Being Human is the Point: Writing Our Mother and Our Humanity Back in Our History

When the Mother was removed from our foundational narratives, we lost a vital part of ourselves. Then we demonized our humanity. But our flesh is the miracle. Being human is the point.

Writer’s Note: There are some cracks in the foundations of Western Civilization, the ones the Mother slipped through. I attempt to understand how narratives brought forth with origins in love were shaped over time by agendas of control and fear, which shaped my understanding of, well, everything. Our Mother was shoved into a dark corner and asked not to speak.

This essay is about finding our way back to the love of our Great Mother, that primordial womb that carried the beginning of all that is. It is an invitation to imagine a different way, what it could look like if we allowed Her to return. As the cliché goes, when one door closes, another opens. Welcome to an opening—an opening to a more balanced history and what it could have looked like if fear and control hadn’t tainted it. What could it have looked like if the Mother had been more present?

In the middle of writing this, I met with a friend who is a community organizer for a long lunch. We talked about the world we want to live in, the one we want to help rebuild as the systems no longer serving humanity’s highest good fall away. When I say our highest good, I mean personal sovereignty and unlimited love, less fear-based systems. OK, how about no fear?

She mentioned that one thing we (humanity) will need to do is rewrite our history with the one that illustrates who we actually are and what really happened along the way. A history of balance. In a moment of synchronicity, I shared with her what I was working on here.

I know I am not alone. So many of us are questioning everything, and for good reason. Things don’t feel good in the world right now, and we are waking up to why. We are also waking up to the reality that this problem dates way back, like millennia, and is not an issue measurable in presidential terms. We are all aching for our Mother to return.

I started thinking of ways we have become, willingly yet unwittingly, broken down bondsmen and bondswomen. We show up and exist in places 40-plus hours a week for a price. Many of us don’t even want to be there. But we stay because we were sold a fib that we have to earn our right to exist, we have to earn our right to healthcare and benefits like free time and sick time, and the lie that the joy that awaits us is not here; it is in the afterlife.

How did this happen? How did we get here? Where do we go from here?

I write this with some knowledge— I have a philosophy degree from a traditional, private Catholic college, and I would argue that philosophy before the Enlightenment was essentially the study of theology as there was no separation. I then spent 20 years studying Catholicism as the foundation for all Western theology prior to the Reformation. However, this writing extends far beyond religion and politics and is a small part of a much larger project I am working on, which is to weave our Mother, our sacred humanness, and our profound and divine connection to God back into the world through those truths.

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What if being human is the point? What if being you is the point? What if the way you show up in the world, no matter how sloppy or neat, is the point?

Why wouldn’t it be?

If sacred geometry in nature and beyond points to the intelligent design in all things, then every detour, every joyful moment, every painful moment and every hurdle are part of an intelligent design to return us to Love, then I will argue that all of it is THE POINT.

But our histories, religions and ideologies have told us otherwise. Parts of our story have gone missing, downplayed and left out in the cold, including our humanity. But no Mother would want to leave any part of us out in the cold. She embraces all of us.

Like millions of others, I was raised in the Western Judeo-Christian framework. With that came a belief that when I die, I may go to heaven, but only if I work really hard and avoid this thing we label as sin at all costs.

This heaven is not accessible to the living, and it is something we toil after our whole lives by doing things that church leaders interpreted out of filtered and translated texts, mind you, by a few fellow “sinful” humans. Heaven then became something we can obtain once we shed what has been painted as cumbersome and sinful bodies. After all, our bodies are the cause of all “sin,” our founding fathers argue.

This narrative was shaped in part by the same humans, early church fathers, who erroneously silenced one of the Mothers of Western Civilization through a rumor. In a famous homily in 591 CE, Pope Gregory I conflated three women in the Bible into one, labeling Mary Magdalene as the repentant prostitute. Before that, she was named the Apostle of the Apostles in the third and fourth centuries because she was the first to witness the resurrection, the cornerstone of Christianity. Over time, this rumor became widely accepted and perpetuated for centuries.

Pope Paul VI apologized for that mistake in 1969, and Pope Francis tried to rectify her reputation by giving her a feast day in 2019.

