An excerpt from Michele Noel’s upcoming book, Respect the Light
“He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.” Isaiah 40:29
If I were to put into one sentence the main reason for the sorrows that plague the women of our day, it would be, “We do not fully appreciate our current, inherent, and systemic magnificence.” This one plague of the heart has caused extreme damage to Womanhood. Satan’s scourge, designed precisely to hold back the power of our Queenship, is working well on too many of us—until we learn to recognize and apply our resident glory-power.
Glory-power is an inner or unseen portion of the power of God’s Light that illuminates our magnificence, revealing to our cognitive minds the reality of our intrinsic strengths and creative gifts. It lays dormant until we seek it. We usually seek it only after coming to ourselves–somewhat like the prodigal son. After we have endured some of Satan’s scourges of abuse, divorce, anxiety, injustices, or betrayal against our Womanhood, we are now ready to move past self-pity, anger, or blame mindsets. Softening our egos, we approach the Gods with a true seeking heart. Our female gender can help us in this seeking if we allow it.
“We will go down…and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell. And we will prove them…and they that keep their second estate shall have glory add upon their heads forever and ever.” Abraham 3:24-26
Our glory-power grants us many gifts. For the purposes of this work, our definition of those gifts, propensities, and powers are combined in the words Womanhood or priestesshood, which encompass all our rights, privileges, duties, roles, authority, strength, brilliance, and magnificence. All of these gifts have been bestowed or lent to us by the Gods. Queenship is the ultimate goal, and Womanhood embraces our female glory-power.
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 3:18
The glory-power of Womanhood is our God-given ability to create. For instance, we are able to create:
Beautiful environments in our cognitive mind-space despite the heartrending wreckage that life’s hardships sometimes amass.
Light-promoting environments within our material circumstances.
Unconditional love in the spaces we make for meaningful relationships.
A health-giving environment for our bodies and minds.
Our wombs, when fruitful—here or in eternity, create magnificence in the unborn.
If exercised, our minds create powerful God-centered characteristics that spill over into everything and everyone we love.
Let's keep in mind that the "brand" of Light we are talking about is of the female variety. If we are comfortable in our own skin, we will know that women are motivated and concerned about a unique agenda. These bullet points are not a list of rights but acknowledgments of our intrinsic woman-glory. They are truths and endowments we claim and the stance we take against the world's dark elements set against those endowments:
We dismiss the worldview of our Womanhood and trust our inner woman's story.
We function from the standpoint of strength as we wake up the Light of the Gods in us and respond to the vibrations of our innate priestesshood authority.
We suffer our losses in our own way and in our own time; refusing the judgments of others, we will accept help from God and those who have also suffered and endured.
We love, birth, lactate, and nurture, here or in eternity, as part of our women’s glory power without the need to constantly defend those sacraments.
Endowed with glory, we develop that glory through service to one another. We expand that service and that glory through the wisdom of proper self-care.
We are not intimidated by others’ successes and see our self-value as sourced in the Light of the Gods.
We give no attention to the mocking and demeaning voices in our pain-minds, various social media, or cultures.
We accept and physically project our inner beauty without interference from mores or self-doubt. We recognize that our self-beauty is held in the participation with created Light sourced from the Gods who created all human magnificence.
We acknowledge that Eve's agency is also our agency; we are free to choose life and Light, which carries limitless powers, opportunities, and consequences.
We do not bow to the world’s arrogance or power-mongering because we are endowed with a voice that carries Light and energy to a suffering world.
We reject darkness and seek the miracles promised to us long ago–the needed healings in God’s timing. We use our magnificence to endure this earth’s time well.
