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The Divine Mother: A Primary Spiritual Director

Dr. Carol Flake for the Haden Institute Spiritual Direction Program

i found god in myself
and i loved her/i loved her fiercely
(Ntozake Shange, 1975)

Women. like myself, from liberal religious traditions are having a hard time accepting the patriarchal views of traditional religious perspectives. So, I have struggled to find a primary spiritual director or mystic that I could focus on with integrity for this paper. I studied Teresa of Avila in fairly great depth and I LOVE the book Entering the Castle that Caroline Myss wrote as a modernization of Teresa's ideas. My friend, Jeanie, and I discussed that book in our weekly coffee shop visits and I also discussed it in a spiritually-oriented book club, but I couldn't feel pleased with writing a paper on St. Teresa. Everything that I might think to say has already been said. I thought about Black Elk and the Native American tradition, but again it is a male point of view.

Finally, I remembered the masters thesis I wrote in 1997 at the University of South Carolina. I was, at the time, planning on entering a Unitarian Universalist divinity school when I retired, so I was completing a masters in religion and culture. I had visited Crete and Athens, Greece and Bali and Peru and India. In all those cultures, the Goddess was worshipped both historically and currently so I utilized a personal narrative form of research and talked of my experiences "Re-membering the Goddess." In this paper, I will revisit that masters thesis and discuss the Divine Mother as the primary spiritual director for many liberal religious women.

Marilyn Sewell (1991), a UU minister, says it this way:

Women have gone within themselves to find their own sources of spiritual truth. We didn't have much of an alternative, really. Where were we to go for meaning, for identity? To books written with the assumption that the male perspective is also the human perspective? To the arts, where woman is pictured as Madonna, virgin, or whore? To the mass media, where she is seen as an object for consumption? (p. 6.)

Some women such as feminist thealogian Carol Christ (1980, 1987, 1995), who led my Goddess pilgrimage to Crete, believe that women must create a new religious and thealogical tradition more congruent with their own experience of Mystery, and that this new tradition has its basis in ancient myths that have been buried—literally or figuratively. For modern liberal religious women, creating a new thealogy begins with re-membering the Goddess to reclaim Her imagery, mythology, and Mystery. Christ (1980) analysed the mystical experiences of five women writers on spiritual quests and found that their experiences were not a "classical" mystical experience as defined by Eastern or Western mystical traditions.

Christ concludes that women's spiritual quests take a distinctive form in the writers that she studied, proceeding from an experience of nothingness, to an awakening, to insight and to a new naming leading to newfound self-awareness and self-confidence. Christ goes on to say that women's mysticism often takes the form of nature mysticism or social mysticism. For example, Simone Weil (1951) says "Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent. . . it is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny" (p. 99).

The transformational process from the old patriarchal story to the new story aligned with modern women's own mystical experiences results in action aligned with the new story. Concluding sections of this paper contain brief summaries of the implications for anam caras (spiritual director is a patriarchal term) that I derived from my direct experiences with the Divine Mother in Greece, Bali, Peru, India and the United States.

The Earth is Our Mother

In women's personal stories and writings, the Divine "is almost always seen as immanent, not as an abstract, transcendent being 'above' the earth" (Sewell, 1991, p. 15). It is by sharing their stories in small, supportive groups that women's spirituality can emerge. Like life that evolved in the teeming tidal pools of the ocean, women "need deep, quiet, safe places" (Anderson & Hopkins, 1993) to share their stories.

Gaia is the Earth in ancient Greek writings and Demeter is Mother Nature. The island of Crete itself embodies the Goddess—from the blue–green embryonic ocean waters to the uterine caves to the twin mountain peaks reminiscent of the breasts of the abundant Mother Goddess. In Peru today, Pachamama, the Earth Mother, continues to be a very real focus of worship and respect as the Andean Mountain people pray reverently for Her immanent display in the bounty of harvest. Sarasvati is the Goddess most immanent in the Balinese spirit. Balinese children take offerings to school on Her festival day, but do not have classes or read books so that this Goddess of art, music, and books might rest.

The Love of the Divine Mother

Our American culture is dominated by a consumer-oriented, patriarchal mythos that is more pathological than promising, more violent than loving, and more deadly than life affirming. Today, I believe that women (and men) need to acknowledge and enact the compassion of the Madonna. Because our children require our care to grow into healthy, whole, adults, we must refocus our attention on early childhood development and education. Diana Eck, who as a Christian, has extensively studied Hinduism, also emphasizes the importance of The Madonna in her role as compassionate nurturer and sustainer of life.

Three forms of the Madonna are evident in the world today. The red Madonna offers unconditional abundance, protection, life, and passion. In India she protects every household, every family, every village and every field. The Black Madonna is seen throughout Europe and is a descendent of the African Isis. In Africa today, many people honor mothers for their mysterious powers of transformation and contact with the spirit world. As mothers they are models of nurturing and healing to the community (Fisher, 1995). Most of us are more familiar with the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Madonna of the Christian tradition. Diana Eck (1993) emphasizes the importance of enlarging "our capacity to see Christ as a child" as critical in "A world in which children are the most vulnerable victims of poverty, malnutrition, and violence" (p. 104). Eck emphasizes the compassion of the Divine Mother, in her role as nurturer and sustainer of life.

The Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother, and Crone

Throughout time, the Goddess has been consistently associated with transformation and fertility. The new, waxing, full, and waning moon, called Mama Quilla in Peru, is seen as representative of the life cycle of the Goddess as she progresses through the phases of her life as Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The transformational cycle of birth, life, death, and regeneration was established as an Ancient Mystery of the Goddess for thousands of years before being adopted as a mystery of the Christian tradition.

In the ancient myths, the Goddess always returned from the underworld bringing vegetation to Earth. The Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, practiced for 2000 years prior to the birth of Christ and for 350 years afterward, consisted of a celebration of the relationship of the triple Goddess aspects of Maiden/Mother/Crone as embodied in Persephone, Demeter, and Hekate in a drama of death and resurrection. Demeter, the Greek Grain Goddess, withdrew her fertile presence from the planet Earth when her daughter, Persephone, was taken to the underworld Hades. It was only at Persephone's return that the Earth again flowered and brought forth fruit.

Wisdom and the Goddess

Jean Houston predicted the birth of a new world religion. She believed that the new pattern had already crystallized when she prophesized this new religion in 1983, but warned that a great deal of "human homework" was required in order to perceive and actualize this "myth of times to come." Jean believed the major archetypes for the new story are Gaia and Sophia. Human consciousness was changed forever when we saw Gaia in the photographs taken in space by astronauts. Gaia requires that we become sacred stewards and care for our planetary home, our Earth Mother. Sophia is the Goddess of Wisdom. With the compassion for our planet born of our knowledge of Gaia and the wisdom gained through Sophia, we can follow the trail blazed by the Native Americans who reportedly considered the impact on seven future generations before making important decisions for the present. In the words of Brooke Medicine Eagle, a modern Native American mystic:

In order to step across the gap that lies between this age and a new age of harmony and abundance, we must make a bridge, and that bridge must be made of light. In order for the light to become a rainbow powerful enough to arch across the chasm, it must contain all colors—all peoples, all nations, all things. If any one color is left out, it will not have the strength to become the arching rainbow bridge upon which all of us will walk into a new time. This, in essence, is the same teaching given us by White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman: the teaching of oneness, of unity, cooperation, and harmony.

Living this new way into reality seems to be the challenge of those of my generation (1991, p. 24).

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Last modified: Thu Jun 12 22:35:37 EDT 2008