“In the article for the Vatican newspaper, Archbishop Arthur Roche [... said], St. Mary Magdalene's feast day is a call for all Christians to ‘reflect more deeply on the dignity of women, the new evangelization and the greatness of the mystery of divine mercy. ‘Pope Francis has taken this decision precisely in the context of the Jubilee of Mercy to highlight the relevance of this woman who showed great love for Christ and was much loved by Christ,’ Archbishop Roche wrote.” - America: The Jesuit Review

Thank you, but it is about 1,570 years too late. The gospels and teachings of Magdalene and Thomas were removed and deemed heretical because they taught personal power versus power over another and that God lives in our hearts, not in the hands of an external authority. They were deemed heretical out of fear that those in power would lose their power because it gave power back to the people.

These missing gospels have been found and published, and they are beautiful if you are curious to look them up.

Questions are now popping up for me:

Why did the patriarchal structure who built the foundation for all the systems we dwell in today, that we have lived in for thousands of years, have an interest in defaming Mary Magdalene’s character?

And why were they interested in downplaying Jesus’ humanity while simultaneously downplaying our divinity?

Suddenly, nothing in the world made sense, yet everything started to make sense. I began to understand why it was so hard for a woman to exist and work in a world that was never built with her in mind. Or worse, a world whose foundational texts cast women like Lilith, Eve and Mary Magdalene in such a way, and Mother Mary was not given a voice in the Bible.

Every single system and structure I have existed in is based on these skewed stories — Jesus was fully human but not human because he was without “sin,” whatever that means, and Mary Magdalene was a demon-possessed whore, but she wasn’t.

What would it be like to exist in a world where the truth was shared 2,000 years ago: Jesus lived a very human life to tell us that we are all like him, and our human bodies are good, and if we are like him, then this means we are also all fully divine, powerful beings, and that we are like Mary Magdalene too, who was powerful as the Apostle to the Apostles funding the savior’s mission?

This is not a feminist stance. This is what the old-school Catholic church has finally coughed up and shared with the world. They are apologizing and discreetly bringing the truth, the importance, dignity, and power of women back into the fold, but so much damage has been done. Look around the world. Look around the room. Look at the home you grew up in. What would it have been like if the Great Mother had been present alongside the Father?

This skewed narrative has had devastating effects on all of us. To deny the humanity of the man who came here to show us all the way, and the divinity and power of the woman who walked with him, taught me to deny, neglect and reject the things that made me human, which led to a lack of compassion for my humanness, and worse, my womanhood. To deny the richness of the Divine Feminine in both men and women is to create problems like suppressed emotions, hyper-competitive culture versus mutual flourishing and collaboration, workaholism, greedy governments, a need for external validation, sex addiction, sexual abuse, drug addiction, the list goes on.

When the Divine Feminine is removed from men and women, a hollow ache forms inside us. A severing occurs, not just from the sacred feminine, but from our own hearts, our intuition, our capacity for empathy, tenderness, surrender, and true inner knowing. We begin to seek power without love, control without compassion, and identity without soul.

And the world pays the price: through war, through domination, through estrangement from Mother Earth and from each other. Men without the feminine are like trees with no roots—reaching, towering, but easily felled by the winds of fear.

But when we remember Her, when we honor the sacred feminine within ourselves, we become whole. We can stand tall and open-hearted. The masculinity within us becomes balanced with our feminine, not domineering, but self-sovereign. In balance, we act not from fear of losing power, but from love's desire to serve. When the Mother is present, we become servant-leaders, leading yes, but not from our wounds, from our hearts.

Realizing I had been lied to my whole life, I was angry. But in a good way, like the kind of anger Jesus must have felt when he flipped the tables in the Temple when a sacred space had been commercialized, like how our sacred world has been commercialized.

Our world and our human bodies are holy Temples. Nature, which we should never have been separated from, is a holy Temple.

I imagine that if Jesus were here today, he would be flipping some tables, not feeling out of control but with a deep divine indignation. And not because money is bad, but because money has been used to manipulate our free will when things that are our birthright have been monopolized and dangled over our heads like carrots … we label them as benefits in the corporate world.

This is cause for divine indignation. My divine indignation. Your divine indignation.

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I was an atheist in high school. I was mad at God and experienced some teen rage from injustices already accumulating in my young life. But I never stopped searching for the depth that juxtaposed the hyper-materialistic church and world I grew up in.

When they built a bookstore blocks from my home when I was about 14 years old, I discovered frappuccinos and moved into their “New Age,” “Spirituality,” and “Religion” sections for a few years, exploring all the world's religions.

