MOTHER GOD
by Forrest Church
May 13, 2007
Nothing is more basic to human nature than our search for ultimate meaning. For 95% of all Americans, both churched and unchurched, the foundation for this search is experiencing and building a relationship with God.
Over the past year or so, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett have each published best selling screeds against God and religion, up in holy scientific arms at such abject credulity. Journalist Gary Wolf calls their growing little band, "The Church of the Non-Believers." Dawkins places the probability that God exists at near zero. Harris says that religious wars will lead to an almost certain Armageddon. Dennett calls religion child abuse.
Christopher Hitchens has now joined the rising chorus in an entertaining book entitled, God is Not Great. Destroying God and Religion the way Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins and Harris do is like shooting plastic ducks at a penny arcade. They take religion at its worst—which is very bad indeed—belief at its most credulous, and God as literally as does the most purblind fundamentalist, and stir the three together into an unholy witches' brew. Yet I can certainly understand their motivation.
Some half of all Americans apparently reject evolution, including three of ten Republican presidential candidates (a group that seems to offer some corroboration of this belief). Not to mention that religion is now, more dangerously than ever before, the single most divisive element in the global body politic. That said, the greatest horrors of the 20th century were powered by secular states, either Fascist or Communist—Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia—with priests more likely to be caught in the pyre than guilty of torching it.
Save for the particulars of their creed, the fundamentalists of the left are almost indistinguishable from their arch-enemies, the fundamentalists of the right. They damn their opponents just as gleefully, are no less lacking in humility, and add to the fires they claim to be putting out.
As most of you know by now, when someone boasts to me that she doesn't believe in God, I ask her to tell me a little about the God she doesn't believe in, because I probably don't believe in Him either. It's easy to torch a straw God. Those who do so appear to believe that by destroying God the Father, Almighty Lord and King, Master and Judge of the Universe, in short, by destroying the same, sometimes monstrous, idol that fundamentalists enshrine on their altars, they are putting religion itself in its grave.
In fact—calling themselves "Lights" to distinguish themselves from their benighted neighbors—they instead miss religion's three most important elements (awe, humility, and compassion) almost entirely. In our cosmic ignorance, by the way, we are far more alike than we differ in our knowledge. Today's science will look like abject superstition two hundred years from now, yet I'll wager that people are still being saved—yes, and damned—by Jesus, and the Buddha, and Mohammad.
Some in the scientific community have had it with Dawkin's and Dennett's brand of anti-religious reductionism. Dana Ivey sent me an interesting piece from the Dallas Observer yesterday. "Roy Abraham Varghese has a God equation," it begins. "He sees it in a grain of sand."
"In his 2003 book The Wonder of the World: A Journey From Modern Science to the Mind of God, Varghese (founder of The Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas) laments the loss of wonder. Ô[T]he modern world knows little of wonder," he writes. "Some Grinch has stolen the magic that makes us wonder and turned the paradise we call the world into a desolate wilderness.'"
Truth be told, I once participated in this very phenomenon. Back in the 1970s, when I began preaching from this pulpit, I avoided using the word God entirely. It embarrassed me. Above all, I didn't want anyone to mistake what I might mean by God for the tiny, judgmental, anthropomorphic God of so many true-believers. I believed only in things I could parse and thereby comprehend. I approached the creation as a taxidermist not a worshipper. Even the most fragile and beautiful manifestations of the creation, I examined as a blindered lepidopterist might a butterfly. I netted, chloroformed and mounted them for observation. After long study of my favorite specimens, I could only conclude that butterflies don't fly.
Over the years, challenged by the demands of love and death, I had to make room in my theology for a more capacious, if unfathomable, power. I had to clear a place for mystery on the altar of my hearth, which before I had crowded with icons to knowledge. The eighteenth century classical lithographs of architectural drawings that I favored while at Divinity School could no longer divert my awareness from the cracking plaster behind them and between. I needed something far more arresting and humbling, something more like Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night."
I soon discovered, whenever I wished to soar a little higher into the mystery of the heavens or dive a little deeper into the unfathomable sea of being, I lacked the vocabulary necessary to describe such a journey. Stripped of religious symbol, my attempts at poetry were at best prosaic. Of greater concern, without transcendental symbols to relate the sublime to the ordinary, my spiritual life was parched, my well of inspiration, dry. Only by sacrificing a bit of pride, and petty pride at that, could I even begin to commune with the muses or touch an angel's wing.
So it was, haltingly at first and then with slowly gathering confidence, I began to employ God-talk—not to define the supernatural, but to divine the super in the natural. Cultivating as best I could a higher sense of wonder and deeper sense of humility, I grew comfortable with Rudolph Otto's depiction of "The Holy" as a "mysterium tremens et fascinans," a tremendous (both awe and fear inspiring) and fascinating mystery. With Paul Tillich, to avoid idolatry, I began to think in terms of God beyond God. With Ralph Waldo Emerson, I explored transcendentalism and played with the idea of the oversoul. And with the great Romantic poets, within nature and human nature, I sought experience of the sublime. "God is not God's name," I now say. "God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each."
But I also returned to the scriptures, listening with my Hebrew forbears for the still, small voice, and heeding Jesus' teaching that the Realm of God is not a future state, but here, right now, within us, in our very midst. Through parable and paradox, seeking evidence of the divine in the ordinary, I began to uncover little hints of eternity in time, tracings of the divine within the ordinary.
