The Mother Tree
Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother
Please join us for our inaugural book club series. Over twelve weeks, author Kathryn Knight Sonntag will lead readers in a community reading of her book, The Mother Tree. Each Saturday, participants will receive via email an excerpt from the book and a question to spark conversation within our online chat community. The series will culminate with a live discussion of book’s themes and what the Divine Mother means to all of us, just in time for Mother's Day. The chat community and live discussion will be open to all subscribers. To receive the invitation to participate in these activities, first subscribe, then manage your subscription under your account and select The Mother Tree. Once subscribed, participants may also access the chat community through the Substack app. Purchase a hard copy of the book here. Find our first installment of this series below.
Why Seek the Mother Tree?
As Latter-day Saints, we believe that “our theology begins with heavenly parents,” and yet there is a conspicuous silence surrounding what it means for us to have a Divine Mother individually and collectively. The reality of a Heavenly Mother in our doctrine is explicit. A recent work, “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings About Mother in Heaven,” documents a substantial number of references to Her reality and nature, comprising “over six hundred sources of all types referencing a Heavenly Mother in Mormon and academic discourse since 1844.” Statements about the Mother from Church leaders affirm Her as heavenly wife and parent, co-creator with the Father, co-framer of the plan of salvation, an involved parent during our mortality, and our Mother after we leave this earthly realm. These identities alone give me reason to seek Her and to understand more fully Her role in my salvation and the salvation of the world.
While I always believed in Heavenly Mother, it was when I began to desire to know Her that I felt Her absence most keenly: from the plan of salvation, our temples, and our weekly Sunday meetings. I felt Her absence in our worship and our conceptions of spiritual parentage. I began to understand the Divine Feminine as an integral source of my divine essence, real to me since childhood; and while my Heavenly Queen was so unshakably a part of my soul, She was missing from institutionalized representations of God. I continue to ask: What parts of me come from my Mother? What is She like? What wisdom and love are uniquely Hers to give, and how does She teach and guide me in mortality? Is She merely nodding alongside the Father as He gives counsel and commands, or does She have something uniquely Hers to impart?
More and more of Her children are sensing an existential need to know Her. I don’t know all of the answers—none of us do—but that doesn’t mean there are no answers or firm conclusions that we can draw. I believe asking questions and exploring possibilities are indispensable ways to show love and reverence for revealed truth.
My desire to better understand old and new dimensions of my female experience is inseparable from my desire to know Her. The fruit of my initial inquiries materialized as a collection of poetry called The Tree at the Center, which explores the Mother as She appears in my experiences as a new mother, in world cultures (symbolized as the tree of life), and in the natural world. As a poet, I find great satisfaction and enlightenment in exploring metaphors. Their power to convey vivid imagery that transcends literal meanings ignites the imagination, inviting active participation in what can result in sacred sensorial experiences, spiritual revelation, and new intellectual considerations. In The Mother Tree, I offer the same ancient mother tree metaphor that helps me contemplate Heavenly Mother. I offer my thoughts about the tree in reverence with the hope that it helps to keep the doctrine of our Mother from neglect. With this book, I wish to provide room for all seekers to explore, where we can consider together who the Mother is, why She has been seemingly absent, and how we can approach Her through the image of the tree that holds Her in profound framing.
We are accustomed to expressing in concrete words that God the Father and Jesus are individual beings with knowable attributes. The way is not made to know Heavenly Mother equally; She resides in shadow. This creates a theological understanding of God the Mother that is potentially more mysterious and different from the theological landscape of God the Father and Jesus. It is new territory. Although Jesus is a specific being, we also come to know Him through metaphor: as the Lamb, the Bread of Life, the Way. We can discuss God the Mother through symbolic language because She is cloaked in the metaphor of the tree throughout the scriptures. Mother takes us even further into a symbolic realm where divine femininity is able to make itself known as generative, intuitive, compassionate, a complement to divine masculinity. Further exploration of the Mother is part of the unfolding Restoration in our hearts. It is needed now more than ever.
As children of heavenly parents, we embody traits from each parent. Because we have come to understand God as He, the majority of our discussion about divine attributes we seek to emulate originate from a male deity. We have had little experience thinking of God as feminine and masculine, let alone considering Mother God as an autonomous, whole being with unique traits that we, as Her spirit children, have also inherited. We are less experienced at seeking out the Mother’s attributes. I believe that a knowledge of Her character, power, and purpose creates wholeness in ourselves, in our relationships, and in our theology. Harmonizing Their divinely feminine and divinely masculine principles inside our souls leads to unity with Them. For this work of harmonizing, we can come to the Mother Tree.
Introduction
The tree of life has always called to me. When I was a child, I would read Lehi’s vision in the Book of Mormon and feel drawn in by its ecstatic presence. I sensed there was more to the symbol than I could then grasp. Over the years, I found a thread of groves and trees running through ancient and modern revelatory experiences, though I was unsure of the significance. I reencountered the symbol of the tree of life as I prepared my master’s thesis on the role of the transcendent in landscapes. I engaged more intimately with the sacred symbol as I learned about its archetypal power. I finally grasped what my childhood self was sensing: The tree implores my soul to reveal its truest self.
