The Expansionist Podcast
Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake invite you to listen in on a continuing conversation about expanding spirituality, the Divine Feminine, and the transforming impact of living attuned to Wisdom, Spirit and Love.
#expansionisttheology #spirituality #spirit #spiritual #wisdom #love #Sophia #feminist #theology #community #table #expansion #fifthwaylove #deconstruction #Jesus #annointing #marymagdalene #feminism #Jesuschrist #holyspirit #women #feminine
The Expansionist Podcast
Attuning to the Whisper of the Feminine Divine
Have you ever sensed a whisper of wisdom or a nurturing presence guiding you through life's complexities? Today's heartfelt episode draws back the veil on the often overlooked feminine divine, a force that has silently shaped the spiritual landscape across cultures and eras. In this conversation we journey into the sacred interplay between masculine and feminine aspects of the divine, discovering how this balance is not only essential but transformative for our faith communities and personal spirituality.
We share enriching stories from those who've found solace and strength in the maternal aspects of the divine—a voice of compassion amidst a world of strife. The episode is an open invitation to listen more intentionally to the diverse and sometimes marginalized voices that carry the gentleness and empathetic resonance of the feminine divine, encouraging us to embrace a more inclusive approach to our spiritual understanding.
As we honor women in scriptural narratives and reflect on their contributions to apostolic circles, we uncover a deeper layer of wisdom and empathy that enriches our spiritual practice. We highlight the roles of these often unsung heroines, whose stories are not just footnotes but foundational to the faith. By embracing the resonance of the feminine divine, this episode guides listeners toward a more complete and harmonious spiritual journey, one that fosters connection and healing. Join us for a transformative exploration that may just reshape the way you experience the divine in your everyday life.
#expansionistpodcast #femininedivine #expansionisttheology #egalitarian #ancient #fifthwaylove #hope #love #spirit #spirituality #compassion #female
Welcome to the Expansionist Podcast with Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake. In each episode, we dive deep into conversations that challenge conventional thinking, amplify diverse voices and foster a community grounded in wisdom, spirit and love.
Speaker 2:All right, I'll start. Thank you so much for being here for this amazing topic that we're about to dive into.
Speaker 1:I'm very interested in this conversation and I promise you that this will not be the last time that we talk about this or talk around this, or read about this, or enter carefully into and also joyfully, and so this is a topic that thrills me, largely because I don't have this conversation as often as I'd like to, and I'm excited to share some of what I've learned, what we've learned, and how we are engaging the beauty of the feminine divine in our lives and in what we are sharing and in how we're learning and in how the Holy Spirit is showing up and expanding our, not just our vocabulary, but our understanding, our intuition and our attunement. So good stuff, prayerfully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I've always been motivated by the feminine spirit of God. I didn't always know what to call her, but I think I've always been motivated by her. As I look back at different places in my life and different seasons, I can see her work right. I think. Growing up in a mainline church what we would call an evangelical church as well, there wasn't always places for her language, right For the she language, for the feminine spirit of God language, but I was fortunate enough to be part of a congregation early on that allowed women to speak or teach or lead or pray out loud or preach, speak whatever they needed to do. So it wasn't hard for me to make the leap that somehow in the divine order there was this feminine spirit of God as well, and not just a masculine spirit of God. How about for you? Was that the case for you, it?
Speaker 1:wasn't In the very beginning of my introduction to the faith that I had been gifted. Through what my family had taught me, what the church had taught me, what the culture had taught me, I missed the voices that were already present. I just wasn't tuned into them or taught how to pay attention to them. As a very young child, I memorized a lot of the Psalms, a lot of the Proverbs, but missed the fact that wisdom is always recognized as the feminine Wisdom is calling out in the street and we believe Jesus to be wisdom manifest and we believe spirit to be wisdom all-encompassing, to agree to those things, yet miss the fact that wisdom has, since the very beginning that we have this literature, been given a feminine voice. I was thinking about why do we need it to have a feminine voice? Why can't we just gloss over it like we've been doing for so long? But I think that in our present state of the world, where broken-heartedness is so prevalent, where people are in need of the tenderness of God, the compassion of spirit, I don't know if we've spent enough time cultivating to be able to hear this voice.
Speaker 1:You and I both appreciate Lori Beth's work.
Speaker 1:I was just thinking about we did an event where Lori Beth was teaching how to hear the voice above the noise.
Speaker 1:I think that this is the same kind of thing like how to hear the voice of the feminine divine above the clamor of all the other voices that have been around us.
Speaker 1:Part of that is through walking with someone who has heard it and said there, that sound, there, that is the voice of love, that is the voice that calls to us from the upper chamber, this is the voice that calls to our spirit, that moves us, this is the voice of compassion and comfort, this is the voice that is not in any way judgmental, is in no way, even in any point harsh, but just the tenderness of God. And I think I listened to the spirit through what the apostle even said when he said that gentleness is a fruit or an evidence of the Holy Spirit. And in this gentle, tender, yet not soft I don't want to use the word soft, I want to use the word gentle and tender voice. I think so much of our souls need to hear this and we sometimes miss the music of the universe because we haven't been taught how to hear the voice of the feminine divine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I appreciate what you're saying about this. You know our growing up years because the task that was before many people that led us, those that trained us or developed our spirituality, or you know, our understanding of the faith were also shaped and fashioned by a generation previous to them.
Speaker 2:And I think you have to go, I think we have to go, you know, really, really far back in church history and Christian history to understand how the feminine voice of God was, you know, kept in church, once again silent, why women were kept silent. What is it about the feminine spirit? If she were released in the world, you know, full force, how hopeful, what would it look like, what a hopeful thought.
Speaker 1:What a hopeful thought. And one of the things that is important to me in why we would have this conversation is, firstly, because you and I both honor the tradition that we grew up in, that first handed us our faith. But what we have recognized is the call is to expand on that tradition, to go past what we have learned, even go into this place of unlearning that Jesus called us to. This is the repentant life. This looks like having a higher thought that Jesus called us to, and this higher thought includes all of the manifest presence of God and looking and being attuned to the manifest presence in the feminine, in the divine feminine, in particular, in listening to the small still voice of God that reassures us, that gives us directions, that comforts us, that is with us always, and learning to hear her voice, to trust that voice and to, I think, to give attention to it, to the world, to help us as we navigate our current circumstances, our current world, and to be able to say there is love and love is still speaking. And love sounds like the feminine, divine. Love sounds like tenderness. Love sounds like everybody come to the table.
Speaker 1:Love sounds like Jesus, who said that God is like a woman who has lost a coin and she gathers up her skirts and lays flat on her stomach on the floor and looks between the slats on the floor, looks under the bed, looks in the cabinet tree, looks in drawers to find this lost coin. And this God who looks like a woman who searches the high and the low for things. I love the imagery in that particular scripture where it says it's the coin that's lost, because the coin doesn't lose itself. Sheep wander, suns leave, but the coin. That's not the coin's fault.
Speaker 1:And so I think very often in places, even in myself, where I need God to come for me, where I need to hear the spirit of God's comfort or direction, I need to hear the voices of the feminine that have honored the word of the Lord In this season that we're in we're just finishing up Advent and we're coming into, or Christmas time, coming into Epiphany and there's so many voices of women in the scriptures, in the story of Jesus, in the story that God is telling us that love is coming and that the story is even looking differently than anybody even recognized. So what does it look like to have our ears healed? What does it look like to have our eyes healed so that we can hear and that we can live differently.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great question, heather as well. What does it look like to have our eyes healed and our ears healed? There was a season in my life where it was hard for me to listen to the male instruction week after week in a church, preaching or teaching, and I got to a point where I either just I had to leave the church or I had to find the feminine voice somewhere in the city. Where was the feminine voice being allowed to be released? And so, when you bring up the healing of our ears and the healing that maybe this place of expansionist that we're here to talk about and to share, is that in order to hear, in order to heal our ears, sometimes we have to hear it differently than we've always heard it. Sometimes we have to get in a context where the spirit can move us in a way that we've never been moved before. And so I had this choice I could stay listening, which wasn't a good option for me, or I could just leave the church all together and say, okay, this is not for me anymore and go off and find something else to connect to spiritually, or I felt the spirit of God saying to me there's a way to hear my voice, there's a way to know me and I want you to keep searching, I want you to keep looking and listening and finding that voice. And so, thank goodness, there were female pastors in the city and thank you for being a female pastor as well that I was allowed to sit under and hear from them and their perspective of the scripture, their perspective of the text. It wasn't that they were necessarily preaching a different gospel. It's that they had aligned and attuned to the feminine spirit of God within them and that began to make all the difference for me in my faith and my spiritual walk.
