Creativity and Godliness

Earth: Through All Things, Part 4

The healing we experience in our cyclical dives into the chambers of our underworld changes us on a cellular level and improves the quality of energy we embody, tuning us to a higher frequency; we experience a greater awareness of what we energetically contain and release into the world. We take greater responsibility for what we radiate. As David O. McKay taught:

Every man, every person radiates what he or she is. Every person is a recipient of radiation. The Savior was conscious of this fact. Whenever he came into the presence of an individual, he sensed that radiation, whether it was the woman of Samaria with her past life; whether it was the woman who was to be stoned, or the men who were to stone her; whether it was the statesman, Nicodemus, or one of the lepers. Christ was ever conscious of the radiation from the individual, and, to a degree, so are you, and so am I. It is what we are and what we radiate that affects the people around us.

When we are motivated by wisdom and love, our very souls are altered, as is the heart of how we spend our time.

Finding expression in creative forms becomes one of the most direct ways to connect to the divine, including to our Mother. Creative acts are pure manifestations of faith. They are the heartbeat of harmony, pleas for holiness to flow in the land, in our bodies, and through our transformation paths. We weave ideas into new patterns, breathe life into the seemingly lifeless, and live into being stronger and more tender threads of connection. Creative expressions open the mind and spirit to the possibility of transcendent (revelatory) experiences.

As I awoke to the reality of Mother God while carrying my first child, I felt myself moving toward a vast unknown. I was in awe of the new dimension of myself being revealed by pregnancy. What did it mean to be a vessel between the eternal and mortal realms? I marveled at its cosmic and simultaneously intimate reach, as I also felt incredibly daunted by the unknown in a way I never had before. I wanted to understand more profoundly how I resemble my Mother. This time, I recognized divine distancing as a sign of a faith transformation: I was embarking into uncharted territory and realized that a great deal of trust and resolve on my part would be necessary in order to find myself and God again.

I felt what I can only describe as a call compelling me toward the symbolism of the Mother Tree. While my world shifted and a new reality of who I was grew inside me, I turned to poetry as a way to weave together all I had learned. It was my natural next step to find Her through the influence of poetic composition. I knew that by opening myself to this soul-expanding medium, I would co-create a new depth of perception.

The act of writing each poem remade me. I began to find my voice. I was able to explore the intersection of my own experience of pregnancy and motherhood and my spiritual desires for a feminine landscape within the gospel. There are poems in my collection, The Tree at the Center, that were given to me. The Mother gave me the words to re-create my soul and, in turn, reflect Her to the world. These poems are as alive and “bright” to me as scripture (Alma 37:5). I find new connections and meaning with each rereading; they are scripture to me. We all have the spiritual faculties to receive personal revelation that marks our souls as profoundly as any other source of revelation, including canonized scripture. Each kind of recorded and/or received communion has a place in our development. God has told us time and time again that if we ask we will receive (Matt. 7:7). What we receive in answer to this eternal pronouncement and law is illuminated in our hearts and minds: sacred unveilings that re-create our souls.

In a symbolic way, when we create, we participate in states of mind, body, and spirit akin to the Gods who created Earth. In very real ways, we participate in the re-creation of the universe through our individual transformations of intelligence, faith, and presence in the world. Our personal transformations lead ultimately to a shift in collective consciousness, bringing us all closer to wholeness and holiness. I believe this is all in preparation for Her. Our collective movement toward Zion will open the way for Her return.

Taking Stock of Where We Are

What would it be like to have our Mother restored to our most sacred scripts and visionary spaces of the temple? To the Holy of Holies? The archetypal form of womanhood returned so that women may know in whose image they were formed? So that men might see the source of all their feminine wisdom?

What would a healthy, living Mother Tree in our midst mean to the ongoing Restoration?

We will spend the next chapter exploring some of these questions. But first, let’s take a moment to look around and see where we are. Before embarking on this journey together, we were on the well-trod masculine path of ascent, a linear trajectory of largely performance-based development in the gospel. We see now that because of its separation from the feminine way, the path is troubled with brambles; creeds of patriarchy mar it and obscure our vision. And it is not getting us to the end point. Frankly, it cannot. Traveling down a straight path of masculine understanding, led primarily by law and patriarchal rule with the feminine path nowhere in sight, was not our heavenly parents’ intent; Jesus’s very life is testament to that. As the Embodied Way, the Completed One, the Union of our Mother and Father, ultimately He points us to Them. And for us in the latter days, at this time in the Restoration, I see Him pointing us to Her. He knows we each need one-on-one time with our Mother.

Our journey in this book focuses on the feminine path—the cyclical, undulating way, tender and new to us like a tiny sapling. Our final goal will be to integrate this new wisdom about the Mother into our lives and understandings. But for now, the path asks for us to stay with it so we may give it the attention it deserves. So we will continue to explore, to let this path grow and mature. In its purity of vision and tenderness, it is more able to reflect us back to ourselves when it is free from obscuring images. It is largely unlabeled with other associations and a long history of men’s philosophies, having been exiled for so long. We see more clearly on this path the source of our joy and the source of our pain because the space is still open. As we’ve seen, an unknown Mother means our vision of ourselves is not healthy. If we, as small and weak saplings in the Mother’s image, want to grow, to reach the full stature of our potential, it makes sense that we would speak here first.

In the third part of our journey, “Crown,” I hope to sketch a vision of what continuing along the feminine ascension path might look like. We will explore how its full blooming can reveal a feminine side of ourselves that can heal us and mature us and lead to a strong and healthy tree, eventually able to bring us to the marriage of the feminine and masculine that is “the marriage” of the bride to the bridegroom from scripture. This book will not take us to the final union. I, for one, have not yet experienced this oneness and so am entirely unqualified to describe it. Yet I feel incredible hope that we have arrived this far together.

Discussion Questions:

How does Chapter Two invite readers to recover divinely feminine characteristics on their spiritual paths of transformation?

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the Poetry Editor for Wayfare and the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother and The Tree at the Center.

Art by Hilma af Klint.

Keep Reading: Earth, parts 1, 2, and 3