I wanted to belong to something, and I wanted to live a life that had meaning beyond just me. I thought that was something that existed outside of me, something I had to reach for, to earn. So I decided I would explore and convert to a religion. At some point, it was between Taoism, Buddhism and Catholicism. (I know, don’t ask.) They all had such beautiful truths. How does one choose?

At 18, I worked with a priest for a year, reading, asking questions, attempting to understand the paradox of religion. I found so many beautiful truths in original texts that I didn’t know had existed. Like the original intentions of what Love in a human structure could be like but had been forgotten. They also had a Mother in Mary who was very present, and I clung to her.

By 19, I had become Catholic and was studying philosophy and metaphysics in college. It would be 20 years before I started to wake up and challenge the issues within that worldwide organization, when I realized that just because they honored the Mother in some capacity, it actually just distracted me from all the ways they had removed Her.

At 21, I moved to Rome for a while to study the civilization that built my understanding of the world I inherited, not really questioning, but to reach out and literally touch the marble and ancient columns that became the foundation for the world I tried to find myself in, the worldview I saw reality through.

To see the evolution of art and architecture as an illustration and a nod to what came before, and physical and metaphorical evidence that helped me see how documents and texts did the same throughout history, helped me trace the ideologies born out of what came before, which shaped governments.

Locke and Hume’s work was in response to the Renaissance. The Constitution of the United States is nearly a carbon copy of books born in the Enlightenment Era, the Age of Reason. Our country was a fear-based reaction to, and was built in rebellion against, the controlling structures of a monarchy and the unity of church and state because it gave the church and its narratives of sin and oppression authority over the government.

Yet the foundation of oppression and fear-based dominance was carried over to the United States in other ways, creating a similar system that still controlled women and people of color. The class systems created by the financial systems started to look like the royal hierarchy they were stepping away from. It was like the root of the weed hadn’t been pulled up, just the top.

So many still couldn’t vote or work for the money that offered those freedoms, and until recently, women couldn’t even have a line of credit, which in a world based on money means no independence from either your father or your husband.

It’s like the apple fell, but not very far from the tree.

And I argue that it is because we pointed the finger at Eve when she plucked the apple.

That narrative was also skewed by the patriarchal lens. A punishing God did not tell Eve that she could not eat the apple in the way we have been told. The "apple," which was never actually called an apple in the original texts, represented the knowledge of good and evil in the stories we were fed. But it was never an apple, and it was the figurative fruit that held the awakening to our duality—of contrast, of choice, of consciousness.

In the original Hebrew text of Genesis, the word used was “peri,” which means fruit. There is no mention of an apple. That came much later, through a Latin pun — the word “malum” means both "apple" and "evil" in Latin.

This little wordplay stuck, and over time, like the church’s rumor of Mary Magdalene, the fruit of sacred knowledge became unfairly symbolized by something dangerous, tempting, sinful. But the true "fruit" was never evil. It was the fruit of awakening, of duality, of self-awareness, the very things that help us evolve and awaken to our personal power and sovereignty.

In this story, Eve is the first awakener, the courageous one who reached beyond naivete to know the depths and complexities of human creation, our light and our dark, our wholeness. This did not make her a sinner but a seeker, a holy rebel, a bringer of wisdom.

She brought the shadows of our human existence to light so that they could be integrated and embraced as a whole, with the love of a Mother. This more balanced narrative does not make Eve, the Mother of us all, responsible for the “fall of humankind.”

The patriarchal retelling twisted Eve’s sacred curiosity into shame. It turned her into the cause of the fall, when in truth, she was the catalyst for our evolution, our awakening.

Because of the false narrative, curious men and women, seekers of truth and knowledge, were burned at the stake for hundreds of years.

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I grew up in a WASPy family in Texas. I knew we were Christians, but I didn’t know what it meant to be one. As a child, I don’t think I realized that Christmas and Easter were about Jesus. I didn’t know about Jesus’ life until my early teen years.

Sometimes on Easter and Christmas, we got dressed up in expensive dresses with big matching bows and showed our faces at the local WASPy church where my grandfather was a founding member.

I had a hard time finding depth and unconditional love in the ways I grew up around religion. There are a lot of beautiful truths in organized religion, but there are also a lot of ugly ones. I am here to challenge the ugly ones that are killing humanity under the guise of saving humanity.

And I am a big fan of Jesus and have always thought he was a beautiful being who believed in the power and beauty of all creatures, the balance thereof, including women. I believe he came here to restore the light that was going out in humanity because of oppression and an imbalance of structures, because of the removal of our Mother. I do not believe he came to create more oppression through the narratives our human institutions perpetuated.

