Episode 23 - There’s Nothing Wrong with Us, with Dr. Christy Bauman

Dr. Christy Bauman and Anni discuss embodied theology—what it means to be a woman following Christ, leaning into our intuition, and listening for the Divine Feminine. Dr. Christy shares a helpful tool for women to reclaim our intuition and live into the fullness of what our bodies know. Drawing deeply from womanist theologians and scholars, she offers a fresh look at what many of us have long sensed but struggled to put into words: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with us.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian, Fully Christian.

I'm your host, Anni Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ-likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God.

I am absolutely thrilled to share today's conversation with you with Dr.

Christy Bauman, who helps us identify embodied theology and what it means to be a woman following Christ and leaning into the Divine Feminine.

Join me as she helps us discover there's nothing wrong with us.

I am so excited for this conversation today with Dr.

Christy Bauman.

Did I get that right?

Okay, great.

I'll let her introduce herself properly.

But just so you all know, I found her because of a book her husband wrote called, How Not to Be an Ass for Christian men to come close to the expanding conversation about how we can be loving to one another.

And through him, I learned about her work.

And so here's what I know about her so far.

I'm very excited to explore more into the wilds of who she has become on her journey.

She is committed to helping humans come into their true voice.

She is an author and psychotherapist who focuses on the impact of trauma and abuse on female psyche, sexuality, and theology.

She's written a whole host of books.

I have just finished her.

Is this your latest?

Her writes A Sacred Journey for the Mind, Body and Soul.

Yes.

Okay.

And there are so many treasures that you buried there.

I think that's where we'll go first.

And what else would you want to say by way of introduction?

Who are you in the world and how did you come to be here?

My goodness.

It's probably so hard to synthesize, right?

Who we are, who we started out as, and then how we got somewhere, right?

And so when you ask a person like, where are you from?

Do they say where they were born?

Do they say where they felt most at home?

Or do they say where they're currently residing?

And so for me to say where I'm from is that I was born in deep south Louisiana.

I was a Cajun, Creole, little barefoot girl who played in the swamps and killed alligators and turtles and learned how to cook them for meals.

And so I come from a very rural, rural background.

But if you asked me, I preside currently in the Asheville area of North Carolina, and I would still not call these mountains, the Zappalachian Mountains, my home.

I would tell you I'm from Seattle, Pacific Northwest Mountains, because I lived and birthed my family and my children and my degrees amongst the Cascades.

And so it's hard to say who I'm from and how I got here.

But definitely is that not all of us who reside in a body and skin that was there when we came into this world and then stretched and grew, and took on different amounts of sunlight and cold, and found our way into this adult body that we're in now, who's still trying to search to say how is home.

But I am learning that home is right here in this body, that presides and lives amongst multiple different spaces in time.

And so I come to you from North Carolina right now, and I would say, I would tell you Seattle is home to me.

And yet I was born in deep South Louisiana.

So that's how I come geographically to this space.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is such an interesting thing to ask someone, well, who are you?

Because we are so complex and full of story that goes back way before we ever came here now.

And so interesting to try to find, well, how can I get an onramp into the stream of who you are?

Talk to me a little bit about theology of the womb.

Yes.

And so that would be who I am in my career, right?

And so I became a psychologist because I wasn't allowed to be a pastor.

Again, saying I grew up in the south, I went to seminary, got my masters at a seminary, wanted to go on staff with a ministry.

And because I was a woman, it just wasn't allowed.

It wasn't even contended with for the most part.

And so even in getting those degrees, psychology and counseling was the only thing that my seminary offered that I could get a degree in.

And that's what I pursued.

And of course we are our own stories and we are always looking to save ourselves and then save others.

And so it became helping women with their spiritual and sexual health.

And from the get go, it was because I was trying to revive and save my own spiritual and sexual health as a female in our culture.

And I gave myself over to it.

And so I studied and researched and researched and talked to woman after woman and held story after story for 20 something years and thousands of hours.

And then I started to make statistics and stats of what was best or not best for the female who comes from this place.

And it's interesting how it came back to if we can know our stories and then if we can get into our bodies, we can be present and we can show up fully.

And that's the simplicity of it.

But part of my way of getting into my body, into my spirit and my sexuality, was through my bleeding.

That was the only thing that was different than men and was not talked about in the church.

And so theology of the womb was, what do I do with a bleeding God, with a God who created me to bleed, to create and to co-create with him?

And that book is not just the research of what we know historically for women who bled in different cultures, but it's also how do we understand that through Holy Week, through the idea that Christ broke his body and poured out his blood to birth, resurrection and eternal life.

And he invites women in their stories to have the same experience.

Even if they don't birth a child in this world, they bleed monthly and their body aches and groans and then bleeds.

And when we bury the blood, so to speak.

And in that practice, we know something of Christ that men do not know.

Wow, that yes.

So so many points of connection right there.

Are you familiar with Shannon K.

Evans's new book, The Mystics Would Like a Word?

Oh, I sure am.

Okay, I figured.

I just.

She was so lovely in so many ways.

She's a sweet friend.

She's a kindred.

What you were just saying reminds me of the part in the book where she tells the story of her friend who's a nursing mother just having given birth, and it's just all kinds of pain getting this baby's latch right, and the blistering, and the sharp needle point pains that so many of us have experienced in the early stages of nursing.