Speaker 2:And so how do our ears and eyes become healed? And I think it's through individuals like yourself who are preaching in a pulpit, on a platform. They have an audience every week and an opportunity to say to all those that are there, male and female, that there's a piece of God that we might not have given enough time to understand. And that's why I think this podcast expansionist podcast is so important is it gives us this opportunity to take what we have learned about spirit, about wisdom and love, and make it reach and stretch towards healing other individuals that might be ready to leave the church, might they can't really listen to another male preacher, whatever their case may be. But for me that was a very real time and thank goodness that I just stayed with it. I stayed with it until I could find the feminine spirit of God and and I haven't really looked back since. It's been quite the journey, and so I'm excited that we're talking about that today.
Speaker 1:A couple of things as you're speaking, I'm thinking of.
Speaker 1:The last miracle that Jesus does is heal someone's ear that was damaged by someone who was a follower of Jesus trying to protect Jesus lost someone's ear and I'm wondering how many of us have by people who really are intent on protecting Jesus or protecting God, have done damage to the way that we hear.
Speaker 1:And I just see the compassion of Jesus who tells Peter, put away your sword and gently heals this man.
Speaker 1:And I'm hoping that in that tenderness and in our looking to Jesus that we find his gentle healing that says we may have had someone who was trying to defend or protect the God that they knew and in the way that they did that it caused us to hear differently. And so what I'm asking is that perhaps the spirit is coming in this place to heal our ears so that we can hear the true things. Cause I'm confident, no matter, I mean, I don't know how old this person was, but at some point we lose some hearing. I know that when Jesus restored this person's hearing it was the best hearing that he's ever had and I know Jesus didn't like smack it back on that. I could just feel that pain in that person and then feeling that tender healing of your hearing is restored and there's a tenderness there and even then Jesus' tenderness toward Peter to just put it away, put it away and I think sometimes for us that's the same thing the things that we have used to damage ourselves or damage others.
Speaker 1:Sometimes those things need to be put away, and I think that's what Jesus is calling us to, as the church, as the bride of Christ, as people who are whole and listening for something more. Put away the sword, Listen to the voice that is calling us and wooing us into this realm of love, this kingdom of love that Jesus is saying you're looking everywhere for the kingdom and it's within you, and so how?
Speaker 2:do we care within us? Yes, and talk to me a little bit about Jesus left right. Jesus ascended, jesus has moved on to another realm and Jesus invites spirit to come.
Speaker 1:And Jesus' gift spirit. That is the gift of Jesus as before he ascends. He says I'm leaving, but I'm not leaving you without. In fact, it's better for you that I go away, because the spirit will be with you now. So there is a. This is not a pinch-hitter. This is the full gift of God's manifest presence with us. We wanna pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend, and if you found the conversation intriguing and want to know more about what we're learning or how you can join our online community, visit our website at expansionisttheologycom.
Speaker 2:So if that is the full gift and Jesus was the introduction to that full gift, then and you and I believe that the spirit is the feminine, divine spirit of God, like God literally says, through Jesus, I'm going to give you this comforter, this entity, this spirit, this movement, this breath out of my own being and I want you to move in this world in a particular way. Why are we not seeing that? Why are we somehow still focused on God and Jesus?
Speaker 1:I don't know necessarily that I can give answer to that, only from my own experience, because sometimes I don't have the confidence to maybe go out of things that are other than what have been told to me or what is written in something that I can find, and so being able to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, to have the opportunity to act on it, to respond to it, to engage that spirit, and then say what is the end result, what is the fruit of my engagement with the spirit? Is it love, is it peace, is it joy? Is it allowing me to be a better lover of the world, of my family, of my neighbors? Then, when it does that, I can ask. I can ask with confidence to hear the voice of God. And sometimes, when we say the voice of God, people often feel like that voice may come from the outside, may come like hearing, like with our ears, outside of us, but very often it comes from that very deep place within us, where God, where love dwells, where that spark happened. I was just thinking while you were talking for me, some of the things weren't highlighted as a young person or as a child, and the things that were highlighted may have overshadowed or misconstrued the narrative I have about women in the gospels in the first Testament and also in the second Testament. But I was thinking about Psalm 68 in verse 11, when it talks about the Lord announces His word. And we were just in the season of Advent and this idea of the word being made flesh and dwelling with us and this word that comes, this Logos word.
