“Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry” – A New Book from Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido

Mormon literature again tunes artistic sensibilities to the concept of Heavenly Mother, this time with “Dove Song,” an anthology of “poetry and art” released April 2018 by Peculiar Pages with editors Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, Martin Pulido and 80 contributors. The book’s foreword appears below.

The Hebrew Bible’s Exodus narrative opens with the children of Israel in bondage to the Egyptians. Enter Moses, a Hebrew by birth who was allowed to live because the Hebrew midwives ignored Pharaoh’s decree that all newborn Israelite boys should be killed. Hidden away for several months, he’s eventually sent downriver where he’s adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and grows up in Pharaoh’s household. As a young adult, he observes the Hebrews’ oppression and, standing up for a Hebrew man, kills an Egyptian. Fleeing into exile to avoid Pharaoh’s anger, he marries and begins a new life in the wilderness as shepherd of his father-in-law’s flocks.

The story of his divine call to return to Egypt as prophet and deliverer of Israel is widely-known and repeated. Drawn to Horeb, “the mountain of God,” he hears God speaking “in a flame of fire from within a bush.” Turning from the work of tending his father-in-law’s flock, he approaches the bush to see how it burns without being consumed and God tells him to remove his sandals because the place is “holy ground” (NET [New English Translation], Exodus 3:1–5). In Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (1956), God’s words (voiced by the late Donald Hayne) rumble from the bush, sending Charlton Heston-as-Moses to his knees. Prostrate before the deep-voiced God of his father, Moses commits to carry God’s name from the encounter, to hold it up before Israel, and to lead Israel out of Egypt, to freedom.

As we consider this story now, after working for years on Dove Song and exploring for longer the Divine Feminine in Mormonism, two questions come to mind: first, why must God be a dramatic basso profondo? And second, what might it look like to approach—and attempt to grasp and sustain—the holy?

In response to the first question, we hear the 79 poets whose work we’ve gathered in Dove Song bearing witness that He doesn’t. In fact, Mormonism says, God isn’t simply a He, God’s also a She—God’s a They, a union of Eternal Beings. But what, pray tell, might They sound like? And more apropos to the anthology’s concerns, what in particular might God the Mother’s voice add to the chorus? Joseph Smith described “the voice of Jehovah,” whom Latter-day Saints take to be the Son and recognize as acting and speaking after the manner of the Father, “as the sound of the rushing of great waters” (Doctrine & Covenants 110:3). While this may capture one aspect of the Father’s verbal register, it may also echo how the Mother sounds. If not, we may only ever be able to guess what Mother sounds like, especially when the largely patriarchal voice of Mormon discourse (as of Western discourse in general) dominates religious conversations. Nevertheless, as compilers and editors of this collection, we’ve tried to showcase poems that imagine the potential range and register of Mother’s voice as performed by many poets from the lush field of LDS Mormonism.

To organize this abundance, we’ve arranged the anthology in a loosely chronological order, while at the same time attempting to keep each poet’s poems together. This hasn’t always been possible, since the writing lives of some poets span multiple decades and since the three-part structure we’ve chosen for the book splits the contemporary era into two discrete sections. (The work of five poets appears in both sections.) At first blush, this separation might appear unnecessary; but as we kept company with the poems from the 1970s to today, we noticed a definite tonal shift in the early 2000s. Whereas the poems featured in Part One: A Mother There [1844–1910]—many of them written by early Church leaders—speak with authority about and adoration of “the Eternal Mother,”[1] “Queen of Heaven,”[2] the poems in Part Two: On the Far Shore [1973–2003] in general express grief, sorrow, and bitterness that Mother is largely absent from Mormon culture and discourse, an absence illustrated in Dove Song with the lack of poems from the 1920s through the 1960s.

This noticeable void in the anthology may mark a reduction in references to Heavenly Mother in the Mormon poetry published during those decades; while our research uncovered some poems addressing Heavenly Mother during this period, we didn’t feel that the aesthetic or theological characteristics of those poems were pronounced enough to merit their inclusion among other texts that do rich aesthetic and/or theological work. Dove Song is a selective anthology, and that may create improper expectations for readers who view it as an exhaustive historical chronicle. In addition, researching this period has been more difficult with sparser digital records, meaning that there may be more to uncover in that period, including non-English works published outside the United States.

