A Girl's Voice: a BRIDGE to Women
with
Trista Hendren
Author of The Girl God series
www.thegirlgod.com
There is a wound in the world that is specific to women and girls. Many
of us take a lifetime to figure out what it is. In my case, giving birth to
a daughter was a bridge to my own healing and prompted me to find a
new path for both of us.
I did not realise how deeply my upbringing in the Church had tainted and still
suppressed my core being until I read Patricia Lynn Reilly’s book, A God Who
Looks Like Me.
Everyone is born of a woman, but somehow the patriarchal creation myth
reversed this.
Women are secondary, if not cursed, via this tradition. The textbooks that our
children read are still almost entirely male-dominated filled with maleaccomplishments.
Our spiritual communities are still mostly male-led and refer to God as “He.”
Religious thought seeps in early and is very damaging to girls. If God is a man,
and “He” is everything that is good and superior, it is easy to conclude that we
as women are, in fact, beneath men.
Whether you practice a religion or not, this still has a profound effect on our
collective thinking.
Despite 15 years as a feminist, it never
dawned on me to question my family and
religious upbringing. We were, by all accounts,
“normal”. Compared to many other people, I
really didn’t have much to complain about.
So while I learned about and rallied against the
systematic oppression of women, I did not
correlate my family and faith to the roots of
my own.
‘GO WITH THE FLOW OF LOVE’