Women’s Voices So Dangerous They Buried Them: Meggan Watterson

Speaker 1 Well, Pod Squad,

Speaker 1 when we were dreaming up this season of We Can Do Hard Things, this conversation that we're about to share with you was one of the most important tent poles to us of this entire season.

Speaker 1 We knew in our bones that you needed to hear this conversation, and I think it just blew every expectation that I had for it out of the water. I feel changed.

Speaker 1 If you've ever felt like

Speaker 1 something is missing that you can't quite identify,

Speaker 1 you are right.

Speaker 1 And during this conversation, you're going to find out what was missing and how to reclaim it and change your life with it.

Speaker 2 I know that there are many like women theologians of this world, but there is something about this conversation that

Speaker 2 was really important in this moment of my life to hear from a woman about theology, about Christianity, about power, empire. I just, I cannot, I cannot tell you how much that changed me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think this is the conversation we need right now. I stand by that, listen, and you can tell us what you think.

Speaker 1 So there's only one person who could have a conversation this world and life changing with us in this moment about this topic, and that is Megan Watterson.

Speaker 1 Megan Watterson is a Harvard-trained feminist theologian and the best-selling author of Mary Magdalene Revealed.

Speaker 1 Megan's most recent book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself, is about the first-century Saint Thecla and how the scripture that contains her story reads like a manual for defying the patriarchy and following the voice of our own soul.

Speaker 1 Buckle up, Pod Squad.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 1 So, Megan Watterson.

Speaker 1 So we were talking this morning. When we are planning a season of this show, we actually plan it pretty carefully and

Speaker 1 we have this idea that each episode will kind of speak to the last and speak to people where they are and sort of

Speaker 1 be helpful,

Speaker 1 whether that's in a comforting, helpful way or a challenging helpful way, because both are equally important.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 we don't want to make people too comfortable and we don't want to make people too challenged just both um

Speaker 1 and one of the

Speaker 1 sort of like a book like when you're writing a book and you want each chapter to kind of stand alone and speak to a moment and then all flow together and when

Speaker 1 we were planning this season you this episode this conversation with you was just a like a tent pole

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 1 for many reasons. One, I just think you're magic.

Speaker 1 I can't imagine anyone who's been preparing for a moment better than

Speaker 1 you in terms of your work

Speaker 1 finding and insisting upon getting voices of people who have been silenced throughout time, in particular women, to the people.

Speaker 1 And I want you to explain that in a second, but I just want the pod squad to hear before we begin that Megan's life

Speaker 1 work has largely been about finding

Speaker 1 gospels written by and about women who were purposefully

Speaker 1 left out or cut out of biblical scripture

Speaker 1 by

Speaker 3 governments

Speaker 1 who wanted to ensure that people started conflating empire with religion and did not want any gospel or information in scripture that would cause people to not fall in line with empire.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 pod squad, if you're picking up what we're laying down, it's important that you listen to this conversation not as a study about the past,

Speaker 1 but a study about the present.

Speaker 1 We are in a time where

Speaker 1 voices, important voices, voices from the margins, voices of women, all kinds of voices are being erased, taken out of museums, suppressed.

Speaker 1 And that is a tactic as old as time. Okay, in fact, it happened in the creation of the best-selling book of all time,

Speaker 4 The Bible.

Speaker 1 So, Megan Watterson,

Speaker 1 introduce yourself, however the hell you introduce yourself these days. I don't, I'm fascinated to hear.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 tell us

Speaker 1 about your work and why it matters. And

Speaker 1 tell us about how this Bible was created.

Speaker 3 Let me start by describing the divine feminine, which I think is important.

Speaker 3 It's the images and the stories, the voices of the embodiment of the divine in the female form. And that's throughout the world religions and all throughout time.

Speaker 3 So, you know, stories of the goddess Inanna, which date all the way back to 4000 BC, or the goddess Kali in Hinduism, the female Buddha, Vajra Yogini, within Buddhism.

Speaker 3 All of these images and stories of what the divine is according to the female form. And it's also, of course, the female mystics and theologians and saints all throughout world religion.

Speaker 3 It is also the divine feminine is

Speaker 3 the spiritual practice of going inward in contemplative prayer or meditation and connecting to the divine from within the body, no matter who we are.

Speaker 3 The impact of that erasure is so incredibly profound. For me, as a feminist theologian, I like to describe it as

Speaker 3 a corrective lens. So it's as if by only having mainly the majority of the masculine and the male version of the divine,

Speaker 3 we are seeing God or love or the divine like a cyclops. And the divine feminine allows for this corrective lens, right, for the collective other eye to open so we can see the divine more fully.

Speaker 3 So for example, within the Christian tradition,

Speaker 3 we can take the example of Mary Magdalene. So

Speaker 3 the first,

Speaker 3 erasure of her gospel, which began to happen in the fourth century, when a whole

Speaker 3 group of scriptures were labeled apocryphal by the empire under Constantine, a group of male bishops decided that the gospel of Mary was apocryphal, which that word means of doubtful authenticity.

Speaker 3 So, her teachings in her gospel is labeled in the fourth century as

Speaker 3 of doubtful authenticity.

Speaker 3 And then by the sixth century, within the church that's forming, which is deifying the patriarchy, right, from the fourth century onward, by the sixth century, Mary Magdalene is labeled the penitent prostitute.

Speaker 3 So she goes from being a spiritual leader within the early Christ movement before the fourth century to being the penitent prostitute within the Christianity forming under Constantine. And so

Speaker 2 her

Speaker 3 position as a spiritual leader is then pulled into question, and the justification for the exclusive male succession of divine authority going all the way back to Christ is then solidified by this detrimental decree of Mary Magdalene as the penitent prostitute.

Speaker 3 The other side of that, of course, is also that

Speaker 3 the teachings that our gospel contains, which is like a roadmap to us being able to hear that voice of the divine within us.

Speaker 3 That

Speaker 3 aspect of what it means to be human for all of us, then,

Speaker 3 even if we, in meditation or through our own contemplative prayer or you know, whatever our practice is, if we encounter the voice of love, if we encounter what we understand directly within us as this voice of truth or voice of love,

Speaker 3 we doubt it.

Speaker 3 We question its authenticity, right?

Speaker 3 So we are impacted then. We internalize

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 impact of silencing the female and feminine presence of the divine. We internalize that then by silencing our own truth and understanding of what the divine is from within us.

Speaker 2 Okay. Just

Speaker 2 listen to your talk for hours and be like, gosh.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 if you are a woman anywhere throughout history and you have witnessed life and love and experience and told about it and have been dismissed using any kind of word, apocryphal, I guess was the word before.

Speaker 1 Now there's let's just

Speaker 2 narcissist, neurotic, the slight crazy, the whatever, crazy

Speaker 3 the whore of the prostitute or crazy. Just crazy usually works.

Speaker 1 But what Megan is saying, please hear, is that when that happens to a woman, it is a message that then radiates to every woman who hears it to also silence herself.

Speaker 1 This is the internalized misogyny and self-silencing that comes when we watch woman after woman after woman be dismissed and silenced.

Speaker 4 Can I just, just, just so I understand from like a lay person's perspective of like 101 Bible stuff, to tell me if I'm understanding what you're saying. So like

Speaker 4 Jesus comes, has the whole thing. It is threatening to the empire, so the empire kills him.
Then

Speaker 4 everyone wrote the stories. Mary Magdalene's stories were as old as the rest of the stories that are currently in our Bible.
They're not like new additions. They're as old as that.

Speaker 4 Then in the fourth century, Constantine is like, hey, lots of people following this. I might want to co-opt it instead of being against the empire to be for the empire.

Speaker 4 So I am going to take out the parts that are not good for me, not aligned with the power authority I'm trying to make through the empire.

