Spiritual Cowgirl

I fired a priest today. OK, technically he’s an ex-priest who was asked to officiate my little sister’s upcoming wedding, but still. He’s also a wonderful person and if my little sister wanted a man to officiate her wedding, he would be ideal. All that said, I have to admit that asking him to step aside, so I could officiate the wedding by myself, was very satisfying and deeply significant. I swear I could hear Mary Magdalene clapping.

Yeah, I lied in the below post. I didn’t want to be a nun when I was a child. I wanted to be a priest. I heard, what many Catholics refer to as, “the call,” from what I assumed back then was from Jesus, but now realize, was most likely from Mary Magdalene. They sound so similar sometimes, mystically speaking that is, except M.M. has that deliciously dirty sense of humor, that shameless sensual sensibility, and that heaven-shattering divine feminine wisdom that keeps J.C. lovingly washing her feet with the Roman collars he steals from the Vatican. But, let’s return to my wacky childhood.

When I informed the priests at my church that I too was called to be a priest, they laughed, patted my head, and told me I couldn’t have heard the call to be a priest because women were not allowed to be priests. After all, they said, Jesus only had male disciples (M.M. shakes her red head, juts out her hip, and slaps her left cheek), but all was not lost, for of course, I could be a nun.

OK, I thought, nuns must be female priests. Fine. “Can I marry people? Can I give sermons? Can I give people the host? Can I hear confessions? Can I anoint the sick? And, uh, can I bless the red wine?” No. No. No. No. No. And finally, a no.

Wow. These men were so powerful, so intuitive, and so omnipotent that they could translate and determine my personal spiritual experiences. Fascinating. Their surprised reaction, crafted response, and staid theology communicated to me that my spiritual knowing was not real or true or right. These men told me that the voice from God that I so clearly heard, urging me to serve Him as a priest (not a nun), was false. My collect call from God was a wrong number.

Why did these men of God try to silence and reshape my hoot from the Holy? Because I was already questioning the hell out of my Sunday-School teachers? Because I enjoyed swiveling my hips when I walked up and down Church aisles? Because I wanted a pink Trans Am as my priest mobile? Because I was already showing alarming signs of my future redness? Perhaps. But the obvious reason why my sacred nudge to adorn a collar and serve God as a priest was immediately denied - was because I had a vagina. Duh. And we all know the only thing that terrifies the Church more than Hell is a vagina.

Fast forward a few decades to the Beak family Christmas 2007. That holiday week I met with a young priest for dinner. He had read my book, come to my talk the previous spring at The Sophia Institute, and wanted to talk spiritual shop with me. During our lovely time together he exclaimed a few times with surprise, “Sera, you’re a priest!” Each time he said this I shook my head, deflecting the painful title, but all the while hearing this strange hissing noise, “sssss,” from somewhere deep inside.

It was during this very Beak family holiday that my little sister told us that she and her boyfriend were getting engaged soon! After we expressed our delight, I randomly asked, “Can I officiate the ceremony?” I was kidding. Sort of. But, much to everyone’s surprise, my little sister said “yes”. Of course, my family felt that there should be a priest present as well to make it all official and proper and holy (and because my parents are Catholic, and oh yeah, because I’ve never officiated a wedding before, well, at least not in this lifetime and this wedding is big – 300 guests and counting).

And so a few months later, after the perfect proposal in Paris, we started asking various priests if they would co-officiate the wedding with me. I even asked my new friend, the young sexy priest. He said he’d love to, but his congregation would not allow it… because I’m not ordained. This was the answer we received from every priest we asked, except for the wonderful ex-priest. He said he would risk the fires of hell and officiate the wedding ceremony with me despite my lowly non-ordinated status (I do realize ordinated is not a real word, but it’s late and my brain is tired and red wine has been involved in this evening’s musings).

Fast forward a few months later when I was asked by a Unitarian Church to give a sermon. I agreed without thinking much about it. A week before my sermon, as I browsed the church’s calendar to prepare, I saw that every person who had given a sermon in the past year was ordained. Hold up. Gulp. Did the U.U. peeps think I was ordained? This assumption has happened before because the sister program at my grad school was for those who were ordained. I was about to call the kindly U.U. minister to tell her I’m most definitely NOT ordained and that she should cancel my sermon, when my body came to a halt. My spirit bit my tongue. The heat rose, pausing my temporary insanity. My heart roared and I heard, in a loving but fiercely feminine voice:

“Do you really think you’re NOT ordained?”

