Women's Issues Articles

Searching For The Feminine Divine
By Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway

I always had a sense that if there was a God, there had to
be a Goddess. Host-Hostess. Steward-Stewardess. Actor-
Actress. In my heart I knew there had to be a yin to the
yang I grew up knowing as the Divine source of all that is.
I just did not have clue how to find Her.

It wasn't until I was in seminary school that I began to
truly see the many feminine faces of God, known as Goddess,
as she exists in so many of the worlds religions and
traditions. My path included many bumps, questions and
doubts along the way. I share my insights with you because
I suspect that many people raised in our traditional
religious culture may find it hard to believe -- and
perhaps even sacrilegious to consider -- that the male God
of the Bible is one of many interpretations of divine
presence that exist in the world's religions.

Fortunately, I was trained by a seminary that encourages
free thinking and exploration. Its motto is "Never instead
of, always in addition to." In order to embrace all faiths
we were taught that God is one source and yet that source
manifests in many ways, through many paths, religions and
spiritual practices. And that God is represented by a wide-
range of deities with different names.

Nevertheless, the fear of acknowledging a feminine face of
God grabbed hold of me in the middle of seminary school. I
was doing what seminarians are supposed to do... grappling
with God. As I studied comparative religion, I was trying
to reconcile the belief system I was raised with--God is a
man, no two ways about it -- with the new belief systems I
was learning -- The Divine is neither male or female and/or
The Divine is indeed both male and female. One day I was
praying to a feminine deity...and I became panic stricken:
What if the Male God gets mad at me and cuts me off? What
if he's saying, Oh, switching teams, eh? We'll see about
that...

Many people are even afraid to consider the Divine as
feminine in form or nature. Yet I learned on my personal
journey that in order to be truly whole, whether we are
women or men, we must embrace both the male and feminine
aspects of the divine-- and we must embrace those aspects
of ourselves and of one another.

I discovered that I am among so many women--and men--
searching for spirituality that brings both The Father and
The Mother to the table. As we desperately seek balance and
peace on our planet, and in these times of deeply
disturbing and frightening world events, many of us are
searching for what's been missing in modern life. And I
believe one of the most important missing pieces of our
lives has been The Sacred Feminine -- not instead of, but
in addition to, The Sacred Male. In the tradition of all-
inclusive spirituality, we refer to the Divine as "God,
Goddess, All there is."

She is there, in between the lines
When I first began to search for signs the Mother in the
world's religions, I found a few beautiful examples of
including the "she aspect". One was in the gentle spiritual
practice known as Taoism, founded by Loa Tzu in the 6th
Century B.C.E.. The Taoists explain the origin of all that
is as feminine, yet is manifested as both male and female,
in what is known as the Yin and the Yang. It is this energy
that the Taoist religious text Tao Te Ching attributes to
the creation of the cosmos. "Conceived of as having no
name, it is the originator of heaven and earth...it is the
Mother of all things."

In Kabbalah, the mystical aspect of Judaism, the
indwelling aspect of God, also known as Shekinah, is
considered to be the feminine aspect of God. Kabbalists
also know the soul as "She." Consider this petition to the
divine from the tradition of mystical Judaism: "My soul
aches to receive your love. Only by the tenderness of your
light can she be healed. Engage my soul that she may taste
your ecstasy."

The Judaic scriptures and the Gnostic Christian doctrines
also include wisdom as a feminine aspect. She is called
Sophia and considered the personification of wisdom.

The Buddhists confer that Praj-na-para-mita (which means
the perfection of wisdom) is feminine. An important
Buddhist text, Sariputra, puts it this way: "The perfection
of wisdom gives light, O Lord. I pay homage to the
perfection of wisdom. She is worthy of homage. She is
unstained and the world cannot stain her."

Then of course, there is Grace. In Christian Theology it
is the expression of God's love in his free and unmerited
assistance. And, as the New Testament puts it, Grace can
only be conferred through Faith. Isn't it interesting that
those are names assigned to women? That Grace and Faith
evoke perhaps the greatest sense of connection to the
Divine, yet do so in the name and essence of the feminine.
I was excited to see that when you dig around a bit you
will find the feminine between the lines of well-
established religions. Still, I was searching for a God who
looked like me--feminine in nature and in her
manifestations...The spiritual mother I longed for.

