Spirituality Part 4

I'm a Welsh boy. In case you haven't noticed, we like our mams. You could even say that most of us are mammy's boys. Thackeray in Vanity Fair wrote Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of little children. Maybe he was Welsh too.

I also have a suspicion that maybe Jesus is a bit more Welsh than we've been lead to believe.

I've been looking at a phrase Jesus uses in the Gospels, that God is like a Mother hen, gathering Her chicks under Her wing. God's followers being represented by little spring chicks in this case. And that got me thinking. Of all the ways we picture God, how many of us would have come to the same conclusion that Jesus did, that God is a Mother hen? And Jesus does seem to know an awful lot about God, what with being God and the Son of God simultaneously and all. So back to what we've been looking at with spirituality being where teaching meets experience, how does this image of God make you feel?

At first your feelings may be of warmth and protection. Your next feelings however might be that of astonishment, you may even be aghast: God is being portrayed in the feminine. Hopefully you've all been following this article for the past few months and you're in the habit of writing down how you feel when you read a passage from the Bible. You are allowed to feel you know. So now it's time to do something else, ask something a little more self reflective. Why do I feel this way?

You should already have a list of Bible verses and how they make you feel, and here's a great opportunity to revisit them and ask the same question. And I'm going to share just a little of my experience of doing this with Jesus describing God as a Mother hen. I feel protection from this image, because I can relate to it far more than the overtly male ideas of God as Father. Growing up, it was just me and my mother, and I'll always be grateful to her for everything she has done for me. Not having a positive father figure in my life means that the Mother hen idea is far more personal and relatable. A Mother hen isn't absent or violent, doesn't let me down when I need something. A Mother hen holds her chicks close and keeps them warm. And these are the very feelings Jesus is trying to convey about God. As I've already said, Jesus knows an awful lot about God.

How does this apply to our spirituality? Well for me, it shows how God can be different, and in my wanting to reflect God to the world, it shows how I can be different too. Too often we get caught up in the judgemental idea of God, but reflecting on why we are drawn to certain parts of the Bible, and why we respond the way we do to them, can show us the things we value, and the values we want to show.