Like I do whenever my spiritual underpants are pulled down, I called my cosmic twin for reinforcement. She has more personal connections with “the clergy” than I do, having been through the sister program I was referring to, and she reassured me that I do not need to be ordained in order to give a sermon for the liberal U.U.’s. She then said “but la (my nickname), that’s not the point. Even if you did need to be officially ordained, you would still do this…you know what you are… you know what we are….you know”.

I do.

I’m a priestess. I’m ordained simply by the fact that I exist and have a vagina. Naturally. And so are you. If you dare to remember and if you’re willing to re-define this “priestess” role for yourself and shake off any ideas that this somewhat sci-fi, ancient-sounding, exotic title is out of your league or cheesy or woo woo or mystical or something other than a label for a powerful archetype that if appropriately reintegrated could change your life and this planet, not too mention scare the cardinal robes off the Vatican – all things we red ones try to do at least once a day.

As Jalaja Bonheim says in her brilliant book, Aphrodite’s Daughters (please go buy this book. Right now. I’m serious. And pass it along to every one of your girlfriends, sisters, and even your mother)

“Today, I would describe a priestess as a woman who lives in two worlds at once, who perceives life on earth against the backdrop of a vast, timeless reality. Whether or not she is mated to a human partner, she is a woman in love, wedded to being, to life, to love itself. Having offered herself, body and soul, in service of spirit, she mediates between matter and spirit, between the human and divine realms”

“Claiming her own authority is possibly the most important step that a contemporary priestess can take…for untold centuries, we lived as spiritual children who bowed to the authority of supposedly wiser authorities or institutions. Like all children, we often had to sacrifice our personal truth in order to conform to the rules of our religious communities. Now such authoritarian structures no longer serve us.”

After remembering and trusting something so obvious, but so repressed, I called my little sister, waved the red flag, and we decided to nix the priest. And, as we all know, there are plenty of sites online that will ordain me in a few minutes so the marriage will be legal. I am amazed and a bit embarrassed that we of the spiritually-liberal Beak family had been searching so desperately for a man to stand next to me, just so I could officiate my own sister’s wedding. It was absurd. It was sad. It’s a perfect example of how deep and subtle the roots of patriarchy grow.

My beautiful little sister who is most definitely spiritually attuned but not exactly familiar with this sort of funky parlance, called me this afternoon and said: “I don’t want you in the dress I had planned for you when you were going to be a bridesmaid, you know, that white one. Nope, now I want you in a red dress, a sexy stylish long red dress, like something a modern priestess would wear”. My eyes filled with tears, I smiled, thanked her, and immediately prayed to the fashion deities for help. Seriously, if any of you come across a sexy, long, stylish red dress in the next 6 months, lemme know. Price is not an issue. I’m sending the bill to the Catholic Church.

Reclaiming, redressing, re-igniting the inner priestess is not just for the unique or special few. It’s your inherent birthright. A priestess is every woman who trusts her individual path, determines her own life, celebrates her unique relationship with divinity, unifies her sexuality with her spirituality, and uses her innate spiritual authority to ordain herself…over and over and over again…from the bedroom to the boardroom to a wedding ceremony.

“In our day and age, the long-dormant priestess is awakening, knocking loudly on the doors of our psyche, demanding entrance, and often bringing tumultuous change and upheaval to our lives. Afraid, we may turn away and try to ignore her call. But she will not take no for an answer. “You have work to do,” she insists. “Don’t run away.”

“To know oneself as an embodiment of the divine is to gain access to the ultimate source of spiritual authority within. The man or woman who knows God within is no longer dependent on outer intermediaries. Women must discover the divine female essence within themselves. This should inspire self respect, confidence, and the “divine pride” that is necessary to traverse the Tantric path. Divine pride, or remembering one’s ultimate identity as a deity, is qualitatively different from arrogance, for it is not motivated by a sense of deficiency or compensatory self-aggrandisement. This pride is an antidote to self-doubt and discouragement and an expression of the pure Tantric view. When a woman reclaims her divine identity, she does not seek outer sources of approval, for a firm, unshakable basis for self-esteem emanates from the depths of her own being”
- Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment

“One should worship a divinity by becoming oneself a divinity. One who has not become a divinity should not worship a divinity. Anyone worshipping a divinity without becoming a divinity will not reap the fruits of that worship”
- Gandharva Tantra

My shakti left the building this past week. My mojo vacated to Mexico. My She Bang was barely booming my inner universe. It felt horrible. Painful even. Like going from Technicolor vision to black and white, pomegranates to potatoes, Astroglide to KY Jelly. Every time I checked in, I got nuthin’. My true self drew my personality self a big depressing blank. I felt like I was covered with a thick funky fog from a Stephen King novel. I became depressed and withdrawn and even started watching really bad T.V. (gasp).

