The Divine Mother by Rev. Ricky Hoyt

[Guest guest]

The Divine Mother

© 2006 by Rev. Ricky Hoyt

 

" Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home. "

 

Each of us ought to feel like a motherless child. Spiritually, each

of us is a motherless child. Spiritually each of us was born into a

religious culture where for the last 3,000 years or so God has been

pictured nearly exclusively as a Divine Father. As the Patriarchal

religions began to slowly supplant earlier Matriarchal religions we

lost touch with the Divine Mother and with the feminine qualities

she represents. And we re-created our culture as children with only

a father, a religious cosmology that gives value only to the

elements traditionally or symbolically associated with fathers,

maleness and masculinity.

 

Thus, our religions, and our culture have been dominated (and that's

the right word in this case) by rationality and logic, and a de-

valuing of intuition and mystery. We're concerned more with what the

mind can learn and discover, than what the heart or soul already

knows. We're warriors in both our culture and our religion. We're

concerned about getting it right. We want absolutes. We create

cultural and religious institutions that seek control and order, and

are willing to sacrifice spontaneity and creativity in order to

achieve that end. We're not above using fear as a tactic, and sin,

and guilt. We value individuality over community. We separate mind

from matter and then value mind more highly. We separate reason from

emotion, and value reason. And we separate humanity, most

grieviously, from nature, and value human wants above nature's needs.

 

This is not true of all religions, but it is true of the Judeo-

Christian religions that most of us were born into. And that

religious tradition continuing with Islam, has been the dominant

force in defining cultural, economic, and political values

worldwide, even among people who follow other religions.

 

To claim for oneself a deep and nurturing relationship with a

spiritual mother, requires an intense act of personal growth and

development, when the formerly motherless child eventually, as an

adult, seeks out and finds a way to fill in a spiritual gap she or

he has been missing. We aren't born with divine mothers. We have to,

later in life, go out and create our own mothers, if we would have

them.

 

The situation, spiritually, is as tragic as would be the physical

situation of an actual baby being born into our world and then

denied the loving attention associated with mothering. And of course

I don't mean that a male parent can't also provide these qualities.

It's mothering that's essential, not necessarily a mother.

 

But imagine a baby who is born unexpectedly and violently out of the

womb. The only universe it has known, dark and wet, muted and warm

is suddenly replaced by a brightly lit, nosiy, unbounded space,

filled with air, not water. The child's first reaction is certainly

terror, and an overwhelming sense of abandonment and loneliness.

Some methods of birthing attempt to mitigate these responses, but I

doubt they can be removed entirely. The birthing process itself

describes a sudden and complete world change for the child.

 

Quickly the mother moves to ease that transition. She comforts the

child. She assures the child that it is safe. She holds the child

against her chest and shows that the soothing sound of the heartbeat

is still there. The child is not alone but is held and loved. The

child is not abandoned. Mother is there.

 

But what if mother is not there? We know the trauma this causes

actual children, the wounded psyches and shattered lives that

follow. But spiritually this is the situation for all of us, and our

religions and culture generally.

 

Born without a spiritual mother our initial experience of spiritual

terror is confirmed not eased. The world is a scary place, we should

be afraid. Our patriarchal religions and governments confirm our

sense of terror, encourage our terror, and are not above using our

terror and even manufacturing new terrors in order to keep us

fearful, and thus dependent on the strong father who's symbolic mode

is not comfort but protection, not healing, but war-making.

 

Born without a spiritual mother our initial experience of spiritual

loneliness and abandonment is confirmed not eased. We are alone,

says the religious myth. The world around us, the Earth, is a

strange and alien place, not our real home, and of no use to us in

healing our lonely spirits. We have been cut off and cast out. The

patriarchal religious story is designed to re-unite us with a long-

ago paradise we have lost, very different from the religious story a

divine mother would tell us, and that many of us know intuitively,

that we never were actually separated from her paradise, that we

live in it now.

 

An actual child, born with fear and loneliness, is comforted by a

mother, who teaches the child that they are safe and loved, and

eventually the child quiets her or his initial anxieties and learns

to trust. The spiritual child, born with fear and loneliness that

are never addressed and are even confirmed as the truth of our

existence, never learns to trust. Instead, spiritually, we go

through life distrustful of messages that say the world is a holy

and good place, that other people with different ideas are not

threats to us but can be friends and helpers on our own journey,

that this isn't after all a journey you have to do by yourself, but

it's a journey we all do as companions with each other. Without a

spiritual mother we have forgotten that the goal of the journey is

not storming heaven, conquering some spiritual land out there, but

the goal is already with us, has always been with us.

 

Unlike an actual child who even if they are born into a world

without mothering, still has the experience of mother in the womb.

We spiritual children have lost even that. We don't have that

spiritual sense of floating peacefully in the universe, a part of

all that is, linked directly to the heart of the universe through an

umbilical cord, and relying on that strong and sure connection for

all our sustenance. We may feel that spiritual connection to the

divine, intuitively, but it's not a metaphor taught or encouraged by

our religions. For patriarchal religions, traditionally, God is

distant, majestic, transcendent. God is an other, unapproachable,

vastly different from and far beyond us. God the father loves us and

showers us with gifts, but not with himself. The gifts stand between

he and us. While the Divine mother, the one who's womb has been

symbolically denied us, gives directly of herself, no separation,

indeed in the womb we don't even feel that it is me and her, it is

just us, a singular, satisfying sense of being.

