Sunday, February 17, 2013

Sunday re-post #1: God Our Mother

Today's Sunday re-post is brought to you from February 23, 2010 (I struggle to believe 2010 has already been three years ago!). This is one of my favorite entries from my first year of seminary because it captures, with the fresh excitement of new insight and possibility, that moment when I first encountered a theological idea that has since grown and developed into something that is foundational to my understanding of God--namely, that God is not a man and our male-saturated religious language is both idolatrous and potentially harmful. Language and words are so powerful, and what we say has deep implications for all those who hear it--especially in something like liturgy that is repeated and internalized. I have enjoyed the process of rethinking the language that I myself use (and am thankful to be in a church where gender-inclusive language for both God and collective humanity is intentionally spoken and sung). As a religious educator, I know the most consistent lesson I can offer my students is to speak with intention about who God is. It is fascinating, though, to hear even the youngest of my students (3 year olds at St. Martin's) call God "man." At times, I am exasperated with how innately ingrained this image of God seems to be--it is a true testimony to the pervasiveness  of patriarchal language and imagery within our culture's religious imagination. If I can influence even ONE student to consider God as something more than just "He," I will consider the endeavor well spent--and not because I just want to be some bra-burning feminist who rages against the patriarchal machine for the sake of it, but because I want my students to know a God who is bigger than anything we can understand or imagine. I want my students to know that God is not limited by gender or family roles, God is not contained by our metaphors or explanations.

And now, the original post:

"God Our Mother" --February 23, 2010

This weekend, in the middle of a two week discussion on God and gender in my 'Images of God' class, I attended church on Sunday morning at Haygood UMC, which is where I'll be serving next year for my contextual education internship. As we progressed through the traditional elements of the service--the Apostles' Creed, the doxology, the gloria patri---I was starkly aware of the proliferation of God-language as father. I mean, this should have been pretty obvious (even in the title of one...gloria patri = dead giveaway) and this is the language that I've always heard and been perfectly comfortable with. But it's funny how focusing on the overuse of masculine language for God in classroom theorizing will immediately highlight the reality of it in practice. My question on Sunday was why? There's no real reason for the creed to say, "I believe in God the father, maker of heaven and earth" instead of, "I believe in God, maker of heaven and earth."

Where does this imagery come from? Certainly it's legitimate--I'm not questioning that. Jesus called God, "father,"  and in our traditional Trinitarian understanding, God is father to Christ the Son. Yet a deeper look at biblical imagery will certainly reveal a God that is not all male. For just a few examples, consider Wisdom-Sophia, consider the maternal imagery of second Isaiah, and of course consider both male and female as the imago Dei in the creation account.

The key point is this: all these images for God are just that--images, metaphors. God is beyond comprehension, beyond definition, beyond gender. When we assign these roles to God--father, mother, and so on--we are only trying to conceptualize the inconceivable. The danger comes in focusing too heavily on any one of these images. Recall the second of the ten commandments: you shall not make for yourself an idol. What else are we doing when we focus exclusively on one image of God, which is, again, a mere means for representing the divine--what else are we doing but creating an idol? God is father, yes, but not just that. God is so very much more. We are limiting God by calling God only father. It is an idol of our understanding, of our tradition, of our patriarchy.

I willingly admit that I have trouble with this. I am extremely comfortable with calling God, "father" and have never had problems with imaging God as male. I find it challenging to picture God as female, to call God, "her" or "mother." But it is this very discomfort that awakens me to my own idolatry of God as male and challenges me further to enlarge my understanding of God, to draw closer to the holy mystery by exploring other metaphors and images of God.

The practical question is this: how, as a future church leader, can I bring this notion into a congregational setting? You can't just up and pray in front of a roomful of unsuspecting parishioners  "God our mother" or repeatedly drop "She" as the divine pronoun. I think it would be healthy for us to get to a place where we do feel comfortable making those adjustments, but you can't make such a drastic shift without losing everyone in the process. Pushing these boundaries of our understandings of the divine can't happen overnight. I wonder where to start though--I imagine it will be in one-on-one conversations or smaller group discussions. There's plenty of things I would want to do if I were to go home and plan/lead a service at my home church, but I might be chased out with torches and pitchforks and dropped into the lake with a stone around my ankles. We discussed this particular challenge at a recent religious education retreat I attended, and one solution is called innovative traditioning. You've got to start with what people know, and then tweak it.

I may not probe too deep into this next issue right now (I've got OT midterm studying to do that I've been expertly avoiding thus far), but another big part of this discussion is how exclusivist male imagery for God has become oppressive and subordinating to women. We are cast as the 'anti-image' of God and cannot know fully what it means to share in the divine being if God is father. I do not think this is a biblical intent, but it has certainly become a historical reality. And while we explore different metaphors, images, and language for the holy mystery, the divine other that is God, I hope, too, we can return to Scripture and look at it with new eyes, with the lens of patriarchy removed, and find in its pages a God who deeply cares about all people, not just white males. I say this because a couple of weeks ago, someone in our class suggested wishfully that we should just rewrite Scripture as a means of correcting these gender imbalances. It was almost funny how my body instinctively reacted to this proposal--I got hot and my face turned red and I had to take a few deep breaths! I don't think we're in any place to rewrite what has been given us. We just need to start treating it as the holy word that it is, instead of as an instrument of exploitation and oppression.

1 comment:

a grateful heart i give said...

ahhhh, this is so well-written. When I first came to St. Paul I instantly noticed all the ways that "father" and "he" and all the patriarchal references had been taken out of the church language - and I didn't even know what to think!! I felt annoyed and angry, even. Who were these people that would alter these texts that I hold as sacred!? But I felt an unspoken assurance in my soul that I needed to stick with St. Paul and discover why I felt so strongly about the lack of "reverence" that I was (mistakenly) perceiving. Now I feel a new light on my understanding of God...that isn't at all hemmed in by the notion that God is merely a male figure. More over, I have learned how to think for myself and not rely wholeheartedly on ONLY what the actual Biblical text is telling me. That may not seem like much, but it is huge for my life. Thank you for putting into words what I have been feeling!!! (And I love it that it was three years ago that you wrote your blog and that it is still so beneficial. Oh, the sweet power of words.)