Mother

  

Some months ago a High Councilman spoke in our ward and told a beautiful story about his difficulty in speaking with his single mother by long distance phone calls while at college.  On the occasions when they connected by phone she would say, "I love just hearing your voice."  Then the High Councilman reflected on how much more our Father in Heaven delights to hear our voices.

The High Councilman proceeded to lay out the scriptural examples of prayer and quoted the Savior, "Our Father which art in heaven. . . ."  Although he did not say so directly, it seemed clear that he was re-establishing the policy that instructs us to limit our prayer addresses to the Father.  This position is defended because Christ, in His examples of prayer, addresses only the Father.  President Gordon B. Hinckley said, "Search as I have, I find nowhere in the standard works an account where Jesus prayed other than to his Father in Heaven or where He instructed the people to pray other than to His Father in Heaven."  ("Daughters of God," Ensign, 1991)

President Hinckley also said in the same article that when the word "man" is used in the scriptures, it is most often a generic term referring to males and females.  I would add that that was the style of the day and more of a cultural reality than an actual limiting of the messages of the scriptures to men, which, if that were the case, would allow women to exclude themselves from the counsel contained therein.  This relates to President Hinckley's logic on the issue of proper prayer patterns.  If women and woman pronouns are excluded from the scriptures as an outcome of the cultural conventions of those days, could that apply to the passages in the scriptures relating to prayer?

President Hinckley also referred to the hymn "O My Father" to establish that he accepts the doctrine that we have a Mother in Heaven.  "It was Eliza R. Snow who wrote the words:  'Truth is reason; truth eternal/ Tells me I've a mother there.'"  (Hymns 1985, no. 292)  President Hinckley goes on to say, "It has been said that the Prophet Joseph Smith made no correction to what Sister Snow had a written.  Therefore, we have a Mother in Heaven. . . ."

Later he says "I have looked in vain for any instance where any President of the Church, from Joseph Smith to Ezra Taft Benson, has offered a prayer to 'our Mother in Heaven.'"  But now we have an admission from present Church leaders that former leaders could have been, in some instances, operating from "limited understanding," as Bruce R. McConkie stated when referring to the previous, official First Presidency statements connecting the priesthood and temple ban for African blacks to their unrighteousness in the pre-mortal life.  In the Gospel Topics essay, "Race and the Priesthood," we have a liberating acknowledgement that some of our practices and present understanding of doctrines are sometimes the result of cultural realities that color and inform our doctrinal positions.  The re-examination of history and its effect on present policies and practices that has led to this startling admission can now be applied to the issue of women and authority within the Church and the practice of limiting our prayer addresses to the Father.  The fact that no president has prayed to the Mother no longer prevents us from asking the question, "Could they have been operating from 'limited understanding'?"

And yet, each of those presidents has indeed offered a prayer to the Mother in Heaven when they sang the full text of "O My Father."

When I leave this frail existence,

When I lay this mortal by,

Father, Mother, may I meet you,

In your royal courts on high.

Then at length when I've completed

All you sent me forth to do.

With your mutual approbation,

Let me come and dwell with you.

To quote the Lord from D&C 25:12, ". . . the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me. . . ."  And, significantly, the original title of the hymn was "Invocation:  or the Eternal Father and Mother."  To use President Hinckley's logic, Joseph Smith didn't correct her on that either.

These points from our scriptural and church history are indications of a fuller conception of God.  Have we fully developed these themes?  Have we truly considered the implications?  Even if we take the position that there was a time when limiting prayer addresses to the Father was mandated from heaven, we are  now living in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times.  Christ came in the Meridian of Time, fulfilled the old law, and thereby brought it up into and circumscribed it within a  new, more expansive law.  This alarmed the Pharisees who saw many of Christ's teachings and actions as violations of the old law to which they clung.  Christ said in Luke 5:37, "And no man putteth new wine into old bottles. . . ."  I believe the worship of Heavenly Mother openly and concurrently with the Heavenly Father does not diminish Him nor thwart His purposes and may be some of the new wine for which Christ is inviting us to prepare new bottles, to change our hearts and minds to receive this added nourishment.

The story of the High Councilman and his connecting with his mother has a twinge of irony.  Just as the High Councilman's earthly mother was eager to hear from him, just as our Father in Heaven is eager to hear from us, wouldn't our Mother in Heaven likewise delight to hear from her children, directly and frequently?

