You’ve got to Quit the Catholic Evangelizing, Dad. Stop. Now.

A letter to my father after My Baltimore Book Launch, 11/3/12

Written 11/4/12

Dear Dad,

I am weighing whether to send this to you or not. It will definitely go up on my blog. I know that anger is poison and I am sitting in so much anger right now. It’s not rage. It’s not the kind of anger that is going to propel me to go get a gun or something like that. This is a good thing.

I am so PISSED OFF at you, for sitting in the back of the room at my book event for Messages from Mother…. Earth Mother and proceeding to do more of your Catholic evangelizing at a forum that is about my book, which is clearly about a different set of spiritual beliefs. You had the audacity to once again make a comment at the end your set of statements about God and the Catholic Church, to once again state how you hoped that I would come back to the Church.

This is after you and I stood in the parking lot behind the restaurant in Baltimore about 17 months ago, and I told you there and then that you needed to STOP pushing the Catholic stuff on me. You had tried to give me a book called Rediscovering Catholicism at that meal and I just got up and walked out on you. I told you directly and clearly that you needed to stop this. Here’s what I wrote then about it.

You know that I’ve been studying with Native American teachers for 16yrs. You know that my first book was about my spiritual journey away from the Catholic Church and I spent seven years interviewing all of those people to learn what their beliefs are. And I did not go back to the Catholic Church then, after all of those seven years. No, I found a spirituality that embraces the feminine, the Sacred Feminine and all of her divinity in balance with the Sacred Masculine.

But no. In your arrogance, you proceeded to sit in the back of the room and shake your head at my words, at my book event and proceed to try to make me wrong.

Your arrogance is just the tip of the iceberg of the Patriarchal values and ways that you and the Catholic Church perpetuate the beliefs that women are inferior and need to be kept under the Man’s thumb.

Oh, I’m angry all right. Very angry.

Until you, and others similar to you, can really understand and look at the history of the Catholic Church, and how many women were tortured and killed, raped, burned at the stake, all of the women who tried to stay in their own Sacred Power, in the face of marauding representatives of the Vatican and their cronies. If you could look at this very dark side of the Catholic Church how women have been repressed, over the centuries, and even today are made lesser than.

Sure, the church has started to give women some credence and some more respect since the dark ages. But they are still not allowed to be priests. The Vatican still does not want women to have access to any birth control so they can’t have a say on whether they want one more baby or not, if their husband wants to have sex and they are ovulating then.

Your daughter, me, has a number of past life memories of being tortured, assaulted, killed by Christian forces. Groups of men have come and grabbed me and pulled me away to have unspeakable things done to me. Yes, this is true.

But your Catholic beliefs won’t even allow you and others in the church to believe in past-lives, even though it was in the Bible in some of the earlier editions. But political/church leaders removed those sections for purposes that they felt were important. From all that I can sense, these were not positive purposes.

I have been sitting with this anger and been trying to talk myself out of it since yesterday afternoon. I’ve been trying to forgive you. To come to a place of compassion and understanding. And I can do that to some extent.

But this anger in me is what has been bottled up way too long. This is what is making me sick. These lifetimes of being raped. Assaulted. Had spears thrust up my vagina, all by men.

And then my childhood, our childhood, all of us kids in our family. All the crazy rage there. And I was so sensitive, still am, so I just swallowed up all of that rage. I internalized it and was not allowed to feel it, express it, let anyone else know that I was pissed off at how crazy it was there, and all the shenanigans between you and Mom.

So, I’ve been spending a lifetime trying to heal my emotions, learn to be more balanced. Learn to come back into my own power and take my own path that is away from the Patriarchal suppressive ways that we were raised in.  Yes, I have done this. And I feel very strong in my path now, my choices, my power.  Yes, I do.

And if my choices to pursue a spirituality that is more embracing of the Divine Feminine, and shows deep reverence for the Earth. For Earth Mother. Then that is my choice.

And you need to learn to accept this. And if you can’t learn to accept this, then I have compassion for you with where you are stuck in your conditioning. I have compassion for you with your closed mind to what is going on around the planet with the Sacred Feminine rising.

But I also know enough about my boundaries. I know enough about what is good for me and not good for me. And your continued behavior and evangelizing about the Catholic Church, at my book event, no less, is completely unacceptable. Completely.

But you will probably never understand this letter. You will not be able to get past the section about the past lives since you’ll probably go to that place of thinking “hogwash.” You won’t be able to read the words about my compassion because some of what I need to say, my truth, may be hard for you to digest.

And so it shall be.

And if you do get to this place in this letter. This letter that I’ve posted publicly but will probably never send to you directly. Not sure actually. Sitting with it. You will know that I do love you so much. But I need to keep you at a distance until I completely remove all the triggers that you push in me with your evangelizing. These triggers go back so many lifetimes, that it’s a very hard set of triggers to remove. I’m not sure how capable I am of removing all of those. I’m trying.

I’m working on the Compassion. But it’s tough when these Patriarchal beliefs and values and practices are trying so hard to repress women these days. What’s been going on in Congress and the Tea Party politicians trying to remove women’s rights to health care and contraception. It’s scary. Very scary to be a woman these days and be outspoken and want to continue to have our rights equal to a man’s rights.

So, I encourage you to try to imagine what it is like to be a woman these days. What it was like to be a woman who was a gifted healer (and labeled a witch for her positive healing abilities), and have the Christian forces from the Vatican hunt her down.

I encourage you to step off your Catholic, Patriarchal pedestal and try to understand that much of the chaos on the planet these days with the Climate Chaos, the economic systems crumbling is that things are way too off balance. Way too much masculine energy that has run amok. And the feminine has to come back into balance to right this. To help heal this. To help ensure that our children, your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren have a planet to live on that is healthy in the future.

I pray that you get this. I will not go into a Catholic Church to do this praying. I will pray here in my own  house, in front of my own altar to do this. I will pray outside in the trees, and as I stack the 1.5 cords of firewood that just got delivered to my house. I will pray.

The Sacred Feminine is here. She will not go away. I pray that you come to understand this. So there is no more anger, no more disagreement. No more silliness on that level. It is not worth it.

Please try to get this.

Your loving, and intentionally distant, daughter.

Mare