Mama God—God is Better Than We Think She Is, Part 2
Can we really lean into God our Mother?
By Anni Ponder
“Would any seed take root if it had not believed
His promise, when God said,
’Dears, I will rain. I will help you. I will turn into
warmth and effulgence,
I will be the Mother I am
and let you draw from
My body
and rise, and
rise.”
If you were raised in any sort of fundamental or evangelical Christian tradition, you might have serious questions about the validity of the Mama God thing. For that matter, it might seem like downright heresy.
“Nonsense! All the mention of God in scripture is strictly male. When Jesus talked about His Father and the Spirit, He used masculine pronouns. There is no basis for this feminine divinity stuff,” you might reason.
I get it. Followers of Jesus have long been warned not to fall into that goddess-worshipping trap. After all, isn’t that why the ancient Israelites kept getting into trouble? Didn’t they go after foreign gods and goddesses? And isn’t that where child sacrifice came in?
Hold that thought for a moment. I want to share a piece of my story.
When I was young, I learned God was male: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Why should women be equal to men in worth and power?
They told me women came in second to men, and it made sense, really. If there was no female representation in the Godhead, why should we women be equal to men in worth and power?
I learned that it would be my job to submit to my husband. He wouldn’t have to submit to me, but he should love me like Jesus loves the church. I figured that would be enough.
For a long time, it was. I, like so many of my peers, went along with the patriarchal perception of God, and never gave a thought to whether there might be more. It never occurred to me that I might be missing something.
Well, it never occurred to my conscious mind, anyway. But now that I’m walking into the territory of Mama God, my body is telling me I’ve been longing for Her my whole life.
I have burned to know that I am made in God’s image just as much as any man is.
I have ached to feel that God’s nature is reflected in my own maternal nurture.
I have desperately wanted to hear the affirmation that my femininity is patterned after Her own. That there is holiness to my way of being.
But all along, I silently agreed that women were somehow secondary, because scripture is so clear on our “role” (a word not actually found anywhere in the canon, by the way) as helpers and support staff.
I can’t tell you how damaging this was to me. The notion that I am a second-class citizen in my home or church, simply because I am a woman, has done incredible harm. I’ll save the specifics for another day, but maybe you can relate to what perpetual secondarity does to a person. It nearly destroyed me.
Thank God Almighty that has begun to change!
Let’s get back to the question you might have about whether or not it’s heresy to believe the Spirit is our Mother as much as God is our Father. And let me clarify one thing first: I’m not a trained theologian or an expert on ancient Middle Eastern culture and language. I don’t have any fancy credentials or special authority. I’m simply, as one author so elegantly said, a thinking woman who isn’t afraid to ask hard questions. And, probably like you, I’m a seeker on a quest for a more authentic way of being.
Since I’m not a theologian, I don’t want to address this from a study of language, culture, or history. I’d rather offer you a few of the questions that have led me along this path. If they’re helpful, great. If not, just let them go.
The first question I encountered on this road came more than a decade ago: Do I believe anything about God that is not true? At the time, that seemed like utter heresy. I was grounded in my fundamental, Bible-thumping faith, and I was confident that my church had all the theology anyone could ever need. How could I possibly believe anything false about God? But still, the question came, and I agreed to hold it.
Not long after, another followed. One day as I was driving home, God asked me How would you relate to Me if I were a woman? I nearly rear-ended the car in front of me, I was so startled. I didn’t know what to do with that question, so I kept it hidden deep within my heart for a long while, only rarely taking it out to examine it and turn it over in my mind. But it was there, a silent seed growing in my heart’s soil.
More recently, I was in my favorite bookstore when a provocative title caught my eye. Mary Magdalene Revealed: The First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel, and the Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet by Meggan Watterson was right there on the shelf, daring me to come closer. My first thought was What? There’s a gospel by Mary Magdalene?! Why haven’t I been told about this before? I bought the book, took it home, and began to devour it.
All of a sudden, I felt a fire ignite.
All of a sudden, I felt a fire ignite: Where have all the women writers been all along? Why aren’t there any books in the Bible penned by women? I looked at our bookshelf and began to notice the overwhelming majority of male authors. Where are the women? Why haven’t we been invited to tell our stories? We have been here all along! Why haven’t our voices been heard?
I was sitting on the couch next to my husband, and started asking these questions out loud. I think I might have been shouting a little. He looked alarmed.
Those questions led the way to more. Why is it that Christian women are expected to submit to our husbands? Really, why? What is it about being a woman that means we need to be led? What about a man is more worthy of leadership? Why can’t we be equal partners?
As you might imagine, the questions didn’t stop there. Soon, I found my gaze turning to the “all male” Godhead. Wait. If God is our Father, and Jesus is our Brother, what does that make the Spirit? An Uncle? That doesn’t make any sense.
And then it hit me: Why not our Mother?
Boom.
God our Mother?
Heresy!
But.
The questions kept coming. So I started to dig. And what I found is that I’m not the only one wondering about the femininity of God. It turns out that there is all sorts of evidence for this buried in scripture (see the first blog post in this series for a little taste). And plenty of historical believers and church founders (even Thomas Aquinas himself!) wrote and talked about Mother God.
This led me to writers like Sue Monk Kidd (check out The Dance of the Dissident Daughter), Carol Lynn Pearson with her beautiful volume Finding Mother God—Poems to Heal the World, and Daneen Akers, whose gorgeous children’s book Dear Mama God makes me want to weep happy tears. These writers and more are way ahead of me on this path, and I found their questions and insights a welcome balm to my questing soul.
And so that brings me here, wondering along with you about the mystery of God. I do not have all the answers, but I am so comfortable knowing I’m being led deeper and deeper by the Spirit. She is, after all, such a beautiful and trustworthy guide.
If any of this is resonating with you, I invite you to keep wondering. I know it can be hard to ask questions that challenge the status quo, but if you’re anything like me, there isn’t a way around it. We have to be honest with ourselves and let the questions keep working on us. Otherwise, we just cannot grow.
