Mothers' Day — Mind Meandering

     Many, many years ago in my early twenties, before I even had children of my own, my friends and I would discuss for fun what we would be if we were a piece of furniture or a car. The furniture or car would symbolize the kind of person we were, what our values, goals, and aspirations were. 
    I always saw myself as an overcrowded loveseat, with too many people trying to sit on it—children and adults of all ages and genders. Some were men trying to have a romantic relationship with me, but most were just persons who wanted in some way to be part of my life. I chose a loveseat because it is smaller than a regular couch but larger than a chair, and it had “love” in its name. My heart was full of love for the people in my life, but often I felt too small and inadequate to support all of them in their collective clamoring for a part of me. 
    For the car that represented me, I chose an older model of a VW bus, filled with children, cats, and dogs hanging out the windows. The model was older and a gas-saving VW to reflect my values of trying to live an ecologically responsible lifestyle, and the VW in those days was one of the symbols that represented the hippie movement that wanted liberation from meaningless social mores, unnecessary spending, violent means to an end, and prejudice of all kinds. I chose a bus because my life needed to allow room enough for many people, and it was an older model because in some way I “felt” older than most people I knew. In those days, my bus never was empty; it was always filled with my many pets, students, and friends.
     When I became a mother in my late twenties, my life did not change that much, I just had my own babies to also care for. I related to the native pueblo storyteller, a sculpture of a woman with children climbing all over her, and felt I was a lot like her, and I still do, though I’ve expanded to have more of the earth’s children be a part of me.
     Today, in my “older” years, I am a much-used, circular couch that surrounds the planet and can seat as many people who want to sit on it properly. Today I am a sailboat that skims softly and silently across the oceans of the revelation of Aquarian concepts, filled with anyone who wishes to ride the journey with me.

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     At this stage of my continued unfoldment as a woman, mother, and grandmother within my personality, I have come to realize many attributes and patterns of the circuitry of the Universe Mother Spirit, which most women have innate within them and which need to be discovered and manifested by each woman. According to Continuing Fifth Epochal Revelation (found in The Cosmic Family volumes), “Mother circuitry” originates with the Third Source and Center or Infinite Spirit, sometimes referred to as the Paradise Mother. The Fifth Epochal Revelation (found in The URANTIA Book) has much information on the Infinite Spirit (the Third Person of the Trinity), as well as the Universe Mother Spirit who both reflect the numerous attributes and functions of “Mother” personality.[1]

      The URANTIA Book states the obvious—that mother love is instinctive and inherent in almost all higher animals (especially mammals)—and indicates that this mother love in mammalians (and we humans are mammalians) is due to the endowment of the adjutant mind spirits,[2] given by the Universe Mother Spirit (a creation of the Third Source and Center, the Paradise Mother). The mother of the first human beings on earth (Andon and Fonta)—who was not quite human but definitely on the higher end of animal evolvement—fearlessly gave up her life to save her special and gifted twins. Now that is mother love![3]
     We are informed in the Fifth Epochal Revelation:  “The early home was founded upon the sex restlessness of the male when deprived of frequent gratification and upon that devoted love of the human female, which in measure she shares with females of higher animals.”[4] We are also told:  “Woman, however, has always been the moral standard-bearer and the spiritual leader of humankind. The hand that rocks the cradle still fraternizes with destiny.”[5] On our world Urantia (Earth), throughout the uplifts in evolution as well as the countless tragedies, woman has been the fortifier of spiritual truths. At whatever level of evolution, woman has been the one to bear the higher morals and truth of the day, to maintain them and pass them on, usually from the home front.
     The URANTIA Book also gives much attention to the great prophets and spiritual leaders, mostly men, who for hundreds of thousands of years carried to the ends of the earth spiritual truths that expanded the existing evolutionary religions. Always in any truly great movement that brings any kind of progress to the planet, there is the presence of both men and women, usually men at the forefront and women in the background. On our world, Urantia, Amadon was the native man who stood steadfast in a leadership role next to supermortals in the face of rebellion against God. However, on another planet, Panoptia, it was a woman, Ellanora, who was the native in spiritual leadership who confronted the Rebellion of Lucifer. 

