Welcome Missing Witches Coven, and happy Lammas!! Today we celebrate the halfway point between the summer solstice and the fall equinox with a spiritual feast.
I'm joined by Christina Cleveland, PhD, a social psychologist, public theologian, mystic-activist, a good friend, and author of some of our favourite books, including God Is a Black Woman, and the brand new life altering The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance and Nourisher of Souls.
I also invited a co-host today, another good friend, Reed Stephenson, another PhD, a former pastor working her way through deconstructing a lifetime of programming. Now she's a witch. (Reed's also a Christena Cleveland superfan!!!)
We discuss freedom, liberation, how to make an altar of our tantrums, and opening up to a mothering force, in the space between accountability and unconditional love, where the Black Madonna holds us in her loving arms.
Join us for a Lughnasadh party where we discover a profound love and nurturing, explore and affirm our own sacredness, and maybe even find God.
Listen now:
GET 'THE BLACK MADONNA' TODAY!!!
Christena Cleveland is an award-winning author and scholar, founder of the Black Madonna Freedom School, international speaker, and world-renowned teacher of the Black Madonna and the Sacred Black Feminine.
A weaver of Black liberation and divine feminine wisdom, Christena integrates psychology, theology, storytelling, and somatics as she guides people of all races and genders into freedom, wholeness, and embodied justice.
Find Christena on her website and on instagram.
My whole world changed when I encountered the Black Madonna. Though I was a professor at Duke University and presented a stoically-confident persona to the world, internally I struggled with deep insecurities about my worth, the validity of my embodied experience as a Black person and a woman, my body, my ability, and more. In 2016, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, I went searching for a spiritual icon that could relate to my experience as a Black person and a woman, and affirm that my body, life and story do in fact matter. It didn't take long for me to encounter the Black Madonna — an interfaith, ancient, uncommon, dark-skinned version of the Virgin Mary who has been venerated across religions, eras, and geographic locations. Within seconds of viewing photos of Black Madonnas, my gut shifted from terror to hope. Before I even read a word about the Black Madonna, my soul immediately recognized that these photos and drawings of ancient Black Madonnas declared a truth about my own sacredness and gave birth to a new understanding of the divine. In late 2018, I embarked on a 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France to visit 18 Black Madonnas in tiny mountain villages. Each encounter with each Black Madonna healed a part of me – from embracing my imperfection to loving my body to standing in my truth.I detailed my transformational journey in my book God Is a Black Woman (HarperCollins). Now I’m a troubadour of the Black Madonna and I guide people away from white patriarchal conditioning and into deeper communion with the Great Mother.
Find Reed Stephenson on her website, Pastor To High Priestess, on substack @kreedstephenson, and on instagram @little_reed_writing_hood
I was raised in a fundamentalist, Pentecostal denomination. I do not remember a time before I was taught about Hell and the Rapture. I was brought up in purity culture and taught that all the sin in the world was the fault of women. Terror lived in my body. I was a precocious kid who asked a ton of questions, especially at church. I was described as rebellious and told over and over again that rebellion is the sin of witchcraft. When I was 16, my youth pastor tried to cast a demon out of me…it didn’t work! At 19, while at a private bible college, I was assaulted by a security guard, and I dared to do something about it - I was later asked (not so nicely) to leave. At 32, I had two kids and realized I didn’t want them to endure the same trauma I did as a result of religion. I knew in my gut that there had to be a better way to raise my babies. At 40, I went to seminary. At 43, I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD and an autoimmune disease. At 45, I became an ordained pastor in the ELCA. I was trying so hard to make it all work. At 50, I rescinded my ordination credentials because Jesus didn’t die for my sins to put up with that much bullshit. My therapist asked me if I had ever considered that the church was a lifelong abuser in my story... At 51, I bought my first tarot deck in East Tennessee at a witchy store that was part occult shop, part prepper store, and part tiki party supply, and secretly started calling myself a witch. My entire life, I had been trying to find my place in this system, contorting myself to fit into a system that did not want to make room for me. At 54, I finished my PhD. Now, I'm bored with the old stories of skydaddies, Edenic myths, and certain apocalyptic futures.