The mortal world continues to be unkind to that agenda on several levels. Yet, we will not allow the behaviors or uninformed prejudices of others to deter us if we possess self-awareness of our personal or collective magnificence. Spiritual alertness is vital in this process of seeking our glory-power because our multi-tasking, over-thinking, stress-tending, event-rehearsing pain-minds so often operate in a disorganized, thus crippled realm. Although we are gifted in seeing what we believe to be the big picture, and we think we know what needs to be done next, if we are not careful about our thought patterns and self-care, we may fall prey to feelings of physical and emotional exhaustion. We may succumb to the common stress where we cannot deal with even one more problem. Typically, that problem will come in the form of someone else's need.
Our spiritual and emotional Light seeking brings us to a place where we begin to see more realities. We are encouraged and begin to ask intelligent questions. Answers, even partial ones, in turn, help us see more of our personal strengths and our place in this thing called Womanhood. We should be clear, at this point, that to embrace all the facets of Womanhood, our current individual marital circumstance does not matter. Many of us are single, ex-wives, step-mothers or step-daughters, single mothers, step-grandmothers, widows, or extended family members of a blended family. The arch-element is that we are all women, although our current multiple roles are complicated and full of growth opportunities.
“Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.” D&C 6:36
Our mortal pain-minds are constantly trying to cope with Light and Dark on both subconscious and conscious levels. When we are not actively engaged in thinking forward, meaning having faith in the future, we easily drift into a world of past fears. The unbearable what-ifs of the unknown future will snuff out our peace if we choose to go down that rabbit hole of negative thinking as partially defined in the introduction.
There are several types of rabbit holes depending on which negative thought pattern we have built. For instance, the stress-fed rabbit hole is at the end of the thought pattern built or carved into our brains by rehearsing the same fear-driven thoughts. We are familiar with these thought patterns. In fact, after some time, from a few months to many years, we will have carved what science is now identifying as a significant thought worm or a neuro-dopamine rut. These are synaptic stress hormone and neurotransmitter pathways which, without the tools of serious thought work, will become the repetitive path to an emotion-driven rabbit hole called anxiety. This usually ends in a terrifying anxiety attack leaving us in a dark rabbit hole of anxiety for several days, requiring much effort and further stress to climb back to our daily fearful stress level. Time takes its toll on our resilience or ability to recover—next time, it will take longer and more work to climb out.
Often the pain of these repetitive trips into the rabbit hole of our choice will drive us to take drastic steps to find relief. Drugs, legal or otherwise, unhealthy living or eating, or something even worse drives us to use an alternate rabbit hole, such as blame or self-pity. These thought patterns have destroyed the peace of mind, family relationships, and marriages as often as I have seen the ravages of any substance or behavioral addiction do so. What if we could change the direction of a thought instantly and avoid the run down the rabbit hole altogether? (Chapter 2)
Suppose we could resist the desire to comfort ourselves with unwise behaviors and press our way to a much deeper place where we recognize pain as our instructor instead of our enemy. In that case, we may find that the deep reach will take us to the very bone and sinew where the strength of the glory of Womanhood lives. This blaze has always been there, though perhaps unnoticed, unused, and basically unappreciated. It is as if it can only be approached through that deep-reaching. Some women are gifted and find the strength of Queenship early on in their lives. No matter the timing, discovering such hidden strengths brings us new grit and fortitude that I am sure the great matriarchs of our earth's time used to propel them through whatever they were called to endure.
Think of Eve, Mrs. Enoch, Mrs. Noah, Sarah, and the several Marys. And what about the lesser-known matriarchs who surround us now? One such matriarch told me recently that because she is in a wheelchair and has gray hair, people think her mind doesn't create anymore. She was not complaining, just observing with her brilliant and time-tested soul. We walk amid greatness without the slightest notion of what sorrow or suffering produced that greatness—including our own.
Our souls were built to be builders of beauty. Every woman is endowed with this glory-embryogenesis or capacity to grow in glory—no exceptions. We are gifted, by our Creator, with the very best heaven has to offer. It is within our minds that we determine whether we will uncover these gifts or remain in pain of mind to the destruction of our creative priestess powers.
