a thing?

The best part was coming home from my first day of the pilgrimage with this experience and remembering the importance of trusting myself and honoring my vision and then doing some research about this church, the Santa Maria Maggiore, and learning how it came to be built -- from a vision.

According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius and instructed him to build a church precisely where he saw a patch of snow on the next day.

Since Rome was currently experiencing one of their typical hot summers, it was out of the ordinary that he found snow at the summit of the Esquiline Hill the next morning (on Aug. 5) and was thought of as a miracle. In commemoration of this event, every year thousands of white petals are released from the ceiling church to "snow" on the congregation.

Beyond the words written that define our connection to the Divine, our visions, intuition and instincts are a vital way that each of us can connect with the Divine Feminine.

As we each learn to trust our own visions -- and one another's visions -- we can begin to dream a bigger dream. I think of John Lennon's quote, "A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." May this vision of a Feminine Renaissance expand in our own consciousness, so that it can also expand in our world."

Source and Full Bringing Back the Feminine Divine Article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rochelle-schieck/reclaiming-the-divine-feminine_b_1766494.html

Bringing Back Goddess Church
Pastor; Priestess; Reverend Crystal Cox
Port Townsend Washington

ReverendCrystalCox@Gmail.com