Do you swagger at church?  Not too many women do.

Only a few women I interviewed identified the realm of religion as a place where they swaggered.  Michelle, who is the daughter, granddaughter, niece, sister and wife of a minister, was one of the few women to say she swaggers at church.  She says “as a minister’s daughter, all my life I was caught between someone standing up and saying what they believe and having other people think that is what I believe.  As a minister’s wife – you have to decide to be yourself and not feel inhibited.”  When Michelle first married Jacob she frequently said to herself “I can’t believe I married a minister!”  She even had an evil alter ego named Katrina who came out several times, usually after a few cocktails.  She says “I was very young and just married.  I hadn’t figured out how to reconcile the different parts of myself. Katrina was not very nice to Jacob or his job.  I had not figured out how to be me.”

As she has come to know herself better, she has felt more balance and she sees Katrina less and less.  She says she has “come into her style, which means both taking an interest in what other people care about and also wearing biker boots.” She asked herself “can I wear these boots to church?” And the answer was “Hell, yes!” She says she found swagger about ten years ago when she got the big boots.  She says “I want to be there for Jacob- authentically or it is hard for him, but I don’t want to resent him or his role.  I don’t want to be a stereotype.”

I began to find my spiritual swagger when I read The Double Goddess by Vicki Noble.  I went to my favorite bookstore in Taos NM and browsed the women’s section.  Many of the books seemed interesting, but the one I chose was Vicki’s book because it was about women sharing power.  I was the co-director of my organization- a model we have pioneered without much guidance and I wondered if other women had shared power over time.  The answer was yes – as far back as history went and further.  There were the Amazon double queens, who were often sisters – one for peace and one for war.  There is also a long history of dual queens in Egypt and Africa.

As I began to read, I found out more about the ancient, earth-based religions in which women were revered for their life-giving powers and sex was sacred.  There was a civilization on Crete that appeared to live without war for 1,500 years in which men and women were equal partners.  In this book and others that followed, I read about the destruction of some of those civilizations by Indo –European invaders.  The goddess-based societies that were more than 5,000 years old were matriarchal “sedentary, peaceful, art-loving, earth- and sea-bound that worshipped the Great Goddess”. (Goddess in Every Woman.)

These societies were further suppressed and eliminated by the Hebrews and Muslims.  I was particularly shocked by the stories about the Hebrews. After their journey in the wilderness, they came to the land of Canaan. In Christianity, we talked about this event as a great triumph.  What we don’t talk about is that the land of Canaan was occupied by a peaceful, goddess-worshipping culture and that the Hebrews killed everyone except the virgin girls. In the list of what they took in one battle, they listed “sheep, cattle, asses, and thirty-two thousand girls who had no intercourse with a man.” (The Chalice and the Blade) They shaved the heads of these girls and took them as wives – after an appropriate time had passed, which was defined as a month, since the girls watched all their relatives being killed.

I met with my minister and demanded to know how he could hold up the Israelites as examples of virtues and heroes.  It turns out our religion had an interesting interpretation:  all the stories of the Bible were not factual – necessarily – they were symbols for our spiritual growth.  So like the Hebrews, we wander in the spiritual wilderness and are delivered through perseverance into the land of milk and honey.  I found this explanation convenient, but not convincing.  My outrage continued.