Approaching God as Mother

Published: August 16th, 2010

Lisa Borden's first book 'Approaching God' explores some of the ways we can approach God in prayer. The book is beautifully illustrated both with pictures and some of Lisa's poetry. In the chapter from which this extract is taken Lisa approaches God as mother.

The knot in my shoulder had progressed from being merely annoying to actually causing a headache.  I tried to look unaffected but the awkward motion of my neck as I went about my day was apparent.

“What’s up?’ Byron asked.

“Oh, my neck is stiff,” I said.  “Kind of knotted up.”

“But how did it get knotted up?’ he asked.

“Well, I was holding the baby,” I replied, as if that should make it all be perfectly clear.

His eyes widened a little with the wordless question “And?”

“I was holding the baby for kind of a long time while he slept and I had my head in sort of a weird position in order to keep him comfortable so he would stay asleep.”

We were traveling a lot in those days.  We were in and out of people’s homes visiting friends and family before we returned to East Africa.  There wasn’t a lot of routine.  Some days I was listening to a lecture on how to effectively learn a new language, our little son in tow.  Other days I was careening through the shops filling my cart with what I thought were the essentials for the next few years stretching ahead of us in remote places.  Again, our little son was always in tow.

With life a bit on the road and suitcases as our normal entourage, calm rhythms of daily life evaporated and a well-napped baby was hard to come by.  I just remember that on this day, the nap had been in my arms and I didn’t want to bring it to an end until it had had sufficient time to do its good work.

Looking no less puzzled--in fact maybe a little more so--Byron sighed.

“Wow,” he said.  “I would never let my neck knot up just so the baby could sleep.”

It wasn’t a particularly admiring or a particularly critical response.  It was just a fact as he saw it.  But it made me smile.

“And that,” I said, a wee bit cheekily, “is why you are not the mommy.” 

A mom heart and a dad heart—this baby of ours was in need of both.
And so are we. We need to know both the fatherly heart of God and the motherly one.

Now, I’m not suggesting that God actually has two hearts.  What I’m suggesting is that God’s heart is big enough to encompass all that is traditionally thought of male characteristics as well as all that may have traditionally been thought of as female characteristics.  Our ability to appreciate this fullness of God is curtailed when we are limited to seeing God through the lens of male-only imagery.  When it says in Genesis that God created “them in his image, male and female he created them” it means that his image carries within it all the qualities that both genders reflect.  To degenerate into an argument about whether God is male or female is not actually helpful at this point.  I’m not trying to assign gender.   God is something beyond our understanding and whether or not God has a gender, or what that gender is, is not the point of my ponderings.  The purpose of pursuing the female imagery of God is not to reduce God to anything, but to allow God’s fullness to appear more clearly to us.

Some of the most beautiful images of God in Scripture are feminine and decidedly motherly.   In Matthew 23:37 Jesus uses the picture of a mother hen, collecting her chicks under her wings, as he describes his longing to care for Jerusalem.  Unless you’ve seen this happen, you can’t appreciate how fantastic it is.  When a bird of prey would pass even very high above our garden in Africa, our fluffy mama hens would transform from docile farmyard inhabitants to vigilant living fortresses in a turbo-second.  There was a mom-call that they employed in these moments and the chicks dove directly under the wing to be hidden totally as soon as they heard it.  The image of a chicken might not strike you as beautiful, but getting beyond poultry and thinking of the way the mother hen uses her own body to hide her chicks brings a moving image of selfless love that is lovely indeed.

In Hosea 11, God speaks to the children of Israel and says that he is the one who taught them to walk; he took them by the arms to lead them.  It goes on…

“I led you with kindness and ties of love, lifting the yoke from the neck and I bent down to feed you.” 

These are very motherly images of tender care for a small child.  I’m not suggesting that they are one hundred percent exclusively motherly any more than I would suggest that the images of protection and provision we looked at in ‘God as Father’ are totally and exclusively fatherly.  Those things are predominantly fatherly just as these images of teaching a child to walk are predominantly motherly.   As we allow ourselves to think of God in a motherly way, we will find ourselves able to experience a deeper understanding of the nature of God’s love for us.

I say all this because there seems to be a fear or resistance in some spheres of Christianity that would keep people from being able to experience this aspect of God.  Maybe it’s a fear of goddess worship, or perhaps a fear of Jesus’ mother being almost deified by some.   But recognizing motherly characteristics in God is not the same as creating a goddess, calling God female or worshipping Mary.  A dear friend of mine here in Africa is a former Catholic priest.  He and I were chatting one afternoon about how the motherly characteristics of God can be so comforting and so helpful, especially in certain situations. 

“Alfonse,” I said to him as we looked out into the garden.  “Do you think that so many people have such a strong hunger for Mary to be more than human because we’ve failed to highlight the softer, more motherly things of God in the spectrum of characteristics that are present in God?” 

“Yes,” he said quietly.  “I really think that could be it.  We’ve left some parts missing.”

But I don’t want to leave some of the characteristics of God missing.  I want the full array of characteristics that both male and female images of God reveal so that my heart might learn to know this God in the beauty and richness that Scripture portrays...
 

Taken from Approaching God by Lisa Repko Borden. Copyright(c) 2010 by Lisa Repko Borden. Used by permission of Lion Hudson Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford, OX2 8DR, England. A longer extract is available through Lion Hudson and the book is available to purchase through Amazon and most book stores.

Lisa Borden (along with her husband Byron) has spent the last twenty two years nurturing new Christians first among the Maasai in Kenya's wilderness, then among urban tribes of young people in Europe.  They are now living in Tanzania to continue living out the prayer, justice and mission calling on their lives.  While balancing the roles of wife, mother,  and pastor / teacher / missionary, Lisa has found that singing in the shower and dancing in the kitchen keeps her sane.  To dialogue with Lisa and learn more from her, visit her blog.  Lisa and Byron have also set up a website to chronicle the stories of hope from Africa they are involved in.

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