Hilaria Baldwin and the Divine Feminine

In Which I Happen To Read That Bit in Ephesians Five

Me contemplating the divine feminine:

File: ErdmutBrandenburgPommern.PNG - Wikimedia Commons

I only have two hours and forty minutes left of Becoming The Pastor’s Wife. I intended to power through yesterday but I thought I would take a short break and ponder some feminist adjacent content about the dire suffering women apparently endure in these bad awful times. To wit, I listened to half of a long podcast about the Divine Feminine, and then this shorter TED Talk:

That person, Meggan Watterson, has a book coming out in a couple of months called The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth. The blurb on Amazon is pretty epic:

A teenage girl named Thecla is sitting at her bedroom window listening to a man share stories nearby. Her mother and fiancé order her to stop. But Thecla, trapped in a world that expects her to marry and have children, refuses. This man, Paul, is talking about a world she wants to believe in: an inner world of freedom to define her own life. And he’s talking about a kind of love she hasn’t known before—a love that asks her to be true to who she is within.

For Meggan Watterson, a Harvard-trained feminist theologian, Thecla’s story in The Acts of Paul and Thecla has everything to do with power. Thecla’s refusal to be controlled, as well as the authority she reclaims by baptizing herself, reads like a lost gospel for finding our own source of power within—a power that allows us to know who we are and to make choices based on that knowing. This hidden scripture suggests that Christianity before the fourth century was about defying the patriarchy, not deifying it. But early church fathers excluded The Acts of Paul and Thecla, along with other sacred texts such as The Gospel of Mary, from the New Testament.

Watterson synthesizes scripture, memoir, and politics to illuminate a story that has been left out of the canon for far too long, one that follows a girl freeing herself from a life predicated on the expectations of others—a path that made her feel unworthy. Thecla’s story offers us a path to take back the power we often give to others and live based on the truth of who we are.

This, to me, feels like someone said to Grok or Chat GPT, “Write me a book blurb about women that is like every other book blurb that’s been published in the last five years about women.” All the elements are there in the most unoriginal and pedestrian way imaginable.

So anyway, after contemplating the deep mysteries of the feminine divine mystique, I popped over to X and saw lots and lots of posts about Alec Baldwin and his “Spanish” wife, Hilaria.