by Carol Lynn Pearson
THE IMMEDIATE STORY: After suddenly and surprisingly in 1967 becoming well-known in the Mormon community for a little volume of poetry called Beginnings and subsequently four other volumes of verse—and after nearly 30 years of hardly ever picking up a pen to write another poem or even wanting to—unexpectedly I did. The result is a new volume that appeared in print on September 1, 2020, Finding Mother God: Poems to Heal the World.
THE BACKSTORY: From my pre-teenage years I have been passionate about “the place of woman in the plan of God,” accepting everything my church taught about the spiritual centrality of maleness and the peripheral place of femaleness. Fundamental to all this was the unquestionable doctrine that God is a glorified man. Of course, there was the suggestion that somewhere we’ve a Mother there. But She was hidden, unavailable, unknowable and functionally non-existent. My years of tears and studying and searching without finding can be capsulized in a brief conversation I had with one of my highly respected professors at BYU.
Me: Tell me something—do you think God values maleness more than femaleness?
The Professor (thoughtfully): Well, I guess I would have to say yes. God, being all-powerful, could be anything God wanted to be, and He chose to be male.
Of course. And where did that leave me? And slightly more than half the population of the Church and of the world? I was good. I was smart. And I was forever destined to be a second-class citizen in the Kingdom of God. But my search continued and my view of heaven and of earth expanded. I studied history and mythology. I learned to read the revelations of my own heart and came to my own conclusions. Something was very, very wrong here. And it was not me that was wrong—it was the system that was wrong. A paradigm shifted. And new questions arose.
What if a great deal of the pain experienced by humanity is a consequence of a near-total eclipse in the heavens of the Female Divine? What if the strange disappearance of God the Mother from history and from religion is not a cold case but can be cracked wide open? And what if we now acknowledge the missing half of God and invite the Mother—the essential Feminine Principle–back into the family? What if this is not just a cosmetic nicety but a cosmic necessity?
I knew I had to do something about it. I wrote and performed over 300 times internationally a one-woman play, Mother Wove the Morning, in which I play sixteen women throughout history in search of the female face of God. The experience could not have been more thrilling. I hired a professional filmmaker to create a video of the performance, something that is still available on DVD at my website. I thought I was finished. I had done my part in inviting God the Mother back into our consciousness and I had nothing more to say.
But then something happened.
THE STORY BEHIND THE RECENT STORY. I haven’t written this down anywhere except in my diary. But it should be told somewhere and so, as this is sort of a private visit between you and me, here it is. In August of 2018, just two years ago, I attended a fireside in Berkeley at which a church scholar gave a presentation on women in LDS Church liturgy. Just the facts—the sisters had some power in the early church–then they had to sacrifice much of it on the altar of prodding the priesthood brethren to step up and take a leadership role—and now new doors are opening for LDS women: being put on better committees, a lowering of the missionary age for young women, etc.
As the time came for questions, I—sitting on the front row—raised my hand.
Me: Well, you know, there’s not going to be any real movement on behalf of women in the Church until the brethren can do something really significant—like address the gender of God.
The Scholar: Oh, yes. Heavenly Mother. We don’t know much about her . . . .
Me: Of course not! Because there’s so many of them!
(Laughter in the room.)
Me: Honestly, what would it take for the brethren in Salt Lake to truly address the gender of God?
The Scholar (after significant pause): I don’t believe that any of the leadership is interested in doing the heavy lifting that would be required to address that subject.
I can still feel the anger I felt in that moment. Not anger at the scholar. Anger at the system. Anger that so few people in power cared much about something so essential as the disappearance of Half of God. I was angry on the drive home. I was still angry the next day. I was, in fact, so angry that I cried.
And then I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time. I grabbed a brand new notebook and I wrote a brand new poem. The next day I wrote another one. The day after that I wrote three. I couldn’t stop, and to my surprise I was having the time of my life. Anger had been replaced by celebration. Here were all these intriguing poems lined up in my head waving their hands and waiting for me to get to them. I kept writing. And then I had twenty, then thirty, then seventy-two. And then I got a publisher. And now the book is out. It’s available on Amazon or personally autographed copies from my website.
I want to share with you one of the first poems that I wrote. This one did not make it into the book. I took out all that felt specifically LDS because the volume is written to the general public—to women and men, to people of all religions and of no religion. And actually I didn’t want to offend the brethren. But this little verse really ought to be preserved somewhere besides in my diary, and this seems to be the place because, you know, this is sort of a private visit between you and me.
HEAVY LIFTING
Having been assured by the scholar
that the male leadership of my church
has no interest in doing the heavy lifting
that would be required to address
a subject as weighty as
the gender of God
it falls to me
to do the heavy lifting
in poetry.
Please visit Carol Lynn at her website: https://carollynnpearson.com
Thank you Carol Lynn Pearson, for everything.
.
THIS is what poets are FOR.