There Is Both Father and Mother God 


Why we must pray to both God the Father and God the Mother. 

It came to me in meditation this morning, one of those lightning bolt recognitions that come after decades of searching. Archimedes, Kekule, move over. I have had a eureka experience. I experienced the absolute necessity of praying to both Father and Mother God. In my last blog, I talked about the influence of Paramahansa Yogananda in my life, and how I maintain in my life two practices side by side. On the one hand, I have my decades of dedication to Christian churches, culminating in the membership of my partner and me at Trinity Episcopal Church. On the other hand, I have my decades of dedication to the meditation practices of the Self Realization Fellowship, founded by the realized master, Yogananda. Suddenly, I realized that during all those years, I struggled fitfully towards finding EITHER God the Father OR God the Mother in my spiritual experience. For me, God has always been an ineffable presence before my mind, impossible to describe to others clearly, yet a present presence nevertheless. It is God to whom I turn when all human help fails. I know that working together, God and I can solve any problem I face, even death.

Of course, I have always been praying to God the Father all my life. I learned the Lord's Prayer on my father and mother's knee. I said the Lord's Prayer as soon as I was old enough before I went to bed each night. I became increasingly alienated from the literalist Biblical interpretation of my parents in my teens and proclaimed myself an atheist. But the concept of God as Father was deeply ingrained. Then as a gay activist in my early thirties, I began to read in feminist theory. One of the revolutionary concepts that I encountered was of Mother God. Simultaneously I found myself back at the Metropolitan Community Church, now historically famous for offering Christian succor to gays and lesbians. At the MCC I attended, they were still in the grips of a patriarchal image of God, or at least, the liturgy was. These feminist writings that I was reading at the time challenged and frightened me. But one day, summoning up the dynamic courage that I had in those days, I walked into that church and said the "Our Mother" instead of the "Our Father." It was liberating, if only because nothing bad happened. I had thrown off the limitations of a cultural taboo.

But when I was introduced to the Self Realization teachings in 1979 by John and Rosanda, I began a practice there of primarily praying to the Divine Mother. I didn't see it at the time, but God had brought to me two halves of a complete practice which still didn't quite make one whole. This morning, I figured out what the problem was. There IS no best portal to God. God has all the good qualities inherent in being a good parent, and a whole lot more. God moves mountains, God does windows. We need to remember that viewing God as a human superparent is both a good and a limited analogy. It's good, because models of parenting, both male and female, are both widespread and dominant in our culture. Parenting models are a touchstone on which the spiritual seeker can rely in building a relationship to that which created him or her. It's limited because no matter how important it is, creating and raising a baby lovingly to adulthood is only a pale reflection of God's creation of human temples of divine appreciation—the spiritual correlate of being raised to adulthood.

So, as I said, I was sitting this morning before my alter—on which rests pictures of both Jesus Christ and Bhagavan Krishna—and trying to be a temple of silence for the appreciation of God. Cars drove by, the cat begged for food, the furnace turned on and off, my foot hurt a bit, I felt guilty about not turning to the days activities. Finally, I remembered the stories of Yogananda about how he pleaded for the Divine Mother to "Come to me, come to me, just for once come to me. Night and day, night and day, I look for Thee night and day. Will my days fly away, without seeing Thee, Oh Lord?" And then "Engrossed is the bee of my mind on the blue lotus feet of my Divine Mother." That's when the insight clicked in, and I saw clearly that these prayers to Father God or to Mother God are only lenses.

I'm forever telling stories about my own mother in here, and while she was definitely an earthy mother, she was also imbued with devotion to God. Over all these decades mom and I have been talking about and around God from these two different perspectives: mom a devoted fundamentalist Christian even unto death, and I the kind of superecumenical Earth Religion nut that worries the fundamentalist so. The last time Stephen and I were home to visit mom, we were having a discussion, and it was dripping over with mom's patriarchal image of God. It was a discussion and not an argument; I have mastered that level of parental respect. I don't know where it came from, but I said to her, "Mom! God does not have a penis! What would He do with it?" Well, it floored her, but bless her stout old heart, she regained her composure, and she seriously entertained my outrageous proposition. And what she was sort of mumbling about was that, well, yes, God would have a penis, but I could see that in her heart, she got my point. Conversation and activity flowed on, and Stephen and I were once again defeated by the Scrabble Mother God.

Finally, the revelation I had was this. We MUST pray to both God the Father and God the Mother. We need the analogy of divine parent to human parent to help us through our spiritual childhood and adolescence. However, when we finally reach the shores of spiritual maturity, we but see through the metaphor darkly to the true object of our intent: our personal relationship to God. 

Posted: Wed - February 15, 2006 at 08:28 AM          

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