I called on three Athena-like prayer warriors via email, after Marshall’s PTSD symptoms re-emerged with bunny Acorn’s death.
Soon after, Marshall was peaceful again, happy with being mayor of Animal Crossing on his Nintendo.
Yesterday, he went to hippotherapy and music therapy. He learned to groom a horse and got a piano lesson. The therapies are creative, life-giving, healing, an ointment from Mother God our Creator-Healer.
Marshall’s told me more stories lately, while rocking on the rocking chair and resting his face on the back cushion. How all of S.’s ToonTastic characters (Pin, Fiery, Plummy, etc.) would meet a Marshall character she created and call him a jerk and other names. How S.’s posse on the playground circled him one time while S. kicked him, and how a tall boy said to him, “This group is for brutes only; wimps can’t join.”
And how there was a group of kind girls who invited him to their club. And there were gentle boys too who befriended him who weren’t a part of S.’s group. He felt protected when he was in the group of girls.
Where were the grown-ups? Where was Mother God? Where was I, his mother?
I have wondered lately if Mother God feels the pain I do, over what happened to Marshall.
Lauren Winner writes about rarely considered metaphors for God. In her chapter about God as a laboring woman, she writes, “In their darkest hour, the exiles wondered, ‘God, where are you?’ In His final hour Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In the image of the laboring woman we see that God does not respond with silence. God groans, gasps, and pants–making a new way for exiles, breathing life into the whole of creation, offering God’s body to be broken open for the sake of the world God created.”
It makes sense that God is capable of a great range of emotions like Her creation, and able to express those feelings. How odd it would be for a Spock-like God to make beings with a capacity for feelings, when She had none! I think we all intuit that though feelings do indeed lead us to unwise decisions, they lead us to all our decisions, ultimately.
Feelings are our spiritual life blood, from the Spirit Herself.
So, surely God does suffer over our traumas. Jesus has felt all our weaknesses, our temptations, and feelings, as humans (Heb. 4:15). And Jesus was bullied, too.
Mother God, unlike me, the human mother, was with Marshall each moment he felt trapped and abused by the bully. Mother God was at work to rescue Marshall. Human adults weren’t listening, but some children were.
Mother God was present in the girls who invited Marshall to join their club, and in the boys who played with Marshall without questioning what class he was in.
Part of listening is also seeing: She comes disguised as the child who says, Yes, to love.