Dichotomy vs. The Divine: There is Plenty of Amniotic Fluid for Us All
By Jane Tawel
January 8, 2026
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We have created a false dichotomy-ridden world — my team vs. your team, your politics vs. my politics, my god vs. your God, us vs. them. Our dichotomization of the world we live in extends to our philosophy, theology, worldview, plan for living — whatever you would like to name that which claims you and how you think and how you behave. We give these various worldviews names so we can contrast them, own them, follow them, when facts or life seem to intrude on the mysterious truth of our Meaning. We feel we must have something to fight that gives our achievements the savoring quality that metaphorically, a plain diet of bread and water does not fulfill. Competition becomes the spice of our lives whether we know it or not and creates sound-proofed walls around our religions, our national loyalties, our genders and races and economic statuses, and around our football teams. But here is the thing I have been learning, small little nibble by small nibble, in the works of people like Walter Wink, Paul Tillich, Richard Rohr, and Marcus Borg among others: our dichotomies have almost severed our relationships to other humans and to The Divine. We are hanging by a thread to the Real, which some call God or Spirit or The Divine or the Universal. There are several causes of this, and I am sure I am not at all smart enough or aware enough to know them all, but the number one cause, I think, of our estrangement from God is that we see God as the distant over-seer of a dichotomized belief-system. And what God says over and over in the Hebrew Bible, in the Christian Testaments, in the Quaran, in the Hindu Vedas, and in the glorious, achingly beautiful scriptures of the Natural World is this: God/Spirit/ Divine/ Creator wants loving, compassionate, truthful Relationship with every human being — a relationship as close as our heartbeat, as close as our breath, as close as a lover, as close as Mother’s womb.
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Imagine if we thought of every immigrant, every Palestinian, every person of color, every unhoused person on our streets, every differently gender-identified person, every person from the other team as swimming in God’s Womb with us? Picture it: Here we are floating along together in Mother’s care and there is plenty of amniotic fluid for all of us. Or imagine that we begin to see God as a Father who doesn’t love any of His kids any more than His other children? And this God-Father, that allows us to call Him, “Daddy”, “Da-da”, always sees us as His little innocent baby who really can’t talk all that well because our words are limited, and really can’t think all that well because we can’t see much past our own little toes and we can’t reach much further than Da-Da’s Face as He holds us, and as Daddy places us in Mother’s arms, which are the same as His arms, we can’t really get nourishment from anything other than God-Mom’s ever-flowing- with-Life-giving-nourishment Breast. Is this not what all the teachings of Truth, True-Truth, try to show us with metaphors and parables and myths — all those human creations that struggle toward those Realities beyond the material and beyond our egoic-minds and beyond the struggling wrestlings with the limits of language that give us just an inkling of our own created creativeness in the image of the Creator?
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Let’s be honest: relationships can be tough. I don’t know about you, but I have never had any kind of relationship: friend, spouse, child, parent, relative, co-worker, boss — you name it — that has proceeded in a lovely little straight line forward, like a smooth road with no hills, no bumps, no muddy potholes. And some of these bumps and potholes are frankly of the other person’s making and lots and lots more of them are of my own making. But if you commit long-term to being in a relationship as I have been privileged to do with my hubby, my children, and a few close companions on The Way, then you can see the trials as part of being a human being who is meant, like all in and of this lovely Creation/ Nature, meant to let go in order to hold on to something new, to get lost and seek in order to find, and to, just as the trees who lose their leaves to grow new ones do, to die daily to our old sense of self in order to be reborn to new life. And to find a more intimate loving relationship with Another that without those bumps and trials and vulnerable achings would not have been possible yesterday.
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When I read what now I have come to think the Bible was supposed to provide for us — stories about real people’s struggling relationships with The Divine Real (God) — I realize that much of my life and hence, my belief system, has been about making God into my image. God is so often only close if I think of God as an “It” that can fit in my heart, kinda like Jesus, and be used as needed. But God is also so often been at the same time, a distant figure Who has dichotomized the world into haves and have-nots, thems and us-es, good and bad, my religious team against their religious team, and heaven-bound folks against the hell-bound. God has been for most of my life a powerful patriarch of my own religious views that I need to beg for what I want, that judges my every action and thought, and that I hope will forgive me enough to allow me as I am to live forever as I am, while sending to hell the people whom I deem unworthy. And then I throw Jesus into this mix as someone who was God but died and “paid up” all my debts so I don’t have to worry about my connection with God any more because Jesus had a special relationship with God on my behalf. And when you put it that way in words — it sounds as crazy and insincere and messed-up as it is. Right? Because what The Divine/ Creator / God — whatever you can still with love call Spirit in and of, but also beyond and above this material existence — what Parent-Spirit wants is not our sacrifices, not our offerings, not our achievements — but our loving hearts connecting to THE IAM Loving Heart.