And she says, something to the effect of coming close to this mama in pain offering her body to her newborn, hearing the words of Jesus, this is my body broken for you, take and eat.

There we are.

There is something godly and good about the feminine body and how it gives of itself to others.

I loved in your book where you highlighted every one of us is born through a process of a woman's body being broken open in one form or another.

That's how we all get here is the breaking open of a woman.

And so here we are in the midst of trying to navigate what that looks like in a world that has not largely understood or appreciated or elevated what it means for us to be women who are on our own journeys, but particularly those of us who claim Jesus.

It's a wild, uncharted landscape for many of us.

And I'm so glad you're here helping pave the way.

Yeah, and it's not surprising.

Like this fight even for men to trust the female body.

And in a sense, we don't normally use this word, but to submit to what it can teach him is age old.

This has been happening so long.

The fall of Lucifer, the rank of angels, was all about the idea of I do not want to bow to a woman.

And I don't want Mary, if we're going into Catholicism, which again, people can be questioning about that.

But I'm just saying, the story is old in scripture, talking about the idea that us learning from the broken female bleeding body has been contended and rebelled against for a very long time.

Yes.

So, you know, we are there again, and I think people are thinking this is new, but it's been happening for a very long time.

It's not patriarchy and misogyny and objectification are new terms we use to explain something that the stories of old have been telling us have been happening for forever.

Oh, so true.

So in my hermeneutics class, we were invited to take on one verse that's a toxic verse, right, or tricky, and go deep with it.

So I did 1st Timothy 2.12, I do not suffer a woman to have authority over a man or teach, right?

And in my research, I came across a cache in different places.

I looked of quotes from men of history, men whose names we would all recognize, speaking of their hatred of the feminine, their fear of the feminine, their desire to subjugate the feminine.

And so I just started putting these on a document, like how, how common has this been throughout history?

My document is 14 pages long, quote after quote after quote after quote of keep women down.

If we let them be our equals, then they will overpower us and subjugate us.

The woman is the lesser be, you know, all of the things.

And so it was really illuminating for me to compile all of that, look at it on my page and realize of this is so ancient.

And yes, it's helpful for you to say, yeah, patriarchy and like male supremacy and these terms that we're hearing now might be a new language to us, but it is ancient thought.

Yes.

And if we want to move it over to a different, to race instead of gender, right?

We can still see the flavors of, if we let someone have authority, they will make us pay for how we've treated them.

Whether it's submission to another, to gender, between gender, or we turn that to race, we will often hear the person in power saying, if I submit to the authority now of the one that I have harmed, enslaved, put down, belittled, they will make me pay.

Or there is fear there.

Instead of a position of what would love look like, what would maybe community or kindness look like, there is fear that is behind that pushback of what would I do now if I had to listen to the person that I have mistreated and been over.

And again, it's the giving up of power that is that age old fight.

What do I do if I give up my power?

What will happen to me?

Oh, that is so true.

I hadn't thought of it through that lens exactly.

I had an experience when I was in middle elementary school.

I was at a tennis camp all summer long, and I have not always been super athletically inclined, and so I was not one of the more impressive specimens in my tennis group.

And the way the teacher structured it was, whoever did the exercise best, or finished first, or whatever, they would get to then create the next sort of punishment for everybody else, right?

Like, oh, you will have to do 10 pushups, whatever.

And I was always on the receiving end of all of this discipline, because I was never the first one to finish.

Well, on this one particular day, I happened to come in first, and the teacher was like, okay, what are you gonna say everybody has to do?

And I thought about it for a moment, and I was like, oh, I could make friends and be really nice and, you know, have everybody do three jumping jacks.

But there was this like desire for revenge in me, and it came up, and I was like, everybody has to run 20 laps.

And the teacher was like, really?

That's, that's really harsh, Anni.

And I was like, yeah, because there is this within me, I recognize this, like, I'm going to get even and make them pay for what they made me do.

And I missed an opportunity, and I didn't make any friends.

Shocking.

Nobody wanted to hang out with me afterwards because I missed an opportunity to show grace and kindness.

So as you're saying this, I'm like, oh, I really want to consider as, as we continue to elevate this conversation about particularly you and I focus so much on women and also to all women of color, I want to say we are not leaving you out this time.

I know Second Wave Feminism did a really bad job of focusing on white women.

And so as we focus this conversation on anybody who's been marginalized, really being elevated and centered, let us have in our own hearts a resolution not to seek vengeance and let us be in conversation with others who fear that we might because that's real.

Yeah.

It's so good that you name the reality of what came up in you in that moment.

Like just the part of envy or the part of, what did you say, making them pay, like getting them back.

It's a power that feels, it's fleeting, but it feels like something in the moment that can satiate us.

And so I think we go for it, hoping that it won't have that sting after.

And what I love is, in my research around womb theology, womanism, which is black women's stories about theology through their body.

They were coming body first.

They were like, I can't get out of my blackness.

I can't get out of this body of mine.

So they sort of introduced me to the dilemma I felt of, I can't remove my breasts.

I can't remove my vagina from my teaching.

I can't remove my bleeding from that.

And sort of that womanist theology brought me into Alice Walker and all these women said like, we cannot remove our bodies, our blackness from us.

And so therefore we interpret and understand God through that lens of this body that given us.