Speaker 1:But then the next part of Psalm 68, 11 says the Lord announces the word and the women who proclaim it are a mighty throng. And so this idea that even before, this is not a new thing that we're doing, this is not like 2023, and now we're listening for the divine feminine, this understanding that if in my feminine heart, in my uniquely feminine spirit, if I understand that I am also made in the image of God and not just my brother, husband, son, but that each of us bear this, and this idea of a very egalitarian type of understanding where everybody, everybody has the same value, equality, belovedness. And that calls me to listen for another voice or to learn another way of hearing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've often thought that you know some of those same things that you just mentioned. That you know. Maybe it was our training, maybe it was our upbringing that kept the feminine at bay, or maybe it was patriarchy. Maybe there's things that we can continue to point to, that we tell ourselves well, we really don't understand the feminine divide because of you know all these factors and nobody really preaches about it or teaches on it and so and so. Consequently, here you and I are trying to bring our thoughts about.
Speaker 2:You know, the spirits impression upon ourselves and yet, at the same time, I do believe that there is a movement of the spirit. You know, even if, even in a Trinitarian theology, where it's God, the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the movement of those two lessons, the God lesson and the Jesus lesson, yeah, and yet, at the same time, if this feminine spirit of God is not unleashed, if it's quenched, or if it's watered down, or if it's placed in a margin or, you know, under a table, you know where it's not freely given or freely talked about or freely received, then I think we find ourselves Heather in these spaces where we don't understand the movement of the spirit. We don't understand that the feminine spirit of God is within reach.
Speaker 1:And when you say things like you know, we don't understand the movement of the spirit or what the spirit is doing or up to. I often wonder if we even understand that to be an invitation when we see the spirit moving or when we sense the spirit's motion brooding over chaos. It's an invitation to co-create. It's an invitation to bring the kingdom of love here on earth, even as it is in heaven, as we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray.
Speaker 1:But when we say something like approaching the feminine divine, I mean even listening to that somebody might say well, what would that even sound like? And to me it sounds like. It sounds like Mary who said let it be unto me, according to your word. It also sounds like Mary when she said hey, the proud, they're gonna be brought down, and those that are mighty, they're gonna be brought down, and the lowly and those who don't have power, they're going to be raised up. And it sounds like Elizabeth who said you know, just when she is in the presence of Mary, she senses the presence of the Holy Spirit so much, it senses the presence of Jesus, so much that she says you know, you're the mother of my Lord, and before he's even manifest. She does this. So to me, that's what the feminine divine sounds like these people who are able to, these women in particular, who and not just those two, I mean then we go to Mary Magdalene, which you and I both have, you know, so much respect and admiration for in her apostleship, but she shows us this.
Speaker 1:The feminine divine looks like washing his feet with your tears and when no one else can understand why this is so important, or the extravagance of this, To me, the invitation is that spirit would lead us into an ascended place where we can understand that our, I think from the very beginning, if we go back to Eden, we were invited into divine fellowship, into the fellowship, the dance of Father, spirit and Son and all of creation. That is a part of this, and the invitation I think that Jesus offered us is to come up higher, think differently, change the way that you're thinking about that, maybe unlearn things that seemed harsh or ill-fitting and come to learn these unforced rhythms of grace. Come and learn how to live freely and lightly and how to live as Jesus did, as he paid attention to the women in his life who taught him.
Speaker 1:As we listen to the voice of the spirit that comes to us, and is that a different spirit? Is the same spirit, the spirit of God? We're again when we're talking about the divine feminine. This is not different than the spirit of God, but it is a attribute or a particular tone, a sound from the feminine that gives us a whole picture of God, a whole sound of God, when we listen to the masculine and the feminine.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the hunger and I think that's the desire in many ways, is to hear that, as women who have grown up in churches, where it is seldom heard or seldom invited to be an active movement in our own personhood, that there's a way to identify with God, the feminine side of God, because obviously God created the feminine and the masculine, and so there's something that's been missing. And I think, as you and I kind of excavate and interrogate the history that we have had in our own lives, but also in the present moment, what God is stirring in us, what Jesus is inviting us into, what Spirit is revealing through, to use your word, through rituals or through practices or ways of inviting the feminine Spirit of God to join us on a journey that maybe has been absent from many of us, from many people, particularly women.
Speaker 1:I appreciate what you are reminding me of or drawing my thoughts toward, because one of the ways that we can practice the feminine voice and listening for the feminine divine is to look for tenderness. Just be aware of tenderness in all kinds of places, and by that I mean things like sometimes a breeze that blows is so tender you can just it's so gentle and tender and those kind of ways. I mean there's other times when your hair is all a skew from the breeze. That's not tender.
