Dear one,

There comes a moment when the pew feels smaller than your spirit. You sit inside a room built to hold prayer, yet something in you goes quiet. Not the holy part. The part that learned to survive. You walk out because your soul refuses to shrink any longer. The world outside the doors is wider than you expected, and for a while it feels like wilderness. You wonder if you stepped away from God or stepped toward a different kind of encounter.

I wrote this as someone who remembers that wilderness. I also wrote it as a scholar who spends her days in the company of voices the Church never fully absorbed. The further I traveled from the institution, the closer I came to a different sacred presence, a presence that moves through texts the same institution once pushed to the margins.

When I read The Gospel of Mary, something inside me settled. The moment the Savior leaves, the room fractures. The men fall apart. Mary rises. She speaks encouragement out of a spiritual grounding that does not begin or end with a building. Karen King’s work on this passage is clear. Mary functions as the one who stabilizes the community and interprets divine presence from within her own vision. The text reveals a form of spirituality that does not pass through a hierarchy. It emerges within the mind. It moves through inner sight and personal revelation. The narrative calls the reader to remember the divine spark inside and listen there.

Leaving the church did not take the sacred from me. It stripped away the noise. It set me back in front of a God I could hear again. When Jesus warns the disciples not to go out and “promulgate law like the lawgiver,” he points to a truth many of us learn the hard way. Institutions that elevate law often fail to tend the human heart. Beneath the fear of leaving is a quieter truth. You were never asked to surrender your own knowing.

In Thunder, Perfect Mind, the sacred voice speaks in a way no sermon ever prepared me to hear. The poem speaks from the edges. The divine voice claims joy and sorrow, purity and impurity, honor and rejection. It refuses to divide sacred identity into categories. It gathers the pieces. The voice announces a presence that can be found in the places society calls unclean or unworthy. This was the first religious text that made my body feel welcome.

You see how these texts speak to people who left. They speak to the ones who sat in silence while others preached certainty. They speak to the ones who endured small wounds that became large wounds. They speak to the ones who carry their spirituality in private because institutional settings could not hold the weight of their questions.

I grew up in the church. I learned to pray in dim sanctuaries. I loved Jesus long before I understood theology. Leaving never undid that early love. It simply made room for the God I could no longer meet in the places that harmed me. My own scholarship on the Dark Feminine helped me see that the sacred is not fragile. Sacred presence moves through shadow and healing, through rage and reclamation, through the slow rebuilding of trust in your own inner life.

Mary Magdalene becomes a companion for this path. She knows misnaming. She knows the sting of being doubted. She knows what it means to carry revelation that others try to dismiss. Her gospel gives voice to a theology shaped by inner vision and spiritual maturity rather than external authority. She holds open a doorway for anyone who stepped outside a church and wondered if they stepped outside grace.

Leaving the church can feel like abandonment. It can feel like failure. It can feel like exile from a God you still love. Sit with Mary. Sit with Thunder. Sit with the part of you that walked out to save your own spirit. You will begin to see the truth that lived beneath the fear. The sacred did not stay behind. It never belonged to the institution in the first place.

You carried it with you.

Always,
A fellow traveler at the threshold