“Just as God is truly our Father; just so is God also truly our Mother. A mother’s service is nearest, readiest and surest. This office no one person has the ability or knows how to or ever will do fully but God alone.”
Julian of Norwich, Swallow’s Nest, p. 227
I am beginning to experience God as Mother God more of the time. Today I got a luxurious twenty minute time to lay down and snuggle down under a warm blanket in the middle of the day. I felt like Mother God was comforting me, caring for me in the same way I would Marshall or Sam. In the past, even when I have reached for Abba/Daddy-God, I have never felt God so concerned about my physical comfort.
Mother God is “ready to serve” as Julian of Norwich said. She waits on us at our bedside.
I want to give Marshall this experience, too. The other day he said he felt unsafe with someone and he said to me, “I wish I could keep you physically near me always, some way we would always stay connected.”
I replied, “So you’d feel protected always.”
I didn’t mention God, Mother God who can actually live in his body, never leaving or abandoning, always tending to him.
Maybe I kept quiet by habit of circumspection. Leaning on Jesus “safe and secure from all alarm” isn’t exactly fool-proof. Our own anxiety or pain can crash and thunder so loud that it seems the realest thing there is, that not even God is bigger.
But Mother God might be bigger, at least what I am experiencing in flashes. The feeling is that this new mother-metaphor is giving me a physical sense that God loves me.
A mother’s love is, well, what I am doing now as I write. My sixteen-month old baby boy is lying across my lap, just having finished comfort-sucking, now deeply asleep, head resting on my upper arm.
I am mother because I am here physically. This is what God is becoming to me as She becomes Mother and not just Father.