She jumped up and down with sheer glee as the plane taxied up to the gate. This grown woman, whom most people would call mentally handicapped, clutched her mother's arm and waited breathlessly as the passengers filed one by one into the terminal.

Finally, she spotted her father. And she ran toward him with a shriek of joy. The look on her face was beautiful beyond words, beautiful enough to make the woman next to me start crying. "It's as if angels are all over her face!" she said.

What touched me the most was the look on the father's face as he put his arms around his daughter. His countenance beamed with unforgettable love—the kind of tender, overflowing, long-suffering love that many people call "mother love." The kind of love that never holds back, never runs out. The kind of constant love that comes straight from God, the Giver of all true love.

The father's look of love reminded me of what Mary Baker Eddy says in Science and Health about maternal feelings. She writes, "A mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy, both of which are immortal."

Mrs. Eddy herself had felt this mother love. And her feelings had stood severe tests. Her only son, George, had been taken from her by relatives when he was just six years old. They felt sure that her fragile health couldn't stand any more of his rambunctiousness.

Mrs. Eddy wasn't reunited with George until he was thirty-five years old—married with two children. She was delighted and brought him to join her in Boston. George never accepted the spiritual vision that made Mrs. Eddy one of the most significant women of her era. But she still showered motherly love on him and his family for the rest of her life. And she forgave him with all her heart even after he was manipulated into joining in a lawsuit against her when she was eighty-six years old—in an unsuccessful effort to get control of her estate.

Yet the mother love Mrs. Eddy felt so deeply has nothing to do with gender. Men can radiate this affection as naturally as can women, just like the man in the airport terminal did. Matter of fact, being a biological parent—male or female—has nothing to do with expressing this kind of love.

Because our true being is the spiritual reflection of God, the all-loving Father and Mother of all creation, each one of us can express the love that comes from our divine Parent, with both fatherly and motherly affection. We can feel the strength and protectiveness associated with masculine love as easily as we can feel the softness and sensitivity associated with feminine love.

And we can all express the full range of attributes connected with the fatherhood and motherhood of God. We can reflect God's power and intelligence just as fully as we can reflect our divine Father-Mother's never-ending tenderness and patience. As Mrs. Eddy explains in Science and Health, "Man and woman as coexistent and eternal with God forever reflect, in glorified quality, the infinite Father-Mother God." A little further down on the same page, she notes that the idea of gender comes not from God but from thinking rooted in mortality. "Masculine, feminine, and neuter genders," she writes, "are human concepts."

Seeing one another in terms of sexuality has the effect of dividing us into opposing camps—camps forever engaged in "the war of the sexes." But seeing others as Jesus saw them—as God's children, free from denominational, ethnic, and sexual labels—unites us. As the author of the book of Galatians writes, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

The understanding of God as Father-Mother, including both male and female qualities, ultimately frees us from the pitfalls of gender-based thinking. If God's being transcends sexual stereotypes, so does ours. If God's attributes aren't rooted in gender, neither are ours—since we're made in His image. And if God isn't limited by gender, why should we be?

In the first years after Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science, she sometimes shrank from assuming leadership in the movement she'd started. Eventually, she realized that her womanhood couldn't disqualify her from leading the Christian Science movement. The time had come, she saw, for women to advance to new levels of service to God and humanity. "This is woman's hour," she wrote in 1891, "with all its sweet amenities and its moral and religious reforms." And she acted on these words, boldly founding "The Mother Church," a unique institution designed to express God's mothering love in a universal way.

As this concept of divinely empowered womanhood was taking shape in Mrs. Eddy's lifework, she read an article written in 1895 by Walt Le Noir Church, editor of The New Century—an article that came so close to stating her own views that she said, "Why, I could sign that article without the change of a word." Delighted, she published it in The Christian Science Journal and in her book Pulpit and Press. Church's piece concludes with a stirring proclamation. " 'The time of times' is near," he wrote, "when 'the New Woman' shall subdue the whole earth with the weapons of peace. Then ... equal partners in all that is worth living for, shall stand the new man with the new woman."

Understanding the full potential of God-endowed womanhood in no way detracts from the potential of God-endowed manhood. And vice versa. As Church's article brings out, the natural corollary to the new woman is the new man. As women are liberated to be all that they can be spiritually, so too are men liberated to do the same.

Women and men who unload limiting gender concepts inevitably renovate their thinking and experience. They "put on the new man," as Paul urges us to do. They discover their wholeness in God's wholeness. And they feel and express as never before God's Mother-love.

Mary Metzner Trammell