Return to Radiance with Danielle Venables

093. From Catholic Roots to Personal Awakening: Seeking Faith, Not Religion

• Danielle Venables • Episode 93

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This episode delves into the intricate relationship between faith, spirituality, and personal awakening. Danielle shares her journey of questioning organized religion, exploring biblical texts, and honoring the role of intuition, while affirming that it’s acceptable to seek one's own truth amidst the complexities of belief.

• Reflects on early experiences with Catholicism 
• Discusses the disconnection from organized religion 
• Explores spiritual awakening and alternative beliefs 
• Questions biases in biblical teachings and scripture 
• Highlights the significance of Mary Magdalene's role 
• Examines skepticism towards modern prophets and guidance 
• Encourages listeners to trust their intuition and faith 
• Stresses the importance of community and open dialogue

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Return to Radiance, the podcast with one core purpose to remind you of your innate power and essence. I'm your host, danielle Venables, an Akashic guide and soul coach, here to activate, heal and empower the new wave of soulful CEOs to become radically aligned and unapologetic. In these episodes, we will be diving into all things mystic, soul level transformation, the new paradigm of leadership, business, energetics, awakening, healing and more, as well as holding potent conversations around connecting deeply to your personal power and owning your truth. If you are here for it all, be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. While I'm confident the discussions in this podcast have the power to change your life, these episodes are for information only and are in no way a substitute for individual medical, legal or mental health advice.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Return to Radiance podcast. I am once again doing a morning coffee episode here, just in the cozy nook of where I have my morning coffee. I wanted to talk today about religion, specifically relating to my own journey with it. I know I've touched on this a little bit in the past, but recently I have been called back towards back towards Christianity, back towards the Bible. For those of you who don't know, I was raised Catholic and attended catechism and church every Sunday for the most part my entire childhood. I even went to Spain in 2011 to attend World Youth Day, which is a big pilgrimage type gathering for youth to go see the Pope.

Speaker 2:

I went to Rome, I saw the Vatican, um, and after that trip I actually ended up leaving the church. It was a really beautiful trip. It was amazing. I met so many incredible human beings and just kindhearted, beautiful people, um, and obviously had the trip of a lifetime, because prior to that I had only really been to Canada and the States.

Speaker 2:

But shortly after that trip I ended up leaving the church and there were a few reasons for that, but I would be lying if I said that part of it wasn't seeing the Vatican for myself, seeing all of the gold and, you know, precious stones and precious metals and tapestries and paintings worth millions, if not billions, of dollars at this point, and just seeing like the hoarding of resources felt very dissonant from what I felt were the core teachings of the Bible and of Jesus. I was always of the opinion and you're going to have to bear with me during this episode because I'm not going to have scripture to back these things this is entirely my own process and intuition and what's been true for me throughout my life. But you know, to me the core teachings of the Bible were about love and generosity and not hoarding resources, and I know that there are passages in the bible that that talk about how, um, you know, the rich men are the furthest from the kingdom of heaven and and things like that. And um so it. It felt very interesting that a place like the Vatican and even big cathedrals and stuff across the world, would be so adorned with gold and other precious possessions. But regardless, I had already been feeling a bit of a disconnect from the messages of organized religion as a whole. You know some of the attitudes towards perceived sinners, whether that's people who get divorces or, you know, whatever else, single moms, that was one for me.

Speaker 2:

My, my church actually ended up throwing me a baby shower when I had my son at 17, but I knew that that was not the norm. I knew that this was a small group of people in a small town that wanted to support me, not that it was like the belief of the institutionalized religion as a whole, right, um. So all of that to say that's a little bit of like a history of where I left religion and I kind of I turned my back on that um and walked away and for a long time I didn't consider myself an atheist, but very much agnostic, seeing the truth in multiple sacred texts and believing that there was some higher power. But, um, I had no way of knowing what it was. So I just went on living my life by my own personal philosophies of being kind and being a good person and, you know, some days I my wounding and my selfishness and other attributes of, you know, a late teen, early 20 year olds. Um, as part of the evolutionary process, I think that's a very normal um sort of phase to go through. And then, in 2019, after I had my daughter, I had my spiritual awakening and this was very much coming back to, um, spirituality as a whole. But I was very um repelled by any concept of God, any use of the, the word God, um, and I was more so in a space of, you know, talking about the universe, and when I would refer to a godlike figure, it would be source or spirit or even creator, and I was very afraid to use the word God or I was very just not feeling it. And that was when I started using oracle cards. That was when I started to meditate and connect in different ways and it just it ended up becoming in hindsight a pathway back to where I am today, obviously.