And so in that, I found myself comforted like, oh, it's okay to bring my body as a lens for hermeneutics.

It's okay to use these parts of my body to then investigate what this scripture means.

And, you know, if we want to just go back to scripture around men and women, my verse was around enmity.

I will set enmity between the man and the woman.

And I remember writing that 15 page paper on just that word enmity.

And the flip side is in the New Testament, when the husband is told, lay down your life for the church and gave himself up for her.

Right.

There's something of he's already commanding submission to lay down your life and be crucified, for you to go from your disembodied place to embodiment, to break your body open.

Your wife is already breaking her body open.

She doesn't have a choice.

She's been given a body that's going to bleed no matter what.

And that's what womanist theologians taught me was like, Oh, wait, I can't divorce myself from my body.

The masculine is disembodied by nature.

Their work is the flip side of being embodied.

Their genitalia outside of their body.

Right.

Their sperm comes out of their body.

We as females can't divorce ourselves from the body.

And so we understand scripture and we understand God in a way that is foundational because we can't get out of our bodies.

And that is the growth edge for the masculine.

It's, Oh, what would that be like to not be able to get out of this body?

They live from a place of disembodiment just by nature.

Just by their physiology.

Yeah.

That is really fascinating.

And of course, we know how this has manifested those of us who were raised or steeped anytime in our lives in a Bible thumping kind of environment, right?

Like, Oh, scripture is so hyper masculine.

It's written by men, about men, for men, with men in mind.

And then we come to it and we have to do a whole lot of work to find ourselves in the text.

We have to do a lot of gymnastics to relate.

And so, can you tell us the story of the bathtub night with your daughter and how you introduced her to a feminine version of David and Goliath?

Oh, my gosh.

I, you know, actually my editor at the end of this, she was like, I think that's my favorite part of the whole book.

And I was like, Oh, you know, and we're talking about this book, Her Rights, which is the six most common rights of passage in every female life.

So women are initiated into the world.

But like you said, because if it's masculine driven, or if it's male driven, the male doesn't know how to initiate a girl into womanhood.

And so then we are just looking through the Bible, trying to find the stories that we can relate to.

And I had the opportunity and the great gift of having a daughter who is so sad that she's only one female amongst her two brothers.

She just could, she will maybe never forgive me, even though I tried to explain her that is not my fault.

But it wasn't my body's doing, highly offended by it all.

I'm like, you've got up with your dad.

That is actually his fault.

So he's doing.

And so anyway, in this story that I tell in the book, I rewrite some of these story, these Bible stories that I was told my entire life.

And I told them to my children as they have been growing up.

And I have two boys, so they love the story.

And I see my daughter's eyes glaze over every time.

And it was a moment where she was sick and she was in the bath and she was without her brothers around.

And she wanted a story to comfort her.

She wanted a story about her God and about who she is to God and where she belongs.

And so, you know, I start telling the story of David and Goliath, and I see her little spirit just dampen.

And I think to myself, Christy, will you be brave enough?

Will you be brave enough to tell this story different?

And I used all of my seminary degrees and all of my knowledge to keep as many names and people as accurate as I could.

But I did something blasphemous and beautiful.

And I changed David's gender to Dana, the girl, the shepherdess, the one who threw the stone and killed Goliath, a little girl, a little girl who would then be anointed as queen.

And when I tell you that story and that rendition of that story, saved me and my daughter and called us into a deeper understanding of the God we serve, it did.

It just did.

And, you know, I have a doctorate, and I was scared to publish that story because of being scorned and called not legitimate, not a theologian.

And I thought, wow, if with all of my degrees and all of my knowledge, I'm afraid as a 45 year old woman to tell my daughter that story and to tell the world that I told her that story.

How many little girls are walking around, scared to death to be in their gender, not excited to step into their story with a God who created them perfect as the Imago Dei?

Yes.

That she bears the image of her God.

Yes.

But how is it that we've come so far that that is not only foreign, but blasphemous to tell that story?

And so it was liberating in many ways for me to publish that and to offer that story to my daughter and offer that story to myself.

And think about who I would be in my walk with God if I had grown up hearing that.

If I had grown up dreaming about the type of warrior, goddess I could be in the story.

But there was, but there's no imagination when it's, when it's not only not allowed, but it's wrong when there's something heretical about me.

The type of shame that gets buried in us.

And then the type of shame that we bleed, that we break open, that we can't possibly know resurrection better than a man.

What is, you know, and, and so that's just, it's, it was heartbreaking to me.

And I thought, no more, I'm not, not on my watch.

Like I, I don't care if every denomination refuses my teaching.

I'm going to do this for my daughter.

I'm going to do this under the conviction that I feel right in that moment from the spirit that says, trust me, Christy, you were made and are an image bearer of God.

Absolutely.

I mean, how many of us didn't know we have Imago Dei?

Didn't know that we look like God in our spirit and maybe even in our flesh.

How many of us were raised trying to squeeze ourselves into a shape that would sort of resemble something except a role that was given us?

You know, you can either be the Virgin Mary or you can be a Jezebel, and those are your two really options here.

We hope you pick Mary and go, but I'm having to stifle, I'm having to cut off, I'm having to hide so much of my nature.

And then we are coming into this recognition that our nature is in God's nature.

