Book Review: Finding Mother God by Carol Lynn Pearson

As a poet and editor, my instinct in reviewing a poetry collection is to evaluate its linguistic originality, its element of surprise, its style. Yet sometimes I find myself stepping back from this judgment seat and losing myself in the content and thought of the poems. Sometimes I have to remind myself that the purpose of poetry is not merely to perform stylistic gymnastics, but to say something important. Carol Lynn Pearson’s collection Finding Mother God: Poems to Heal the World, though it may not completely live up to this promise, certainly offers healing and hope to those searching for Heavenly Mother, as well as those who don’t realize how much they might need Her–including me.

Though there are quite a few places that are linguistically clever and lovely–“Even without existing / God wears a suit and a tie” (9), or “I am remembering Her / rather like the blind man / remembers a face by his fingers” (26)–the strength of the collection lies in its juxtapositions and examinations of various cultures in its search for Heavenly Mother, requiring us to reexamine the traditions we’ve taken for granted in conceiving Her. Pearson attempts to leave no stone unturned in her search for the Divine Feminine, examining faith traditions ranging from Muslim (a brief nod), to Buddhist, to Jewish, to Catholic to Native American–and successfully finding evidence of Heavenly Mother in each.

In the Jewish tradition she plays upon the concept of Ruach Elohim, its association with wind and breath (inspiration), making the case for our Mother as the Holy Spirit Herself, a concept taken from us through mistranslation: “At the stroke of a quill the Hebrew ‘she’ / became the Greek ‘it’ and then the English ‘he’ and no one cared” (79). As someone not familiar with this concept, not necessarily being a scholar of all things related to the Divine Feminine, I found this suggestion not just plausible, but faith-promoting and refreshing. After all, if the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body, what makes Him male, other than faith in the traditions passed down to us? That she (typically) sacrificed her body to comfort all of us–what a glorious, moving possibility! In “Christ’s Garden,” She is the comforting angel come to strengthen her suffering child (100). How fitting! And when, at the end of Shabbat, a husband and wife unite as one flesh, this “assists God and His Shekinah / to couple and to become One as they should be One / and from their Oneness the Shekinah / delivers the souls of humans / and from their Oneness the world will be healed” (49).

This Mother sends her answer to the speaker’s prayer back in haiku, implying the Mother God as Muse, a connection which she continues in “Running Cloud Speaks”:

In the beginning was Thinking Woman

who has always existed.  [ . . .]

She thought the words

that I am speaking to you now.  (41)

These are poems of imagination and desire for knowledge, poems of yearning for a world free of unrighteous dominion, that embodies what a perfect God would truly want for his Daughters; for a church that has a clearer, truer understanding of a woman’s role in it, of Heavenly Mother’s place in a religion that is Patriarchal, which we’re told values women equally (which I believe God truly does), but which cannot escape a sense of contradiction (call it paradox, call it hypocrisy) in the hierarchy, in the Missing Mother God. However comfortable/comforted/at peace we may be in the gospel and our role in it, at minimum there’s still that thought we have all placed on the shelf (borrowing Sister Hinckley’s metaphor) until it can be answered–and which is still there. A few of us have the courage to pick it up, dust it off, look at it from a new angle. And when one day we can return it to its proper place, “our shouts will be joyful and our songs will celebrate that the Queen of Heaven also is Queen of Earth / and the family is whole once more” (22).

Finding Mother God: Poems to Heal the World by Carol Lynn Pearson. Gibbs Smith, 2020.