Laying in the dark, absolutely still, heart pounding audibly, my mind framed the words Mother, Daughter, Feminine Spirit. What? Mother, Daughter, Feminine Spirit. Shhhhh… Mother, Daughter, Feminine Spirit!!

I felt terrified. And then an ancient part of myself broke open and spilled out all over my life. I have not been the same since. I am becoming whole.

How strange to have been born female, to grow up a girl, to live my life as a woman and to only know a male image of God. How strange to have no conscious knowledge of what was missing… the Goddess in whose image I was created.

The Christian Bible told me clearly that in our relationship with Jesus there is neither male nor female, master nor servant, slave nor free. However, the words, symbols and values of a male centered belief system permeated my church and the culture I lived in. As I matured as a person and as a woman, I became increasingly intolerant of a relationship with the Divine in which I was a perennial child, seeking the favor of a heavenly Father through the intercession of a perfect Brother. On a simple human level, the inherent inequalities in this religious family system are obvious. In Protestant circles even Mary, the Mother of God, is relegated to fourth place at best. I felt most intimately connected to the Holy Spirit, dwelling in every human being, comforting, healing and teaching us to love one another.

Over the decades of seeking God, I came to listen more and talk less. A year of practicing Zen meditation helped to quiet the chatter in my mind. I listened in silence and in silence the Infinite held me. Then She began to call to me, at first more quietly than a whisper of longing. In recurring synchronicities, I found one book, then another and another by women discovering, researching and writing about the civilization of the Goddess.

Over a 30,000 year span of time, before the coming of patriarchy, communities of people honored the sacred female and lived in harmony with nature as a part of the matrix of life. The incredibly beautiful cave drawings of Ice Age people attest to this, as do early carved images of the Goddess, for example the familiar Earth Mother of Willendorf. Contemporary archeologists, most notably Marija Gimbutus, digging down into the debris of human history have found at the bedrock, people who worshipped the deity in female form as Maiden, Mother and Crone. Catal Huyuk, Old Europe, Malta, Avebury and Minoan Create were highly developed cultures with systems of religious practice, language, law, visual arts, agriculture, mathematics and commerce. However, what was most significant was what was absent… weapons of war.

If early people lived together for thousands of years without going to war with one another then, perhaps, it is not "human nature" for people to kill one another. I believe this is the most radical paradigm shift in the history of civilization as we know it. Of course, we cannot go back in time. But we can go forward with a renewed vision of what might be possible. Looking into the Feminine Face of God may provide the balance necessary for us to survive.