 

That's what we lost when we lost our spiritual mothers. We're a long

way from home. A long way from home.

 

I'm not dissing the male and masculine god, in this sermon. He's

important. He's good. Masculine qualities, many of them, are also

helpful, enlightening, healing, and positive. And many of the

negatives associated with masculinity are not actually inherent in

masculinity but are aberrations based on a sick and broken culture

which has short-changed men from their own health and wholeness by

labeling some of his true self feminine and therefore to be

supressed, unnaturally, from his personality.

 

Women, too, of course, are harmed by this de-valuing of the

feminine. They feel it in their own persons. But women, too, the

children of only a male god, and the inheritors of three thousand

years of patriarchal culture also re-form that culture in their own

lives. Women, and men, are all victims and victimizers. Women assent

to a patriarchal religion and even encourage it. Fearful, lonely,

women look to a powerful patriarchal government, support its

masculine perspective even as it destroys them, and vote the men who

will perpetuate it back into office.

 

Enlightened religious people know there isn't really a divine father

in the sky. Maleness and masculinity are simply ways of talking

about a divine energy that is far beyond categories of sex and

gender. What that energy truly is, is a source and guarantor of our

values. Some might say, what we value in our lives we assign to

divinity. Others might say, me among them, that the contents of

divinity define our values. But without addressing the theological

question, the point for today's purpose, is that what we value is

associated with divinity, and what we call divine tells us what to

value.

 

In speaking of divinity only in masculine terms, what we are saying

is that we only value, or at least primarily value, only those

things that we also call masculine. That God is masculine, and has

been for thousands of years, doesn't mean at least to enlightened

people that God is a man, but has meant, that qualities associated

with femininity are devalued.

 

So when I say that we have suffered these three thousand years

without a divine mother, I don't mean that we need to transform the

divine father into a divine mother. The divine hasn't ever been a

father, but it has been associated only with masculine values. And I

don't mean that we need to reintroduce the divine mother to stand

alongside the divine father as a divine couple. What I mean is that

we need to re-associate the unsexed and de-gendered divinity with

feminine qualities so that we can value them, too.

 

Eventually this has to happen on a global religious and cultural

scale. We simply aren't going to survive as a species unless we

accomplish that, and as we destroy ourselves we might very well drag

the entire planet down with us. But today, rather than tackling that

global issue, I want to suggest that we simply tackle it personally.

 

To do this, I want to remind us of two spiritual truths.

 

The first is that the divine itself hasn't actually changed just

because we have been ignoring half of it. The divine wasn't a

goddess who then became a god, and we don't need to change her/him

back. It always was a collection of all the values we value, both

those we call feminine and those we call masculine. The divine is

already complete. The divine already speaks to us as both mother and

father. It is our ears that need to open. It is our spiritual

practice that needs to change, not the divine nature. The divine has

not been impoverished these last three thousand years, only our

spiritual imaginations have been impoverished.

 

The other spiritual truth to remember is that we are, each of us,

divinity. The divine does not exist far off in space or heaven and

doles itself out to us only with infrequent revelations or rare

scripture or uncommon miracles. The divine exists in and through and

with all things, us included. It speaks through all things, to all

things, and from all things. The divine is all things. We are made

of divinity. We participate in divinity. In the words of the mystic

poet James Broughton, " I am it and you are it and he is it and she

is it, and they are that and we are that and this is it and that is

that. "

 

So the ever-existing but long neglected mother exists, and exists

inside you. You are she. She is as close as your heart, and your

fingertips. You touch her, when you touch anything. And whatever you

touch she touches also. Her spirit fills your spirit. Her nurture

and care are your nurture and care. Her mysterious sense of

intuitive knowing is your own talent for intuitive knowing. Her

sensitivity to emotions, both feeling her own feelings and feeling

the feelings of others, is your own sensitivity to emotions. She is

there within, the caregiver, the healer, the pain-bearer, the

patient lover, the generous giver, the feeder, the helper, the

dreamer, the creative, the one who draws in with warm embrace and

sends out with hope and loving prayer.

 

Though religion tells us we have no divine mother we know that isn't

true. We walk across her back with every step. She is the earth

beneath us and the holy feminine qualities within us.

 

We don't need religion to give us a divine mother, because religion

hasn't the power to take her away. We can invoke her for ourselves,

if we need to. We can be our own divine mothers, we who were denied

a divine mother at birth. Seek her within, as she silently but

expectantly waits for you. Call her out, and invite her spirit and

grace to be your own. Nurture her. Let her nurture you. Let her

teach you the gifts of the feminine that our religions and culture

haven't taught us. Let her heal the wounds a stunted psychic growth

has made in all of us, correcting a masculinity perverted by

denigrating essential aspects of itself, and filling in the yearning

holes where something important has been lost. Learn to trust again

through her renewed presence that you need not be afraid; the world

is a mother's womb growing life and enfolding all. You need not feel

lonely for indeed you are never alone in a universe, like a womb

where there is only us, no other. You are not a motherless child,

for the mother you seek has always been close, connected by an

unsevered umbilical cord that starts at your navel, and leads inward

to your own soul.

 

The Divine Mother

© 2006 by Rev. Ricky Hoyt