Psychologies Magazine, October 2002 —
“Eve is alone in paradise. She is bored and asks God to create a companion for her. God creates all kinds of animals to keep Eve company, but she is still bored. Then God says to her:
—I could create a man who will be very close to you, but you might regret it, because he is a proud being who needs to dominate.
—It doesn't matter, begs Eve, give me this companion.
—Fine, continues God, but on one condition: don't tell him that he was created after you, because he wouldn't bear it. Let this remain a secret between us... between women.
This little Jewish story is significant of a development that seems to me very important in the representations we have of the divine. The advent of Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheisms had imposed the very masculine divine figure of an "all-powerful father" and sometimes tyrannical. However, this representation is less and less common among Western believers. Today, it is replaced by the image of a protective, merciful, enveloping God, who ultimately has all the qualities of a "good mother".
It is no coincidence that the figure of Mary, mother of Jesus, has continued to grow in importance for the past 150 years: the increase in pilgrimages to her places of apparitions, the importance of Marian worship within the charismatic renewal, and the last two dogmas of faith formulated by the Church concern the Virgin Mary: her Immaculate Conception in 1854 and her Assumption in 1950. This tendency towards the feminization of the divine also inhabits those who, ever more numerous, no longer attend Churches but believe in a meaning of existence. We are thus witnessing an erasure of the personal and paternal figure of God in favor of another, more impersonal and maternal one: that of destiny. We can no longer imagine God as a creative father, but we believe in providence, in the meaning of life, in signs, in the destiny written in the stars, in our "personal legend," an expression that made the worldwide success of "The Alchemist," the initiatory tale by Paulo Coelho.
In short, we no longer want an authoritarian and legislative God, dogmas and norms, but we willingly believe in a benevolent and protective divine energy, which envelops the universe and guides our lives in mysterious ways. This conception is not without evoking the providence of the Stoic philosophers of Antiquity. It also leads us to reconnect with the feminine figures of the sacred of ancient societies, against which monotheisms have fought so hard. Certainly, we are not going to worship the "mother goddesses" of the past, but we need, undoubtedly more unconsciously than consciously, to restore to the absolute the feminine and maternal qualities that patriarchal societies had partly taken away from it. Chase away the feminine... it comes galloping back. And so much the better!
October 2002