Qualities  of  the  Mother  and  the  Bride

Anne Blaney   January 7, 2001   Sunrise Ranch

I’d like to explore the archetypes of the Mother and the Bride. As a context for that, first I would note that there is no Mother without a Father; and second, a woman must go through a certain progression before she becomes a mother; a woman is not instantly a mother. So let’s consider the images of the bridegroom and the bride. The archetype the bridegroom represents the One that we know of as the LORD of Lords. It could be said that that One came to greet His bride here on the earth. The bride is all mankind: male and female, we are that bride.

In the words of the song just sung, the image of a woman first kissed was beautifully described—of her tremendous wonder at the deeper significance of that experience. Men, too, can identify with this experience: we each know when we have been touched by a love that has transformed us, so that we will never be the same again. The description is of surrender, the rapture that steps past the mind as we are swept up into a blessing of love from the bride or bridegroom.

At first the bride is young. She’s caught by the power of the experience, entranced and taken up by it; but as we know, the bride's experience continues to unfold, and moves through a maturing process which allows her to fully embody her role as bride. Using this image as an analogy of our own awakening as the bride, we are all involved in that progression from knowing we will never be the same as a result of that first awakening, and discovering what that truly means.

Recently we’ve been speaking about the capacities that we’ve taken up here for our time on earth. Often in our experience we find ourselves challenged by our capacities; we bang around, we agonize over them, we analyze them, we medicate them, we do all sorts of things to meet this ongoing challenge of living in the clothing we have inherited. This morning I’d like to shift from the usual perspective and look at our capacities in another way. Here’s something that describes it, from Isaiah 61:10-11.

“I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.

“For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.”

As this passage describes, we have been given beautiful raiment to wear while on earth. We have personally received the raiment of our capacities, the beautiful clothing of mind, body and heart. We are aware—and this is a particularly painful awareness at times—that the clothing is imperfect in the world that we have right now. Nevertheless the invitation is to receive the clothing exactly as it is and recognize the great gift. This is a gift from the ages of human life on earth; we receive our capacities as they are. They are, despite their outer imperfections, the gift given to us by God. In that gift of raiment are the seeds of righteousness, and of great potential, often dormant, but present nevertheless. These seeds will come forth in the right conditions—in the condition of the warmth of love.

Someone said to me that our capacities begin as slaves, then they move on to becoming our servants, and then they become our friends. They move through a progression of coming into union with the One who is here. There is no distinction when there is union. We are moving towards the union of the outer and the inner, the bride and the bridegroom right within ourselves, so that we can express through these incredible friends of body, mind and heart.

I'd like to mention a friend of mine, Edith Brownlee, who lives in 100 Mile House and who just recently suffered a stroke. She is in hospital at 100 Mile House. I am thinking about Edith in connection with the topic of capacities because, if any of you know Edith, she has a very frail body. She's a slip of a thing, and she's in her eighties. She has had a body that has been compromised by a heart condition most of her life. And yet this woman, the greatness who this woman is, has inhabited her frail body, and Edith has lived a life of power and courage greater than many of brawn have. I want to salute Edith this morning and send her a wave of strength of our spirit to join with her spirit, and use her acceptance of her circumstance and the victory of her spirit to illustrate how an outwardly frail capacity might be filled with glory, that temple can be filled to overflowing with the one who dwells in that temple, and true magic can happen as that power moves through those capacities. [Edith Brownlee passed away January 17, 2001]

The Lord also clothed another mother, our Earth, with the raiment of glory. It is very obvious that this Earth is clothed in a magnificent raiment that is the evidence of great love, the love that has been showered on this planet and on the inhabitants of it. No one described it better for me than Uranda. He understood the immensity of the love of the Father for men and women, and the blessings that have been granted to mankind. He compared mankind to the young woman or bride being lovingly wooed by the bridegroom. I think the use of images of this kind is helpful. They catch the mind by surprise, and remove the imagery from a mental into a relational mode. It more closely describes the actual experience of the relationship into which we are invited, one that engages the fullness and magnificent potential of the heart, the delight of the mind, and the joyful ecstasy which is the birthright of the body. All the capacities are invited to enjoy the blessing that we have been given.

In a service called The Great Lover (March 22, 1952—some of you may know it), Uranda describes the wooing that God has lavished on us, absolutely heaped up for us:

“If we would know God's Love we must yield to His wooing, and if we say He has not wooed us tenderly, persistently and everlastingly, then we surely lie and the Truth is not in us; for constantly that wooing Love has been sent forth to all of us and to every man, woman and child on the face of the earth, regardless of race or color or creed. The great Lover is wooing you [this morning]. He has been through the years that have gone.

