On Divinity
Write about the closest you’ve ever felt to God.
Damn this exercise! It’s been in nearly every book on writing that I’ve read in the last 15 years or so, and I’ve read many. I never even tried to do it, stiffening against the impossibility of it all, or maybe the audacity of anyone even suggesting that it can be done outright. I mean, isn’t that what I’m doing anyway as a writer? How does one - anyone! - write about the Divine?
So no, I won’t write about God.
I have nothing against the guy, but perhaps that’s the issue after all, for me: God the Father. And let’s not even go to that place of defensiveness, that place where somebody says, “Oh, well really God doesn’t have a gender so… He’s neither. Or, errr, He’s both. (Both? Or neither?) Well, yeah. God just IS.”
Okay, alright. Whatever. C’mon, we all know it’s true - God’s the Dad. And it’s great. He’s, like, the Universe’s greatest little league coach. We need him dearly. We’re a gendered race, so of course we ascribe gender to the Divine. I love the idea of leaning into a big Dad God, His work-worn hands (after all, most of the world agrees that He did create everything) holding me, strong and sure, when I can’t hold myself upright. In this business of being a human, we need Dad God.
It’s the rest that gets tricky. The words I need to say, the part of my heart that am offering you, isn’t really welcomed; the moment your eyes read “Goddess” or “female Divine,” some part of you laughs at me, assumptively snickering to yourself about my straw-grasping attempts at bringing my feminist hocus-pocus into your faith.
So go ahead. Laugh, or sigh, or whatever you need to do. Get it out. I’m so very used to it and you won’t hurt my feelings.
Done? Nope, not yet, I can tell.
Now? Alright.
So this is why it’s tricky. We’re weird about this whole thing. We like our God male, or at least non-gendered, especially in public. And like I’ve already mentioned, I love Dad God. He taught me how to ride without training wheels. And it’s that love for Him that makes me wonder: in all of our gratitude and reverence and awe, why have we relegated Him to single Fatherhood?
If we can recognize that we perceive the Divine as a whole as non-gendered, and who we call “God” as Dad, then it’s not hard to see that we’ve been unfair. The Divine has given us power, and I’m not talking free will, here: I’m talking free thought. All that we’ve used to conceptualize the Divine employs free thought. The Divine is the Divine - and our renderings, our mental images, our practices and rituals and dialogue can never change the essence of Divinity no matter how we shape or shift these things.
We conceptualize the Divine for one reason and one only: we need and crave that special, personal, unique and attainable connection. What’s most curious is how complacently we accept the pre-formed qualities of Dad God, imagined or felt by people so long gone, and yet we deny ourselves the opportunity to commune with the Divine on a new plane with renewed clarity. We do this by ruling Her out.
So who is this Mother? Well, that’s the beauty. She is anything and everything we need her to be. She can heal the mothering wounds within us, or She can serve to deepen our relationship with the Divine through a strong human bond that we already feel (for our mothers, or as mothers). This is part of the gift of free thought - we get to conceptualize Her from scratch.
She doesn’t even need a name yet. We’re funny like that, and it’s alright. She doesn’t mind, and He certainly doesn’t either. Whatever They call One Another is none of our business.
Instead, my instinct is to consider giving Her qualities. What might She be to you? Sure, we’ve got the Goddesses: Buddhist, Hindi, Greco-Roman, Celtic, Norse; we’ve got Native American variations of Mother Earth and the neo-Pagan renderings; there’s Mary and the canonized female saints; heck, we’ve even got Mrs. Clause, Tinkerbell, and the tooth fairy to look to. But these come pre-formed. We have inner associations with them which, if we carry them for too long, serve only to remove us from the relationship with Her that we may need.
So take a moment. What do you need Her to be? Is She fierce, destructive? Or is She soft and nurturing? Perhaps, much like Him, She is both, and much more, exactly when the time is right.
Does She scold your wrong-doings by blocking your way, or sweep the path behind you clean when you’ve led yourself astray? Does She come to you in dreams? And if She does, does He come to? Or does She replace Him in your mind?
If you feel a sort of panic at that potential - that partnering Dad God will actually displace Him - recognize that it stems from conceptions of theism. The greatest gift we can give ourselves is the Truth. If we try to parse the Truth from what has been said by others, before, in a time that does not translate to this one, we may find the essence of this widespread reluctance to open ourselves to an even more palpable communion with the Divine.
In every monotheistic faith on earth there is a child of God, a prophet, a messenger. We accept this comfortably, turning to the word of God through these human conduits. Does this split the Divine, or threaten God: the fact that we sometimes need a conduit through which to reach Him? In our constant preoccupation with our unique human condition, we can forget the grace that we possess as creations of the Divine. Essentially, yes, we are humans, we are fallible. But anything that comes from something else claims the original matrix as part of its own. If the Divine created you, then you are Divine. When we forget this simplicity, we look to those whose grace, we believe, has been unmarred: spiritual leaders, the writers of holy books, and those in power within spiritual institutions.
Communion with the Divine in this way is once removed, and we are frequently grateful even for that; we do not wish to feel alone in these skins. This is one of the oldest monotheistic strategies: we hear Let me tell you what God has said and we are comforted. So why feel awkward or shameful in giving ourselves the opportunity to hear the Divine directly as perhaps we’ve never tried - through a Mother’s voice?
If we allow that Mama Goddess comfort as we’ve so easily allowed Dad God’s, we may find that it is She who cleans the puke of our souls off Her nightgown at one a.m. without getting annoyed for a second, and that it is She who tucks $20 bills in the pockets of our jeans before they go in the wash. We may learn it is She who pops crocus buds through the snow just as we lose our trust in spring’s return, and She who leaves shells at low tide for our delight.
We may recognize that She has loved us so deeply that She gave us the life we needed to learn what only we can learn, to be who only we can be to the world, and that Her commitment to us is so strong that She even loved us through our rebellious years when we hardly said a word to Her at all.
Heck, maybe we’ll learn that we encounter the same writing exercise over and over for a reason, all thanks to Her.
