Reflecting on the holy feminine

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death."


It was a death in the middle of the night at the hospital. When you are the Chaplain on-call, you work your usual 8:30 am to 4:30 pm shift and then you pick up the night pager from the Spiritual Care office. From 4:30 pm onwards, all spiritual emergencies in the hospital are in your hands.

What will these emergencies be? Someone who has been given some bad medical news, and is scared in a way they never thought possible? A mother who has been in the hospital with her gravely ill child for the last two weeks and has reached her wits' end? An hysterical relative beating his head on the brick wall (I actually witnessed this)? Or a family who is sad, but calm; who knew that their elderly relative was dying, had a chance to say their good-byes and who are experiencing a sad sort of peace?

It was the latter situation that I walked into at 1:45 am one early Spring night when Administrative Services paged to let me know there was a death. I wakened out of a sound sleep and tried to come to my senses, to prepare myself for whatever state the family would be in.

As I opened the door into into the large room on the Palliative Care unit, I encountered approximately 25 family members as well as the deceased. The patient was elderly, an Irish-American matriarch. Her visitors were about 18 female relatives and about 7 men.

As I entered the room, it was quiet and peaceful. Some family members were crying quietly. A number of eyes looked at me and a number of mouths smiled sadly.

"Thank you so much for coming in the middle of the night, Chaplain. The priest gave mom Last Rites the other day, and we are thankful for that. We know she is with God. But we wonder if you would say a prayer for her while we are all here?"

As I usually do, I asked about the deceased and what the family wanted to pray and I tried to incorporate that into my prayers. As I also usually do with Catholic families, I suggested that they join me in the "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" afterward.

I hope a prayed a good prayer of commendation and blessing for their matriarch. But it was the "Hail Mary" that I remember. Because somewhere in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, all the men stopped speaking. And, along with these 18 other women, we were praying this prayer asking Jesus' mother to keep us all in her prayers up until the hour of our deaths. And we stood in the presence of this family matriarch who seems to have taught her family some small thing about dying well or they wouldn't have been there in the first place. Holy Mary, mother of God, were you praying for this sinner at the hour of her death?

Creating Godde in my own image

I’m coming out of the closet: I have decided to create God in my own image. Really, I have.

I’m going to call Her Godde. Godde is a white middle class woman. Or, in your case, Godde might be an African-Caribbean young woman, or a disabled elderly Latina.

Someone else’s God might be a 3-month old Asian boy with a congenital heart defect or even a white, middle-aged, middle-class man.

I’m absolutely, utterly serious. Here’s the deal.

Christian theology has long asserted that God has no gender and that God is neither male nor female. Yet, if we’re being honest, Western Christianity traditionally pictures God as a powerful white male who is not elderly but old enough to have power and influence and still be physically virile. The CEO of Exxon, perhaps.

Jesus, despite his ethnicity and cultural context, we have pictured as a younger version of the CEO-God. Of course, Jesus was certainly male. And we’ve also been happy to envisage him as white and powerful, a sort of up-and-coming CEO to God’s Chairman of the Board image.

So, if Jesus is divine and male then God must also be male. And Jesus called God his Father, so that must be the way that Jesus wanted all his followers forever after to refer to the first person of the Trinity, right?

Hmm.

British Methodism – I speak only for the tradition in which I was ordained rather than trying to speak for other traditions – affirms that every person is made in the image of God and that we each bear that image within us.

Bearing the Imago Dei does not mean that any one of us bears God’s complete image. Scripture tells us that God created both male and female in God’s image. Thus, woman is not a complete image of God. And man is not a complete image of God. But together we complement each other and bear something that is closer to the image of God than one gender or the other on its own.

Many conservative Christians are not only happy – but indeed eager – to point out this complementarity of gender when it suits their purposes.

So, tell me why tradition, and much of conservatism, insists that we must think of God as male and that we must conceive of the male human being as being a complete image of God and the female as representing no aspect of God whatsoever?

But here is why I am really creating Godde in my own image: because I realised that I have spent over 50 years not being able to get in touch with the Imago Dei in which I was created because “everyone knows” that God is a man.

Did I think that God is a man? No, I did not think that. Did I believe that God is a man? I didn’t believe that in my head, but I sure believed it in my heart and in my gut. God could not be part of me because God is not a woman. Even if I have “received the Holy Spirit” and the Spirit is in me, the Spirit is a man (not in Greek or Hebrew, but certainly in popular Western thought).

Of course, God is not black either. Or disabled. Or gay. Or transgendered. If you’re any of those things, you have to think that the Imago Dei inside you is a straight white male. A foreign invader. Not really part of you. You bear no image of the divinity. But if you are ready to confess to God your sin of being female, black, gay, disabled, or whatever, then God will be happy to put his “normal” corrective image within your field of vision, even though you will never be able to change the way you are.

So, I have decided to create Godde in my own image. And I hope that you too will create God/Godde in your own image in the same way. I’m not going to pretend any more that God is a powerful, white middle class male CEO. And if you don’t believe that either, maybe together we can begin to change the world one person at a time.

Advent - What is God Like?

A stunning sermon for Advent 3 by Lawrence Moore of The Windermere Centre.

If you like this:

Advent brings the question of what God is like into sharp focus. Advent is about waiting for God. The underlying supposition is that we will be waiting eagerly and anxiously - that God’s advent will be a good thing; that it’s something we’d obviously want. Yet if we could persuade people that God was genuinely just in the wings, about to appear, most people would regard that as thoroughly Bad News. In fact, it would absolutely ruin their Christmas! And why? Because the God they anticipate arriving is to be feared or disliked or appeased or grovelled to. Nobody wants to see the person who dislikes them the most appear - especially when that person has absolute power over them! If God doesn’t like you, and God has the power to consign you to hell, or do whatever other sorts of things God might do to express disapproval, disappointment and dislike of you, you will not be anxious to see God!

And for goodness’ sake, let’s not shake our heads regretfully, or tut at people’s capacity to get things so wrong: the reason they think like that about God is because that’s the message they’ve got from the Church! And if not actively, they’ve at least heard nothing to act as any strong counter or corrective.

You'll like this

And for all of you who are reading this thinking: 'But people need to know that God is angry with them' - No, they don't.

Other gods?

My friend Sally has written an interesting post on the subject of whether the followers of other world religions worship a different God from the Christian God. I have a lot of respect for Sally and her views even when I disagree with her;  and this is one of the rare times we disagree! Anyway what she said, as well as some of the other comments on the post, got me thinking.

The most intriguing comment was by my blog-friend Tim Chesterton who suggested that when people say that other religions worship 'different Gods', that they are saying that they believe different things about the God they worship than people of other religions.

The problem I have with Tim's suggestion is that I often feel I'm worshipping a 'different God' from many people who call themselves Christians. And I sometimes feel that my concept of God has more similarity with people of other religions - particularly progressive Jews, Sikhs and Baha'i.

What I specifically mean is that there are many Christians who seem to worship a hard God who is eagerly waiting for human beings to slip up so that he can punish them. These individuals wouldn't say that this is their official doctrine, but they act that way. They also voice objections to my brand of 'soft and fluffy' Christianity that really believes that Jesus meant 'forgive your enemies' when he uttered these words. On the other hand, many progressive Jews, Sikhs and Baha'i would say that a merciful God who calls us to forgiveness is at the centre of their beliefs. I often feel that I have more in common with some of these individuals than with other Christians, yet I feel it is my duty not to reject my Christian brothers and sisters.

As Sally noted, this is a very complicated question and I'm not claiming to have all the answers to it.  I thought it was an interesting discussion, though.