Shaddai – Feminism and Religion

After a beautiful and insightful Foreword by Christena Cleveland, Chelsea begins her engaging book by telling us, “Up until the age of 26, I didn’t struggle to align my identity and my life experiences with the white, evangelical way of seeing the world.” Born in the late 1980s and raised in a nondenominational megachurch, she grew up with a strong sense of belonging. All was well as long as she matched her thinking and experiences with authoritarian expectations. “I was able to exist in those spaces just fine until, quite suddenly, I wasn’t.”

What changed? Pregnancy. “It was the first splinter in a crack that eventually ripped my whole worldview apart, forcing me into a crisis of theology where I felt I had to choose between myself and the church I loved.” Experiences surrounding pregnancy and childbirth opened Chelsea’s eyes to the realization that as a woman in a patriarchal structure, built by men, she didn’t fit. Interpretation of Biblical text empowered men. “I couldn’t see my femininity reflected in and affirmed by the God they made in their image.” She fled her home church.

“I walked through many lonely years trying to wrestle my way into a version of faith that reflected my reality and contained my life experience.” Chelsea, as a child, had memorized Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” No room in her natal faith for “heart knowledge” since logic and reason superseded intuitive thought. She had learned to mistrust and silence any wisdom that came from within her own Being.

Intro: I have been working on a project inspired by Charlene Spretnak and her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. I am writing biblical stories through the eyes and words of the women. The scribes who wrote down the tales of the bible, wrote mostly from men’s point of view. And they had their own which was to destroy evidence of the Goddesses. I tell Noah’s story through Naamah, his wife. Abram and Sarai’s journey to Egypt through the eyes of Sarah. Exodus in Miriam’s voice. In my telling, Miriam went to Midian with Moses and, while there, experienced the Burning Bush and worked with Moses’ wife Zipporah to protect knowledge of the Goddesses. Below is an abridged version of this section of Miriam’s tale.

I look around at your world today. You, yes you, are my descendants. My beloveds. I mourn for what you’ve lost. No, I am angry, how could things have gotten this bad? I dare you, I dare any of you to challenge my work. We did everything we could. It should not have taken this long to find our clues. But then I see the job the scribes did. It was better and more thorough than even we, who saw so much, could have imagined. I look around at this precious earth we bequeathed to you and see how damaged it is.