In her book, The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother, author Kathryn Knight Sonntag wrote, “Further exploration of the Mother is part of the unfolding Restoration in our hearts.” Today many women are feeling led to explore the divine feminine more deeply, or for the first time, in an effort to erase the separation that has existed between Latter-day Saints and our Heavenly Mother. In Episode 113, Kathryn shares insights and ideas gleaned from her personal research and experiences. It’s a conversation about creating wholeness and healing the mother wound in our theology.
Notes & Quotes:
ALSSI Episode 30, The Mother Tree, with Kathryn Knight Sonntag
The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother, by Kathryn Knight Sonntag
The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, by Beth Allison Barr
“I believe asking questions and exploring possibilities are indispensable ways to show love and reverence for revealed truth.” — Kathryn Knight Sonntag
“If you, as an individual woman, are not ready to acknowledge the wounds you have because of the identity that the outside world has given you vs what you carry truly, innately inside yourself, you’re not going to be in a place where you can speak out, or where you can support other women who are speaking out.” — KNS, ALSSI Ep. 30
“My experiences and study led me to see that we have a Mother wound in our theology. This theological phenomenon is a collective wound that has affected our ability to perceive the need for the Mother as individuals……Just as unexamined pain–be it feelings of unworthiness, abandonment, or anger–can keep us from a clear perspective on what is happening inside and outside of us, our unacknowledged wound caused by separation from our spiritual Mother likewise obscures our vision of ourselves and the divine.” — KNS, pg.13
“Keeping women silent, keeping women separate, keeping women degraded is a very real tool of the adversary to continue to rule on this earth. There’s no happenstance to the way things are and the way women have been siloed from having a larger voice. [… ] Seeing women pedestalized and silenced is THE sign, in my mind, that Babylon reigns.” — KNS, ALSSI Ep. 30
“Instead of being a point of pride for Christians, shouldn’t the historical continuity of a practice that has caused women to fare much worse than men for thousands of years cause concern? Shouldn’t Christians, who are called to be different from the world, treat women differently? What if patriarchy isn’t divinely ordained but is a result of human sin?” — Beth Allison Barr
Curtis Howe
Admittedly, this podcast challenged me at first but as i took time to understand the perspectives given i began to see some truth in what was talked about. I’m now going down the rabbit hole of understanding the tree archetype of the feminine more.
I did find a great research study that was done on what has been said by church leaders over the years about Heavenly Mother and thought you would like to read it too- https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4308&context=byusq
Shannon Starks
It comforts me a great deal to hear this discussion. I discovered Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade less than three years ago and began to understand where so many of our traditions, some thousands of years old, have come from. As I think you’ve said before, the only way forward is through, so we need to explore this deeply.