(copyright Michael Henry Dunn, 2018, all rights reserved)
(Maha-Prakriti - God in the Aspect of the Divine Mother of The Universe)
We stand in such need of Her - the Compassionate, the Unconditionally Loving and Forgiving, the Intuitive, the Fertile, the Healing, the Nurturing – our world is withering for lack of these feminine qualities. And if these qualities do not speak to you of God then I recommend you, friend, to some other book! And if you would insist that Spirit wear only a masculine Face, a masculine Name, and come to us only as the Law-Giver, the Prime Mover, the Protector, the Creator, if you would restrict the nature of God to only these qualities, and regard Woman and Motherhood as secondary, earth-bound, and inferior – well, clearly, you are not likely to be reading this page!
You are with me this far, perhaps, because your intuition tells you that God’s twin aspects of Feminine and Masculine, the Dance of Feeling and Reason, the intertwining of Nature and Spirit, the Divine Romance between the Soul and the Creator, answer a deeply felt need in your being.
If you are a woman, my task is easier – you need only look in the mirror to see Her. You need only cease for a moment to regard your body as merely a magnet for affection, and see it instead as our world’s most perfect reflection of the abundance of nurturing Nature Herself. You need only cease to feel anxiety over enhancing the beauty of your eyes, and remember instead that men are really only drawn (if only we knew it) to the compassionate light of the Feminine that shines there. You need only cease to fear that your figure is not provocative, and remember instead that every man who is stirred by the sight of your sweet curves is only responding (unconsciously though it may be) to the memory Divine Mother planted in him of Her unforgettable beauty and perfect love - a memory echoed in this life by the dimly present recollection of the perfect contentment of the infant at the mother’s breast.
That driving and powerful memory is the secret behind evolution’s procreative urge – the blind motive toward union that our animal natures have not yet matured enough to recognize as potentially the most angelic gift of our being.
That we men do not revere you as Her reflection is our tragedy.
And if you are a man, and this spiritually romantic yearning you feel is tethered to the demands of your reason, if your mind requires proof of the reality of God in the aspect of Divine Mother before you can reach out to Her as that Lover with Whom you are destined for union, then I would encourage you to become an empiricist of love, and to make the experiments of the heart that are offered in this book. If the promise of intimate communion with the Infinite is lure enough to earn your sincere effort, you shall have proof enough, if you persist.
Though my reason did demand (and find) a logical path towards the Goddess, I found finally that Her reality required no intellectual proof. The sun on my face became enough. The leap of my heart at the sight of an expanse of green meadow became enough. The way my cells felt gratitude for a drink of clear water became enough. The incomparable comfort of an embrace from the woman who gave birth to me became proof enough of the Mother from whom my mother came.
If seeing God as both Mother and Lover confuses you, then you may need to practice more reverence for the mother in the woman you love.
If you do so, you will find that every time Spirit tempts you with Her irresistibly seductive beauty, every time you feel Her caress in the breeze, or offer Her your heart in the silence of the night, you will find yourself falling in love with Her Divine Motherhood at the same moment that She comes to you in Spirit as the Divine Lover.
And if She has also come to you in mortal form as the woman you love, then you are doubly blessed.
And if you are a woman who is drawn to women, or a man who is drawn to men, in a way your path may be easier, for the blending of Masculine and Feminine between you and your mortal lover may offer you (more so, perhaps, than for opposite-gender lovers) a greater chance to see each other first as souls, and only secondarily as identified with these bodies we inhabit. And the Divine may then come to you in vision (perhaps) in whatever form your heart holds dear.
Chapter Nine– The Dwarf’s Door
It was in that same fourth floor walk-up on Chicago’s North Side that the dream came. It was perhaps a year later. The bliss had long faded and my heart was well toward healing, but the memory of it haunted me. I was busy but not happy. I had been shown that the Love I sought was real, but I had no path back to it – and four days of sleepless heartbroken fasting was not a formula I cared to repeat.
You may have had dreams in which there is no preamble and no back story - just an image, indelible and steeped in deep emotion, that brings you awake in the night. That is how this was for me: I dreamed my way into an iconic painting. I became a figure at the table in Dali’s ‚Last Supper,‛ and at the head of the table shone a Light, bright, gentle, and so full of Love that my body lost its density on the instant, and rose in the air to accompany my heart in its flight Home.
