Prayer to Our Mother

Our Mother, who art within us,
We celebrate your many names.
Your wisdom come. Your will be done,
Unfolding from the depths within us.

Each day you give us all that we need.
You remind us of our limits and we let go.
You support us in our power and we act with courage.

For you are the dwelling place within us,
the empowerment around us, and the celebration among us.

As it was in the very beginning, may it be now.

-Sister Miriam Therese Winter

🌀

Sculpture by Avian Shinrei Thibault,
Sacred Tablets

“Just” a Mother

Drawing by Henry Gray

“It is not female biology that has betrayed the female, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed more than one hundred years ago, it is the myths and stories that have been told about her, what has come to be believed about her – even by the female herself.

In the Christian West, it is common for a woman to be described or to describe herself as “just a mother”. It is common for “barefoot and pregnant” to connote powerlessness. Simone de Beauvoir suggested that it was as mother that woman was most fearsome, so it was as mother that she was enslaved.

Yet there are cultures in the human community where a birthing mother is described as a “great warrior” – going to the gates of life and death, to heave and push a soul into the world.”

~Glenys Livingstone, PhD

Magna Mater, Great Mother Cybele
Lounging on her Lion