god(dess)

I love Buddha’s simple reply when asked if he were god or prophet or saint. His answer? “I am awake.”

The last few years have turned many of my notions about the world and God on its head. No Jewel Tree enlightenment for me, alas. Rather, I seem to be waking up again and again. As soon as I get my footing the rug gets snatched out from under my feet yet again. While this has been uncomfortable in some ways, it’s been sheer joy in others. I feel like my spiritual vision has been doing a gradual zooming out like the too-much-fun Google Earth satellite cameras. I keep getting pulled farther and farther out, getting my focus, and then suddenly, whoops, here I go again! And each time my vision, my awareness and my concepts about life and God broaden.

Walt Whitman advises in his preface to Leaves of Grass, “Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Is that not wonderful?

In the re-examining of all I’ve been told, I came across something that insulted my soul, something hidden and pervasive and unhealthy. Yet, it was such a given; so well accepted that I resisted sight for a time. When finally I surrendered and opened my eyes, my first impulses were strong and confused.

As yours very well may be, upon reading on.

Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about the word “Goddess“? When you see it or speak it, what rises in you? Is it revulsion? Fear? Distaste? Suspicion? Impatience?

Friend, I am on a journey that has brought me to an unexpected terrain. I’ll admit that when I’ve come across the word Goddess, I’ve felt conflicting emotions. The word held no meaning for me, yet it upset me, just the same. When I heard someone refer to “Goddess” it sounded a little silly. Why, I wonder? What is it about that word?

Let’s talk. Is God male? I love how quickly folks rush to correct, “No, no, God is genderless.” Which they then follow up with, “He is Spirit.” Or, “He created man and woman in His image – He is neither and both.”

Does anyone see the problem I’m bumping up against?

In Children’s Letters to God, a little girl named Sylvia writes this, “Dear God – Are boys better than girls? I know you are one but try to be fair.” Do you see the quandary? Do you feel the pain of a young girl struggling with her self-worth here?

Ah, but women have equality now, don’t they? All is well now, isn’t it? What more could women need?

But all is not well, my friend. Four times as many girls as boys die of malnutrition worldwide because boys are preferred and given more food. Millions of female children are stolen for or sold into sexual slavery each year. Women do 2/3 of the work in the world and receive 1/10 of the world’s wages. I won’t begin to try to cover all of the ways that women and girls are oppressed, devalued, down trodden and abused in this world.

But this is America, you say. Hmm. American women earn 75% of what men do for the same job and comprise only 2% of top management. (all of these stats from World Watch Inst. and UN Report on the Status of Women) I could go on, but I won’t. There are so many ways women are devalued, often in ways that aren’t so easily noticed. To make just one example: take the loss of women’s creativity throughout history. Name a woman composer. Can you? I can’t. They’ve always been there, but have been left out of the books, their work erased from history or stolen and used by men.

Ancient history, you say? But it has an effect on us today. My point in all of this is that in the area of spirituality, the past packs an extra punch on the women of today’s world.

By now you’ve guessed it. My quest is to find the missing femininity in spirituality. I’m looking for the female soul that has been lost to patriarchy. I’ve been awakened suddenly to the knowledge that I have no grasp of the feminine in spirituality and that, as a woman, I’ve been adversely affected by this. “God is she, he and neither,” declares theologian Sallie McFague. But one can stumble over this simple assertion. God as genderless – yes. God as He – well shoot, I’m used to that. But God as She? Does that stick in your craw?

One of the things I’ve learned these last few years is that wholeness isn’t found by rejecting or denying part of who I am, but by integrating the contrasting elements into one. Could it be that to stop rejecting or denying the feminine in the Divine would bring about this same wholeness in the idividual, the Church, the society?

I think of my spirituality as the core of who I am. And in this core, could it be that I have been missing an essential element of identification? In Women Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola observes that, “when a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized.” Sanitized. What a frightening word.

I realize that to become authentic I must reach for the fullness of who I am, in my core. Would an image of the feminine in Diety stretch me into a place of increased wholeness? Ellinor Gaden would say yes, “Until women can visualize the sacred female they cannot be whole and society cannot be whole.”

