by Roger Mock
Rev. Crystal and I were talking yesterday about her upcoming talk this Sunday on the Divine Mother. She pointed out that our core experience of God—of that which brought us into being and nurtures and cares for us and loves us with an all-encompassing love—must necessarily emanate from our experience in the womb and from our earliest days in our mother’s arms. From our very beginnings God has been, for every one of us, the Mother. It’s inescapably true, yet it feels as if I’m only just beginning to grasp it.
I’ve been trying to conjure up my earliest memories of my mother this morning. I have just a few dog-eared clippings in this old scrapbook of a brain. There are memories of walking with my mother through the park near our home as she pushed my new born sister in the baby carriage. I would have been three years old. There is an aura of serenity, of beauty, and of safety, provided in part by the canopy of trees and the pleasant summer day. Much more so, though, it is bestowed by virtue of this miraculous being (she has just somehow created a real live kicking and screaming baby!) whose hand I cling to. There is goodness everywhere. People stop and chat and say the kindest things to the young mother and no doubt embarrass me terribly as they blab and fawn and send me ducking into the folds of my mother’s skirts.
Among the other scraps of memory is one very significant one. It might even be from before my sister showed up as she is not in the picture. My parents are sitting at opposite ends of the living room sofa watching late ’50s television and I am curled up in my mother’s lap. I am in a state of dreamy reverie. There is nowhere else I’d rather be. I feel as safe and protected and loved as I have ever felt in my life. But I also feel the distance from my father and I have a twinge of guilt that I am not able to convey the same amount of utter devotion toward him in this moment that I am now lavishing on my mother (and she on me).
Intimacy and distance and the gulf between. We were German-Irish and, though I had a wonderful father, that Germanic stoicism held sway to a degree. I should note here, though, that one of my favorite early memories involves a time of intimacy with my dad as I road on his shoulders in the dusk of a late summer evening.
And, of course, God was a man. God as Father has remained the most comfortable image of divinity for me. The idea of God as Divine Mother is one I have considered intellectually for most of my adult life, but one that it has taken me decades to truly embrace in my soul. I have, though. And my brief discussion with Rev. Crystal brought me a little bit closer still.
I shared with her this quote I found as I was preparing this Sunday evening’s service on this same theme:
Only when we begin to understand how vast the Mother is
will we begin to understand how powerful she is, and how
powerful we, her divine children, can be when surrendered
to her, guided by her, infused with her immense,
passionate, and transfiguring sacred force.
Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey,
Divine Feminine
Actually, it was finding this very passage that brought that memory of being lost in the bliss of my mother’s lap back to my mind this week. Such a memory can become a spiritual tool. In prayer I can enter that memory and, re-experiencing that profound maternal intimacy, I can transfer it to the Divine Presence, to Mama God Herself. To begin to experience God in this way, at least for me, draws me into a more intimate relationship with Her. And with Him, too, over there on the other end of the sofa!
love and light,
Roger