Divine Feminine: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Although Jesus was a man, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation. —Richard Rohr

Monday
Paul pictures the entire human race—people of all colors, all religions, all political and economic systems—as living, moving, and existing within the cosmic womb of the One God. —Virginia Mollenkott

Tuesday
Women interact with Jesus in mutual respect, support, comfort, and challenge, themselves being empowered to acts of compassion, thanksgiving, and boldness by Spirit-Sophia who draws near in him. —Elizabeth Johnson

Wednesday
All we have to lose are the false images of God that do not serve us and are too small. The foundational good news is that creation and humanity have been drawn into this loving flow! —Richard Rohr

Thursday
I call Her the Sacred Black Feminine. She is the God who is with and for Black women because She is a Black woman. She is the God who definitively declares that Black women—who exist below Black men and white women at the bottom of the white male God’s social pecking order—not only matter but are sacred. And in doing so, She declares that all living beings are sacred.
—Christena Cleveland

Friday
The earth is at the same time mother, she is the mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all. —Hildegard of Bingen, interpreted by G. Uhlein

Praying to the Divine Feminine

Contemplative teacher and author Beverly Lanzetta encourages us to pray to the Divine Feminine, discovering and honoring the unique ways that female images of God have shaped us:

Reflect on your relationship to the Divine Feminine figures [such as Mary, Wisdom, Sophia, or Mother Earth]. . . .

Consider ways in which culture has responded to the idea of God as Female. How has (if at all) the Divine Feminine and feminine energy been violated, shamed, abused, silenced, and/or ridiculed in you? As a female, as a male. Reflect on the ways that the feminine is celebrated in your culture. . . .

Write a prayer or meditation to the Divine Mother or to any attribute of the divine nature that you find reflects the sacred feminine and ask (if you feel so called) to learn her way of compassion, mercy, and unconditional love. . . . Give yourself permission to see that the path of the Divine Feminine you follow is an immense liberation. By praying or meditating on this gift, you will break out of imposed constrictions or oppressions, and be able to celebrate your free expression.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Beverly Lanzetta, A New Silence: Spiritual Practices and Formation for the Monk Within (Sebastopol, CA: Blue Sapphire, 2020), 317.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read contemporary mystic Mirabai Starr on the Lady of Guadalupe.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photograph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: Divine expression comes in many forms. The Divine Feminine meets, nurtures, and is in us all, regardless of gender. Like a rose in a forgotten window, She Is and continues to be, despite attempts to neutralize her fragrance.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

The Earth Is at the Same Time Mother

Father Richard recognizes the divine feminine has been at work at all times and in all places, even when she has not been affirmed or even recognized:

Today on many levels, we are witnessing an immense longing for the mature feminine at every level of our society—from our politics to our economics, in our psyche, our cultures, our patterns of leadership, and our theologies, all of which have become far too warlike, competitive, mechanistic and non-contemplative. We are terribly imbalanced.

Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in mysterious ways, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied women roles, offices, and formal authority, the Divine Feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels. Feminine power is deeply relational and thus transformative, bringing new life from both the womb and the symbolic tombs where we have locked away our hurt and pain. [1]

Hear this magnificently courageous poem from the Book of Proverbs 8:30–31:

“I was by God’s side, a master craftswoman, delighting God day after day, ever at play in God’s presence, at play everywhere in God’s world, delighting to be with the children of humans.” [Father Richard: Read Proverbs 8:22–31 to be both enthralled and shocked by this notion of Sophia as the feminine side of creation from the very beginning. Who had the courage to talk this way in a monotheistic religion?]

The mystic and Doctor of the Church Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) proclaimed the feminine aspects of God, challenging both church and culture. Author and spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr considers Hildegard’s relevance for our time:

Although Hildegard was recognized as a saint among her own people . . . over the ages, her teachings faded into obscurity. It has only been since the twentieth century, in light of a renewed interest in feminine spirituality, that Hildegard’s transmission has been revivified. Her recognition of nature as sacred and her outstanding musical gifts directly address our contemporary hunger for a spirituality that is both socially relevant and passionately alive. [2]

Starr explores Hildegard’s visions:

Hildegard was smitten with the creator and enamored by every element of creation. Her mysticism is intimate—erotic, even. She coined the term viriditas to evoke the lush, extravagant, moist, and verdant quality of the Divine, manifesting as the “greening power” that permeates all that is. This life-giving energy is imbued with a distinctly feminine quality.

The earth is at the same time
mother,
she is the mother of all that is natural,
mother of all that is human.
She is the mother of all,
for contained in her
are the seeds of all. [3]

For Hildegard, the Son may be the incarnation of the Holy One [in human form], but the Mother forms the very stuff from which the Word of God issues forth into the world. [4]

References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019), 128.

