Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 22 - August 17, 2025
Why was it so dangerous to be a Christian before the fourth century? To start, as the brilliant author and activist James Baldwin explains, “Love has never been a popular movement.”
Each action we take while performing a ritual actively draws a line in the sand between what was and what will now become possible. So that we can step from out of our former self and enter a new reality, a life of our own choosing.
Stripped down to its core, a baptism is a rite of passage. A threshold.
Depending on the denomination, it’s a cleansing of “original sin,” a concept that wasn’t formally created until the early fifth century by Saint Augustine, who was the first to use the phrase—and
let’s just take in this fact, that the idea that what’s “human” in us could be anything less than what’s “holy,” that we’re born with some sort of debt we have to spend our lives paying back by diminishing our joy, by ignoring, sacrificing, and denying the body—this concept didn’t arrive on the Christian theological scene until hundreds of years after Christ.
Because in this book, in this story I’m about to tell you, baptism is a form of resistance. It’s a triumphant dissent, an act of disobedience, a ritual of rebellion. Baptism in this story is a public display of reclaiming a power that exists within.
Thecla’s story, and the scripture where it’s found, suggests that women held positions of spiritual authority from the start. And it suggests that this earliest form of Christianity was about defying the patriarchal power structures that exist in the world, powers that seek to legitimate the idea that some of us are greater or less than others.
What becomes apparent when we take The Acts of Paul and Thecla seriously is that Christianity before the fourth century wasn’t an institution, or even a religion; it was far closer to an ancient version of an equal rights movement.
I wasn’t raised Christian; I was raised feminist. I inherited a sacred rage from my mother. And she inherited it from her grandmother. It’s a rage at the refusal to be satisfied with a world that doesn’t reflect the inherent worth of every human, or with language that doesn’t actually name us.
French philosopher, mystic, and political activist Simone Weil described her spiritual position as located “at the intersection of Christianity and all that is not Christianity.”[1] This is true for me as well, except for this one edit: I stand at the intersection of Christianity and all that is not yet Christianity again.
Thecla was not allowed to choose a life of her own. And this is critical context for us to understand before hearing her story. She was her father’s property, then she would become her husband’s. And her children would be theirs, her husband’s and father’s, not her own. It was a revolutionary act then for women within the Christ Movement to consider themselves equal to men, and equal to one another—to call each other sisters—even if one was enslaved and the other was married to a wealthy man with political power.
In short, the Christ Movement became patriarchal. But it did not begin that way.
Beginning with the Council of Nicaea, a council of Christian bishops convened by Constantine in 325 C.E., the church under the Roman Empire took all of the scripture that had so much to say about finding a source of power within us—a power greater even than the emperor—declared it “apocryphal” or “of doubtful authenticity,” and then ordered for all evidence of it to be destroyed by the end of the fourth century.
When the scripture that contains Thecla’s story was excluded from the formation of what would become by the fifth century the formal Christian canon of the New Testament, what was lost was the power of what happens when a girl becomes her own.
“And the women all cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth.” This one line from scripture, and its resonance in my life, made me return to The Acts of Paul and Thecla when the world stood still in 2020. Because it more than matched the intensity of the times; it read as though it was made for it.
I was familiar with Paul before seminary but less for his dramatic conversion story and more because he is somewhat notorious in feminist theological circles for declaring in 1 Timothy 2:11–13, “A woman must learn, listening in silence with all deference. I do not consent to them becoming teachers, or exercising authority over men; they ought not speak.”[2] Paul is also attributed with saying, as if in direct contradiction to 1 Timothy, in Galatians 3:27–28, “For all of you who were baptized into union with Christ clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Judean nor Greek, slave nor
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Love is not an emotion. It’s not a sentiment, a fleeting feeling. Love is not transactional. It’s not fair, or rational. Love is an actual presence. It’s a presence that’s within us. And it’s more vast than I could ever name or that my own individual life can ever grasp. Love is an actual presence that calls us to be present to it, to be its witness if we can allow that small egoic self to quiet down enough to just listen.
Love is a presence that arrives often when we least expect it. And it asks everything of us. And what I mean by “everything” is that love does not figure the ego into its asking. Love does not care who our enemies are or what plans we’ve made. Or about what linear progress we want to make by a certain age. Love is a presence that arrives and sometimes demands for us to be its presence, its hands and feet.
Love for me isn’t something that I wait or long for; love is the beginning and the end of what I know of god. And for me, god is a love that liberates.
I felt this electric thrill the first time I came across D. H. Lawrence’s description of “the very body’s body,” because I knew what he meant. Without entirely understanding it. It somehow made more sense to me. The body’s body. It described to me something truer than just saying “the body.” It felt like saying something deeper, something more profound. It felt like the direct experience of the body itself, not all that I impose or want or desire or expect of the body. It’s just the body’s body.
In the heart’s heart, there’s just unending, unmitigated, unspeakable light.
The thing itself is here, with or without the ego. The thing itself is here in the heart’s heart. And it doesn’t claim. It doesn’t own. It just radiates, like an open palm. Because it’s not and has never been and will never be ours. It’s a presence that’s shared with us from within us. It’s a presence that’s shared with us because it’s meant for us to then share.
The “Our Father” part… This anthropomorphic idea that god is a paternal human male, a father, perpetuates a deeply engrained belief that males are not only entitled to inherent power due to their sex but also that this power is divinely ordained.
If heaven is an ultimate resting place, then the earth becomes in a sense an impermanent purgatory. Whereas if heaven is a state of mind—or heart, more accurately—that we can enter now through spiritual practice, while we’re still living, as well as when we pass away into whatever might come next, then our sense of responsibility for the earth shifts and becomes more pressing.
It’s hard to even imagine the Christian tradition referring to “the queendom of god,” or “the queendom of goddess.” And this illuminates the inequity.
The word “kingdom” is translated into English from the Greek word vasileio or basileio, which can also be translated as “royal power.” This “kingdom of god,” so often mentioned in Christianity, is more accurately referring to a royal power that exists within us. Not a human kingdom ruled by a man, but a sovereign power within every person.
For all these reasons, the words of the Lord’s Prayer perpetuate a patriarchal version of Christianity that I’ve always sensed in my bones is not the whole story.
Love was the weight that bowed his head forward.
He loved his daughter as if he had already spent a lifetime with her, as if he had already lived his entire life by her side. His love for her couldn’t be calculated in the days and hours and minutes he spent next to her tiny incubator. That’s how vast love is. It’s out beyond time.
