Christianity has failed Women.

And my convo with Jesus about it.

Christianity has failed women (and every other group that is not straight, cis-gendered white men, but I can only write from my own perspective on women rn). By eradicating the divine feminine as part of creation and the divine marriage that exists in every other myth and tradition, we women lost out on being able to claim our part as equals in the most adhered-to religion in the West. 

When Christianity shut out women (or a woman) as part of the creation of Jesus, we as a culture decided that only God, Holy Spirit, and the Son were more important - to the detriment of women.

Marie Louise von Franz, a therapist who studied with Jung and wrote much about Christianity, fairy tales, and archetypes, talks about this often in her work.

And while Christianity has failed all of us by not reconciling ALL parts of the self… (i.e., you are a “good person” if you are Christian, but what does that mean for the parts of you that are “not good”? Those parts get repressed. Shut away. Without any chance of true reconciliation or actualization of the whole of you.)

…This is especially problematic for women. Because it means that women are shut off from their divine, sexual nature. We are convincned by modern Christianity that to have sexual feelings means there is something wrong or bad within us.

Even as a child, I knew there was something wrong with women not being able to be priests or pope in the religion I grew up with - Catholocism. It wasn't until my twenties, though, that I could name the hypocrisy prevalent in the church and ultimately caused me to leave the church. 

But those of us who are were raised in the church, or still are part of a Christian church, are still reckoning with our roots. Most (not all) Christian churches still don't recognize women as equal to men. 

And that's not what Jesus would have wished for. 

I don't usually connect with Jesus as a guide, but after all of my recent reading of Jung and Marie Louise von Franz, I wanted to have my own conversation with him.

The first word he said to me was "Sister." 

And it landed sooooo deeply. He meant it as "Equal." We then had a very long conversation about how the women he grew up with in his tradition (the Essenes) were absolutely equals. Sisters. Teachers. Mentors. 

As tears poured down my face, he reminded me that he never wanted Christianity to take on his name, or to create a religion around his work. That was never the intent. When he said “The way is through me” he meant by living as he did - by loving your neighbor as yourself.

And here's the thing - if you grew up in the West, with Western traditions, then  you are already in a relationship with Christianity. You will have to untangle what your realtisionship is to this religion that has dominated so much of our thinking. 

Simply by choosing to be spiritual, as I have done, doesn’t mean that we can shut off our entire upbringing. Simply by saying that we no longer believe in the church doesn’t mean that we are instantly healed from the trauma that being raised in the church has caused us. Simply saying that we don’t believe in the bible doesn’t make us immune to the concepts that those who preach the bible continually inflict on our culture(s).

So - how do we heal, then?

By claiming our role as the Divine Feminine. By seeing ourselves as God. By knowing that our power is not in the masculine “push” energy, but is instead our wild, untamed, bloody, messiness. By accepting and loving all parts of ourselves, especially the ones that we wish others didn’t see. By knowing ourselves to be equals, no matter what the outside world has said.

(This post is partially inspired by Caroline Lovewell’s Red Work, a program I was recently part of.)