Absent Mother God of the West (Excerpt)

The Garden of Light highly recommends Absent Mother God of the West: A Kali Lover's Journey into Christianity and Judaism, by Neela Bhattacharya Saxena, for its eye-opening glimpse into the western concept of God. The book is available at Amazon.com. The passage below gives much food for thought:
 
 
Most followers of the biblical tradition do not have in their consciousness any memory of the Mother God; after all, no one I had talked to could even imagine her or his “spirit” God in female form. The biblical God was decidedly male. It is strange that this imageless divinity has such a clear male “image.” In spite of the prime commandment against graven images, images are formed in the mind as soon as we enter language; in addition, almost always genders are implicated even within apparently neutral ideas. I figured that even the atheists and secularists were vigorously denying the existence of a biblical Father God. Since there was no trace of the Mother God in their consciousness, they could not deny Her.
 
My Mother God neither exists nor does not exist; she permeates everything and makes the material world pulsate with her luminosity. She invites me into a sort of “endarkment” and frees me from fears of life and death. Her dance of duality and multiple manifestations lead to the nondual recognition that “Sa Ham–I am She” (Sherma). I ached with longing to name and [...] to carve the “western” Mother. I began searching texts, places, virtual and real, and my inquisitive soul wanted to know how She vanished, and what happened to Her visible presence. However, I could not have dreamt the adventures that awaited me, and the revelations that would unfold.
 

 
Saxena, Neela Bhattacharya, Absent Mother God of the West: A Kali Lover's Journey into Christianity and Judaism – Introduction, p. xiii
Lexington Books, 2016.
 
Sherma, Rita DasGupta, “’Sa Ham–I am She’: Woman as Goddess.” Is the Goddess a Feminist?: The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. Eds. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York, NY UP, 2000.