The Expansionist Podcast
Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake invite you to listen in on a continuing conversation about expanding spirituality, the Divine Feminine, and the transforming impact of living attuned to Wisdom, Spirit and Love.
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The Expansionist Podcast
Divine Motherhood: Reimagining Our Relationship with Spirit
What happens when we expand our vision of God beyond Father to include Mother? Shelley Shepard and I journey into territory many find unfamiliar yet deeply healing as we explore divine motherhood and its transformative potential.
This conversation travels through personal stories of our relationships with our mothers and how these experiences have colored our spiritual understanding. We examine how limiting God to masculine imagery creates barriers for many who've experienced trauma or difficult relationships with fathers, while embracing feminine divine aspects opens pathways to deeper connection. As we share, "Mothering is too huge a job to relegrate to one person," suggesting our spiritual lives benefit from seeing the sacred feminine expressed through earth, community, and divine presence.
The conversation crescendos as we read the Lord's Prayer from the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book—beginning with "Eternal Spirit, Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver, Father and Mother of us all"—demonstrating this expanded theology already exists within Christian traditions worldwide. We reference Jesus using feminine imagery and mystical teachers like Julian of Norwich who embraced God's mothering qualities centuries ago.
Perhaps most powerfully, we suggest God transcends gender entirely, with the various expressions—Father, Mother, Spirit—serving as different access points for different human needs. The episode concludes with a beautiful prayer to Mother God, granting listeners permission to experience the divine in healing, expansive ways that honor their unique spiritual journeys.
Has your understanding of the divine felt incomplete or limiting? This conversation might just unlock doors to spiritual healing you never knew existed. Join our community of spiritual explorers at expansionisttheology.com as we continue reimagining faith for wholeness, inclusion, and love.
Welcome to the Expansionist Podcast with Shelley Shepard and Heather Drake. In each episode, we dive deep into conversations that challenge conventional thinking, amplify diverse voices and foster a community grounded in wisdom, spirit and love. Hello, shelley Shepard.
Speaker 2:Hey, heather Drake, what a pleasure it is to be with you today. This is going to be one of those conversations that we're going to be happy that we had this conversation. How about?
Speaker 1:that I agree, and part of this is we podcast. But after we spend a few hours talking together, we get to podcast after we've already gone deep, after we've already figured out how each other's family is and what's happening in the world, and then to be able to encounter spirit and our own souls and the thoughts that we have in what we are creating and how we are aligning or attuning ourselves to the spirit within us. This is how we get to these podcasts, and so I'm excited to be here with you today.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, indeed, indeed, and you and I have danced around this topic our entire lives, practically, right. I mean, we've had our mothers our entire lives. Thankfully, my mother is still with us. We'll celebrate her 86th birthday.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Next month, july 5th, she and my sister have the same birthday, so that was always kind of a big big, a big big deal around July 4th, and then my dad and his mother shared the same birthday, so July 5th and July 8th and July 4th, it was just like celebration after celebration.
Speaker 2:And then I think as and you know this about me I'm writing sort of a memoir about my own story with my mother, about my own story with my mother, and that is, I think, one of the hardest things that I've ever done in my entire life is to sit down and write this story, and maybe all of us have this strand, or some people call it the mother wound, right that we look back at our lives growing up and we see things like, we notice things that maybe at the time we just walked through, we didn't really stop, and it comes to our mothers is, you know, did we stop long enough and talk about that? Did we pray over it? Did we ask wisdom? What she would do? And so here I am now, all these years later, thinking about this story with my mom. And so I know that this podcast isn't about our mothers, but I think, if we have a podcast about Mother God, which we are getting ready to do, and we reflect on our mothers and our years growing up, you know, do we look at God in the same light and in the same ways that we do our earthly mothers, and so I'm ready to jump into this dance with you.
Speaker 1:Well, and I want to add, or at least contribute to that line of thinking and saying, no matter where we are as people and what our relationship has been with our mother or what it currently is with our mother, that there is an invitation by the spirit, the spirit that created us, the spirit that dwells in us is to allow expansion in how we see mothering and in where we're mothered. And I think mothering is too huge a job to only relegate it to one person, but to be able to say that we are mothered through our connection to the earth. We're mothered to our connection to other women. We're mothered in connection with grandmothers and aunties and women that we have community with, and so mothering is not relegated to one person's responsibility.
