Spiritual Mothers

Hi Friends -

Happy Mother’s Day. Here is Unity magazine of 100 years ago, in May 1924. That issue had Spiritual Mothers, a timely piece by Celia Ayers, Silent Unity Worker, frequent writer for Unity magazine and head of the Unity Correspondence School curriculum in 1929. I hope you enjoy it.

Mother’s Day, May 12, 2024

Spiritual Mothers

Celia Ayers

Extracted from Unity Magazine, May 1924, pages 443-445

We have heard and have talked a great deal about the fatherhood of God, but there is much to be said about the motherhood of God. The fatherhood of God projects the idea, but that projection cannot bring forth unless the motherhood of God gathers from substance and molds the child into perfect form. The motherhood of God is love unified with wisdom.

There is, on any plane of consciousness in the world, only one child, the Christ child. By unifying love and wisdom in our consciousness we can bring forth perfection—the Christ child. When this child is brought forth it is the part of the spiritual mother to continue to gather and mold substance for it and to let the child grow in the wisdom and the stature of the Lord.

This may seem a roundabout way of getting to the child; but it is an effective one. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked by a woman when she should begin the training of her child, replied that the training began one hundred years before the child was born. We begin training for spiritual motherhood by unifying , love of Truth with understanding of Truth.

A woman wrote to Silent Unity, asking: “How shall I begin the training of my child? How shall I train it, and what shall I do?” The only way to train a child, and the only way in which any of us can act the part of a spiritual mother, is by doing. We must learn and understand the law of Truth in ourselves before we can give it to others, before we can train others.

Another mother wrote: “My child is not obedient. Will you pray that he manifest obedience to me? He has been staying with his aunt and he is perfectly obedient to her in every way, but he does not seem to be to me.” At least nine tenths of the trouble in this case was with the mother. She had not learned the love of Truth in her own being and therefore she could not train it in the child. It developed that the aunt had been studying Truth. She had learned, no doubt, that obedience is freedom, and had radiated that thought to the child; consequently the child gave her instant obedience.

The only way in which we can train children is by being; we ourselves must be. The reason why we sometimes do not train those who are closely related to us so well as we train others—as in the case of the mother and the aunt—is that we look upon these children as possessions. They are not possessions. The mother gives the child a body, but the soul in the child’s body knows what it desires to express. If we free ourselves from the thought that our children are our possessions and learn to think of them as perfect children of a perfect Father, we shall have done much in training them. Because Silent Unity has unified its love of Truth with its understanding of Truth, it is qualified to take the part of a spiritual mother. Children write to the department for help along almost every line. We all are children and we all have the same problems, whether we are the younger children or those who are more mature. So our first thought in teaching the younger children is to tell them how to think of themselves, just as we teach the older children. We all should look upon ourselves as sons of the Most High and be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect.

With every letter that we transmit, our thought is to direct the children from the downward to the upward vision and, no matter what the problem may be, to change their thinking from the destructive to the constructive side. This may be done in many and various ways. The chief aim is to turn their thoughts upward. We teach them also that the body is the temple of the living God; that this temple should be kept pure and sacred in every way, and that the way to keep the temple pure and sacred is to think right thoughts.

We give to the children the idea that love must be unified with wisdom. Sometimes we think that our way is the only way; we think that every one else should do exactly as we do. I remember the case of a woman and her daughter who had written to Silent Unity. Both the daughter and the mother had comments to make in regard to the father. The mother said that she had subscribed for Unity magazine for her husband and had it sent to his office, and the daughter said that when she was there he threw it into the waste basket. This woman wanted to know what she could do to make her husband see Truth. Here was an example of the love of Truth without an understanding of it. One of the things foremost in our teaching is that every soul should have freedom of expression. If some one cannot see exactly from our viewpoint, then as spiritual mothers it is our privilege to know that the Christ is in that person the same as he is in us, individually. It is our privilege to trust, to have faith that God will bring into expression that which he desires to bring into expression, whether or not the manifestation be along the line that we desire. Every soul has its own experience to go through and it knows what it wants to express.

“Thus saith Jehovah: Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, saith Jehovah; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. . . . thy children shall come again to their own border.” (Jeremiah 31:16) This is a promise of fulfillment of the law. In teaching the children correctly we are sowing words of Truth, and no word of Truth is ever lost. Even though these children should manifest for two or three generations on what we term the material or physical plane, the word of Truth is still in them, lifting them higher. Their thoughts are turned toward constructive things and they come into the perfection that has been theirs from the beginning.