Notes from the sermon by Don Portwood on using more feminine language for the Divine July 25, 2010
Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial."
And he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.' And he answers from within, 'Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
"So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"
1) blockages to intimate PERSISTANT…keep praying, keep asking, keep talking and listening.. conversation with God
2) Jesus is Lady? How did that feel? Be aware of it….tradition…gut… Lady wouldn’t feel so foreign if we used that feminine language like the catholics…Lady of Heaven. How about the father language?
3) Sue Monk Kidd’s story….quotes from Dance of the Dissent Daughter
4) growing in love, faith, diversity of knowing and talking with God
5) God is still speaking…Jesus, teach us how to pray….that we may have intimate conversations that open us to our deepest self. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Sophia, may we ask pray persistently for healing and justice, and continue to be that in the hallowed name of our mother/father God.
Sue Monk Kidd’s quotes: One morning, though, I tried to get talkative with God, to talk to “him” about the things in my journal, the fed-up feeling, the realization that a new way of being a woman wanted to be born in me. I got nowhere. I kept wondering how “he “ was going to understand this distinctly feminine experience. I tried briefly to imagine a God like me. God as female. But it was such a foreign notion.
Now with the wisdom of hindsight, I can look back and understand what I could not really see that as a woman I was severed from something deep inside myself, something purely and powerfully feminine. Steeped in a faith tradition that men had named, shaped, and directed.
A young girl learns Bible stories in which vital women are generally absent, in the background, or devoid of power. She learns that men go on quests, encounter God and change history, while women support and wait for them. She hears sermons where traditional (nonthreatening) feminine roles are lifted up as God’s ideal. A girl is likely to see only a few women in the higher echelons of church power. And what does a girl who is forming her identity, do with all the scriptures admonishing women to submission and silence? Having them “explained away” as the product of an ancient time does not entirely erase her unease. She also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness, the lessness of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.
To name is to define and shape reality. For eons women have accepted male naming as a given, especially in the spiritual realm. The fact is, for a long time now men have been naming the world, God, sacred reality, and even women from their own masculine perspective and experience and then calling it universal experience. As feminist culture critic Elizabeth Dodson Gray points out, this naming tended to benefit men’s needs and concerns and in lots of cases to oppress women.
I realized that over the long course of church history, Mary had been the closest thing Christianity had to an archetype of the Feminine Divine. For many she filled the vacuum in the divine image and came to represent the feminine “side”. She was referred to as Queen of Heaven, Lady All Holy, Sovereign Mistress of the World.
I was in a religion that celebrated fatherhood and sonship. I was in an institution created by men and for men. As de Beauvior put it, religion had given men a God like themselves—a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, that their sovereign authority had been vested in them by the Supreme Being.
Patriarchal hierarchy, Theologian Anne E. Carr relates that this hierarchy issues forth in a whole series of “unequal power relations; God as father rules over the world, holy fathers rule over the church, clergy fathers over laity, males over females, husbands over wives and children, men over the created world. The pattern even extends to our relationship to nature and how countries seek dominance over each other.
One rain-soaked weekend when the children were off with friends and Sandy was away for a conference, I read practically nonstop, making a breathtaking discovery. I found that within early Christian history there had been two traditions regarding women. The first we could call the revolutionary tradition which included Jesus’ “feminist and egalitarian intent and practice. This tradition, preaching a gospel of liberation and mutuality, treated women as equals. Evidence exists that Christian women carried out priestly functions—teaching, baptizing, and blessing the Eucharist—on a par with men. But soon another tradition asserted itself, the patriarchal tradition with its anti-female, body-negating spirituality, insisting on the dominant cultural taboos and sanctions concerning women. This tradition, which had started long before Christianity, viewed women as naturally inferior and as the property of men, associating women with matter, flesh, evil, and sin. For a while these two traditions, the revolutionary and the patriarchal, clashed, but soon the revolutionary tradition was stamped out, sealing an interpretation of women as inferior that has continued to this day.
I was aware that Jewish and Christian theologians point out that God is genderless. The ultimate ground of being the Divine One, is neither male nor female. In the Bible God names God saying I am that I am. The Absolute Being simply is. The question then occurred to me: Well, if that’s so if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what’s the big deal? Why all this bother?
The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We NEED forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It’s the language the soul understands. And yet—and here was the crux- the images that have pervaded our speech, thought, and feeling about the Divine have told us the Divine is exclusively male. They have told us there is only one form and that form is masculine. Indeed, the image, language, and metaphor of God as male has been used so exclusively, for so long (about five thousand years) that some people seem to believe God really is male.
As I spilled these thoughts across the pages in my journal, I recalled a story a women had told about her six-year old daughter. The child, freshly home from Sunday school, was reporting to her mother what she’d learned that day about God. Over and over she referred to God as “he”. Her mother asked, “Why do you say, “He, “Ashley?” “Because God is a man, Mommy.”
But why is God a man?” Ashley thought a moment. “I guess because God thought that was the best thing to be.” There’s something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it ‘s because male is the most valuable thing to be. The belief resonates in a thousand hidden ways in their lives. It slowly cripples girl children, and it cripples female adults.
That day with these weighty thoughts spinning in my head, I reaffirmed to myself the deep, formless, indescribable nature of the Divine. But I also affirmed the human need for forms, for dances or images that express the Divine. And I realized that if we were going to meet that need without being idolatrous, and do I t in an egalitarian and just way, we must recover a Divine Feminine.
The fear of and resistance to feminine images goes deep.
I remember the time I discussed this fear and resistance with a minister who was genuinely interested in creating inclusiveness in his church. He thought we should forgo recovering Divine Feminine images and move directly toward abstract, androgynous images, we should neuter the language and symbol of the Divine. He said we should use only the word God, not Father or he or his. (And this is confessional for me, because when pushed, as I was 15 years ago, that’s what I said.)
“But the word God does not register in us as neuter.” I said, “Technically it may not imply any particular gender, but what registers and functions in the mind is male.”
As McFague says, androgynous terms only “conceal androcentric and male assumptions behind the abstraction.” How many times had I heard someone say, “God is not male. He is spirit”?
The minister looked at me “Then where does that leave us?”
“I think it leaves us in the position of finding ways to speak of the Divine equally in female as well as male terms” I said.
He looked at me with alarm and dismay as his own ambivalence about the feminine surfaced. “Oh dear,” he said.
The “oh dear” reaction is common. It’s the uh-oh-what-will-they- think? How can it be done? questions that surface inside.
But that day in my study, I came to a new sense of the urgency and importance behind it. I felt in my bones how crucial it was, “oh dear’ response or not.