     In an explanation of the evolution of human government and early human relations,[6] we are told:  “Sex hunger and mother love establish the family. But real government does not appear until superfamily groups [tribes, communities] have begun to form.” It is indicated that in the evolution of human civilization mother-families have to evolve into father-families for “the establishment of agriculture, the development of architecture, and the initiation of industry.” “Mother-families” are families that are physically and emotionally maintained by the mothers in the general absence of fathers, whereas father-families indicate the presence of the father participating more in the overall physical and social welfare of the family.
     For thousands of years, due to their mother love and the absence, often, of evolved mature men, women naturally accepted the cultural standards of their day and usually were locked into definitive roles that kept them close to home, carrying the burden of the work required to keep the family and home intact, just struggling to survive on a material level.
     In order for civilization to progress in a holistic manner, men collectively have to evolve out of their purely physical desires for sex gratification and their desires for power, which so often result in war. In any culture where men are still at that lower level of consciousness, the family and things of eternal value are maintained by the mother, by women of that culture. In order for a superfamily (real community) to happen, men have to begin to ascend out of their more base, animalistic desires into a less selfish, more expanded perspective. When they do, father love happens, and they too become more involved with family life and the preservation and expansion of the community, the civilization.
     The URANTIA Book states that the mother-family was natural and biologic; the father-family is social, economic, and political. “The stupendous change from the mother-family to the father-family is one of the most radical and complete right-about-face adjustments ever executed by the human race. This change led at once to greater social expression and increased family adventure.”[7] It is when men become more spiritized in their minds, when they begin to connect with the Father circuitry in divine pattern that expansion for a group—whether a family, community, culture, or whole civilization—happens.

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     The 2001 movie, Life as a House, is well worth watching. It is a heartwarming story with the theme of personal and family redemption. Kevin Kline plays a broken man in his forties who lives in a small home, which has deteriorated to shack status, inherited from his alcoholic father who had been physically and psychologically abusive. And though he had a gentle, loving mother, there was only so much she could do for her son since she too was abused by the domineering, bullying, imbalanced man of their home. Needless to say, the Kevin-Kline character grows to be a man who has damaged relationships himself, and thus, after ten years of life together, his wife (played by Kristen Scott-Thomas) leaves with their small son and remarries a wealthy man with whom she has two more sons.   
     As is often the case in dysfunctional families, the cycle of abuse and damage can continue for generations, and it takes years for healing to happen for the victims, if it does happen at all. However, in this film’s story healing does happen between the shack-dwelling father and his estranged and resentful son.
     The schism between the father and his former wife and son continued for years, with their relationship paralleling the deterioration of the shack. And though her new husband provided a wealthy lifestyle—a multi-million dollar home in the right neighborhood with all the right things and her not having to work to help bring in income, the home had no warmth of an active family life, for the husband was too busy working long hours in his high-paying job. So she was the one who held that family together. In a manner of speaking, they were a “mother-family” because the husband, though kind and a good “bread-winner,” was not really present for his family, as a loving husband, father, and friend. It wasn’t a “father-family,” and thus they felt isolated and lonely. The mother’s relationship with her teenage son was broken; she couldn’t relate to him, and he was an angry, rebellious person due to having no father figure active in his life.
     As many individuals do when they discover they have a limited time to live, they begin to assess their lives, and so does this troubled teenager’s biological father when he discovers that he is terminally ill and has about four to six months left to live. In evaluating his life, the Kevin-Kline character realizes that he made many wrong choices, which landed him in the dreadful state he is in. He also realizes that he failed in being a good father and wants to reconcile and help his troubled teen-aged son.
     The father had always dreamed and talked about getting rid of his shack, which he really hated, and building a new home in its place. That shack symbolized his shattered, wreck of a life, and it also represented the wreck of a person that his own alcoholic father had been. So the Kevin-Kline character becomes a father and takes in his son, in spite of the son’s loudly- and angrily-expressed complaints that he doesn’t want to live there. This broken man and estranged father finally takes responsibility for his angry, confused teenage son who has been a heavy substance abuser since he was twelve years old. 
     In the few months left of the dying father’s life, he implements a project where he and his son together tear down the shack and begin building a new home, paralleling their attempts to break down the wreckage of their own personal lives and relationship with each other in order to rebuild a renewed relationship between a father and son who are healing and recovering from their own brokenness. As the story goes on, there are, of course, a lot of conflicts, for the son has a lot of walls and anger that need to be broken down, and they do eventually get broken down as the walls of the shack are symbolically torn down.
     Because this man decides to “get a life” and become a father, while building a new house, he helps change the mother-family into a father-family which inspires and draws in, not only the mother and her other two children, but, one by one, other friends and neighbors who want to help build this new house and be a part of the renewed family. 
     Eventually the woman’s second husband participates in the construction of the house and in the reconstruction of his family. As this house begins to come together, people come together, and instead of just a nuclear father-family it becomes a superfamily and brings in more people and creates a little community of love, joy, and shared purpose in work. Out of this shack comes, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a beautiful new home and a reconciled new family and community. 

