A Love That Knows How to Stay

The Sacred Feminine in a Time Like This

Before anything is healed, it is held.

I didn’t have language for the Sacred Feminine—but I knew it when I saw it.

Some years back, I was sitting in a room while my wife Stephanie was being prayed over—held, really—by a group of friends who were helping her name and release the burden of a spiritually abusive upbringing. My role was simple. Be there, supportive, listening and available.

There was a lot of stillness. Long stretches with eyes closed where nothing seemed to be happening. I was itchy, twitchy, and impatient.

And then an image came to me—Mother Mary, holding her child, head bowed with a kind of adoration that felt almost unbearable to witness. 

But that wasn’t all. Behind Mary stood the adult Christ. If I was puzzled by what I was seeing, some clarification was about to come.

He was looking directly at me, and he had something to say.

“I’m all grown up now,” he said. “She is available to be a mother.” Only then did I understand that the baby in Mary’s arms was, in fact, baby Stephanie. 

My wife, whose own mother had been achingly absent in her life, was being held by Mary.

When Wisdom Was a Woman

I grew up without language for the Sacred Feminine. I am probably not alone. We all share as a humanity in historically patriarchal mechanisms, and rigid hierarchies. 

The fallout is being visited upon us all, and in countless ways. 

Many of us were formed in systems that elevated a much more stern image of the Divine—one that mirrors our own cultural instincts toward duty and control.

Meanwhile, we go on longing for wholeness, wisdom, connection, healing, union and healing. We struggle to find it in seasons like this one, when the world seems particularly cruel and the way forward shrouded in darkness.

But what if that darkness is just the clue we need?

Before any of us were formed in the sunlight of a demanding world, we were formed in darkness. We all spent nine months in the womb. 

Across traditions, there is language around this, often called the Sacred Feminine. And before we reduce that to gender—or dismiss it as aesthetic or symbolic—it may be worth asking a different question:

What kind of wisdom have we neglected by only trusting what can be cornered, categorized, or controlled?

In both Hebrew and Greek, the primary words for wisdom are feminine —Chokmah and Sophia. In ancient texts, Wisdom is not an idea but a presence. She calls out in the streets. She builds her house. She is described as being with God in the act of creation itself.

Not as an accessory.

As a co-creator.

Wisdom teaches us more than how to do. It teaches us how to stay. How to sit in tension, in the questions, in the darkness.

The womb is a space where life forms slowly. Invisibly. Without immediate explanation. Nothing in a womb can be rushed or forced into clarity, yet everything essential is happening there. 

What if slowness, darkness, and uncertainty are signs, not that something is wrong, but that something is real?

The Mother Stays

I think about that moment often—sitting in that room, watching something unfold that I didn’t orchestrate.

If I had reached for my phone, or tried to make sense of it too quickly, I would have missed it.

Because nothing about it was trying to explain itself.

Mary wasn’t fixing the past.She wasn’t even offering clarity or resolution.

She was holding.

That was the revelation.

The healing in that room wasn’t driven by insight or effort, but by a kind of love that could stay present to what was wounded—without needing to manage it.

A love that could bear it.

What I was witnessing—though I didn’t have language for it at the time—was the Sacred Feminine.

She—the Mother, Sophia, this receptive presence—was asking me to stay. To join her presence. To hold and be held.

For the Mother does not and cannot force anything to happen.

As much as we want healing and resolution, our feminine hearts know that the timeline of a birth is out of our control.

Life is formed in the quiet and in the dark, and all we are asked to do is stay and wait.

Stabat Mater, as the hymn sang last week: The Mother Stays.

So, too, must we, if we are to embrace our feminine spirits.

We stay, in the uncertainty and the ache.

Let Yourself Be Held

The Sacred Feminine is the presence that trusts something real is happening, even when it cannot yet be seen.

And maybe this is the question beneath it all:

What are you trying to carry that was never yours to carry alone?

What might change if you allowed yourself to be held—not fixed, not solved—but held?

This is the space we’re opening in this Saturday’s Night School class:

The Sacred Feminine: Her Gifts for the Long Dark

We’ll be guided by Coke Tani, whose work draws from ancestral lineages, creative practice, and communities shaped by resilience and justice. She speaks of the Sacred Feminine as “She”—a presence encountered in oceans and forests, in ancestors, in the body, in creativity, in grief, in love.

Together, we’ll explore what it means to live from that presence—not as an idea, but as a way of being.

A way of being that can hold what this moment asks of us.

A way of being that does not turn away.

For maybe healing begins not when we understand or orchestrate, but when we finally allow ourselves to be held.

REGISTER HERE

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David Drury began his career as a night janitor in a church and has been circling that same mystery ever since. A speaker, writer, notorious card counter, and author of twelve books, his work blends spiritual depth with humor and a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. His essays and stories have appeared on NPR, CNN, and in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Kathy.