The psalmist today, in praising God, exults: “How priceless is your love, O God!” and points out our dependence on God, noting: “your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.” Reflecting on the shadow of God’s wings brings to mind Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem during the final week of his earthly life according to Matthew (23:37—Luke 13:34 places it on his way to his fateful confrontation in Jerusalem): “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathering her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” I love that feminine image of God—so often we seem to limit God to Father, ignoring the nurturing, mothering aspects of God’s love. Some years ago, I came across a book entitled Is It OK to Call God Mother? written by a Baptist minister whose name escapes me right now. I no longer have my copy, having donated it to Trinity’s library at some point, but in it he goes through the Bible pointing out countless examples of feminine images of God that tradition has tended to overlook. Starting with Genesis 2:21: “and the Lord God made garments for the man and his wife and clothed them,” he notes that in that day making garments and clothing folks was women’s work, the job of the mother—not the father. He makes his way through the scriptures underscoring all the places where God’s intimate, feminine, nurturing, feeding work is mentioned. It was a veritable eye-opener for me at the time, even though I was well aware of mystics in their experience of the Divine through the ages relating to God as “Mother”. For me, one of the most powerful feminine images for the Divine comes from Paul where, in his address to the Athenians in front of the Areopagus, he says God is “not far from each of us. For ‘in him we live and move and have our being.’ “(Acts 17:28) That speaks to me of our being in the womb of God. Paul develops that womb image further in his letter to the Romans (8:22) where he points out that “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” waiting for new birth—an image of the entire cosmos enfolded in the womb of God. That sounds very much like the picture that the physicist David Bohm paints of what he calls the “Implicate Order” enfolding all creation. We know, of course, that the Holy One is not anthropomorphic, but when we take time to sit with God’s word, we never know where our reflections may take us, what insights may be revealed to us.