Speaker 1:And I think ultimately we ourselves, in connection with the spirit that birthed us, into being always know or always knew.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's an ancient knowing in all of us that mother is bigger, Like how, when we're tiny, do we know that's not what a mother should do, Not because of the wisdom and have seen all mothers and can do it, but very early on we're able to determine and to actually to discern the care and the nurture and the love that it looks like to be mothered and to mother and for us now, as adults, to look at that and go.
Speaker 1:Are there areas in my life that the Spirit is inviting me to expand my ideas or my parameters about the Spirit as mothering, as God is mothering, as my participation in what the Spirit is doing in the world? And I really believe the invitation is into the realms of Spirit that maybe we have not journeyed before or we have not been invited to before. And there's so much hope in being invited into this place of expansion to say God is not just Father, God is more. Spirit is inviting us into this beauty of oneness that calls us to. What does it look like for us to imagine that the very source of all things also mothers us?
Speaker 2:That is a very, very expansive thought for us to unpack and unravel, and earlier in the pre-show I was suggesting that we open the alabaster box and let that pour out here, particularly as an anointing for those who maybe, as you suggested, the relationship with their mother was not good or maybe they're currently experiencing some divide in their mother-daughter relationship or mother-son relationship. And if we use the alabaster as an image and open it, like Mary did, and pour it out as anointing, not just in this moment on this conversation, but maybe in an expansive way, that becomes a practice when I find myself in a conversation with my mother that you know she's not understanding, or maybe she's using a biblical text against me in my own personal identity, or maybe there's you know, some other kind of you know side eye that, uh, that I get because I I pray to mary magdalene at the mountain. These are just differences often, and so allowing this alabaster box that Mary Magdalene broke open and used to pour anointing, used oil to pour anointing, anointed Jesus, I think is a place that I'm finding myself more and more in my relationship with my mother and in particularly in the story that I'm writing, and so I would just offer today that using this word expansion and expansive to see God as Father and God as Mother is a little bit of a stretch. It's a stretch sometimes for people to see God in that way and I'm not sure why, heather, I'm not. I mean, I understand theologically how that has been taught and preached. Of course maybe you and I have even taught and preached that ourselves.
Speaker 2:But this expansion, this stretching, this movement that Spirit is doing in our lives and in the world, I think requires our attention to have this be inclusive of God as mother and God as father, not just in the biblical text that we can use to support that thought, but in our own spiritual walk, where we have been nurtured by a mother, god.
Speaker 1:I want to read to us the Lord's Prayer from the new zealand anglican prayer book okay one of the things that's important for me is, in my expansion, also to include the ancient, to include those who have gone on before us in places to be able to say what does it look like for us to stop, stand at the crossroads and ask for the ancient paths? But this is from the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book. Eternal Spirit, earth Maker, pain Bearer, life Giver, source of all that is and all that shall be, father and Mother of us all. Loving God, in whom is Heaven, the hallowing of your name echoes through the universe. The way of your justice. Be followed by all the people of the world. Your heavenly will be done by all created beings.
Speaker 1:Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come to our earth With the bread we need for today. Feed us In the hurts we absorb from one another. Forgive us In times of temptation and tests. Strengthen us From trials too great to endure. Spare us and from the grip of all that is evil. Free us, for you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever. Amen.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I love to do is to be able to say you know, is this an expansion so far that no one has considered it? But clearly this is cultural, because in New Zealand, this is the Lord's Prayer that they're memorizing, and the prayer that I was told to memorize was our Father, who is in heaven. Well, I'm grateful for that, but God is more than Father. Jesus even called us to this understanding that God is like a woman who looks for a lost coin that Jesus himself says I am like a mother hen who longs to gather you and bring you under my wings and protect you. And so Jesus is asking us to expand the way that we think about these things. And again, we could go into the cultural study where, when Jesus calls God, abba, father, it would have been startling because those kind of relationships were not part of the culture that they have.
Speaker 1:And so you know, there's much to be said about the spirituality that we are handed by culture.