Regardless, notable Mormon writers no longer included Heavenly Mother as a topic of literary reflection in that period. The resurgence and tonal shift in the 1970s grew out of a response by LDS women to their dwindling participation in religious practices during those prior decades. LDS women had been censored from giving blessings and from offering opening and closing sacrament meeting prayers and the rather autonomously run Relief Society was realigned by church correlation into a “priesthood auxiliary” to make it more “priesthood-centered.” This had incredible impact on the society’s focus, teachings, publications, financing, and social services operations. LDS women were upset, and found in poetry an outlet for that frustration. Linda Sillitoe observed of this time period: “Anger has become an acceptable emotion for women to experience, let alone display, only recently—if at all. [. . .] In most of the angry poems I have seen, the anger is directed toward personal or institutional absences; the anger represents the rejection of rejection.”[3] For the first time, LDS women were vocalizing in art their complicated experience within the cultural and theological mores of their church.

They brought up Heavenly Mother to support their arguments and frustration. For instance, in the heat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) debate, feminist activist Sonia Johnson had an airplane fly overhead trailing a banner noting that Heavenly Mother supported the ERA. It’s no surprise that Heavenly Mother appeared in LDS women’s poetry that grappled with women’s religious marginalization. They saw the Mother as a symbol for that marginalization, both in suffering it Herself and as an audience to hear their plight and even reveal a remedy. The poetry in Part Two of Dove Song tackles both these challenges of gender inequality by either directly confronting them or by reenvisioning Heavenly Mother as more proactive and involved in the roles typically associated with Heavenly Father. The latter texts became a means of correcting in heaven what was unequal on earth with its patriarchal ecclesiastical structure and social norms. This shift in content is paralleled by tremendous shifts in form and tone, as if the old literary conventions themselves were something to be overcome.

Hence, the section division for Part Three: A Fearsome Beauty [2007–2017], which signals the aforementioned tonal shift. While the poems in Part Three—Dove Song’s largest section, although it covers only a decade-worth of writing—don’t deny the abiding grief, sorrow, bitterness, frustration, or anger many Mormons feel over Mother’s long discursive absence, they also take Her as a given and revel in the space poetry provides to explore new possibilities for understanding, honoring, celebrating, and connecting with Her. More, they echo trends in contemporary LDS art that envision women no longer as merely the faithful saved (recipients of light, revelation, and salvation), at the periphery of the scene, sitting in awe and adoration at the knees of male prophets, male angels, and the Son of God. They are cast in salvific roles themselves—as bearers of lights, as leaders, as angelic beings offering comfort, support, and announcing the love of God. In the visual arts, this can be seen prominently in the works of Annie Henrie Nader, Brian Kershisnik, J. Kirk Richards, and Caitlyn Connolly (the latter two have portrayed Heavenly Mother repeatedly).

We can’t be fully certain, but we suspect that this assumption of Heavenly Mother as a granted aspect of Mormon doctrine may emerge from Western culture’s focus on and gradual acceptance of the equal rights of men and women, as well as from increased reference to Heavenly Parents in official Church discourse.[4] And broader acceptance of Heavenly Mother as a “cherished and distinctive”[5] doctrine seems to have made speaking and writing about Her a much less fraught activity than it once was. When combined with the expansive state of contemporary Mormon poetry, the growing institutional recognition that Mother stands beside Father at the center of LDS theology seems to have stirred the emergence of an abundant field of poetry that contemplates Mother and Her role in our lives. The texts in this field include pieces published for the A Mother Here: Art and Poetry Contest, which Martin Pulido and Caroline Kline hosted in 2014, as well as poems gathered through the open call for poetry we distributed in 2015.

