An Interview with Mary Murray Shelton

(Excerpt)

During her service as a minister for the Church of Religious Science, Reverend Mary Murray Shelton became aware of a Divine Feminine force emerging in her own life and in the lives of her congregants. Her book, Guidance From the Darkness, The Transforming Power of the Divine Feminine in Difficult Times, artfully and articulately shares her story.

Science of Mind : How did you begin to distinguish a difference between a Divine Feminine and a Divine Masculine?

Shelton: I first became familiar with the concept when an assistant minister of the Church of Religious Science in Seattle started doing a Saturday series on the Divine Feminine. At that time, the concept was pretty unfamiliar to me. I had grown up in a traditional religion where God was always spoken about with a masculine pronoun and, although I realized that God was not a male, it still felt very odd to consider the feminine aspect of God. The next step in my recognition of the Divine as being  a balanced  unity of masculine and feminine principles came when a Shamanic healer introduced me to the resource material on the Divine Feminine. Reading it piqued my interest in exploring he Divine Feminine, which I began to do in 1981.

What are some of your first recognizable experience of a Divine Feminine Presence or energy?

My first experience with the Divine Feminine happened when I was a senior in High School. I was trying to make a decision about where to go to college and I had two places in mind. My senior class went on a retreat at the ocean and I was walking on the beach by myself with this question in mind. I can't really pinpoint the moment it happened, but by the time I turned around to go back to the retreat center, I knew which school I was going to attend. It was not a decision I came to by weighing things or by making a logical decision. It was as if, all of a sudden, there was just a "knowingness" where I wanted to go. I never questioned it, I never doubted it, and I never regretted it. Looking back, I would say that the Divine Feminine was directing me to the appropriate place for me.

Another experience of the Divine Feminine relates to my ministry in Northern California. While teaching classes and giving my Sunday morning talk to the congregation, I began to get ideas of things to say, such as examples and stories, that I had not planned to say. These ideas were relevant to my topic, but I hadn't thought of them previously. They would just pop into my head.

Initially, it bothered me when this happened, so I would just push the ideas aside and go on with what I had planned to say. However, over time this became more difficult to do because the images would be really insistent. So, as I became more experienced, I began to include these ideas into my talks and they enriched the sermon. They actually helped me to make my point better. I started to trust them.

As you incorporated this activity of the Divine Feminine into you work, did you notice a balance being effected between the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine?

Yes. The Divine Masculine was always there because it's the metaphor that our culture emphasizes, in terms of God as "He" and human beings in general often being referred to using the masculine pronoun. But over the years, because of experiences like the ones I just described and also as a result of exploring other faith traditions, I began  to question the use of "He" as a generic for God. I began to distinguish the difference between the masculine aspects and the feminine aspects of Divinty. The feminine aspects are nurturing, spontaneous, holistic, and non-linear. They are simultaneous rather than sequential, process-oriented rather than result-oriented. Culturally, and almost globally, the way that we view God is as God the Father, the lawgiver, the dispenser of reward and punishment, and so on. Seen in this way, God appears to be very linear, very goal-oriented, having the autocratic powers of a ruler who can decide things and enforce them. All of those things are valuable, but when they are divorced from the feminine side they are limited.

So in the early nineties when I started doing my Womanspirit Retreats, I began to go more deeply into the aspects of the Divine Feminine. I recognized that not only the Infinite, not only God, but also human beings—meaning of course both men and women—have these qualities. In our culture we have a tendency to be focus on the left-brain, rational side of things, so we need to be more in balance with the masculine and feminine.

What is the result on the culture of so great an emphasis on the masculine, linear, rational qualities?

We experience a lot of stress because we're in such a hurry to accomplish our results faster and faster in order to move on to the next thing. We don't allow ourselves enough playtie and doing-nothing time because we believe to do so would interfere with  our accomplishing more. We want every moment of our time to be productive. So we short-circuit ourselves by putting so much stress on the body/mind system that it doesn't have time to refill and replenish. It doesn't get a chance to make those internal connections that emerge out of the non-linear-mode which actually make us more brilliant and productive and effective. We get more frenetic. We lose touch with  feelings and the balance between awareness of fact and awareness of process. Seeing things as discrete and separate, we lose an awareness of connections.

To play the devil's advocate, doesn't life get messy when we start leaning into the feminine and the non-linear? Won't we lose control if we do that?

I don't think we'd ever lose control completely because we're not going to operate totally in just the feminine mode. There's always going to be a strong masculine aspect to us as well. When we start to balance the two modes, for a while our life will look messier because we will be stepping into the realm of the unfamiliar. But in the long run, we will become more effective than we are without balance. If we can find a way to incorporate more of the Divine Feminine into our own everyday life, we will become more productive and healthier. I believe the transition to this balance is hapening already, because we human beings intuitively feel the need for it. We are already in the mess and it's going to get messier before it gets smoother!

In Guidance From the Darkness you talk about certain qualities that are related to the Divine Feminine. Which of these qualities is the hardest for you to practice?

I think the hardest one for me is surrender. Letting go is something that I come back to again and again and each time, it's a challenge for me. Mostly that's letting go of my habitual emotional reaction to things when it's not productive, healthy, or useful to respond in that particular way. I have to be able to honor the emotional reaction that I have to something, but not continue rehearsing it. There's a strong part of me that wants to hold on. I find myself coming into contact with the need to surrender on a daily basis.

Continued in the April, 2001 issue of Science of Mind.