A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother

McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding are the team behind some of the most notable LDS children’s books of the last decade, including two AML Picture Book Award winners, 2014’s Girls Who Choose God: Stories of Courageous Women from the Bible (illustrated by Kathleen Peterson) and 2016’s Our Heavenly Family, Our Earthly Families (illustrated by Caitlin Connolly). Today McArthur introduces their new project, A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother.

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Bethany and I write together… each with different talents but a united vision. Let me tell you about our process behind the vision for A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother. 

Bethany is an excellent hole-spotter— no matter where she lives, she has this knack for looking around, seeing what’s needed, and working to fill it. I’ve seen it happen over and over again with food activism, setting up tutoring assistance programs for hundreds of intercity youth, and, of course, writing groundbreaking books for children. So, it was not a surprise to me that she was eager to tackle the topic of Heavenly Mother.

My Heavenly Mother history dates back to when I was 12. I had a moment when it just clicked in my head— if there were a Mother God on par with a Father God, that structure and its implications made perfect sense to me. (The concept that They, together, actually make God was not a concept I could even begin to fathom then… and still work/fail at every day in my own life now.)

For me, knowledge of Heavenly Mother changed my world. In fact, I thought it should re-organize the whole world.  But, starting with my life…the truth of Heavenly Mother and Her partnership with our Heavenly Father has been a guiding light in making decisions about how to spend my life from junior high through graduate school, owning my own business, getting married, and having children. This knowledge steered me to people and places that value my worth and honor my soul. (Yes, there were detours along the way as well.) With a desire for that same light to guide all girls and women, I was completely on board with Bethany to create a book for girls about our Heavenly Mother and our Heavenly Parents’ partnership.

We both thought—girls NEED this book. (We each have three daughters.) So do boys. So do families. So does the world.

We had already written the book Our Heavenly Family, Our Earthly Families with Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father on the cover. (Caitlin Connolly’s gorgeous art.) And while we were proud of that book for showing a realistic and inclusive way to talk about faithful families, it still didn’t capture the power and potential efficacy of our Heavenly Mother.

We toyed around with a couple of framework ideas…perhaps a letter from a mother to her children, perhaps a letter from Heavenly Mother (but that was too daunting), perhaps…who knows. We were wanting a structure that could be an effective platform for a LOT of dense concepts and information but would still be accessible and friendly. We don’t like writing slogs, much less reading them.

And, then, Bethany was inspired—a GUIDEBOOK! Bethany and I are both travelers and have relished seeing the wide-flung parts of our Heavenly Parents’ stunning planet… and guidebooks have been our fast friends along the way. Viola!

A guidebook could give the platform to share information but in an engaging and flexible way. We sat down to see if that could work. And by sat down, I actually mean we Skyped, FaceTimed, WhatsApped — whatever technology could connect us from rural India to Richmond, VA, Bhutan, Australia, South Africa, Greece…as Bethany and her family worked their way around their global sabbatical. (You can see how some of these places now feature in the guidebook!)

We started with research…a lot of research. We wanted to ensure that this guidebook was full of quotes from prophets, apostles, and female church leaders. While conjecture is a fun activity for adults, we wanted to be sure that the ideas we taught children were rooted in solid doctrine.

And…we were AMAZED at the sheer amount of information we found!

A lot of us seem to carry the admonition from our childhood that Heavenly Mother is too sacred to talk about. Or there isn’t enough information about Her. Or because church leaders were not discussing Her, that neither should we. Or that people were simply not interested in Her.

The thing is, none of those are true!

The LDS church has a gospel topic essay on Mother in Heaven.

The most frequently downloaded article from BYU Studies is a historical survey called “A Mother There”—it alone has over 600 quotes about Heavenly Mother from historical church leaders.

In our own survey of more recent quotes from prophets, apostles, and female church leaders we found dozens and dozens of quotes…many from General Conference. We decided this information needed to be more accessible to people so we joined forces with the fabulous team from www.SeekingHeavenlyMother.com—that site has a ton of research compiled in one place.