Finally, last night I managed to lift my self out of the creepy weepy fog just enough to receive a download from divinity.

“You need to love Me”

Whaa? Love the divine? Come on! Give me a freakin’ break! I’ve loved you since I was cosmically conceived. I wanted to be a nun for the first ten years of my life, for Christ’s sake. In third grade I scribbled “I HEART God” on every test, note, and paper, risking severe teasing from my peers. I spent years yawning behind the rigid walls of academia to appropriately study you. I traveled around the world and dealt with all sorts of physical ailments to encounter you. I have participated in countless personal retreats, read all the books, done all the workshops, risked late-night dangerous bus rides through the Himalayas - all in order to directly experience you. I have dedicated my life, my career to sharing my experience of you in order to inspire others to deepen their own unique relationship to you. I have faced, and continue to face, my deepest fears in order to spread the red, and btw, while I’m bitching, you know I haven’t seen a dime yet for all this work and my checking account and credit card debt would make Suze Orman pass out with a bottle of Scotch. And isn’t it enough that I love you through loving the people in my life, the trees, my parrot, my self, organic vegetables, even a few Republicans…isn’t this loving you? What more do you want from me?

“Everything”.

Gulp. After I piped down from my loaded defense, I inquired deeper. I looked, I unpeeled, I began to slowly realize, that I was, well, scared shitless to love the divine in this seemingly new way - free from patriarchal ideas of the divine, prescribed ideologies, popular modern spiritual maxims, rituals, trends, personal habits, my past. When I listened I heard a few definitive basic reasons why… from my unconscious (Sense a theme these past few posts? I’ll be nailing this one home for a while folks. The shadow world is just too damn revealing. My conscious beliefs have very little power when they’re up against my unconscious beliefs). So. If I love the divine the way my spirit wants to, deep down, where the shadow puppets frolic, I’m scared:

1. I will lose my personal power.
2. I will turn into a freaky sappy chick no one can relate to or want to invite to dinner for fear I will lick their foreheads and hug the steak.
3. My human relationships won’t measure up to this Divine Lovegasm and I will continuously be let down and disappointed.
4. I won’t be regarded as “professional” in my career.

Also, if I love the divine the way my spirit longs to, really and truly love like I have never loved before, won’t I split open like the Grand Canyon? Won’t my blood burn through my skin? Won’t my eyelashes catch fire and my heart beat so loud that I’ll disrupt yoga classes, airports, sex toy stores and bookshelves?

I paused, took some deep breaths, went into my heart, and began to feel all the space I had been saving, guarding, protecting. Tears came and came and came, and so did the obvious and deeply humbling other reason why I’m hesitant to love the divine in this new way:

5. I don’t know how

Really. I have no idea. How the hell do you love Love? I can’t exactly smooch the universe or bring it red gerber daisies. I know that how I’ve loved in the past has been beautiful and real and good, but this new nudge to love feels amorphous, unknown, foreign, and obviously uncomfortable. This new way of loving also feels very needed, because I’m calling my self to experience it, repeatedly, gently, with a fancy cosmic fog machine.

I then understood that the only One who is capable of teaching me how to love the divine in this new way, is the divine - which I’ll admit is sort of woo woo and circuitous and chicken and egg-like, but this understanding felt like an energetic allowance more than an intellectual or intuitive realization.

Suddenly the Red Lady interrupted my spiritual navel gazing with the song lyric, “give a little bit, give a little bit of your love to me!”. I burst out laughing and said, “fine, teach me how to love you”.

And with that red invocation, the shakti shook free, my mojo made out with my She Bang, and together they huffed and puffed and blew the fog away. I have no idea what will happen next, how the love lessons will unfold, but I’ve always been a good student.

