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The Feminine Face of God The Reverend Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange, April 23, 2006 Have you heard the latest dumb blonde joke? Two men were standing near a sidewalk looking up at a flagpole with a look of confusion on their faces. An attractive blond comes walking by and asks, “What’s up?” The men say that they are supposed to measure the height of the flagpole, but they only have a yardstick and no ladder. The blond surveys the flagpole, then reaches into her bag and pulls out a large wrench and proceeds to loosen the nut to the bolt that holds the flagpole upright; lowers the flagpole to the ground, takes a tape measure out of her purse and measures it. “Sixteen feet, eight inches,” she tells them. Then she hoists the flagpole back into place, tightens the nut, and walks away. Once out of earshot, one fellow turns to the other and says, “Isn’t that just like a dumb blond? You ask for height and she gives you length.” Not quite what you expected, huh? I admit I get a kick out of setting a dumb blonde joke on its head but the real reason I told that joke is because I think that little jolt of surprise at the punch line just might help us remember another time when we encountered the unexpected. What do I mean? Well, in our culture, God is almost always “He” and for many people to hear God called “she” can be quite surprising. In Unitarian Universalist churches, that’s no longer the case. Nor is it unusual in Unitarian Universalist churches for women to be ministers. But can you remember what if felt like to hear God referred to as “she” for the first time? Or to see a woman in the pulpit for the first time? In the classes I teach, I’ve had the opportunity to hear a lot of newcomers describe their spiritual journeys and their initial encounters with Unitarian Universalism. I often hear people say how oppressed they felt growing up in a religious tradition—it often happens to be Southern Baptist in this region, but it can be Catholicism or Judaism or Islam—that only talked about God in male terms and where women were relegated to subordinate roles. And, time after time, I hear these newcomers describe how it felt to walk inside a Unitarian Universalist church and see a woman in the pulpit, to hear inclusive language, to hear God called by many names, including “she.” I’ve heard men as well as women describe that experience as liberating, revelatory. Person after person says it was then I knew I had come home. These newcomers remind me how powerful the imagery we use for God and religious authority can be—something I think is important for all of us to remember. But why do we need anthropomorphic images of God at all, you might ask? Isn’t God beyond gender? Well, yes, but from time immemorial human beings have spoken of God in metaphorical terms, comparing God to things within human experience. Abstract theology might speak of God as ultimate concern, or the source of being—but while such concepts may be intellectually satisfying, they are hard to relate to on a personal level. Human beings have yearned for some way of thinking about and coming to know God that captured their imagination and passion, as well as their minds. And so human beings have resorted to the language of image and metaphor, the language of “as if.” Images of God speak to what human beings most need and want, give expression to what we find most worthy of regard and emulation, what we deem most sustaining and ennobling in life. Images have the ability to constellate archetypes in the human soul, revealing what might otherwise be hidden and so help us to discern our own spiritual path. Images of God help move religion from being a purely intellectual enterprise to becoming a lived reality. The problem comes when we believe that there is only one way to properly image God. And so while you and I may know, with the academic theologians, that God is beyond gender, there are scores of people out there in houses of worship who know darn well that God is male and he has a long white beard. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all historically imaged God in almost exclusively male terms and for a majority of the faithful that imagery has taken on the status of fact. Moreover, masculine imagery for God has supported a definition of religious authority which excluded—and in many cases continues to exclude—women and assign women to a subordinate status. In much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a definite hierarchy that places men at the top with authority over women, and, in descending order, children, the non-human and, finally, the earth itself; a hierarchy which is taken to be divinely ordained and which is very much alive and well in many religious traditions. The reification of the image of God has profound effects. It alienates women from their own experience. As Carol Christ writes, “As long as a woman prays to a male God, she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture, of having her full identity affirmed as being in the image and likeness of God.” And further, if God is the name we give to that which is the highest and the best we can aspire to and God is male, then women will always be seen as inferior and religion will continue to legitimize the suppression and oppression of women. Now I imagine some of you are saying by now, Becky, you’re preaching to the choir; we get it—God can be imaged as both male and female. But I think it’s useful to ask ourselves if our intellectual assent is really matched by our emotional and spiritual realities. What one of us, no matter how theologically sophisticated, can say honestly that there aren't times when we have to sweep from our minds that Michelangelo-like picture of a white bearded patriarch? As one of my younger female colleagues, an ordained, seminary trained, Unitarian Universalist minister, writes, “I realize I have to fight all the time to imagine God as feminine. . . Somewhere deep inside me, it was impressed upon me that God is masculine, and I will fight all my life against the exclusion that this implies. When my defenses are down, when I am in quiet prayer, the God I speak to is other than I am in some important ways, and there is loss in that.” To image God as male in this culture is almost a Pavlovian response, even if we are a humanist or an atheist, because in this culture if we reject god the god we are rejecting is male. The social implications of masculine images of God and the patriarchy it supports are incredibly deep seated and often subtle. A small example. When my husband and co-minister Mark meets with a wedding couple to plan their ceremony, and they want to include the traditional “giving of the bride,” Mark explains that this is a vestige from a time when women were viewed as property, that in giving the bride away the father, in effect, passed her from the authority of her father to the authority of her husband. If couples say, well, nobody views it that way anymore and we still want to include it, Mark