Mothering God, you gave me birth

Mothering God, you gave me birth. Jean Janzen (1933- ). This hymn was inspired by the description of God as Mother in Julian of Norwich*’s The Revelations of Divine Love. It is a hymn to the Trinity (see Trinity hymns*), addressing one Person in each of the three stanzas. The familiar images of God’s power and might are replaced by a gentler vision of a patient ‘nurturing one’, who offers us ‘food of light, grain of life, and grape of love, your very body for my peace’ and who is the origin of our whole existence: ‘source of every breath, my rain, my wind, my sun’. Copyrighted in 1991, it quickly found a place in modern hymnals. It appeared in two books published in 1995, the Chalice...