We bear God's image.

It is healing me in so, so many ways.

Profoundly, I can not even begin to enumerate them.

I just, I love that.

And that's what this work kept bringing me to, is that women were coming to me even in my practice or in my church.

And they were saying, where is my place?

I feel so limited by the titles that I am allowed to try on.

Yes.

And the exploration of that is what kind of God do we actually believe we serve?

And so some fire gets riled up in me.

And not only that, not only the fire, but the demand that we actually aren't doing the work we were called to.

And therefore, our bones are drying up, our songs are cracking in our throats, and we no longer are actually bringing the gospel and the calling that women were particularly given.

Even in scripture, there is a reason there were five women at the tomb.

There were a reason that there were women who knew how to wash a body that had been harmed and violated.

What do we know of the masculine in scripture?

We know that they go to war and they kill and they defend.

That is in their nature.

That is even what still many white pastors teach from.

I bless them for knowing something of that strength of God, something of that protection.

And it's not the whole story.

Because what you see at the tomb are five women walking in and knowing how to clean the Savior's body, knowing how to wrap it, knowing actually how to prepare it for resurrection, how to rebirth it.

The work of rebirth is the woman's work.

And we're lying to her, and we are stealing from her by not saying, your body every month is preparing you to do the work in this world where you're going to be handed death and loss again and again.

Broken and wounded bodies that you are going to have to anoint and clean and comfort and wrap and also bury.

And you're going to have to return and wait for them to rise up again.

This is the work of the female.

Yes.

And she knows it and she knows it.

And yet the church is not liberating her to that.

No.

And it's the worst for it.

Absolutely.

We are all suffering without having a divine mother that we recognize.

Of course, she's here, but we've dressed her up in a suit and tie and most of us don't recognize her.

And we are not fully allowing the women to open and blossom and give of ourselves, like we are made to do, because we're hampered and our wings are clipped.

Yeah, I get a little salty about it actually.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I can feel it rise up in me.

I spend a lot of time in black churches.

I'm like, do not shout me down when I'm preaching good.

Like, this is the word.

And the truth of it is, is part of me is offering it to women to give water to their soul.

But truthfully, this is the message for the white male pastor.

Yes.

The white male husband.

And I have to say it, because that is that is part of the narrative.

This is part of how why we're not moving forward in the church.

Yes, it is.

And in the work of the church.

Yep.

I'm not going to leave a man in charge of the work of bleeding and burying.

It's not his work.

And thank God it's not his work.

Right.

Like that's okay.

He's got a different calling.

But man, the limitation that we're putting on the work.

I was trying to explain this yesterday.

To my pastor, who, you know, we're in this conversation right now.

It's very live.

What about women being totally elevated to complete equality with no restrictions and no glass ceiling?

What about that?

And I was trying to explain why sometimes I go to other churches where women are leading and guiding.

And the question was like, well, you know, are you jumping ship?

And is that hasty and all that?

And what I'm saying is I don't know how to explain this to somebody who doesn't intrinsically understand, but let me try.

There is something you as a man can never give me in a sermon, in liturgy, in blessing the communion that I crave from woman.

There is something I can't put my finger on.

It is not because of necessarily her body physiologically being different.

It's not necessarily because of her cyclical nature, although those are all important.

There is an essence to her that I'm craving.

And so the best way I could describe it was if you had grown up in a home where you only had a dad, there might come a time where you sense into, oh, I'm missing something.

I want my mom.

I can't explain it.

I'm past nursing.

I don't need that kind of care.

But there's something that I need from the feminine.

And I'm always really quick to say, and I don't mean just men or women.

And I understand gender is a much larger spectrum, that I don't need to leave people out when I talk about this.

And sorry, my language is still pretty binary.

I'm working on that.

But there's this essential woman-ness that I'm craving in a spiritual setting, because I need, I am mom, I need my mom.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

There's a sweetness when you, I need my mom, you know.

What the listeners don't know is that we took a pause in this because your daughter called you.

Yep.

From a hotel room in Europe where she is sick and everyone's out and she needs her mom.

Yeah.

And I heard that same part in your voice where you said, thank you for being so gracious.

I'm like, if that was my daughter, I would have just been like, Anni, we have to have her on the phone for the podcast interview.

There's something of the mother's love that knows, that is connected to giving her voice to remind her daughter, you're okay and you've got this.

You've got this.

And I think there's something that we're all longing to hear, maybe from the pulpit, maybe from the presidency in the cabinet, maybe from somewhere where we're looking for a female to tell us, yes, you can do this, too.

It doesn't have to be all the time, but we're not so against the feminine.

Part of seeing the feminine in a place of power is not to actually be in power, but it's to all know that there's nothing wrong with us.

Because that's the message that we've swallowed and choked down, just in proxy.

Why don't we?

Wouldn't it be so lovely?

Maybe we don't have to have a female pastor, but maybe we use female pronouns for the next 50 years in our churches and in our scripture readings, just to see what happens in our psyche.

I teach cognitive psyche.

It would be lovely to test the prefrontal cortex as it listens to just a same gendered.

And men don't understand that because they haven't had to.

They've been privileged enough.

And so my hope would be that they are centered and grounded enough to let us experiment with what it would feel like to not be in a PTSD response, to not be in a place where we're having to think about God as something opposite than us or different than us.

