Midweek Faith Lift
May 16, 2018
Mothers and the Divine Feminine
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Good Morning and Happy Mother’s Day! Today we honor mothers and the Divine Feminine. What has always resonated with me is that in Unity, I can claim my Divine Nature as a woman, as feminine. I don’t have to pray to or from the perspective of a male God. Even as a little girl, when the only role models of minister or priest were male, I could still claim a Divine Feminine Nature that was mine. I did not give it a voice, but at a young age, probably 9 or 10, I knew that some day I would be a priestess or a minister. I didn’t know how or when or anything about Unity, but I knew. Isn’t it amazing how we have these inner “knowings” or intuitions and that over time with prayer and an awakened consciousness, they manifest? That is the Power of the Divine Feminine!
That is what we are celebrating today, this Mother’s Day. We are celebrating the Divine Feminine and how it manifests in your life. How has it manifested in you? What have you birthed? You have had intuitions, which have been revealed to you as Truth. Learning to TRUST those intuitions and LISTEN to them and FOLLOW them is empowering the Divine Feminine. Your mother manifested the Divine Feminine AS you! Today we celebrate the energy of mothers and the power of the Divine Feminine and what that has manifested in our world. And even more, we celebrate what the Divine Feminine will manifest in our broken, fractious and troubled world. We need the vision and healing energy of the Divine Feminine now more than ever. We need to TRUST, LISTEN and FOLLOW the wisdom of the Divine Feminine.
What I have loved about Unity is that it began with the experience of healing in a woman; a woman who tapped into the power of the Divine Feminine within herself! Myrtle Fillmore is the Mother of Unity, which began with her healing experience of Listening, Trusting and Following. By doing these things, Myrtle connected with her true Divine Nature, which she identified as her Higher Consciousness or her Christ Consciousness. But this was not a male consciousness. It was the ultimate combination or union of the masculine and feminine, which we call “the Christ.”
Myrtle was raised in the Methodist Church, which is ultimately how Unity was anchored in the Christian tradition. Charles had no religious tradition in his background. Myrtle and Charles attended the very first Parliament of the Worlds’ Religions in Chicago in 1893. There they learned about the Eastern religions, pagan religions, all religions and realized they all lead to the same center, the Christ Consciousness. After exploring the writings of the Hindus in the Unpanishads and the Bahgavad Gita and the Dao te Ching of Taoism, and the Hebrew Scriptures, Myrtle and Charles together chose to anchor Unity in the Christian tradition but gave it an Eastern mystical twist.
Today I celebrate that Unity was birthed with both the Divine Feminine in Myrtle and the Divine Masculine in Charles. That is what has given us the Mother/Father God invocation of the Divine in Unity. When I first heard Mother/Father God spoken aloud in church at Unity of Des Moines, I had tears. It was like rain on parched soil or manna from heaven. It truly nourished my mind, body and spirit. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I had grown up Catholic, praying to Mary, the Mother of God which allowed for the holy nature of the feminine as mother, nothing else. And she was “less than” God. Now I could embrace God or the Divine as Mother/Father. If fact, God was not complete without both the feminine and masculine natures as equally vital!
When Charles and Myrtle developed that idea in the 1920’s, it was truly revolutionary and heretical within the male dominated hierarchy of most of Christianity. They were tapping into an energy of the ages, for there have always been goddesses on equal footing with the gods. It was in the evolution and unfolding of Christianity as it grew in power and influence that it became so male dominated and oppressively restrictive to women. Unity has always embraced the Divine Feminine. If you go to Unity Village, you will see pictures of all the classes of ministers ordained through the Village and in the earliest days, they were all women! Having women ministers in Unity has never been a “thing”!
We have always been there, ladies! Yay! I celebrate my photo on that wall of ministers along with all who have gone before. Along with Myrtle Fillmore, there was May Rowland, the first Director of Silent Unity. Other Unity women luminaries are Mary Kupferle and Dorothy Pierson, a long time Unity minister whose presence influenced so many people. She shared an affirmation for Prosperity: “ I look with wonder at that which is before me. Miracle follows miracle and wonders never cease. There is gold dust in the air!”