[2] Mirabai Starr, Hildegard of Bingen: Devotions, Prayers, and Living Wisdom (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008), 17.

[3] Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1983), 58. Uhlein’s version is an interpretation of Hildegard, The Book of the Rewards of Life (Liber Vitae Meritorum), 4.20.

[4] Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2019), 152.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read Choctaw elder and theologian Steven Charleston on experiencing God as a Grandmother.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

divine feminine offering understanding / a spirit of serenity, knowing, Peace, contentment / securely holding preciousness / hands offering strength and foundational belonging / child rests over open heart / finding rest in what is / unity of hearts completing the circle / of life, growth, struggle, letting go, new life
—Patricia S., “My Little Meditation-Mother and Child” (inspired by a painting by Mary Cassatt)

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Power of the Black Madonna

St. Patrick’s Day

Scholar and activist Christena Cleveland has studied and visited Black Madonnas across France. She writes of her pilgrimage to a 12^th-century Black Madonna in the French town Mauriac and the transformative impact this encounter had on her:

As I examined the cavernous interior [of the basilica], I was aggressively confronted with signs forbidding visitors from trespassing beyond the crimson velvet ropes surrounding the town’s renowned sixth-century statue of the Black Madonna, an uncommon dark-skinned version of the Virgin Mary. . . . The ropes hung more than forty feet from the magnificent unapologetically Black-and-female Madonna.

My unapologetically Black-and-female body longed to be near this Black Madonna, whom people of diverse races, religions, and eras have recognized as a Black and female image of God. Though I was raised in a Black family and had spent significant time in Black church spaces, the image of a white male God permeated my being. I know I am not alone. The late Black tennis star Arthur Ashe shared his childhood experience with white male God with a reporter from Sports Illustrated, who wrote: “Every Sunday, Arthur Jr. had to go to church, either to First Presbyterian or Westwood Baptist, where his parents had met and where he would look up at a picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes and wonder if God was on his side.” [1]

Like Arthur Jr., I too questioned whether God was on my side. And after years of questioning, healing, and transformation, I had traveled all the way to the heart of central France to finally come face-to-face with the Black Madonna. Desperate for a divine image that I related to and breathed hope into my experience as a Black person and as a woman, I had to be near this likeness of God that looked like me. Seeing Her from a roped off distance wasn’t enough. I longed to gaze into Her mysterious and kind eyes, to witness Her unyielding clutch on Her precious Black boy, to run my fingers along Her centuries-old dark, wooden body, and to stand before a sacred image of Black femininity. . . .

Christena Cleveland’s research of Black Madonnas was not simply an intellectual project; it changed her entire perspective of God and how God loves the world:

Within seconds of viewing photos of the Black Madonnas, my gut shifted from terror to hope. Before I even read a word about the Black Madonna, my soul immediately recognized that these photos and drawings of ancient Black Madonnas declared a truth about my own sacredness and gave birth to a new understanding of God.

I call Her the Sacred Black Feminine. She is the God who is with and for Black women because She is a Black woman. She is the God who definitively declares that Black women—who exist below Black men and white women at the bottom of the white male God’s social pecking order—not only matter but are sacred. And in doing so, She declares that all living beings are sacred.

References:
[1] Kenny Moore, “Sportsman of the Year: The Eternal Example,” Sports Illustrated 77, no. 26 (December 21, 1992): 21.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read a week of meditations on Black women mystics.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Circle Dance of God

Father Richard writes that our images of God become more fluid as we grow in spiritual maturity:

God comes to each of us in unique ways throughout our lives. It may be good if God comes to us as a Father, but sometimes God must come as a friend and other times as a lover. Yet as we continue on our spiritual journeys, I promise that sometimes God will reveal himself in feminine form: himself as herself. (Perhaps it will be through Sophia infusing us with wisdom, or Mary loving us as she loved her son Jesus.) For some of us, this may be the first time that we fall in love with God. I know many such people myself.

We have to break through our ideas about God to find out who God really is. Our early and spontaneous images of God are typically a mixture of our experiences with our own mothers and fathers. If our mother was harshly critical, so is our God. If our father was domineering or authoritative, likewise our God. It’s almost tragic to witness how many people are afraid of God, experience God as cold and absent, and even have a sense of God as someone who might hurt and betray them. These ideas about God reveal far more about the state of our parent symbols than they do about our Trinitarian God.

