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Week 2 of UUI's course "Our Mother God: Knowing Her, Loving Her, Sharing Her."
Michelle Klimesh's interest in Our Mother God began over five years ago and now it influences her everyday life. She owned and operated a gymnastics school, serving mostly girls, for several years which has been an important way in which she has shown the love of Our Mother God:
"I've taken The Urantia Book and tried to teach kids who they are. I told my daughter, it's like my gymnastics school is a fierce women factory. We teach them to be strong, we teach them to be brave, kind, and disciplined. We teach them how to get up when they fall, to set long-term goals, and to be resourceful. These strong, fierce, brave, kind, and disciplined women can persevere and keep going in the face of adversity, And they will take these attributes with them out into the world, wherever they go."
Excerpts from the Interview
What led you to develop this course for UUI?
Women in the Urantia movement have been talking for quite a while about God as our Mother in The Urantia Book. We find ourselves in this position where we're female Sons of God, we’ve got the Mother Son, and God the Supreme is like our mother as God in Paradise is our father—whow are we supposed to make sense of thatt? The revelators are telling us something. We need to integrate the Mother Spirit into our minds—the feminine aspects of deity seem to be what our world needs the most of right now. We recognized that we need to balance our understanding of the Fatherhood of God with the female side of deity and so we brought together a team of men and women to present this topic to Urantia Book readers.
Michelle, you focused some of your research on the loss of the Mother God concept that prevailed in some ancient cultures. How was this idea lost to Western cultures?
In sort of a flippant way, I say that the Greeks killed the Mother Spirit and the Romans built her coffin. The Bronze Age (3300 BC – 1200 BC) was a watershed period because humans were able to engineer metals sturdy enough that they would last more than a few months before they had to be reforged. Long distance travel was easier and the Greeks and Romans embarked on military campaigns to conquer other lands. Conquering and war was an overwhelmingly male pursuit.
The Romans had such good recordkeeping that we can see the evolution of law, including the changing ways in which women and marriage were treated. There’s a theory that Greeks and Romans controlled women by suppressing the idea of the mother God that was still so prevalent for those 40,000 years between the Adam and Eve period and the Jesus period. For example, they remade the God Athena into the goddess of wisdom and war and also cut out the woman’s role in creation myths. Athena, they claimed, sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus—there was no woman involved in her creation.
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