“Let us put on the armour of light.” Romans 13:12
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts will take you. You cannot escape the result of your own thoughts, but you can endure and learn, accept and be glad.”
Let's consider the creative priestess powers centered on conception, pregnancy, birthing, and lactating. The scholars and thinkers of our time have brought us full circle. As Vivian McConkie Adams explains, Eve's overarching reason for partaking in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was to have children. Eve brought with her into the garden the understanding that she had the power to make life and to be a bearer of Light. This powerful drive and her remarkable faith in the Savior's promise that He would redeem them from their separation from God in becoming mortal beings were the first expressions of Womanhood’s Glory-Power. No one will ever convince me that she and Adam were not taught the Plan of Creation by the Gods during their stay in Gan Eden or the Garden of God. She was not tricked—she knew exactly what she was doing and the consequences. She chose the course that would allow her to be the Creator she was chosen to be.
Jeffery R. Holland helps us understand Adam and Eve’s choice to become mortal:
“But they–like us–were able and willing to venture these only with the knowledge that there would be safety at the end of the day for those who wanted it and lived for it. They were willing to transgress knowingly and consciously (the only way they could fall into the consequences of mortality, inasmuch as Elohim certainly could not force innocent parties out of the garden and still be a just god) only because they had a full knowledge of the Plan of salvation, which would provide for them a way back from their struggle with death and hell."
We can appreciate these truths now even if our wombs have been still or our offspring have chosen destructive or hurtful paths because we have an inner sense that this earth-time is not all there is. Our call to be creators will carry through eternity; the question is—will we receive the glorious gift of creation, or will we reject it because of a closed paradigm and mortality’s unbearable hardships?
Further, Elder Holland explains that the act of intimacy which brings forth conception is a sacrament.
“Indeed, if our definition of a sacrament is that act of claiming and sharing and exercising God’s own inestimable power, then I know of virtually no other divine privilege so routinely given to us all—women or men, ordained or un-ordained, Latter-day Saint or non-Latter-day Saint—than the miraculous and majestic power of transmitting life, the unspeakable, unfathomable, unbroken power of procreation. There are those special moments in your lives when the other, more formal ordinances of the gospel—the sacraments, if you will—allow you to feel the grace and grandeur of God’s power. Many are one-time experiences (such as our own confirmation or our own marriage), and some are repeatable (such as administering to the sick or doing ordinance work for others in the temple). But I know of nothing so earth-shatteringly powerful and yet so universally and unstintingly given to us as the God-given power available in every one of us from our early teen years on to create a human body, that wonder of all wonders, a genetically and spiritually unique being never seen before in the history of the world and never to be duplicated again in all the ages of eternity—a child, your child—with eyes and ears and fingers and toes and a future of unspeakable grandeur.”
In her well-referenced and straightforward piece, The Matriarchal Order and the Ordinances of the Flesh, Gwendolyn Stevens Wyne explains the additional sacraments (ordinances) of pregnancy, birth, and lactation and then cautions us not to ignore or demean them.
“These ordinances of the flesh are what we are referring to when we speak of “nurturing,” and their near-universal receipt can blind us to their value. One of the great ironies of this day is the derision many aim at the very ordinances they themselves have already received, that in fact enable them to think and speak derisively of childcare and those who provide it out of love. We should be extremely careful not to desecrate nurturing—by belittling it ourselves or allowing others to—for God has called it sacred and essential. When we honor beliefs that belittle that essential authority, we give the devil power.”
Countless women with whom I have had meaningful conversations during my fifty-two years of marriage have acknowledged that they feel these truths deeply, but they fear reprisals if they voice them. Thankfully, I believe that we are entering an enlightened time: one where women and their God-given magnificence will be a mighty force in doing the work of preparing the world for the Savior's second coming. Whether we subscribe to this train of thought or not, we can appreciate the beauty of the concepts discussed with an open paradigm or lens.
