The Book That Made Me Rethink Spirituality

I didn’t set out to question my understanding of spirituality.

I was listening to a podcast conversation where Meggan Watterson was talking about patriarchy and the rise of Christian nationalism. It was one of those conversations that makes you stop mid-task and actually listen. She spoke about power, about how religious narratives are shaped, and about the way certain voices in history have been softened, reframed, or pushed to the edges of the story.

It caught my attention because I spend my days listening to people trying to make sense of the systems they live inside – families, workplaces, institutions, cultures. And I know how easily the truth can become distorted when power and hierarchy are involved.

Curiosity led me to her book about Mary Magdalene.

I expected something reflective and spiritual. Maybe a little historical context, maybe a new perspective on an old story. What I didn’t expect was the quiet shift it created in how I think about authority, belief, and whose voices get remembered.

For most of us, Mary Magdalene appears in the Christian story as a repentant prostitute. That’s the version many of us absorbed without question. But historical scholarship paints a different picture. Magdalene appears in early texts as a witness, a teacher, and a central figure in the earliest communities around Jesus. Over time, that image changed. The story was reshaped. Her role diminished. Her voice softened. That shift didn’t necessarily require a dramatic conspiracy. History rarely works that way. Institutions evolve, leaders make decisions, narratives become fixed, and eventually those narratives feel like they have always been true.

But reading about Magdalene in this way left me with an uneasy thought.

If something as foundational as a religious narrative can be shaped by power, hierarchy, and institutional priorities, what else in the world might work the same way?

This isn’t about attacking faith or dismantling people’s beliefs. For many people, spirituality is a source of meaning, comfort, and community. What interested me more was the human pattern underneath it.

Human systems protect themselves.

Whether we are talking about religions, governments, organisations, or even families, systems develop ways of maintaining stability. Sometimes that stability is helpful. It gives people a sense of structure and safety. But sometimes stability comes at the cost of uncomfortable truths.

One of the things therapy teaches you very quickly is that truth rarely arrives neatly packaged. People carry stories they’ve struggled to tell, experiences that didn’t fit the narrative of the family or workplace they lived inside. When someone finally speaks about those experiences, the reaction they receive can shape the rest of their life.

If they are believed, something begins to heal.

If they are dismissed, minimised, or reframed as the problem, the harm deepens.

That dynamic isn’t limited to personal relationships. It shows up in larger systems, too.

Reading about Mary Magdalene made me think about how often voices that challenge authority get reshaped over time. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, but often in ways that make the original message easier for the system to absorb.

And that led me to think about something I see regularly in therapy.

Many people arrive carrying anger they feel ashamed of.

They apologise for it before they even begin explaining where it came from. They’ve been taught that anger is dangerous, unhelpful, or unspiritual. So they try to suppress it, manage it, or smooth it over before anyone else notices. But anger often tells a story.

It can be the nervous system’s response to injustice, to betrayal, to something that doesn’t add up. Anger appears when a boundary has been crossed or when someone begins to recognise that the story they were given doesn’t quite match their lived experience. When people start questioning those stories, things can feel unsettling. Systems rarely welcome disruption. Families can react defensively. Communities can close ranks. Institutions can move slowly or not at all. That doesn’t mean every challenge to authority is correct. Human beings are complex, and truth can be difficult to untangle.

But it does mean something important. The people who first raise uncomfortable questions are often the ones with the least power to enforce them.

Reading Watterson’s exploration of Magdalene didn’t give me answers so much as it sharpened my awareness of that pattern. It reminded me that history is shaped by human decisions and that human decisions are influenced by power, culture, fear, loyalty, and belief.

It also reminded me of something I often say in the therapy room. Truth has a way of resurfacing. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes generations. But stories that have been buried rarely stay buried forever. They emerge through individuals who decide to speak, through historians who re-examine old texts, through journalists who investigate uncomfortable questions, through people who refuse to accept the version of events they’ve been handed.

The forest edge is where ecosystems change. It’s the place where cultivated land meets something wilder, where new growth often appears after disturbance. Standing there can feel uncertain because the ground is shifting beneath your feet. But it’s also where new light reaches the forest floor. Reading about Mary Magdalene felt a little like standing at that edge. It made me realise how easily the stories we inherit can feel fixed and unquestionable, and how unsettling it can be when those stories begin to move.

And once you notice that movement, you start to see similar patterns elsewhere.

That’s where this series begins.

Not with answers, but with curiosity about how power, truth, and human systems interact – and what happens inside us when the stories we’ve always believed start to change.