My daughter’s job occasionally puts her in people’s homes
for legal work. She likes this and finds that when folks are more comfortable they are often more personable. But last week some people who were indeed very nice and open asked her to join them at their church on the Sunday, even wanting her phone number so they could call and remind her.Whoa! What could she tell them? A woman’s relationship with her Deity
is very intimate? She doesn’t want another “father?” Lie and say she already
has a church?
Her story reminded me of my own search for Deity and how I
came to the conclusion that God had to have had babies. After all, the most
Supreme Being is capable of anything.
Surely to understand the full range of human experience and specifically
to empathize with children and the needs of children, who are the future of the
race, be must be able to deliver babies. But if he has babies, how does he have
them?
When I was a little girl in Methodist church school I
pondered this for many months. How
could a man have a baby? Of course, that was before transgender operations, so
I thought that it was impossible, although I did consider it. Perhaps they
burst from his forehead like the Goddess Athena from her father Zeus’s? There was
something a little off about a forehead cracking, but certainly it would be as
painful as vaginal birth and so I considered this for several years, pursuing
the Greeks and Romans for God during my college years, looking everywhere for
evidence of the kind of empathy and devotion I experienced from my grandmothers.
But NO! The great Zeus actually COMPETED with his children, not treating them
as the part of his soul that I, as a mother, knew they must be. I was offended.
I went a generation further back to the Titans and it was
even worse, cutting each other up and eating offspring like they were cannibals
or something. It may be that these men were cannibals, but it was surely not
true that any of them were God, who loves his children even as the smallest of
these. What loving mother would eat children – anyone’s children!!!
So I moved around the Mediterranean to Israel and the
Hebrews, the source of my own childhood Christian God, so see if their God had
a birth canal. This was pretty easy to look into as I had several copies of the
Bible and the Old Testament, of course, is about their God. I read all of it closely and came away
with not one comment about God giving birth and a whole lot of “vengeance is
mine” crap. This God, like the Classical Gods, seemed to think that killing was
the most important thing, taking power and using it, slashing and burning and
such. The way God slew all those innocent Egyptian children was as coldblooded
as you could get, and I couldn’t believe the Israelite far right actually
decimated every trace they could find of the ruling families they replaced in
the early years in their Promised Land.
It makes the current administration look warm and fuzzy!
So after rejecting Yahweh as the possible real God, I
thought I would look at some Eastern deities, and indeed I got all excited when
I saw that they had FEMALE deities.
What a concept! Most famous
and so the first woman I looked at for Supreme Deity status was Kali – I had
seen her in some movie. Of course, she was very evil in that film, but then I
know that movies aren’t real and they probably had a point of view, some axe to
grind. I was encouraged at first
by the four arms, thinking that holding a baby in each one would be very
satisfying and surely would indicate that she shared my grandmothers’ infinite
patience and deep desire to nourish life and grow children into kind and
responsible adults. But to my surprise the movie was right and the four arms
were used to enclose ultimate chaos.
Even that I could begin to buy from a certain distant perspective, but
when I found out she “creates” life in a non-physical kind of ongoing magic
way, rather that through the usual method, I became suspicious and less able to
forgive the chopped-off arms she wears for a skirt and the daggers and blood
her own arms are wielding. She in fact seemed to be the personification of
males’ worst nightmares about loss of power to emotional females and all manner
of vicious, mean, terrible, and terrifying powers are ascribed to her, like their
hard-ons are all her fault. I have to admit that I did like that she is
depicted standing on her old man Shiva, but vengeance is not what I am looking
for in a Deity even if it suits me. And also, nowhere does it say she ever had
a baby – just that full-time job of creator of the universe. I do think a Deity should have a little
real experience before she is saddled with the whole enchilada. All in all,
after a cursory look at other female Eastern candidates I came away feeling
like I was looking for Mrs. Goodbar and moved back to more familiar ground.
