“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Luke 18:17 (RSV)
Mircea Eliade wrote many books about mythology. He made it quite clear that ancient people were not simple-minded. They were every bit as sophisticated in their thinking as we modern people are. The difference is that their mode of thinking was mythopoeic – mythopoetic, if you will – while our modern mindset is scientific and analytical. Reading Mircea Eliade convinced me that myth is not falsehood. Myth is truth, spoken from a poetic mind set.
Another author I would recommend is Robert Coles who wrote a book called The Spirituality of Children. He showed us that children have a much greater grasp of the truths of life than we adults often give them credit for. I think that children have that poetic sense that our ancient ancestors had and that all of us once had before it was socialized out of us.
When my daughter, Elaine, was six years old, I overheard a remarkable conversation between her and her playmate. They were involved in an art project painting rocks at our dining/arts-and-crafts table. Elaine (while painting a rock) said, "There's the right color! I knew God would show me."
Her friend said, "God is in my heart."
Elaine replied, "There's Mother God and Father God. Mother God is the Earth and Father God is up there watching over us." She made a big sweep of her arm as she said this. "Father God can't watch everyone at the same time, but Mother God can."
Her friend responded, "There's two – there’s God and Jesus."
To which my daughter replied, "Well, I know Mother God very well – I'm like her."
Her friend, not exactly following Elaine's statement said, "I like her to."
"Do you sway with the grass?" Elaine asked her. "Mother God sways with the grass," swaying her arms and her body back and forth as she spoke.
At six years of age, my daughter had a remarkable gift. She had latched onto a feminine identification with the divine. "I know Mother God very well – I'm like her... Mother God sways with the grass."
Elaine had talked to me before about her ideas. I once told a theologian friend of mine about a conversation I had with her about Mother God and Father God when she was four years old. She said, "It's hard for me to say something about Father God, but it's easier to talk about Mother God." I asked her why that was. She said, "Well, Father God – I don't really know him, but I know Mother God. I was in Mother God's belly before it was time to be in my mother's belly to be born. You see, I have two mothers: Mommy and Mother God."
I had marveled at her honesty and insight. My thought was that she captured the notion of the imminence of God vs. the transcendence of God. My theologian friend's comment was that Elaine's idea was "classic Meister Ekhart." Not bad company for a young observer of life. My daughter is a sophomore in college now. My hope for her is that she will always remember the God who is like her, and that she never forgets how to sway with the grass.
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Hi Charlie,
ReplyDeleteCharlie, I hope you're able to read this, but I suspect you can't. I think you've passed, and some blogger or computer is keeping you on blogger life-support. You were getting up and years when I used to read your comments.
About Elaine and Mother/Father God. I have no reason to doubt the reality of your daughter. [It's odd how I am editing this as I go, even adding this "parenthetical remark", even as I suspect no one will ever read this, unless it be some AI that has a few milliseconds with nothing to do.] I guess I'm indulging what some primates might call a whimsy, or something.
Once upon a time I wrote about the fact that the Hebrew Bible contains a feminine name for God, El Shaddai. "El" is a word for God, and the Hebrew root "shad" means breast. Thus, the name El Shaddai means "God, the God of Breasts" or "God the Breasted One", or something like that.
Interesting. You and I are primates--mammals, and our dreamy subconscious seems to have "invented" a concept that it somehow intuited that our primate brains needed to lubricate the interlocking gears of our minds and bodies. Actually, I suspect that there was a primate God-concept before the Neanderthals. But that's obviously speculation. Interesting? What's interesting is that I am discussing a speculation when the god-concept may have begun its existence as a "thing", and you were discussing the fact that your precocious Elaine seemed comfortable talking about a feminine God (god?), which god--whether gendered or ungendered--does not exist. And then I added an alternative speculation about the existence in Hebrew of a gender-female name for god.
What was the question again? (No, no, there is no question, just an opportunity to comment.) Why the impulse to falsify an utterance on a likely-unread-blog.) Oh, another one of those, a provocation, a conversation-starter.
So long, Charlie.
Ronald W. Goetz
Charlie, is this a huge mistake? Are you going to reply and make public my error? Please?
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