Speaker 1:But I mean those tender places, even in nature, where we find a place to put our foot down that is so soft, the grass is so comforting, and you know, attending to even the minuscule things in nature, where we find tenderness of a little bird or and there's so much strength that I mean all birds in all nature can tell us about God. But in these tender places, looking for the feminine, listening for a softer voice, listening for the kindness of God revealed to us through Jesus, and listening to the voice of Jesus who does not condemn, the voice of Jesus who shows us that you know, this voice of love, this voice of committed love, this voice of wholeness and holiness. Sometimes, when we use those words, they have been weaponized against certain people and certain people groups, and so I think it's so essential that we hear the voice of the feminine God who calls us home to herself. In fact, jesus, when he's looking over the people, says I long to gather you, like a hen gathers chicks.
Speaker 1:Please just come here, here, to this place in me and this is sometimes I look at the world and and you know, read the news on my cell phone and I'm going. Jesus, please come and gather us. Gather us from all our places of separateness, gather us from all our places of division and gather us to your chest, where we can hear your heartbeat, where we can hear your voice and I think that we learn that often by being with other women who can tell us things like do you hear that sound? That's the feminine, divine sound that is beloved, the sound that calls us by our true name, the sound that, well, we are asleep and in that waking place, when we find our place of home, almost in those places, the voice of love calls to us from the feminine divine and calls us back to ourselves, calls us back to you. Know our oneness with God and with all people so beautiful.
Speaker 2:I love the words and the images that you're crafting and creating here for us. You know, to pay attention to the tender, to pay attention to the love, to pay attention to what spirit is is moving in our individual heart and lives that we have maybe not paid attention to before. I think you know the imagery that you've shared, you know, requires stillness, requires solitude. You know, and maybe that's how the feminine works the best. I'm not sure I have seen a mighty rushing wind of spirit, and I've also seen and experienced a still small voice, and so I'm not trying to like put spirit in a box, like it's just this way or that way, but I feel like the tender place that you're describing is more likely than not.
Speaker 2:What spirit invites us to? I think that's one of the clear practices. The clear way is just consenting to presence, right, consenting to spirit, being in that, in the dark, in the quiet, just sitting with this invitation, and sometimes nothing happens, maybe nothing is shared, but it's the invitation to consent to. I want to know, I want to learn, I want to be in this moment with spirit, with God, with how this can impact my faith and how this impacts my life and then the lives, of how that ripples out from you and from me. I think is beautiful imagery, so thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 1:I'm also reminded of a really useful way to start listening for the voice of God that is gentle and that is tender and that is uniquely feminine is going back and reading the text Testament and Second Testament and paying attention to the women, paying attention to the fact that Hagar, who is this I mean, I love her for many, many reasons. What I feel like is I understand, often, as a mother, there are things that I would think are like the worst things that could happen to a mother to be put out and not be able to provide for a child. And yet in that place and this is the very beginning of the story in that place she names God, and I love that we serve a God, that there is not just a God that you and I have created, but the God who is love has been named first by a woman. And so it's those kind of little things. If you look at those threads, we can talk throughout the entire First Testament, but even in the Second Testament here, where we're talking about the woman who asks at the well and Jesus responds, the woman who asks for the child to be healed, the mother of James I was thinking the other day how I'm sure that she's mentioned so many times in the scripture and yet we only refer to her as this one act of mothering that she did in giving birth to this child.
Speaker 1:But she's everywhere that the apostles are, and so she's a devoted apostle present in all these places. Maybe she has a better memory even than some of the men of what Jesus said and what those things are, and still she's just the mother of James. You know, and I'm sure James is hot stuff. You know, like I want to be known because I'm the mother of some other people.
Speaker 1:But this idea is that if we pay attention to these women who are in the story, listen to how they interact, listen to how Jesus interacts with them, then it may give us like a tuning fork so that we can go aha, I hear that voice and I realize these are the voices of women. But these are the voices of women who are speaking to the divine and then hearing the echo of themselves, hearing the echo, this long echo of gentleness, of tenderness, of kindness, of the feminine divine. That moves us into wisdom, and for you and I, wisdom is really important and I think it grounds us in wisdom, in being able to hear the feminine. It was our joy to have you listen to our conversation today. If you would like further information or for more content, visit us at expansionisttheologycom.