Speaker 1:And when we allow the spirit that is sourced in God, the spirit that has created us and sustain us, the spirit that is love, the spirit that is God, those things, when we allow those thoughts to invite us into something bigger. We remind ourselves we're not alone in this. And when Jesus said to the people following him, you've heard it said, but I say to you, he's giving us framework to challenge the things that we've heard said and to say is there a higher way, is there a bigger way, is there a more expansive way? And so you know, you and I have read and have such enjoyment, even discussing and living out lives from like Julian of Norwich and some of the other mystics that have brought us into true deep spiritual conversation and deep spiritual living. And I think that embracing this or being willing to open our mind to this also opens us to healing, and to healing in places that are very deeply painful to us. And I think one of the things our world needs now so much is God, the mother, because we are in such pain.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm, I love that you bring that piece about healing and nurture and compassion. Often the God of First Testament is seen as a cruel father and perhaps for reasons that we learned later in second testament um, that weren't always necessarily true, but in many ways very, very violent, destroying death, you know, ravishing children and throwing babies against rocks and all sorts of things of this God. And I wonder, when we talk about healing, if we don't need healing around sometimes, the way we've been taught from the stories in 1 and 2 Testament about who God is and who God was. We just had Trinity Sunday, last Sunday, and this effort that they went to three centuries later after Jesus departs the earth, to try to figure out what Jesus meant persons into one and comprehend that and understand it.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I wonder if we don't need healing just around our theologies, because sometimes when I think about my own personal posture with Father God, I have a hard time transferring that to Mother God. For me it's easier to see Mother as spirit and maybe for someone else maybe you could talk about what that posture is like for you I lean into into spirit, maybe because spirit doesn't have the history that god had and um, or that god does or that spirit doesn't have the history that, uh well, we don't even know the mother god history, because where is she like? Where have we kept her? Where has she been hiding? Inside these tabernacles and these temples and these mosques and churches? Where is she hiding?
Speaker 1:I also feel like Mother God is really clearly giving to us in Mary, the mother of Jesus. Okay, her response. I mean that would be clearly just very one of the ways that it's described for us, but I think that we have to allow ourselves to say yes to the invitation of the Holy Spirit when we expand our mind about these things. I also wanted to read to us a poem, or prayer liturgy, that's based on a text by Julian of Norwich and this is actually from Fran Pratt, but it's incredibly beautiful and obviously by Julian is wonderful.
Speaker 1:but mothering God, you gave me birth into the bright morning of this world. Creator, source of every breath, you are my rain, my wind, my sun. Mother in Christ, you took on my form, offering me life, your food of light, grain of new life, grape of love, your very body for my peace. Mothering spirit, nurturing one in the arms of patience, hold me close so that in faith, I root and grow until I flower, until I know. That feels very beautiful to me and this is what it would be like to have God understanding our understanding of God as mother, to offer us a becoming a compassionate witness of our very own, to not look at us with judgment, but to us look and say, oh, delight when we talk about delight, to have just the eyes of delight upon us. That to me, is the language of a mothering God.
Speaker 1:That is the language of a God who just wants to be with us in presence. But I loved very much the lyric of this poem that tells us that God's spirit, god, mother, god, being with us and our invitation into that. I think it's an invitation into our own wholeness as well, thusly our own holiness, that we wouldn't cut off parts of ourselves to be able to experience something or to be able to run from a certain pain, but to be able to say what is the spirit inviting me into, into nurture, into comfort, into healing. Those are all such beautiful things and the things that seem that we need in huge proportion today. We want to pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us.
Speaker 1:If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend. Pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend. And if you found the conversation intriguing and want to know more about what we're learning or how you can join our online community, visit our website at expansionistheologycom.
Speaker 2:And I'd like us to maybe individually share. And I'll start with this one um, where that shift began to happen, um, where I saw myself expanding from just father god to a mother god or to a spirit god. Um, it was. I was very young, um, when I had some of these, some of these experiences. But there is one book in particular that I think, and it's fiction, so it's the author's lens and view of the spirit.
