I always had a sense that if there was a God, there had to be a Goddess. Host-Hostess. Steward-Stewardess. Actor-Actress. In my heart I knew there had to be a yin to the yang I grew up knowing as the Divine source of all that is. I just did not have a clue as to how to find Her.

It wasn’t until I was in seminary school that I began to truly see the many feminine faces of God, known as Goddess, as she exists in so many of the world's religions and traditions. My path included many bumps, questions and doubts along the way. I share my insights with you because I suspect that many people raised in our traditional religious culture may find it hard to believe--and perhaps even sacrilegious to consider--that the male God of the Bible is one of many interpretations of divine presence that exist in the world’s religions.

Fortunately, I was trained by a seminary that encourages free thinking and exploration. Its motto is "Never instead of, always in addition to." In order to embrace all faiths we were taught that God is one source and yet that source manifests in many ways, through many paths, religions and spiritual practices. And that God is represented by a wide-range of deities with different names.

Nevertheless, the fear of acknowledging a feminine face of God grabbed hold of me in the middle of seminary school. I was doing what seminarians are supposed to do... grappling with God. As I studied comparative religion, I was trying to reconcile the belief system I was raised with--God is a man, no two ways about it--with the new belief systems I was learning--The Divine is neither male or female and/or The Divine is indeed both male and female. One day I was praying to a feminine deity...and I became panic stricken: What if the Male God gets mad at me and cuts me off? What if he’s saying, Oh, switching teams, eh? We’ll see about that...

Many people are even afraid to consider the Divine as feminine in form or nature. Yet I learned on my personal journey that in order to be truly whole, whether we are women or men, we must embrace both the male and feminine aspects of the divine--and we must embrace those aspects of ourselves and of one another...