Reflections on Feminine Spirituality
and My First Christmas Conscious of Being a Woman
By
Jennifer Angelina Petro
Dear Friends,
I wish you all the happiest of holidays–safe, warm, and love-filled.
I am have edited this piece with a new title and a paragraph at the end that should have been in there from the beginning.
I want to also add a trigger warning for some brief, erotic content. It seems I have turned a few people off with my teenage visions of Mary and my adult visions of bliss with my Beloved. It’s interesting that erotic images for the Beloved have been around since before the Song of Solomon–but most of them between either a male beloved and a female lover or vice a versa. There are not many lesbian spiritual images for union and oneness so perhaps that is why my descriptions seem so strange to some. They are my truth however and not shared with the intent to offend. So read on if you dare, and I hope your day is filled with light. The story of the birth of divinity is as old as the earth. And yet for me the real story of Christmas is Mary. She is the anointed one. She was the one strong enough to say yes to the Divine within her and then bravely share the fruits of her womb with the world.
Mary Chistmas! Love, Jennifer
Reflections on Feminine Spirituality
and My First Christmas Conscious of Being a Woman
By
Jennifer Angelina Petro
For years I loved the story of the little baby king of the universe being born in a manger in a city whose name means, “House of Bread.” I loved the idea of this king of all being manifested as holy innocence—the greatest power of all. I loved how the animals—the wisest of all—gathered around to seek him with their marble-brown eyes. I loved how time stopped and the whirling of the earth paused when he was born. I loved how shepherds came to visit him with lambs draped across their shoulders. I loved how the entire story was steeped in light and yet I could not escape the foreboding and foreshadowing of what was to happen to this king of light some short thirty year later. And over time I began to hate the story.
The idea that a supreme being would sacrifice his only child to atone for his own mistakes is profoundly disturbing, whether that child chose freely to accept this mission or not. The idea that the actions of people were so depraved that they demanded the brutal killing of “god’s only son,” is barbaric. The story is perverted to me. It is an example of masculine energy gone awry.
Interestingly the past several years leading up to my discovery that I am transgender, I found myself drawn closer and closer to Mary in the nativity narrative. The more I read books about her and wrote songs to her the more I remembered how I loved her more than her son when I was growing up. I would stare at her in the many pictures and statues around my house and in the Catholic churches I went to. She fascinated me with her fiat—with her yes, with her beauty, her grace, her oceanic blue robes, her womb full of spirit-seed. I felt horrible guilt imagining her nursing her child. I felt like the worst of sinners the more I could not move my gaze from her beautiful face and chest during mass. I felt unredeemable when I imagined bathing her with kisses, and bound for hell for wanting to touch her there. All these years later I finally know why.
My soul has given birth to my true self—I am a lesbian woman–a revelation born from the womb of myself–and even though I am wrapped in the sweetest innocence and sense of discovery and wonder at being a woman—the circumstances around the revelation—the medical symptoms surrounding my womanhood leave me with a deep sense of loss—time lost, opportunities to live and love as a woman—to love a woman as a woman myself lost. No sooner was I born when the knowledge that the body that swaddles this woman is not traditionally feminine—it is a man’s body—came rushing in. This knowledge grieves me to the core of my being (my three sons not withstanding). It is my fiat to the holy mother. It is her will that this is so, and now I must release my womanhood into the hands of a transition that will take years of sacrifice.
Yet there is cause for rejoicing. Innocence has been reborn in me. I am approaching fifty with the soul of a young woman in her twenties, and the heart of a teenage woman, and the spirit of a little girl all of ten. And I have never been so happy. And as I bloom (a word and image I have been using in my writing for decades) more and more into myself as a woman the more the idea of a masculine deity becomes foreign—alien—tiresome.
I know about yin and yang and the thought that the divine encompasses the opposites—that the world we live in is a world of duality—and yet I no longer accept this sphere of opposites as the ground of being for the divine. It is true of nature—seed and ground, sperm and egg, but the force behind it all is mother—is Creatrix—is the goddess. All things are born from her womb; all things arise from her and suckle at her breasts.
Mary—mater—matter—mother–she is the goddess I love–the earth as mother, the soul as feminine—my soul as feminine—my soul as woman. The more I journey into myself as a woman the more I recognize the goddess as the prime force behind and within all things.
Who provides her with seeds? In the story of advent, the shadow of the holy-spirit sought Mary out for she was pure—without sin—desirable—she was woman. And I see this shadowed spirit to be of her own being covering herself with herself, and a short time later she is found to be with child. To me this is the image that she is self-generating—she is the goddess of parthenogenesis. She is the goddess of the virgin birth because she can generate her own offspring in her own womb. This is not to invalidate the masculine, the wonderfulness that is a man of wisdom, grace, power, beauty, talents, and magic. Nature needs the masculine, and the masculine is, in itself, holy. The divine Creatrix however has no need of this force to exist. She doesn’t encompass the opposites—she transcends them—she bleeds together darkness and light creating something altogether beyond these things—she gives birth to the flow of time and imagination. She is the source of all and reveals the fruit of her womb in everything we see, touch, taste, hear, smell, intuit.
Like a good mother she raises her children to be free and o how she must weep at what so many of her children have chosen to call living. She sings with joy too at the children who choose consciousness and peace, and she is constantly providing mercy and ways out to living with kindness and compassion, bliss and holiness every moment of every day.
And so this Christmas–this mass for the anointed one–I am deeply grateful to know what I believe as my truth. I no longer need to believe in a story I despise. I have been baptized with chrism scented with amber and myrrh, with magnolia and geranium, with vanilla and honey, coconut and sandalwood. And as the oil pours over my spirit and seeps, soaking my soul, I am alive as a woman of the moon and the earth. I am daughter of the Mother, the goddess, the Womb of All. I am the daughter of the Muse, the lover of the Wild Woman, the beloved of the Lover of All, and I am full with the fruit of my womb—children born from the shadow of my spirit—poems, songs, innocence, adventure, passion, wonder, and self-acceptance that I am honored to mother into the world. They are my gifts to myself and as long as you are willing to accept them, they are my gifts to you.
And speaking of gifts—thank you to all of the powerful women in my life who have befriended me over the years—especially recently. You are my guides, my stars, my shepherdesses leading this lamb home to her moon-lit fields and her moon-lit flock, and the moon-lit arms of her Beloved.
Blessed Be, Jennifer Angelina Petro
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