What the Pursuit of Wisdom Means to Me

 

  I  have lived between two ideological worlds of black and white.  It has not always been so.  For most of my life I lived deeply within what I thought was an insulated, singular world of goodness and light in stark contradistinction to evil and darkness.   In that world truth was not questioned or up for debate; truth was granted by male authorities who had a unique connection to the divine within the unique brand of the Judeo-Christian tradition of Mormonism.  In that world spiritual safety was ensured by adherence to the authorities’ counsel—a simple formula that granted immunity from the vicissitudes of life.  I consented fully to my citizenship in that world and reveled in the uniqueness that set me apart.

The ground upon which the Mormon patriarchal system is founded is the family.  I received my identity, my self-image solely from the roles of wife and mother and the promise of eternal felicity in the kingdom of God with my burgeoning posterity collected around me.  This house of cards came tumbling down when my posterity had quite different ideas.  As some of them found their destinies outside of the values that informed my world, I found my drowning self stumbling for foothold on shifting sands that had once seemed liked solid ground.  As these loved ones moved further away from the predictability and sureness of the Mormon path, their pendulums swung toward an apogee of ideology that threatened family relationships.  This was problematic because I don’t do superficial relationships well.  I am discomfited by small talk.  I do one on one very well—sitting across the table, looking deeply into another’s eyes, plumbing the depths of what matters most.  That is hard to do when the chasm of belief yawns wide.   That is hard to do when maternal prescience sees pain coming from a loved one’s choices.   The finding of common ground became ever more difficult.  

For some of these loved ones, science began to replace the clearly defined God of Mormonism with the same kind of dogma and pseudo religious fervor they thought they were leaving behind.  I found myself stretched between two poles of belief, each claiming unique truth.  During one difficult period, I wrote the following:

I live between two ideological sets of black and white, only what’s black on one side is white on the other.  I notice that black and white don’t exist in nature very much.  There are more subtle colors, more rainbow than stark delineations between light and dark.  I live between two ideological sets of rigid lines and planes, chiseled into existence by the minds in both worlds.  In nature, things are not so clear cut.  The two contrasting worlds feel like two edges of a very sharp sword.  You hardly have to breathe before the sword cuts, slices, severs, and eviscerates those who get in the way of its blade, leaving them weak and bleeding.  Fundamentalist religion; cold, hard calculating science.  Both worlds seem so bleak to me, so much the razor’s edge of black and white and rigid lines and planes of truth.  Both claim unique possession of the word, and both cut, slice, sever and eviscerate in their search of it.

I feel weak and bleeding.  Is there a better way?

It was in that state of despair and hopelessness, with that question in my heart, that I heard, I felt a message from God:  “Things are not what they seem.”  As I saw my house of cards lying scattered around me, I heard, I felt another message, “Will you trust enough to begin to transform the rubble of the old house of belief into a new, more living edifice.”  It was at that juncture in my life that the rawness of pain made me receptive to a new spirituality.  My spiritual life became all potential as I began to examine the old beliefs that had not served me and, if not modified, could well be my emotional destruction.  It was in that reaching out that I sought for other dimensions of the spirit. 

I began to feel clear messages of spiritual guidance.  My experience of synchronicities expanded and multiplied.  People came into my life who accompanied me in new ways of thinking.  I read; I prayed; I continued my devotion to my religion but with a new depth and purpose and with a new consciousness.
   

I began to dream.  When I lay down at night, I did not fall to sleep in the ordinary way; I went into another, semi-hazy dimension where I entered worlds of symbol and instruction.  Upon awaking I was not always aware of the content of my nightly journeys, but many distinct impressions stayed with me and expanded on my daily searching.  

It was only after many years that I looked back at these events and realized that I was having a divine feminine awakening.  I had always felt close to the masculine god of Christianity.  I had a mystical connection to the Christ being and never felt deprived of the full complement of divine assistance.  But now, as my mother’s heart was being torn asunder, I needed my Divine Mother, something I had not before considered.  And she met me in my extremity.

