In Her Image — God Is Better Than We Think She Is, Part 6
Can we see ourselves as Divine-image bearers?
By Anni Ponder
“I yearn for the day
someone will look at me and say
‘You certainly do look like your Mother.’”
One night about a year or so before my mother died, I was tucking her into bed and gently grasped her hand, cradling it in my own.
“We are so alike,” I mused. “Look at our hands. They have the same form, the same tender grace. I am made from your body, and I will always carry you in mine.”
She smiled feebly, her body weakened from the cancer that was emptying her from the inside out. I knew I could lose her at any moment, and it felt so good to recognize I would always have her with me in some form or another.
“Yes, babe,” she whispered. “You are made from my body.”
This was a profound moment for me—it was the first time I realized I resembled her in any tangible way. Most of my life, I’ve been told I take after my dad, whom I have always loved and adored, and gotten along with more easily than I ever did with my mom. But here, now, in the guest room in my home, for the first time I recognized how much I am made in my mother’s image.
Fifteen years later, that is truer than ever. I see her looking back at me in the mirror, her worry-lines now present on my own forehead. My hands, now much more speckled and weathered, tell the story of my lineage more with each passing season. I suppose there is truth to what we say, half-joking, half-despairing: I am turning into my mother.
Well, physically anyway. Emotionally and spiritually, there’s a different story for a different day.
I’m thinking about all this today in relation to Carol Lynn Pearson’s poem “A Motherless House.” I found it in her collection of poems Finding Mother God, and I cannot stop returning to the line about wanting to resemble my Mother—not my biological mother, by the way, but my Eternal Mother. This won’t surprise you if you’ve hung out with me lately or read or listened to anything I’ve created recently. I’m speaking of the Holy Spirit, whom I revere as Mama God, The Ineffable One, the Source and Birther of Us All. (If this is your first glimpse of my work, I encourage you to read the other pieces in this series, starting with the first one, so you can get an idea of how I arrived at this while still identifying with Christianity.)
Back to Carol Lynn’s poem. I have long felt a yearning to have the freedom within my faith to identify as a Daughter of the Mother, but in the traditional view of the all-male Godhead, that simply hasn’t been possible. Until recently, I didn’t even have the freedom to wonder where the Divine Mother was at all.
But the ache for Her was there. The deep desire to know that what is innate to me derives from a Feminine Source has been here all along. I have longed to affirm that what is native and true and organic to me is not only a gift from my Heavenly Father, but also and perhaps more importantly, a divine offering from Someone who understands femininity because She embodies it.
I have felt lonely, left out, unmoored, thinking we are all Children of the Father, but nowhere in sight has there been His Counterpart, His Companion, my Mother.
My house has been Motherless, or so I have thought, and I have been so lonesome.
Thanks be to God that the story does not end in despair. Today I am especially grateful for that mysterious conversation between the Godhead in Genesis 1, where God says to God, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature,” and then God proceeds to make us male and female.
This changes everything for me. I am made . . . in Her image?
Yes. Indeed.
Wow.
This past Christmas, my friend gave me this little candleholder shaped like an old woman cradling the world in her arms. What a gorgeous thing to do: to gather, to hold, to nurture. What a Divine act of love, to embrace and delight in that which is held.
This, to me, is the essence of femininity. It is who I am at my core.
Not that menfolk can’t embrace or hold or nurture. (Also, not at all to exclude those who don’t identify along binary lines.) We all have the capacity for this kind of care, for this beautiful expression of love.
My point is that we all get it from our Mother. We each have traits and habits and tendencies that point back to Her. Like my freckled, crepe-papery hands, there are parts of us that undeniably reflect the Mother’s image, whether we are able to acknowledge it or not.
Of course this might open up a larger conversation about what is innately feminine to begin with, and I’m not here to say I have compiled an exhaustive list—as if such a thing could exist! Rather, it’s been a good exercise for me to ponder (ahem) what is feminine, and re-discover and remember that all good things derive from God, especially my tendency to create, nurture, protect, collaborate, and embrace. It’s been helpful for me to look at myself and call out these natural energies and bring them to the surface.
I hope it’s starting to show. I hope the longer I grow and mature, the more like Her I am becoming. Like the reflection on a rippled pond, I hope that when you look at me, you are able to see more and more of my Mother’s image.