And again, not to take away the masculine God or the masculine parts of God or the father in God.

Never, never.

But to be inclusive and to invite and understand that we need our mother.

One of my, we need our good mother.

One of my most treasured people on this planet is Mormon feminist.

She calls herself Mormon feminist, Carolyn Pearson.

I don't know if you've come across her work.

Okay.

She's 84 years old right now.

And she wrote a book of poetry called Finding Mother God Poems to Heal the World.

In this book, I found a poem and if I had it right here, I would read it that speaks to something that's my experience also, which was she went to Father God and said, Do you mind that I need to talk about Mother God so much right now?

Is it troubling to you?

And Father God wrapped her up in an embrace and said, No, I'm so glad you need your mother.

I'm so happy you're finally talking about her and engaging with her.

And that's my experience, too.

And that's something that I often lead with when I'm entering into a conversation with a person or a congregation where I'm where I'm talking about who I call Mama God.

But, you know, then that's a personal name for me.

But I mean the Holy Spirit.

I mean, God, the father's wife, whatever you want to call her.

And I often have to say, I am not asking for us to get rid of Father God.

We need him.

He's wonderful.

But there's something about Mother God.

Yesterday, this is so, so sad.

Right now, today is June 4, 2025, when we're recording this.

Yesterday, I went to a vigil to collectively weep and mourn with my community as we are staggering under the loss of three little girls who were just murdered.

These elementary-aged girls.

And right now, we don't know much of the story we, the news is saying it's probably their father who's at large currently.

And so our community came together to grieve.

And it was a sacred holy time.

I thought of being at the tomb there with the Mary's and the other women.

And there's this woman pastor in our town whose face I know, but whose name I couldn't tell you.

And she had led a few words.

She actually led the singing, This Little Light of Mine.

And then she came up and just hugged me.

There were no words exchanged.

She gave her body to me and pressed it against mine.

And I could feel her soft, womanly body against mine.

And then she opened her heart and I could feel it, Christy.

She opened her heart and I could weep in her arms.

And I could feel the love of this maternal God entering my heart through this other woman.

And I thought how sacred and precious and holy.

And that's an experience that for many different reasons, I wouldn't have with a male pastor.

I wouldn't press my body quite so fully.

I wouldn't feel that that feminine connection.

And so in all of these cases, whether we're grieving or celebrating or offering Eucharist or baptizing or burying and tending, we need the feminine too.

And at this point, I'm fond of the analogy of, my listeners have heard this before, the teeter totter where if you're on the playground and your friend's on the upper end here because there's somebody much larger on the lower end and your friend up in the air calls for your help and says, hey, help, I need to get balance here.

You know that in order to help your friend who's too high up, you don't come and sit on the fulcrum point.

You come and join them on this part.

And then you can bring the teeter totter to balance or then maybe you can play fair.

And so what I'm fond of talking about now is, yes, Father God, I am not saying no, Father God, but I am saying we must emphasize Mother God.

We must bring her front and center now to reorient ourselves to all of this beauty that we have missed for 2000 years in history in our Christian tradition.

I was just hearing about that tragedy.

Well, in your community makes me think of a Bible story, which is interesting because it was a Bible story I didn't know for a very long time, but of Rizpa, who was one of King Saul's wives.

And what happened was her two sons were killed to pay a debt to another of another sin of a town.

And also her sister wife, Abigail, her five sons, and they were all crucified.

And it's, it's horrific, but Rizpa makes the journey every day to protect the bodies from being eaten by the animals and the birds.

And she every day walks as far as she can to where they were crucified.

And she takes her cloths and she runs between her two boys who are laying, hanging their dead.

And she keeps the birds off of this, off of their bodies to try to honor.

And she's beckoning with God in her rage.

And it also talks about her rage against the mother who didn't come.

So she felt the weight of trying to protect all seven bodies from the birds eating and that her mother heart didn't know how to protect them all.

They were all dead.

All of all that she had given to the world in her offspring were dead and and at the hand of her husband sin.

And I say that to say that's a Bible story that I have yet to hear preached.

I've heard it on two podcasts with women theologians, but I have yet to hear that sermon preached ever in my life.

And I have grown up in church since I was in the womb.

And why is that when you tell a story of of that great tragedy and this woman coming and holding you to her body?

There's something we know about what we have to do to bury our dead and that our dead need to be buried, that their bodies can't go long uncovered and vulnerable from the violence that has been ensued upon them.

Right.

There's something the female knows about that.

And it's scripture.

And so again, where does the church show up in this great tragedy?

Why?

Why would we say something as small as the gender of a human who knows that story and what to do in those moments?

To rage at the violence and what's taken her child from her, and she still knows what to do.

Even after they're dead, she knows what to do.

She knows that she will defend them and that she has to bury them.

And that is her work as their mother.

This is the guidance that we actually have in scripture that we're not using.

And it does not take away the horrificness of the grief of the violence of the crime done in this situation.

But it does speak to something that that woman's body knew how to comfort the part of your mother heart that was breaking and horrified and did not know what to do in the face of this injustice.

We can wail and we can weep and there is work to be done.

Yes, and there is so much work to be done.

Yes, and you, I will tell you, I have never heard that story.

I probably read it when I've read my way through the scriptures, and it didn't stick, and I have been a Christian my entire life too.