The early church fathers left those beautiful details about his and Mary Magdalene’s teachings out of church doctrines and the entire canon of Western Civilization to create “order.”

From a young age, I understood that if I wanted to go to heaven, I had better behave. Everything I did on this planet was ultimately with that goal in mind. And that right there is the message we have swallowed for millennia—tow the line, or you won’t make it to heaven. More questions swirl in the storm forming in my soul.

But what should I make of my human form if my lifelong goal is to shed it? I mean, every sin is “of the flesh.” Our flesh is our humanness. The religions of the world made desires of the flesh, namely pleasure, evil. So am I wrong for even existing? Can’t. Wait. To. Get. To. Heaven, I thought.

And…

Why would a loving God create beings with desires and then punish them for it? I know, everything in moderation, but...

What if we changed the script? What if our humanity, our desires, our lives, our mistakes, were all the point? And what interest would authority have in saying otherwise?

Being Human is the point. Our humanity is sacred, not something to be escaped in some bodiless form in some faraway dimension we can’t access here.

What does it mean for Jesus to be fully human and fully divine? Western tradition argues in its doctrine that he is 100 percent human and 100 percent divine, not 50/50.

That God became human was always so beautiful to me. How humble, how potent. I know he came here to tell us that we were worthy of all the divinity that Jesus had, not to rescue us from our humanity, but to reunite our divinity with our humanity. He came to break the bondage of the illusion that we were somehow separate from God and from ourselves.

Old questions haunt me. I have been confused that the founding fathers of Western Civilization (notice that the founding mothers were left out) painted an image of Jesus as 10 percent human and 90 percent divine. He ate, but not too much. He never had the sexual desires humans had, because that was bad, that was left for the rest of us, so he remained a chaste virgin his whole life, because to have sex would be to make him dirty.

But sex is the very miraculous creation act that perpetuates humanity. I know, the church made sex sacred only in divine union, marriage, which is yet another thing ordained within and controlled by the church. More questions.

But if Jesus was The Way, then why didn’t Jesus get married in these texts written down and passed on to us today? Was marriage bad too? Or just for the lesser holy people?

What was the man the church presented to us as “the way” modeling for us? Could the mention of such a bride have given too much credence to women? Did His love for his human existence and all that it offered threaten to make us all enjoy life too much? Is this why joy is powerful? Is this why to enjoy something is the ultimate rebellion of systems of control?

If Jesus was “the way” for all of us, then why didn’t the canon of Western Civilization allow him to show us THE WAY … for all of us?

I believe he did, but I believe those in power chewed it up, put it in a blender, and spit it back out in a way that created their version of order, letting fear-based illusions of control take over the narrative that we all live by today. Removing feminine prowess that led to humanity’s wholeness, removing our beloved Mother as one who exists alongside and in equal parts to the masculine Father, removed our wholeness, thus our personal power.

And I imagine Jesus had a sweet tooth and ate too many cookies. Like we do. And I also believe he got stomach aches, like we do, and both Marys helped him through his choice with compassion. So that the next time he didn’t get weird about the cookies and hid them, eating even more out of shame, or denied himself entirely. I imagine the next time he ate them with more compassion for his humanity, and a few less.

Our bodies are living scriptures, holy temples, through which codes live and provide access to the divine. This truth makes us powerful beyond measure, and nobody in power wants that.

Because being human is the point, and being you in whatever body you exist in, is the point.

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For 12 years, I taught mass communications and news writing at a few local colleges. I was fascinated by how the dissemination of information and narratives, whether true or false, significantly influences society.

That has always been true, but 2,000 years ago, it was through oral traditions and scribes, translations of Aramaic words in Greek and Hebrew writing, the latter being rigid in its interpretations, and the former being a living, breathing fluid language. For example, click here for the Aramaic version of the Our Father prayer next to the Western Colonial version passed down from Greek translations. This says it all.

But there is a real systemic problem when we deny our humanity and remove our Mother — we lose compassion for what makes us human, the parts that are messy, that make mistakes, that eat too many cookies, that slip up, get angry, cry, lose control.

When we lose compassion for our personal humanity, we lose compassion for our fellow humans. When we deny our humanness, discord settles into the marrow of our society. This divides us and separates us from ourselves, from each other, and from the all-loving compassion we all have access to.

I have been asking myself a lot lately: Who or what would have an interest in disseminating this story?

