The Hen's Wing

His images, not ours

This series has been careful with a boundary: the canon leads, and speculation stays outside the veil. So this essay's premise must be stated exactly, because it is stronger than it first sounds: what follows is not a collection of feminine images that poets or readers have applied to God. It is a collection of feminine images God has applied to himself — his own chosen self-descriptions, in his own voice or his prophets' inspired speech, across both hemispheres of scripture. When the Lord of heaven reaches for a picture of what he is like, he reaches — again and again, at the tenderest moments in the record — for a mother. The catalog deserves to be assembled in one place, because assembled, it is no longer a curiosity. It is a register.

The hen

Begin with the image he used at the height of his mortal grief, and again in his first resurrected words to this hemisphere. Over Jerusalem: "how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" (Matthew 23:37). And then at Bountiful, out of the darkness, before his descent — the voice in the void speaking to the survivors — the same image, three times in six verses, in three tenses: "how oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have nourished you" — the past; "how oft would I have gathered you... and ye would not" — the refused conditional; "how oft will I gather you... if ye will repent" (3 Nephi 10:4–6) — the standing future. Past, conditional, future: the whole history and destiny of the covenant people, conjugated through one barnyard image — and mark that the verse adds the feeding: "and have nourished you." Gathering and nourishing: the hen's two verbs, which are the Mother's two verbs, which are — this is the point — the gathering of Israel's two verbs. The greatest project of the last days, the gathering, is described by its Director as a mothering act: chicks collected under wings and fed.

And consider what the hen's wing actually is as a defense, because the choice of bird is the doctrine. A hen cannot fight the hawk or outrun the fire. Her whole defense is coverage: she spreads her wings, calls the brood in, and puts her own body between the danger and the chicks — the shelter is the sacrifice; the old accounts of barnyard fires finding a dead hen with living chicks beneath her are the image at its full price. When the Lord says hen, he is not choosing softness over strength. He is choosing the defense that consists of absorbing the blow yourself — which is, precisely, the atonement's own architecture: the wing over the brood is Gethsemane in feathers. "How oft would I have gathered you" is the Lamb's lament in the Mother's image, and the two are one picture.

The hover

Now trace the wing backward through the record, because it has been over the covenant people from the beginning — and over the waters before there was a people. Creation's first motion: "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" — rachaph, the mother-bird verb, fixed by its one Torah twin: "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young [rachaph], spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings" (Deuteronomy 32:11). The same wings carried Israel out of Egypt, by the Lord's own summary at Sinai: "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself" (Exodus 19:4). And the Passover itself — the founding night — runs on the wing, in a verse Isaiah supplies as the key: "As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over [pasoach — the Passover verb] he will preserve it" (Isaiah 31:5). Pasach is not the Lord skipping the marked houses. It is the Lord hovering over them — standing over the blood-marked door like a bird over the nest, "and will not suffer the destroyer to come in" (Exodus 12:23). The Passover was a wing over a door. The destroying angel passed houses that were covered — which unites the whole register in one mechanism: the brooding at creation, the eagle of the Exodus, the hover at the door, the hen of the lament — one wing, one posture, from the first waters to the last gathering: the covering body interposed, the brood beneath, the danger absorbed above.

The nursing oath, and the mother-comfort

Then the two Isaiah passages that should be read at every bedside where someone fears God has forgotten them. Zion complains: "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me." And the answer stakes God's faithfulness on the strongest bond human experience contains: "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands" (Isaiah 49:15–16). Parse the argument's structure: the nursing mother's love is invoked as the floor — the most unforgetting love the mortal world knows — and God's love is placed above it: even where that love could fail (and the verse's honesty admits it can — "yea, they may forget"), his cannot. The maternal bond is not a metaphor God condescends to; it is the highest available human comparison, cited and then exceeded — with the exceeding proven by engraving: graven upon the palms — and the risen Lord showed this hemisphere the engravings (3 Nephi 11:14–15), one by one, hands extended: the nursing-oath's collateral, felt by a whole multitude.

