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The masculine face of God — the Source of all sources — has been overplayed. The receptive, manifesting divine feminine, the matrix of plurality, has been underplayed as to its divine nature. This book is Her restoration: not invented, not imported — restored, the way a painting is restored. Nothing added that was not always there.
Two chapters from the working manuscript
Before naming Her, call Her.
This is not a chapter to read so much as a door to stand in. Every tradition that remembers Her begins the same way — not with doctrine but with address. You do not study a mother. You call her, and she turns.
So: to the one who receives what the Source pours out. To the field in which every seed of possibility germinates into a particular life. To the matrix — the mother-material, for that is what the word means — of every galaxy, every body, every morning that has ever localized itself out of the infinite. You were never gone. You were only unaddressed.
An invocation is not a summoning of the absent. It is an adjustment of the one who speaks. She has been holding the world the entire time we were praying past Her toward the exit. To invoke Her is simply to stop praying past — to let the address of the sacred include the room you are standing in, the body you are standing in it with, and the earth holding both.
Reader, this book will make arguments. But underneath every argument runs this single act of address, and you are invited to make it with me: not "God, get me out of here," but "God, you are also here."
Now the same movement, seen from the other bank.
What looks, from wholeness, like a dying — looks, from here, like a birth. The contraction that severed you from the everywhere delivered you into a where. Edges, yes: and because of edges, touch. Limits, yes: and because of limits, this morning's particular light through this particular window, unrepeatable, addressed to you.
Mortal, natal. The two words are the two banks of one river. Deathlike — and birthlike. Everything the grief-vocabulary says is true, and every one of its terms has a twin: the fall is a landing, the exile is an arrival, the descent is a delivery.
Incarnation is not a doctrine about one man in one century. It is the standing structure of existence: the infinite, continuously, gladly, taking on flesh — through Her, as Her. To be a localized being is not to be estranged from God. It is to be God's most recent act of localization, still warm from the making.
The contraction is holy. Say it in a church and watch the room divide. Say it to a mother holding a newborn and watch her nod.