A Mother’s Day Prayer to Our Mother God

Mother God,

Today we honor the mothers of the world and we honor our Mother God. We honor the deep strength, the sheer grace, the unending love, the watchful eye of the fierce, unwavering protector. We honor the lioness, the stalwart vigil kept, the spirit fire lit, the tears bravely spilt, the strategic sacrifice, the billowing, brilliant mind which thinks, which dreams, which leads us in the harsh struggle for the greater good.

For the pain of birth and the joy of life created and sustained, holding the green breathing earth and the root-woven dirt in her tireless, timeless arms and courageously offering the womb that cradles hope and grows faith, she winces and smiles as humanity kicks and prods, and she creates life anyway, life after life, life after death, she does it anyway, she gives it all away, she gives life. Not just from her womb but from her brain, from her heart, from her hands. Her imagination is our only hope, our hero is her persistence. We crawl into her warmth for prayer and sustenance and to find our belief in the depths of her soul. We hold her up and revere her for bringing breath where there was death, for breaking dark with sparkling light, for her laughter’s salve and for the seriousness of her admonition; her mind, an ever expanding universe; her feminine experience both the conviction and the contrition of human history.

Our Mother God is the God of dreams deferred. She is by necessity, by the sins of humanity. But this is not her passivity, it is her power. She is free yet she stays with captives, she is whole yet she lies in pieces next to the hurt and abused. She moves for the immobilized, she speaks for the silenced, she defends the defenseless. She exhausts herself with righteous rage, making the incessant argument on behalf of those who receive man’s selfish anger. She is what it means to be all-powerful. To abide in all things, not just the glory and triumphs. Not to resort to violence, not to shed blood, not to prolong the cowardly wars, and not to make vengeance hers.

This, this is the God who has the strength to never leave the side of the oppressed. This is the God who confined herself to chains and hid herself in basement shadows, who endured insults and punches, rapes and assaults with Gina de Jesus, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry. She is not the God of a mindless assumption of a happy ending…she is the God who keeps us in mind of the lost years, the palpable fears, the hot tears, the broken hearts, the stopped starts, the heaving sighs, the bye and byes that we were supposed to buy. She knows us, she comes for us, she suffers with us, she breathes new life into us, again and again.

We are exceedingly thankful for the return of Gina, Michelle and Amanda. Yet at this very moment, our Mother God is bound in slavery across this country, with hundreds of thousands of girls and women. We turn our hearts and minds to them now.

Sophia Wisdom and Peace, we honor the God who birthed us, and we honor the many women who have also raised us in every way.