Hail Mary
Conventional religious belief is obviously dominated by
references and images of a male Divine, whispering ever so
softly of feminine energies between the lines. Yet
Catholicism has given us our most tangible mainstream
connection. Mary, mother of God's only begotten son, along
with a handful popular female saints, have been the most
highly visible aspect of the feminine in the traditional
religion for 2,000 years. Because of that, The Blessed
Virgin cuts across religious boundaries. She is, in many
ways, the adopted spiritual mother of all women and people
of many faiths embrace her. She has been solely responsible
for keeping the sacred feminine alive for a couple of
millennium. Yet there are many cultures that are rich with
mythology, spiritual practices, religious experiences and
sacred texts that show us so many ways in which The Goddess
has been and can be worshipped, remembered and evoked.

It is extraordinary to realize that just over 2000 years
ago, less than 40 years before the birth of Jesus Christ,
queen Cleopatra of Egypt prayed to the mother Goddess,
Isis, who was the favored deity of the Queen's temples.
Cleopatra's beloved, Julius Caesar, bowed to Isis' Roman
counterpart, the Goddess Venus. What was considered
sacrilegious in their day was not the worship of Goddesses
... but Caesar's worship of Cleopatra, which was so intense
that he erected a statue of Cleopatra as Venus, but looking
like Isis, in a holy temple to the Roman Goddess. The
Romans did not appreciate that interfaith approach to
Goddess worship back then.

When the Romans conquered Egypt, they ultimately replaced
the antiquities and images of Isis and her infant Horus
with images and icons of Mary and the baby Jesus.

Although Mary and Jesus are the most famous mother and
child, the image of the mother and the child (or the
pregnant, fertile mother) abound as a motif of cultures
that worshiped The Great Mother. Joseph Campbell often said
that the same essence of the Divine Feminine could be found
in the religious mythology and folklore of every culture.
Many of the stories are the same, yet the names and
specific circumstances change according to cultural
tradition.

History of the Goddess
The earliest signs of Goddess worship date as far back as
35,000 years ago. One of the most famous artifacts of the
Divine Feminine is The Venus of Willendorf, which is
believed to have been carved in stone 20,000 to 30,000
thousand years ago. And while she looks like a rotund
female--pregnant and voluptuous--when you place a replica
of her famous statue on a flat on her back, she takes on
the form of the earth--the hills and valleys, mountains and
ravines, are all in her body.

And that is how the ancients worshiped The Great Mother--
as Mother of the Earth, Mother Earth and Mom Nature. They
followed an earth-based religion. The Great Goddess Mother
was the earth--alive, growing, pulsating with life. She was
fertility, death and regeneration, as witnessed in the
flowers and trees, the moon and the ocean, the cycles of
life and nature. She was seen in so many diverse forms--
fluid, capable of assuming any role. Much like our own
mothers.

She was revered as the great power because women were seen
as the great power. It was human women who could conceive,
birth, and nurture children from their own bodies. A
Miracle. But a miracle akin to the magic of mother earth--
who could nurture flowers in the summer, protect them in
her womb in the winter, and magically let them grow again
in spring.

It is believed by many scholars that it was the eruption
of violence as perpetrated by the newer, male dominated
cultures that obliterated the peaceful, earth honoring ways
of Goddess worship and paved the way for the strong hold of
Christianity and eventually the obliteration of the Goddess
from religion, religious texts and teachings.

Native American and indigenous shamanic cultures
The shamanic religion -- 50,000 years old and still going
strong, and considered the oldest of all religions -- also
reveres the mother, along with the father. She is the
earth, the Great Mother. Some cultures call her Patchamama
or Corn Woman. She is the nurturer who feeds us from her
own body and sustains all of life. In Native American
cultures she is represented by the turtle--a hard shell
with a soft inside. A popular Lakota chant sums it up well:
"The earth is our mother... we must take care of her."

Who is the Goddess?
Like most people who are unfamiliar with the concept and
the rich spirituality of including The Goddess, the first
time I began to explore the aspect of Feminine Divine
called Goddess I was afraid that it meant I had to worship
only a SHE and practice a spirituality that excluded men.
Wrong.

Almost three decades ago, Merlin Stone wrote a
groundbreaking book called When God Was A Woman, tracing
cultures that worshipped "The Goddess" or "Goddesses". She
described Goddess this way: She is the "divine feminine
principle" or the "sacred feminine principle in the
universe."

In this millennium we are seeing a resurgence of the
Divine Feminine and an observance of the feminine as
sacred. We are seeing her in history, art, folklore,
religion, spirituality, archeology, media, and mythology.

Many scholars and clergy agree that we need her help to
midwife this new point in history... Because she brings to
our world--and our lives--those qualities that, as
discussed, even some traditional religions and most
mystical religions assign as feminine qualities: Wisdom and
the expression of the Soul. When we tap into wisdom and
follow the call of our souls we can then forgive, be
tolerant, appreciate everyone's individual evolution, and
love without conditions. The energy of the Divine Feminine
also balances the energy of the male; without it, the
qualities traditionally associated with male energy - which
include warring and aggression - will get completely out of
hand.

Rich spiritual traditions and religious mythology can help
in everyday life
The natural progression of my search for the Divine
Feminine was to write a book that put together all that I
learned about the Goddess and how she can help us in our
daily lives. In researching A Goddess Is A Girl's Best
Friend , I found thousands of ways the Divine Feminine is
personified in different cultures. The rich mythology of
the Feminine Divine has reemerged to offer role models--and
guidance-- to modern men and women. She comes to us as The
Mother, and also the Maiden and The Wise Woman. She is also
Sister, Daughter, Best Friend. For example:

" The Greek Goddess Aphrodite, also known as the Roman
Goddess, Venus, is Goddess of Love and Infatuation. She has
completely insinuated herself in our culture, helping us to
evoke the love within us all and encouraging us to
experience high romance.

" The Egyptian Goddess Isis is one of the most revered
Goddesses, worshipped as Queen of Heaven in the ancient
Egyptian religions. A healing and resurrection Goddess who
was also consider a physician, she brought her beloved
Osiris back to life from the dead and bore his child Horus,
who went on to be the chosen son to represent the father,
on earth. She lives on through her image and energy, in
reliefs on ancient temples and tomb walls. She shows us we
can heal, survive our grief and live fruitful lives.

" The Chinese Goddess Kuan Yin is a beautiful Bodhisattva
who has captured the heart of Buddhist worshipers and
beyond, just as Mary has captured the heart of so many in
her religion of origin and around the world. She comes to
tell us to be merciful and compassionate--especially to be
our own merciful mothers.

" Lakshmi is the Hindu Goddess of Good Fortune who brings
abundance and beauty into our lives, pouring her gifts upon
us. She, like Aphrodite, was born of the milky waters of
the sea. She is symbolized as beautiful woman with four
arms, one pouring coins into the ocean from whence she
came. She is still worshipped daily in Hindu temples and
homes, as are all Goddesses in that tradition.
(please link LSB October column).

All that is Divine is both Female and Male
The Hindus teach us that the Divine essence of all that is
the creative summary of both male and female principle. And
so do the Taoists, who show us the feminine and the
masculine principle that feed one another and make up the
whole in the symbol of Yin/Yang. The circle of black and
white halves shows two opposite energies from whose
interactions and fluctuation the universe and its diverse
forms emerge. Tibetan Buddhist do the same with their most
sacred objects, dorje and bell. The bell represents the
feminine and the dorje is the male principal. No worship
service is ever conducted without use of each, together,
one held in each hand.

In these systems of belief.... You can't have one without
the other. You can't have day without the night. You can't
have man without woman, or masculine without feminine. In
very, very simple form, you can forget about toast for the
rest of your life ...you can't plug in a toaster without
both the male plug and the female outlet.

When we really understand that the Divine nature of all
that is contains both the masculine and the feminine
principles, it begins to make sense that men and women each
contain those Divine principle; that the energy of the
Goddess exists within all of us; and that one energy might
at some times be more prominent than the other.

We are all children of God, Goddess, All There Is. When we
acknowledge that we are all Divine, as well as complex
beings that are both feminine and the masculine in nature,
we can begin to access true balance in our lives. It is in
acknowledging that these qualities exist in all of us that
we begin to find balance in our relationship to ourselves,
our relationships to one another, and in our relationship
to the world we live in.

Copyright 2003, Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway
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Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway is an interfaith minister and non-
denominational wedding officiant. She is also a spiritual
counselor and author devoted to empowering women's self
esteem and spirituality. She's a love and relationship
columnist for SoulfulLiving.com, LoveMagazine.com, and
HealthWise Magazine. She is creator of Create Your Romantic
Resume: A 30-Day Program to Transform Your Romantic
Destiny, available only through
www.selfhealingexpressions.com and is author A Goddess Is A
Girl's Best Friend: A Divine Guide To Finding Love, Success
and Happiness (Perigee Books, December 2002). For more
information, visit Rev. Laurie Sue at
www.GoddessFriends.com.

 

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