Customer Reviews

The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother

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At fifteen, when I found this book, it changed my life. I did not know then about women's spirituality movements. I have since become aquainted, thrilled, disenchanted, and reaquainted. Through it all this book has been a touchstone. Craighead tells stories and images of God which are too idiosyncratic to have been manufactured to cater to a faddish movement. They are images of a journey, honestley, skillfully, and beautifully wrought, and I would reccomend them to any seeker of God. Craighead wrote that her belief in God the Mother flows like a river beneath her (other? churched) Christianity, nourishing it. This is a powerful image of how one's personal experience of God, and the communal, ritualized expression of that experience need not be reconciled, but can both be cherished. Buy this book. Buy this book for your thirteen year old, who is searching. Buy it at your local independant bookstore. Ciao.

This book reproduces 41 paintings in full color, full page with white borders. It also includes a black and white photo of the artist on the back cover. The text is by the artist and provides insight in into the paintings' meanings, both personal and on a universal level. In the form of prose-poems, the ideas expressed are full of touching memories especially those of the artist's grandmother. The paintings are full of female imagery, multi-cultural Goddess symbols, and also Roman Catholic imagery. It is a wonderful book for lovers of the Goddess (or God the Mother) but it is not for the Christian weary. The paper cover is a little flimsy for a book of this size, but the wealth of color reproductions make this book a good value.

I found the paintings to be very inspirational. They are very earthy and feminine. I also liked the accompanying poems.

Do you find such concepts as religion, faith and God to be something left over from a superstitious, unsophisticated era with no practical application for a modern, contemporary thinker? Have you lost personal contact with that interior sense of the sacred, that naïve, overpowering sense of wonder that informs you that things are more than what they appear to be?

If you long to reconnect with that divinity within let me invite you on a journey into the heart, art and autobiographical musings of Meinrad Craighead in her amazingly intimate and profoundly spiritual book, `The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother'. The first thing you will immediately conclude is that the work and life of Meinrad Craighead has been anything but mundane. Reminiscent of the famous Carl Gustav Jung, she has lived a life governed by dreams, intuitions and seemingly sacred experiences that interpreted through the eyes of an artist where endowed with messages of unquestionable spiritual portent. As you would expect from a painter, images carry immense meaning for her and amongst the most powerful influences for her has been the Black Madonna (Meinrad was a Benedictine Nun, living in a monastery for 14 years) and the American Southwest landscape (she's part Native American on her Father's side).

This book is unlike anything I've ever read. Her colorful paintings (there are 39) are powerful, archetypal and hypnotic. Her brief, intimate, autobiographical excerpts accompanying each one is touching, emotional and mesmerizing. If I were to try and place this 79 page paperback volume into a particular genre I'd probably categorize it as devotional material, something I could see myself frequently pulling out of my bedside cabinet for a moment of quite meditation and reflection.

Are you, just for a moment, able to set aside all your pre-conceived notions about how others have taught you to approach the realm of spirit and enter into Ms. Craighead's interior, highly unorthodox, visionary universe where God is Mother and the true meaning of church comes from within? Be forewarned, it will change you.

This book is one to offer to organized religion and spirituality. Craighead devoted 14 years of her life as a Catholic nun and yet had unconventional dreams and visions of the feminine face of God. Her work is inspiring, educational and visionary. A must for any art lover, goddess worshiper or individual who is trying to think outside the box.