Answer

How Should I Think About Heavenly Mother?

You have heard that we have a Mother in Heaven, and then noticed how little is said about Her. Perhaps you want to know more and cannot find it, or you have been told the silence means something is being hidden. The gap between how significant the doctrine is and how rarely it comes up is genuinely strange.

Start with what is actually revealed, because it is both more and less than people assume. That you have heavenly parents is doctrine, published over fifteen apostolic names. Nearly everything else, including Her name and any instruction to pray to Her, is not revealed. Both halves of that are worth holding at full strength.

Eternal Truths

The doctrine is stated plainly and it is remarkable. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each person is “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents.” Plural. That is not a hint or an inference. Latter-day Saints are close to alone among Christians in teaching it, and it is one of the most beautiful things the Restoration recovered.

The Church’s own summary is short on purpose. The Gospel Topics essay on Mother in Heaven gathers what prophets have actually said and is candid that little has been revealed. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke of the reverence owed here in “Behold Thy Mother”.

We direct our worship to the Father because the Savior taught us to. Through the Sermon on the Mount He speaks again and again of “your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16, 45, 48). Following that pattern is obedience to Christ rather than a judgement about our Mother.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Two different conversations travel under one heading. One is doctrinal: what has God revealed about our Mother? The other is about the standing and voice of women in the Church, which is real and important and not the same question. When they merge, people argue past each other, one discussing theology and the other discussing whether she is being heard. If men in your life have hurt you, the two are connected humanly and reasonably, and that deserves someone who will listen rather than a doctrinal correction.

Questions to Think About

• Which of my questions here are doctrinal, and which are about being heard?
• Does what I read on this subject leave me closer to Jesus Christ or further away?
• What do my covenants already tell me about what I may become?

What You Can Do

Read the Gospel Topics essay this week in full. It is short, and most of what people argue about is either settled or set aside in it. Then apply one test to anything else you read on the subject, including from people who agree with you: does this draw me toward the Savior, or has it quietly changed jobs and become a grievance? The essay behind this Answer asks that question of the wider conversation.

Jesus Christ can teach you to hold a silence without filling it, and He can show you that being a daughter or son of heavenly parents is not a small thing to be going on with.