The Girl Who Baptized Herself Quotes

“The communities that considered The Acts of Paul and Thecla and The Gospel of Mary sacred scripture in the first several centuries of the Christ Movement understood and practiced that gender is not a determinate factor of leadership. What matters is the depth of spiritual transformation a person is willing to undergo, and continues to practice.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“Thecla is my personal hero, but if you, like me, have never managed to immediately switch into Krav Maga mode the moment you’re groped on the subway, just know the rage that surfaces at the boundary that was crossed, the rage that surfaces when you encounter someone acting from their Ignorance and their blindness from the power of Forgetting, the rage that surfaces within you is proof of love’s presence. There’s a universe of love within you, and glorious rage flares loudly when someone behaves as if the body is flesh only and not also a portal.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“And this is what I found so fascinating—this mystical union with nous, with this window to what’s true and real and lasting for us, takes place not by leaving, transcending, or ignoring the body, but by learning to become fully present within it.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“From the atrocities coming to light about the global scale of child sexual assault throughout the Catholic Church, to the scandals shuttering the Pentecostal church Hillsong, to the horrific abuse of an entire generation of Native American children in Christian boarding schools, we have to witness the egoic tendency for the church to protect the perpetrator, to mitigate the financial impact on the community, to care more about the scandal the truth will bring rather than the current and future harm being caused to those abused.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“The man here is not unlike the magician, a skilled illusionist who creates a great distraction so that we’re mesmerized by the smoke that’s suddenly wafting all around us—the illusion that menstruation is unholy, that the female body has the power to defile, that childbirth is a punishment for Eve’s audacious apple eating, for daring to want to know truth in her own body. We soon forget to look at the true source of his magic right here between our own”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“We are not here to live out someone else’s expectation of us; to fit into the conditions someone else has set for us in order to be loved. Our purpose is to know love, from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge gained from direct experience. We are here to know and experience love directly. And this is what makes turning inward so critical. Because we can never truly be loved if we aren’t also revealing and articulating the truth of who we are. Our purpose is to love ourselves enough to be authentic, integral. And this means disentangling from all those lures cast in our direction from people and positions of power that might suggest we will be loved if…or then. Our purpose is to confront the voices within and around us that suggest love is conditional. Our purpose is to stand up amidst the doubt, the name-calling, the shame-throwing, and become a presence of love even in the absence of it.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“have to build a bridge between what we desire and what we feel worthy of having.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“Since all three fragments of The Gospel of Mary are missing these same pages, it may have been the most incendiary teaching her gospel contains. After all, if Mary can perceive directly from within her what is true and real, then no one can control her, or mislead her into believing, for example, that she’s unworthy of leadership or spiritual authority simply because she’s female.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth

“None of us know empirical truths when it comes to theology, to god. That’s not the point. The point is to question, wonder, and share what we know to be true with humility, and with the aim to strengthen love’s reach.”
― Meggan Watterson, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth