reveal: a sacred manual for getting spiritually naked by meggan watterson

The first time I read the Old Testament I broke out in hives.

I was ten years old, sitting in Sunday school trying to make sense of the stories we were reading, which the teacher explained were considered to be “God’s word.” I couldn’t get the echo of his comment out of my head. “God’s word?” God writes? God’s published?

The stories were making me so visibly incensed because, although they contained women, we didn’t actually hear from women in their own voices. The teacher asked for my thoughts, because I was a hot mess – a hive the shape of Italy stretched from my forehead to down across my neck. So I stammered out something like, “But we don’t know what it was like for them – for the women!”

At ten years old, I didn’t know how to articulate what the red rash clearly conveyed. Brimming with tears, I pushed back my chair and marched dramatically out of the room.

While waiting for my mom on the curb of the church parking lot, I tried to figure out why I was so upset. And in that moment I realized it wasn’t anger, but fear. I felt more afraid than I had ever been.

If God was seen as only male, and if only men had been able to think, write, and speak with spiritual authority on behalf of the divine for the past two millennia or so, then, I realized, I am the sex not considered sacred.

I was scared to be a girl in a world that didn’t yet get that I am sacred too.

I went to divinity school and seminary with a belief that had been planted in me that day as a little girl – a belief that there is a connection between our ideas of the Divine and the status of women.

I believe that if men and women could speak more equally about the Divine, and if there could be more balanced stories and images of the Divine as both male and female, there would be far less gender-based violence than what our world currently endures. And, women would more easily consider and treat their bodies as sacred.

I became a theologian to find balance in my perception of the Divine. I’ve surrounded myself with stories of the Black Madonna in Catholicism, Tibetan Green Tara, and Hinduism’s Kali Ma. I’ve read every female mystic from St. Teresa of Avila to Meerabai.

It is my belief that our potential to be transformed by the Divine is exactly the same whether we are a man or a woman. The real barometer of our spiritual potential is not our sex, but the commitment of our desire to want to encounter the Divine.

This is the belief I held at age ten; I just didn’t have the words yet to tell the truth.

I have been compelled since then by a singular passion to answer this question: “What does spirituality look like for a woman who hasn’t abandoned her own body?”

This inexorable passion led me to earn two theological degrees, to go on two pilgrimages, and to devote two decades of my life unearthing the Divine Feminine.

Ultimately, by finding the voice of the Divine Feminine I also found my own soul-voice, the one buried beneath veils of fear and self-doubt.

What I have desired most is to share my story in a way that might help other women do the same- to find the voice of unfaltering truth and love inside them.

REVEAL: A Sacred Manual For Getting Spiritually Naked is my spiritual memoir and it’s also meant to be a spiritual guide for women who long, as I did, for a spirituality that empowers them to tell their own stories of the divine, to abandon their fears but never themselves, and to reveal the life of limitless love and possibility their soul-voice wants them to claim.

I want this book to be the spiritual mentor that I couldn’t find but desperately longed for when this process began for me. I want you to know that there is a way through fear. You are not crazy for wanting so much more out of life. You are not selfish or greedy either.

You have been initiated.

Meggan Watterson is a spiritual mentor, speaker, and scholar of the Divine Feminine who inspires women to live from the audacity and authenticity of the voice of their soul. She facilitates the REDLADIES, a spiritual community that encourages women to reclaim their bodies as sacred and to be led by the soul-voice inside them without compromise or apology. (Some break bread together; REDLADIES break dark chocolate.) She is the founder of REVEAL, a spiritual event for women that is a triumvirate of one part fiery soul-voices, one part ritual, and one part dance party. She received a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in media such as The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Feminist.com. She lives in New York City with her son and his two imaginary dogs, Shelley & Brendam. 

Read Meggan’s piece on Eat, Pray, Love and the New Spiritual Seeker here.