     We cannot really honor and celebrate Mother’s Day without the presence of the fathers. Here was a beautiful woman, a mother, in this movie who had much love and was a very good mother, but she really could not do for that family what was needed to be done with it just being a mother-family. When the father took his place in that family and brought in Father circuitry, it became also a father-family, and healing began to happen with the balance and expansion.
     That is the way it is in divine pattern—as an individual chooses to take responsibility for his or her life and acts out of a sense of love and duty for others, it pulls more and more persons into the circle of family and community where healing and building of new paradigms can happen.

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     In my study of The URANTIA Book and The Cosmic Family volumes, I see a pattern of how the Father and Mother circuitry from Paradise, throughout the Grand Universe, parallels the evolution of humankind and the ascension of individual mortals on this and other worlds. Very often The URANTIA Book refers to the “mother wheels” of space in discussing the evolution of universes, constellations, and systems.
     The threefold physical organizations in the Central Universe called “triata” are considered the “superpower mother systems of the creations of time and space.”[8] All physical energies and systems in the seven superuniverses begin in some manner from those “mother systems of triata.” In the births of all physical systems, they begin with a “mother nucleus” and then eventually grow and expand out away from the mother system and eventually become their own system, still in some way related to the mother, the beginning, but also a separate and different individual.
That is the divine destiny for all of us mothers here on Urantia. We birth our children, love, nurture, and minister to them, but within divine pattern, we need to raise them up to let them go so that they can move into their own God-given destinies. Twentieth-century philosopher Erich Fromm once stated:  “The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.” 
     It is the destiny for all individuals within God to expand inward, upward, and outward in the balance of Father, Mother, and Son circuitry. Though we need the Mother circuitry in divine pattern, we also need with it the Father and Son circuitry, all three coordinating. I see Mother’s Day as a day to honor the Mother circuitry within all of us, regardless of our gender.

^[1] Papers 8 and 9 of The URANTIA Book focus on the Infinite Spirit and Paper 34 tells us of the Universe Mother Spirit. These are good places to begin in studying about Mother circuitry within divinity.

^[2] For further information on the adjutant mind spirits in The URANTIA Book, see Paper 36, Section 5.

^[3] To learn more about Andon and Fonta, refer to Paper 63 of The URANTIA Book.

^[4] The URANTIA Book, Paper 68, Section 2, Paragraph 6

^[5] Ibid. Paper 84, Section 6, Paragraph 4

^[6] Ibid. Paper 70, Section 3

^[7] Ibid. Paper 84, Section 2, Paragraph 7

[8] Ibid. Paper 11, Section 8, Paragraph 7