I don’t have such dreams often. At that time, I had never had such a dream.
It might have been the next day, or the day after. Wanting to visit my parents, I drove out to the old hulking tribal manse (still well-stocked with a few of the notoriously slow-to-mature Irish-American siblings - Irish Catholics tell the following joke, but do not like others to tell it: how do we know Jesus was Irish? Simple: at age thirty-three, He had no job, He lived at home - and His mother thought He was Jesus Christ).
There was nothing profound on my mind, and I sat down in the kitchen to fix myself a snack.
I have always been an obsessive reader. My mother taught me to read at a very young age, and time spent eating alone without something to read has always seemed to me time wasted. So there I sat, my sandwich hot and ready to eat, my many siblings not in evidence, and I looked around the kitchen for something to read, something to feed mind as well as body.
There was a bookshelf above the radiator – old copies of National Geographic and some other magazines. No, I thought, not that. I walked into the breakfast room – four full shelves of books: Prevention magazine – lots of those – books on how not to get cancer, old Readers Digests, a miscellany of World Books’ Book of the Year. No, I thought, I need something better tonight. On to the former playroom we now called The Office – many books there. I plowed quickly through them all. "No, not that. This one won’t do. Not that. Something better. No, not that."
I had become obsessed and my sandwich was now quite cold.
It was a large house, and had always had many books in its many rooms. When there are ten children who have each been given their own bedroom so that they might grow up to become truly cantankerous, self-engrossed, and eccentric members of The Missionary New Age Church of Irish-Catholic Tribal Holistic Medicine, over a quarter century or so such a home will accumulate a goodly and eclectic store of books.
Down to the basement – three bedrooms. Books musty and mildewed, of dubious provenance. Nothing there. Back up to the second floor, five bedrooms there, all with bookshelves – surely in the Study (the bedroom of my teenage years) there would be something. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? No, it’s just a sandwich, not a three-day banquet.
By the time I impulsively ran up the stairs to the five bedrooms on the third floor, I should have realized something strange was going on. Yes, I love to read and all that, but I’m usually fine with yesterday’s paper, or even a book I’ve read a dozen times, just to content my eyes with passing over the written word.
I may have sprinted up the stairs with the intuition that there was one room on the third floor that was sure to hold some one book that might meet my strangely high standards this particular night - my oldest brother’s room. It had briefly been mine one summer, and his closets were crammed with books. Chris majored in history, had an interest in politics, and worshipped Churchill. That would be my salvation.
But no. Churchill was there, but he would not do. Many dozens of titles were quickly glanced through, and all discarded. I was now on my knees in front of his closet, worn out with my weird search, surrounded by a pile of apparently unworthy books.
The Lover will occasionally require some eccentric behavior of you. Not always, but sometimes.
And then my eye fell on what we called The Dwarf’s Door. In the far corner of the room, it was perfectly proportioned to be the stately entrance to a manor, but it was only two feet tall, and led to a closet that might have held a wardrobe for a hobbit, but could accommodate only a few dozen human-sized books. I crawled over, opened the door (as a child I’d always done so in terror of dwarves), and went through my last due diligence in this fevered search.
(The 'Dwarf's Door' on the 3rd floor at 333 N. Euclid)
I discarded them all. Save one.
The last book, on the last shelf. A very slim volume, no more than five inches high, with its title facing away. I had to pry it out of its hiding place and turn it round to see what it was.
Now, I promised you that I am not here as a proselytizer for any one teacher or path. Yes, I’ve brought you a long way up to this third floor bedroom, and built up a lovely suspense as to what marvelous book could have been the sequel to so powerful a dream (don’t worry, you’ll find it in the list of Lover’s Resources at the back of this book).
But, you see, if I tell you now what book it was, this little story I’ve told you will become all about that book and its author, who became my incomparable guru. But what I really want to share with you is that there may be one path, and someday, perhaps, one special teacher, one lovingly chosen route that the Lover has mapped out for you in your journey home, and no other will do. And it may not be the one that waited for me behind the Dwarf’s Door. But it is surely waiting for you somewhere. You just have to be willing to discard all the others, and follow that one alone.
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(Stay tuned for more chapters - or purchase the entire book, "Romancing The Divine" at this link.)