BBC Radio 4 2016-03-04

BBC Radio 4 2016-03-04

Good morning. The results of the Iranian elections came in this week showing some modest advances with more women elected than ever before. For me it brought back the memory of a young girl I met in Iran a few years ago. My wife and I were on holiday and when we flew into Shiraz airport there was a crowd of young teenage girls wanting to speak to passengers coming off the aircraft in order to improve their English. One young girl came up to me and asked what job I did. “I am a kind of Christian Imam”, I replied, to which, apropos nothing, she immediately said “I don’t think God is a she do you?” To which I replied “I think that all that we mean by he and she is contained within God.” At which point she preached me a little sermonette on the theme of God is love. All this from a young teenage girl to a stranger at the airport in a foreign language. Even given the fact that Shiraz is the city of Sufi mysticism it was one of the most extraordinary encounters I have ever had.

I am opposed to gender stereotypes, which can be so false and misleading but I would still reply to that girl as I did then. All that we think of as good masculine or good feminine qualities are in God. And one of the images the church has traditionally used this coming Sunday is the mothering of God. Of course for most people now it is just Mother’s Day, an opportunity to express our appreciation of our own mother, an important and wonderful thing to do. But it is also Mothering Sunday and one of the reasons that it got that name is because in the epistle for the fourth Sunday in Lent in the Book of Common Prayer, a book which so decisively shaped our culture and religion for 400 years, we read “But Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all.” Jerusalem in Christian thought is our heavenly home, our life in God where we truly belong not just after death but now –and this, says the writer, is our mother, nurturing and caring for us.

There are a number of images in the bible which draw out the feminine side of Divine Love. It says of Eternal wisdom for example that “She is a breath of the power of God…In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God”. (Wisdom of Solomon 7.25-8.2) And Jesus is recorded as saying “How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” ( Matthew 23, 37; Luke 13, 34) I know that for people who have had a bad experience of their father and a good one of their mother such images can be hugely important. And Mother’s Day can be a time not only for expressing appreciation of our own mother but reflecting on how something of the Divine Love has been channelled through human motherhood.