© 2022 Kurt Cira
© 2022 International Urantia Association (IUA)
| Our Missing Mother God – Monotheism at the Cost of Trinitarianism | Journal — November 2022 — Index | The Psychic Circles and Morontia Life |
My understanding of, and relationship with, God has changed tremendously since I discovered The Urantia Book fifty years ago. I was raised in a religion where masculine, anthropomorphic descriptions of Deity dominated the religious thinking of our world. This is not surprising given that almost all aspects of society have been male dominated except within the home, where women have often played an equal or dominant role in family life. The Judeo-Christian and Islamic theologies that are the prevailing religious systems of our times are a product of, and are rooted in, concepts of God that place little emphasis on God as Mother as well as Father. Even the Urantia Papers are written in a way that makes far more use of the term Father and masculine pronouns to describe God. This preponderance of usage has led me and many who have studied the book to overlook its ground-breaking revelation of God as equally mother-like and in possession of all the traits and values that we associate with the feminine.
As my study of The Urantia Book deepened, I found that it reveals in the Trinity not only the Universal Father, but also his co-equal Eternal Mother-Son. Together they bring forth the Infinite Spirit, the deity of mind and action. Our own Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon and Jesus of Nazareth, is in a perfect partnership with our Creative Mother Spirit in their cooperative collaboration to create, maintain, and perfect their evolutionary universe while representing their Trinity parents to their universe. Each has different abilities, qualities of being, and divine natures that are perfectly designed to complement and complete the other. Together they are our Divine Parents who provide our lives and our homes in which we are born and grow as we begin our ascent to Paradise and universe service. Their relationship is not one of dominance and submission, but of cooperation and coordination in perfect harmony. I learned that my relationship to each is different based on the divine natures, but in my experience, they work together as one.
Even though I often cannot distinguish between the ministry of the Father and Mother aspects of God, I have come to believe that it is important and helpful to attempt to understand the differences in their functional relationship with us. To do so will not only help us to develop a more complete and accurate understanding of Deity but also to observe the model of how the masculine and feminine can work together and complement each other, a crucial ideal in a world where sex and gender differences are a challenge for almost all people to understand and adapt to personally and socially.
I view religion as my attempt to connect with my divine Adjuster/ Controller within, to seek to know God and the Father’s will for me, to strive to become perfect like God, and to serve the Divine Family in love. This is fundamentally, but not exclusively, an individual pursuit described in The Urantia Book as the Religion of Personal Experience, which I have come to call by its acronym, the ROPE. My experience with Spirit in my daily life provides me the opportunity to make decisions and take actions that my Adjuster uses to create my soul. Each positive value I embrace, every moral decision and loving action I participate in, builds another piece of my soul, another strand in my growing ROPE that connects me with God. I use this rope analogy to describe the differences in my relationship with God as Father and as Mother.
I have found that having a relationship with God as my Father is something I must sincerely want, and that it is up to me to reach out for Father through my decisions and actions. Just as you cannot push anything with a rope, God as Father never imposes any obligation or pushes me to connect with him. He only extends an invitation to me to discover him as a reality in my inner spiritual life that can guide and sustain me. This choosing to have a relationship is my gift to the Father and allows his gifts to come to me and through me to others. My ROPE is like a wire through which I can communicate with Father and receive spiritual power. It is as if God is on a high cliff, impossible for me to reach on my own, and so he offers his guidance and strength to climb up to him by creating for us a connection that he can use to pull me to him, if I will make the decision and take action to grab and keep hold of it. It is how I eventually attain eternal partnership with God and progress upward through all the stages of growth from here to Paradise.
My relationship with the Mother Spirit is somewhat different. What is it that our Divine Mother gives me? She provides this universe, material reality, my physical body, and a world on which to grow. She is the source of my minds, both the lower adjutant mind and the higher cosmic mind functionally developing with my evolving soul. She is the vehicle on this world for the universal bestowal of the Spirit of Truth, the combined Spirit of the Father and Jesus, her Creator partner. She provides helpers, her angelic children, to guard and guide me, work with me in doing the Father’s will, and be my companions on the long journey to Paradise.