How do you define your spirituality? The Dalai Lama succinctly states, “My religion is kindness.” Jesus counseled loving God with all you’ve got and loving others just as you love yourself. Sue Monk Kidd has written a compelling definition of what spirituality means to her, “My religion is being in an awakened relationship with all that is and doing so with a kind and pure heart, with an authentic feminine soul and a vision of justice with people, nature and earth, self, and the One who holds us all in Being.” My. That is a definition I could aspire to. But within this declaration, notice the determination to discover and live fully in her feminine soul.What is the feminine soul?

As I imagine it, the feminine soul is a receptacle of Divine wisdom and power – the inner well that provides a woman with the strength needed to be grounded in her self, while also connecting her to all that is. Connection is vital to the female heart – and this most basic connection, of being in union to the sacred feminine in her inner reality…well; it seems to me that this would be a most valuable experience. But sadly, it’s an experience that is quite uncommon.

And why so uncommon? The ways that society and culture have capped this inner well can best be realized by looking at what is called ‘patriarchy’. (defined as a social system where men have power over women and children, or any form of social power given disproportionately to men.)

This system touches all of our lives, often in ways hidden until brought into the light. Gerda Lerner paints us a picture in the Creation of Patriarchy, describing men and women as living on a stage, acting out their assigned roles. The play can’t go on without both of them, but, “the stage set is conceived, painted and defined by men. Men have written the play, have directed the show, and interpreted the meanings of the action. They have assigned themselves the most interesting, the most heroic parts…women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from the theory formation.”

That is to say, women have largely been kept out of the drawing room when symbol and myth are decided upon; denied a voice in the process that explains and interprets our lives.

And this is particularly true within the Church. (There are ancient female sacred myths, but I am ignorant of them as of yet, so will curtail myself to what I do have some small knowledge of – the Church)

As I begin my thoughts on the effects of patriarchy on the Bible, Church and early Christians, please remember that I am not a scholar. I know, that is probably pretty easy to see, but I mention it because by no means do I know all there is to know about these things. In fact, I’ve only scratched the surface. So, a little grace, please. Also, please understand, this is not an exercise in male-bashing. It’s the system, not the men in it, that gives me pause.Simone de Beauvoir, in the Second Sex, muses about the authority given to men by the Church. As she saw it, religion gave men a God like themselves – a God exclusively male in imagery – legitimizing and sealing their power. Isn’t it nice when you can cite Supreme Authority as given by the Supreme Being? (We’ve seen a lot of that going on lately in America’s Far Right, haven’t we?)

The Bible can be read like a manual for patriarchy. Written mostly (if not entirely) by men…edited by men…translated by men…even which books could get ‘in’ chosen by men — all happening over a period of roughly 1200 years in a series of societies where men dominated public life.And it talks almost only about men. Don’t be so shocked. Listen: in the older testament 1,426 men are listed by name, compared to the 111 women who are given name. The proportion of women to men is about twice as great in the newer testament, but still shows women as a tiny minority.

 As a prescriptive text, the Bible has been interpreted in such a way as to be very effective in justifying the subordination of women. (For any not familiar with the ‘favorite verses’ often used to silence a woman and keep her ‘under control’, here is a sampling; ‘Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.’ ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.’ ‘Man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.‘) As Collen Murphy in Women and the Bible summates, “As a text presumed by hundreds of millions of people to speak with authority, the Bible has helped to enforce what it prescribes.”

I would like to disclose for you some interesting tidbits that give all of this a different slant. A careful look will uncover feminine imagery not completely sanitized out of the Bible. Consider my personal favorite in the list of the names of God — El Shaddai. It’s used 48 times, usually translated ‘God Almighty’. Yet a little digging makes me wonder how they arrived at that translation. The root word shad means breast. Ai is an ancient feminine ending. A much clearer and more accurate translation would be Breasted One. The One pouring forth, sustaining and nourishing us.

 

The idea of compassion or mercy in Hebrew is rechem — womb. And there is strong imagery in several places (as in Duet. 32:18) of God birthing, sometimes of God writhing in labor.There are numerous images of God as a mother bird caring for her young or a mother eagle watching over her nest.

