Who is Mother God and Where Might I Find Her?

The day felt like a sheet of blank paper and I was a broken pen. And it wasn't just one day--there were three of them in a row. I didn't ask Gertrude to come over to sit with me as I lay there alone in my bedroom, because...I don't know why. I'm just not like that.

Pain has a way of drawing out the person you really are. I hate asking for help because in the past when I had ailing people in my life I used to judge them. Why weren't they healthy like me? They must have brought it on themselves. How foolish.

Now I'm the aging, weak woman lying there in bed with my shoulder streaked with pain. It's been coming and going for so long it's changing my personality.

Today I had another attack of shoulder pain. I've been getting therapy for it but sometimes it's not enough. I've learned to get around and get on with important tasks.

So anyway, finally I felt well enough to go over to Gertrude's place again and lay on her couch with a hot water bottle and a cup of tea on the table. I was saying,

"Gertrude, I've been having this condition since January or February. It's starting to wear me down. I will change my life if maybe I can trust that I have a Father that is God. I have rejected any particular thoughts about what God might look like. Instead I just want the honesty, the Truth, the guidance, the teaching. I would let go of my sense of my own ego protection, my innocence, to open up all my wrongs to my Father and let any kind of peace come to me. That way, even if my shoulder never feels fine again, I can have faith."

She winced.

"You're no good at maintaining any kind of order, or even faith. You're a wanderer."

My heart sank.

"Well, what about you? What's your faith?"

"Well, I guess you could say I do have faith but I've found it unhelpful," she said, scratching her gray curls and taking a sip of her tea. "Instead I have faith that I just can't see all I'd like to. I just carry on the day."

I silently thought about my relationship with God, and with my own dad. My dad is my hero, except for the smoking and the alcohol. He's been there at times that made a big difference for me. The same with my mom. I will never forget being held on her lap and loving her. Now I don't want to be nurtured by my parents. But...

I am in pain. I want my Mama. I guess I want to learn what I need to learn from my Father. But I want Mother, so badly!

"Where is Mother God?" I asked out loud, rhetorically. But Gertrude said,

"Mothers are like extensions of us when we're infants. They sacrifice. They feed. They clean up. They don't dress like teenagers anymore. If you ask me, Mother God is here and we pay no attention, and she works anyway. She gives us consideration and comfort. Warmth. Cleanliness. Release. But you don't ever look at her."

Yes.

Someday when I'm old, will anybody view me the way I do Gertrude? Or is she the only one of her kind, and am I the only one who knows her?

I know a girl, Androgyne, who looks at me like I'm a fool most of the time. To her I seem irrelevant and outmoded because I question myself and I move slowly, hesitating where she would leap. When I look at Gertrude and how slowly she moves and how little she seems to do, I sometimes feel sorry for her too. I'm middle aged; I can still do so much, almost anything except sit on the floor and hug my knees.

Androgyne doesn't know a lot about love, and I can't tell her anything because I never learned how to love even someone like Petrus until I passed through that period of time in my life when my self absorption and inability to love deliberately came to a head and I felt my ego crashing to the point where all of my emotions had turned into one big psychic bruise. Afterward I saw that love isn't from above. It's not like water, something you can go and get and share. It is the stuff I'm made of that flows from me with warmth or held back with coldness, is clean or polluted, is generous or miserly.

It seems to me like Androgyne feels as if love is a happy accident that might come crashing in one day and the stars will align, rendering a stable and mostly gratifying situation, knitting together most of life's contingencies with the life of the other.

I can only hope she finds a situation that starts out like that, but which can make that difficult transition to the point where it's not easy anymore but it's worthwhile, and you have to lose something of what you started with, to trade for something you never knew existed until you reached your hand out into the fertile darkness of what lay beyond your vision.

Gertrude is on the other side of me from where Androgyne dances. She is maybe more fully human than I am. She enjoys simply being alive. I drink more of the blackberry tea at her table.