Guest Post: Seeking the Mother, Reclaiming the Father

Guest post by Katy Stovall, a lover of nature, baking, reading, and learning. She lives in upstate NY with her amazing husband, two lovely stepchildren, busy twin toddlers, and a neurotic rescue dog. 

I was a child when I first heard of Heavenly Mother, learning about the doctrine from my mother. I kept this knowledge in the back of my mind, sensing its significance but not seeing any application of it in my church. The doctrine became more important to me as I grew older—it offered some hope of peace in the face of unspoken, even unrecognized, insecurities I felt about my role and worth as a woman. Naturally, there were the obvious questions: Why don’t we talk about Her? Why doesn’t She speak to Her children? What role does She play in our theology? There were no answers to these inquiries, just speculation mingled with patriarchy.

At times my unanswered questions regarding Heavenly Mother would irk me and I would ruminate on them. I reasoned that if we were commanded to cleave to our spouse and become as one flesh, then our Heavenly Parents must be so perfectly unified that they would have been side by side in everything. I wondered why we don’t include Her in our prayers, but I accepted the explanation that we followed Christ’s example in praying to God the Father. I determine that Heavenly Mother would not be so egotistical as to be diminished by the fact that we speak almost exclusively of and to Heavenly Father. Eventually, it struck me that, though God may not really care what pronoun is used, surely it would make a substantial difference to God’s children if we were to more frequently acknowledge the face of women in God. It troubled me, but I was able to put it on the proverbial shelf. Although the doctrine of Heavenly Mother was something I kept returning to, my desire to understand more was really just a burning ember. As long as it remained so it posed little threat to my understanding of God.

My small ember found the fuel it needed to ignite into flames during the infancy of my twin sons. I marveled at their dependency on my husband and me, in awe of my body’s ability to house and then feed them, humbled by the power I uniquely had to soothe them. My thoughts frequently turned to my own mother, imagining what she felt as she held me, the last of her seven children. I thought of my grandmothers, their mothers, and all other mothers that came before me. And I also thought of Mother God, the questions that I once asked becoming weightier as my bond with my babies grew and highlighted Her absence. Why, with so much emphasis on earthly motherhood, has the church had so little to say about Heavenly Mother? All my life I had been encouraged to seek God the Father, but never once was it suggested that I might desire to seek God the Mother even though it was supposedly my divine destiny to become like Her. Everyone else, it seemed to me, was unbothered by Her absence. I felt erased by the theology of my church.

Concurrently it was becoming more and more difficult to say personal prayers. I would stumble over the very beginning. “Dear Heavenly Father,” I would start, hesitate, then fume. I was exhausted with newborn twins, so I didn’t question why prayer was becoming so challenging. There was a growing chasm between God and me, a disconnect that I didn’t know how to fix. I wanted to pray for help, but every time I would begin I would recall instructions to not direct prayers to Heavenly Mother and I would get stuck wondering why. How could this comport with a belief in a loving Heavenly Father, one who would deny His children access to their Mother? I could no longer approach that God in prayer. My image of God was consumed by the flame now burning in me.

It surprised me how much patriarchal ideas had persisted in my understanding of Heavenly Father, as I didn’t actually believe any of them on an intellectual level. My anger, then, was not really with God, as I no longer believed that Heavenly Father was the power keeping the Divine Feminine shrouded. Yet I still had to sift out these ideas that led me to think of God as punitive, egotistical, and sexist. Of course, these traits were completely inconsistent with my own personal experiences with God, and I never would have used those words to describe Heavenly Father. Yet I found there was a part of me that feared God would act in those ways.

As I struggled to connect with God the Father, I was seeking more for God the Mother. I reflected on times I had felt God’s love and found myself trying to retroactively insert some impression of Heavenly Mother into those experiences, but I knew that was disingenuous. It pained me to suddenly feel disappointed by some of my most impactful spiritual experiences. This time I did pray to Heavenly Father and told Him as much. “Were you not loved and cared for?” was the gentle response. I was, I knew I couldn’t deny it. Though I couldn’t go back and give my younger self the cognizance of a Mother’s love in those moments, it didn’t mean that Her love hadn’t always been entwined with the Father’s. I could rest in the peace those experiences gave me.

“Not my idea of God, but God” stated C.S Lewis in A Grief Observed. Letting go of the patriarchal image of God, I try to be careful not to create God in my own image. But truthfully, we all do that to an extent. God speaks to us “after the manner of [our] language” (D&C 1:24) so how could we not? I’m less concerned now with uncovering the true image of God and working to be open to God however They speak to me, allowing God to be expansive. I endeavor to seek the Mother and reclaim the Father. Sometimes I imagine the Father-figure I once held to, sometimes the image is maternal. I envision Them as if They were heaven and earth, the one lifting my vision up, the other grounding me, and both inspiring love, curiosity, and awe. And now, in my prayers, I address Them both.

This post is part of a series, Contemplating Heavenly Mother. Find more from this series here.