Speaker 4 So Mary's gospel is threatening because A, it shows that she was an original leader. That messes up our narrative.
We have to get rid of that. And B, because it says, look inward.

Speaker 4 We don't want anyone looking inward. We want them looking to us for power.
So they go and literally take these out of the Bible, like where they take them out, they call them bad.

Speaker 4 Then 200 years later, they say, and to further discredit her, she was a whore.

Speaker 4 But that is all new,

Speaker 4 all of that.

Speaker 4 Where does it go? Like where, when they take it out,

Speaker 4 who witnesses it taking out? Where does it go for the thousands of years in between?

Speaker 3 Underground, literally. It was buried.
So

Speaker 3 there was an edict that went out for all of the scripture that, like the Gospel of Mary, that sets a precedent for female leadership within the earliest form of Christianity, right?

Speaker 3 That proves that there's a precedent.

Speaker 3 So not only the Gospel of Mary, but also the Acts of Paul and Thecla, because that shows Thecla baptizing herself and being one of the earliest ministers of Christ. So those have to go.

Speaker 3 But then also the scriptures that are really giving us those roadmaps and those affirmations of the fact that we can hear the voice of love, the voice of God, the divine directly from within our own heart.

Speaker 3 Those have to go. So like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, these are really

Speaker 3 the story of Christ that didn't win out, right?

Speaker 3 It's a story of Christ that is saying power in its most ultimate form, love, exists within every single one of us and no one can deny us access to it, no matter who we are.

Speaker 3 And that was threatening, of course, to the emperor and to the empire, because that decentralized power, right?

Speaker 3 Power belonged then to these small bands, these groups of the earliest Christians who mostly comprised those who were the most oppressed.

Speaker 3 So when that edict went out, gratefully, there were these rebellious monks

Speaker 3 who refused to destroy the scripture and they literally buried the scripture in urns in the Egyptian desert or some of them like the Gospel of Mary was also found in urns in caves so I mean

Speaker 3 just the symbolism and the metaphor here is so exquisite on another level because it's like that information was also buried within us it it

Speaker 3 if we because

Speaker 3 Because what what I want to make clear is that I don't think we have ever lost this information because this information is ultimately ultimately accessed from within us. Yes.

Speaker 3 So we don't actually even need that scripture. It's phenomenal that we have it now.
It was found for the most part after 1945, after World War II, at Nag Hammadi

Speaker 3 in a treasure trove. Many of these scriptures were uncovered, but the Gospel of Mary wasn't there in that discovery.
It was found in several different

Speaker 3 places along the Nile. Her scripture was found.
And this, I mean, to have three

Speaker 3 versions of the Gospel of Mary from the first, you know, and second century tells us this, this was like a New York Times bestseller. This was something that was really popular.

Speaker 3 For that to have survived from antiquity and for those monks to defy the decree, you know, for them to be destroyed meant that there were those who really considered this information sacred and refused to destroy it.

Speaker 1 Based on your understanding of Mary Magdalene and who she was, can you just tell us, give us a Mary Magdalene for dummies from your perspective for anyone who may not be familiar with her life and story?

Speaker 3 If we take her scripture seriously, which is what I do,

Speaker 3 and we read

Speaker 3 it as an example of what this earlier communities of Christianity before it became a patriarchal tradition

Speaker 3 from the fourth century onward. If we look at her scripture and take it seriously, it's really a metaphysical map

Speaker 3 to how we can

Speaker 3 get past the egoic layers that confuse and derail us from being able to have clarity within ourselves and really know what love is, the presence of love is.

Speaker 3 So, Mary in her gospel, my favorite part of her gospel is that, well, there's so many, but let me first say: so, Peter asked Mary at the beginning of her gospel, he calls her sister, which that's indicating to us the kind of

Speaker 3 community these earlier Christians were trying to practice. Women and girls had no rights.
They were considered property in the first century. So

Speaker 3 the male body was the only body that was considered whole. Like one in itself was the male body in the Roman Empire.

Speaker 3 So for Peter, a male, to refer to Mary as his sister is really indicating this radical equality that they're practicing, that they are considering each other family, that they're taking care of one another.

Speaker 3 So Peter calls her sister and he says, we know the Savior loved you more than all other women.

Speaker 3 And tell us the words that you know that we don't because we haven't heard them.

Speaker 3 And then Mary says, I will teach you about what has been hidden from you and she goes into this explanation of a vision she has of christ which is my favorite this is chapter seven so christ comes to her in a vision and she says

Speaker 3 she asks christ how is it that i'm able to perceive you right like is it with the soul or with the spirit

Speaker 3 And Christ first says to her,

Speaker 3 blessed are you for not wavering at seeing me, for where the mind is, there is the treasure. Now, the reason why this is so exciting, you can see the theological geek in me.

Speaker 3 Get excited, but this is so exciting. I really spent all of seminary with that word mind, which doesn't mean mind in the modern sense of it.
That word mind, where the mind is, there is the treasure.

Speaker 3 This is what Christ is saying to Mary.

Speaker 3 That word, N-O-U-S

Speaker 3 nous, from the Greek, actually means the spiritual eye of the heart. So where that vision is, that clarity, that spiritual eye of the heart, there is the treasure.

Speaker 3 And he is saying, blessed are you for not wavering at seeing me because she believes in this vision she's having inside of herself, right?

Speaker 3 So it's sort of indicating that there are those that might receive a vision within them or have some direct idea of love, presence of love within them, but then they doubt it. They question it.

Speaker 4 They think it's apocryphal of doubtful. Like, how ironic is that is the most beautiful thing about her is she doesn't doubt herself and then she's deemed doubtful.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Exactly.
So she doesn't doubt it. And then she she, and this is what I love her for.
Like she's not afraid to roll down the window and ask for directions. She's like,

Speaker 3 she's, she's like, how is it that I'm able to see you? You know, like from what aperture? Like what aspect of me is able to perceive this vision of you from within my heart?

Speaker 3 And that's when Christ says it is neither with the soul nor the spirit, but the mind. So he repeats mind twice in that chapter seven, but the mind that exists between the two.

Speaker 3 So, and we know that that word for mind is new, spiritual eye of the heart, or the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, he described the new as a diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven.

Speaker 3 So this is Christ giving Mary these explicit directions on how we can perceive the divine directly from within us.

Speaker 3 Now, in each of those those three versions that we have of the Gospel of Mary, the next four pages are missing.

Speaker 3 So Christ's full answer to how we're able to perceive this vision, which is like the most tremendous question and the most powerful answer we could live into, is missing.

Speaker 3 It begins again with this whole description of the powers, which I think for those of us who have studied her gospel, it's really indicating that it's important to somehow clarify, right, distinguish between what's ego and what's soul.

Speaker 3 And that's really emphasizing that.

Speaker 3 But so Mary is someone within the earliest form of the church that Christ gave secret teachings to with how to receive a vision of him from within him before he passed.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I feel

Speaker 3 deeply that it was intentional that he give these teachings to a woman for the very reasons that I opened with about the divine feminine.

Speaker 3 Because not only is this a female who's receiving these teachings, but she is

Speaker 3 she has perfected, mastered this capacity to be able to see from within her own heart, to receive what's true for her from within her. So she's embodied those teachings fully.

Speaker 3 And then, of course, we know from the scriptures that weren't taken out of the New Testament, we know that she was the one that he rose to, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that wasn't for me that she was at the empty tomb. That wasn't a right place, right time situation.
That wasn't like an accident. That was because she was the one who could see him, right?

Speaker 3 She was the one who could perceive him.

Speaker 1 So we're always taught the gospels or all of these stories, like they're a movie. Like, this is what happened, and then he showed up, and then the da-da.

