Gifts of the Divine Feminine

Yvette Warren is a grandmother, the author of the blog One Family, Many Faiths and a newly ordained minister in the Universal Life Church.

My mother died a year ago. Her eighty-fifth birthday would have been the twenty-third of this month. Her death freed me to finally find the sacred in my feminine self. I celebrate the freeing of the bonds of patriarchal religious fears and abuse from both of our souls.

For me the divine feminine is the manifestation of The Power of Creation in my mother self and the “mother selves” of so many women I know, whether they have physically given birth or not.

I am at the stage of matriarchy, with all my grandchildren into their pre-teen and teen years. Having grown up in an abusive home, there was no autopilot on my mothering, so it is a constant source of wonder to me that my children are exceptional parents. I can see in them what I never could accept as part of myself.

A friend who has suffered through my motherhood with me wrote this to me:

“I see you every day as a parent relating to your own children in love, despite your terrible experience as a child.  I see your own face of love and pride, and I wonder how you do not see it yourself.  I do not see you treating your own children as scapegoats, nor constantly reprimanding them—and I wonder how you do not relate God’s love to your own.

I know the deep wounding of childhood, yet I see that somehow you have lept out of that experience, refusing to pass it on to your own children.  I see that as nothing less than a miracle—I see YOU as a “beaming parent, so proud of your progeny.”  I see YOU as the matriarch of cherished children, and grand-children and neices and nephew that you rock and hold and croon to, protect and nourish.  I see YOU as the great warrior against anything that would destroy or harm your loved ones, and YOU  as the one willing to lay down your life and all you possess to defend them.

Does none of this speak to you of the love of God?  You are my role-model of the love of family—- you are my role-model of the love of God.”

What greater gift can one friend give another?  From one mother’s heart to another.