What if the person who was left out of the Bible still has something important to teach us about faith? Thecla was an early Christian woman whose story tells of a woman who refused the life prescribed for her, claimed her own spiritual calling, and—when no religious authority was available to baptize her—baptized herself. Her story invites us to ask what it means to trust our own experience of the sacred, to claim spiritual authority for ourselves, and to live into a Unitarian Universalism where no priest, minister, creed, or institution stands between us and the truth we are seeking.