Speaker 2:

But I was very fascinated still with religion, not so much with christianity and catholicism, because that was like old news to me, that's where I had been but I was fascinated, um, with different beliefs, even, even cults. I mean, I've, I've always had a fascination with with cults. Um, I was kind of joked with my husband that I would totally be the type of person that would like accidentally join a cult, which is irrelevant to what I'm like getting at here. But I've always had a fascination with, like, what other people believe and why they believe what they believe. There's a part of me that is a philosopher, that that wants to seek truth and that has this like curiosity about mysticism that I is like unquenchable, like it's just, it's an inexplicable fascination for me and throughout that time, with my spiritual awakening, like I really did cultivate a relationship with myself, with my sense of discernment, and that ultimately like laid the foundation for now coming back to the bible and back to more traditional christian teachings, with my eyes wide open, because I can look back and see all along the things that didn't feel right, the ways that I was rejecting the teachings and couldn't really explain why, and I thought maybe it just wasn't for me.

Speaker 2:

But now that I've sort of come I don't want to say full circle, I mean probably full circle, because I was a skeptic back then too but now that I've kind of come full circle, I'm kind of in a space where I'm asking questions, and they're questions that maybe I even asked as a kid I really don't remember but I'm asking questions about scripture and about the people who wrote even the gospels and definitely the people who wrote, you know, the Old Testament, the prophets of the Old Testament and things like that. And I'm asking questions like. Well, how do we know that they're not biased? How do we know that they are not propelling an agenda? And then you take in the layer of um, the people who compiled the bible, um which I'm assuming a lot of that is related to the Vatican, which I've already expressed, I have issues with. But you know what was the agenda of the people who put together the Bible? What was the agenda of the people who have translated different translations of the Bible? You know there's so many variations from one version to the next. There's been books that have been added, passages that have been added or removed, and it's impossible to know exactly what you can trust right.

Speaker 2:

And when I asked this question, I joined some biblical groups because I'm literally determined to discern what is right for me and what path I'm meant to take, because I feel like I've been being called. I don't know if it's to a church or just to community, but I know that I can't go to a church where I feel like I'm just completely wrong either. So I've been kind of exploring like different denominations and different churches and what they believe and the way that people carry themselves, and so I've asked in some biblical groups some of these questions and when I've brought them up, I've been essentially told that, um, I just need to have faith because it's the word of God, and the word of God can't be manipulated and hasn't, you know, has been preserved, and that's part of you know. God has been preserved, and that's part of you know. God's promise to us is that it can't be like basically bastardized or misrepresented, um, which I thought was really interesting, and my human self didn't, didn't really feel that that was true and, and I think my soul felt like maybe that wasn't entirely true too. You know, I'm not trying to come at this from a place of critical thinking necessarily. I mean, I have sought answers and so critical thinking does come online sometimes. But I'm really what I'm looking for on this journey.

Speaker 2:

When I'm asking these questions and engaging in dialogue with people, what I'm really trying to achieve is to have feedback that I can then respond to. You know, when people say things, I can then discern does that feel true for me or not? And in some of these groups, when I've said that, when I've said, oh, that doesn't feel true for me or how can that be true, or, you know, that doesn't sit right with me, or whatever. They've basically turned around and said well, that's the devil at work, he's the master of confusion, and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2:

And meanwhile there are things in the Bible that I've read that have felt very dark and not at all resonant with the God that I have come to know over the last five years since my spiritual awakening, that I have come back to, that I have cultivated a personal relationship with, and basically the response is like the Bible is the Bible and you have to take it for what it is and you're not going to like everything you see, and that's part of like your devotion to God is like you're not going to like it all. Um, so, needless to say, I kind of respectfully bowed out of some of those spaces and was like nope, this is not for me, this does not feel, this doesn't feel true, like if I have to abide by every binary thing in the bible, um, and I can't question the intentions or the motives of the people who wrote or compiled or translated the Bible this isn't the place for me. Discernment is such an important piece and I have come so far in my cultivation of my intuition and my relationship with myself. That intuition and my relationship with myself that, again, looking back even into childhood, I've always had that discernment and that questioning of you know, if it says this, or if Jesus stood for this, then why are we acting like that? You know, and I feel really good in that, I feel really secure, but at the same time, I acknowledge that it's so easy to be human and to fall into ego of, oh, I don't need to listen to that because I know better, and that can be a trap too, right, and so I'm not naive to that either, which is why I'm trying to push the edges of my comfort zone and get curious and ask questions and receive alternate perspectives, to have my mind opened, to have my awareness expanded so that I can try things on and I can, you know, mull things over. And there have been things that people have said that I can try things on and I can, you know, mull things over. And there have been things that people have said that I've been like, oh, okay, that makes sense, and it clicked and all of a sudden I was able to accept something that maybe I was struggling to accept before. But all of that to say it has been such a journey for me, um, as I've uncovered a lot of this.