Speaker 1 And it's all like a bunch of plot, like action story driven but when we're talking about Mary perceiving Jesus or God and saying how am I perceiving you it is very likely that this is not Mary running into Jesus at 7-Eleven and going I see you I'm perceiving you it very much more could look like a woman now sitting in her home and feeling an inner knowing nudging or a

Speaker 1 a voice or a pull in one way or another. A woman just sitting on her couch or in the kitchen or in her work and just feeling something and saying, is that real?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 is this.

Speaker 1 And then I'm thinking about when you're talking about Jesus teaching Mary how to perceive him really to prepare her for separation through death,

Speaker 1 likely, I'm thinking about my friends, Andrea and Meg,

Speaker 1 and how before Andrea died, allegedly, Meg and Andrea talked to each other over and over again about how Meg would perceive Andrea

Speaker 1 after they were, quote-unquote, separated by death. That

Speaker 1 this experience, because I've always thought Jesus is God, 100%, I am like, I worship the guy, okay?

Speaker 1 in the way that everyone is God. There is something about these enlightened beings who were not different than we are, but were able to perceive in a way that we cannot yet, because of the ego,

Speaker 1 their oneness with the divine that is exactly the same as our oneness with the divine. And so to me, Jesus and Mary are like Andrea and Meg right now, just like

Speaker 1 trusting the mind, the spiritual mind, through connection.

Speaker 2 Go ahead.

Speaker 3 Right. And it's the embodiment of the truth that love never dies.
Love never ends. Love is that bridge between this world and whatever might be next.

Speaker 3 And it's that moment when Mary perceives Christ and Christ's, the first word he says when he resurrects is Mary, is her name. To me, that moment is

Speaker 3 the affirmation of the embodiment of his teachings in her because she's able to perceive him. And it's the

Speaker 3 model for us of the power of human love, right?

Speaker 3 That That it never ends and that it's this bridge between us and that we all have access to that.

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Speaker 1 I just want to go straight to something that I bet gets you in so much trouble.

Speaker 1 What does there is no such thing as sin mean?

Speaker 3 At the beginning of Mary's Gospel, Christ is instructing the disciples, and one of the questions that Peter asked is about sin, and Christ begins by saying there is no such thing as sin.

Speaker 3 Christ goes on to explain that it's our misunderstanding

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 identifying with the ego, like so identifying with some aspect of the ego that

Speaker 3 we forget that we're also a soul.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 sin is not original. It is not intrinsic.
It's not in our bones. It does not go back to the story of Eve.

Speaker 3 Sin

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 this missing the mark, right? It's misunderstanding the ego for the soul.

Speaker 1 What is the ego? When you say the ego, what is it that you mean? What are we misunderstanding ourselves to be and who are we really?

Speaker 3 We're love.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 cut to the end right there.

Speaker 2 We're love.

Speaker 3 In the Gospel of Mary, which I absolutely love and appreciate, it's sort of like

Speaker 3 the delineation of the seven powers within the Gospel of Mary is so helpful for me. As a human being, I read them like the ingredients labeled, you know, on food.

Speaker 3 It's like, this is what it means when you have a body, when you are human. What it means to be fully human is that you are meant to experience and encounter all of these climates.

Speaker 3 That's how mystic and priest Cynthia Bourgeois refers to those seven powers in the Gospel of Mary. She refers to them as climates.
So they're these aspects of the ego.

Speaker 3 of the part of us that won't survive death, right? It's the part of us that's here while we have a body and we're meant to feel them. It's not wrong.
It's not a mistake.

Speaker 3 Every time we are aware, for example, one of the powers, the seventh power is rage. So every time we find ourselves in the power of rage, it's an opportunity

Speaker 3 to bring love to where it's never been before, right?

Speaker 3 So it's this opportunity when we bring our consciousness, because when you're in an egoic state, you're often unconscious that you're in it.

Speaker 3 It's like a habituated, you move into it and you don't even know you're there.

Speaker 3 So I'm in this state of rage, and the practice,

Speaker 3 right, the opportunity here is to awaken

Speaker 3 while in that stage, not to like feel shame and to berate ourselves. And it's the opportunity then

Speaker 3 to actually embody it and listen to it. What does this rage have to tell me? Like to really feel it and to know why I'm experiencing it.
And then

Speaker 3 before I act, to release it, right? Because I don't want to act from the ego. I'm just going to conjure up more egoic responses.

Speaker 3 I'm just going to, I'm going to perpetuate old patterns if I act from that place. What I want to do is take that climate seriously, really listen to it because there's a reason why I'm in it.

Speaker 3 Receive that rage as information and then

Speaker 3 allow it to release, which that practice goes all the way back to the first century and really is indicated within the Gospel of Mary. It's referred to as the kenotic path.

Speaker 3 And that's the Greek word for self-release or self-emptying love. So it's a love that allows us to let go of those stories that that rage is telling, right?

Speaker 3 After we've heard it and took it seriously, it's releasing that to allow something more infinite, more expansive, more limitless, the voice of love to return.

Speaker 3 And then that's when we go to take action, is from that place.

Speaker 4 So, in Mary's gospel, what you just discussed,

Speaker 4 the seven powers, most

Speaker 4 people will know as the seven deadly sins.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 when

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 Mary is the perceiving mastered, the eye of the heart, fully embodied, she becomes a whore. Right.
Seven powers

Speaker 4 become seven deadly sins. So how does that happen?

Speaker 3 I know. And her name is completely like the origin of that in her gospel is completely removed.
Like she is, that wisdom is taken.

Speaker 3 It's then distorted and ascribed to something that's a deadly sin, which is not how it began.

Speaker 3 And it's co-opted into this idea of why we should feel shame and how this is a part of to be human is lowly. And that's not how it's originally described.

Speaker 4 Which to me feels like a parallel to the she's a whore thing.

Speaker 4 Where it's like, if you are going to rely on your body, if you think like the power of yourself comes from your ability to go within and to trust your body,

Speaker 4 you're a slut. Like that whole, I'm going to put shame on your body and your desires and your feelings.

Speaker 3 Right. So she was just used as a symbol, as an example for the way that the body was scapegoated as well, right?

Speaker 3 Within that.

Speaker 3 Within that movement of the erasure of the divine feminine, the body is suspect as well.

Speaker 3 And so we have this erasure of the original source of where this, really, it's just instruction, an opportunity for what it means. Like while we have a body,

Speaker 3 this is great. The Gospel of Philip says, you must awaken while in this body, for everything exists in it.
Resurrect in this life.

Speaker 3 right so that's a very different understanding of resurrection and of the significance and importance of the body body. The body is the soul's chance to be here then in that understanding.

Speaker 3 But so what happens is there's this complete erasure

Speaker 3 and you know belittling of Mary and her teachings and the co-opting of the whole seven deadly sins. But then we see, which this is so fascinating for me, right?

Speaker 3 Because I was obsessed with that word new all throughout seminary and divinity school.

Speaker 3 I was obsessed with it and I followed the thread of it and it took me into this contemplative practice, this ancient practice called hesychism.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 this practice was essentially,

Speaker 3 it involved the seven powers. There were eight, but it involved the vices and how to clarify them within the heart.

Speaker 3 And the focus of this of the Hesychus, which comes from the Greek stillness or silence, right?

Speaker 3 So the object was to, the goal was to go inward, to focus all of the consciousness into the heart in order to be in a constant dialogue with the divine from within.

Speaker 3 And a lot of these mystics, really, you could call them, these contemplative Christians, they referred to this word new.

Speaker 3 So there's that word mind from the Gospel of Mary after it's been erased, but they're practicing what the Gospel of Mary is teaching. And they describe it.
One of them,

Speaker 3 Saint Isaac of Syria, he says, Enter the treasure house, enter your inner treasure house, and you will find the treasure house of heaven.

