The first time I met Lasara, my shoes didn’t match. We had connected through my zine, Hip Mama, and decided to meet up at a park in Oakland to talk shop and to let our kids play. In those days it felt important to reach out to other moms who were “weird like me.” We were both weird like that.
I’m not sure how the mismatched shoes happened. I was probably just tired and distracted—I was a single mom and working writer running a business.
When I noticed the shoes, I laughed. Lasara said, “It’s all good,” like she was some old hippie. She didn’t care. There were more important things to focus on, and sometimes people put on the wrong shoes.
She was talking about women and ownership of our own bodies; about motherhood and feminism. These were the 90s and a new wave of Christian right men were declaring feminism dead—again. But we were feminists. And we weren’t buying in to the latest obituaries.
Lasara was angry in a good way—the way that ignites into activism. She talked about her spiritual point of view at a time when a lot of feminists we knew shied away from religious topics for good and righteous reasons. “The personal is political,” we all said. But Lasara understood that the spiritual was political too.
I was of course familiar with the goddess movement—what 1990s feminist could avoid it?—and I’d found value in it. I’d grown up in a 1970s progressive agnostic-Christian church myself where my father, an ex-communicated but still practicing Roman Catholic priest, used male and female pronouns interchangeably when he referred to God and performed gay weddings every weekend. Still, I knew a lot of women and men had been traumatized and continued to suffer under the singular vision of an angry white male god in the sky.
Yet the goddess movement seemed to hang onto threads of patriarchy. I got that the notion of a maiden-mother-crone goddess acknowledged the female—and that was something—but here I was in the “mother” phase and as much as I worshipped pregnant bellies, it did feel a bit at odds with my own maternal feminism that sought to acknowledge the complexity of real life. I was a proud mama, but I rejected the idea that my sexuality was behind me, my wisdom elusive, and my roles as an ambitious artist and ass-kicking bread-winner were seen as side hobbies.
In Jailbreaking the Goddess, Lasara addresses all these questions and more, opening up a conversation about the intersections of feminism, spirituality, and women’s real lives. The book offers a starting point for a feminist spirituality that decenters assumptions and makes room for authentic enquiry into issues of sex and gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and class.
Whether or not you believe in the Goddess (or even gods as a whole), Jailbreaking the Goddess offers an opportunity to break free. Jailbreaking the goddess out of her patriarchal trappings won’t change everything. It won’t end patriarchy. But a sovereign goddess will change the spiritual lives of some. And that change will ripple outward.
Lasara doesn’t care if your shoes don’t match. Ultimately this is a come-as-you-are kind of a gathering, a deeply engaging and ever-welcoming conversation on a park bench about our own sovereignty.