Speaker 2:

I've also, you know, dove into the works of people like Megan Watterson, who is very much an advocate for Mary Magdalene and her erasure in history and within the Bible, her exclusion within the Bible and even the way that she was basically canceled by the church in its early days before eventually becoming a saint, before eventually becoming a saint. And all of that doesn't sit well with me either. And I've worked with Mary Magdalene long before I ever came back to the idea of church and Christianity and those kinds of things. I've cultivated a relationship with Mary Magdalene and truly feel like she really was a mystic, she really was somebody who played a critical role in Jesus's life and in helping him to navigate the human condition. Because it's easy in the Bible to glorify this man who is supposed to be the son of God, and so the writings are kind of slanted in that direction of like. Basically he was perfect, and that's another thing that I don't really believe, because to incarnate as a human means that you are subject to the human condition, um, so he would have had the very real fears and concerns about his own impending death, right? Um, you know, he would have had the survival instincts of a human being because he incarnated as a human, um. So I really feel like she was in his corner, helping to prepare him, helping to accept his mission and and his calling in this incarnation that he had um. So to erase that, to erase the mysticism, to erase the importance of that role, um, also doesn't sit right right. So I've, you know, explored that, I've, I've come back Um.

Speaker 2:

And then the other thing that that I find so interesting, and I posted this on my Facebook last night, for any of you who are connected with me. There was questions about how, but why we also don't um, why we don't trust mystics nowadays, and part of that post was um. Is it? Is it because we don't trust them because they're humans? Is it because of their bias? Is it because we've realized that prophets might be more likely to be cult leaders than actual prophets or channels for the word of God? Why is it that there has been no additional material added since Jesus lived?

Speaker 2:

You know, I find that really interesting because I truly don't believe that the God that I know would leave us high and dry for000 plus years since then. Right, like, obviously, you know, the New Testament was written after, so maybe not 2,000 plus, but, you know, for almost 2,000 years. Why would God just leave us without any messages, without any messengers on this planet? Or are we just ignoring them because, oh, they're not. They're not the son of god, they're not the messiah, they're not jesus.

Speaker 2:

So I've been wrestling with that as well, because it's like we trust these people from thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago that we have no way of discerning how perfect or imperfect of people they were, how clear of a channel they could have been, whether there were political agendas going on which there always are, by the way and how that could have influenced the way that their message came through. We're not accounting for human bias. And then we're also not accounting for the margin of error, with different translations and manuscripts being lost and only getting parts of the story and having to kind of piece it back together and like all of this stuff that that has to be true. And yet if somebody modern comes out and says I heard God and this is what he said, we don't even give them the time of day, and especially the church does not give them the time of day. So it's all this is.

Speaker 2:

This is such a like runaround of a podcast episode and I'm sorry and I hope you were able to follow, but this is all the stuff that I'm sitting with right now. So, long story short. If you're like, along for my journey not that my faith overly matters to other people, but, um, if you're wondering, like, where's she at? Is she gonna be one of those people that, like, renounces the Akashic records and renounces all the things that she's done and turns into, you know, radiant soul ministries or something? No, I'm not. I'm not going there. I'm not part of institutionalized religion. I don't see myself going to institutionalized religion at any point in the near future, anyway, unless I discover something significant somewhere. But it does just leave me questioning, it leaves me in limbo. So I'm going to keep doing me, I'm going to keep cultivating my relationship with God and I'm going to keep asking questions and trusting that the answers and the path are going to reveal themselves.

Speaker 2:

And if you're in this in between and you're resonating with some of the things I'm saying and some of the questions, I invite you to do the same Just allow yourself to be neutral. With a world where, like, we're seeing a huge uptick in conversions of, like, born again Christians and things like that. It's okay to not jump on that boat and for some of you, going to church will feel really good just because of the community, but it doesn't mean that you have to subscribe to a hundred percent of what they're telling you there. And for some of you, you'll be like, yeah, I can't do church, I will not do church, and that's okay too. Just, you know, find like-minded people. My inbox is always open if you have questions or, you know, want that same feedback that I've been seeking from other people, um, so that you can discern what's true for you.

Speaker 2:

I'm always happy to have like philosophical conversations, because I'm a nerd like that. Um, but, yeah, just trust yourself, trust your faith. I truly believe that God gave us our intuition and gave us our inner compass as a compass to him, so I really don't think that you can mess it up as long as you are trying and you know that's's. That's really what matters is trying to be a good person, trying to, um, you know, just love and care for one another and for the planet and use your life to do something good, right, like Rebecca Campbell talks about to do something good, right, like Rebecca Campbell talks about making your life a moving prayer, and I've always resonated with that so deeply because it really is. If my life is lived in devotion to God, in ways where it's like in service to the people who need it and in service to the betterment of the planet and into a world with just more love, then I don't believe that we need to subscribe to any type of dogma or institution in order to experience the kingdom of God, whatever that might be.

Speaker 2:

So that's what I've got for you today. Hopefully it landed, and let me know, like if this resonated with you. Come find me over on social media Danielle Venables on Facebook, at. I, amielle venables on facebook at. I am danielle venables on instagram. Uh, come, let me know what you think and let's have a conversation. I love to hear about this kind of stuff, um, but yeah, that's all I've got. I hope you have a fantastic week ahead. Stay tuned for an episode coming out this friday and I will talk to you very soon. Bye for now.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this podcast, it would mean the world if you'd take a moment to download a couple episodes and rate the show to help it reach more like-minded leaders. If you loved today's discussion and decide to share it, be sure to tag me on Instagram at Radiant Soul Coach to help expand the ripple effect of this podcast.