Speaker 3 So there's that word treasure from the Gospel of Mary, and there's that word new. And then one of my favorite Hesychists, John Cassian,

Speaker 3 after he's in Egypt being a hesychist

Speaker 3 for a while,

Speaker 3 then he travels to France and he goes to an area of France that is referred to as the Sacred Mountain, Saint-Baume.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 3 consecrates this cave in the mountain that legends say Mary Magdalene lived out the last 30 years of her life.

Speaker 3 So here's a Hesychist bringing these teachings and really honoring Mary Magdalene in a way that she's erased within the formal church. And he,

Speaker 3 you know, he brings those ideas to the West, to France. And

Speaker 3 her legend then is that after the crucifixion, after testifying before the court of Tiberius Caesar and then

Speaker 3 crossing the Mediterranean because she was being persecuted by the Roman Empire, she

Speaker 3 went into the caves in the south of France and with the druids who protected her. So that's the sort of circle of

Speaker 3 her teachings and its erasure, but also it's hidden preservation as well.

Speaker 2 I just want to say one thing. Number one, thank you for doing all of the work.
Like

Speaker 2 your ability to learn, research, and synthesize this information is so important to me personally because I think that I have so much

Speaker 2 stuff from the church that I'm still like constantly working out.

Speaker 2 Number one, and two, like the joy that you clearly and the passion that you clearly have, like it is just like so lovely to see somebody love what they love and it's so obvious.

Speaker 2 So that's it. That's all I've got.
I just am, I could just literally sit here listening to you talk about this for the entire day. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this for dummies. If the gospels that were cut out, Mary Magdalene Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, I know there were several others,

Speaker 1 the themes in these gospels that were most threatening, because I've read everything you've ever written, and I'm what I understand from the most threatening parts of these gospels that would be threatening to an empire trying to consolidate power and

Speaker 1 suppress a group of oppressed people, that there is no hierarchy, that there is no gender, that there is no rules to closeness to divinity.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Number one. Right.
Number two,

Speaker 1 that you can

Speaker 1 go inward

Speaker 1 to find God, that God is inside of you.

Speaker 1 And by the way, this is in the red letters from Jesus, too. I mean, Jesus himself said the kingdom of God is not out there, it's inside of you.

Speaker 1 Right. That's kind of...
glossed over. Emphasis on that.
And then the other thing I'm hearing you say that I haven't thought about until today is this idea that is so important to power

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 this life doesn't matter, that you will live, but it will be after you're dead. So it's okay to suffer now.
It's okay to not need equality now. It's okay to not need freedom right now.

Speaker 1 The best thing you can do is just be quiet and suffer well because your chance of salvation is actually directly tied to how well you suffer right now.

Speaker 1 That is an excellent message for people trying to keep money and power to themselves and not to people.

Speaker 1 But what I'm hearing you say is that there's an emphasis in these gospels of awaken now, live now.

Speaker 1 There is no other, like right now

Speaker 1 is when to come alive. My sister just told me before you came on that the definition of salvation is what?

Speaker 3 To be made more alive.

Speaker 1 Now.

Speaker 1 That's not what I was taught.

Speaker 4 Say that again. Salvation means.

Speaker 3 Salvation in its original context meant to to be made more alive

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 I thought it meant to just stay dead so that after you die you can be alive

Speaker 3 right so all the power then in that is what happens outside of us right something rather than us saving ourselves being being complicit and

Speaker 3 having having a participation in our own salvation

Speaker 1 So are those the main themes and is there anything else? No hierarchy, no gender, everybody's equal, direct connection with God, no middlemen, inward, not outward, to find God,

Speaker 1 and be alive now, not later.

Speaker 1 Is there anything else?

Speaker 3 Well, and that

Speaker 3 when you can encounter the divine directly from within,

Speaker 3 you know love, right, from the Greek word gnosis, meaning from direct experience. So that way you can identify all that is not love.

Speaker 3 If you know love, you can't be convinced outside of you by someone, even in a position of you know power and authority you can't be convinced or manipulated that that is love right like if you know love you're empowered to me it's the ultimate form of power is that knowledge of love and that proximity to love that we are love and can be guided by it the

Speaker 3 Really, the reason I had to become a theologian, I really, really wanted to work directly with children. I wanted to be,

Speaker 3 I would say, my ego really wanted the affirmation that I received by working with children directly. I loved that, right? Like everybody, everybody's like, oh, that's such good work.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and it did. It felt like that, but I also felt like I was hiding.
And

Speaker 3 for me, the calling came every single time.

Speaker 3 I was so enraged, and it was physical, it was visceral.

Speaker 3 I was so enraged when someone was saying or using God, using Christ as a justification for their bigotry, you know, whether it was as a little girl when I encountered it in the New Testament and I saw the misogyny, I didn't have the words for it yet, but I broke out into hives, you know, because it was like, I was like, what?

Speaker 3 How it's only the father and there's nothing else and this somehow gives this divine decree for an exclusively male succession of divine authority. I just,

Speaker 3 it was, you know, and then when I was working with Navajo children on a reservation, I encountered the genocide, you know, that Christianity justified.

Speaker 3 um the erasure of a culture the the christian boarding schools and

Speaker 3 it was

Speaker 3 like nearing a fire, you know, and my rage,

Speaker 3 I didn't experience rage anywhere else like that in my life. It was this rage that was so ancient.
It was like, this is not love.

Speaker 3 That's, you know, and I didn't have the language yet. I didn't have the scholarship, but I had this visceral knowing this is not love.

Speaker 3 And then another moment was at Smith when I was studying world religions because like I was still trying to recover from my exposure to the New Testament, right, in the hives.

Speaker 3 And so I was studying everything other than Christianity. I was like trying to avoid it.
So I was studying the divine feminine in the world religions in college. And there was this

Speaker 3 man on our campus proselytizing. I called him angry billboard man.
You know, he had like all of the scripture that justified his homophobia, like Leviticus 18. You know, it was just all over.

Speaker 3 And he was calling us sinners and, you know, saying we're going to burn in hell. And again, it was that same visceral awareness, this knowing

Speaker 3 that I was actually just as convicted as he was.

Speaker 3 I just didn't have the scripture that justified my faith, my knowing.

Speaker 3 It was never presented to me, right?

Speaker 3 And so that was the hunger, that that was the inner knowing for me to then go into seminary go into divinity school and find these missing scriptures that do tell a story about christ that is one of love and is one of

Speaker 3 being that love now like in the acts of paul and thecla Her proximity to Christ absolutely liberates her from any of the patriarchal confines of what it means to be a female.

Speaker 3 That's why it's so important

Speaker 3 that we have these stories and we have these voices because it brings us

Speaker 3 this story of love, this love story about Christ that didn't win out.

Speaker 1 Megan, what did Mary

Speaker 1 Magdalene call God?

Speaker 3 The good.

Speaker 3 Just the good.

Speaker 3 In the Gospel of Mary, I find this so exquisite. In the Gospel of Mary,

Speaker 3 God is a masculine word for the divine, descriptor of the divine, because there's also the goddess. But in the Gospel of Mary, it's just good, capital G.
The good

Speaker 3 is also a part of us. So we are a part of the good.
We're not separate from it.

Speaker 3 So good is something that is inherent. It's not something that we have to prove or,

Speaker 3 you know, perform. Goodness is not performative.
Goodness is inherent. It's innate.

Speaker 1 So, Pod Squad,

Speaker 1 a while back, I told you that my daughter convinced me to get the word good tattooed on my arm. And it's a long story.
And I woke up and was like, Why do I have the word good tattooed on my body?

Speaker 1 Like, I just wanted my kid to think I was cool. So, I went with her and did it.

