Quotes by Carol Lynn Pearson

“The Lesson: Yes, my fretting, Frowning child, I could cross The room to you More easily. But I’ve already Learned to walk, So I make you Come to me. Let go now— There! You see? Oh, remember This simple lesson, Child, And when In later years You cry out With tight fists And tears— “Oh, help me, God—please.”— Just listen And you’ll hear A silent voice: I would, child, I would. But it’s you, Not I, Who needs to try Godhood.”

“But I know that the despair that these young people ? and older people, too ? face is so huge, and the extreme response is suicide. Their self-destructive, self-loathing is so strong that they just cant live with themselves, and that is just untenable.”

I would not have been able to articulate it at that time, but I had begun a painful journey toward an impossible goal, a journey that lasted a long time: how to love a God who hurts you.

I suggest that the representation of women deserves a much higher consideration in our religious discourse. When words are presented as if they come directly from God, they can have monumental impact on our psyches, our spirits, our hearts, and our relationships. Women are given, in story at least, first place in the lifeboats, but often in more common circumstances we are consigned to the back of the bus.

We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that Ive a Mother there will give way to the experience that Ive a Mother here. We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness.

When Heaven has an earthquake you fall to your knees and feel through the rubble to find the pieces of God. When my eternal, temple-blessed marriage shattered and everything that had been meaningful lay in jumbled shards around me, I had to slowly and carefully pick up every single piece and examine it, turning it over and over, to see if it was worthy to keep and to use in building a new house of meaning. As I gathered the broken pieces of God, I used only my own authority, only my own relationship with the divine, and the good, small voice that speaks inside me, to appraise them. I threw away many, and I kept many, assembling the bright pieces into One Great Thought. I asked only, Do I see Gods fingerprints on this? Does this little piece feel godly? Does it speak of love? That made it easy. I was forever finished with the insane attempt to love a God who hurts me. When I picked up the little pieces of God-ordained polygamy, I smiled because there was no question. I thanked the God of Love, and threw that piece away.