The enemy of creation is ignorance. Uninformed chaos rules when the illness of body or mind, struggles with faith, betrayal-trauma, abuse, empty arms and empty wombs, divorce, widowhood, singleness, addiction, regret, and shame all bare down on us as a part of humanity. This intimate and overwhelming pain—our personal pain, seems to be designed particularly for us. This exquisite pain feels like the cosmos has gone all wrong—it bores into our minds and our thoughts with unrelenting and repetitive thought patterns which so easily destroy our peace. I am confident that while Eve knew that pain was part of the plan, surely she did not fully anticipate the depths of the sorrows which would be hers, such as losing two sons on one fateful morning. The truth is that pain, sorrow, and loss may be our most outstanding teachers and in the end, contribute to our glory, they were never meant to be our masters. They are meant to propel us, in our need for relief, toward our higher power—our source of Light.
Valerie Hudson Cassler teaches us volumes as she discusses the call of Womanhood to be the Light bearers for humanity.
"In every gospel dispensation, the women of God, because of their greater Light and knowledge, have been under special obligation to uphold and carry forth the labors begun by Mother Eve. This is particularly true of the latter-day women of God, who live in the last gospel dispensation, the dispensation of the fullness of times, when the knowledge of God has never been greater and when that old Serpent, the enemy of Eve and her seed from the beginning, has mustered all his forces to hinder and destroy her work. In their own families, in the communities of the Saints, and in the larger world of humanity, there exists opportunities aplenty for the women of God, whether or not they have children of their own in this world, to further the work Eve began. Whatever secures or promotes the ways of Light, whatever preserves or enlarges the things that give life, whatever fulfills the image of God, can help fulfill the calling inherited from Eve.”
At some point in every woman's forever existence, she will come to the glorious truth that she has always been accompanied by a myriad of sisters bringing their collective watch-care power, wisdom, and ever-constant assistance. The Gods are always near, watching and loving deeply. If our minds are attuned to this particular Light, our creative efforts will flourish—if not, we will suffer the dark and confusing dregs of dullness of mind or the ravages of an out-of-control ego. We choose between these two realms every day. Next, we will explore just how to teach our rabid and scattered minds to choose correct thought filters and how to avoid the rabbit holes that plague us. Our journey continues—meanwhile, know this:
When you were earth-born, angels sang and
Creation bowed to your magnificent soul
On your way to priestesshood.
We will meet you at the throne,
You’ll put on a robe and crown,
For glory is your home.
References
Michele Noel, Respect the Path, Fulton Books, 2022, p 54
For the purposes of this book, “God” and “Gods” are used interchangeably. God, meaning Elohim is a plural Hebrew word meaning Heavenly Parents, which can also mean ‘goddess .'See Genesis 1:27; also see Yahweh Elohim, An Ancient View of God, The Masculine and Feminine Nature of Elohim https://sites.google.com/site/yahwehelohiym/an-ancient-view-of-god/the-masculine-and-feminine-nature-of-elohim
https://neurosciencenews.com/thought-worms-16639/ accessed August 6, 2020
Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain; A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs Public Affairs, New York, 2011, p 156
James Allen, Above Life’s Turmoil, 1910, chapter 10
Vivian McConkie Adams, Our Glorious Mother Eve, Deseret Book, recording, 1996
Jeffrey R. Holland, Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments, BYU Speeches, January 12, 1988
Gwendolyn Stevens Wyne (2022) "The Matriarchal Order and the Ordinances of the Flesh," SquareTwo, Vol. 15 No. 1 (Spring 2022), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleWyneMatriarchalOrder.html, accessed March 20, 2022
Valerie Hudson Cassler, “The Story of Eve” in Women in Eternity, Women of Zion (Springville, Utah: Bonneville Books, 2004), 95
I so enjoyed this upcoming chapter in Glory Is Your Home. I can't wait for the book! Michele is inspiring and does so much to build women and helps us remember our marvelous potential.