Many of us, consciously or unconsciously, have pictured God and reality as a pyramid-shaped universe. We placed a male God at the top of the triangle and everything else beneath. Most Christian art, church design, and architecture reflects this pyramidal worldview. Humanity’s capacity to disguise its own flaws, even through religion, seems endless. Pyramid or patriarchal logic is only “logical” when applied in favor of the system and the status quo—which it proudly calls the “real world.” Our very inability to recognize that shows how little influence the dynamic Trinity had on our historical ways of thinking. Trinitarian thinking is more spiral, circle, and flow than pyramid.

We truly have nothing to be afraid of. The Trinitarian flow of God’s love is like the rise and fall of tides on a shore. In a Trinitarian Universe, reality can be pictured as an Infinite, Loving Outpouring that empowers and generates an Eternal, Loving Infolding. This eternal flow outward is echoed in history by every animal, fish, flower, bird, and planet you have ever seen. It is the universe: the first incarnation of God.

All we have to lose are the false images of God that do not serve us and are too small.

The foundational good news is that all of creation and all of humanity have been drawn into this loving flow (no exceptions)! We are not outsiders or spectators but inherently part of the divine dance. Such good theology was supposed to create good politics and history. We still have hope.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: Exploring the Mystery of Trinity (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2004). Available as CD, MP3 download; and

What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2015), 74–75.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read contemporary mystic Mirabai Starr on images of God as female.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I believe that the Holy Spirit is the Mother within the Trinity, brooding over Creation to bring forth life. Having been raised in the Catholic Church and then spending decades in a fundamentalist church, this belief felt like heresy, but I couldn’t shake the knowledge that God is simply too big for any gender-specific label.
—Eileen J.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Envoy of Sophia

Theologian Elizabeth Johnson points out that when we examine the entirety of Jesus’ life, language, and mission, we get a picture of Wisdom at work in partnership and mutuality:

In his brief ministry Jesus appears as the prophet and child of Sophia sent to announce that God is the God of all-inclusive love who wills the wholeness and humanity of everyone, especially the poor and heavy-burdened. He is sent to gather all the outcast under the wings of their gracious Sophia-God and bring them to shalom. This envoy of Sophia walks her paths of justice and peace and invites others to do likewise. Like her he delights in being with people; joy, insight, and a sure way to God are found in his company. Again and again in imaginative parables, compassionate healings, startling exorcisms, and festive meals he spells out the reality of the gracious goodness and renewing power of Sophia-God drawing near. . . . Scandalous though it may appear, his inclusive table community widens the circle of the friends of God to include the most disvalued people, even tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes. In all, his compassionate, liberating words and deeds are the works of Sophia reestablishing the right order of creation: “Wisdom is justified by her deeds” (Matthew 11:19). . . .

Johnson makes a connection between Jesus’ Sophia-inspired teaching and the many women who were empowered by his ministry:

Women interact with Jesus in mutual respect, support, comfort, and challenge, themselves being empowered to acts of compassion, thanksgiving, and boldness by Spirit-Sophia who draws near in him. . . . [These women] befriend, economically support, advise, and challenge Jesus, break bread with him and evangelize in his name. Others receive the gift of his healing, being empowered to stand up straight beyond physical or mental suffering, spiritual alienation, or social ostracism. . . . New possibilities of relationships patterned according to the mutual services of friendship rather than domination-subordination flower among the women and men who respond and join his circle. They form a community of the discipleship of equals.

All of this is too much for those heavily invested in the political and religious status quo. [Father Richard: The giveaway of the dominance of the masculine is the assumption that all problems can be solved by top-down power, a mistake both men and women make.] Mortally threatened, they conspire to be rid of him. In the end Jesus’ death is a consequence of the hostile response of religious and civil rulers to the style and content of his ministry, to which he was radically faithful with a freedom that would not quit. The friendship and inclusive care of Sophia are rejected as Jesus is violently executed, preeminent in the long line of Sophia’s murdered prophets. . . .

For the Christian community, the story does not end there. Faith in the resurrection witnesses that Sophia’s characteristic gift of life is given in a new, unimaginable way.

Reference:
Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992, 2002), 157–158.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read biblical scholar Marcus Borg on female images in the Bible.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

God the Mother

Rabbi Rami Shapiro is a Jewish contemplative and interfaith teacher, well-versed in the Hebrew Scriptures. He describes how the Divine Feminine has been present all along as Wisdom, God’s essential partner in the creation of the cosmos:

It is no small thing to note that Wisdom is feminine. The original language of the texts, both Hebrew and Greek, make this very clear: Hebrew Chochma and Greek Sophia are both feminine nouns. The authors of the Wisdom books [such as Proverbs, Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, and more] took this gender specificity seriously and envisioned Wisdom as Mother, God’s consort and bride, the Divine Feminine through which the masculine God fashioned all creation. . . .

