Growing up as a fairly conservative Protestant, it wasn’t until my mid-life crisis of faith that I even heard of the subject of the Divine Feminine. Of course I was aware that ancient pagan cultures had worshipped goddesses as well as gods, and I was aware that many Catholics venerated Mary. But with my typical evangelical black-and-white view of the world, I naturally condemned them all as lies of the devil.

I spent years studying theology, and remember on one particular occasion even championing the brutality of the overly-masculine aspects of the God portrayed in the old testament. If this angry, warmongering, intolerant god was the creator of the world, who was I to say otherwise.

The wisdom literature, the feminine aspects of god, the uncomfortable sexuality of the Song of Solomon: these were all conveniently downplayed. After all, what really mattered was how Jesus saves us from the wrath of the angry, vengeful god we have been taught to call Father.

Like most people growing up in the closed world-view of conservative evangelicalism, I was blind to the excesses that this masculine-only view of God produces: war, intolerance, lack of love and compassion, extreme judgementalism toward all other people in the world who do not hold exactly the same views.

It took a complete loss and deconstruction of my early-life faith to realise this. Now I look back with horror at how judgemental and unloving I used to be, all because of the faith I had been taught, a faith which emphasised only masculine qualities. A faith which interpreted the sacred Trinity of christian tradition as an interplay between three male deities.

Once I “lost” my faith, I had the freedom to explore many religious traditions during my years as a Seeker, and it was the study of Kabbalah which really began to show me how unbalanced I had become.

In the ten sephiroth of the kabbalistic tree of life, there is a divine harmony at the mid-point. The sephirot of Geburah, Severity, is balanced by the sephirot of Chesed, Mercy. I remember reading a book about parenting which referred to this balance as an ideal which every parent should pursue. There are moments when severity is necessary in order to train children and punish wrongdoing. But there is also a time for mercy, for compassion, even when the child may deserve judgement.

This teaching on how to be a good parent opened my eyes to balance in the character of god. I suddenly realised that the god I had believed in as a child was one who only exemplified the attributes of Severity. He was standing there ready to punish us for any misdemeanor.

As my eyes opened to the required balance of Mercy, I began to see aspects of the motherly nature of god in the bible. These aspects had never been emphasised in my theological training. In my unbalanced religious zeal, I had subconsciously taken on only the attitude of Severity, thinking myself as godly for doing so. This impacted my view of others, my view of women (how their place was to submit unquestioningly to men), and my view of the world we live in. After all, I reasoned, the world is just a backdrop to our own salvation, and one day the wrathful, vengeful god will descend to burn it up along with all the millions of species of animals and plants, because of our sin. At least, that’s how I saw it.

However, as I began to open up to the feminine aspect of the godhead, exemplified in Mercy on the tree of life, I began to realise that god must be beyond gender, but must have a balance of the energies of both genders if (s)he created them.

This led me towards my first hesitating exploration of the Divine Feminine. I slowly realised that Catholics, with their veneration of Mary, were not so errant as I had been led to believe; they were actually seeing aspects of god’s motherliness in the person of Mary. I also began to explore why many native traditions venerated female deities, and why even the earth itself is often referred to in feminine terms such as “Mother Earth”.

I even discovered a feminine figure who has been hidden to most protestants because of gender-biased translations – that of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, a figure who plays a prominant role in both the Wisdom literature of the canonical scriptures as well as in the apocrypha and the gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi…

But that’s the subject for another blog post.

Peace and blessings of the Mother to you today.