One resonance that struck me most was the tree as an image of eternal life inextricably linked to the Divine Feminine. It felt like no coincidence that I became pregnant with my first child as the tree’s power to invoke sacred connections between the earth and the heavens was unfolding in my consciousness. I felt the tree return and re-center inside my soul, filling an absence I had sensed my whole life but could never fully articulate. As my first child grew inside me, the revelation that I was a tree of life distilled upon me (D&C 121:45). Like the tree of life, I connected heaven and earth as I brought a soul into the world. The symbolism of the tree lived in my very limbs and heart.
Inseparable from my new understanding of the tree of life was the revelation of a Mother God in scripture. I found Her first in the book of Proverbs, named there as Wisdom, the tree of life (Prov. 3:18). The eternal presence of the Mother, rooted in my own religious heritage, continued to be unveiled, and I saw Her everywhere: in the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Sacred Grove, Lehi’s tree of life, the first temple in Jerusalem, Abraham’s sacred Oak of Moreh, and the cross from which Jesus’s body hung. Her presence beckoned me to make more profound connections to my own divinity. I discovered, in the image of the tree, a reflection of my yearnings for unity with the divine, with wisdom, wholeness, and renewal. I experienced, once again, how our scriptures become alive and bright, responsive and renewed, by our engagement with them (Alma 37:3–5).
Join me on a journey through the three primary zones, or realms, of the tree—roots, trunk, crown—that represent three different regions of our spiritual journey, as a way to discover our Divine Mother in each place. As we consider the botanical and symbolic expressions of the tree, we are able, by the final pages of the book, to hold a more integral vision of our Mother, one that weaves together Her tender maternity and Her exquisite power to bind together in love.
As with all things sacred, I have found the Divine Feminine to be beyond the structure and confines of language. We find Her substance, Her language, Her voice, Her abundance in symbolic expressions, layered and transmuting, ever evolving as we develop our discerning of both what is knowable and the godliness beyond mortal comprehension. While no language can adequately describe the holy, I hope this journey toward the very real presence of the Divine Feminine can aid our understanding of how She manifests on our path toward becoming.
While I have devoted some scholarship and years of study to this topic, the knowledge I hold most sacred comes from personal experience with God, Mother and Father. Any wisdom I have to share on this subject grows from earnest seed-questions in my heart that continue to be nurtured by divine love. I extend the pattern of this quest to you and invite you to bring your own discernment and desires for healing and truth to these pages as you read. In fact, your active participation is essential. As you continue to experience the Mother, to grow in Her nature and nurture, I hope that the transcendent power of Her love enlivens you to expand your soul’s engagement with faith, love, and peace.
The Mother Tree
From the Bible and the Book of Mormon, we are familiar with the tree as a salvific image. Most familiar to us is the tree of life envisioned by both Lehi and Nephi, symbolizing the love of God and eternal life. Perhaps less familiar is the depiction found in Jacob 5. The allegory of Zenos, quoted by Jacob, reveals one of the most beautiful and grace-filled portrayals of a tree as a maternal figure gathering souls for salvation. In three different verses, the tame tree is called the mother tree (Jacob 5:54, 56, 60). She nourishes and grows her natural and grafted branches with the help of the servant and the Lord of the vineyard, providing life for all who will accept her redemptive powers. The tree image connects maternal care to the saving powers of God, our divine parents.
Together we will explore this simple and profound connection between the maternal and the salvific, united in the symbol of the tree. Engaging with an expansive framing of our Mother’s selfhood, wisdom, power, and love, we will find in Her an essential guide on our personal journeys of transformation. We will learn, through both the materiality and spirituality of our Mother God, Her portion of care for our journeys of transformation and how She, as the tree, frames the journey itself. Wisdom about Her becomes wisdom from Her; in knowing Her, we are changed into truer versions of ourselves with eyes more able to see that She has been with us all along. Recognizing Her place in our faith journeys, and consequently in our Latter-day Saint theology, reflects the order of the heavens and restores a vision of wholeness and healing that our hearts desperately seek.
As mentioned in the introduction, each portion of the tree reveals characteristics of our Divine Mother. In the diagram that follows, we see the tree and its three distinct parts—roots, trunk, crown—corresponding to three different regions— underworld, earth, heavens. As Latter-day Saints, we are very comfortable with the idea of Earth as the place of our mortal existence and with the heavens above symbolizing the life to come, but the idea of an underworld is less familiar. For now, we will simply say that it is an internal region that we experience on Earth, a place of beliefs, introspection, ancestral wisdom, and spiritual rebirth.
Diagram of the Cosmic Tree: As we familiarize ourselves with this diagram, we can begin to play with symbolic layering, to see the roots as the past, the trunk as the present, and the branches as the future, for example. The symbol of the tree can also manifest three ways of knowing: the intuition of the shadowlands, the experiential knowledge of the earth, and the imaginal wisdom of the heavens.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
In what ways could our interest in the Divine Feminine make a difference in our personal lives, communities, or societies at large?
Please join us at the online chat community to join the conversation. See you there!
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.