Heavenly Mother

"In the heav'ns are parents single/No, the thought makes reason stare/Truth is reason, truth eternal/tells me I've a Mother there"
-Hymn #292 "O My Father," by Eliza R. Snow 

So I was invited to present at Sunstone Symposium a week ago, which was a fun experience; it being my first time, I often felt like an anthropologist, observing a whole new culture of sorts.  To a lot of leftie LDS folk, Sunstone is clearly kind of a safe place, to gather and share and support one another; for others, its clearly more of a confrontational place, to argue and debate and vent.  Often it's both, as was the case with all the Ordain Women panels there in the aftermath of the whole Kate Kelly debacle.

A lot of ink has been spilled (or, more accurately, blogs have been typed) about Ordain Women and Kate Kelly's unfortunate excommunication recently.  I'm of two minds about it.  On the one hand, the whole Ordain Women movement was always kind of a non-starter: gender identity and gender roles are far too essentialized and central to LDS doctrine to ever get seriously re-evaluated by Church leaders (we believe that one must sealed in a biologically heteronormative Temple marriage to attain the highest level of heaven, for example).  But on the other hand, if Kate Kelly's worst sin was preaching false doctrine, well, I know some folks who still preach that white Americans were more valiant in the pre-existence, and I don't see any disciplinary counsels convening to rebuke them.   Besides, it is a matter of historical record that Joseph Smith did in fact allow and encourage women to perform priesthood blessings in the early Church--that is, Ordain Women is perhaps on firmer doctrinal ground than the idiot BYU professor who claimed black people were fence-sitters during the War in Heaven.

I could go on, but most the major points have already been made repeatedly and made better elsewhere.  Rather, I'd only add this: I know a number of LDS young women who are, by any metric you could devise, conservative, faithful, believing, Church-attending, Priesthood sustaining, Temple-recommend holding, returned missionaries, aspiring moms and home-makers, etc, etc.  You know the type.  They are as far from sympathetic with Ordain Women as can be. 

Yet even amidst these most conservative of LDS young women, I've heard: "You Elders have something I wish I had: the Priesthood" (I heard that from a conservative Sister missionary once in Puerto Rico);  or, "when I get to the other side, Heavenly Father and I are going to have a long talk about why women get the short end of the stick so often" (I heard that from an RM and Relief Society Instructor);  or, "I wonder what Heavenly Mother is like?  The Prophets and Apostles and God the Father and Jesus Christ are all men, I want so badly a feminine model I can look up to and emulate, to know what it looks like to be a divine woman" (I heard that one most recently from about the most conservative, modest Midwest girl I've ever met).  Again, these are hardly the target audience for Ordain Women, these are not liberal agitators or whatever, no, these are the conservative ones, the faithful, believing ones!  If they have questions, then what of the rest of the Saints?

I think this anxiety comes down to the Heavenly Mother, whose very absence from our present discourse looms large in a manner that would delight Judith Butler or Luce Irigaray; the feminine lack is all the more present in its absence.  For if we truly believe that the highest exaltation is possible only in the Temple marriage between a man and a woman, then we perforce believe God the Father is married as well--and that He therefore has a wife.  Heavenly Father has a Heavenly Mother.  We don't bring it up much, it's one of the high heresies of Mormonism as far as mainline Christianity is concerned.  It's mostly just preserved nowadays in verse 3 of the popular hymn "O My Father" (written by a woman, no less)--and given the sheer volume of hymns that have been dropped from rotation over the years for being doctrinally false or out-dated or too controversial, it's significant that that one has stuck around.

My point, simply, is that not just the radicals but our most conservative female members would love to know more about this Heavenly Mother (I would too, while we're at it).  And I suspect that much of the agitation centered around Ordain Women sprouts up from this very deep-seated, primal need to know our Mother in Heaven--men have a Man to look up to, the women would like a Woman as well, and some generic, genderless, bloodless Protestant God just doesn't cut it--but we know so frustratingly little about Her.  If women had the priesthood, then maybe they could finally know her as well, is perhaps the unconscious hope, I don't know.

Back at Sunstone, one panelist noted that in every extant version of the First Vision, Joseph Smith not once mentions the gender of the "two personages" that appeared to him; only that one says, pointing to the other, "This is my Beloved Son, hear him."  That is, this panelist proffered the wild theory that Heavenly Mother is maybe who introduced Christ Jesus to Joseph Smith.  And indeed, the Old Testament, New Testament, and Doctrine and Covenants all state that husband and wife become "one" in marriage--and what exactly does that even mean?  That is, perhaps that panelist wasn't as far off as might first appear in trying to locate Her in the First Vision.

Now, I'm not saying I buy that theory, I feel like Joseph Smith would have brought it up at some point--he introduced so many radical, mob-enraging religious ideas in his short life that I think he would've just gone for broke on that one, too.  Rather, I found it significant how someone was trying to locate the Heavenly Mother within that foundational moment of the LDS faith--it shows a very real maternal need that is not currently being met.  Kate Kelly may be out, but that need is not.