Liberating feminine wisdom from Christian patriarchy
Author and spiritual coach Angela J. Herrington stops by the ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’ virtual studio
LOUISVILLE — It turns out that the proverbial old witch in the woods has much to teach the faithful about liberating feminine wisdom from Christian patriarchy.
Angela J. Herrington, a spiritual coach and author whose “Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods” was published in October, was the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to her 62-minute conversation with hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong here.
The majority of Christian theology is “rooted in this idea that the first woman broke the world by being disobedient, by being selfish and manipulative,” Herrington told the hosts. “That’s what we’re taught.”
In the Bible, the second main pillar is Mary, the mother of Jesus, “who is the exact opposite, we’re told, of Eve,” Herrington said. “Either we’re perfect or we break the world. We bounce back and forth between ‘I want to be good, but oh, I’m made bad.’”
Women are taught “that it’s very tempting to flip to the other side and be the evil woman, the manipulative woman, if it serves us,” she said. “We’re raised to be responsible not only for ourselves, but for all the people around us, without ever acknowledging that other people are responsible for themselves.” That can leave women “depleted and edgy and spiritually can be just devastating.”
“I’ve seen so many people walk away from the church because everything they were taught in church was suffocating any sort of spiritual connection or any sort of spiritual flourishing. It was actually healthier for them to leave,” Herrington said. “I’m not mad at people for leaving. I’m mad at us as a church for making leaving the better option for someone who is spiritually hungry for connection.”
Noting that witch language has long been demonized, Catoe asked Herrington to talk about it.
“Before the outline for the book was even cemented, this visual of the old witch in the woods was there,” Herrington said, adding that to her, “everything we are told to be afraid of, everything we’re told not to be, everything that is naturally strong and resilient and wise within us that threatens unjust systems” has been ”labeled the old witch.” It’s very different “from the young, sexy witch we see on TV” in such comedies as “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” who was “cute and innocent and lived with her aunts. It was very sweet, and that was fine.”
The old witch who lives in the woods is there either by choice or “because she’s been pushed out there by the community that doesn’t understand her. She has no redeeming value in the eyes of a system that wants to exploit people,” Herrington said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of that. Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of our intuition or our generational connection with our ancestors. Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of our bodies in the way we’ve been taught to.”
Why, Herrington wondered, “is this little old woman who knows how to give you herbs when you’ve hurt yourself, knows how to make a poultice for a cut, knows how to deliver a baby or when the wind is changing — why is that the biggest evil in the world? The answer is it’s a threat to evil systems that want to exploit people and want to commodify those services.”
Asked by Doong how men can help empower women to resist patriarchy, Herrington had a frank response: “You can’t, until you root out your own bias, until you figure out what pieces of you unknowingly uphold that system,” she said. “If we go barging into vulnerable populations wanting to be an ally with the best of intentions but we haven’t done our own work, all we’re doing is undermining those healthy little pockets of people and putting the responsibility of fixing us on their shoulders, when they’re already facing these huge oppressive systems.”
Do some work first, she suggested. “Make sure you have people helping you with the work and that you’re compensating them for their time,” Herrington said. The people who benefit most from an unjust system “should be shouldering the majority of the weight for fixing it,” she said, “and that includes figuring out where we still benefit from it.”
As a married heterosexual cis white woman with a master’s degree from seminary, “it’s easy for me to feel like I know what I’m doing. But that is also rooted in a whole lot of white saviorism,” Herrington said. “You want to go to a first-person source who’s saying ‘here’s how you can help,’ and do what they’re saying without asking them to do extra labor to help you understand the why.”
We all have our story “of how we got to this moment, which means the undoing of that story has to be individualized and is best driven by an honest decision to be better without having to feel better right away,” she said. “It won’t feel better, but that’s where the good stuff happens — even if it’s miserable for a while.”
Feminine wisdom is widely available, according to Herrington.
“It’s not something I have because I have a uterus or because I have children,” she said. “Feminine wisdom is more an archetypal thing that exists in all of us.”
“What I’d love people to know is this is not a book to tell you what to believe,” she said. Rather, “it’s meeting people where they’re at right now … It describes how oppression is playing out in your life, and here are some things that might be missing. Whichever one is resonant, sit with it.”
“I loved this conversation,” Catoe said once the hosts had thanked Herrington for her appearance and signed off. He said he appreciated “the honesty to sit in all the things we need to sit in and to take a breath at the new year to reorient ourselves.”
“Angela gave us a lot to think about,” Doong said, including “what it’s going to take to create change in our systems.”
New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.
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