And the book's last chapter gives the Comforter his own simile, and it is the series' crown: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem" (Isaiah 66:13) — spoken over a Jerusalem herself pictured as a nursing mother, her citizens invited to "suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations" (66:11). When God wanted to tell his people what his comfort would feel like — the Comforter's own job description, the very ministry this series assigned to grace's courier — the simile he chose was a mother with a child against her. Every soul who has ever been held while crying has been given the reference experience for the Holy Ghost's ministry, by the text's own declaration.

The Rock that gave birth

The Torah's great farewell song contains a verse our translations soften, and the Hebrew should be allowed its full force: "Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee" (Deuteronomy 32:18) — where "formed" is chul: to writhe in labor — the verb of birth-pangs. The line reads, in the Hebrew's own image: the God who bore you — who labored you into being — you have forgotten. The Rock, in the same breath, gives birth: the masculine image of permanence and the feminine act of travail, welded in a single verse of Moses' own song — and Moses knew the doctrine from experience, for when the burden of Israel crushed him he complained to God in exactly these terms: "Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child?" (Numbers 11:12) — the complaint's whole logic being: I didn't conceive and bear this people — you did — so the bosom and the nursing are yours. And one name may carry the register in its very syllables — held loosely, as contested etymology honestly marked: El Shaddai, rendered "God Almighty," which some scholars trace to shad — the Hebrew for breast — a proposal the letter itself flirts with in Jacob's blessing, where the Shaddai-blessings are itemized as "blessings of the breasts [shadayim], and of the womb" (Genesis 49:25): whatever the etymology, the patriarch heard breast-and-womb inside the Almighty's own blessing-list. The Nourisher hides in plain sight among the names.

Under the wings

And the wing, finally, is where the covenant itself lives — in the temple, and in the tenderest courtship in scripture. The ark of the covenant sat beneath wings: the cherubim's, "spread out their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings" (Exodus 37:9) — the presence of God dwelling, by his own architectural instruction, under a canopy of wings — which is why the Psalms' worshippers keep using the image for the sanctuary itself: "hide me under the shadow of thy wings" (17:8); "how excellent is thy lovingkindness... therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings" (36:7); "in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast" (57:1 — the Passover posture, personalized). To enter the temple was to come in under the wing.

And the book of Ruth — this series' own eshet chayil — runs the image through a marriage. Boaz blesses the Moabite gleaner: "a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust" (Ruth 2:12) — the convert described as a chick come in under the covenant's wing. And then, at the threshing floor, Ruth turns his own blessing into the boldest and loveliest proposal in scripture: "spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid" (3:9) — and the word rendered "skirt" is kanaph: wing. Spread your wing over me. She asks the man who invoked God's wings to become one of them — and the idiom is God's own for his covenant with Israel: "I spread my skirt [kanaph — my wing] over thee... and entered into a covenant with thee... and thou becamest mine" (Ezekiel 16:8). Marriage, in scripture's own grammar, is wing-spreading: the covenant of the hovering God, replicated at household scale — every faithful marriage a small Passover, a wing over a door, under which the young are gathered and nourished and the destroyer does not come in.

The register, assembled

So assemble what he has said of himself: he broods the waters like a mother bird; he bears his people on eagle's wings to himself; he hovers over blood-marked doors so the destroyer cannot enter; he gathers and nourishes like a hen, and grieves like her when the chicks refuse; he cannot forget us at the strength of a nursing mother's memory, and beyond it, and his hands are engraved to prove it; his comfort feels like a mother's; he labored us into being; his presence dwells under wings, and his covenant is a wing spread over the beloved. None of this is our embroidery. It is his vocabulary — the register he reaches for when he wants to say the truest things — and it means the divine feminine is not a theme his people import into worship. It is a voice already speaking on nearly every page, waiting for the church to hear it the way Ruth heard Boaz: as an invitation to come in under the wings — and then, having trusted there, to turn and spread our own over whoever stands out in the weather. The wing is the series' emblem now: coverage as sacrifice, gathering as mothering, covenant as canopy. Come in under it. Bring the brood.

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How oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if ye will repent and return unto me with full purpose of heart.