A Mothering God

And I praise you for crows calling from treetops
The speech of my first village,
And for the sparrow’s flash of song
Flinging me in an instant
The joy of a child who woke
Each morning to the freedom
Of her mother’s unclouded love
And lived in it like a country.

-Anne Porter

If by chance I should find myself at risk
A-falling from this jagged cliff
I look below, and I look above
I'm surrounded by your boundless love

-John Prine

When I was in high school my Mom and I read the Bridge Over San Luis Rey together. It was when I began to learn again (after a period of Middle School overconfidence) that my Mom was indeed smarter than me. [a much better grammarian as well :)] It was also when I began to realize something that my Mom seemed blind to—that, in the words of Toni Morrison’s Beloved—love can be too thick. Or, to put the idea into theological terms not all sin is privation. That we can do harm to others when we love them idolatrously. And yet, I also began to understand even that error can be undone by the application of more love. Oh, the ironies! If we push deeply into this overabundance and excess and over-acceptance we creep into the territory that Christians call grace--a whole continent that unnerving to explore and yet, also, so easily domesticated.

My imagination is defiantly governed by a male deity which is mostly okay—I loved and was loved by my Father ...though he had his faults. I suspect that if I allowed myself to deeply imagine a mothering God that it would unsettle most everything. I got a bit of glimpse at what that deity might look like from Amy Laura Hall’s book on Julian of Norwich.

What would it mean for me to live fully into

The joy of a child who woke/Each morning to the freedom/Of her mother’s unclouded love/ And lived in it like a country.

I think this might be a fruitful spiritual discipline for me.

This quarantine reminds me most of being a very young child home through the long days of winter with my Mom, stuck in the house with no car, the wild winds howling outside, the fire in the wood stove, drawing pictures at the coffee tables, keeping busy.

On a more personal note, I have been in a difficult time in my life where Wendell Berry’s line in his poem Do Not be Ashamed is very resonant: Though you have done nothing shameful,/they will want you to be ashamed.

It was my mother who continually called me to attend to the herons beginning their evening flights, the vacant lots raising up blue chicory flowers, and tenacity of the dandelions.

It was my mother’s love that embarrassed me: made me wonder when we read The Bridge over San Luis Rey if her love wasn’t too much, too overwhelming. And yet, in this season of life I need to be confounded and surrounded, above and below, by God’s boundless love. It is the only antidote or as Thorton Wilder wrote the only meaning and the only survival.

And so I will rest hard into love and I will ask the mothering God to

bring us ... life
Out of every sort of death

And teach us mercy.