In another story, Newell shares about a friend who experienced the Divine Feminine:
“Bede, at the age of eighty-six, had the most transformative experience of his life. During early morning meditation on January 25, 1990, he experienced God as Feminine. For years he had been teaching the marriage of East and West, and the importance of conjoining the feminine and the masculine within ourselves and within our religious images and rituals, but that was in the realm of ideas. This was different. This was an experience of God as Feminine. It shook him down to the foundations of his being. As he later said, “This was too much for my old Western body.”
The experience affected him physically, mentally, and spiritually. Physically, it manifested as a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. Psychologically, it was a moment of illumination. He saw the Feminine as divine. Spiritually, it was an experience of Divine Love. He now realized that everything else was insignificant. A few days after the experience, he wrote to Sister Pascaline Coff at the Osage Monastery in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “The ego has collapsed. I feel totally free. All the barriers have broken down.” It was an experience of liberation. He had been set free, not only from his own ego but also from the ego of his Western culture, education, and religious tradition. There were no barriers now. He could give and receive in the utmost openness.
-John Philip Newell, The Rebirthing of God
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