Chris Hoover reflects on the divine feminine voice and how it seems to be missing from the world today.
This blog is in preparation for the 2025 Mennonite Church USA convention, Follow Jesus ’25, and the Women’s Summit that precedes convention.
Photo by Sandy King
Chris Hoover lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and is currently working as a spiritual director and Reiki Master through her practice Soulence. She serves her local community through her work as interim executive director of NewBridges Immigrant Resource Center. She attends Shenandoah Valley Church of the Wild.
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Have you ever had the right book land in your hands at just the right time? I’ve been basking in the wisdom of “When Women Were Birds” by Terry Tempest Williams. The book contains her reflections on opening her late mother’s secret journals to find that they had been purposely left blank. Tempest wrote the book to explore the feminine voice, which offers a very powerful read.
I’ve been reflecting on voice for many years — my own and others’. As a Reiki practitioner, I have experienced the truth behind what was taught to me — that 9 in 10 women deal with blocks in their throat chakra. This is the center for the sacred exchange with the world, of putting what is inside of us into form, through spoken word, song, art, writing and more.
As I look across the political landscape, it’s clear that the divine feminine voice is missing and needed. How do we, regardless of gender, embody and express the divine feminine in the world today?
How do we call it forth from one another? How do we invite courage, honesty and the truths about our lives that we have swallowed and stuffed down, in order to be safe, acceptable and “good”? How do we listen for it and amplify it when we recognize it. Do we trust ourselves to do this?
Here are a few of Tempest Wiliams’ musings:
- “Your voice is the wildest thing you own.”
- “Unexpressed emotion will be expressed somewhere, somehow, inside or out, most cruelly as unconscious aggression delivered with a smile or a poisonous cup of tea.”
- “The world is already split open, and it is in our destiny to heal it, each in our own way, each in our own time, with the gifts that are ours.”
While Anabaptist theology and the Mennonite church have greatly impacted my worldview, I have also spent a significant amount of time outside of traditional church walls and Mennonite culture and have appreciated the greater invitations to freedom and to the recognition of what has kept my voice silent and afraid of its wild honesty.
It was women who had struggled to own their own voices who met me in this season of life and affirmed my deepest desires. If we cannot hold this space with one another, how will we be able to express the divine feminine voice in the wider world?
The Women’s Summit is an opportunity to explore and practice voice, truth and courage.
“Once upon a time,
When women were birds,
There was the simple understanding
That to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy.
The birds still remember
What we have forgotten,
That the world is meant
To be celebrated.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
MC USA Women’s Summit 2025: Beholding it Together
A Sacred Space to Rest, Reclaim and Resist
The MC USA Women’s Summit 2025 is more than just a gathering—it’s a movement toward reclaiming time, breaking cycles, and finding our power in the presence of one another. With the theme “Beholding it Together,” this one-day summit offers women in MC USA a space to pause, reflect, and be affirmed in their callings, ministries and faith journeys.
The Women’s Summit will be held directly before the Follow Jesus ’25 convention, July 8, at the Koury Convention Center, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Register here.
Support Mennonite Church USA’s Peace and Justice Initiatives by giving here.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog belong to the author and are not intended to represent the views of the MC USA Executive Board or staff.