Why are these stories not elevated?

Why aren't there so many sermons around the women who stayed at the foot of the cross, who were there the whole time when almost all of the disciples were not to be found, but the women stayed?

Why don't we talk about this?

Why don't we talk about what Jesus knew about us and called out of us and elevated in us and reminded us of ourselves and then gave us back to ourselves?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Again, this is the work for us, and I bless and I'm so grateful that I have had many men and pastors in my life who have said, please come and teach the story.

Please come and preach.

It hasn't all been bad.

Getting there, yes.

And the majority, sure.

But there have been key men in my story.

There's one who I'm teaching in two weeks at his church while he is going on vacation.

You know, and it's, and he said, please, please teach about whatever you want, but the women, your specialty, what you know, because I don't know.

And I, it's so, it's so healing to be invited.

Yes.

So I think that, you know, for any listener who is here, there's an invitation.

Yes.

There is an invitation to maybe have faith in the feminine heart of God.

And in the Imago Dei that bears the part of the mother and the wife and the single woman and the bleeding woman.

Yes.

And the little girl who wants to know that she was made and is an image bearer of Christ.

Yes, and can see herself in the stories and doesn't have to do gymnastics in order to find somebody she can relate to.

Yeah, when I first started on my journey of awakening into all of this, it's not that long ago that it really began to happen in my thinking and my curiosity.

I at first was so timid and I thought, surely I'm the only one because it's so not mainstream.

It's not talked about, right?

And I would ask people, what do you think about this?

And there was all kinds of, like, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?

You're going to, you know, slippery slope.

You're going to go off the deep end.

We're going to lose you.

You're going to leave Jesus, right?

It has been such a deep joy and also a point of deep frustration to find that this conversation has been going on for centuries within some sects of the church, right?

We, I wasn't exposed to the desert mothers or the early saints.

In my tradition, we were very Catholic averse, and so we didn't talk about that at all.

But to go back and find the mystics, in the 12th century, leaning into the arms of God the mother.

And then to find more recently, the women discovering this, writing about it, and then their lives ending, and it being buried, and then new women cropping up, doing the whole process of discovery, and having to do the work all again, and were not connected to the work of our mothers of the past, who could benefit, we could benefit greatly from their work.

I was just at, I was in this library at my school.

I went to residency at St.

Stephens, and I was just walking through the library, and just looking, oh, I wonder what books they have on the shelf here?

And one of them was called like the Divine Feminine, or Divine Mother, or something like that.

And so of course I'm like, oh, what is this?

I pulled it out.

It almost fell apart in my hands, because it was, the copyright was like 1984 or something, and the glue was coming undone.

So I cracked it open, I started reading, and it's this woman, I don't know much about her, having discovered, oh, God is our mother too.

She finds her in the Ruach, in the Shekinah, in El Shaddai, in all the places that I have found her.

And she gives this beautiful theological, like here it's okay, God really is our mother.

This is not heresy.

And there is this little tiny book, right?

This little tiny volume.

And I'm like, this was published when I was four years old.

Why didn't anybody hand me this and say, this is good work, build upon it?

Why am I reinventing this?

And we keep finding that women have over and over and over.

And in the larger conversation about women and equality, not just as relates to theology, but that's my favorite.

We keep finding that we're having to redo the work that many courageous women have done before us, because it's been, and you could say on purpose or accidentally, and I don't even really care at this point, I just know it's been buried and suppressed, and we're having to resurrect it yet again.

So true.

It is so true.

And it's, yeah, it's an extra work that in some time, it's not that it's distracting, it's just not as embodied because we're here trying to birth books or education for the next generation.

And really, we want to just be living in our bodies and living out the story to our daughters and to our sisters and with our mothers.

And so it's, you know, it's so hard.

And I have all these dreams.

I'm like, oh, yeah, let's rewrite those stories.

But you're right, they've actually been written.

It's not that.

But there has been a hold against it to move forward because it's intimidating to someone.

Yeah, it's just, it's at once heartening to find these old treasures and inquiring, why didn't I know about this before?

It's kind of like the way that I was introduced and initiated into this was through the work of Megan Waterson.

I'm sure you've come across her.

The Mary Magdalene Revealed, that book presented itself to me.

And my first thought was, Mary Magdalene is my very favorite.

I adore her.

What in the world?

She might have written a gospel.

Why did no one tell me this?

I had no idea that there was even a conversation about whether or not this gospel that bears her name was from her.

It had never come up in all my years of study and church attendance.

Nobody had ever even mentioned that maybe Mary Magdalene might have something for us now.

And I was, yes, I was delighted and enraged.

What do you mean?

This has been here since Jesus' time.

And I'm only just discovering it now.

Right, right.

Yeah.

One of the conversations that I find myself having with people, and I've had this less recently because I'm kind of moving past it, but it's interesting to think about, is I've asked several people who I think see Christianity from a really interesting perch, right?

Authors, beloved clergy who kind of are well known in the world for their work and have a wide viewpoint.

So my favorite question to ask these guys, and it's been all men that I've done this with so far, is from where you sit, do you think Christianity will be able to turn its view toward God the Mother?

Will it be able to accept it as a whole or widely accept mainstream kind of come alongside with what I'm discovering?

Like God's our mother too.

Will Christianity be able to make space for this?