Chochma was not simply the first of God’s creations; She was the means through which all the others came forth. This is what it means to be the master builder. Chochma is both created and creative. She is the ordering principle of creation: “She embraces one end of the earth to the other, and She orders all things well” (Wisdom of Solomon 8:1). To know Her is to know the Way of all things . . . and to act in accord with it is what it means to be wise. . . .

This is how Mother Wisdom works. She doesn’t change anything; She illumines everything. She is right seeing. Chochma “pervades and penetrates” all things (Wisdom of Solomon 7:24). She is the ordering principle of the universe. What you see when you see Her is analogous to seeing the grain in wood, the current of wind and oceans, and the laws of nature, both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. . . . She is the Way things are. . . .

She is the Way God is manifest in the world. To know Her is to know God as well. [1]

Biblical scholar Virginia Mollenkott explores the frequent imagery of God as Mother in the Bible, including in surprising places in the New Testament:

More pervasive than any other biblical image of God as female is the image of a maternal deity. Not only is the Creator depicted as carrying in the womb or birthing the creation, but also Christ and the Holy Spirit are depicted in similar roles. . . .

[A] serene, transcendent image of God the Mother occurs in Acts 17:26 and 28, during Paul’s speech to the Athenian Council of the Areopagus. Paul declares that God is not dependent on anything, since God is the one who has given life and breath to everyone. Furthermore, this God is not far from any of us, for it is in God that we live, and move, and exist. Although the apostle does not specifically name the womb, at no other time in human experience do we exist within another person. Thus, Paul pictures the entire human race—people of all colors, all religions, all political and economic systems—as living, moving, and existing within the cosmic womb of the One God. [2]

References:
[1] Rami Shapiro, The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature: Selections Annotated and Explained (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2005), xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii.

[2] Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1984), 15–16.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Read Julian of Norwich on Jesus as our “true mother.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I have found the divine feminine in my healing from abuse by both parents. She holds me when I am shattered, calls to me to see her in all created things, and enfolds me when I get lost. She also calls me to grow and become the person she sees me to be. We travel together daily and I feel so blessed to have found her.
—Nancy B.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Feminine Symbols for God

Both Scripture and Tradition offer metaphors of God as female, having feminine qualities, or fulfilling traditionally female roles. This week, we consider the implications that the Divine Feminine has in our lives. Father Richard describes Mary as a feminine symbol for the divine presence:

Although Jesus was a man, the Christ is beyond gender, so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does.

Why did Christianity, in both the East and West, fall head over heels in love with this seemingly ordinary woman Mary, who is a minor figure in the New Testament? We gave her names like Theotokos, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Notre Dame, La Virgen of this or that, Nuestra Señora, Our Mother of Sorrows, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and Our Lady of just about every village or shrine in Europe. We are clearly dealing not just with a single woman here but a foundational symbol—or, to borrow the language of Carl Jung (1875–1961), an “archetype”—an image that constellates a whole host of meanings that cannot be communicated logically but is grounded in our collective unconscious.

In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation—or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. (I am not saying that Mary is the first Incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it, particularly in art.) I believe that Mary is the major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery. This archetype had already shown herself as Sophia or Holy Wisdom (see Proverbs 8:1–3; Wisdom 7:7–14), and again in the Book of Revelation (12:1–17) in the cosmic symbol of “a woman clothed with the sun and standing on the moon.” Neither Sophia nor the woman of Revelation is precisely Mary of Nazareth, yet in so many ways, both are—and each broadens our understanding of the Divine Feminine.

Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation. Try to count how many paintings in art museums, churches, and homes show a wonderfully dressed woman offering for your admiration—and hers—an often naked baby boy. What is the very ubiquity of this image saying on the soul level? I think it looks something like this:

The first Incarnation (creation) is symbolized by Sophia-Incarnate, a beautiful, feminine, multicolored, graceful Mary.

She is invariably offering us Jesus, God incarnated into vulnerability and nakedness.

Mary became the symbol of the First Universal Incarnation.

She then hands the Second Incarnation on to us, while remaining in the background; the focus is always on the child.

Earth Mother presenting Spiritual Son, the two first stages of the Incarnation.

Feminine Receptivity, handing on the fruit of her yes.

And inviting us to offer our own yes.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 122–124.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Divine Feminine: Weekly Summary

The Earth Is at the Same Time Mother

The Power of the Black Madonna

The Circle Dance of God

The Envoy of Sophia

God the Mother

Feminine Symbols for God

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Divine Feminine: Weekly Summary

The Earth Is at the Same Time Mother

The Power of the Black Madonna

The Circle Dance of God

The Envoy of Sophia

God the Mother

Feminine Symbols for God

Category Archive

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