Tammy Letherer 
When my son was barely two weeks old, I went with my husband to see the movie The Matrix. It was our first outing as parents and we brought the baby along, figuring he would sleep the whole time in the Baby Bjorn.
Everything was fine until a scene began that showed a large room full of babies floating in pods that were attached to a tangle of black tubing. I found the image disturbing and became very upset. I left the theater, paced the lobby for a while, and ended up watching the rest of the movie standing in the back doing that instinctive sway that’s triggered when holding a baby.
That was my first experience with the idea of a matrix, as something cold, impersonal, sterile, and scary. In the 17 years since that day, I’ve come to think about a different kind of matrix. In one of my favorite books, The Divine Matrix, author Gregg Braden, a former aerospace computer systems designer, describes the universe as a quantum incubator for reality, in which everything is possible.
“The Divine Matrix is the container that holds the universe, the bridge between all things, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.”
That’s far from impersonal and sterile. It’s ripe with possibilities and uniquely mine. I prefer this idea—that my life is a container for conscious creation—to the dystopian science fiction version that frightened me all those years ago.
Today my son, at 6 feet tall, may be too big for me to hold, but I still try to sway him toward this view of the world. When he texted me recently about achieving an impressive accomplishment, I responded:
Now that your gift has been so clearly identified, you can simply say ‘God show me how to use this to fulfill my purpose’ and your way will be revealed. There’s nothing to figure out.
Him: Interesting.
Me: Yes! The Divine Matrix is fascinating and miraculous!
What I want my son to know is that the Divine Matrix connects each of us not only to each other, but to our purpose. I’d like him to be able to relax into watching his life play out, without fear or worry or dread, in a way I wasn’t able to relax watching that movie when he was a baby.
Does he roll his eyes at me when I talk like this? Probably. After all, I’m the same mom who takes him to what he calls “witch doctors” and has him take mysterious tinctures prescribed through muscle testing.
That’s OK. I’ve already been pegged as a little whoo-whoo. Once, when my son ran into a friend’s mother, she said, “How’s your mom? Is she still into, you know, all that happy stuff?”
Hmm. Well, I guess. Because a matrix is simply something that constitutes the place or point from which something else originates, takes form, or develops. It’s a glorified Petri dish. So I try to populate it with, you know, happy stuff.
Don’t you?
