I have spent a good number of years now wondering what it means to be a woman and be made in the image of God. Some of us grew up with all male language for God and have a hard time calling God “mother”. So how about “Mothering God”?
Can we agree that like moms, God does a lot of feeding and nurturing and correcting and instructing and singing and praising and blessing and more feeding?
One of my favorite pictures of my mom and me is this one where she is making her famous cloverleaf or “Trinity” rolls (see the title page of the book Blessings Flow for an artistic rendition of what her rolls look like) and me sampling the lard!
She greased her hands with the lard so that the dough rolled easliy from her palm through her thumb and index finger which were pinched together to form a smooth glob, a little smaller than the golf balls she teed up later in her life. In the years since her death, I have nearly perfected her technique, minus the lard and plus cannola oil. While it is Jesus who is the Bread of Life, it is your own mothering spirit that draws the children you care for into God’s nourishing loaf—a single roll of love, grace and peace.
May our One Mothering God rise up in your own soul with honor, mystery and joy.
