“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George Box
“If there is a ‘God the Father’, why isn’t there a ‘Goddess the Mother’?”
This was the Big Question on my mind when I started breaking out of the Christian filter bubble over 10 years ago. After all, I have a dad and mom on Earth. So I must have a Heavenly Father AND a Heavenly Mother as well, no?
The Big Question was on my mind in the early days of my disillusionment with Christianity. But soon enough, I discovered the horrifying history of violence that was undertaken in God’s name. I discovered the cover-up of the child sexual abuse that plagued the Catholic Church. I was disgusted!
I felt betrayed by my family and my community — how could they be such hypocrites? How could they continue to call themselves Christian when such terrible things were being done in the name of Christianity!
In response to these feelings, I became a radical anti-theist for a few years, trolling religious people every chance I got! I was the logical and rational person and everyone else was wrong!
But despite my cocksureness, the feeling of being ungrounded and lost never went away. My faith in the Christian doctrine — the whole structure through which I had made sense of the world and my place in it — had proven to be a farce! And science — as brilliant as it was — was a poor substitute to religion.
“Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes.” - Jonathan Sacks
Returning to the Big Question
After a few years of being cynical and hating religion, I realised that this was no way to live. The response to a bad idea should be to come up with a better idea and not to spend your life hating on the bad idea.
So I returned to the question that started it all — “If there is a God the Father, why isn’t there a Goddess the Mother?”
Life has existed on Earth for 3.5 billion years. Mothers and fathers have existed for 1.2 billion years — about half that time. Before that, life was propagated through asexual reproduction — there was only parent and child, no distinct mother and father.
But 1.2 billion years is a long time. For context, Homo Sapiens emerged only 200,000 years ago. The parent-child dynamic and the mother-father-child dynamic is deeply rooted in our psyche and our evolutionary biology. Humans also have an extended childhood — we depend on our parents for survival much longer than any of our cousins and relatives in the animal kingdom.
Our communities are built around raising children. A child doesn’t just have one mother and father each. There is a whole community of mothers and fathers to bring us up! And it goes deeper than that…
We have an intuitive sense of the feminine and the masculine. All of us are both masculine and feminine to varying degrees. But there is still a distinction to be made between the two.
We have all heard about the left brain being more analytical and the right brain being more creative. It’s a bit more complicated than that. But the statement is — broadly speaking — true. More accurately, your right brain is more background or context-oriented — it’s interested in the peripherals. And your left brain is more subject or content-oriented — it’s interested in the details.
“In general terms, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes, or friends.” — Iain McGilchrist
Now, the model I’m creating is probably wrong, but it feels useful — the right brain is feminine and the left brain is masculine. Just as we need both our brains to function, we need both the feminine and the masculine to create a healthy individual and a healthy society.
Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine
Toxic femininity and toxic masculinity exist — this we cannot deny.
If the Toxic is that which harms us, then the Divine is that which heals us. The Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine are the antidotes to the poison that is rapidly spreading across our hearts and minds!
The human mind doesn’t handle abstractions very well, so it helps to personify the Divine. Mother Nature and Father Future are the personifications of the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine.
Nature is not a reference to trees and plants or birds and animals. Nature here is your basic or inherent character, features, or qualities.
Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning. One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank. In the process he was stung. He went back to washing his bowl and the scorpion fell in again.
The monk saved the scorpion and was stung again. The other monk asked him, "Friend, why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know it's nature is to sting?"
"Because," the monk replied, "to my nature is to save it!"
We all have an inherent nature that is shaped by our genetics, our upbringing and other factors. Everything we are and every action we take is in the context of this nature of ours.
Future is not tomorrow or next year or next time. Future here is an instrument — the inherent contract of expectations you have with reality.
A future a financial instrument — an agreement between parties to buy or sell an asset at a certain time in the future and at a certain price.
Let’s say there is a futures contract between you and an oil company and the agreed price is $10/barrel. Then the next day, the price of oil increases to $15/barrel. The oil company has now lost $5/barrel because the selling price increased from the price at which they are obligated to sell the oil to you. On the other hand, you profit by $5/barrel because the price you are obligated to pay is less than what the rest of the market is obliged to pay.
We all have an inherent future — a contract of expectations we have with the world around us. We expect water to flow from the taps, food to be on the table, the lights to turn on and the ground to hold beneath our feet. And in the other direction, our families, communities, employers and societies have implicit or explicit futures with us that shape our own behaviour. Everything we are and every action we take is for the fulfilment of these futures.
In Mother Nature, For Father Future
To sum it up, we live our lives in the context of our natures and for the fulfilment of our futures. Mother Nature is our collective nature and Father Future is our collective future.
“Duality is always secretly unity.” - Alan Watts
So far, I have spoken about the distinctions between the feminine and the masculine. But to bring it home, I want to speak about how they interplay.
Let’s return to the Big Question that we started with — “If there is a ‘God the Father’, why isn’t there a ‘Goddess the Mother’?” My dad gave me the most compelling answer to this. He said, “God ‘Himself’ is both masculine and feminine!”
The unity is really a duality. And the interplay of The Mother and The Father gives rise to you and me — Their Children.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler
We are in the middle of a breakdown of traditional categories and the masculine/feminine are no exception to this. The young rebel because they see that the old have been worshipping ashes for a while now.
But let’s not forget the fact that there is fire worth preserving in there. Our traditions carry rich wisdom that we ignore at our own peril. Sure, the fire needs to be renewed so that it may burn bright in this brave new world of ours. But it would be foolish to assume that we can create our own fire from scratch — that is an experiment doomed to fail, as we have seen with the catastrophic social experiments of the 20th century.
As I see it, the elementary approach would be to acknowledge, cherish and nurture the divinity that exists in all of us. Perhaps then, we will discover the wisdom and courage required to rise up to the challenges we face.
I am an optimist. I believe that the future is bright! I believe that the outcome of this drama is the flourishing and expansion of all life! All we need to do is root ourselves down into our deepest nature and aim courageously at our highest possible future. If we do that, perhaps, we have a shot at engineering paradise.
In mother nature, for father future!
Great article. Motivates me to explore the deeper aspects of my nature and gain purpose from it !