Which brings us back to our earlier question: what might it look like to approach—and attempt to grasp and sustain—the holy? Per Moses’ story, the approach looks like turning from everyday concerns to consider how common objects, like a hillside bush, might flicker with God’s presence and glory; and also per Moses, the attempt to grasp and sustain the holy looks like holding in mind and holding out to others the objects, language, and metaphors through which we meet God and give shape and/or meaning to our experience of God. Gathering the poems for this project and considering together the vital presence of God the Mother in Mormon poetry and theology, we’ve felt like Moses approaching that hillside bush and attempting to comprehend and bear witness of the holiness he found there. This isn’t by any means to say that we fancy ourselves prophets and deliverers chosen of God to save God’s people. No, by that we simply mean that as scholars and poets who are invested in Mormonism, we’ve felt drawn to turn our attention to the presence of Mother smoldering in the brush of Mormon thought. Smoldering, though, isn’t the right word for what we found. Rather, exploring the expansive field of Mormon poetry that contemplates Heavenly Mother, we’ve seen not smoldering ashes in the underbrush but a many-colored flame building within and whispering from a sacred Mother Tree.

And here we’ve shifted the burning bush metaphor in light of Dove Song’s interest in the Divine Feminine, bringing the narrative of Moses’ encounter with God into conversation with a more directly Mormon text: Book of Mormon prophet Jacob’s telling of the allegory of the olive tree. In this narrative, a man worries over his vineyard, fertilizing his olive trees, aerating the soil around their roots, and pruning their branches to preserve the health of each tree and its fruit, to keep them from growing wild. While tending to his favored tree, he sees signs of distress and decay in the plant and turns his full attention to nurturing it back to vitality. He dungs it. He digs about the roots. He prunes it, and with his servant’s help, grafts some branches into other trees while planting other branches elsewhere in the vineyard and grafting branches from other trees into his favored tree—all to cultivate and preserve his favored tree’s health, productivity, and biological heritage. The scriptural account likens this tree unto the house of Israel and can be interpreted as arguing for God’s abiding attentiveness to Israel’s seed such that it might propagate to fill and bless the earth. However, the story’s clear concern for the vigor of what it finally and repeatedly calls the vineyard’s “mother tree” (Jacob 5:54, 56, 60) opens possibilities for reading the figure as a benevolent feminine influence whose presence brings glory, strength, goodness, and joy to the vineyard and its vast ecology just as she receives these things in return (5:54, 59, 60).

Like the allegorized vineyard workers laboring to preserve their mother tree, we’ve sensed a compelling need to focus attention on the work of cherishing God the Mother and acknowledging Her influence among Her children by presenting and celebrating Her abiding and expansive presence in the literary and theological handiwork of a diverse group of Mormon writers. While, as the visual and verbal imagery bound up in the phrase “dove song” suggests, this work has emerged from a sense of mourning and loss, it also reaches to share the peace, power, and grace that emanate from our Mother Tree: “the throne of the Great Eternal Mother” (to borrow from Eliza R. Snow).[6]

*

It has been humbling—and a deep honor—to attend to this work together as we’ve compiled Dove Song and, through the process, to feel that we’ve been handling the holy. We’ve had the pleasure of getting to the heart of Mormon theology, which as Dallin H. Oaks has put it, “begins with heavenly parents.”[7] Heavenly Mother is the capstone to Joseph Smith’s explosive and radical theological output during the Church’s Nauvoo period. The revelation of Heavenly Mother wasn’t adding an additional deity to some Mormon pantheon of gods, akin to adding a Hera to a Zeus; rather, it redefined the very nature of what it meant to be God. Through his unveiling of Heavenly Mother, Joseph can be seen asserting that the world possesses radical alterity—that its products and inhabitants possess differences that are, at root, real and irreducible. In the theology emerging from Joseph’s teachings, God is a Many (Mother and Father) made One, a Many that did not begin united in purpose, as in flavors of social trinitarianism. No, this Many began in a moment in time, meaning that the oneness of God can be seen as a voluntary coming together, a marriage of and preservation of Their eternal differences. In this view, no person removed from others or the world is a God; rather, to be a God means to be intimately bound up in relation with others. Hence, Mormon theology ultimately rejects the traditional doctrine of God’s impassibility and instead exalts relationality, intimacy, the work of persuasion, and exposure to the Other.

