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Regarding the issue of God as Mother ....

Now, as I have alreadly pointed out on more than one occasion, and I am certainly grateful for yet another opportunity to speak about the truth again, that when we talk about the "Word of God" as it is revealed through Holy Scripture, there are some very important factors to take into consideration. Though I will not reinvent the wheel here, but copy and paste what I have already said on the subject, (with some minor revisions) and then tie it into the question of whether God can be seen as our Mother, as well as our Father.

First, when God our Father releases a teaching through a particular prophet, and this includes Jesus Christ, it is given in terms that are tailored for the mindset of those to whom the prophet is speaking.

I believe that it can be said with a fair amount of accuracy, that the people of Jesus' day, were a very narrow and closed minded people, with a very narrow outlook. These people, if they ever thought about where the center of the universe was, they were inclined to believe that the earth was the center, and that the sun revolved around the earth. And of course, their conceptions did not even include the fact that the earth was round. And as you all know, it took more than 1,500 years for the truth to triumph in the minds of men in this regard. Moreover, the culture was stridently patriarchical, i.e. male centered, and after 2000 years, this has only just begun to give way to some ray of truth. I mean, a mere one-hundred years ago, the women in this nation, America, were not even allowed to vote.

These are just some of the limitations, in no way representing the entire list of mental limitations, that God had to take into account when releasing his Word through Jesus Christ in the year 33AD.

Therefore, the teaching that Jesus released in public was primarily given through the vehicle of parables. Anything that had a really deep mystical meaning, was presented in the most simplified manner. Now, this had to be the case, because the quality of human pride will reject out of hand anything that is too far outside the framework of existing knowledge. I mean, the human ego likes to think that it knows everything. And it is very stiff necked in this regard. If something totally new is presented, they do not say, "O, please tell me more, help me to understand." Rather, they will simply take offense, because the revelation of new knowledge challenges their pre-conceived notion that they know everything. Rather than relinquish such a pre-conceived notion, they defend it, and they defend it, by rejecting out of hand the new information. So, when you need to present to such people a truth that is completely outside of their framework of belief, you have to deliver it in such a way that some portion of it falls within the existing framework of belief, but will at the same time bump right up against the existing framework, gently pushing the line of limitation outward, to nudge it out, and this is done with generalities. We see this throughout the four gospels, and we see it in the Book of Revelation as well. This describes, I think fairly accurately, the general character of nearly everything that Jesus spoke in public.

Additionally, if we keep in mind the important question of how accurately the teaching will be passed down from generation to generation, especially in those days when there were no printing presses, we can see, that if the Master spoke a particular truth that was so far outside of the people's ability to comprehend, that he would run a great risk that the structure of that belief would get modified, molded, or reformed, by the limitations inherent in the mindset of those people, as that paricular concept was passed from generation to generation. So, if the Master wanted a paricular truth to survive, he would have to present it in way that would be very general.

Moreover, we can conclude from what is said in the Bible, that many more things were said to his close circle of immediate disciples. But even some of them had their limits. I am thinking here of the time when he told everybody that they had to eat his flesh, and drink his blood. This caused many of his disciples to walk away. And this was a metaphor, not the direct revelation of the mystical truth that he had in mind. You can imagine how many people would have walked away if they had him talking about the transfer of spiritual energy from his chakras to our chakras.

Therefore, when we confront the great task and challenge of making sense of what we find in the Bible, we have to understand that what Jesus spoke to the people in public, represents but a tiny, microscopic subset of his total knowledge, and in regards to what he did speak, these ideas had to be clothed with generalities. And in regards to what he actually spoke to his disciples, he said a lot more than what we see recorded in the Bible, and that this great body of additional information will eventually be released to the general public through the vehicle of progressive revelation in later centuries as the people are ready and able to assimilate it. For example, in the Book of John, we find the following testimony:

This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. (John 14:24-25)

And there is this additional testimony:

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. (John 20:29-31)

The bottomline is this. Jesus Christ was not about to challenge the patriarchical basis of the culture by teaching the people that God is Mother, as well as Father. For those people, it would have been a bridge too far. They would not have accepted it, and the good that would have otherwise come from the Teaching that he did reveal, would have been lost.

I think that it is fair to say, that for any opened minded person in the 21st century, that it is self-evident that God is as much Mother as God is Father. That this is an absolutely reasonable observation.

For example, we are told that we are created in the image of God. Well, what do we see around us? We see male and female. We see fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers. I hope a lightbulb is going off in the minds of most of the readers of this thread. Duh ... If we are made in the image of God, then the image of God is an image of male/female, which means that God created man, and he created woman, out of his/her own sense of male/female identity.

And what does it say about our Father's valuation of his own female half, that He gave to woman, the single greatest responsibility of life, and that is, to bring forth new life, His life?

Just as every Man/Woman union is intended to be a valueable partnership for the raising up, and nurturing of new life, so to is the partnership of our Father/Mother God, exactly that, as an a priori creative principle, which is at the center of all life, and all creation, worlds without end, i.e. the highest partnership which makes possible the highest expression of life throughout all the heavenly mansions.