will then say, “Okay, how ’bout we also have the groom given away by his mother?” Very few men have taken him up on that suggestion over the years. How we image God is not trivial, not simply a matter of indulging a little feminine language for God now and then. When our defenses are down, when we are in quiet prayer, if we turn to god, should not the images of god we turn to be ones that authenticate our existence, that empower us to grow in fullness and freedom, that call forth possibilities for inclusiveness and justice, for both women and men? Our images for God need not be either/or nor even exclusively anthropomorphic. But we do need balance and we need images that express the full range of human experience, of human need and desire, of human challenge and comfort. I suspect it’s easy enough to understand why women may find female imagery for the divine more affirming and reflective of women’s reality. What may be less obvious is why men also benefit from female images of the divine and why our society needs them and the vision of equality they embody. But as long as there are women still told to stay in abusive marriages because it is god’s will to submit to their husbands; as long as there are still women who can’t exercise their spiritual gifts because they don’t look like god; as long as there are women who are viewed as property, trafficked as sex-slaves, or stoned to death for being raped; as long as there are teenage girls who think that their worth is measured primarily by their sexual attractiveness, who minimize their competencies or censure their assertiveness, we will need to redeem the feminine face of God. Shouldn’t men also want the women in their lives—their daughters, sisters, wives and friends—to be empowered to grow into the fullness of their potential? Don’t men need and want strong allies to meet the demands of living? As long as there are men who recognize that patriarchy also has insidious effects on their spiritual lives—requiring then to deny, on the one hand, their own needs to be nurtured and cared for and their desire for intimacy and, on the other, their innate capacities to be nurturing and caring of others, there will be a need to redeem the feminine face of God. In our quest for feminine images of God some will return to the great Mother Goddess of old, ancient symbol of generative and regenerative power, who gave birth to the world and made the earth to flower—she who comes to us in many guises—as Ishtar and Isis, as Devi and Kali, and Inanna, whose hymn was inscribed in stone—“she in whom light appears, radiant one, guardian of all greatness, whose hand holds the seven powers, lofty as heaven, wide as the earth, to my lady enfolded in beauty, sing praise.” Images of the Great Mother, can inspire us, as Starhawk writes, to see women as equally divine as men, women's bodies as sacred, women’s aggression as healthy, women’s power to nurture and create but also to limit and destroy when necessary as (part of) the very force that sustains all life. Others might turn to Greek goddesses for models of confidence and strength. Artemis—goddess of the hunt who ran at the head of fifty hounds with a quiver full of painless silver arrows; who was fiercely independent and stunningly beautiful. Or Demeter, goddess of the harvest and the fields, who in her own time was as revered as Zeus because her temper determined the lives of all those on earth. Or why not Athena, who sprang from Zeus’ head full grown, goddess of winning military strategy as well as women’s arts and goddess of wisdom, inventor of the flute, the trumpet, but also the plough, the chariot and the ship. Or we may search out and reclaim hidden vestiges of the female divine in the major religious traditions. Shekinah, who, in Judaism, was the indwelling presence of God in humankind, often called the “feminine face of God.” Or what about Sophia, wisdom, who appears in Jewish and Christian texts, and was said to have been present at the creation and to live in the world as a guide to humanity. We just might discover that the feminine face of God has been waiting for us all along. The poet Judy Grahn writes: “They say she is veiled and a mystery. That is one way of looking. Another is that she is where she always has been, exactly in place, and it is we who are mystified, we who are veiled and without faces.” And through that quest of rediscovery we may be freed to create powerful images of our own, as in this poem by Jane Kenyon, who, surveying the history of all that woman has touched, finds an eternal nurturing presence: “I am the blossom pressed in a book and found again after 200 years; I am the maker, the lover and the keeper; I am the food on the prisoner's plate; I am water filling the pitcher until it spills; I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden; I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name.” Or this imaginative ode by Nikki Giovanni, who finds in the generative female principle, courage to be herself: “I was born in the Congo; I walked the fertile crescent and (inspired) the sphinx; I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool my thirst; the tears from my birth pains created the Nile; I am bad; I am a beautiful woman; I caught a cold and blew my nose giving oil to the arab world; I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went; I cannot be comprehended except by my permission—I mean, I can fly like a bird in the sky.” But we don’t have to be poets to engage in this project. All we need do is turn to our own experience. For what one of us, woman or man, has not had times when we need to be rocked and held by one whom we know will embrace us even when no one else wants us? Cannot we think of the principle at the heart of the universe as being as reliable, as unconditionally accepting as a good mother? And what one of us does not have times when we need to go out into the world feeling well provisioned, well equal to the tasks before us, as when our mothers saw us off, lunch in hand, kiss on cheek, with words of faith in our abilities? What one of us does not need—doesn't everyone in the world need—to feel connected to and part of a great interdependent web of creation sustained by the earth, the primal great Mother who gave and gives birth to it all? And what human person does not need to be effectively reminded of the power to both create and destroy, for good and ill, that resides in each of us? As Unitarian Universalists we are not limited to one image of God, but free to explore whatever images might empower us to lead lives of wholeness and grace, whatever images move us to become more loving, more justice seeking, more open to the precious gift of life in all its glory and terror, sorrow and joy, whatever images challenge us to be who we are, male and female, in the fullness of our divine potential. For our coming home and our going out, for our past and our future, for our hopes of what life might be for ourselves—for others—let us bring many names. |
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