I once believed, like many of my big hearted friends, that I could cut all the male/female references out of God and It would resonate for me. I even thought the neutral would work better for me because He would be free of gender. A great Force. An It that was bigger than gender. Bigger than the labels we give to what our limited minds understand.
The Force defies images, but if I try, I come up with objects like mountains, or the sun, the moon or even flowers.
Then one day I read two books by Sue Monk Kidd that shattered those neutral thoughts.
In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Kidd talked of needing deep in our souls to connect with the Divine. She talked of how very much we needed to feel a connection as a reflection of ourselves. She even talked of how she felt so steeped in male terms for God that she once slipped and thought of herself as Father Sue while visiting a monastic retreat.
Since reading that book, I’ve awakened to how very repressed the Divine feminine is in our consciousness. I wonder, as Kidd did in another book The Secret Life of Bees, how the world and its balance of power would shift and how it might change if we thought of the Great One as a woman of color. Could we subjugate people if we clearly understood that they reflected the face of the Divine? Could we begin to think of these images as representing the Divine?
I still respect and admire others’ need to take gender out all together. The Divine is not actually a woman. The Divine is not a man. The Divine is greater and more marvelous than the gender that we assign or that is assigned to us. I once believed God lived on the mountain and, living in the shadow of a volcano, it’s easy to feel the power of inanimate things.
But I am a woman, not a mountain. And I’ve discovered that to reach my best and most wonderful potential, I need to relate to a Goddess, not a God or a great unknowable Force, as fair-minded as that would seem. I don’t even object to terms like Father and Lord when we gather to worship. I feel the deep need of others to name God and relate in that way.
I only wish those male terms were balanced with the words Mother and Lady so both genders in the congregation could relate and see ourselves as reflections of the Divine. Maybe we could even sprinkle in a few neutral terms now and then to remind ourselves of impermanent nature of what we are now.
The idea of Goddess is shocking to me still — much scarier than a Force whose existence people more willingly agree to acknowledge. I’m scared to post this. My friend Shirley challenged me, and I have had a good long pause in posting while I considered what to do.
I am hoping maybe this means I’m ‘starting to get it right’ — that I might be reaching that moment Neil Gaiman described:
“The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself…That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.”
Whether I am getting it right or not, the She Who Is keeps insisting I write this in ways that won’t let me go. So I will punch the keys, hunt for public domain pictures, and hit publish. The world will keep spinning, and then I can move on to the next words tucked inside me.
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Oh, wow, how I relate to your piece on a genderless god. I love to think of God as Mother. Once our pastor slipped in “Mother God” in her Sunday morning worship prayer and the church didn’t fall apart as I was afraid it might. But I still feel more comfortable intellectually with God as Spirit.
I also wonder sometimes if the church might fall apart, Martha, when we push boundaries. I’m happy to see that so far it hasn’t. 🙂
And I easily relate to your intellectual comfort with God as Spirit. I suppose in the end there will be no pleasing everyone because, it seems, it’s hard to even figure out what will work for our own selves. For now, it feels enough to sit with the questions.
Thanks for writing. I have missed seeing you.
Interesting post. Thanks Karrie.
I think this is a dillema that many of us feel. Ken Wilber addresses the issue by talking about the need to relate to Spirit in three (3) different ways; first, second, and third person. That is, there is an insight that many of us have when we realize that we are a part of the universe and therefore are at some level Spirt (first person). When we pray, meditatate, or contemplate however it’s more natural for us to do that in relation to another person with Spirit as the other person (I think this can be useful both with Spirit as the same gender and as the opposite gender. Maybe even as an indeterminite gendered person) (second person). When we’re in awe of nature or have that grand feeling of connectedness then I think we’re relating to Spirit as a mysterious other (third person). All three (3) ways of relating to Spirit are useful. Each has insights. Each is appropriate in different contexts.
I agree with Wilbur and you. As I turn the ideas over, it seems that what bothers me most is the single picture for a something that no single picture quite fits. Thanks for the insight – with familiar grammatical terms, no less! 🙂
Karrie, your thinking is well done, and I appreciate your efforts to empathize with people’s needs to identify with the divine. Surprisingly, my seminary studies did not have much in the way of feminist theology; in the mid-west they only went as far as requiring the use of inclusive language. The simplistic explanation was so that people abused by men could relate to God. I always wondered about the people abused by women.
Certainly we need to be much more balanced in our use of gender pronouns, especially as long as we want to attribute certain characteristics to specific genders. If we want to claim that nurturing is a feminine characteristic then we must be willing to grant God femininity, for God is the greatest nurturer and the source of any nurturing we might ourselves do.
I think you can safely push the envelope, especially in your current congregation. There are many who would be delighted and thankful that someone dared, Who knows, you could become the permission-giver for some to draw nearer to God than they ever believed possible.
Grace and peace to you, Shirley
Thank you, Shirley. For both the challenge to write this and the permission I somehow need to push the envelope.
And thank you for taking the time to write this, too. Grace and peace to you, too. May we all feel included and deeply loved.