Speaker 2:But Laurie Beth Jones takes what she calls the Contessa Chronicles and creates this family in a heavenly realm that is in charge of, of managing the valley landers down below us, us humans. And in that story, heather, I began to see in a more clear way that there was more to God's intention than what I had been taught Expansiveness that is housed in this unknown, unfathomable presence that we could not get our minds and hearts around if we spent the rest of our lives doing so. God is more expansive than what even the Bible contains, what even the books contain. But this particular experience for me was an eye-opener in many ways to see God. So in the book she calls God Al and Mother, god Meg for Alpha and Omega. And just that, that connection, growing up hearing that god is alpha and omega, the first and the last right, the beginning and the end. I don't know, somehow it switched on an expansive channel that I've never wanted to let go of, like, like, like it gave me. It gave me a different way of seeing it, and you and I had this similar experience in the book of longing as well, sue Monk kid's book, uh, where something expanded, something opened up wider through through an author's words.
Speaker 2:But that particular book, contessa Chronicles, was, was, was kind of my turning towards this more expansive, uh, understanding of who God as father, god as mother, god as spirit um, uh, was intended, uh, I, I think, for me. Maybe she wrote it just for me, I'm not sure, but boy, I, I, I lobbed onto that and it was just like, okay, here we go, we go. But what about for you? What has been the turning point? And maybe it's not just one book, maybe it's multiple things, but share with us what caused this expansion for you? How did you move from seeing God as Father and expanding to God Mother and God Spirit, I think?
Speaker 1:gradually. That's really important. It wasn't one day I woke up and saw that needing, but by the expansion in other parts and also in loving people and learning to love people.
Speaker 1:Well, I often found people who could not wrap their mind around a loving father, yes, and there's so much horror in their life and true terror. So to ask them to expand their thoughts around that almost became too painful, correct. And to be able to say in order to love them, well, in order to serve them as pastor, but also as just friend, we had to reimagine what was given to us, and we see this in what Jesus tells us to do you know God as shepherd, that we have a good shepherd. I'm not a literal sheep and so I don't need an actual shepherd, but I need that metaphor to tell me how it is that I will be cared for.
Speaker 1:And when Jesus begins to offer us this understanding that we need different metaphors the ones that we have are too narrow and to be able to say what does it look like to have a divine mother? What does it look like to allow ourselves to be reparented by God and allow spirit to come to us? And you and I have had discussions before, and very often it leans more toward the mother. God is leaning toward how the spirit treats us or how the spirit interacts with us. And so you know to have the understanding that it's Spirit, god, who is always with us, who never listens, you know, to just our longing, but listens to our souls. And so I'm asking the Holy Spirit to not only expand my way of seeing the work and the movement of God and spirit all in the world, but to also bring us back into these places where we can offer this expansion or offer this love to someone else, to be able to say, if you cannot imagine God as loving father, can you see him as loving mother? And if you cannot see God who is beyond pronouns, beyond gender, god is not a person.
Speaker 1:So there are these metaphors that kind of help us to understand that. But, you know, do we see God in the witness of nature? And if we recognize that the earth itself is our mother? We were made from earth, we are earth. You know, god took his creativity and shaped us from the earth and then breathed into us. You know this beauty of saying that the earth ministers to us, the earth like a mother would do. The earth not only made us but continues to make us, with the food that we make and the water that we drink, and just that care. And I believe that we are asked not just to expand for ourselves but for the world for our brothers and sisters? How do we get into oneness and into singularity with people so we can all find a better story, so that we can all find our place in the story that God is telling?
Speaker 2:our place in the story that God is telling. You bring such a great point here and I want us to go back and maybe chat about this that.
Speaker 2:God is genderless. God is neither male nor female, yeah, and yet for thousands of years it has been layered and layered and layered throughout history that God is he. But clearly there's male and female on this planet, there's gender and yes, and maybe there's this wide variety of identities wrapped in gender, and and if we can see that in each other, then perhaps that's a reflection of who God is.
Speaker 1:And you. You bring me to this beautiful question of saying God is not male or female we know this but that there is a scope of God in that, the same way that when God said I created darkness and I created light, he did not exclude twilight, did not exclude sunrise. It's a spectrum, a spectrum of these things. And so are we able to experience from God, to be able to hear from God in a spectrum of voices, be able to listen, to learn, attune ourselves to hear from God in a spectrum of voices, be able to listen, to learn, attune ourselves to voices that are on the spectrum of what love offers to us, not to hear the one clanging bell of the masculine. That bell is important in some places. It cannot be the only way that we experience God, who is genderless, who is calling to us through everything and inviting us into the beautiful work and the beautiful story that love is telling. Yes, I love that.