There are parts of myself that need more compassion. The part that grows tired and weary at the old world crumbling around me. The part that thinks she must always be productive or else. These are the things that make me human, the imperfect perfection of who and what we are, like an English garden, beautiful in its mess. Until I embrace my shadowy parts as part of my natural human self, until I embrace the beauty of my womanhood, I will react to others in less than savory ways. I will live in my ego, always offended, defensive, living out of my blind spots, the parts I have hidden in agreement with society at large, never evolving. To see the dark is to see the light.

This is why we needed to pick the apple. The intuitive curiosity in all of us, saved us. I am so glad my Great Mother picked that apple.

For this reason, I am convinced that the way forward is through embracing our humanity, through embracing our Mother.

This journey is not about floating above the human mess— it is about loving within it, transmuting through it and becoming whole despite it, with the love of a Mother.

But the beauty of finding truth in this way is that there are both objective and subjective threads to it. We each get to have our own experience. And these detours, when we wade through the illusions of self and others, and in the dark womb, are never as bad or sinful (as those are dramatic and egoic labels), but they are learning moments in our own experience that guide us back to who and what we really are.

After I wrote my last piece on finding beautiful truths through the observations of patterns, I realized that it was through our bodies that we observe these patterns, arriving at the mysteries of the universe. It is through our senses, our very human senses, that we witness miracles.

Our senses also help us stay in the present moment, which is where the eternal Divine exists.

This makes our bodies portals to the unseen, the divine. This makes our bodies holy and sacred.

Humanity is losing its light and getting sick because of the imbalance created by these foundational and false stories. If the health of the body is defined by homeostasis, a balancing of all systems, then the health of society is also defined as such. When we remove the Divine Feminine Mother from the narrative that defines our very existence, we become sick—all of us.

Which one of you arrived here without a Mother? OK, then how did our universe arrive without a Mother?

Through the portals of our hearts, we experience the fullness of how both a Mother and Father God made us and the divinity that exists in each of us. That was the message Jesus came to share.

I am so grateful I get to witness the magic of the world, the beauty all around us, because I am a human. We spend so much chasing the unseen magic of the world, a faraway heaven, but the observable world is the portal to that world. And I don’t want to skip any of that. I don’t want to miss any part of being human. I don’t want to live another day without my Mother.

In all the joy, the pain, the crumbling, the loving, and even the fighting, this is us. This is all of us, in wholeness.

The Judeo-Christian framework, in its purest origins, held many truths. It began with a hunger for union with the Divine, a reverence for the sacred, a longing to understand Goodness and Order. There is beauty still within it—love, justice, forgiveness, grace.

But what it forgot, what it buried, was the Mother.

To elevate Magdalene as the Apostle to the Apostles would have been to uplift the sacred feminine in all women and men, to restore the balance between masculine and feminine, heaven and Earth, head and heart. But a church aligned more with empire and power than Eden could not allow that. So they recast her. Erased her. Silenced her.

And with her went the voices of countless women prophets, mystics, healers, and teachers who carried the living wisdom of the Divine Mother.

It exiled the Divine Feminine. It severed Spirit from Nature. It reduced God to only Father, forgetting that the breath of the Universe was born from a Womb—from mystery, darkness, gestation. When those in power removed the Mother, the lies and imbalance unfolded, and unfurled into the Beast we are facing today. It built towers of power where once there were circles of communion. It taught separation instead of oneness. Hierarchy instead of harmony.

And perhaps most heartbreakingly, it taught you that you were born wrong. That you must strive to be loved. That God was somewhere far away, watching and weighing your worth. That your humanity, in all its complexity, is wrong.

None of this is true.

We were never separate from each other. We were never cast out. There was never original sin—only original blessing. The only thing that could be sin is this delusion that we are separate from Source, from our original blessing, from our true self, the soul that we have been told we don’t get to become until we die, or pay our debts in purgatory, or worse, hell.

When we remove Her from the foundational texts, traditions and the world, this does not just hurt women, it destroys men.

To believe this lie is the hell. And we created it.

Now, let’s restore it. Our Mother never went anywhere. She never left. And now that we remember, we walk with Her again, barefoot, bold and wholly human

P.S. Your life is your living, breathing story you are here to share, a testament to the truth of humanity. I believe your awakening to this truth is the message humanity needs to hear through your art, your writing, your creations that you gift this world. Send me a message and share your story of becoming whole. Let’s write this living book together, as a new Living Testament to the New World we are entering.