“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.” Ana, wife of Jesus of Nazareth, from Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Book of Longings”

I speak, but who listens? I live life as a man, but my femininity frees my chaotic soul. My male conscience imprisons my female spirit. My paternalistic mind searches for answers, but my maiden heart aches for belonging. Like Ana from the Book of Longings, I am developing my own voice. Our understanding of God the Father bolsters religious leaders to hide God our Mother. As I search deep inside my heart, I think I’m feeling Heavenly Mother’s presence.

Heavenly Mother isn’t explicitly named in the Scriptures, but there are parallels to Eve, the first human woman. Eve is a powerful female graced with spiritual gives to seek out truth. She is an experimenter. She is not an experimenter in the scientific sense, but Eve’s searching is an explorative process, similar to contemporary dance experimentation.

I attended Columbia in New York and I learned to dance across the street at the woman’s school, Barnard College, Many diverse women filled the dance studios. Tall, blonde, slender women destined for classical ballet shared space with non-binary, bi-racial women. My dance peers showed up to class to learn 20th century modern dance techniques designed by Martha Graham. Woman outnumber the men in all the dance classes. I don’t know if there is a general reason dance departments are commonplace for women. The dance world is a safe haven for individuals to express the deepest parts of themselves through movement and music.

Learning to dance felt like learning to speak. Learning dance from various women and incorporating live music fed my soul daily. In my last year of college, I took this intermediate level dance class. The instructor studied dance at Juilliard and she danced with a great company. But one day, we shook for 5 minutes. Imagine 20 women and 3 men shaking all parts of their bodies.

She led us into the exercise with simple instructions: to close our eyes and think about the atoms vibrating within us. Soon enough, I would jump while shaking my head. I would fall to the floor and I moved like there was a snake in my shirt. My spine hasn’t tested the boundaries of possibilities since that small moment in Barnard’s crowded, muggy basement. The unknown is where we can find Mother God waiting for us. She cheers us on as we begin to see, just as Eve did in the garden once she ate the forbidden fruit.

Heavenly Mother matters because we can be self-autonomous with flawed decision-making skills. There is something about learning to lean into ourselves while also navigating our commitment to follow Jesus Christ.

Heavenly Father symbolizes obedience and Heavenly Mother symbolizes freedom. Finding connections that are not transactional is hard to do with men. It’s not just the teacher-student model. It’s a peer-to-peer model, and I think we find this model with Heavenly Mother. I am trying to find freedom within constraints, and I think Christ is helping me.