Harvard-trained theologian Meggan Watterson marched out of her church at
age ten. With little-girl clarity, she knew something tremendously
crucial was missing...the voices of women. Watterson became a theologian
and a pilgrim to the divine feminine to find the missing stories and
images of women's spiritual voices. She knew women's voices had never
been silenced, just buried. But what she truly sought was her own
spiritual voice inside her--the one veiled beneath years of self-doubt.
At a sacred site of the Black Madonna in Europe, Watterson had a
revelation that changed her. Rather than transcending the body, denying
or ignoring it, being spiritual for her meant accepting her body as
sacred. Only then, Watterson realized could she hear the voice of
unfaltering love inside her- the voice of her soul. With passion, humor,
and brutal honesty, Watterson draws on ancient stories and lesser-known
texts of the divine feminine, like The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, making
them modern and accessible to reveal the spiritual process she went
through. She suggests that being spiritual is simply about stripping
down to the truth of who we really are. Through her extensive work with
women, Watterson found that she was not alone. There are countless women
who long for a spirituality that encourages embodiment rather than
denies it, that inspires them to abandon their fears but never
themselves, and to be led by the audacious and fiercely loving voice of
truth inside them. No matter where you rest on the spectrum of
spirituality; religious or secular, devout believer or chronic doubter,
freelance mystic or borderline agnostic, this story is about the desire
in all of us to want to shed everything that holds us back. Reveal
provides what religions have left out--the spiritual voice of a woman
who has claimed her body as sacred--a woman who has found the divine
insider her. In essence, this is a manual for revealing your soul. I
have spent the majority of my life gathering stories of the divine
feminine. Each time before getting my masters degrees in theology and
divinity, I went on a pilgrimage to sacred sites of the divine feminine
throughout Europe. The first one was with a group and the second was on
my own... The stories of the divine feminine, of Christianity's Mary
Magdalene, Catholicism's Black Madonna, Hinduism's Kali ma, and
Buddhism's Green Tara for example, allowed me to begin to see that I
wasn't as much of a spiritual misfit as I had thought. There was a red
thread that became visible to me that ran through so many of the world
religions, especially through their mystics, relating that the way to
find the divine is to go within. And, that our potential to be
transformed by going inward is exactly the same whether we are a man or
a woman. The real barometer of our spiritual potential is not our sex,
but the commitment of our desire to want to encounter the divine.
Excerpt from Reveal