Most meaningful to me, the term for Spirit (of God, Holy Spirit) is feminine – ruah, the Life of God, the Essence through which the Divine acts. Wisdom came to be associated with this acting part of God – hokhman, also a feminine term. Not only in concept, but personified as a woman. A walk through the older testament reveals that her acts were great, much more numerous than the OT giants I’ve heard of, and yet I’ve scarcely heard of her. By NT times, her imagery is almost lost, only referred to a few times as Sophia (greek/wisdom).In Gnostic texts, Christ was often proclaimed as Sophia. (One of the distinguishing factors in the Gnostic texts is the richness of female imagery of the Divine. I wonder if this played a part in disallowing these texts into the official cannon of texts that we now read.) These texts show many early Christians worshipping God as dyad — a being with both male and female characteristics.

Prayers were offered to both the Divine Father and the Divine Mother: to Mother-Father. One of their prayers begins, ‘From thee Father, and through thee, Mother, the two immortal names. Parents of the Divine Being.”

The Gnostic texts more openly refer to the Holy Spirit as female. In one, John describes a vision, ‘A unity in three forms appeared to me and I marveled: how can a unity have three forms? It said to me, ‘John, why do you dou…? I am the One who is with you always: I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son.‘ In other Gnostic texts, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as his mother.

In later years, many Christian mystics continued this tradition in their development of God as Divine Mother. Meister Eckhart, along with Julian of Norwich, for example, often referred to Deity as God our Mother.

Enough history.

 

I read about a woman needing to write a paper and submit it before an (all-male) board of seminarians to be approved for ordination. Funny thing, on the night before she was to appear, she got this nudge —and in obedience to it rewrote her paper, replacing every male pronoun with a female one. And this was long ago, when doing something like this was a huge risk.

When she appeared before the board, the men sat speechless for a time, shocked with this paper geared exclusively to the feminine. When they could speak, they admitted feeling religiously excluded for the first time in any of their lives. (Wonderfully, they praised her courage and ordained her!)

By now, I’m sure many wonder what the fuss is all about. After all, is God not genderless? I’ve often heard this, “God is not male – He is spirit!” I’m sorry, but reading that “He” as a universal He – as is often done when speaking about humanity – doesn’t seem do-able. Not when there are so many He’s, His’ and Father’s all over the place. Taking out reference to gender doesn’t really seem to work all that well: trying to use only God and not He or His or Father doesn’t seem sufficient or even practical because we don’t conceive of God as neuter.

We need forms and images. Without them it’s difficult to relate to the divine. How else can we envision the Absolute? Symbol and image create a spiritual language that the soul can understand.

Exclusive male imagery of the divine not only sets up an imbalance but also legitimizes and feeds into patriarchal power structures in the church and in our culture. There is a connection between the repression of the feminine in our Deity and the subtle and not-so-subtle diminishment of women. As Mary Daly said, “If God is male, then male is God.”

The lack of female symbol and imagery can result in feminine spirituality getting buried deep in our psyches and in our society, just as it has in our idea of God. The natural continuation of this is to undervalue, overlook and exclude the feminine within ourselves and in the world around us.

But why a female form for the formless? (besides the mystery and love She ignites within) Deity needs no imagery since it is formless, right?

But Deity does have imagery. We do it without even thinking. And if we were made in the image of God, male and female, doesn’t it strike anyone as odd that there is little or no common female imagery in the Church today?

Here is the rub. The images that have pervaded our speech, thought and feeling about God are almost exclusively male. There seems to be only one image, only one form, and it is male. This has been true for so long (oh, thousands of years?) that most of us, maybe without really realizing it, envision God as male.

What providing female divine imagery and symbol does is to help deconstruct patriarchy — which may be one reason why there is so much resistance, even hysteria, over the word Goddess. (I know that some use the word or idea of Goddess because they find helpful in bursting the exclusivity of the old symbol and opening the way to re-image deity. And to others, this is a natural and beautiful expression of the feminine revealed in Deity.)

Why burst the exclusivity of the old symbol and re-image deity? A sacred feminine experience can be healing for a woman (or a man), giving new voice and passion to the heart-song. It can provide a fresh and invigorating way to locate spiritual meaning and vision. And I think that we, as a race and as a planet, need the resources this can bring.