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As a parent of four adult children, I can confirm: when I am filled with true love (compassion, desire, care, obsession, commitment, adoration) of my four children, now adults — when I am full to the brim of That Which Loves and Only Loves — then all I want is to Be with them, in relationship, in relationship, in relationship. Why can not I trust, have faith, that God in the Purity of His Grace, wants this with me, Her child?
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There is this old rock and roll song and one of the lines about the romantic relationship between the two lovers has stuck in my mind all these years. It is partly because I grew up when you had to figure out the lyrics to songs by hearing them over and over on the radio or sometimes on the LP you had bought. Ah, life before computer screen immediacy of information — how sometimes I do miss it! So, for this song that we heard on the radio, the important line was a bit hard to understand, and we had a friend one time riding in the back seat of mom’s car with us, and she was adamant that the catchy line was: “For you are Amanda and I am Steve”. And you know that works for what I am trying to say about God. God wants to be our Amanda or Steve to our Steve or Amanda, depending on which gendered name we want to identify with. The Divine wants to be as close as a lover in the act of loving the beloved — God wants to name us and be named — and this understanding of God is all over the Bible texts and many other spiritual texts as well. But the true lyric of this song, which eventually we preteens in the back of that car finally figured out, reveals something also true about what The Divine wants us to understand about Her which is also metaphoric and anthropomorphic, because of course God is incomprehensible and beyond our human understanding, despite our centuries of boxing Him up and defining Her in controllable, bite-sized bits. We still laugh today about our confusion about what the lyrics actually were to that song, which were: “For you are a magnet, and I am steel”.
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Today I am on a journey by way of, not fighting, not running or even walking, but of Being — being in the kind of relationship with what I call God, that people throughout history have sought with The Divine Mystery/Reality. I am letting go of my striving in small moments as well as I can to find: “resting”, “cradling” and “hiding in”. I am asking The Divine Creator to “create in me a new heart”, to “hide me in the Rock”, to be the “Mother Bear to my cub-ness” to let me be the “chick to Her Mother Hen”, “the son returned to the Loving Father”, and the “little lamb to the Shepherd who lives among us sheep”. These are all metaphoric relationships found in my primary Scripture, the Judeo-Christian Bible, but they are true to all True-Truths throughout our known history of humankind. We just have either forgotten or neglected that Truth and chosen to set up the golden calves of our preferred individualistic idols that have led us, like the lost sheep, astray.
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The next time I feel the old dichotomies of us vs. them rise-up in me, I will try to remember that in Christ there is no us and them. The next time I want to cling to the black and whites that seem to build a foundation for me I will remind myself they are foundations built on sand, and like the sands of Time, they melt away in the Flow of Eternal Truths — beyond space and time and where black and white are forever, only Light. The next time I feel what I call God is distant, needy, controlling — a monarch to be feared and to whom I must beg — I will lightly touch my breath and pray, “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me and breathe into me Your Life”. The next time I feel angry or alone, I will let God know how I feel, just as I would my most intimate lover and I will trust that my relationship will grow through honest vulnerability to He Who Loves me. The next time I despair at all I think or fear all that I feel, I will thank my Mother-God, that She holds me safe in Her Womb, safe in Her arms, and safe in Her Love. In fact, she “holds the whole world — tree, rock, lizard, bee and my enemy — in her loving hands.
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And I will ask Love to let me begin to see the Universal Christ not as a small, locked security-deposit-safe, but as a free-flowing Ocean of compassion for all — not just enough, but so much that it breaks our nets of prejudice, and spills out of our baskets of miserly grasping, and runs to our prodigals with forgiveness and joy and connection — just as our Father runs to embrace and welcome us.
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Relationship. Scary, isn’t it? Yes, one hesitates in any relationship to be vulnerable. But I have found that a life of putting on the armor of constant battle is exhausting, confusing, and leads to a life of negativity. I am trying bit by bit, to unshackle myself from old ideas, and to free myself from the battlements I have let my thoughts create. I ask The Divine, to create in me Her Spirit, and to be unarmored except with the “the breastplate of faith and love, and a helmet of the hope of salvation”. I appeal with no small amount of trepidation but also quite a bit of excitement at what I might discover about the Lover of My Soul and That which longs to live not just with me but within me. And I can call this “Other that is All and is My Truest Self” God — or I can call it Mother, Father, Divine Spirit, Creator — or I can call it Amanda or Steve. True Lovers have lots of names for each other. But no matter what names we use, I want to learn, day by day, hour by hour, breath by breath, to be the longing heart of Steel to the Magnet of Universal Compassionate Truth that draws all the world, all of us, to The Pulsing Heart of the Eternal Lover.
Jane Tawel 