All of this combined to a more robust picture of Heavenly Mother than what we had even initially realized!

(Trust me, if Bethany and I could write a scripturally-accurate children’s book about the women in the Book of Mormon, this was plenty of information to write a book about Heavenly Mother!)

So, we wrote it.

Now, that sounds pretty simple. But, it’s not. We wanted to be very aware of how this could impact people in the most wide-ranging circumstances, especially single women, families of different structures, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. It’s tricky. We wanted to be inclusive. We wanted to be true. We wanted to share regal, bold, revolutionary concepts of Heavenly Mother—but in language that would work for tweens. (Our books are used across age groups…but we aimed this one specially at the girls who had loved Girls Who Choose God series…but had grown over the years and were ready for more doctrinal meat and NEEDED to know about their divine worth. Basically, our daughters.)

And, yes, we aimed the book at girls for a wide variety of reasons. Partially, that’s who we know how to write to. And, we felt it was vital to share unique aspects of being a woman through the lens of our Heavenly Mother. There are some concepts that are not equally applicable to girls and boys both. And, while we think this doctrine is important for everyone, it is actually vital for girls to know of their divine destiny.

We wanted glorious art—of course! We have been blessed by Kathy Peterson’s talent in creating the women for the Girls Who Choose God series. But, for A Girls Guide to Heavenly Mother, we wanted a wider range of artists. It was imperative to us that Heavenly Mother not be one canonized style, look, ethnicity. We wanted girls from all over to feel that they were made in Heavenly Mother’s image. So, we cajoled, begged, recruited, pleaded—basically, anything we could do to round up artists who could give life to this vision. In the end, twenty-seven artists from around the world agreed to contribute their art. (Humbling, truly, that they would take a chance on us.) Several of them later told me how the invitation to contribute had been an answer to prayer or how they had a rich spiritual experience painting Her.

And we were astounded by what they came up with! Their visions of Heavenly Mother are rich and varied and powerful. They show a Deity creating, a Mother welcoming Her children home, a Mother in the pre-mortal life teaching her children, a Queen, a Female Master of the Universe…and more. Stunning, really.

I had seen all of the art but when I first held the hard copy in my hands, I cried. A life’s work encapsulated in a mere 52 pages.

Bethany and I are delighted to share with you A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother—we hope it blesses your lives.

https://dstreetpress.myshopify.com/

(And, this feels like the end—but it’s not! Because, about two weeks after we went public that the Girls Guide book was coming, we got lobbied by several mothers-of-boys…and they made a very compelling case for why they also needed a book for their sons. We were moved…and so recruited Martin Pulido to team up with us to write the Boys Guide to Heavenly Mother. It has completely different text, activities, and art. It has mostly different quotes… and, of course, unique angles that boys need to hear.)

P.S. The artists who generously contributed to the Girls Guide are listed below. A show of art from both the girls and boys book will hang from April 30 to June 15, 2020 at Writ and Vision in Provo, UT. We will do a book signing and panel on April 30, and then an opening of the art on May 1 for the Provo art stroll. Come say hi!

Artists: Allen TenBusschen, Ashmae Hoiland, Ben Crowder, Caitlin Connolley, Claire Tollstrup, Courtney Vander Veur Matz, Esther Candari Christiansen,  Heather Ruttan, J. Kirk Richards, Jenedy Paige, Joumana Borderie, Kathy Peterson, Katrina Berg, Kwani Povi Winder, Laura Erekson, Lisa DeLong, Louise Parker, McArthur Krishna, Melissa Kamba Boggs, Michelle Franzoni Thorley, Michelle Gessell, Normandie Shael Luscher, Paige Anderson, Rachel Hunt Steenblick, Richard Lasisi Olagunju, Sherron Valeña Crisanto, Sopheap Nhem, Susana Silva.

(The credits for the art pieces in this post are forthcoming–later today.)