One of my brothers is a pilot. It was he who took me to the sky the first time in a 4-seater airplane. I was twenty-four years old, a widow and a mother. I can still feel the sensation of my feet being lifted off the earth as a thrill of energy holding me suspended in air. I could hardly fathom that my brother had learned how to do this! If not for the trust I’ve always had in him, I daresay I’d never have flown. But the taste of that first flight never left me. My dead husband’s body was buried in the ground and here I was floating in the sky … astonishing!
The next time I flew was on a jet to California where I was to marry the man who would become my second husband in a preposterous fantasy he’d concocted to seduce me. At the time, I was enthralled with Robert Schuller, an American Christian televangelist, pastor and author. I was reading his books along with the works of another clergyman-cum-author, Norman Vincent Peale. My academic quest wasn’t limited to the college classroom, where I’d met my fiancée, who was actually one of my teachers. I immersed myself in texts and sermons because I wanted to understand not just my life, but life itself and how it worked. I was also witnessing new life and its development in the presence of my baby son. I was eager to learn. There was urgency in my quest. I’d known death up close and life had become somehow magnified. There was so much I didn’t understand!
Since I was a child, going to church nourished me inwardly. I’d attend with my family and when they didn’t go, I’d go on my own. I loved when we all stood up and sang hymns together, read Bible stories together, and sometimes stayed together to share food and drink in the basement of the church. I’d carry the songs out of the church with me and sing to myself. I’d re-imagine the stories and write what they meant to me.
I was baptised and confirmed in the Anglican church by the archdeacon who married my parents. He would’ve married me, but when I decided I wanted my first wedding to be in the park under a tree, he said no. For him to officiate, the wedding had to be in the church. I was disappointed. It was romantic to marry under the tree where we first kissed, but I wonder now why that was more important to me than staying in the church. In the end, the United minister agreed to officiate and we got our wedding in the park. It was a break from the Anglican church and our family history.
My father said, “You can’t get any closer to God than nature” and I thought so, too. It was my first step away from the church and toward a new religious attitude.
On that flight to California, and I’m hesitant to reveal just how naive I was at the time, I looked out the window to see the border separating Canada and the United States. I actually believed there would be a wall or a fence or a something demarcating this and that, here and there, us and them. I’d never left my home country prior to that moment. The reason for marrying again had been precipitated by the fact that this soon-to-be second husband had accepted a job offer which would take him overseas and he wanted me to come with him. He claimed it was the only way to make this happen but I learned later, much later, that we didn’t need to be married at all. There were other ways for me to travel with him.
So the first time I married, I married for love.
The second time I married, I married for the possibility to love again and travel the world.
The first marriage awakened me to life through death.
The second marriage descended me into the darkness of my own shadow.
From the window seat on the airplane it felt like my life was expanding. It was. For in that moment of realizing there are no boundaries but man-made ideas existing in the human mind, I had direct experience of one earth, one people. I felt it. This realization would be followed by experience of what it is to be woman in a world built on denying its basic truth and plenty of opportunity to remain true to the spirit of it. In other words, my realization of the nature of life put me in direct conflict with the world.
Had I been prepared to do battle? No!
I took my naiveté into every experience and through sheer bafflement found my way. For the innocence that made me vulnerable also had the power to protect me.
So I married a second time in the Crystal Cathedral at Garden Grove, California — Robert Schuller’s church, which is literally a reflective glass building. It was surreal. The only people attending the wedding were the bride, the groom, and the groom’s sister with her husband. Somebody sang Ave Maria. I remember feeling sick with missing my son and our family. The grandiosity of my second husband’s fantasy had captured and possessed me. The spell was cast and I was lost in its magic, but not for long. The veil lifted eventually and I would see through the charade.
Many a modern woman is lost to herself in a world built on dominant masculine fantasy. If she understood she is feeding this fantasy through her own projections of the undeveloped masculine energy within her, she could break the spell.
What is a projection?
It is that which we are unaware of in ourselves that we see in events and people outside of us. The less conscious we are of our own immature qualities, both positive and negative, the more vital life force we give to others for the very things we have yet to claim in ourselves.
I didn’t need to hitch a ride to another country on an academic adventure that wasn’t my own, but that was the spell I was under when I spoke vows in the Crystal Cathedral — I’d agreed to leave myself, my home, and the life I was building on my own esteem.
How does modern woman mature herself in this day and age?
She must work to discriminate her feelings and her values distinct from conventional opinions and secondhand convictions. What most women call empowerment today is nothing more than pseudo-masculinity. The invitation and gift of being in conflict with the world is the chance to recognize and move beyond instinctual emotions that can easily keep her in the very world she wants to change. This is not about women ruling the world. If women were to unseat the masculine power structures now from the archaic feminine most are possessed by, then humanity would surely regress rather than progress. This will not happen. True womanhood is rising. It demands real inner work. When inner change has taken place then outer appearance will reflect the change. This is how new consciousness is birthed — love awakens from within individually and then translates reality collectively.
Getting married in the park under a tree was the beginning of the feminine coming into form as me. In widowhood, I’d succumbed to a spell caster, and gave my life away without understanding what it would cost me. In similar fashion, modern woman is vulnerable to present day collective unconscious forces and she must learn to wield her own masculine sword — the sword she earns from within when she discerns true power from pseudo power and love from fantasy.
True womanhood is not interested in removing difficulties from the world.
True womanhood illumines feminine power and naturally transforms the world.
Question for Reflection:
Women with pure gold in their shadow often show the most resistance to digging it out. Talent reveals obligation. Do I bury my own best qualities and live below my highest potential because I secretly shirk the responsibility I assume will be asked of me?
Magdalen Bowyer
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