Speaker 1 And I told that story, I think, in one of my newsletters. And Megan wrote back to me on the newsletter and said,

Speaker 1 Mary, Meg, you have good on you because the Gospel of Mary defines God as good. And I just want to say, when I have two things tattooed on me, one is be still, and the other is good.
Okay,

Speaker 1 and when I think, when I put those together in my body, and pod squad, practice this,

Speaker 1 when I say, be still and know that I am God,

Speaker 1 I feel

Speaker 1 like someone is

Speaker 1 like I'm a soldier

Speaker 1 and there's a sergeant, and someone is telling me to be still and that I should trust their direction regardless of how it makes me feel. Just the be still and know that I am God.

Speaker 1 There's no

Speaker 4 vibe

Speaker 1 attached to God,

Speaker 1 meaning God can be whatever in power says God means.

Speaker 1 There's nothing attached to it. Now listen to this.
Be still and know that I am good.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 1 There is a mountain, there is a chasm difference in my body when I think about the difference between God saying to me, be still and know that I am God,

Speaker 1 and saying to me, be still and know that I am good.

Speaker 1 And in this moment, that's what I need. I need

Speaker 1 God, God's brand is muddled right now. And I need

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 assurance that I can trust because the moral arc of justice is like because there is some sort of quality that is running things here. Right.
And that that is goodness.

Speaker 1 So that little O

Speaker 1 just makes

Speaker 1 that can't be hijacked. Like

Speaker 1 the administration right now

Speaker 1 cannot they can take God and make it mean anything they want it to, but I'm not sure that they can take good

Speaker 2 and make it mean anything they want to do.

Speaker 1 That's why they chose great.

Speaker 3 They can't change our perception of it. And I think this is why it's so important to have that both and

Speaker 3 to have this checks and balances where it's like, yes, okay, we can have a voice of spiritual authority outside of us.

Speaker 3 And also, we need to not discount that voice of truth and love that we hear within us, right? So that we can know

Speaker 3 when something is not actually the voice of love for us.

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Speaker 4 There was a part that I thought was so interesting. Can you speak to the true human piece and what that means to you in terms of both God and ourselves?

Speaker 3 Its repetition in the Gospel of Mary goes to the Greek word anthropos. And that word is referring to this understanding that to be human means to have all of these egoic powers, right?

Speaker 3 To be fully human is to be an ego, the whole mess of it.

Speaker 3 And also,

Speaker 3 it means having a soul. It means being connected to that voice of love that is eternal, that will survive the death of the ego.
Right?

Speaker 3 So it's an aspect of us that we can encounter and know now within the body that will survive the body. So we're both.
That's what it means to be.

Speaker 3 That's the totality of that word anthropos is that we're fully human and fully divine.

Speaker 3 And why it was so radical, that idea within the first century, is because, again, women were not considered fully human. They were subhuman.
They had absolutely no rights.

Speaker 3 And they did not determine what happened to their bodies, much less their lives. They could not vote.
They were not in places of political or spiritual authority. So, for these

Speaker 3 radical band of Christians to be referring to each other and considering each other brothers and sisters and fully human, whether they were male or female,

Speaker 3 is to say that the true human understands that it isn't about the external,

Speaker 3 you know, no matter our sex or gender or presentation, it's that we are fully human and fully divine. And that's what makes us the true human being.

Speaker 3 It's not deciding and delimiting what we can be and become simply because we're male or female.

Speaker 3 That's not what determines our capacity to be able to be a spiritual leader, simply that, you know, we're male. It's that we have

Speaker 3 this full understanding and embodiment of this idea that we're fully human, meaning we have all of these egoic powers and also we are a soul.

Speaker 3 And we're doing the work to try to decipher between the two, right? Not perfectly and not permanently. It's not a permanent state.

Speaker 3 It's something that we're perpetually working on because that's the whole point of being here. That's the whole point.

Speaker 1 Megan, what do you think in your

Speaker 1 sweetheart, when you lay down at bed in bed, not your theologian talking self, but yourself. What do you think happens after we die? What's your best guess?

Speaker 3 I think it's the experience, the little sips of it that I've had in this lifetime, I would describe as mercy. And mercy to me

Speaker 3 is this, like it can't be contrived, right? Like you can't contrive mercy. You can create the conditions for mercy to arrive.

Speaker 3 The experience of mercy for me is this utter and complete collapse between me and love?

Speaker 3 That distance between me and love vanishes. That's mercy.
And I think that that's what happens when we're no longer in the body: there's no distance between us and love, the presence of love.

Speaker 3 And that presence of love

Speaker 3 for me is what we

Speaker 3 can experience

Speaker 3 when we have those moments of just not being so hard on ourselves. Like,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 we get so caught up in these states of the ego. We get so hard on ourselves

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 we

Speaker 3 come up with all of these excuses for why we're not worthy of love, right? Or why we don't deserve love yet, or what we have to do in order. to experience the full presence of love within us.

Speaker 3 This is not a love that's arriving from outside of us, right? This is like the call is coming from inside the house, right?

Speaker 3 This is the presence of love that we meet with from within us that no one can keep from us.

Speaker 3 And so mercy is this experience of like suddenly all those egoic stories and ideas, all these things that we think we did wrong or or we think proves why we're not worthy of love, they just vanish, you know?

Speaker 3 And unfortunately, it's usually only for a a moment. We get like a

Speaker 3 brief sip of it, this brief moment of like

Speaker 3 all of the reasons why we think we're not worthy of love, they just suddenly disappear, and the presence of love is just merged. It's just seeing out through our eyes, you know.

Speaker 3 We're just one with it. It's just that union with that presence of love.
And I think that that's what happens. And I feel like I know that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that's, that's where words end, you know?

Speaker 1 Yes. I know.
And mystics in every religion have been saying that. This is not just, this is what mystics, I mean, you're talking and I'm thinking of the Rumi poem.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or maybe it was Haviz, but that our job is not to search for love, but just to remove all the obstacles between us and love inside of us right now is exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 Can you talk to us about Thecla?

Speaker 1 She is,

Speaker 1 You've said learning about Thecla changed your life, so I need to know why, who she is, and why she matters so much right now.

Speaker 3 The story of Thecla we find in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which was among one of those many scriptures that was

Speaker 3 silenced, that was hidden in the fourth century and labeled Apocrypha of doubtful authenticity, right? Because this involves a woman who, a girl, who

Speaker 3 begins really

Speaker 3 trapped within the circumstances of what it meant to be a female in the first century, which was basically she her mother was, who is really the embodiment of the patriarchy, her mother,

Speaker 3 is forcing her to marry and she doesn't want to. And by the end of her story, she baptizes herself.

Speaker 3 So the acts of Paul and Thecla,

Speaker 3 for me as a theologian, were so, it was so incredibly important to encounter her story because

Speaker 3 this is

Speaker 3 a sort of road to Damascus moment. This is a conversion story we haven't heard before.

Speaker 3 Many of us who've had any kind of exposure to Christianity, I wasn't raised Christian, but I had all of these experiences of knowing love or knowing Christ that really made me a not a pain, but like my mom didn't know what to do with me as a feminist.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, she had to just sort of put me into a Unitarian church to like answer my questions.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 but it's like, what little, and I left, you know, right after having those hives with the New Testament. So I left church really quickly.

Speaker 3 I only had this really minimal exposure to Christianity, but I had heard of Paul, especially later as a feminist theologian, because he's attributed with saying in 1 Timothy that women should remain silent, right?

Speaker 3 And that

Speaker 3 they are not to be teachers. They ought not speak.
So that's Paul. And

Speaker 3 we know his conversion story. Like so many of us have heard his road to Damascus and he falls down and he's blinded.
And then he hears the voice of Christ.

Speaker 3 asking him, you know, why are you persecuting me?

Speaker 3 And then when his vision returns, which I I think is so symbolic and powerful, after three days and three nights, he understands what Christ is really all about.

