For years in my new thought circles we have said "Mother-Father God" as a way to include the Mother, include the Goddess in our God, something that didn't happen in our childhood. We have also often referred to God as "It" in order to leave the gender out. But now that I know more and more people who identify as neither male nor female, some going by the pronouns "they" or "them," I begin to wonder whether "Mother-Father God" and "It" leaves out not only the in-between nature of God but also the plural nature.
Let me unpack this. See, where I come from, God is all there is. God isn't a man in the sky with a beard or a woman in the sky with conch shells on her breasts, God is an energy of love that connects and makes up all things. Because the God I understand has formed into all of creation, the sky, the earth, the galaxies, as well as all types of people, plants and animals, that God feels more to me like a They or Them than a singular point of Mother, Father or It.
Now of course I hasten to point out that because God is all things, God is the Mother, God is the Father, God is the It and God is the They and Them and the Z and any pronoun or configuration there is. There is really no way to limit God to one pronoun, one gender, one human definition. And because there's no way, there would be nothing inaccurate about referring to God as He, She, Mother, Father, or anything at all. For that matter, there would be nothing inaccurate about referring to God as Tyrannosaurus Rex or My Little Pony.
Yet, how we refer to the All in All, the Source of Everything says much about what we value and what we include in our time, place and point in history as limited humans. I remember a huge aha a few years back when I realized that my thinking was SO black and white. I always wanted clarity on everything (still do, as a matter of fact). I wanted to know answers to such deep questions as Am I fat or am I thin? Am I worthwhile or am I a piece of junk? Should I or shouldn't I do this thing?
What I have learned is that while God is most certainly in all things, the Truth of the Divine lurks in the human gray areas between black and white. So knowing that, and knowing the time we live in and knowing that we are moving into a richer gender expression between and including male and female, men and women, mother and father, today I am choosing to call my God, "the Holy They."
"Everything you need is right here," said the young woman behind the counter of the Philadelphia Airport food counter as she handed me my bag to go. "Really?" I couldn't resist saying. "Everything? Absolutely everything that I need?" And we shared a laugh together at the idea that the bag of sushi rolls, wasabi, low sodium (wtf?) soy sauce, chopsticks and napkins could really represent the sum total of what I need for true happiness and fulfillment.
But the truth is that she was a messenger from, as Deepak Chopra would call it, "my nonlocal intelligence," or higher self. Her comment caught my attention because she uttered a profound truth: everything you need truly is right here. And don't I forget that truth all the time? Wasn't it great of my nonlocal intelligence to remind me of it?
See what I know from my study of the science of mind is that right here and right now, every single one of us is whole, perfect and complete. Nonlocal intelligence (the unified field, Higher Power, Atman-Brahman presence, Holy Spirit, Mother-Father-Parent, Christ Consciousness, Sacred Grandmother Tree, Yahweh, Yemiya, Jehovah Jireh, God) has already given me everything that it is ever going to give me. The Holy They (see upcoming blog on why I'm using this term) has given me love. The Holy They has given me peace. The Holy They has given me joy. The Holy They has given me abundance. The Holy They has given me wholeness.
So when I am feeling sad, lonely, sick, poor, or angry, it is not because I lack all these things that have been given, it is because I not receiving what has already been given to me. It strikes me that "acceptance" which is often talked about as if it is about just reconciling myself to the hard truth of my existence could be reconsidered to mean literally accepting as in accepting a gift or something that is handed to me.
In Genesis 22, God introduces himself as "Jehovah Jireh" meaning
"the Lord will provide." One analysis reminds us that this is not
provision in the sense of snacks or rent money, but in the context of the most profound need a person could have. This is the story of Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac (a great gift from God already long coming) on Mount Moriah. Since the time I first heard it as a young child, this story has terrified and moved me. Abraham is being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, to kill his most precious loved one and he is so willing and so faithful and so trusting of his God that he makes the preparations to do -- he ties Isaac to the altar and raises the knife to cut his son's throat. And indeed the Lord rescues him and provides a ram who gets caught in a thicket nearby and is substituted for Isaac in blood sacrifice.
While I might be tempted to take the violence and the blood and the idea that animal life is cheap out of this story, there's a reason that the gore and the hell of it is important. So often I find that the times I need to be willing to do what the Holy They wants me to do is when I least want to. If I find myself saying "Please, God. anything but that," I'm Abraham on Mount Moriah.
And what does that really mean? It means that I have forgotten that the true name of the Holy They is "The Lord will Provide." Or, in new thought terms, "my good has been provided." In other words, I can do absolutely the single hardest thing that is being asked of me. I am safe in the arms of Divine Love. Everything I need is right here.
The saying goes, there are four seasons in California: flash floods, mudslides, wildfires and pride parade. At this point we're deep in the wildfire season. Where I sit in Sacramento we're breathing smoke and seeing haze from a huge fire near Redding to the north, the massive Ferguson fire conflagration to the south, and another flare up in Lake County northwest of here. It's literally hellish.
On a personal level my family's cabin in Foresta, a community inside Yosemite National Park, has been threatened for days by the Ferguson blaze near west of it. Foresta has been evacuated for about a week. As of this morning, the USDA has not lifted the evacuation order for Foresta or several other parts of Yosemite.
The previous primitive A-frame version of our cabin and most of the homes in Foresta were destroyed by the "A-Rock Fire" in 1990. The A-Rock Fire was called a "hundred year fire" at the time, which meant that a fire like that was predicted to only happen every 100 years. With that in mind, like many of our Foresta neighbors, twenty years ago in 1998 we rebuilt on that land a real house to the code of the surrounding county. Since its rebuilding, Foresta has survived another 3 or 4 fires (4 assuming we survive this one--fingers crossed).
We even have a "Foresta Forever" t-shirt that lists the A-Rock, the Meadow Fire in 2009, the El Portal Fire in 2014--some people have chosen to scrawl in the Dog Fire (in 2015 or 2016?). Last year we weren't evacuated I don't think but we were chased out by smoke from a fire nearby.
I have very mixed feelings about the survival of our Foresta cabin. Yes, I would love to be able to continue to go to our beautiful sanctuary in Yosemite the rest of my life. But I am much more concerned about the safety of the full time residences in the wake of the Ferguson fire than I am our vacation home. The ravages of climate change make me sad and angry. Increasingly I feel that we are living on borrowed time up there. And I am heartbroken that 2 firefighters have lost their lives fighting the Ferguson Fire.
What energy, space and consciousness can me, my body, and our body politic be, such that we can quench the thirst of the earth, restore the habitability of human habitat on earth for the long term?