I thought perhaps that the Christian writers had just gotten
the story wrong – certainly most religious writers I had been reading had.
Maybe Mary, the mother of Jesus was really God, as we know for sure that she
had a birth canal and that she was involved with Supreme Beings. Maybe a rival
Christian faction had just left out all the powerful Mary stuff so their own
God candidate could be the Almighty.
Really, I thought that on my own before the Dan Brown book, stemming
from a class I had taken in college that followed the four different literary
traditions the linguists find in the Bible’s production, thinking that each of
them probably had a different perspective on the story and that being the
narrator could make or break history.
Like the monks who circulated their story of finding Arthur’s bones
under the church only to rebury them, and no one now knows where they are,
right at a time when tourism was lagging.
Depression economics will make people write anything that might help
make a buck.
So I was pleased to find there was a whole historical
literature on Mary as the object of worship, a powerful Deity with the
interests of her children her central calling, as it should be. But it was not
about Mary the mother, it was about Mary Magdeline, who was probably the wife
of Jesus. I know it is only one generation, but somehow she seems like kind of
a latecomer for Supreme Being status to me. She does have all the right characteristics, but then people
seem so exercised that she might have been black and then there is the whole
hide-the-children theory about the grail; I think all of that would have kept
her too busy to be in charge of the universe. Reading about her made me realize
that Mary the mother was probably also too late in the game to be God, even if
the writers lied. Actually, by the time I had read enough Christian history to
have an educated guess about who their gods really are I was so disgusted with
humans I was not sure that I cared if we have a Deity or not – we certainly
don’t deserve one!
But I keep coming back to the way I feel when I hold my
grandchildren in my arms and how much I want them to be happy and untroubled in
their futures that I can’t give up the idea that we are all someone’s
children. God MUST know how this
feels.
So I went back to school and read archaeology, looking for a
kinder, gentler past. I can’t say I had much success in finding it, judging
from the plethora of war artifacts, the defense marks on the forelimbs of
ancient female skeletons, and the architecture of “games” where human heads
were used as the ball. But from before God, from the period around twenty
thousand years ago, we find across Europe a whole array of interesting little
clay figurines of women with big bellies and no feet that were probably kind of
kitchen goddesses, the bottoms pointed to stick into something that would hold
them upright to be viewed by the person in the kitchen. And from Turkey and
Asia Minor there are statues dating to ten thousand years ago of a mother of a
Mother with legs wide and babied sticking out all over the place – that Deity
had a birth canal to be sure! I
liked the stories from near there of the Amazons as well, a little later in
time and lost in the mists between prehistory and history, where the women
lived together and the men lived elsewhere, getting together only when they
wanted to for parties and such.
The women raised all the children, although the boys went off with the
men when they were of a certain age.
I like to think that the men of that time were a kinder gentler lot for
having been raised en suite, so to speak, but probably that is fantasy since
once they were away from moms and competition started there were no females to
interfere; probably the kinder, gentler boys all died in training.
So I have taken up the image of the Mother Goddess as my Deity.
She is all-powerful in her creative duties, and She wants and supports only the
best for her babies, as I would expect. It means, however, that She has very
little energy left for destructive power and since there is so much destruction
in the world it follows that she is not All-Powerful. Instead, I think she must
be full of patience and sorrow, forgiveness and redemption, vast capacity for
understanding, and overarching joy. I think She fills our souls with a
comprehension of good and bad that enables us to choose our steps through the
mass of chaos we call living, and that she does this by modeling good and bad
behaviors and teaching us what makes us laugh and fills us with satisfaction so
that we can sort these things from unnecessary pain. I think She counts on our
intelligence and ability to learn and understand to guide our judgment and
sooth our losses, and She never ever would eat me.
To get back to my daughter and what I might have said were I
her in those nice people’s house last week, I think I would have told them they
were very kind but my heart already has a god. I am not sure that would have
been enough to keep them off me, but egad, you have to say something!
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