So I'd love to give you that question and hear your thoughts from where you sit.

Is this something that you're hopeful will finally make its way into the mainstream thought of Christianity?

What are your thoughts there?

I don't have much hope in the Western Protestant church to bring something like that thought and really let it embody the church culture.

I don't know that that will be.

If I were a betting woman, I would not put my money on that.

Mostly because of what it's been like to try to bring, there's so much nuancing and tiptoeing that's already been done by so many of us to like, oh, if we serve it this way, would you be more inclined to listening?

And I think at some point, at least for me, I reach an age where my goal is not to change the Western Protestant Church.

It's not going to be my goal.

But for me to live fully in love with Jesus and embodied in my own body and in a practice of the way I moved, yes, and also raising a daughter.

And and boys and my boys, raising them in a way of knowing that as the gospel truth, that God is both male and female.

A hundred percent.

In my home, it's nothing to move between pronouns for God.

In fact, we think those pronouns are pretty limiting even for God.

And I was thankful for that thought process.

But the church as a whole, I think, you know, you can find some cultures that are more matriarchal cultures, and they have that sense.

And you can find, you know, very Catholic cultures that Mary is already, in a sense, put not as mother God, but in a position.

You know, it's the mother of God is interesting, the way we use prepositions and things like that to kind of, again, nuance, we have been demanded to nuance.

And it's, it's not our fault.

It is a high cost, you know, we will be burned or deemed witches or, you know, so are ostracized in some way or martyred.

So it's not that this hasn't come with a cost.

I understand why.

And I don't know if it's defeat in me saying, I don't have much hope, but it's not where I put my energy.

It's not my audience.

I don't think to try to convince, to convince that population anymore.

And that's heartbreaking because I do consider myself a theologian.

And so what is it but to explain this, the study of God and the heart of God?

And I don't know that that needs to be, the salvation process comes in so many different ways.

And so the story of the cross will probably work for the people that the story of Mother God will not work for.

And yet, I know many, many a human who needs to be saved only by Mother God.

And that is just their story and their walk.

And that's why I'm so thankful that Mother God can be there and save them.

And so to that, I don't know what the world will do with it, but I know that God is not limited or does not lose heart over it, I don't think.

Agreed.

And I just, I feel so similar.

My original goal was like, I've got to tell everyone and, you know, convince Christianity to let her in because we're missing her and it's hurting all of us.

Right.

And as I have journeyed through this past few years, I've come to a very similar, like, okay, that's not mine to do.

She'll actually wake up the people that she knows are ready to wake up in her time.

But what's really important is for me to let her wake me fully up and then do that with my daughters and my husband and my friends and continue the conversation.

And especially as raising daughters, this is something that came up in this reading.

You talk so much about fostering our intuition, teaching my daughters that we do know in our bodies and to trust that and to lean in and not question it.

And yes, I can hear the voices already to seek also other sources of information.

So we're not solely just in a vacuum over here on our own, but really truly to know with our bodies.

And I'm wondering if you, because you do so much work helping women to reclaim our intuition.

If there's a woman listening who's like, I have no idea how to get in touch with my intuition.

I actually don't think I have any.

I think I just was born without that.

What would you say to her as she's curious and nervous that maybe she doesn't have that at all?

Yeah, I actually just finished a TED talk on this, but this idea that we stay in our head, and then some of my clients can get down to their hearts.

But intuition lives in our belly.

The point is to get down to our toes, to our rooted self, but intuition is where a lot of women, because of trauma and the cost of bleeding, and the cost of birthing, and the cost of burying, has gotten stuck in the scar tissue of their bellies, and in that place is where our knowing lies.

And so, my really good friend Heather Schringer said on a podcast once, the three words that I want all my clients to get out of their vocabulary is I don't know.

So, if you're a woman, notice when you might preface something with I don't know, but, or I don't know how, and just stop yourself.

And instead of saying I don't know, tell us what you do know.

And that becomes your practice to slow down your breath, to fill your toes in the ground, and to bring air all the way down to your belly.

And usually what happens if there is trauma or harm, we don't know anymore.

We can't remember our intuition because it's so covered in scar tissue from trying to heal from the traumas we've suffered, whether that's sexual, spiritual, whatever it is, that is our creative birthing place, right?

The gut is our second brain.

And so we see where harm gets lodged in there.

And then we don't know.

We think to ourselves, I thought I knew, but when I thought I knew, then this happened.

And so then therefore I must not have known.

And then we question ourselves.

And when we start to question ourselves, we're just aware that there's still trauma lodged there in the body.

There's still that scar tissue from there.

And so the work of coming back into our bellies, into our gut, into our knowing self, is to remember what we do know.

And to start there.

This is what I know.

And we take out what we don't know.

We leave that for another time.

Right?

We leave that to be tended to later.

But what we let our body hear and what we practice speaking is what we do know.

The vocal cords, the esophagus, this throat area is the same diameter as our vaginal canal.

And they're made of the same tissue.

And so they're the passageways in which we create from.

We create life and we create glory and orgasm from our vaginal canal.

And we create voice and song, this really powerful place.

But the vulnerable part is our throat going through that passageway.

And so what we know is that those places need to be protected whenever we step out, that we know that those are targeted.

