God has a maternal aspect. Within God’s love, we find a nurturing that we can’t find anywhere else. Only God knows all about us. No one else can know our thoughts. God does and yet loves us fiercely despite our often stinking thinking.
There is a biblical precedent for thinking of God as maternal. Deuteronomy 32:10-11 says that God “guarded” Jacob “like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them aloft.” Other passages depict God in a maternal capacity, which includes:
“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isa. 49:15)
“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you, and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 66:13)
Jesus picked up the maternal imagery and said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34)
God as divine mother
Throughout Christian history, people wrote about God’s maternal characteristics. Clement of Alexandria in the second century wrote about Christians nursing at God the Father’s breast. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said of God, “What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.”
Julian of Norwich wrote in the 14th century, “when [a child] is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can; and [God] wants us to do the same, like a humble child, saying, "My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearest Mother, take pity on me.”
The 16th-century mystic, John of the Cross wrote about God’s maternal care in his Dark Night of the Soul: “The grace of God, like a loving mother, as soon as the soul is regenerated in the new fire and fervor of His service . . . enables it, without labor on its part, to find its spiritual milk, sweet and delicious, in all the things of God . . . God giving it the breasts of His own tender love, as to a tender babe.”
The fierce love of God
What does that mean for us in our daily lives? It means that we can go to God and know that we are loved no matter what we said or did. When we are irritable to the ones we love the most, we can go to God for forgiveness and for the kind of love a mother gives but in greater measure. We can go to God when we feel discouraged in our recovery from the after-effects of childhood trauma. We can sit in God’s presence and know that He loves us with fierce maternal love. And that fierce maternal love we receive is the foundation of not only our recovery but our entire lives.
Seeing God as maternal helps childhood trauma survivors. For some, seeing God as a mother helps correct the negative view of a mother they picked up in childhood. For others, it helps them view God as a parent because their view of fathers is negative. God longs for us with the love of a mother and will protect us just as fiercely as a mother lion protects her cubs. He is not like the abusive parents some people know.