The Sacred Feminine

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Week Twenty Summary

May 11 – May 16, 2025

A photo of a human silhouette holding the sun in their hands at sunset.

The Sacred Feminine

Sunday

Whoever God is, God is somehow profoundly revealed in what it means to be feminine and masculine—both! But in our time, we have to find a way to recognize, to fall in love with, and to trust the feminine face of God. —Richard Rohr

Monday

Internalizing the Divine Feminine provides women with the healing affirmation that they are persons in their own right, that they can make choices, that they are worthy and entitled and do not need permission. —Sue Monk Kidd

Tuesday

Although Jesus was a man, the Christ is beyond gender, so it should be expected that Christian Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full divine incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does. —Richard Rohr

Wednesday

Behind her bosom, lie her heart and lungs—the power of life and breath. God is like a mother. El Shaddai is God of the mountain and God who is like a mother’s bosom, mighty and intimately nurturing at once.

—Karen Baker-Fletcher

Thursday

We know, despite preaching and teaching to the contrary, that our God is not on the side of oppression but on the side of freedom and justice. We know our God is a revolutionary lover who came as one of us to teach us how to love. —Jacqui Lewis

Friday

Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?

—Our Lady of Guadalupe

Week Twenty Practice: Empowered to Heal

Author Kat Armas discovers a model of female empowerment in the Gospels that calls each of us to acts of healing and nurturance.

There’s a story in the Gospels, right before Jesus is betrayed, in which a woman enters Simon’s house…. Here, Jesus is reclining with his friends when the woman begins pouring expensive ointment on his head. This upsets those present, but Jesus defends her. “I tell you the truth,” he says, “that wherever in the whole world this good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:9)….

In this story, both Jesus and the woman cross boundaries as the healer becomes the healed and the one who would typically need the healing assumes the position of healer….

Women are healers. As the inventors of agriculture and the primary food-gatherers, women are nurturers and life-givers. While these characteristics have been used to subjugate us, it’s important we reclaim the power and life that emanate from our beings. It was by experiencing these qualities and characteristics in women “that early humans made the image of the female the first personification of the divine, the source of all life.”… [1]

No matter how we identify as people in this world, we must lean into the feminine in each of us. As humans made in the divine image, tuning into our nurturing, emotive, and embodied qualities is the crucial first step toward the liberation of ourselves and our planet. And like the woman who heals in the Gospel of Matthew, we must continue to transgress boundaries, resist cultural norms, and press on toward healing for the sake of our children and their children.

This starts with daily practices of taking care of the land and people around us. We learn to cultivate and to mother. We pour small handfuls of cornmeal or seeds, and we whisper words of gratitude to the earth that sustains us. We resist patriarchy—domination, exploitation, and hierarchy—so that we may heal.

In what ways are we tapping into the feminine qualities in us and in nature and in the divine in order to heal?

What does resistance to domination, exploitation, and hierarchy look like in your day-to-day life?

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References

[1] Rosemary Radford Ruether, introduction to Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion (Orbis Books, 1996), 4.

Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture (Brazos, 2023), 150–152.