Divine Masculine imagery has been written and repeated for centuries.
Our understanding of Father God runs deep.
But for those of us who never had the pleasure of knowing a Mother God, there is a whole side of the Christian tradition that has yet to be explored.
As we dismantle patriarchal understanding, the Divine Feminine is emerging in new ways.
And what we might not realize is that we know Her better than we thought.
Mother God can be seen and understood in the work of women everywhere.
She is in both the domestic and public spheres, at home and out in the world.
Long before we spoke of Her, the women have been making her known.
So where can we find Mother God in the post-patriarchal Christian era?
In the lives of the women who have embodied her all along.
Mother God is in the Domestic.
Mother God sparks a domestic memory. In a world where women have ruled hearth and home for millennia, these images of Mother are imprinted on our psyche and soul.
This is not a truth to avoid or deny. Feminism isn’t about men and women “switching” roles within the public and domestic spheres, it’s about valuing feminine contributions and giving everyone the choice to contribute to society wherever they wish.
And while the Divine Feminine is present in the public sphere, many of us are most familiar with Her in the domestic.
We know Her love in our homes. Mother God gets us out of bed in the morning. She is the warmth in the fireplace, the cuddles of young children, and the taste and nourishment of warm, buttery waffles.
She is the listening ear and support of a partner, the relational movement of the Divine.
We feel her at rest and in play, and we know Her intimately when we care for the garden and each other.
We understand Her when we begin to know the significance of every mother across the world.
As the primary caregivers of young children, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and childcare workers have formed the consciousness of generations.
Mother God is rooted in this maternal influence.
It is the role of caregivers to teach self-respect, self-love, and self-compassion, and when we have learned how to thoroughly love ourselves, we can love our neighbor as we love ourselves—have you ever noticed that this is a prerequisite for loving others well?
Caring for and forming our children has a tremendous impact on the world we’re creating. You can always spot someone who has been mothered well.
Those present voices in our early childhood become our inner voices, and for many, that inner voice is a compass pointing us in the direction of our mothers and the other women who loved us into wholeness.
In the same way, Mother God writes her love for us in our DNA.
In the collective consciousness, Mother is love.
She has love for herself and the ones in her orbit, moving with ease and confidence, knowing her value in the way the world is woven.
She is the weaver, the compass, and the inner voice.
But the feminine is not limited to the domestic.
Mother God is in the Public.
While She might spark a domestic memory, we are coming to know Her in a new way.
In the modern era, women still work in domestic roles, but we also work in the public sphere and serve an equal purpose to be living, breathing animations of the Divine Feminine.
The working mother is rebalancing the scales in a culture that has forgotten the value of the feminine.
She is rebuilding a society marred by patriarchy. She is giving birth to a new world.
Mother God brings that warm, supportive, inclusive embrace everywhere she goes.
Masculine attributes are often seen as “better” in the public sphere, an internalized patriarchy we are actively dismantling.
We see men and women alike “playing the game” by embracing their masculine energy to the exclusion of the feminine. They are encouraged to value competition over collaboration, results over process, and productivity over play.
But the issue is not the masculine itself, it is the lack of balance in our society at large.
Mother God is pushing back against this imbalance.
We can embody masculine and feminine values at the same time, and when we do, we will see major shifts in business, in government, and everywhere humanity gathers outside of the home.
We will begin to see integration over compartmentalization, the end of hustle culture in favor of soulful, restful, wholehearted living.
We will work together to solve complex problems, embracing nuance and grey areas, killing off perfectionism in favor of flawed goodness.
The Divine Feminine empowers us to create this new world together.
Mother God sees the ones who have been forgotten by greed and fights back. She remembers all of her children, no person forgotten.
She holds every mother and child, the migrant breastfeeding on her journey to safety and the corporate executive weeping in her office when she just can’t pump another ounce.
Mother sees and loves all. She asks how our day went. She understands us as the one who birthed us, and Her hope is that we begin to understand ourselves.
And as we allow her to love, heal, and nurture us, we can love, heal, and nurture those around us.
When we embrace God as Father and Mother, our understanding of the Genderless Divine expands.
When we know where to look, we can see Her everywhere.
Maybe we know Her better than we thought.