When I listen to women's stories of trauma, it's their voice that was targeted or it's their body, their sexual body that was targeted, their vaginal canal.

Those canals are where violence has come.

And so to reclaim our intuition is to go back through those passageways and bless those scars, anoint those scars and say, we're not still in those spaces.

But the reason they were targeted is because probably what you did know was true and someone didn't like it.

And someone didn't listen to your no or to your yes.

And so because of that, we have to step back and take power back into that intuitive place because your body is yours, it's nobody else's and your knowing is yours.

So that's the call back to that right of intuition, of coming back to our intuitive self is what do you know?

What do you?

And I bet all of us would say, well, I do know some things.

And looking back in this situation, I realized, oh, I had a knowing and I didn't heed.

And so I can look back and find how my body was trying to tell me something.

And so we can learn this, we can relearn this.

Yes.

Yes.

And that's what our daughters are asking.

Our sons, to explain intuition is different.

Our sons learn by knowing their rites of passage are more in the hunting, in the gathering.

There's a different style to what they know.

They learn through different parts of their body.

But the female are embodied.

And so our little girls are asking us, wait, I had this like prick in my gut.

I got nauseous today, mom.

I felt tightness in my stomach.

My tears are coming.

What does that mean?

It means something, babe.

You know something.

And for those of us who weren't mothered or our mothers didn't know how to help re-initiate us after trauma, we're learning how to re-initiate ourselves, how to mother ourselves through those places that we were harmed and we have scars.

Yes.

And we're trying to still create.

Yes.

And we still can.

There's still time.

Yes.

There is.

Yes.

There's still so much room to hope because I love, I can see behind you the sign that says they tried to bury us.

They didn't know we were seeds, right?

That's just such a beautiful, beautiful truth to remember.

And this is so true of us, of us women that perhaps our voice has been buried, our sexuality has been subjugated, all that makes us, us has been pushed down and under.

And yet we can still rise.

There is still so much hope.

And that's what the women at the tomb knew.

Yes.

That's that's where they didn't lose hope.

Was their grief so fervent?

Yes.

But their hands were about the business of preparing for a rebirth.

And it's because we know that life can always come after death.

We know it deeply, deeply.

Oh, that's right.

The life, death, life cycle.

Here we are knowing it in our bodies, bringing it to the world and offering it to one another.

This is so beautiful.

I have one last question for you.

Thank you so much for joining.

I'm curious.

We've talked a little bit about hope.

And I'd love to hear what gives you hope these days, looking at all the things, all the way they are.

Why do you still have hope, Christy?

You know, this might be a little charismatic for some.

Bring it.

I love, I have that in my, in my experience too.

Okay.

Okay, good.

But I missed what's been a really hard season for my heart to hope.

It's been a really hard to drop my kids off at school and trust that violence and harm won't come to them.

Like the, where it's been a season where hope has not come easily.

It's that still quiet voice of the spirit who, when I was recently at a funeral and I heard the spirit say, if the pastor asks you to pray, it was unlikely, I knew it was, but he was an old professor of mine and I thought he might, he might risk on asking me to pray over the end of the funeral service.

But I felt the Holy Spirit say, if he asks you to pray, I'm done with just words for prayers.

Please sing, sing, sing, sing every time.

And I had this like, feeling like, as if I was just like dangerous and rebellious.

And I was like, Oh, spirit.

Wow.

Ballsy.

And wow, that's so crazy.

And so I say that to say that what gives me hope is that we have a God and a spirit and a heart of Christ that is still so alive and well, and is still speaking to those of us who are listening and willing to risk on what we know is most true about God.

And so that has given me so much hope.

So I would say to sing, to sing after I lost my son 12 years ago.

And after burying him, I was a worship leader.

I didn't sing for a year.

I couldn't.

Every time I even go to open my mouth to worship, I just would start to weep.

I couldn't do it.

So to see 12 years later, the spirit kind of tap on my shoulder and say, if they ask you to pray, just here's the song I'm thinking, sing this song.

And the idea that I can still co-create in the midst of so much darkness really takes my breath away.

It really does give me hope that this is all bigger than me and that I'm invited to co-create in a way that I feel very much alive and hopeful.

Amen.

Amen.

I can only think of one way for us to end this then, and it's to ask if you would please sing your beautiful doxology to close this sacred conversation out.

Oh, and before you do, help my listeners know how to find you, because I know they're going to have things they'd like to learn from you and maybe come on some of your retreats and offerings and things.

So how could they find you?

Yes.

So you can find me at christybauman.com.

That will, on my website.

I'm not the best tech person, so it's not most up to date.

But I also work with another group of women called Sacred Interruptions.

So, if you look that up, dot org, you will find different things that I'm doing and places that I'm speaking.

And I do counseling.

I do consulting.

I do intensives.

I do a lot of sexual and spiritual health intensives for women coming back into their body after there's been trauma or harm, sexually or spiritually.

And so just what does it mean to come back to your body and your voice and yourself and your calling?

Yes.

Well, I'm just going to put this out there, that I look forward to the time when I get to come on one of your offerings, because this must happen.

I look forward to it.

May it be soon.

Let it be.

Let it be.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Okay.

We leave you, good listener, with this song.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.

Thank you for listening.

I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers.

You can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com.

And now, for more of my favorite song by Wyn Doran and Paul Craig, please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.