God as the father and the Virgin Mary as the Holy Mother are really the perfect metaphors. The father signifies the eternal, the void, and the mother represents the material, tangible world, and all that is in it (maternal : material; mother : matter_. God is not the whole story just as the Great Goddess could not be either for they are both necessary and require each other. The father impregnates the mother, and thus, we have life. One is form, the other void, neither of which has any meaning without the contrast of its opposite. The image of baby Jesus sitting on the lap of Madonna is not one implying the precedence of the feminine, as I had initially interpreted it (in contrast to the view typical of Christianity), but is instead the perfect image of this balance. Jesus sits, on the "throne" of the Virgin Mother, while God the Father, though not pictured, is immanent. Jesus, symbolizing all of humanity and life, is the fruit of this union, the son of God as we are all the children of God, the offspring of the eternal Father and the Holy Mother. Souls inexplicably born from nothing into a world of something, a true virgin birth!
