Maritzia's · Thoughts

My Journal

Livejournal doesn't let me do some of the things I wanted to do, so I went out and created a subdomain off of my website, installed WordPress, and voila...a blog *laughs*.  I'm still figuring out the intricacies of WordPress, but I'm learning oh so slowly to be able to take a theme and change it to something I like.  It's mostly a still-out-of-the-box theme, but I've tweaked it a bit here and there.  It's a work in progress.

Anyway, I'll still be posting here, I'll just copy the posts over to there.  It'll pretty much be a mirror of this site.  It's mostly for folks who read my journal who don't come to livejournal.  I know...people actually read what I write...blows your mind, doesn't it?

Anyway, I might be building some more pages for the journal site to highlight some of my interests.  Not just yet, but probably soon.

Anyway, check it out.  Tell me what you think.

I started back this morning on reading The Twelve Wild Swans.  Since it's been a good 6 months since I last worked on this book, I decided to start over from the beginning.

It's always interesting when I start reading about anything regarding the Goddess.  Obviously, anything by Starhawk is going to include discussions of the Goddess.  But it also seems like everwhere I look today, I'm seeing mention of the Goddess.  At least two other blogs talked about it today (granted they are pagan blogs, but still, so much mention of the Goddess in one day makes me wonder what the Divine is saying to me).  And all of this made me wonder again why I have so much ambivalence to the idea of Goddess worship.

I've thought about this alot off and on over the years.  When I was in the Convent, we were always having these talks about Mary and how she is our spiritual mother.  They used to drive me crazy, and the Sisters could never understand my feeling about that.  They really wouldn't have understood if I explained that people abused by their mothers tended not to appreciate mother images in anything.  As sweet and holy as Sr. Kathleen was, I just don't know that she could understand about things like that.

So I continued through the years, avoiding all talk of the feminine aspects of God, at least in any other context than purely philosophical/feminist contexts.  And being the feminist that I am with a strong interest in paganism, you can imagine how hard it is to avoid such talk.  I've always relied on a very masculine image of God (what can I say, I like masculine men).  For me, a loving God is always a male image.  A nurturing God is always a male image.  But then, in our household, the male parent was the one who we knew loved us unconditionally.  He may have been an alcoholic, but we knew he was the one who really loved us.  With my mom, you always sort of had the feeling that if you did the wrong thing, she'd not only beat the shit out of you, but she'd stop loving you, too, which is much the worse punishment for a child.

So, years later, I find myself among people who have passionate views of a feminine God.  I've gotten better over the years.  I have more female friends than I used to have.  That took me a long time.  I usually stayed among men in my life.  I think being in the convent helped there.  I met loving, compassionate women who helped me to get over some of my antipathy towards the female in my life.  I accept more of the feminine in myself than I ever did.  But I still have this one area that I feel I'm lacking.  I just can't warm up to a feminine aspect of God.  I feel like the Divine is challenging me.  Challenging me that I must accept all aspects of the Divine if I truly wish to achieve the communion that I seek .

So, this will probably be a big part of my seeking in the coming days/weeks/months.  To seek and to embrace the feminine in God.  To seek that which make me uncomfortable, rather than just basking in that which gives me comfort.  To reach out, grow, and change.  That's always a challenge.