We know the Father.
We’ve spent our religious lives learning and honoring the masculine attributes of God.
He is powerful, strong, and all-knowing, He is transcendent, lifting the broken from above. He is known through the masculine spirituality of dogma, hermeneutics, oratorical sermons, and conversion figures.
And there is nothing wrong with this metaphor for God, unless He is written to the exclusion of She.
Vanderbilt theologian Sallie McFague writes, “God is she, he and neither.”
God is genderless, and when we gender the Divine, we are simply using a metaphor we understand to describe something outside of our understanding. This is important because the masculine and feminine attributes of God are in an eternal dance.
He ignites, She settles. He explores, She rests. He learns, She intuits.
When a faith community embraces only one side of God, they attempt to paint a masterpiece with only half of the paint colors.
In Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience, Anne E. Carr writes, “No image or symbol is an adequate ‘picture’ of God.”
When we use the masculine metaphor to the exclusion of the feminine, we are inherently caging an uncontainable God.
One of the reasons we haven’t learned about God’s feminine attributes is that many biblical references to the Divine Feminine have been obscured or lost in translation. In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd gives one example:
“In Deuteronomy 32:18 the Revised Standard Version reads, ‘You forgot the God who gave you birth.’ But actually the words in the verse about giving birth are the Hebrew words for ‘writhing in labor,’ which makes “giving birth” a remarkably subdued translation. Even more interesting, the Jerusalem Bible translates the verse ‘You forgot the God who fathered you.’”
A man can father a child, but writhing in labor is a uniquely feminine experience, and this scripture was originally written to portray that experience as Divine. This verse was intended to depict a Mother God.
Dr. Wil Gafney, a scholar of several languages, a professor, and a priest has restored the original grammar of Job 33:4 in Dear Mama God, and it reads:
“The Spirit of God, She has made me, and the breath of the Nursing God, She gives me life.”
The more you research, the more you learn the rich history of the Divine Feminine in the ancient Christian scriptures and what exactly has been lost. This is why we are moving to reclaim Her in traditional religious circles:
Our gendered metaphors are tools for naming the unnameable, and when we exclude the feminine attributes of God, we lose something vital to the whole spiritual experience.
Wholeness is our hope.
When we embrace an exclusively male God, our practices and priorities reflect that. We live a spirituality that prioritizes masculine values over the feminine, or “matters of the head” over “matters of the heart” as Kidd writes.
Did you know that God hasn’t always been exclusively male?
In A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilbur writes, “Where females worked the field with a hoe, God is a woman. Where males worked the field with a plow, God is a man.”
God was a woman in many horticultural societies, but as farming techniques became more physically challenging, women settled into domestic roles to prevent miscarriage. And as female roles shifted away from the public sphere where males rose to dominance, God as male rose with them.
We are entering a new era. Women are no longer relegated to the domestic sphere. In the information age, pregnant and nursing women face fewer physical risks when they work outside of the home.
Men and women are beginning to choose the public and domestic duties that they are most suited for, but even as we progress, oppressive language, beliefs, and customs won’t die easy.
God is she, he and neither.
If we know the He, then who is She?
She is the Divine Feminine, and She has the power to transform your life.
She is relationship and justice, inclusivity and nurturing. She is the still, soft voice. She is immanence, rest, sexuality, and embodiment.
In She Who Is, Christian feminist theologian and professor Elizabeth A. Johnson explains the radical impact of the Divine Feminine, “(She) gives rise to a different vision of community, one in which the last shall be first, the excluded shall be included, the mighty put down from their thrones and the humble exalted—the words of Mary of Nazareth.”
She was lost to patriarchy as the cultural roles of men and women shifted, but She is coming back into human consciousness.
Mother God moves relationally rather than independently. She sees the oppressed and fights for their cause. She values wisdom over logic and compassion over profitability.
Sue Monk Kidd writes, “A Divine Feminine symbol acts to deconstruct patriarchy, which is one of the reasons there’s so much resistance, even hysteria, surrounding the idea of Goddess. The idea of Goddess is so powerfully ‘other,’ so vividly female, it comes like a crowbar shattering the lock patriarchy holds on divine imagery.”
In churches, She will revitalize an institution that has been in decline for decades when we embrace an equally feminine spirituality.
We will open our doors to the ones who have been excluded.
We will choose radical love and connection over being right.
We will embrace mystery over certainty.
We will build community and refuse polarization and hate for the “other.”
We will engage in embodied rituals that give our beliefs meaning.
We will respect and care for our bodies and the earth that sustain us.
The church is due for a feminist awakening.
We are waking up to Her, a feminine understanding of the Divine that has been dormant for millennia.
As we work to rewrite the patriarchal understanding of God, we will reclaim half of the essence and energy that has been with us all along. And when we embrace Her, the dry bones of religion that have excluded, damned, and oppressed will be resurrected, rebirthed.
May we receive this life with open arms and, with our understanding of Father God intact, begin to feel the movement and love of Mother God as well.