I believe that it was Divine Feminine inspiration that led me to seek a certificate in Waldorf education.  Through the Waldorf curriculum I was introduced to the great wisdom literature of history and pre-history.  My vantage point of inquiry was raised so that I could look with new eyes on the human story and see repeated patterns and cycles of growth, fidelity, rebellion, fall, and redemption.  Because of my religious background I had an abiding image of a divine masculine influence of protection and human advancement during periods of growth and fidelity, but I began to see a feminine influence weaving, quietly inviting humanity to wholeness.  I also identified indications of the fallen feminine drawing souls into dark decadence, soft and moist and grasping.  I likewise identified the fallen masculine that seeks control and tyrannical domination.  The great ancient myths of human history revealed the destructive tension between the fallen masculine and the fallen feminine, playing out in predictable strivings of pre-eminence at the expense of the other, but I acknowledged that the fallen masculine had triumphed for much of more recent history.  I began to suspect and grieve its presence in my own patriarchal Mormon tradition.
   

An image emerged of a pendulum, swinging back and forth through ancient history in linear trajectory between alternating feminine and masculine primacy, caught in the momentum of extremes.  At each apogee, suffering, destruction and grief ensued with no force that checked the inexorable movement towards the other extreme.  But through most of recent history, since the time of God’s words to Eve, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee,” I determined that the pendulum has not swung between the feminine and masculine, but rather between two poles of masculine excess—the pole of piety, pride and personal glorification often found in the dark side of organized religion and the opposite pole of scientific reductionism and materialism.  These were the two poles between which I felt stretched as a mother.  This realization, that evil stands at the two poles of opposites, was pivotal in changing my thinking processes.  Perhaps love does not have an opposite.  Perhaps love stands between the two poles of evil mediating and checking the swing of the pendulum.  Perhaps the Divine Feminine is critical in that process. 

  At Rudolf Steiner College working on my teaching certificate, I was exposed to the balancing role of the Divine Feminine through study of Anthroposophy and the works of Robert Powell, where I learned that She is often identified as the Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom.  I reveled as I read the following from the introduction to Steiner’s Isis Mary Sophia, Her Mission and Ours written by Christopher Bamford:

Sophia is life—the life of the spirit. . . .  Sophia is twofold:  divine and creaturely. . . . Present in both divinity and creation, she is the indissoluble bond and mediator between them. . . . She is intimately related to humanity, for it is through human beings that the presence of God—or theophany—is cognitively realized in the universe.  Sophia is also inseparable from the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom. . . . This living spirit—who is wisdom, beauty, and truth—is also the uniting spirit, the spirit of true community.  This is the spirit that makes it possible that, when “two or three are gathered” in Christ’s name, he is there.  (2003, p. 9)

  What does the pursuit of wisdom mean to me?  It means discovering the role of the Divine Feminine in partnership with the Divine Masculine as an invitation to wholeness that places itself between opposites.  The opposites, if left unchecked, necessarily result in separation and division, pain and suffering.  It is only at the extremes that this occurs.  Embracing wisdom means understanding when a tendency goes too far.   The drive to accomplishment, discovery, production, and advancement is good when it is in balance.  Conversely, the need to worship, revere, perfect, and transcend earthly bounds is good when it is in balance.  It is only when these pursuits extend beyond healthy boundaries that destructive patterns develop.  The pursuit of wisdom means re-enthroning the Divine Feminine in her tempering role as partner and in true interdependence with the Divine Masculine.

I begin to see the weaving nature of the Divine Feminine as crucial to mitigating the unchecked trajectory of the pendulum.  I begin to see a feminine lemniscate, dancing and weaving between the extremes of the masculine, providing a pause wherein wholeness can be considered, a rest from the headlong, and sometimes mindless, pursuits of civilization.  It is interesting to note that when one envisions the sidewise form a pendulum takes in its movement, a chalice is created.  It is at the bottom of the curve that the lemniscate can do its work, creating a vessel to hold the better way that I seek.

This is still new territory for me, new patterns of thought that are foreign to the hardened dogma of a patriarchal religion.  My religious tradition gave me what I perceived to be solid ground, sureness of purpose and direction.  There is comfort in this approach, but inevitably life will create periods when solid ground disappears and the sand shifts beneath one’s feet.  The pursuit of wisdom is developing the humility, trust and skill to navigate those troubled waters. 

References

Powell, R. (1985). Meditations on the tarot: A journey into Christian hermeticism. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam.

Powell, R. (2000). The most holy trinosophia and the new revelation of divine feminine. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press.

Powell, R. (2001). The Sophia teachings: The emergence of the divine feminine in our time. New York: Lantern Books.

Steiner, R., & Bamford, C. (2003). Isis Mary Sophia: Her mission and ours : Selected lectures and writings. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks.

Picture:

Raphael (1512), Sistine Madonna