It has often been the custom at Unity North Spiritual Center that men lead Sunday services on Mother’s Day. This year, I was asked to deliver the lesson, and what follows is the written adaptation of that talk.

Good morning, and Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Some of us are biological mothers, some of us have mothered other things – projects, ideas, children, other people’s children, puppies. All of us come from mothers, so all of us have a stake in this celebration of mothering.

At this time, it seems to be the thing (according to Hallmark) to extol our mothers’ virtues – and we should – but there seems to be pressure to make them something more than human. This is one of the questions I’ll explore here. But first, some revelations – not the book that Carol and Rhonda might talk about, but three times that life revealed something to me. The first one was about hair.

Revelation 1: Hair

When I went away to college, I came back with a goatee and hair not much longer than it is now. This was the 1960s, and I found that some people were appalled at my beard and hair – despite the appearance of the unruly-looking, long-haired, bearded man whose picture was at front of church. This revealed a disconnect to me between what some people seemed to worship but would reject anything similar in the real world.

Revelation 2: Hair again

Through the 1960s and 1970s we often heard preachers bemoaning the long hair of the hippies (if you are old enough to remember that). They quoted the Bible, saying that long hair was a woman’s crowning glory, and not so good on men. Now, it happened that I came across a copy of the New Testament in direct translation from the Greek, and thought I’d read it on general principles. Among my surprises was that the preachers were only using half of the Biblical passage. In I Corinthians (11:14-16), amongst admonitions that a man is the head of a woman and whether one’s head should be covered or bare, I found this passage:

Does not Nature herself teach you that while flowing locks disgrace a man, they are a woman’s glory? For her locks were given for covering.

And that’s what we heard from the preachers. But then I read the next verse that says:

However, if you insist on arguing, let me tell you there is no such custom among us, or in any of the congregations of God’s people.

I had to wonder then, what else isn’t true that we’ve been told by word of mouth? And it became evident we had three layers of Biblical messages: the scriptures as written, whatever they originally meant at that time in that culture, and the verbal tradition. So, the Bible was being used to promote a cultural value that the biblical writer had repudiated, a repudiation of an idea that was still being used into the 20th century to vilify a group of people and tell all how their hair should be. So, I set about to read the Bible cover to cover and found my third revelation.

Revelation 3: The Bible(s)

In addition to the issues of various translations, I felt like I not only faced Old and New Testaments, but a hodge-podge of writings falling into at least four very different books. First were mythological teaching stories (that many have mistakenly taken literally). Next was attempts at history that seemed to mostly justify the Hebrews’ specialness and conquest and slaughter of indigenous peoples. Then came the Gospels – a shining jewel of beauty and wisdom. This was followed by administrative details and the vagaries of building a socio-political establishment taken over by Paul – which includes how our hair is to be done, misogynist passages, and how women are supposed to serve men – many of them complications when ideals get mixed up with customs, organizations and conceits of authority.

I also found through research that some of the Bible was copied directly from Egyptian texts, but that’s another story.

Questions

These revelations left me with two big questions (from which a lot of other questions came):

Who were the “other people” on Earth when this god created Adam and Eve and where did the sons of Adam and Eve find their wives? (I suspect some of us are descended from those “other people”). These were the people against which early Hebrews and Christians had to vehemently defend themselves with purity rules and with swords. Who were they really? I mean, Christianity did not arrive fully formed and unrelated to the cultures around it.

The other question is this: how did the beauty and wisdom of the Gospels end up with a church history of war, misogyny, inquisition, genocide and book burning?

About 40 years or so ago, I began to dig into these questions, wrote what I found and ended up with a manuscript of over 300 pages and 700 footnotes.

So, let’s look at my two big questions.

Question 1: How did the beauty and wisdom I found in Gospels turn into a Church history of war, misogyny, genocide, torture, book-burning and inquisition?

We’ve all heard the history of the Roman church – taking over lands, suppressing heresies and heretics, promoting the idea that women should be submissive to their husbands, that women brought sin into the world (thank you), that birth was meant to be a painful labor and, therefore, midwives and herbalists who sought to provide comfort and healthcare to women were to be shunned, if not burned. Many were executed as witches.

Women were not left with many options. Respectable women could be a mother, a dutiful wife or a nun.