Speaker 2:And maybe that is the definition of expansionist here for us in this expansionist podcast is to teach that and to proclaim and to announce that there are these variables that have stretched across time, part and parcel of this oneness, this unified reflection of who God is.
Speaker 2:And so when we talk about Father God or Mother God, we're actually saying something even more expansive, beyond that, right, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Maybe someone needs a father god, maybe someone needs a mother god, maybe someone needs spirit, and that's, maybe that's why we have the trinity. Maybe we just solved it, oh, and because we all need, we all have a different need, we all have a different shaping there's, I just think. I think, when we try to corner that off and section off God, we are already telling someone like myself she's not him, she's not a him, she's not a he. Right, like we're already telling people that God is not inclusive when we cut someone else out, when we deport someone else from one place to another, when we tell someone you're not welcome at this table, when we tell someone right, we could go on and on. We just keep doing this.
Speaker 1:Then Jesus is telling us something absolutely opposite. He's saying go to the highways and byways, go to everyone who does not have equity, go to everyone who is not included and tell them there is a seat for them at my table. So Jesus is reminding us the stories that you have are limiting. Let me expand how you see and how you interact with the invitation of God. There is for us a beauty and, I believe, a holiness based on wholeness, that God is calling us to and asking us. We are asking on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:I think the whole world is when is our hope? Where is the love that we all declare that we need more of? And it is for me, when we recognize our source is not limited, our source is not one particular sound. Our source is love, god is love. And when we return to that love, what Mary Magdalene invites us to do return to love, return to the good, return to these things it may need to be a different voice that we learn to attune ourselves to. If we only knew a Father God who is judgmental and angry and punishing, then we need to learn to listen to the voice of spirit that is compassionate, that is merciful, that is full of justice. That is gracious. That is all loving, all loving, all loving. And learning to attune our voice to that takes practice and it takes a lot of courage, because when you've listened to one particular sound like for many years, there's a courage in being able to say heal my ears.
Speaker 1:Heal the way that I hear the voice of the divine calling me back to my original goodness, to my wholeness.
Speaker 1:We read a verse on Sunday that reminded us that we are flawless in the eyes of God and that understanding that when God sees us as flawless, as perfect, that it should cause pause for us and go. Is that how I hear God speak of me, flawless, holy, invited into the divine dance, invited to co-create? And if that's not how we hear the voice of the divine speak to us, then we may need healing. We hear the voice of the divine speak to us, then we may need healing. And beautifully the Spirit comes to us as comforter, as healer, but it is by invitation, the minute we invite Jesus to show us or to reveal to us part of the job or I hate to use the word job, I need expansion on that but the role, maybe, of Jesus is revealer, the things that were hidden. Jesus reveals to us, and so many of us need healing and revealing in our eyes to the expansiveness of this love and our part in the love.
Speaker 2:Beautifully said and I think we've gotten full circle here today already in that part of our desire in having this conversation was to expand God as Father, God as Mother, God as Spirit into those that are listening. And I would say, if someone may just need permission, someone just may need permission to experience God as mother because of the woundedness of a father, Someone may just need permission to experience the gift and compassion, as you stated, of spirit, because maybe they were wounded by their mother and their father, maybe abandoned, maybe rejected by their mother and their father, maybe abandoned, maybe rejected. And so I would want to leave today with giving people permission to expand their view of God as Father, Mother and Spirit.
Speaker 1:Great Mother God, who created all mothers and invented mothering. Mother us now into your peace and comfort, into your nurturing love, into the kindness of your presence and into the shadow of your wings. We know that mothering takes many forms and is done by many kinds of people in different ways and situations. Give us the wisdom of your mother heart. We know that love is risky and there's always the possibility of pain, the risk of disappointment or loss. Give us the courage of your mother heart. We bring to you the cares of the brokenhearted. We bring to you the pain of the disappointed. We bring to you the hardship of the overwhelmed and we bring to you the ache of the separated. Teach us the worth of our own souls and the value of our existence, souls and the value of our existence. Give us your mother love to heal us, to nourish us, to share freely with the world. Amen.