Speaker 3 And so with Thecla, the beginning of her story,

Speaker 3 she's sitting in this red brick house and she is stuck in a situation that is really contemporary. You know, it's not just first century.

Speaker 3 She's stuck in this situation where she has to live a life based on the fact that she's female. All these external expectations of her simply because she's female.

Speaker 3 She has to marry, she has to become a mother, she has to become a dutiful wife.

Speaker 3 So she's sitting there by her window in this little red brick house, and she overhears the stories of Paul about the beloved that he's making sweet for everyone listening.

Speaker 3 And Thecla, for three days and three nights, refuses to move.

Speaker 3 So she's essentially here using meditation and contemplation as an act of resistance. She's refusing to continue on with her life as she knows it.

Speaker 3 And she's insisting on going inward and really asking the most

Speaker 3 important question any of us could ever ask. What is it that I desire, right? External to all of these expectations that have been pressed upon me, impressed upon me.

Speaker 3 since the moment I'm born simply because I'm female. What do I as a soul in my heart, what is it that I desire for this life? And she goes inward for three days and three nights.
And when she emerges,

Speaker 3 she

Speaker 3 absolutely leaves this whole previous life that was expected of her and starts moving in the direction of her soul, moving in the direction of how she feels called to live out her life as a minister, which wasn't possible at that time.

Speaker 2 So then what?

Speaker 2 Then what happens?

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. I'm like, and then, and then her mom's like, to death, you go.

Speaker 2 Okay, so tell that part.

Speaker 3 When everyone

Speaker 3 around us

Speaker 3 abandons us and betrays us, when everyone is committed to misunderstanding us and we're literally crucified, so her mother suggests to the governor that Thecla be burned at the stake for refusing to become a a bride, which was against the law at that time.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Thecla is stripped, which I see as both literal and symbolic, but she's stripped and she has to walk through the crowd. So, this whole community

Speaker 3 that's disowning her, she has to walk through the crowd naked. And this is what's so fascinating: the scripture says that the governor

Speaker 3 marveled at the power in her when she walks by naked.

Speaker 3 Now, the reason why I find that so powerful is that here we have symbolically, metaphorically, an example of what happens when you strip away all of those egoic powers, right?

Speaker 3 All those identities, those reasons why Thecla may have you know, considered herself worthy, right, within her society.

Speaker 3 It's sort of like the crumbs of proximal power that the patriarchy was offering her is as a mother as a wife she's refusing all of that she's stripping all of that and she's standing in a power a love within her as she's walking naked toward the pyre because this is the life of her own choosing this is the soul that's guiding her And this is the moment when she's realizing that this is a power that no one can take from her.

Speaker 3 This is all that's left when we're stripped of all of those reasons why we think we're loved, right?

Speaker 3 But this is when she's actually being love itself and the governor marvels at the power in her.

Speaker 3 Here he is with the one who supposedly has the power, but he's marveling at the power in her because his power can be taken. Hers cannot.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 It's like alphabet. Hold on.
And then she goes and gets burned at the stake?

Speaker 1 No, just keep going.

Speaker 2 Go.

Speaker 1 Preach, Megan Waters.

Speaker 3 Literally. What happens? You know, this is, for me, this is very much the story of the Phoenix.

Speaker 3 For those of us who really identify with that, you know, like periods in our life where we go through a trauma, a crisis, you know, something that really

Speaker 3 pulls into question

Speaker 3 all of these.

Speaker 3 All of these identities that have constituted our worth in the world, right? When they're either pulled from us or when we are betrayed by someone, we go through a fire, you know?

Speaker 3 And so Thecla in her story, she climbs upon the pyre and she makes the sign of the cross. So that moment is her saying, my faith has triumphed, right?

Speaker 3 Like my way of seeing and being in the world has triumphed in this moment, despite the external circumstances around me.

Speaker 3 And what ends up happening is that there's like some sort of torrential storm and downpour, lightning, this crazy, and it puts out the fire. And Thecla's saved.

Speaker 3 And when she climbs down from that pyre, she exists now as only the soul that survived it.

Speaker 3 So now she's living as an example, a model for all of us of what it can be like to move through the world by being guided from within.

Speaker 4 And tell about the women in the cinema.

Speaker 3 She continues to go through trials, you know, throughout her story, which I think is really important for us because,

Speaker 3 you know, I think we like

Speaker 3 to think of the spiritual path as like one and done, you know?

Speaker 4 Like it would be better that way.

Speaker 3 Like you've burned the stake once and then that's over. You have your street credit and then that's it.
Like now you're realized and you don't have to keep doing it over and over again.

Speaker 3 But I just think it's more, it's also more realistic. Like this is just the way it is.

Speaker 3 It's that we're constantly tested and we constantly, it's really the whole point is that we keep have to practicing being able to discern the voice of the soul.

Speaker 3 We have to keep practicing collapsing that proximity between us and love within us, the presence of love within us. So mercy, we have to keep working on that.

Speaker 3 So Thecla is tested many times and one of the tests is that she is now following Paul. and they're in

Speaker 3 Antioch and this very powerful politician tries to assault her in the street, just take her as his bride without her consent.

Speaker 3 Paul kind of freaks out and washes her hands of her, like, pretends he doesn't know who he is. He's like,

Speaker 3 I'm out, you know, like, this is too, this is too, this is too much for me. So he leaves, and so she, she is in a position multiple times throughout her story where she is called upon to save herself.

Speaker 3 So she fights off this assault.

Speaker 3 And in a sweeping example of first century gaslighting, she is then punished for

Speaker 3 trying

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 protect herself from this sexual assault. She's punished.
She's

Speaker 3 ordered to be killed in the arena by wild animals and she's paraded through the streets again with the stripping, the nakedness. She's paraded through the streets wearing the word sacrilege.

Speaker 3 She enters into the arena. This is really, really, really, really important.
In the course of this process,

Speaker 3 Becla now finds, because, you know, she's been called upon to save herself again and again, to keep

Speaker 3 solidifying this way of being in the world, right?

Speaker 3 Of listening to her soul, of being guided from within her. And

Speaker 3 she meets then at the end of her story during this last trial, a queen who had recently lost her daughter. And this queen takes her in and protects her.

Speaker 3 And when Thecla is marched off, you know, into the arena to be, you know, thrown to the wild animals, her new mother, the queen, refuses to be separated from her.

Speaker 3 She holds her hand, she walks with her.

Speaker 3 And so in the arena,

Speaker 3 The queen is separated from Thecla, and she, you know, at first has this lion, which is really, really important if we look into the context of the first century.

Speaker 3 The lion represented courage, but it also represented Christ's protection, and courage in the Roman,

Speaker 3 you know, understanding of courage was a masculine trait.

Speaker 3 And this is really interesting when we look at the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and we look at the kind of trajectory of Thecla's presentation of herself.

Speaker 3 She goes from being a girl to really presenting in a masculine way. So claiming her sense of gender and identity by the end of the scripture.

Speaker 3 She cuts her hair short, she wears the robes more commonly worn by men,

Speaker 3 and then she's aligned with this masculine understanding and protection of

Speaker 3 courage.

Speaker 3 So what's interesting is that scholars of these first several hundred years of Christianity, what they relate is that these early communities were using gender as a way to challenge the empire.

Speaker 3 That this, you know, really

Speaker 3 entrenched, embedded idea that a woman, a girl, a female meant this, this, and this, and had to present, you know, in a certain way, and that a man, a masculine meant this, this, and they were challenging that.

Speaker 3 So men wore their hair long, women cut their hair short. They were really playing with gender within their sense of identity as communities in the first century.

Speaker 3 So that's really significant that this lion first is defending Thecla, goes out, tries to kill this bear, and then this male lion kills the lioness.

