Love and the Divine Feminine

David approaches the theme of love from his Quaker background of silence and being, based on wide reading and deep reflection. In his preface, he reports a series of profound messages from Love, articulating its essential nature of uniting the true and good and enquiring into the very nature of Being in its rhythm of separation and reunion, giving and taking held in a harmonious rhythm. This makes for a lyrical introduction striking a similar note to that of Kahlil Gibran. His message is that we need to take love seriously, to bring it to the fore both privately and publicly – one which I regard as quintessentially timely, and with which we have to engage with the utmost seriousness.

The book draws extensively on the work of Anne Baring and Cynthia Bourgeault among many others. The first chapter summarises the transition from a lunar to a solar myth, from the great mother to the dominator system of patriarchy, from wholeness and integration to conquest and opposition with its battles between light and darkness, good and evil. Knowledge of this historical process is essential to understanding our own times and predicament, and sets the agenda for our common future, as Anne also elaborated in her recent webinar. David explains how the suppression of the feminine Holy Spirit within the Church also played a significant role and this is taken up in the second chapter about Yeshua and Mary Magdalene. It is clear in the Gnostic Gospels that there is a tension between leadership of Peter eventually institutionalised in the Catholic Church and that of Mary embodying not only the essential teachings of love but an inner knowing based on initiation and direct experience. It was this immanent mystical experience of the Divine that became heretical and was marginalised in relation to the theology of the vicarious atonement of original sin and redemption, making the believer entirely dependent.

The model of a loving companionship between man and woman is an completely different exemplar, archetypally between the Logos and Sophia. It is time to reinstate Mary Magdalene fully to represent Divine Wisdom and the Divine Feminine, 'calling Christianity back to the love story at the heart of its theology', integrating eros with agape, and rediscovering interconnection and 'relatingness'. At this point David interweaves his own story about the dangers we face when we cannot hear the voice of the Goddess. This brings him to formulate a Myth of Love, a new Soul Consciousness for our time that overcomes the basic pattern of a sense of separation and enables us to sense once again the sacredness of Nature as Gaia and the Great Mother on which we depend. This is 'new way of being, being with ourselves, being with the Earth and being with the Divine.' (p. 82) He elaborates: Love is God, or rather God is Love, and Love flows to us so that we can love. Love flows from Love to love, and our task is not submission but a profound surrender to Love. We need to give ourselves to Love out of love' – this is the way of the heart, the disclosure of the divine beloved, culminating in the realisation, as Peter Deunov also insisted, that Love is the Law of Being; in this sense, the meaning of human incarnation lies in how we have lived and applied this law as part of the whole.

The next chapter poses and answers a few questions, also in relation to the contemporary challenges we face, seeking not escape and transcendence but rather transformation, 'moving away from an old culture of separation and prejudice towards a new culture of integration and acceptance.'(p. 98) The last part returns to a story or parable about the king who lost his memory. He encounters a wolf who explains to him the nature of the seasons and the elements, which he must know both in his head and in his heart. He is told that he will not regain his memory by thinking and that he must feel the awakening of the earth and that his feet must connect him to the land. Each season with its corresponding direction has its own role to play in the cycle of life. We too need to remember our still centre and inherent wholeness, our interconnectedness with each other and with the Earth represented by this inspiring new narrative – a Myth of Love, Being in Love.