God: The Holy Mother.

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I know many read that statement and say, hey he got it wrong. I am not so sure I did. It is much more than a gender issue. Several months ago I was in South India in a town called Madurai. On a rainy, monsoon morning I went for an early morning walk and stepped into a temple to get out of the rain. In the dim, incensed filled interior priests were performing the thousand year old, early morning ritual in worship of Devi, the goddess of mother earth. It started me thinking, always a dangerous thing. Did we lose something when we stopped worshiping the earth goddess? Did we lose our mother of did we just turn our back on her? Most likely the human species earliest religion was animist, the worship of the spirits of nature. Some of the earliest religious figures that we have are images of the mother goddess, the Earth Mother. These do not seem to be unique to any one place. They are found all over the world. People in those far-off times lived much closer to the earth than we do today. They must have viewed nature with both awe and respect. Their representations of the earth mother depict her as bountiful and nurturing. Are we now well enough insulated from nature that we can to take her for granted? No longer do we worship Mother Earth. Now we strip her of her riches. When we stopped looking at a tree and seeing the spirit that dwells within it we started to look at it as so many board feet of lumber or a number of rolls of toilet paper. There are tribes in the Amazon jungle today that still revere a tree so much that the decision to cut one down can only be decided by the tribe as a whole. Before the tree can be cut, after the decision is made to do so, a lengthy religious ritual must be performed to say that they are sorry to the spirit of the tree and seek its forgiveness and blessing. After the tree is cut they plant hundreds of saplings to replace it. We, on the other hand, think nothing of clear cutting a forest and leaving acres of stumps so that we can make paper bags to carry our groceries home. Our new, more advanced and sophisticated religions, separate us from the mother of us all. Perhaps it is time to look back to our beginnings as a species and embrace the nurturing spirits of the earth. We have grown to view monotheism as a virtue and polytheism as a vice. We would be better off returning to the polytheism that taught us respect of the spirits that fill the world around us. It is time again to worship the Mother Goddess and the earth she provides to nurture us, before she, in her anger at our disrespect, throws us out of our only home. If she does we have no place to go.