Two years ago I was in Pembrokeshire in South Wales. The retreat I’d taken myself to consisted of a collection of stone and flint buildings half way up a mountain and set around a farmhouse and chapel. I had come to find a way through my writer’s’ block and also to deal with a couple of really painful family issues.
My room was only a half corridor away from the chapel itself. It was four o’clock in the morning and because I was quite close to the kitchen on the other side I had my earplugs in. Despite all this, on the second night, I quite clearly heard a woman’s voice calling “Madeleine,” loudly enough to wake me and send me looking down a deserted corridor. It was not imagined or metaphorical, but distinct and unmistakably real. The experience startled, not because I was afraid but because I recognised the truth of it. This familiar, maternal and sacred truth led directly to the writing of Maiden Mother Crone, my second poetry collection just a few months later as well as a resolution of the two other issues that had weighed so heavily on my mind.
Continue reading “She Spoke My Name: Finding the Feminine Divine in Silence, Fire, and Verse by Madeleine F. White”
Feminism and Religion 