The huge difference between my connection with the Father and Mother is that, while I must actively reach out for connection with our Father, the ministry of our Divine Mother comes to me and all God’s children without our even having to ask. It is a ministry universally and freely bestowed on all. It is as if we are all in her womb, connected to an invisible umbilical cord, receiving all the nourishment and nurturing that we need to grow into faith children, finally to be born as first stage spirits when we leave the local universe. This is our ROPE connection with Mother. Her Holy Spirit is the first spiritual influence that came to mankind long before the Adjusters or Spirit of Truth. The Holy Spirit was the exclusive guide that helped primitive people discover God and prepared them to receive Adjusters before Michael’s Spirit of Truth made possible the universal bestowal of Thought Adjusters to all who can make moral decisions.
Finally, there is something wonderful that happens when we choose to make a connection with God as Father. It completes a circuit of complemental association with our Divine Father and Mother. When I connect with our Father, it allows me to receive more of the loving ministry of our Divine Mother and her spirit children. Connecting with Father allows us to know and do his will, while our Mother works with us to make that become an actuality. Our task is to work with our universe Parents and build a personal and functional relationship with them, the maximum of Deity we can comprehend in our pre-spirit careers. That brings you and I into their Family and initiates the everlasting connection to our Trinity Parents that is our destiny.
These realizations have led me into a new growth path in my own life. I have recently had some changes in my own life that resulted in me living alone for the first time, and then the Covid pandemic has greatly reduced the contacts I have with other people. This gradually led me to the place within myself where I recognized that my primary relationship in life was now with God within me. I have worked to develop a deeper relationship with God by developing daily spiritual practices that are beginning to have profound effects. I now recognize that my relationship with God is very much a complemental one, and that I am the one who must choose to initiate and enhance our communication. I could stay isolated and lonely, or I have a real opportunity to make God my eternal divine lover, who knows me intimately and shares with me all that he can be reveal. There is nothing that I cannot share with my Beloved. My contribution in this mutual loving is to come to know my lover, to try to know what God wants me to do, make the decision that my will be that of my Divine Parent, and to work with all the spirits of God, accepting their help in serving the Divine Family.
The last thing I want to touch on here is inspired by this relevant paragraph that is easy to pass by in Paper 117, God the Supreme:
Upon the completion of the sixth stage of existence and the entrance upon the seventh and final stage of spirit status, there will probably ensue the advancing ages of enriching experience, ripening wisdom, and divinity realization. In the nature of the finaliter this will probably equal the completed attainment of the mind struggle for spirit self-realization, the completion of the co-ordination of the ascendant man-nature with the divine Adjuster-nature within the limits of finite possibilities. Such a magnificent universe self thus becomes the eternal finaliter son of the Paradise Father as well as the eternal universe child of the Mother Supreme, a universe self qualified to represent both the Father and Mother of universes and personalities in any activity or undertaking pertaining to the finite administration of created, creating, or evolving things and beings. [UB 117:6.7]
I have no doubt that as we progress through our universe careers, we will begin to incorporate all the personality attributes of God that we can possibly discover in our future experience. Our complete growth as personality must encompass all aspects of our personalities. Jesus’ life on Urantia revealed a full and balanced blending of all the best characteristics of each gender. Given that we will represent God as Father and Mother, we must embrace everything possible that could be considered masculine or feminine as we would now regard these attributes of gender on this world. Attributes that our society now considers masculine and feminine, and like others that we cannot even imagine now, will be seamlessly blended throughout our being.
So let us all embrace all that we can of the feminine and masculine attributes that we are capable of now. To accept and express what may be thought of as feminine or masculine qualities does not make us less of a woman or a man. But it does make us more complete human beings, growing souls in a universe filled with diversity and endless possibilities.
¶ References
| Our Missing Mother God – Monotheism at the Cost of Trinitarianism | Journal — November 2022 — Index | The Psychic Circles and Morontia Life |