This beginning point of Mormon theology—which Oaks says also represents that theology’s “highest aspiration”: to make us “like them”[8]—opens other fascinating possibilities. Not the least of these is spirit birth, a concept that, however it works, is bound up in the creative collaboration of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, whose essential differences make Their relationship vital. The belief that we’re spirit children of Heavenly Parents alludes to humanity’s inherited divine nature; it also points to an eternal push for novelty. Sex differences bring biological value to existence by creating variants of life that may have the superior traits needed to better adapt to and therefore survive in an environment. Vague as the realities of spirit birth may be, we wonder: does Father and Mother’s commingling also introduce novelty into existence? Does it fine-tune new lifeforms to an ever-evolving eternal environment? Or does it simply add aesthetic variety and beauty to what otherwise exists in a state of constancy? And on a more basic level, is the universe itself moving toward new varieties of life, new ways of being? Mormon scripture seems to posit that life advances in an ever-repeating cycle—we are thus only doing what has been done on other worlds. This view holds that every entity inherits a pre-existing type or form that has existed from eternity to eternity. But there is another way of looking at the “eternal round,” which sees the reiteration as radical and expansive, spiraling out from its current state and emerging into untapped, unexplored space. In this light, the merging of differences conceives newness. The Son reiterates the image of Father and Mother, but He also becomes something neither Father nor Mother are in and of Themselves.

The concept of Heavenly Mother also opens a more comforting and inclusive notion of eternal family. Mormon theology and religious practices have enshrined the family unit, but have done so by focusing more on creating eternal families through sealings of spouses and of children to parents and less on sealing the individual to the Heavenly Family. For those who are rejected by their earthly families, who are cast off in divorce or by parental neglect, or who are never able to find a companion, Mormonism promises that the faithful can be sealed to Heavenly Parents, that our peers in this world are actual spirit brothers and sisters, and that we can find love, joy, and belonging in the Community of Heaven as the ultimate Family of importance. This may grant a sense of peace and hope to those who struggle with failed or lacking biological and marital relationships. The Church might benefit from putting this notion of Family at the forefront of its teachings on and concerted defense of the family.

These possibilities (and many others) speak to why we felt like we were approaching the holy with this project. Like much religious art, the poems in Dove Song contain what Eliza R. Snow called “a secret something”[9] that points beyond the limits of language. Perhaps best compared to a revelation or a sacrament, art discloses a reality previously absent to observers either because their own imaginations have not or sometimes could not see when left to their own devices. In religious art, this can result in a sense of divine presence. And while no art can portray God in totality, transcendent as deity and all persons are, artworks can invoke a fragment of that dimension through which the power of godliness can be manifest. In the case of this book, the poetry may have the potential to unveil the aspects of God manifest in Heavenly Mother.

Notes:

1. Eliza R. Snow, Excerpt from “To Mrs. [Sylvia Sessions] Lyon” (Trail Diary Version), www.amotherhere.com/coll/snow2.php.
2. W. W. Phelps’ “A Song of Zion,” http://www.amotherhere.com/coll/phelps1.php.
3. “New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Winter 1980, vol. 13, no. 4, p. 57, www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V13N04_49.pdf
4. See Christian Anderson, “Heavenly Parents at General Conference,” Zelophedad’s Daughters, 1 November 2016, zelophehadsdaughters.com/2016/11/01/heavenly-parents-at-conference/.
5. “Mother in Heaven,” LDS.org, October 2015, www.lds.org/topics/mother-in-heaven.
6. “To Mrs. [Sylvia Sessions] Lyon” (Trail Diary Version), www.amotherhere.com/coll/snow2.php.
7. “Apostasy and Restoration,” Ensign, May 1995, p. 84, www.lds.org/general-conference/1995/04/apostasy-and-restoration.
8. See also “Becoming Like God,” LDS.org, February 2014, www.lds.org/topics/becoming-like-god.
9. “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother” (also known as “My Father in Heaven” and “O My Father”), www.amotherhere.com/coll/snow1.php.