When Jesus said that the Realm of God is in a mustard seed, he perceived the divine spark in a tiny kernel of the creation. The Realm of God is in a seed, in an egg. Two of Jesus' parables begin, "The Kingdom of God is like a woman who . . .." If the height of religious goodness lies in deeds of love and compassion, even as its nadir rests in Holy War, we might well turn from God the Lord and Father of Mankind to God the Mother, creator, comforter, and healer. Each of these powers is no less great than the powers of sovereignty and judgment, but rather than damning, they save.
Roy Abraham Vargas posits that "perhaps the most confounding puzzle undermining the theory that life and intelligence is fully explainable in material terms is the origin of reproduction. ÔHow did reproduction start?" he asks. "'Nobody dares discuss that.'"
"This is where evolutionary materialism backs itself into a wall," says Mark Stuertz in his story in the Dallas Observer. "Reproduction is the engine driving the whole evolutionary process. "How is it that the first living beings had the power of replication?" he writes. "How is it that life came with this fundamentally purposive capability preinstalled?" Darwin himself admitted in Origin of Species his whole theory rests on the existence of an unexplained being already in possession of reproductive powers "into which life was first breathed."
Following much the same logic to its cosmic conclusion, God became Goddess for a stretch in history, when the greatest power—which our forbearers projected onto a cosmic screen to divine the secret of the Holy—was not yet deemed a Lord or King, with a mighty army to quell enemies and ensure safety, but instead the renewal of the earth, in cycles of sowing and reaping. The fecund earth, Mother earth, with her supernatural attendants, gave life, even as a mother gives life through birth and nurtures life through love. To tend the earth and keep it was the essence of goddess worship, not to lord over the earth and defend it. God the Mother gave birth and then tended her children with unconditional love.
Imaging God as mother offers a needed corrective to the Big Man in the Sky. The Latin root, "re-ligere," means literally "to bind together." Much organized religion doesn't bind God's children together under a single code of loving kindness and kinship, but instead divides one tribe from another. To do so is to practice the kind of religion that damns, not the kind that saves. Mother God saves.
Think about the words we use to express compassion. We are compassionate when we console—console: literally to stand beside another in his or her aloneness. And when we commiserate, when we open our hearts to share the misery a loved one or neighbor is going through. And when we offer comfort—the word comfort meaning to bring to another our strength. At heart, consolation, commiseration, and comfort are feminine not masculine values. Men can be compassionate too, of course, but when compassion is listed among a set of traits that people are asked to define as male or female, almost every respondent places in on the distaff side of the ledger.
Many who call themselves religious have narrowed their theology down to a straitjacketed literalistic system, a way of salvation brokered through unqualified acceptance of a certain narrow set of faith propositions, drawn from one tribe or another's ancient story. To spell out and enforce their creeds, they employ a linear, classically male, left-brained way of thinking. Again, the chief effect of such religion is to divide (sheep from goats, saved from damned), not to unite or bring together. Being religious in the most capacious sense of the word—that which binds us, all of us, one to another as kith and kin—can be completely cancelled out by belonging to a patriarchal group that believes it alone has the truth and that every one else is damned to Hell. How different this is from embracing the creation, where the only books of revelation are the book of nature and the book of human nature—the books of sowing and reaping, of seeds coming to fruition—the wonder of birth and the imperative to nurture. The cycles of nature and the miracle of birth induce a deeper sense of wonder and awe than any salvation (or anti-salvation) narrative can possibly begin to offer.
This may sound like too broad a definition of what it means to be religious; certainly it is too broad for Richard Dawkins and company, but it is nonetheless an ancient and honorable one. Vargas is right. Beauty surrounds us and we constantly miss it.
To awaken, we must somehow rediscover our kinship with all creation. Albert Schweitzer spoke of this principle as reverence for life. We are a part of, not apart from, a vast and mysterious living system. Mystics of every faith proclaim this sense of oneness. Thus the Brahman-Atman relationship of Hinduism, the sense of Nirvana of the Buddhists, and the concept of Jesus that "I and the Father are One." All of these are examples of mystical oneness. But there is no experience in life to match the pregnant sense of oneness expressed in carrying, birthing, and nurturing an otherwise helpless, yet utterly miraculous child. The mother-child bond is soon broken, of course. We each become independent agents. But whenever we remember how intimately we are woven and how interdependent we truly are, we return, if not to the womb, certainly to the altar of motherhood, the altar of creation, the altar of unconditional love.
The great religious prophets have all recognized that beyond the intellectual realm lies a numinous oneness that transcends all differences, call it the Holy, the divine Spirit, God—it doesn't matter. The mystic oneness of person to person, of mother to child and then brother to sister, is but a simple expression of the greater mystical oneness of all existence in the great chain of being. Theologians may reason their way to oneness, but mothers know it by heart. Extended from hearth to altar, this sense of cosmic kinship cannot help but uplift and transform our personal lives. Such religion exalts self and other alike by placing us together in divine kinship as children of one great mystery, children of God the mother, creator, consoler and comforter, God of love and compassion, to whom we owe all due and reverent praise.
So Happy Mother's Day. It may not be a religious holiday yet, but it certainly ought to be!
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.