So how are you loving the divine/universe/god/dess/energy these days? How long do you make out with divinity? How far do you go?

Check out this video

Although I often recoil at calling myself any “ist”, I like this simple video (and check out the Ms Magazine Kali cover!).

For many, being a feminist isn’t just about changing laws, fighting against patriarchy, and demanding equality in the outside world, it’s also, importantly, about venturing inside ourselves and acknowledging the patriarchy we have internalized - a powerful archetype both women and men have that is sometimes called the Inner Patriarch, Negative Animus, or Shadow King. Our Shadow King can be a patriarchal force far more powerful than the external version only because for most of us, he’s unconscious, yet ruling our daily lives. No matter how well educated we are or how progressive or sexually empowered, chances are our Shadow King is influencing our decisions, relationships, careers, clothing, health, sexuality, and even our spirituality. Bottom line: most of us are unconsciously living in reaction to this Inner Patriarch and allowing it to define and create our reality.

As we all know, when we start doing serious inner work and dive into the unconscious realms and intend to reintegrate what we find, we stop projecting as much of our dark or our light onto others or the world. So, in my red universe, if we don’t take the necessary time to explore and integrate our personal Shadow King (or whatever term/phrase, symbol that works for you), we will continue to live in a patriarchal world. There’s much more to say about this subject, stay tuned for my own special meeting with this inner Mac Daddy. It wasn’t pretty. Pissed off Daddies are never fun.

It started, as most red things do, with a dream. This particular late-night romp with my unconscious was triggered by my tango-inspired Alexander Technique lesson, or, vice versa, depending on how you play with the space/time continuum and how much red wine you imbibe before sleep. In this dream, I was at a friend’s loft and there were dozens of glasses filled with colored liquids resting on circular tables. I was making the rounds, somewhat frantically, chugging all the purple-colored liquids as quickly as possible. Suddenly a beautiful young man tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to quit already with the purple-sipping relay. He handed me a glass filled with a bright red liquid, and said, “this is the one you need. This is Power”. Earlier that day, during my tango-inspired Alexander Technique lesson, the power went off in my teacher’s apartment – but nowhere else in the building.

As the week progressed more electronics frazzled. CDs skipped, sparks flew (my electric toothbrush almost started a small electrical fire), my cell lost its charge within five minutes after charging it, my vibrator…well, OK, thank Goddess that one was spared from my personal electro tornado, but for the grand finale, my computer began to act all tired and whiney and whirly and then, it simply refused to turn on…sob. My sweet clunky ibook is a bit of a dinosaur, but it has sentimental value, and even a personality (as do all inanimate objects that reside in my personal space. Call it a soul nod to Tom Robbins or a quaint Aquarian projection trait, I’ve always had special relationships with most of my inanimate objects, for better or for worse). I received this computer years ago when The Red Book became a possibility. It was the first electronic playground for my new red voice. It held my gaze, fears, joys, and divine intentions day in and night out, for over 4 years. It was in front of my body more than any lover.

So I did what any spiritual cowgirl would do in this situation, I blessed my little ibook, smudged it, kissed its belly. I even chose a tarot card for it, and of course, drew the Death card. Gulp.

I called the Mac Genius Bar and was told I had to wait 3 days for an appointment. Three days! I had already gone two days with no computer because I kept hoping my electric buzz would fizzle down and my electronics would magically come back to life. They all did, except my computer. I haven’t been computer-less for an ever. But there I was, unable to write my book, blog, surf the web, check my email, or do any of the things we do with computers, which for me as a writer who works from home, is just about everything. It was downright freaky, and obviously, tremendously revealing. After a little over a week with no computer or easy email access, a funny thing happened, my head quieted down, my rhythm relaxed, my personal space began to clear. Oh yeah, and I met my Inner Patriarch, which I will share in a future post (how could I not delve into the symbolic reason behind all these power outages?).

Btw, right now, I’m typing on a beautiful new computer, the Mac geniuses could not save my previous computer or my hard drive. I had backed up about 80 percent of my writing, but I have lost over 5 months of email that was downloaded to my mac mail and purged from my server. That’s hundreds of personal and professional contacts…gone. Recovering my hard drive would cost me thousands - money I do not have at the moment. So, if anyone reading this has sent me an email in the past five months, please do so again, and do me a red little favor and acknowledge, affectionately rub, and kiss your computer with gratitude, right now.