Speaker 3 And so, in a moment of when Thecla is again going to be set upon by other wild animals, she goes inward, right? She prays, and then she notices this pit of water in the arena.

Speaker 3 And this is really phenomenal and controversial because in this moment, she decides to baptize herself. And she had asked Paul earlier in her scripture

Speaker 3 to give her the seal of Christ and no trial would touch her. She asks him to baptize her, but he doesn't, right? He says that she's not ready yet.

Speaker 3 And so now she understands that that is actually something, that spiritual authority is something that she can claim from within. And so, so she, with that water,

Speaker 3 says, in the name of Jesus Christ, I baptize myself. And then it's like the women in the arena, in that moment, they recognize what's going on.

Speaker 3 It's like they awake from their stupor and they understand

Speaker 3 that all along, this is about so much more than just Thecla, right? That this is about

Speaker 3 the ways that they have been participating in their own oppression by not standing with her and fighting for her.

Speaker 3 So, in that moment, the scripture says, and the women all cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth. So, they participate in Thecla's efforts to save herself.

Speaker 3 They're super scrappy, which is what I love. They grab whatever they happen to have on them-rose petal, cardamom, nard, they throw it into the arena and they lull the wild animals to sleep.

Speaker 3 So, there is this formula here in this scripture from the first century, a playbook for us now, that

Speaker 3 when we

Speaker 3 unify together, right? No amount of powerlessness is without power once unified. Really?

Speaker 3 And that's, and that's, and that's her story. And that's her, and, and the fact that it exists, okay?

Speaker 3 The fact that she baptizes herself and then later, a little bit later, she goes back to her hometown and paul's like you know he gives her this commission to go and preach the word of god which really she she's not really asking for anymore she's already acting on it she's already doing it but he he gives her that formal commission and the reason why this is so significant is that even to this day

Speaker 3 female priests and ministers aren't validated because

Speaker 3 it's said that there isn't a precedent for female leadership within the church. And the fact is, is that there is.
It's right here in this scripture.

Speaker 3 It's just that this scripture was edited out because it is proof and evidence of a precedence for female leadership in the church.

Speaker 1 So what does it mean when you think about this moment and that? Like what does it, why did it change your life to learn about Fekla? And what does it mean?

Speaker 1 beyond the literal for women to baptize themselves?

Speaker 3 For me, it's to believe that voice of love within you

Speaker 3 and to follow it, to believe it enough to actually take action on it.

Speaker 3 You know, I think that

Speaker 3 every

Speaker 3 institution, every person has to go through that kinotic process, that path of really becoming clear of what love is asking us to do in this moment. And

Speaker 3 it's as if no matter our discipline, you know, know, like how I see that moment in the arena is the possibility, I see it now, is that no matter our discipline, no matter where we are in the globe, no matter, you know, what

Speaker 3 angle, you know, we're going to be coming from,

Speaker 3 if we unify in a voice, as if from one mouth, we will change

Speaker 3 the world in that moment.

Speaker 3 We have that capacity to act on the behalf of really this other half of the story. We have that capacity to be able to merge with, because that voice of love is more than us.

Speaker 3 It's not just asking us individually what to do in our lifetime. It's guiding us to a sense of a collective answer.
to our times because that's what it has to be. It's not an individual answer.

Speaker 3 It has to come from this collective. But the trick is we find that within us, within each of us, and believing in it.

Speaker 1 And now it's time to thank the companies who allow you to listen to We Can Do Hard Things for free.

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Hi Pod Squad, Abby here.

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Speaker 2 It's really about the sports for those of you who might not be sports focused or centric, but it's also about celebrating and uplifting the stories around athletes and leaders across soccer, basketball, hockey, softball, the Olympics, you name it.

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Speaker 4 Megan, do you have any practice that

Speaker 4 helps you to see through the eye of the heart?

Speaker 3 So I refer to it as the soul voice meditation, but it's really just

Speaker 3 my

Speaker 3 take on the Hesychus practice of going inward.

Speaker 3 Now, when I started doing that as a seminarian, well, one, I'm female and with breasts, it was like, because what they do is they curve forward over their hearts, and so my back and my neck were killing.

Speaker 3 Like, when you do that for hours, it just didn't work. And also,

Speaker 3 I felt that the most important thing was, in terms of that yogic posture, the most important thing was understanding that the body has worth, that the body is as worthy as the soul.

Speaker 3 And so holding this understanding first is really important, that the body is the soul's chance to be here, giving the body back that,

Speaker 3 you know, because that's such an ancient wound.

Speaker 3 That's such a healing that needs to happen multiple times all throughout our lifetime is

Speaker 3 seeing the body again as beloved, as sacred. And And so I start by really having that moment of awareness that the body is the soul's choice to be here.
The body for me never lies.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 I take one intentional breath to go inward to the heart. I continue to breathe normally all throughout the meditation.
I didn't say that once and that led to a lot of issues. But like, so you

Speaker 3 continue to breathe normally all throughout the meditation. But you...

Speaker 3 What I mean by an intentional breath is that you're really locating your consciousness consciousness and you're intending for that consciousness consciousness to drop down inward.

Speaker 3 Here in this meditation, further up is farther in. So ascension isn't going up and beyond the body.
Ascension is going deeper and more fully. It's being more fully embodied.

Speaker 3 So then you take a second breath. in order to merge with the soul or the new, the spiritual eye of the heart.
However, you know, for some people, the word soul doesn't land.

Speaker 3 So you can just, the voice of love, the presence of love,

Speaker 3 true self, like capital S, like however resonates with you. But this aspect of you that

Speaker 3 is going to exist beyond this physical form, that, whatever that feels like or however that arrives for you, it's merging with that. And then

Speaker 3 For me, sometimes it's hanging out there for a very long time. If I'm really grappling with something,

Speaker 3 I ask questions from there and I listen.

Speaker 3 When I was first practicing the soul voice meditation, I wrote it out with a red pen. I changed from like black ink to red, red to sort of symbolize the voice of the soul.

Speaker 3 And like when I first started hearing it, I would take this deep breath. I would go into my heart and then you know, I sort of felt like I was channeling and it freaked me out.

Speaker 3 Like it felt like a voice that wasn't mine because it was so,

Speaker 3 you know, it was just so

Speaker 3 human and so,

Speaker 3 but so divine and so practical and just not what my mind would have ever come up with. It felt like it was, and then over time, I understood that actually that was me, right? I wasn't like,

Speaker 3 I wasn't channeling some like, I really did.

Speaker 3 I had a fear for a little bit that I was going to like become, you know, some sort of like Long Island medium or something like that because that I was, you know, I was tapping into like some some other entity.

Speaker 3 And, but it, it really is because that voice of truth within us is just so clear and so

Speaker 3 we we

Speaker 3 know it because it knows itself completely. There's no, there's no urgency.
There's no explanation. It's just, it arrives with this.
just this sense of completion.

Speaker 3 It's like every single statement is a full sentence and and there's just this awareness of love all throughout it that's so expansive, even if it's telling me something really terrifying. So

Speaker 3 that moment happens within the heart with the second breath. And then the third breath is just about surfacing again and hopefully more fully, feeling more embodied, right?

Speaker 3 Like seeing out more fully with the eyes of love or more clearly from the spiritual eye of the heart. So that's

Speaker 3 my practice.

Speaker 1 The whole idea of, you know, when I was reading about Thecla and all the time she went through with the crowds and the persecution and the screaming and the, you know, Jesus the same and all of that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the story of the Phoenix, if we think about this in our own lives, there's a way of looking at it that is very like the world is abandoning me. The world is against me.

Speaker 1 I did not feel that energy in Thecla when I was reading it. And I felt like

Speaker 1 for us, there is a different way to experience those sorts of moments when you are guided by an innerness.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 the tragedy of

Speaker 1 only being guided by an innerness is that no one else can hear it.

