I Don’t Want to Be Like Heavenly Mother.

The Veiled Virgin by Giovanni Strazza

If heaven is not egalitarian, I’m not interested. 

A few years ago, this statement dropped fully formed into my consciousness and looped over and over in my mind. While doing the dishes. While dropping the kids off at school.

If heaven is not egalitarian, I’m not interested.

While sweating at the gym. While trying to read the scriptures.

If heaven is not egalitarian, I’m not interested.

For the first time, my personal scale of “the good outweighs the bad for me” in the church had leveled, and with each grain of sand that further upset the former balance, my conviction that I needed to step back from the church and my fear of doing so increased in lockstep.

I was paralyzed by the enormous stakes of my decision. What if I was wrong and the church was right? What if I died and discovered that I had forfeited my chance at the celestial kingdom, that my choice to not endure to the end had cost me my family? 

So I did what I’ve always done when faced with a seemingly impossible decision: I studied it out in my mind. I spent a lot of time thinking about the temple ceremonies and promises, about my marriage and family relationships, about God, about heaven. Flaming up from the glowing embers of my new mantra was a warm sense of calm that came from a different kind of knowing than what was prized in the church: that of knowing myself. And I knew, as I studied through the little that has been revealed about the celestial kingdom, that I could not be happy there. 

In the end, Heavenly Mother was the thread I pulled on that unmade the tapestry of my faith. She, or rather the absence of Her, gave me the permission I needed to walk away from the church without fear of afterlife regret. While the idea of worshiping or becoming like a goddess is beautiful and meaningful to me in theory, I have no desire to be like Heavenly Mother in practice. I could never be okay, let alone have eternal joy, if my children weren’t allowed to talk to me, if my husband shouldered all the responsibility and received all the glory, if I wasn’t involved in any visible or real way with my children’s mortality or the creation or the plan of salvation, if I bolstered patriarchy by granting power to my sons and sidelining my daughters. As much as I respect that the doctrine of Heavenly Mother gives many people comfort, the little I know about Her, knowledge mostly gleaned by inference from the goddess-shaped void in scripture, in the temple, and in doctrine, is enough to give me confirmation that I do not want to become like Her, that the celestial kingdom is not the place for me. 

Church policy and doctrine allows women the most latitude and authority in the walls of their homes and in their relationships with their children. While husbands still technically preside, the Church generally encourages a mostly partnership model where families are led by a mom and a dad together, jointly parenting and making decisions, even if some of the roles are gendered. The human family, however, is led by the godhead, a trio of males who function as a bishopric or stake presidency, not as two partnered parents. 

Imagine if the church encouraged earthly families to function in the way they claim our heavenly family does: children would be taken from and cautioned against speaking to their mothers, who would be present but invisible, perhaps doing unknown and unacknowledged work in the background. Fathers would partner with other men to raise the children and would get squirmy if their children started talking about their mother “too much.” This parallel may feel absurd, but consider what kind of father allows his sons to keep his children from their mother? What good mother is so off limits that her children can’t even talk about her, let alone to her? 

Heavenly Mother does not appear in the temple, our holiest place where we learn about our potential as God’s children, except perhaps She is hinted at in the promise that women will be queens and priestesses to their husbands in the new and everlasting covenant while men are promised to become kings and priests directly to God. It’s obvious that “God” in this instance equals God the Father, and this realization made me mourn the lack of matrilineal bond between Mother God and Her daughters. If women were promised to be queens and priestesses to God the Mother, not to their husbands or even to Father God, would the symmetry help to bring balance? As it stands, Heavenly Mother is our one example of what it means to be a queen and priestess to one’s husband in the new and everlasting covenant. If the fulfillment of that highest promise means a woman will lead a protected life in her husband’s shadow during the mortal probation of her children, does that sound like an eternal reward most women would actually want?

If aspiring to become like Heavenly Father were an option for me, perhaps the Mormon model of exaltation would be more appealing. But to be a Mother in Heaven feels like an even worse version of what it is like to be a woman on earth. At least here, parity is a possibility, despite the church’s and world’s proliferation of patriarchy. At least here, I can parent my children and have a true partnership with my husband. At least here, I can be actively involved in building up the kingdom of God, even if my service in the church will always be auxiliary. But in the celestial kingdom, as far as our doctrine and most holy rites are concerned, women will have none of that.

I should be clear that I no longer believe in the Mormon concept of heaven. But if it turns out I’m wrong, the terrestrial kingdom sounds like a much better fit for me than Heavenly Motherhood. According to the church’s gospel topics essays: 

“Those who inherit terrestrial glory will “receive of the presence of the Son, but not of the fulness of the Father.”…Generally speaking, individuals in the terrestrial kingdom will be honorable people “who were blinded by the craftiness of men” (D&C 76:75). This group will include members of the Church who were “not valiant in the testimony of Jesus” (D&C 76:79).” 

In other words, it’s a place where good people who had issues with Mormonism can live without the strictures of gender roles or patriarchy and worship Jesus. It’s also a place where Heavenly Father apparently can’t (won’t?) go. And that’s just fine with me.

If heaven is not egalitarian, I’m not interested.

This post is part of a series, Contemplating Heavenly Mother. Find more from this series here.