“And can you say that your response is such as to satisfy His Love? Have you so yielded to His Love that He knows He is in you, that you are one who abides in His Love and lets His Love abide in you? The LORD of Love said: 'Abide in me, and I in you.' Until we abide in His Love and let His Love abide in us, we cannot know oneness with Him, and until there is that oneness we are not ready to do our part toward letting His Kingdom come on earth.

“The Great Lover. No matter how many times He has been rebuffed, no matter how many times His Love has been scorned, no matter how many times human beings have, in self-pride, turned their backs on Him, He loves us still, and that Love so overflowing must finally one day overwhelm us and take us to itself. Finally, if we are to be His in the true and final sense, that Love must draw us into oneness with Himself, that we may abide and go no more out, that we may be so centered in Him that the Light of His Love shall shine through our eyes, the Spirit of His Love shall appear in our lives, in all of our attitudes and all that we do.”

We could hear the song that was sung this morning as a reply to Uranda’s description. In the song, we have a picture of a woman overwhelmed with the immensity of the love that is bestowed on her. The greatness of that love defies her rationality: “How can I be receiving such a love?” she asks. We all received our first kiss when we met the one who represented that One for us. Thankfully the essence of that first encounter is re-experienced many times as our understanding of the invitation it offered expands. As we move through the process of maturation from the young bride into becoming the Mother, much refinement has to happen in our capacities. And there will be times of turmoil, treacherous times even, experienced as we move through the process of allowing these capacities to come into union with us—the one I am. And sometimes in the dark times we experience again that first time we felt touched by the Lord, what it meant, and it brings us back.

As with the first kiss, it's not something we can will; it's not something we can manipulate into happening. There is again a yielding, a surrendering, the experience of being caught up that is, when it's really down to the wire, what gets us through. Another way to describe this is that, in our forgetfulness, we get ourselves into situations where we are in such pain that finally our heart cracks open. One falls on one's knees, figuratively or even actually, and says, “Lord, I feel your love. I know your love, and I will let go of anything that is coming in the way of that love and that union with You.”

In this next passage Uranda speaks about the wall we have constructed between the Lord and us: “And so we let that barrier down, we let the wall cease to separate us from the great Lover, the wall which the human being self-actively thinks must be up there if the individual is to be meaningful. The human being thinks the human personality is in jeopardy, but if we will let that wall crumble, let the door open, the Divine Personality will begin to appear. We need not be concerned about what will pass away when we yield to the great Lover, for we are better off without that which then passes away. Whatever falls away, whatever disappears with the coming of the great Lover, let it go. We do not need it.”

I know this love; I have been loved in the way that was true. In the experience of this love there is a knowing that allows the seeing and shedding of the clothing that is preventing union with the bridegroom, with the Beloved. And the bride is not naive: when she becomes the mother, the bride knows who she is. The bride grows into her true power and knows that with which she will blend. She will not blend with a false bridegroom. That can apply to us too. We know the One that is the true bridegroom.

When we speak of the bride of the bridegroom in this large sense, we understand that the bride is a collective, made up of many. Each of us has our own human personality, which we may think is who we are. But who we truly are can only be known as we know together that we are the bride of the bridegroom. As the divine personality comes through all of us and we let the human personality fall aside as a cloak that’s shed, we can inhabit the temple that we each are, with the capacities that we each have to offer. It is then that our uniqueness has a place. We fill out the richness of the bride. We are all different aspects of the one bride. When we each express the divine personality, we are not all the same. We each have specific divine gifts to bring, and we all need to allow each other to bring that gift into the expression of the one bride.

So this morning I wanted to describe how a woman might describe the love that she has with the Beloved, to explore a different language to get another view. It is possible because of the fact that we, men and women together, are the bride—we are loved by that One, and we are all part of the great love affair that is in motion. As I inferred, this is something that we can describe and discuss in a multitude of ways. But I wanted to bring in the essential part that the heart plays in its desire to know and experience the great love of the Great Lover. That love is much bigger than us, greater than us, and it comes through the heart. We are swept into that love, and we are bountifully blessed by it.

I would like to emphasize something. When the Father has available to Him the richness of the Mother through us all, through the mature bride, then He can pick up material from our rich lives and create forms, life-forms, “children,” from those forms, that are brand new—things that we've never seen before. The mind can't guess what that child is going to look like, or even what sex it is. So there is a divine lovemaking that we are part of and there is an element of surprise to see what it is that is going to come our way.

So thank you for all of us being together this morning, and enjoy the raiment wherever you are. Enjoy the loveliness of the earth today, and remember—remember Him.

© Emissaries of Divine Light