The spirituality of the patriarchal is laced with a denial of the natural, taking flight from earth, flesh, temporality and the present. I think the restoration of the Divine Feminine would help to bring us to a place of we-consciousness, that sense of being connected and a part of all that is. As with a pregnant woman, it’s an experiencing of ourselves as we, not I. Ancient female sacred myths often focused on uniting and affirming the interrelatedness of all life, all people. I think that this sense of connection is at the core of the Divine Feminine Being. I envision Her as the dance of relation, the mystery of the Divine communing with Herself in all things.

Because of the intrinsic love of connection that we see in female hearts, when we envision the Divine as female we release a strong emphasis on relationship. I see Her love as inclusive and non-hierarchal, a Mother love, that love that brings together, that forms a ‘we’ out of the ‘I’.

I can see the sickness we feel inside when we are cut off from nature as a result of not recognizing this interconnectedness. I imagine the sacred feminine giving eyes that can look anew at the world – with love and a desire to protect and care for it. Or, as the Lakota teach, “Mother shows us how to live well in the natural world.” I can sense how the Sacred Feminine would bring validity to all experiences and journeys of the soul in the most ordinary day. Isn’t the ordinary day where everywoman lives? This one thing could transform our lives while walking out, moment by moment, the common acts of life.

I think a release of love for the feminine in spirituality could become a force for compassion and justice in the world. Isn’t this something we desperately need? We need ecological sensitivity and the honoring of earth and body that some would say the Divine Feminine implants. This world needs to embrace interconnectedness, it needs the vision and courage to dismantle hierarchies of power, it needs to be made to face its injustices and it needs to hear a voice speaking out for the voiceless and powerless.

Patriarchy within religion tends to focus on divine transcendence – being above, beyond or apart from the material universe. The feminine divine, or, Mother God, offers divine immanence – divinity here and now, inherent in the material stuff of life. A return to Mother God might reveal to us earth’s holiness; we might see earth once again as sacred and alive. Perhaps then we would be less likely to rape her forests, pave her jungles, poison her rivers, dump billions of tons of toxic waste into her oceans each year or thoughtlessly wipe out whole species of her creatures. Maybe in befriending and loving Mother God we can befriend and love Her earth.

Do I seem naive and overly hopeful here? Priest and geologian Thomas Berry doesn’t think so. He says that when it comes to saving the planet, the return of the feminine is the most important thing happening. He likes to point out that Christians have gotten so committed to the Bible that they’ve lost their capacity to deal with a primary revelation of the divine in the natural world.

As with other deconstructions and re-imaginings I’ve experienced these last few years, I’ve slowly come to where I can no longer deny the truth my soul recognizes. When once I come to refuse denial, when finally I grow weary of my need to stay safe inside known parameters, I am presented with a new grace: the grace to choose to be a loving dissident.This doesn’t mean grabbing power, fighting to turn the tables and dominate in the same old game. There IS a power needed, but it isn’t that controlling, self-serving, power demonstrated so ruthlessly in hierarchy. No, it’s a power potent with compassion, a power that nurtures and enables. Rather than mimicking patriarchal habits of entitlement, control and demand, I would favor a strength displayed by inner grit – a spine of steel with soft arms. 

My fervent hope is that interacting with Divine Feminine symbols and language will help us to relate to the world with a new sense of our interrelatedness and a renewed understanding of the holiness of the earth, the sacred within nature, matter and body. That we would recognize the Divine as being neither separate from the universe nor encompassed by it…to envision Divinity expressed by but also larger than all that is.Tell me, is there anything more needed in the world right now than an image of Divine Presence that affirms the importance of relationship? A Mother God who draws all humanity into Her lap and makes us into a global family?

But to be completely personal: how has this changed me?

I confess, opening to the Feminine in God has revolutionized my thinking, revitalized my spirit and restored my heart to God in a deeply profound manner. Now, this may not be immediately apparent to the onlooker. There is a Zen saying: Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water. After I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water.When you turn a corner in the path and enter a lush, teeming valley, life goes on as before. Yet all has changed. Deep within, you delight in unexplored vistas, your step lightens with a surge of vitality and you begin to move to a new song. You join the circle in a brand new dance.

Unfold your own myth by looking within, listening to your soul and dismissing whatever insults it. Make your own path by cultivating your own unique way of apprehending the Sacred. Then join in the dance. Dance until you become the dance, until you and the dancers and the She who dances within you become One.