The Assumption of Mary and the Divine Feminine - by Janet

When we look at the lectionary readings around the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, we have a story from Revelations about the Queen about to give birth and from Luke the story of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth and the famous words: “My soul glorifies the Lord.”

For the most part, that’s what we celebrate when we celebrate Mary: her royalty and her purity.  The images and attributes which remove her humanness – and remove ordinary women from any way to reach her status - the stories which elevate her to an untouchable. So if she is untouchable, where do we pray to when we pray, “Holy, Mary…”?

Cliff and I were up on the farm this past week, a short break before school begins, and on Thursday night, we sat outside in canvas deck chairs and looked at the sky. I’d brought the binoculars so we were able to tip our heads back and, through simple binoculars, see stars behind and beyond the stars we could see with the naked eye.

Since the discoveries of the Hubble telescope, it’s now estimated there are some eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors around one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are some two hundred billion suns.  Of those, the closest sun to us, in our Milky Way galaxy, that also has planets, is 9 to 10 light years away.  One light year in miles is about 6 billion miles so that next solar system with sun and planets is about 60 billion miles.

I don’t know how to reach that God.

How can we conceive of a personified God, a personal God, in that kind of space?

In that vastness, God is silent. Silent through our personal suffering and silent through the world’s suffering. How do we deal with that silence, with the suffering, with a world in pain? How can we justify God standing apart and distant?

The tough one about God’s allowing human moral evil is reasonable only if we believe that a Good God causes, or at any rate allows, everything that happens, and that it’s all for the best. This is the doctrine Voltaire, and many other thinkers before and since, questioned. So says Annie Dillard in For The Time Being.

Only if we personify God can we ask the question of why God allows human, moral evil.

So how can we still say, Mother/Father God? Why not Creator, Birther, as concepts rather than mother father? I think it’s because we need a personalized God, One with which we have a relationship, and Creator/Birther keeps us in that place of concept rather than in relationship.

One of the real problems in Christianity is that we have divorced spirit from matter. Spirit is somewhere “out there” instead of “in here.” And so, on the one hand, it doesn’t matter what we call God; and on the other, it matters completely because we need to bring the concept or idea of God into some kind of being we can relate to.

The being, of course, is ourselves, with our own integration of the masculine and feminine energies, with the self-reflection that allows Self to mature and become whole instead of shattered by our pasts. Only then can we find a way to appreciate both energies in ourselves and in that which we call God.

 Buddha said, “In truth I say to you, that within this body lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world.”

Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within.”

When did I start believing that God was a woman, too? The birth of that idea is lost in the tendrils of my history, but probably began in the early 70s when I first became involved with feminism.  I needed a God that responded to me as a woman. I needed a God that understood birth and death, children and pain. I needed a She as well as a He.

Since then, much of my work has been centered on an interior Self, as Carl Jung called it. Much of that work has been in clearing out the detritus and confusion of my earlier years so that I could operate from a place of wholeness, from a place of integrating the masculine and the feminine energies within me, denying neither, accepting both.

Remember Mary’s words? “My soul glorifies the Lord.” Think about those words – she didn’t say anything to indicate “out there.” Her words were about “in here.”

If the Kingdom of God is within, as Jesus said, and I believe, then God resides within, too. And within each of us lie those characteristics which are feminine and those which are masculine. Denying one or the other denies their power. Denies our own lives. Within each of us lies the suffering of the world.

The energy and spirit in each of us is God – in whatever way we choose to see it. And for all of us, the energy and spirit is both masculine energy and feminine energy. That’s the energy with which I must stay in balance, that’s the energy with which I offer love to the people around me. It’s the energy you use to offer love.

All of us use our energy to nurture others; to give birth – to another human or an idea; to create; to lead; to stand strong. And sometimes to battle and sometimes to give succor. We are the energy of God in the world, an energy that is both masculine and feminine. And just as we are a reflection of God, God is a reflection of us – of all: the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine.

Is this the answer to what is God? No of course not, but to deny the feminine face of God is to deny a part of ourselves. When we deny a part of ourselves, we are out of balance. And when we are out of balance, our lives suffer.

The artist Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”

Be grand. Be the Queen of Heaven and the King of Heaven; be the one who mops floors and the one who chops the wood; be all you can be and allow the remoteness of the stars to fill you with joy rather than fear. Allow the space of infinity to fill you with peace.