Mother’s Day Musings | Rabbi Shefa Gold

It’s Mother’s Day. Since I have no biological children, Mother’s Day had always made me feel slightly left out, un-celebrated. A few years back, my husband gave me a card that said, “Thank you for reflecting the Light of the Great Mother for me. Happy Mother’s Day!” It made me cry and I realized that I was indeed connected to that abundant flow of Mother-Love. God, who is the Great Mother had chosen me as a channel and had never wavered in Her steadfast generosity and commitment to nurture the World through me.

I spent about ten years of my life caught up in the painful drama of the biological imperative. I desperately wanted to be pregnant. Every cell in my body reached out to hold the child that I was sure would be mine. Each month when my blood appeared, I was overcome with sadness, failure, and the hunger for motherhood. Eventually, that moment of seeing my blood and feeling the deep release of potential Life, became a moment of holiness and mystery.

I always respected that moment with my full awareness. And one day I decided to honor that moment with a blessing. chose the prayer, borrowed from the traditional Morning Blessings, “Blessed are you God, Sovereign of the Universe, who guides my steps.” The very first time I used this prayer, I noticed that the great force of the biological imperative that had gripped me for so many years, was gone. In its place was a wave of gratefulness for my unique path. Though that path was still a dark mystery and though I didn’t know my way, I opened to the Love and Wisdom of the Great Mother. Instead of sadness I began to feel a joyous curiosity; instead of failure, I began to open to the possibility that I was being given another destiny, another mission. The moment that had been a release of potential Life became a doorway to a new potential.

I began to appreciate the process of menstruation as a powerful time of connection. The downward flow connected me to the Earth. My shifting moods connected me to depths of feeling and passion. Those passions connected me with all of Life everywhere. My own mysterious cycles connected me with the cycles of the moon, and with the ebb and flow of the tides. I gradually learned to manage and then master this powerful energetic flow, this primal force of Connectivity. The sense of Connection that this flow of Life gave me, allowed poetry to pour through me, and expanded my capacity for compassion.

And so… the onset of menopause left me bereft. “How would I stay connected to Earth and Moon, to the tides and to my own depths?” I wondered.

I thought that I would be crippled, disconnected, cut loose from the cosmos, exiled to abstraction. I suddenly had great empathy for what it would be like to be a man, living without these cyclical reminders, without monthly doorways into the Depths of physicality. I was entering a completely unfamiliar wilderness. All my usual strategies for staying connected to the Universe were unavailable to me. All those glorious doors that I had known and danced through each month were shut tight. Even as I grieved and prayed, I heard another voice within me that was celebrating. That voice said, “Something wonderful is happening; a new door is opening. Pay attention. Mark this passage well.”

I called my friend, Bahira, who is a wise and sparkling Priestess. She and Phyllis and Shoshana performed for me a Croning Ceremony on a rocky, windy beach in Mexico. We laughed, cried, told stories, sang, celebrated and planted the seeds of Vision.

That was more than a year ago. It was only today, on Mother’s Day, that I was given a glimpse of what those seeds had grown in me. I looked out at the world; and I looked inward… only to find and to know that I am already connected. All those years of managing and mastering the cycles of the Moon, of falling downward into the earth with the flow of my blood, of encountering my own depths as I wrestled with the powerful forces of passion… all those years were my training.

On this Mother’s Day I am filled with a great joy and a new confidence. I am woven in to the fabric of All Life. The invisible threads of connection have already been carefully and beautifully established through blood, through practice, through love.

I am standing at the threshold. Before me is the job that I have been training for, my whole life. Though I don’t yet know what the job entails, I dance through this new door knowing that I am ready.