Isaiah Langford - The Maternal Nature of God and Its Complementarity with the Paternal - 4/21/2026

  The reading from St. Julian of Norwich paired with the images of and stories about mother deer in the wild makes me consider for a final time the inherent qualities of motherhood that permeate our primordial experience; it is from the womb that we come forth, and in some capacity, through both the natural areas of being bound taught, such as fascination with caves and the comforting fetal position of sleep, and through the supernatural means of experiences like Baptism, which entrench and encompass both through physicality and by the spiritual sense of overshadowing with grace, it is to the womb and the water of life that we yearn to return to. As we are buried, we are entombed and thereby enclosed in the womb of the earth, ever longing to be at peace by being completely surrounded, just as before and at birth we longed to be held and tightly bound, first in the womb and then in being swaddled. Thus, to describe the divine as mother-like comes naturally from how we view and understand the world based on our direct experiences, and it is only through vicarious experience that we come to comprehend the necessity of fatherhood as the progenitor of what we are; however, our description of the divine should never lose the maternal or paternal characteristics, because in its infinitude, it must encompass both the means by which we were created and the resting delight from which we come and are to return to. The believer’s journey necessitates pilgrimage which spirals out from the start so as to come to a deeper understanding about where it all began, and that beginning must be described in terms which acknowledges its contradictory yet simultaneously complementary characteristics and attributes. The three does which Dr. Redick encountered already demonstrated the conflicting interests of just the maternal, in that they ranged from protecting their children to showing them off to leaving them; the Divine would, in my understanding, never do the last of these, but intends both to protect what He has created and present it as “very good.” If what has been created and falls on but one side of the gender divide can have such a wide range of intent, does it not then follow that the Being beyond our comprehension would have such a robust character so as to effortlessly be both mother and father? And He must contain all the positive attributes of both, because He is that Being which nothing greater than can be thought of. In her writing, St. Julian furthermore makes the claim that we are to bound up with the Divine, and this is truly the point of the pilgrim’s journey towards their heavenly homeland, that they might come to rest fully in the Divine and be reunited with their Creator in a way which no person could ever imagine the experience of; and yet, the joy that will be experienced is central to the primordial experience and our remembrance of being brought into the world by the very same Creator; the Divine is in us only insofar as we are willing to return to Him and to become “partakers of the divine nature.”