Speaker 1 So you are

Speaker 1 either crazy or it's just, it's just a situation, right? And so often people who are guided by an innerness are a threat to the way other people are doing things.

Speaker 1 And that sometimes in this story manifests as a screaming stadium.

Speaker 1 But however it manifests for you, there is a way that Thecla seemed to respond to it and that Jesus with the forgive them for they know not what they do moment, which is less of you are abandoning me and more of, oh, we are listening to different music.

Speaker 1 We have different earpods in.

Speaker 1 And I am listening to one voice and you all are listening to a completely different other voice and it's just different music.

Speaker 1 But there is something about people who are guided from innerness that it's unshakable because it's direct.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't have to in our in our lives when we're being guided to do something, to make a decision, to do something weird, to do something that goes against the grain of conditioning, that it is all egoic.

Speaker 1 All the decisions being made outside of ourselves by structures

Speaker 1 that is not full of

Speaker 1 doesn't have to be full of disgust.

Speaker 1 It's like, not that they're abandoning us it's just that they're loyal to something else right right and there's such a the that feels like the power that that king was seeing which is just that she has different ear pods in right the governor yeah right the governor yeah so it's just a way i just wanted to mention that in terms of we don't have to think of everyone in our life who doesn't understand what we're doing as against us

Speaker 1 there's just a distance there that can just be

Speaker 1 more peaceful

Speaker 1 and less binary, I guess, than that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think personally, what Thecla's story was modeling for me was that

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 could,

Speaker 3 in terms of baptizing myself, I

Speaker 3 was able to see the ways that I had siphoned my own sense of personal agency and power over to other people

Speaker 3 throughout my life. And

Speaker 3 really,

Speaker 3 I think the opportunity of being human and the practice of merging with the presence of love is really about being able to choose again

Speaker 3 what is right for us, what is meant for us, right?

Speaker 3 It is that luxury of choice. And because when we're traumatized, we don't have that luxury of choice.
We're trapped in a a pattern that just keeps repeating itself again and again and again.

Speaker 3 And if we're able with extremes amount of mercy and embodiment, right, the practice of embodying, if we're able to see that the truest source of power has always actually existed within us, right, like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz with ruby slippers, it's like we always had that power within us to claim the life that we desire, this one little life that we get.

Speaker 3 It's so

Speaker 3 incredibly empowering to realize that we are only ever as far from power as we are from our own embodiment. And that's really what,

Speaker 3 that's what Thecla is modeling to us.

Speaker 1 We are only as far from power as we are from our own embodiment.

Speaker 2 Whoopses.

Speaker 1 Okay, Megan, is there anything

Speaker 1 before we tell everyone how,

Speaker 1 if they haven't already, how to find you? I mean, the reason why I'm trust so much helping people find Megan is because Megan just helps people find themselves.

Speaker 1 That is what you do.

Speaker 1 Is there anything else that you want to say before we end?

Speaker 3 I think,

Speaker 3 you know, the part of Thecla's story with

Speaker 3 the patriarchal version of the mother really exemplified in the first mother who wants to, you know, crucify her or burn her at the stake, and then the queen mother.

Speaker 3 When Thecla triumphs, when the women in the arena come and help save her,

Speaker 3 the queen comes into the arena and we have this moment that I see like a movie, you know, of this triumph of the feminine, really, of when they embrace when the queen and Thecla, who's living her life based on what her soul desires, right?

Speaker 3 She's fully loved. This is the reclamation of the feminine, the female, freed from the patriarchy, right?

Speaker 3 This is Thecla encountering unconditional love, freed from any expectations of what it means to be a girl according to the patriarchy.

Speaker 3 So this is really this triumphant moment where we're freeing ourselves as women.

Speaker 3 We're freeing ourselves as mothers and daughters from this confining and constricting idea that we have to indoctrinate our daughters into the patriarchy and that we have to relate to each other as if power is limited, as if we just have to fight for scraps of power.

Speaker 3 What this gospel is showing us is that here in this story about an encounter with Christ, Thecla is liberated to such an extent that she meets with this embodiment of unconditional love that's freed from the patriarchy.

Speaker 3 This is really an example of this ancient healing of the feminine

Speaker 3 for within ourselves, right? Believing, not discounting anymore this voice of love that we hear within us and can be guided from, but also not discounting each other.

Speaker 3 Trusting each other. So trusting that voice and trusting each other and the power that we have

Speaker 3 to be able to

Speaker 3 embody love in a way that it's never been shown before.

Speaker 1 It's a double rejection of doubt.

Speaker 1 You can't underestimate the importance of what Megan just said, which is that when we discount women, it doesn't just make us doubt ourselves, it makes us doubt each other.

Speaker 1 They not only take from us our

Speaker 1 power, our inner power, but they take from us the power of each other, of sisterhood, of

Speaker 1 connected, and of the collective. That is what this does to us.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I have a, I want to ask a follow-up question from something that you said earlier in this conversation around the four pages of Mary's gospel being missing. Where are they?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 2 is that like, I don't know, there's something that's very connected to me about that part of those missing pages to what's happening right now and all the things that I might feel like are missing in me like what Kellen can you briefly tell us that story and like what the deal is there well I mean I think they exist

Speaker 3 I and I think there's hope there's always hope that they'll surface because all of these buried words surfaced you know so there's always the hope of that but I also love I love how things are literal and things are metaphorical like I love how things are always both and so, when I embrace that part, those missing pages for me, that's my call

Speaker 3 to be able to know and remember that that presence of love

Speaker 3 is for me, is meant for me, is the truth of really who I am, no matter what anyone tells me outside of me, and no matter what I might encounter personally in my life, you know, people and situations that are telling me I'm not love.

Speaker 3 That's my work to do. Those are my pages to fill in in my life

Speaker 3 to figure out how to continue to be a presence of love even in the absence of it.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 that's my practice and that's my calling.

Speaker 1 The rest is still unwritten. It's a very like Natasha moment.

Speaker 1 And it'd be very much like a...

Speaker 1 a woman teacher theologian to be like the rest is yours

Speaker 1 four more pages for you to write

Speaker 1 um megan yeah for

Speaker 2 sake

Speaker 1 um pod squad we will obviously um leave you with all of the information you need to find megan and her work and her books they are life-changing and megan have you ever thought about you know how dudes are always like um

Speaker 1 you know, just

Speaker 1 interpreting scripture and then putting out versions of Bibles that they interpreted.

Speaker 1 And you know how, like, sometimes when we get new information, we get supplemental material. Have you considered

Speaker 1 creating a supplemental brochure

Speaker 2 for churches who are to

Speaker 1 pass out along with the Bible?

Speaker 3 A corrective lens.

Speaker 1 Yes, and it doesn't, and that would be the whole thing. Just these few that they can put, they can slide on top of the Bible as a supplemental experience.
Yes, no, that's wise.

Speaker 4 That's wise.

Speaker 4 You'll only need a several million of those. If you could get on that real quick, a quick print run of those would be helpful.
So, Mary Magdalene Revealed, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

Speaker 4 And the girl who baptized herself.

Speaker 4 That's the one on TECLA.

Speaker 4 Absolutely incredible, scholarly,

Speaker 4 personal, gorgeous,

Speaker 4 required reading.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Megan. We love you so much.
We're so deeply grateful for you.

Speaker 3 I love you three so much. I'm so grateful to you, and I love the pod squad.
I am a pod squatter. I love us.

Speaker 3 We make me more courageous in the world to do the work I have to do.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 1 See you next time, Pod Squad.

Speaker 1 We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production podcast brought to you by Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human.

Speaker 1 And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram and at We Can Do Hard Things Show on TikTok.