You may listen to this post read aloud or read it for yourself below:

O Shekinah,

yours is the feminine face of the Holy,

the luminous moon who lights up the night

as we travel from captivity to liberation,

the pillar of fire who guides our way home,

the cloud hovering over the mountain peaks,

living sign that the drought is over.

–from “Prayer to the Shekinah” by Mirabai Starr

Last year I learned a chant of an old quaker saying set to music. It was written by William Robinson (c.1659), a martyr who was condemned to death by Puritan magistrates and hung on Boston commons. But in the face of death, he penned these words in a letter: “The streams of my Father’s Love run daily through me, from the holy Fountain of Life to the seed throughout the whole Creation.” Paulette Meier, when she set the words to music, alternates between singing “the streams of my Father’s love” and “the streams of my Mother’s Love” (link to the chant included at the end of this post).

My soul latched onto this chant and began to embody it. It was something easy to pick up and sing a cappella in the car or while I was doing the dishes. It’s been a concrete reminder in moments of emotional scarcity that the stream of abundance is already there. Love is flowing through me, sourced from an infinite flow of bounty and dispersed into each particle of creation, each cell of my body, each person I come into contact with. Sometimes I sing it with one arm upstretched to remind me of the vertical flow of love with the Divine and one arm outstretched horizontally as a reminder of the flow of blessing to others. The more I’ve leaned into the gift of this chant, the more I’ve started observing how the energy in my body shifts differently at the words “my Mother’s love” than it does when I speak the word “Father.”

My inner state is cracking open with hunger for aspects of the Feminine Divine.

I grew up dutifully accepting the masculine nature of God, copying translations that use masculine pronouns to refer to the Hebrew term for Elohim, along with the somewhat hierarchical views those translations carried with them about men in places of spiritual power. But now, every time I refer to God and go to write the word “he” with a capital “H,” I’m finding it harder and harder to pen. If you’ve noticed in my writing, I tend to find other ways around it, avoiding terms of gender altogether and selecting words such The Divine instead, which seem to encompass a broader scope of God, one that involves more variety and mystery.

It’s not that looking at God as Father is wrong or incorrect. But it’s only one view. And there are so many others. I’m not going to argue that God should be translated as “she” with a capital “S” either, as if flipping the all-or-nothing spectrum would fix anything. God is outside gender, something wholly other than us. Divinity is formless. We are form. That which is formless cannot be adequately described by words or objects of form. We make our best attempts using art and poetry and metaphors, such as God is like a father, or God is like a mother. These metaphors, if they work well, give us access to formlessness that true higher consciousness provides. But trying to pin down the formless mystery of the Divine into any one metaphor will break and limit what is meant to be.

“Is God a boy or a girl?” my once four-year-old asked.

“God is both,” I told her, and then watched her black-and-white developmental brain try to sort that out.

“Are you made in the image of God?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she says.

“Is Daddy made in the image of God?”

“Yes,” she nods.

“If we are both made in the image of God, then what is God?”

“Both,” she says, a smile lighting up her face. She accepts it quickly and moves on to play at something else.

A friend sitting at my dining room table observing the conversation notes, “It’s amazing how simple that is for her, when it takes others decades to get to that place.”

William Young’s novel, The Shack, was one man’s attempt to put into story his contemplative experience of the Divine in the midst of his trauma. In the book he portrays God as a “large beaming African-American women,” one who “with speed that belied her size, crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a little child.” Certain aspects of the Christian community lost their ever-loving marbles. Sunday school curriculums cropped up addressing what some considered heresies within the novel, one of which was the “gender” of God. They missed the point. The point wasn’t doctrine. The point was experience with the Divine. The book came out in 2007, while I was still in college and long before my experience in the cult and the beginning of my deconstructive phase, but something in my being all those years ago still rose up said, yes! There’s something right about this.

Sacred texts are full of metaphors and images for God. The bread of life. Living water. Wind. Fire. Cloud. A whisper. A mother hen. A distraught lover. Light. Breath. We don’t argue that the Divine is literally bread. Nor do I think we should quibble over the literal fact of God being a male or a female. He is both. He is neither.

Take the metaphors for what they are. Pick up whatever metaphors, images, and embodied experiences help give you access to the Divine. Lay down the ones that don’t, at least for now. What works in this season may not work in the next. What triggers you now may be wondrous in a decade or two. There’s nothing wrong with that. The journey can be beautiful.

In this season, the images of God as Mother are singing for me, filling up gaps that seem to have been left bone-dry in previous years. I keep grabbing for books with feminine language around the Divine, books that seem to balance the scales, books that embrace everything it means to be fierce and tender, wild and merciful in my cravings for the unknowable.

I’m in my own third iteration of becoming a mother, another life incubating inside my body. My energy lies coiled tightly at my core, leaving the rest of me drained. In the weeks past when I crawled into bed exhausted and nauseous, feeling robbed of my true self by this other soul literally feeding off my body, I often wanted to cry, desperate for relief. In those moments, when I whispered the Welcoming Prayer or reached for the Divine, it was not a father I reached for. It was a Mother—a wizened one with long gray hair, wrinkles around her eyes, and enough fat on her bones to create a pillow when she pulls me into her chest and strokes my hair and tells me without words, I know. And she does know, in a way no man ever will. My husband or my father can be kind and try to empathize, but they will never know. Another woman can.

So I pick up that chant again like a life-preserver.  The streams of my Mother’s Love run daily through me, from the holy fountain of life to the seed throughout all creation. Yes, I pray. Mother, Amma, sustain me, as I seek to sustain another. As I seek to sustain so many needs that swirl around me. Help me to feed them, to bathe them [literally and metaphorically], to stand witness to their insecurities, to be the sheltering wing they crawl beneath, to roar with bearish protection in their defense, to quiet them with songs.

Care for me, dear Mother, because I feel lost and inadequate. Show me how I am like you, both fierce and tender. Let me recognize a small part of myself in your face. You have walked the way and not been lost. You are the Way. Show me where to place my feet next.

I will end with a benediction of the Lord’s Prayer, but as one possible new translation from the Aramaic, taken from the book Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus, translated and with commentary by Neil Douglas-Klotz:

O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos,

Focus your light within us—make it useful:

Create your reign of unity now—

Your one desire then acts with ours,

as in all light, so in all forms.

Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.

Loose the cords of mistakes binding us.

as we release the strands we hold

of others’ guilt.

Don’t let surface things delude us,

But free us from what holds us back.

From you is born all ruling will,

the power and the life to do,

the song that beautifies all,

from age to age it renews.

Truly—power to these statements—

may they be the ground from which all

my actions grow: Amen.

Resources:

• Paulette Meier’s chant Streams of Love: https://paulettemeier.bandcamp.com/track/streams-of-love
• A children’s book entitled Mother God by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky (see my page on Parenting for more children’s resources)
• Books about the feminine that have made their way into my hands lately:
  • Rewilding Motherhood by Shannon K. Evans (see my post here)
  • The Mystics Would Like A Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today by Shannon K. Evans
  • Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics by Mirabai Starr
• Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus, translated and with commentary by Neil Douglas-Klotz (the Lord’s Prayer excerpt)
• The Welcoming Prayer (see Emotional Overwhelm and the Welcoming Prayer)

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Shalom.