And how is it that women are still fighting for respect, authority, value and their sovereignty in this century? The answer, I found, was in the cultures from which came our dominant forms of Christianity – cultures in which women were second class, if they could even be considered citizens or having souls.
Women were not valued in these traditions, and they were kept inferior and subservient. Nevertheless, the feminine still embodied an awesome power, and rules were made to keep women in “their place” and safely contained. Men were afraid of that power – and we still see that fear today in various religions and political movements. (After all, we couldn’t have men coming under their spell, could we?)

As empires grew, they found advantages in centralized government and a centralized religion centered on one god. Thus, monotheism became a political tool, along with some of the “Christian” doctrines we see in churches today. The emperor Constantine did not want another messiah appearing, so his henchmen made sure that Jesus would be the only Son of God.

So, we see history and political needs impose themselves on the beauty and wisdom of the Gospels.

Genuine Christianity – the movement begun by Jesus – hardly had a chance as it was taken over by the state.

And then comes that other question – who were those “other people”, the ones about whom our preachers declined to speak sympathetically, against whom the Hebrews and Christians struggled, those who were invaded and killed? And what was before Genesis?

Question 2: Who were those people around the early Israelites?

There were people already on earth when the stories tell us Adam and Eve were created.

People of earlier times had gods, goddesses and the Great Mother. Mothers were celebrated as the source of life and women were the face of the Divine (as were men).

We saw gender in many things: sun, moon, earth, mountains, caves, trees, rivers and seeds.

(These were not universal gender assignments, I should add, because there could be a moon god or moon goddess, depending on the culture; the sun could be a goddess for the Celts and a god for others. Egyptians had an Earth god named Geb, and a goddess of the sky over him named Nut.)

What’s important here is that both masculine and feminine were divine. Both feminine and masculine had natural representations of their divinity. (I would note that Crete seemed to have the closest thing to a culture of equality.) What’s more, there was divinity in everything.

Conclusions

Where does this leave us – on this Mother’s Day? For one thing, having lost our goddesses, we look to our earthly mothers to be divine and perfect, for we still yearn for the Great Mother Goddess. But the loss of those goddess models lets us forget that every woman (and every man) is of the Divine.

Indeed, behind every person’s face is the story of the universal divine taking unique shape in that one individual; and when we look into the eyes of that one person – male or female – if we pay attention, we might just see the light of the Divine shining through their eyes. (It’s no wonder we can’t gaze into each other’s eyes for very long without something emotional happening.)

This may also mean that when we look to our parents to be better than they’ve been – even if we have legitimate grievances – we should remember they are just human beings with their own struggles and with no more of a clue of what’s going on than the rest of us. They themselves did not have ideal models of parenthood or personhood – and not a goddess in sight. We really need to separate out our childlike need for an ideal Mother Goddess from the real and human flesh-and-blood woman who gave birth to us, as well as those who cared for us. If you are looking to a parent to be a god or goddess, you’d better look elsewhere.

For another thing, I would assert that we live in perpetual relationship with our divine parent that expects us to grow into divine adults in a world where every woman or man might be supported in the realization of her or his divine presence, whether as parent, partner, sibling, lover, child, adversary or friend.

Finally, these religious and spiritual traditions that we’ve inherited may not be perfect, just like our parents, but that in no way absolves us from seeking the Divine in them, where we can find it. We would do well to look beyond the faulty cultural shapes imposed on the essence of the Divine Presence.  It’s up to us to follow the trail the Divine Presence leaves for us – a trail that often places us on an individual path; and we must make our own way, sometimes creating the path by living it.

Indeed, we are constantly birthing our own destiny and fate, but we do not do that alone. Many people have nurtured us down through the ages and among the years of our lives. These are all mothers of some part of ourselves.

In closing, I’d like first to offer a quote that I believe comes out of Irish tradition and that is:

The heart of God is a mother’s heart.

And I’d like to offer my gratitude to my own earthly mother, to her mother and foremothers before them, back to the first Mother and the Great Mother, for that is my lineage, and yours as well. And thanks to all of you who have nurtured something in me. You have mothered me and helped to make me who I am. Part of what I am is a function of your mothering and, for that, I thank you.