How is that for a powerful statement of prosperity? I don’t think I would argue with Rev. Dorothy Pierson on that one!
So how does this all fit together? What are the threads in the evolution of spiritual consciousness that Myrtle Fillmore and other women of New Thought were tapping into when they asserted and affirmed their Divine Feminine Natures? Well, as we said, there is a long history of the Divine Feminine, but it was suppressed as Christianity evolved into a formalized religion. Here is what is said in an article published by The Esoteric Theological Seminary: Putting the Goddess Back Into Judeo-Christianity at http://northernway.org/goddess.html
Many theologians and scholars believe the Holy Spirit written as, Pneuma in Greek everytime it appears in the New Testament, is a feminine being. Note that Pneuma is a neuter word in Greek, but in Hebrew the word Ruah (Spirit) and in Aramaic the word Shekinah (Presence) are feminine words and imply a feminine divine presence. The Holy Spirit is possibly a Christian Goddess, not a mysterious invisible member of an all-male Trinity “club.” Or more provocatively, maybe there is a Feminine Trinity of God-the-Mother (Sophia and Mary?), God-the-Daughter (Mary Magdalene) and Goddess-the-Spirit-Presence (Shekinah, Ruah). The Holy Spirit appears at Yeshua’s baptism in the form of a dove. The dove has long been a symbol of the Goddess in the Ancient Near East, and was never used to symbolize any male Being or God.
We must also look in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and consider the Goddess Sophia. Her name means “Wisdom.” She is the Goddess of Wisdom referred to repeatedly in scripture as the wife of God-the-Father. See Proverbs, Song of Songs, (also called Song of Solomon) in the Hebrew Bible, and see the Book of Sirach and the Book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha found in the center of any Catholic Bible.
So, now we know the truth….the Divine Feminine has always been a part of the story, even as the words were “masculinized” or neutered to dilute Divine Feminine power.
There is also the Gospel of Mary Magdala, discovered in Cairo, Egypt, in 1896 (the same year Myrtle’s healing began) purchased and brought to Berlin by Carl Reinhardt. It is a fragment of the Gospel written in Coptic and on papyrus and was translated finally in 1941. It was written when Christianity was in its infancy stages and transmitted as an oral tradition as teachings from one who has heard and understood to another. The significance of this writing is that it was recorded and taught by Mary Magdala, a woman disciple of Jesus who was very close to him. It reflects a teaching that was the essence of the Jesus message, but is unlike the message that was ultimately transmitted in what became the approved writings or “orthodoxy” of the Christian Bible.
The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene
(The Gospel of Mary)
Chapter 4
(Pages 1 to 6 of the manuscript, containing chapters 1 - 3, are lost. The extant text starts on page 7...)
. . . Will matter then be destroyed or not?
22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.
23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.
24) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
25) Peter said to him, Since you have explained everything to us, tell us this also: What is the sin of the world?
26) The Savior said There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.
27) That is why the Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root.
In this passage, adultery means being something other than you are, a spiritual being. Jesus is saying that ultimately we are restored to our Divine Essence and our physical selves are restored to their essence matter. There is no sin unless we forget who we really are, Divine Beings, embodied in this flesh on this earth.
Sounds like Unity to me! This is what Mary Magdalen recorded of her interactions with her master teacher, Jesus and she was rebuked for this.
Did you notice that Jesus said, “Let him who has ears, to hear, let him hear.” That is the Divine Feminine message, Listen, Trust and Follow.
This is how Myrtle Fillmore taught this message in her Healing Letters:
Think of God as everywhere-present light, love, peace, power, and life. Think of all men, all women, all children as abiding in God’s presence and expressing God’s qualities. As you do this, you will touch the reality of individuals and you will invite only the best from them.
Let us follow the Wisdom of the Women throughout the ages and as expressed and taught in Unity. Let us learn to Listen to our Intuition, Trust it and Follow it as we seek to express and empower our Divine Feminine nature on this Mother’s Day.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb